 I woke up this morning to scenes of mounted horseback police using batons to beat people over the head and shoulders in that war-torn chaotic city known as Melbourne, Australia. And I thought, what the hell world are we living in? And I also struck me that, you know, let's not kid ourselves. There are tens of millions of Americans who would absolutely support the same kind of draconian lockdowns and police crackdowns we're seeing on Australia and New Zealand right here in the United States. I don't think there's any doubt about that. So the question for all of us today is, of course, what to do? A few months ago in New Hampshire we held an event discussing medical freedom. And we had Professor Ben Powell give a talk there. I don't know if any of you are familiar with the MP teaches at Texas Tech University. And he gave this great talk about following the science and he said, you know what we did wrong with COVID was instead we followed the wrong science. He said instead of talking to medical scientists and virologists and immunologists about disease and how transmissible COVID might be or how lethal COVID might be. He said we should have been talking to social scientists. We should have been talking about trade-offs. And of course that's the one thing we haven't talked about over the last 18 months since this COVID nightmare started is the trade-offs. We should have been talking about things like depression and alcoholism and suicide. And we should have been talking about the economic damage from shutting businesses and schools and churches. But we should have been talking about boosting natural immunity and supplements and things like this and alcoholism and weight gain. But instead we've been talking mostly just about COVID itself. Now Ben is a brave guy. But imagine if you went on C-SPAN and said, no, no, no, we shouldn't. We don't need to listen to these doctors or these scientists. We need to listen to economists, right? You can imagine the reaction you get from that. But that's actually the truth because what we haven't thought about much or talked about much over the past 18 months is the unseen in Bosnia's conception of the scene and the unseen. And we're all about to experience the unseen for many, many years to come as a result of these COVID lockdowns. And the reality is that there's no scenario under which a poor society is a healthier society. So job number one is to be a wealthier society. And we're shooting ourselves in the foot with respect to that. So no, what we've been through over the last 16 months, it wasn't worth it in any sense of that expression. And if we had literally done nothing, if our politicians had literally done nothing, it might have actually resulted in fewer deaths in hospitalizations. We'll never know. But we definitely know that just this sort of targeted distancing of elderly and vulnerable populations, immunocompromised populations, while allowing younger and healthier people to go out there and run the country and work would have gotten us to a degree of natural immunity faster than we're getting to that. Now, with a lot less collateral damage to our economy and to our physical and frankly our mental health, I think we're all struggling a little bit on that side of the aisle as well. So this is what it's all about, the seen and the unseen. It's the job of social scientists like economists to show us that unseen. And I think they're falling down on the job. But there's a silver lining to all this that I'd like to talk to you about today. And I think that silver lining is that the story of the last 16 months, the political story in this country hasn't been about presidents. It hasn't been about Trump or Biden, particularly. It's been about governors and mayors and county officials and school boards. And I think there's a very important lesson there that we all ought to be heeding. And we really need, I think, at this juncture to start being a little more clear eyed about where we are in terms of the political and social and cultural and economic reality of things in the United States. So first, let's just dial back a little bit to that strange and unsettling time of March last year, 2020. There's this expression, the fog of war, which is when you don't sort of know what's happening because you're hearing a lot of conflicting reports. And I remember feeling that very sense of the fog of war when 9-11 happened. I was working for Congressman Ron Paul in Washington, DC. And of course, the Keystone cops and the Capitol Police bungled everything. And we spent the next couple of days hearing all these what turned out to be debunked reports. Well, there's a car bomb in front of the State Department and that sort of thing. So whenever there's a crisis, we get all this conflicting news and information and sometimes it turns out to be false. Well, we're experiencing the same thing with COVID. And I recall very distinctly being in a restaurant in March of 2020 with my wife and daughter and having that sort of that feeling in the pit of my stomach, like when you're about to go over the first hill on a roller coaster. You know, what's coming? And that feeling wasn't based, it wasn't a fear of COVID or a virus. It was a fear of what government's going to do about the virus. And of course, that's the exact same feeling I had on 9-11 was not as some terrorist going to come blow up my family, but rather what is government going to do in terms of drastic overreach as a result of all this. So here we are 16 months later and we're still in the fog of war. We still have all these questions which nobody can seem to answer for. So we hear a lot of conflicting information. Do these vaccines work? Do they stop anybody from getting infected? Do masks work? Is there asymptomatic spread? Are we creating variants? I don't know. I offer no opinion on the medical part of this or vaccines. I think by all means get one if you care to. But the point is that we've gotten more information at our fingertips than we've ever had in the course of human history. You basically have all of human history on something the size of a deck of cars in your pocket, and yet we still struggle mightily with any kind of wisdom. There was a series a year and a half ago or so before the Trump election on PBS. It was called America Coming Apart or something like that. And one of the people they interviewed was Steve