John Mann
13h ·
while most of the attention from the recent biden speech has focused on the bitter, impotent granddad threatening to “turn this car around if you kids don’t stop screwing around back there, i mean it it!” there was another facet beyond the vaccine mandates that warrants consideration:
biden ordered the federal government seize control of the distribution of monoclonal antibodies, a highly effective form of covid treatment currently in widespread use, especially in florida and texas.
nothing strikes fear into the heart of right-thinking, effective humans everywhere like the words “i’m from the government and i’m here to help.”
these words are all the more pernicious when they are applied to a market that’s already working because only government is so stupid and venal as to try to fix something that is not broken to try to take credit for what was happening anyway.
and, inevitably, you get a total fail because there is nothing government is better at providing or distributing than the private sector is. if you need to get bottled water to a hurricane zone, who would you trust? FEMA or walmart? it’s not even close. and this is why the government assuming control of distribution of antibody infusions is going to be so dangerous: the best you can expect is incompetence and inability to read or respond to market signals.
government will ALWAYS do the wrong thing even when acting with the best of intentions because they have no way to know what they are doing. they do not face real price signals, real market data, or real market discipline. the literal point of government intervention is to break pareto optimality and force inefficient choices and allocations. the free market would have already handled the efficient ones. layer onto that the fact that rather than being steered by the efficiency and accuracy constraints of competition, government serves only talking points, optics, and entrenched bureaucracy, and you get this: