Alejandro A. Tagliavini *
The tight election, against all the polls and a strong anti-Trump media campaign, highlights two themes. First, the media is estranged from the people, and they will have to make changes, or they will perish in front of the individuals and their social media hobbies. Second, many people, if not the silent majority, do not want quarantines and other repressions of the human right to freedom. And the world must understand it or risk regrettable, increasingly violent protests around the world.
McQuillan and Koehler say that Biden is going to socialism. He would support the Green New Deal – a camouflaged state takeover with the excuse of the climate change – a banking system run by the Federal Reserve and the Postal Service with control over money, and he would expand very flawed Medicare. All financed with more taxes than the poor always pay, because the rich avoid them by raising prices or lowering wages.
I do not know if they are right. To begin with, politicians do not keep their word. And I also do not think Trump is a champion of freedom, I wouldn’t vote for him. But the most serious global problem today is quarantines and other state repressions and Trump would end them. And all because of a virus that caused the death of less than 0.02% of the global population when the Spanish flu, per case, killed 2.4%.
To argue that the virus could develop exponentially is science fiction in the face of a real catastrophe, not supposed, caused by these quarantines of which, due to space limitations, we will only see malnutrition.
The free market is not what the conservative right says: freedom for large corporations. On the contrary, it is the absence of state coercion -violence, police- that favors the powerful, so that ordinary people can work and interact in peace. And hence the effectiveness of the market because, while the State is violently imposed, people cooperate achieving efficiency since, being voluntary, interactions take place only when both parties win, they get what they prefer.
Thus, as Sweden shows, free societies resolve epidemics effectively when state violence reaches the point where UK police warn that it is a «civic duty» to report on neighbors who violate restrictions. It reminds me of the informers of Jews before the Gestapo.
Due to the restrictions, according to the ILO, 305 million jobs were lost. Farmers are affected by blockades that limit access to their land, planting or harvesting or accessing markets and selling products or buying inputs. Already 1.5 million New Yorkers, in the most cosmopolitan city on the globe, depend on food banks. But more serious is what Oxfam, an organization in any case on the left, tells us: 12,000 people per day would starve to death due to quarantines, although Oxfam and the UN are quite incoherent and attribute it «to the pandemic and government restrictions».
Let us be clear: those who do not work are because the government prevents it. According to the UN, the number of people in a hunger crisis will rise to 270 million by the end of the year, 82% more than in 2019. And this on a planet where there is plenty of food, says Oxfam.
And for this reason, I make a sincere humanitarian appeal: to end completely and definitively all state repression.
* Senior Advisor at The Cedar Portfolio and Member of the Advisory Council of the Center on Global Prosperity, de Oakland, California
Alejandro A. Tagliavini 
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