Bannon, who was one of the architects of the Trump victory in 2016. And he came up with this expression, which has stuck with me, which is, he said, we're living in post-persuasion America. He said, it's never been easier or cheaper to have facts at your disposal, to obtain information. There's never been a time in human history where that's easier. But yet people are digging in more than ever to their own worldview, rather than being open to facts and changing it. People are doubling down. And of course, with all the white noise coming at us, we have the ability to filter it. And we have the ability to just hear from sources that comport with our own view of things. And so it's very easy for us to live in a media or information bubble, and just we suffer from confirmation bias. And I think that's been operative throughout COVID. And in a sense, just like with Trump in 2016, just we in America are watching at least two different movies. So we've all seen what's been happening in Afghanistan the last few days. And we worry that 9-11, which caused things like the invasion of Afghanistan, has forever remade American foreign policy into, I guess, what we might call permanent state of war making and invasion and nation building, permanent war. So the question we have to grapple with is, will COVID remake American domestic policy into a permanent new normal of masks and vaccine passports and business and school shutdowns, and perhaps what is the biggest untold and unremarked upon story I think of the entire COVID year is this absolutely insane CDC rent moratorium, where for the first time in American history, not even the housing authorities in the federal government, but the Center for Disease Control has unilaterally come along and said we have the ability to vitiate thousands upon thousands of here to for locally enforced contracts across the country seems to me to be a very, very crazy turn of events. So what we know is that you don't defeat a virus, you live with it, you work around it. This is becoming increasingly obvious. But I said there's a silver lining and I think there is. And that silver lining is that the dominant political trend of the 20th century, which was centralization of political and monetary and economic power, I think is being threatened and challenged in the 21st. And I certainly hope it is. And I actually hold a lot of optimism when it comes to this because I think not only is this the way forward for the United States, I think it may be the only peaceable way forward in America. And we've seen some tremendous examples of this in just the last year, where the various states and the various countries around the world have really acted as sort of laboratories in a big federalist experiment. But of course, decentralization comes with a price and we'll get to that here in a bit, but that price is tolerance. It's a heavy price. We have to allow ourselves the painful rejection of universalism, at least in the political sphere. We have to allow people who see the world very differently than we do, the freedom to apply their own worldview as they see fit and where they see fit. And I think this inability to allow for different worldviews is really at the heart of our problems. And I think it's also the opportunity which COVID presents. So what I'd like to suggest to you today that we've learned in the past 60 months is that all crises are really local. At the end of the day, when things shut down and most people went home because of these edicts in March and April of last year. All of a sudden, your immediate circumstances became very important to you. Your street, your town, maybe the grocery store you go to locally. All of these things became much more important because we tend to live in this sort of digital world and most of us travel a lot and we have this sense of the world well beyond our town. But for the first time, people started to have very different experiences, depending on maybe if they lived in Florida and South Dakota, if they lived in New York and California. And certainly if they lived in Australia, they've had a very different 16 months. And so for the first time in a long time, people started to think of themselves as Californians and Floridians. And I think that's a very healthy development for America and I want to encourage that. I think we ought to recognize it, celebrate it rather than bemoaning it. So when we think about being tied to a place and we think about all of us going home last year, that was a change. That was a change for most people. And I remember reading this article about Kristi Noem. She had come out early on and said, well, we're not going to have any lockdowns in our state of South Dakota. And so she got a lot of grief for this. And there was some change.org petition to force Kristi Noem to have the same kind of lockdown and mandates as some other states were. And she said, well, you know, we have one of the lowest populations per square mile in the country. Why do we have to have the same rules in South Dakota for COVID as we do in the rest of the country? Well, that seemed like a fair question. Why shouldn't local circumstances inform the local responses to a communicable disease? So she held firm to her tremendous credit. I'm not a fan of Oliver policy, but she held firm. And she never had statewide lockdowns in her state. And as a result of that, maybe some other governors were emboldened a bit. And we ended up with about five states which never had any kind of statewide lockdown. And there were also some sheriffs at the county level who stood bravely against all these impositions. But I would call soft martial law, I suppose. So here's what Kristi Noem said. She said, you know, I'm quoting her. One size fits all approach to this problem is herd mentality, OK? The people are primarily responsible for their safety. I oppose, meaning Kristi Noem, draconian measures, much like the Chinese government has done in actions we've seen European governments take that limits citizens' rights. So at the time, you know, back in that fog of war of, let's say, April 2020, that was actually pretty brave stuff to say. It was refreshing. And it was also a very needed reminder that all crises are local. And that no matter who you are, you have to live somewhere. Your physical body has to be somewhere. You have to exist in a space, in time. An analog space, not a digital one. And so even if you're the wealthiest billionaire, even if you're Jeff Bezos, let's say, you need to make sure somehow that wherever you are, the calories come into your life, that utilities like electricity come into your life, that hot and cold running water, maybe prescription medicines. Who knows what Jeff Bezos requires on a day-to-day basis. It's probably a lot like what we require. And I thought to myself, wow, you know, this is really a great equalizer because people are starting to see that even elites are subject to the same kind of rules the rest of us have to live under when things get ugly. And I remember there was a report in the news early on how because Amazon was doing so well in the early months of COVID, that Amazon stock had gone way up. And overnight, at least on paper, Jeff Bezos's net worth had increased some crazy number of billions of dollars. And so this was, you know, everyone was sort of bemoaning this and saying, oh my gosh, look at the rich are getting richer. And so there was a demonstration outside of Jeff Bezos's house in Washington, D.C., where he has one of several houses because a few years ago he bought the Washington Post. So these protesters are out there and being the kind of subtle people that they are, they've enacted a mock guillotine, which is presumably designed for his neck. And I was thinking to myself, you know, I don't know if he's there, I don't know if he's home, maybe he's at one of his other houses. But if he is home, you know, just a couple, just let's say 50 or 100 dedicated knuckleheads with nothing better to do and nothing to lose could absolutely disrupt the life of, well, I guess the richest or second richest man on earth. I mean, if he can have ingress and egress to his home, I mean, let's say you have a helicopter, let's say you have some house somewhere with a safe room that helicopter has to have fuel, that house has to have, you know, food and utilities and all kinds of things. So all the physical substances which are necessary for our day-to-day lives and even the wealthiest people's day-to-day lives, you know, they can't just be sourced from a global supply chain unless that sort of last mile delivery remains intact. So if these faraway production facilities, farms and warehouses and trucks and trains and power plants break down, eventually we all feel it. And we're still feeling it now and we're going to be feeling it for a long time to come. So who's to say that a more localized approach to dealing with this is wrong? Who's to say that the Japanese or the Singaporeans or the South Koreans or the Swedes did it wrong? Who's to say that Kristi Noem and Ron DeSantis did it wrong? I'm not sure that it's anyone's place to say. And what's so interesting about this is international authorities like the UN, like the WHO, like our own CDC, they were unable, utterly, to project any kind of global authority on COVID. All the countries just went their own way. And all of a sudden everybody was saying, well, you know, we're going to do what we're going to do. And even the Schengen area agreement in Europe where 26 European countries are allowed to travel amongst each other without passports, that broke down. You know, in Canada we saw provincial travel prohibited. You couldn't even drive from Newfoundland over to Montreal or something like that unless you had some express purpose. And there were even some suggestions for and briefly having checkpoints between US states. So again, who's to say, who's to judge how different localities around the world, around the country act under duress? And I would suggest that this calculation becomes more and more difficult at scale, moving from the local to the regional to the national to the international level. Crises remind us that local matters. And this is exactly what we should want and expect in a pandemic, right? This is what we want, competing visions as to the severity and the scope of the problem, differing localized approaches, experimental treatments, nimble entrepreneurs providing resources and supplies to us. And you know, we're going to have scoreboard. And to an extent, we do have scoreboard. Now, we have some data 16 months later. We know that ventilators didn't work. We know for the most part that lockdowns didn't work. We're starting to think that maybe masks don't work either. And so hopefully, there's going to be remorse. There's going to be recriminations. There's going to be hopefully calls for some criminal action against some of these governors who failed us so badly. So what we have to avoid is allowing the political class to gain from all this. Because if there's a silver lining for all this, it's that we have to understand how, you know, at the end of the day, South Dakota really isn't New York City after all. They're two different places. And why do we have to have the same rules for 330 million people with respect to COVID? Well, I think a lot of Americans woke up to that over the last 16 months. But then what follows is if we could have different rules relating to COVID across 330 million people, why can't we have different rules about taxes and guns and abortion and climate change and everything else? So that's the opportunity. That's the silver lining behind COVID. Now, one thing I just I have to show you, I can't resist. I'm starting to really dislike this guy. He's starting to piss me off. I don't want his new normal. But this is a beautiful thing. This isn't some think tank survey. This is from United Van Lines. So they spent 2020 figuring out who's moving where. So guess what? California, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois lost people. And Florida and Texas and Tennessee and some other states gained people. Shocker there. So what's happening, ladies and gentlemen, is a form of soft secession. This is people moving with their feet. And I'm not even going to say that this is necessarily ideological. People are fleeing dysfunction. And so far, there's not a lot of sign that, you know, you know, blue state voters are turning Texas or Florida blue. You know, so far there's not a lot of data or evidence that that's happening at all. Maybe it's the red state voters leaving California and Illinois and New York and New Jersey. We don't know. But what we've had is this remarkable experiment and federalism that's having real results. I mean, there's a real