 Thank you all for being here and thanks to Mark for sponsoring this event. So I'm going to talk a little bit about the cost of COVID. I think many here know the cost already or some of them in a way. I want to call it the PURIAL PANDEMIC POLICY because it's a nice alliteration. If you want to think about it as PURIAL PANDEMIC POLICY presented by Pair that works too. So everything really revolves around seeing this single-mindedness, this focus on just this one disease and whatever this disease can can do to society and do to us as people, right? That all the costs that we as economists see, whether they're actual economic costs or not, really arise from this fact that we focus so intently on this one thing, this super cold. I know you can't call it a cold. It's not the flu. But the super cold is not really my term. I got this from the media just a couple of days ago. They're not calling it a super cold. You can't really tell if you have a super cold or if you have COVID. So it's not the flu, but it's a super cold. Okay. So I'm going to talk a little bit about first the failure of public health and the costs involved with that. And then we're going to talk a little bit about the economy and move on to the science, these science, and talk about the costs thereof. And then I'm going to take another step and talk about the long-term cost of this too, because it's pretty maddening. And of course, you already heard Mark Thornton talk about what the Fed is doing, which should be enough, but we have a whole lot more costs involved here. So what is public health? Well, public health is looking at the public's health, all the health and all the public. It's always about this trade-off between different diseases, different measures, and how that affects people's well-being in general. That's what public health has been about. Maybe it's a bullshit sort of concept based on collectivism and all this sort of thing. But still, that's what public health has been about. It's not about focusing on this one disease, this super cold, and trying to eradicate it no matter what the cost is. So because we have done that, we have turned the backs or the public health officials and the politicians have turned their backs on public health the way public health is intended to be and the way public health officials saw it all the way back in 2019. So what are the implications of just looking at this one disease and going for stopping it no matter what? Well, here's one, school closures. You have plenty of kids who do not get an education, kids who do not have friends, kids who are depressed. That's one of the results of this. There's another one. There's a tsunami of cancer because people were afraid to go to hospitals. So they were not diagnosed or they were not treated. Also not very nice. There's another one, cardiovascular mortality. People are dying from all these kinds of diseases that they were diagnosed for before but they didn't actually go to the hospital because they could have gotten COVID. So what is a heart attack when you risk COVID? And the mental health among kids, when this is getting really sad. It's not a happy talk but children are being depressed and they're starting to hurt themselves too because they can't see faces, they can't see each other, they can't hang with other people, they don't learn anything and they're with their parents. If their parents are not socially distancing at home, which apparently some people are. Now I took this from back home, well my home now, Oklahoma. And this is pretty sad, right? And look at this, in the article, I mean it is about how kids are harming themselves because they're so depressed. And in the article, very far down, you have some statistics from the CDC. And what are they saying? Well it's saying that suicide rates have gone up by 51%. Holy moly, 51%, that's quite a bit, right? And that's among young girls. So here's another happy one, see? Virus linked hunger, 10,000 child deaths a month. Well at least we didn't get this cold, right? So this is the cost just health-wise of focusing so intently on COVID and focusing so intently on just locking down and making sure that people don't interact, okay? But at what benefit? No one really made that calculation and looked at that trade-off, right? This is obviously a fail for public health. They should not be in office, they should lose their jobs and everything like that, but they should probably exchange places with those kids who died. It's that bad. Some of them of course are stuck in history and stuck with old ways, they're old-fashioned like crazy, like these guys. They're stuck way back in 2019 and what was the rule back then for how to deal with a pandemic. So if you, I don't know if you recognize these guys, but the three in the big picture, they are the authors and first signers of the Great Barrington Declaration saying basically that we should follow what the World Health Organization said we should do about pandemics back in 2019. These guys on the right are two leading epidemiologists in Sweden. Johan Biseker at the top was the state epidemiologist in Sweden before and he also trained the other guy, Tegnell, who's been running the show in Sweden and you know Sweden has been doing it fairly well and has chosen a different path, the traditional path. So some are of course marginalized and some even call these scientists fringe epidemiologists, you might have heard that. Even though they are of course from, they're from fringe institutions too, they're from Harvard, Oxford and Stanford and to be honest it's nothing compared to Oklahoma State. So let's move on to the economy and the economic costs of this because the health cost is terrible, but there is definitely more as well. So everything that we've done, everything that we, they, I shouldn't say we perhaps among you guys, but everything that the government has done trying to fight