OPINION | REAL CLEAR MARKETS – With Anthony Fauci, it’s interesting to think about what might have been.
In particular, what might have been had he worked in the market-disciplined private sector as an immunologist.
The fairly easy speculation here is that his decades of government work held him back, as they do all who toil without marketplace pressure.
The problem with government service is that being wrong rarely has consequences. As I point out in my new book, When Politicians Panicked, Fauci, Robert Redfield and other medical experts didn’t just mis-analzyze AIDS in the 1980s, they did so in stupendous fashion.
Had they been in the private sector, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that their analysis would have been more careful. That is so because you only get so many chances to be incorrect in the real world before you find yourself unemployed.
Imagine then if Fauci had worked for McDonald’s, or AMC Entertainment, or amusement park company Six Flags as in-house virus expert focused on how viruses spread in crowds.
If so, his room for error would have been substantially shrunken. There’s no way he could have uttered something so irresponsible as “I think we should be overly aggressive and get criticized for overreacting.” That’s what Fauci said on March 15, 2020.
Since he was panic-stricken, Fauci thought it was essential for his political-class counterparts to force an economic contraction. Businesses, jobs and freedom be damned.
Crucial about Fauci’s hysteria is that he couldn’t have been so cavalier about overreacting if his pay came from a for-profit business.
To which some readers will say, “Good.” They’ll claim that that “Fauci’s insulation from the pressures of the market enable him to say what can’t or wouldn’t be said if unemployment were the consequence of incorrect utterances, or words expressed in inarticulate fashion” …
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