separation taking place in this country. And I think it's an absolutely beautiful thing. And, you know, we actually have a real-world example of where federalism works beautifully. And that's Switzerland. All you have to do is look at the Swiss government's website and they lay out the principle of subsidiarity and federalism. Now, the big difference in Switzerland is that most people pay about 80% of their overall tax burden, either to their local Canton or their commune, which is this, excuse me, their local commune or their local Canton, and only about 20% to the feds. Whereas here in the United States, that's flipped. We spend about 80% of it to Uncle Sam. So that's a problem. But apart from that, there's no reason why we couldn't be engaging in a great awakening, I think, for a federalist system in the United States. And not because of constitutionalism or anything like that, just because of people's desires to live in places that work and to live around people who share their thoughts and attitudes and opinions and values. And when I bring up that 80-20 thing on taxes, let me just say real quick, this is 2020s. If you want to call it a budget, this is a farce. But this is what Congress and the federal government did last year. So let's just say they brought in about 3.5 trillion and they spent about 6.5. So in a sense, the MMTers are getting their way, right? If half of everything the federal government spends to operate is debt financed, they don't need your taxes for 50% of what they do. Why not 60? Why not 80? Why not 90? Why can't we be Switzerland? It's all funny money at this point now anyway. So what we have to think about is whether we can really turn our backs on DC, whether we have an opportunity of a lifetime, perhaps several lifetimes to go a new direction. And I think we have to be thinking of Washington DC more like the Afghans do. In other words, we're all aware of how Uncle Sam projects military and economic power across the world and bullies people in this crazed foreign interventionist foreign policy which we've been suffering under, especially since Reagan. But oftentimes we fail to recognize that DC is an imperial power with respect to the 50 states as well, right? They're bossing us around just as much as they're bossing Afghanistan around, maybe more. And so when we see the US federal government fail, when we see it fail in Afghanistan, when we see it fail with respect to its COVID response, maybe that starts people's minds questioning whether things have to be this way. So when far away imperial cities begin to fail, when they can no longer project authority, the natural response is for more regionalized or localized approaches to governance. So again, COVID is an opportunity and we ought to see it as such. It gives us actually remarkable visibility into at least two psyches operating in the United States today, the predominant psyches. And the first is those who are AOK with the new normal, who welcome it, who like it, who view those scenes that I was talking about earlier in Melbourne, Australia with approval or maybe even satisfaction. These anti-lockdown, anti-vaxxers are getting their comeuppance. Riot cops on horses are beating them with batons and that's a good thing. There are millions of Americans who think that. There are millions of Americans, probably tens of millions, who would be AOK with these kinds of dystopian lockdowns with no end in sight. That's what they want here. That's not what I want. So I'm gonna leave you with a couple of tough questions. You know, do principles scale? Are principles situational? Does it matter when we're talking about simple human freedom, what we would all consider freedom in this room? If 10 people die from COVID or 1 million people die from COVID, should our approach in those two scenarios change? Well, that's a very tough question from an ethical perspective. But from a trade-offs perspective, I think we can say emphatically that trade-offs don't scale. What's good for one place is not necessarily good for another. And politically we all know how the political class is going to respond. We all know how they answer that question. More, more, more, more. That's all they know how to do. A crisis comes along and what do they do? They throw money at the problem and they boss us around. These are their two approaches to any human problem. Okay, so we know what they're going to do. We can't listen to them anymore. We have to contain them and we have to control them. And that's increasingly difficult, I would argue, at the federal level. You're gonna get 80 or 85 or 90 million people to vote for, let's say, a presidential candidate whom we would consider a reasonable person, like a Rand Paul, let's say. That's a pretty big enchilada. Okay, that's a lot of heavy lifting. But if we turn our backs on these people and walk away from them, literally and figuratively, I think we have the answer in front of us. Mises wrote two books that are radically decentralized in tone and approach. He wrote them in the interwar years. Between 1919, when he had just come home as an artillery officer for the Austro-Hungarian Army, in 1928, the first was called Nation, State and Economy, the second was called Liberalism. If you haven't read these books, they're both short, you can read them easily in a day or an afternoon. If you need one, ping me, find me on Twitter, I'll be happy to send you one. In my opinion, these two books are amongst the most important he ever wrote, and they're also, I think, misinterpreted in many ways. Mises cared very, very deeply about political minorities, about people who find themselves in a political jurisdiction as minorities, whether that was racial and ethnic, whether that was linguistic, or whether that was simply because of the political views that they hold. And I'm gonna suggest to all of you in this room that that's us, we're a political minority, and we ought to start thinking that way and acting that way. Because these people who approve of the lockdowns are not likely to change, and the cost benefit of trying to get them to change their minds, I think, is not nearly as attractive as the cost benefit of trying to get away from them and unyoke ourselves from them. So the silver lining of COVID is that our task has been made clear, and that is, in my view, separation rather than persuasion. Thank you very much. Thank you.