Filling the World With Fools

That tweet is via Nate Hochman, who embedded it at the NR Corner: FDA Social-Media Meme Campaign Cringey. And lets loose some unfriendly fire:

Look, if the federal bureaucracy is making memes — with my tax dollars, no less — I want to know about it. All the more so if they’re humorless and viscerally cringe-inducing. And if they’re not actually memes at all — if they’re really just standard-issue “Follow The Science!“ talking points repackaged as half-baked imitations of memes — well, I consider that a matter of significant national concern. Alexis de Tocqueville once wrote that if despotism ever came to America, it would arrive in the form of FDA interns tasked with orchestrating ill-fated social-media campaigns. (Or something like that. It’s been a while since I read Democracy in America.) The point is: These are things that the American people deserve to be made aware of.

As a commenter said: this is firmly in the tradition of Pajama Boy and Life of Julia.

Apparently the FDA thinks the citizenry can be successfully nagged by intelligence-insulting memes. Which raises a "which is worse" question: Is this honest contempt for the sheeple, or did the FDA hire a bunch of idiot teenagers to do their campaigns?

Pun Salad's first post advocating abolishing the FDA was… whoa, back in 2006. That demand has only gained urgency in recent years.

Briefly noted:

  • On a related issue, Brendan O'Neill brings us The truth about Covid McCarthyism.

    There were two viruses that the authorities wanted to control in 2020 and 2021. The first was the virus of Covid-19. The second was the virus of dissent. Throughout the pandemic, experts referred to lockdown scepticism and Covid misinformation as their own kind of disease, as a contagious malady that might sicken the masses’ minds as surely as Covid sickened their bodies. British politicians referred to a ‘pandemic of misinformation’. We must protect people both from ‘physical disease and the “disease of misinformation”’, scientists insisted. ‘False information has plagued the Covid response’, said one academic. Plagued – what a striking choice of verb. And if contrary ideas are an infection in the body politic, then it’s clear what the cure must be: censorship.

    Nearly three years on from the start of the pandemic, it’s apparent that censorship was central to lockdown. It wasn’t only our everyday lives that were forcibly put on hold – so was our right to say certain things and even think certain things. In the US, Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who was fawned over by the liberal media for his handling of Covid, has been deposed in a lawsuit that accuses him and the Biden administration more broadly of colluding with Big Tech to undermine the American people’s speech rights during the pandemic. The lawsuit is brought by the attorney general of Missouri, Eric Schmitt. The transcript of the questioning of Fauci was released earlier this month. It’s a frustrating read. Fauci continually says he doesn’t recall or doesn’t know in response to questions about his alleged role in suppressing speech in the Covid era. But it seems clear that, informally at least, he helped to devise and enforce the parameters of acceptable thought during the pandemic.

    O'Neill summarizes (with links aplenty) Fauci's slimy dishonesty.

  • Peter Suderman makes a point that should be shouted from the rooftops: Biden's Student Debt Relief Will Make College More Expensive.

    When President Joe Biden announced in August that he was canceling thousands of dollars in student loan debt for most current borrowers, he explained that his plan was partly a response to the rapid rise in the cost of higher education.

    "Here's the deal," Biden said. "The cost of education beyond high school has gone up significantly. The total cost to attend a public four-year university has….nearly tripled in 40 years—tripled." Education, Biden insisted, is the "ticket to a better life." Yet thanks to rapidly increasing costs, "that ticket has become too expensive for too many Americans."

    It is true that the cost of higher education has risen markedly in the last four decades. It is also true that as costs have risen, so has the number of graduates with loans. Prior to Biden's forgiveness plan, there was $1.6 trillion in outstanding student loan debt, up from about $187 billion in 1995. But Biden's plan not only fails to address any of the factors driving those cost increases; it is nearly certain to make the problem worse.

    He asks a good question: "If political pressure to forgive debt can work once, why wouldn't it work again every five or 10 years?"

    Let's keep our fingers crossed that it won't even work once.

    It would be nice if we could get Uncle Stupid out of the student loan biz entirely, but I fear that's a non-starter.

  • Need to brush up on your Bastiat? Michael Munger notes a bunch of people who do: Green Energy is the Modern “Broken Window”.

    John Goodell studied literature at Berkeley, then got an M.F.A. at Columbia. He has edited Zyzzyva, a literary magazine in San Francisco, and been a contributing editor at Rolling Stone. Pretty impressive.

    None of that qualifies him as a climate scientist or economist. So it’s surprising that web searches yield hundreds of solemn, even pious, invocations of Goodell’s economic wisdom:

    In reality, studies show that investments to spur renewable energy and boost energy efficiency generate far more jobs than oil and coal.

    I have not been able to find a source; the quote itself has become self-recommending, using authority by reference: “studies show…” My good friend Russ Roberts often inveighs against the “studies show” formulation, but I think we have to give Goodell credit here. Studies really do show that dismantling, preferably destroying, the existing energy grid really would create jobs. The question is, why is maximizing jobs something we want to do?

    Frederic Bastiat famously showed that destroying wealth creates jobs, in his discussion of the broken window fallacy. But there was a broader context for Bastiat’s observations on the seen and the unseen: a serious proposal that all of Paris should be burned down. Yes, because it would create jobs. Really.

    Or: "If You Want Jobs Then Give These Workers Spoons Instead of Shovels"

  • You've been told that "Life is too short for          ".

    Chris Stirewalt helpfully fills in that blank: Life Is Too Short For Hating Harry & Meghan. And asks a provocative question:

    Is it worse to profit by hating Meghan Markle and Harry Winsdor than it is for Markle and Windsor to profit by sharing their own seemingly bottomless reservoir of antipathies?

    And I found I didn't care enough about the question to try to answer it. See what you think.