COVID has been based off of a ridiculous, stupid economic theory that has no relevance at all in reality. How many of you remember the meat shortage from a little over a year ago? So there was no meat or at least there was a risk of not having any meat. Why was that the case? Well because people working in food processing plants, they got COVID or they tested positive, I hear that's not necessarily the same thing. So they couldn't work, so they couldn't process the food. So there was a shortage coming to the food stores that we would not have any meat. Okay, so that was reported widely in the media, right? Don't expect meat, we're not going to have any meat, which should all be vegetarians. They had two farmers, of course, they still have the animals, but they can't sell the animals. So what are they going to do? They either eat all of the animals themselves, keep them and pay for the feed, which they probably can't afford, so they started shooting them. They still had to kill the animals. They stopped the animals from living, from being produced. Because this goes years back, right? The cow, when you slaughter a cow, you started with that calf years ago in order to get the meat now. So you can't just stop things. Well, so how do you solve that problem? If you let everybody who's working in these meat processing plants, then go home and you can't process these meats anymore, you give them money. That will take the meat from the farmers to the stores. So the USDA, they spent $500 million to increase capacity in those food processing plants where no one was working. Now wait, it was actually a billion. This is a couple of days later. But that's also not true, because they had a budget for increasing this capacity of $9.5 billion. In these processing plants that were existing, but there were no workers, because the workers were sick or tested positive. But there's another side to the story, right? This is from the far left. And here you can see that there was no meat shortage. It was just all the conspiracy by greedy capitalists trying to force people to work, even though it was harmful to them. That's the other side of the story, apparently. Okay? But the worst to me is how they figure that this is how you can run an economy. A freaking pause button. I mean, I'm old enough to have grown up with a cassette player, right? And you punch pause. You can't be on pause for too long because it's going to ruin your cassette. And then you press play again. The economy doesn't work like that. If you run a business, if you have a production process, if you have a farm, you can't just say, let's pause right now. Imagine a farmer is growing corn and harvest is coming up going, ah, the price is a little too low this year. I'll just pause and I'll just harvest next year instead. It's that stupid. You can't do that, right? You still have bills to pay even in a business where you don't grow things. You still have bills to pay. You have people you have to pay salaries to. You have all these other things. You have a location where you need to pay rent and you need to keep hot and warm and inputs that you have on the shelves and whatever it is. All of this stuff. You simply can't do that. What is the result of this? Well, this is one result from a year ago. 34% of the small businesses were closed. 34%. That's a third of the freaking economy. Of course, you can trust this number because you can see at the very top. It's one of those trustworthy sources. That's where I'm going to base all my research on them from now on. It's apparently not quite this bad now, but it's still very bad. Those businesses, when they go under, that's a person's life and career, their livelihood. They can't just rise up again and get the dust off. So let's continue with the business. That's not how it works. But of course, overall, this new economic theory that guided politicians was this view that money fixes all. All that's necessary is just more money. It's just food processing plants. You don't have any workers? Here's money, just increased capacity. Awesome. Increased capacity. Why not just say, here's money, get meat? That's easy. You don't have to produce anything. All you need to do is just get money out there. So here's wealth production right here. So this is future prosperity. We all have a little syrups machine at home. And of course, licensed by the government because we can't just print as much as we like. But this apparently is how they view well-being. This is how they view prosperity, just dollar bills or even better, digital dollar coins that they can do whatever they like. So it takes us to the science. And of course, it should be with a the and with a trademark too. That's what I learned now. There's only one. So what does the science tell us? Well, the science is screwed up too. And that's a big cost that I see from this whole pandemic that even science can't be relied on or the reporting of science. And what I mean by that, I'll show you, this is from yesterday. There's another big study. And of course, journalists, they will just repeat basically what is in the abstract if they get that far. So here, Ivermectin fails in another study. And this is a big study and it's a good study and all this stuff. So obviously there's a conspiracy theory that Ivermectin can help at all whether it does, it doesn't matter. But this is what is reported. This is the news. Reuters is a reliable source of news. Not today. Okay, maybe. But World Economic Forum agrees. You can rely on that. But here's another guy, Alex Berenson, you might have heard of him. I just done a lot of good work during the pandemic because he's a contrarian. But journalists don't really know how to read science. So here he goes being a little provocative as he always is. Ivermectin fails again. This is from his telegram channel. And he says, this is a good study. This is a big study. This is a reliable