A “tribe” is not a large living animal but is made up of a large number of people, all separate and distinct, each with their own preferences, values, and circumstances. Economics is the science that studies the social consequences of individual choices. Ultimately, all decisions are individual, even the decisions made by politicians and officials. Most politics is made up of people. If someone was a ‘national doctor,’ then you would expect him to be an economist, whether he was studying the social effects of the Second Amendment, or the First, or the Fourth, or any of them.
The Surgeon General of the United States officially defines himself, perhaps on the basis of some law or regulation, as the “National Surgeon.” His office is a strange creature (as its history also reveals):
As Vice Admiral of the US Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, the Doctor General oversees the operation of the US Public Health Service Commissioned Corps (USPHS), a special group of more than 6,000 uniformed officers working for the federal government whose mission is to protect, promote. , and improve the health of our nation.
Like many public health officials, he and his office are not well-versed in economics. His latest “advice” has a title Gun Violence: A Public Health Crisis in America. Although surgeons often have opinions on many topics and lifestyles, they rarely discuss the social consequences of free speech or due process. (The current Chief Medical Officer has published advice on social media and misinformation about health.) His advice on gun violence contains no mention of the word “economics” and appears to refer to more than two limited economic studies. Did I miss something in footnote 110 of the report (no separate bibliography)? It seems that the Doctor General believes that he is a doctor of a large animal where ordinary people are organs or cells.
Economics and other social choice methods have rejected the pre-scientific idea that society can be studied as an organism. Émile Faguet, the great French literary critic, historian of political ideas, journalist, and Academician was not an economist, but he knew enough to ridicule the kind of “animal politics” implied by social organicism: “You think you are a man,” he wrote; “In fact, you are a foot”—“Vous vous croyez un homme; you êtes un pied” (This Liberalisme, Paris, 1902/1903). Mine Independent Review The title “The Impossibility of Populism” shows the danger of this mistake.
Of course, we can hope that people will choose to be informed about their trade-off between risk and pleasure—especially when children may be unintended victims. Small government intervention in the form of unbiased information, assuming it is possible, may be justified. But unbiased information and child protection are not what public health is about. An article in the current issue of The Economist“Trans Medicine Research Has Been Frauded,” reviews a sample of what public health activists are saying about information and research.
What we now call “social life” began at the beginning of the 20th century, a little earlier in Germany. It is not a scientific endeavor but an ideological and political movement. (I developed this idea in a Regulation article, “Public Health Hazards,” and the Reasoning Foundation article, “Public Health Models and Related Government Interventions.”) During the Progressive Era, the public health movement and at least one Surgeon General supported eugenics and forced sterilization. In the article “UVA and the History of Race: Eugenics, the Law of Racial Integrity, Health Disparity,” P. Preston Reynolds, professor of medicine and nursing at the University of Virginia, talks about how the fifth Doctor General of the United States. , Hugh Smith Cumming, and assistant surgeon generals,
he took eugenic racism to the tobacco plantations of rural Alabama. Here they conducted the famous Tuskegee Syphilis study, in which about 400 black men were followed for 40 years in an attempt to document how the disease was seen in black people when it was left untreated. The sad thing is that with the discovery of penicillin as a cure for syphilis after World War II, these men were not informed of their disease, or given curative treatment.
In many ways, “public health” is a fashionable life label encouraged, if not enforced, by the government. Consider the decades-long persecution of smokers by banning restaurants, bars, and other private establishments from openly admitting them. Public health is a government mandate with a human face. It’s interesting to see a Surgeon General, dressed in the uniform of an authoritative vice admiral, giving his opinion on what lifestyle choices his patients should adopt (see “US Gun Violence Is a Public Health Problem, Surgeon General Warns,” The Wall Street JournalJune 26, 2024).
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Present Surgeon. By the United States Department of Health and Human Services – Public Domain,
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