I hear from the Guardian that Anthony Fauci pled the Fifth 100 times in Senate hearings about his actions during the pandemic. To a certain knee-jerk portion of the body politic, I hear this means that Trump's former advisor is guilty as sin and should be locked up. [Insert whistle here.]

Unfortunately for MAGA, that same trial-by-ordeal-like "standard" would have have their hero, Donald Trump, behind bars long ago: He did the same thing over 400 times during a 2022 deposition in New York about his namesake organization's business practices.

But that was a witch hunt! will be their version of But this is different!

Trump is openly, obviously corrupt -- and Fauci plainly isn't omniscient and made mistakes. Two things about each can be true at once: Authorities can (1) have valid reasons for wanting to understand their past actions better, and (2) choose to perform a witch-hunt instead.

In 2022, the Democrats were incompetently trying to bring Trump down before the election for legally weak reasons -- after inadequately pursuing several serious legal matters they should have already had well underway by then.

Now, the Republicans, who -- as Amesh Adalja argues in the embedded video above -- should be interested in looking back at their handling of the Covid pandemic are instead trying to simply scapegoat Fauci.

Regarding Fauci, I once said:

As much as I am personally inclined to dislike Fauci, he is a human being who had a very difficult job to to. He should state his side of the story clearly, and we should hear it before passing judgement on him.

That isn't what happened in the hearings.

Regarding actual post-mortems, the Guardian piece mentions the commentary of Zeynep Tufekci, which I found thoughtful.

I concluded that post as follows:

It is interesting, and not in a happy way, to consider what this pandemic has revealed to us about the state of our culture (as manifest in its intellectual and governing classes), both in terms of what passes for knowledge and in terms of how society should be organized.

That observation applies particularly well today. The Guardian notes:

No surprise, really, that Fauci, now retired from his public post, invoked the fifth amendment more than 100 times during last week's Senate committee hearing.

That's the action that -- though reasonable enough given all the circumstances -- is the supposed impetus for holding him in contempt. Now the committee has referred the matter to the justice department for possible criminal prosecution.

Fauci could see the writing on the wall as this trumped-up hearing began. In his opening statement, he singled out the Kentucky senator Rand Paul, the Republican committee chairperson.

"The only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something, anything, that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, 'behind bars'," Fauci said. "Any reasonable person who has followed his unhinged obsession with me would readily come to the same conclusion."

I agree with the Guardian that Fauci does not deserve this, and I agree further with epidemiologist Amesh Adalja (whose podcast is embedded above) that "Blaming Fauci won't prepare us for the next pandemic."

-- CAV

"[M]ost people hold, explicitly or implicitly, that without regulation, markets could, and sometimes would, spin off into disastrous excesses of one form or another.

"The operative image of economic regulation is that of a huge truck without steering or brakes. 'We have to have those instruments of control, or the truck will go careening off the side of a cliff.'

"The truth is that government regulation is precisely the cutting of the brake lines and the seizing up of the steering column.

"The actual alternative is: government regulation vs. market regulation---which means coercive rule by political appointees vs. freely negotiated prices.

"On a free market, when price relationships begin to diverge from economic reality, they are brought back in line because of greed. Speculators, arbitrageurs, and other "profiteers" swoop in to profit from any misalignment.

"Their activity acts to eliminate the very misalignment with reality that created the profit opportunity. ... Whenever prices, including interest rates, diverge from economic reality, there is money to be made in correcting the prices by the appropriate buying and selling.

"And here's the best part: those with the best judgment of economic reality are the ones who make the most money, which means they have the most influence on the market. It is the buying and selling of the Warren Buffets (and their more speculative counterparts) that keep the economy aligned with the facts. ...

"But ... [t]o the extent there is government intervention, the minds of the profit-seekers are thwarted and rewards go not to the Warren Buffets but, at first, to the ward heelers and power brokers, then as the system devolves, power over the economy goes increasingly to those who are better at conning the public. Then, they are replaced by those more willing to use compulsion. The ruthless displace the relatively timid punks, and destruction reigns.

"So, people have it backwards. 'Unregulated' means reason sets the terms and 'regulated' means reason is quashed by political power."

~ Harry Binswanger from his post 'One contradiction in the fear of laissez-faire'