study. So I told you, all you weirdos out there thinking that Ivermectin has any good effect. It doesn't. Here's another study proving it. Well, that's what the impression you would get if you just read the title, the headline of the study, or maybe the abstract. But you need to know a little more. You need to look at it. Scientists are supposed to look at the details. Journalists don't get it. And I'll show you here. This is from the actual study. There's a patient who had had symptoms of COVID-19 for up to seven days and had at least one risk factor for disease progression were randomly assigned to receive Ivermectin or not. And then they looked at, what is the outcome? Does it actually help? Well, the problem there is seven days. If you had symptoms for seven days, then you're already pretty sick. Maybe for some people it's already gone. So they're probably not included in the study at all. And here's one guy you might have heard of him, Pierre Quarry. He's been talking about Ivermectin and using it for a long time. This is a report I found from when he was in the Senate hearing. And he comments on this. And look what it says here. He's talking exclusively about early treatment. Early treatment, that phrase that was banned by Instagram and other scientific outlets. Early treatment. It's not early treatment if you've been sick for seven days. And it's not a prophylactic treatment. He says that, too. So you have to dig into the study and see what are they actually testing here. They're not saying that Ivermectin doesn't work. Ivermectin doesn't work in the end of being sick. Whereas the other side is saying it does work prophylactically. Very different claims. But in the media it doesn't work. Black or white. And you can look a little further into the study. These are who financed the study. You look at that from the top. Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. You look a little further down. You have Merck. You have AstraZeneca. Pfizer. Well, look at that. Okay, so they design a study where they know that the results are going to be in a certain way. It's sponsored by those who will benefit from that sort of result. Which is obvious for any scientist looking into it. Not obvious for anyone reporting on it. So they get a lot of press and media on it. But of course they're showing something. They're making it seem like they're showing something that they're not. Of course, as a result, we are losing faith in science because of this. But never trust a reporter. Read the actual study. It's boring. Here's another thing that you probably didn't expect. Did you know that? I mean, had I known this before, when I teach and students, they're yawning and they're not listening to me and they perform poorly on exams, I should have just asked them to wear a mask. Then they would have learned better. Or maybe I should have a mask on and they would learn better. Obviously there are studies you can design that show that masks are really, really powerful, really, really effective. But what is the design for? What are they actually testing? What are you actually showing with these results? That's what's important. And myself, having looked at many of these medical studies as a social scientist, I'm appalled by the level of science in these studies. I'm not sure many of these who write these studies would actually pass a high school statistics course. Because it's so bad. They think that because you have a number of people and put them randomly in two groups, you can just compare the two groups. It doesn't matter if the groups are very different. You just compare the averages. If I would submit something like that to a C-ranked journal in entrepreneurship in my field, they would not only disc-project it, they would also say, get the hell out of this discipline. Go back to sixth grade. That's where you belong. But apparently in medicine you can do this and it's science. And of course we have the global social credit system, which is also a, some might call it a benefit or an advantage, but I call it a cost. It's a cost for liberty for sure. So the World Health Organization is making moves on implementing a global vaccine passport. You can see this is from the end of February, but then this is in March. So they're obviously not sure. They don't really know what to do or how to do it or who should do it. There's typical bureaucrats just trying to expand their budgets. They don't really think about the consequence. Okay, so what is the pandemic brought us? A highly politicized public health that is much more politicized than before. A more concentrated, centralized, and state-of-the-money dependent economy, because the small businesses are gone to a great extent. You have a science that is following the money and doing whatever they're told. And you have created a sort of need for guaranteeing that your documentation is accurate, that you're actually healthy. There are other words we can use for this. And I just picked some that I think fit. So this is the cost of this super cold, right? Or not the flu. Okay, but that's the cost, the unseen so far, right? What has already happened? Well, I want to look at the long term, too. Because the thing is, it's not the case that everything is what we in science would call a one-shot game. It's not the case that, oops, this business died, but next day, there it is again. Because it has implications, and the economy is a process. It's not the economy's gang sign, as I call it, equilibrium, right? It moves. It changes. Any new business builds off of what was already there. And of course, this seems obvious. Without the iPod, there would never be an iPhone. Because it built off of those ideas and those experiences. We know this. But not when we're talking about policy. Somehow, just thinking about it as really, really short term, just in the present. There's nothing more. But the problem is it builds off of, if we kill everything right now, we're going to start at a lower level, we're going to be on a different trajectory. The economy, the society is going to be very different. Because society is just another name for the economy to me. How we interact and how we deal with each other. And everything is different because we meddled with things. So the long-term consequences are going to be very severe. Not only because people have all these diseases now that they never got diagnosed with, but our behavior is different. The economy is different. New businesses are not going to see the light of day because, well, those businesses, those ideas that they were going to be based off of, never happened. This is the real loss. We're on a lower and weirder trajectory than we would have been. The real loss is the well-being of the present and all future generations. That really sucks. Okay, so what's next then? How do we build from this? Why does this lead us? I told you this is going to be a happy talk. So what will they use this single-minded focus to accomplish? Well, the next big thing might be climate change. So we focus on fighting climate change. So how can we do that? Well, one way of doing that would be to have CO2 lockdowns. You might have heard that the lockdowns, they meant that CO2 emissions decreased. Well, not really. So they did decrease emissions of all kinds of bad stuff, but not CO2 levels all that much. So I think that for climate change, we probably need to do something much harsher than lockdown. Because lockdown will just help the environment a little bit, but not the climate. So we need to do something much more radical to make that happen. Modern monetary theory is not a thing in academia or in theory, but it is in practice. That's basically what they're doing, this maniacal money printing, which is what they're doing. Because where did all this money come from? Have you noticed anyone ask, how are you financing this? Even local politicians seem to have millions and billions that just spread it around. And no one is asking, where is this money coming from? What are they doing? Look at Chicago and Mayor Laurie Lightfoot just creating their own universal basic income program. Where did they get that money? Did they just have a lot of extra wealth that they needed to use somehow? Well, what happened? Well, that's not enough. Because, see, gas prices are up, so the city of Chicago needs to give people money so they can buy more gas. Where is this money coming from? It's obvious that they're thinking that just printing money gives us more wealth, just like the guy with the Xerox machine, right? Okay, and of course we will have a science that will just tell us whatever the highest bidder wants them to tell us. Oops, sorry. I hear this is the science. But here, I think this is actually an opportunity. So I think we should build back better. That's going to be a great clip on YouTube. So I think we can actually use this, and I think the people are not necessarily waking up, but they're realizing that things are happening. And things aren't necessarily the way they're being told they are. So one thing is that it's obvious, and Jeff mentioned this in his remarks, that things are not the same everywhere, and people are even moving to where there is a policy that they like better. Well, this causes tensions, and this increases the differences between regions, between states, between city and rural areas. Well, these tensions, how is Florida and California going to be together in the same union? I think this causes a lot of opportunity for breaking up the United States. It's a session. You can sort of tell what kind of crowd this is. And the same thing in the monetary field. MMT, I mean, that's the last nail in the central bank's coffin. If they start printing a lot of money, they're saying, of course, what they're doing now is not MMT, so we need to do something a little different. That's going to just cause hyperinflation. So the central bank is going out. I'm pretty sure that we're going to start talking about, is there maybe another kind of system that we can rely on? Is there another kind of currency? Maybe we should go back to sound money and sound banking so that people don't lose everything they have in their bank accounts. I know you guys believe this, but I think people in general are starting to talk about this. They're wondering, all this money everywhere and my money, I can't buy stuff with my money anymore. So they're starting to ask questions. They're starting to look for answers. There's also the uselessness of science. Because when science is not focused on providing us with practical implementations, then science is of no value. Have you looked at the journals that scientists publish in? Have you seen the economics journals, for instance? How useful is that? Who can apply this stuff and actually build something? Who can use this stuff to become better in their everyday lives? We cannot. It's usually some mumbo jumbo that is very abstract and weird and it has no ties at all with reality. But what I see is that, well, with people losing faith in science, they're losing faith in public science and public funded science, which means we will probably see some entrepreneur figuring out that we need to do our own science. In businesses, they can't just think the ideas from academia because those ideas are not useful. They will need to invest in R&D themselves. They will need to hire scientists. They need to do the work themselves. Well, that's going to be a science that is directed not to where the government has money, but a science that is directed to where the ideas can be transformed into goods and services and make people's lives better. So, plenty of good things down the road, I think. Might be a little... a few bumps on the road, but I still think that the future looks really, really bright. Thank you.