The Surrealist Surgeon General and Public Health

‘The nation’ is not a large biological organism, but consists of a large number of individuals, all different and unique, each with his or her own preferences, values ​​and circumstances. Economics is a science that studies the social consequences of individual choices. Ultimately, all choices are individual, even those made by politicians and bureaucrats. A political majority consists of individuals. So if someone were “the nation’s doctor,” you would expect him to be adept at economics, whether he was studying the social consequences of the Second Amendment, or the First, or the Fourth, or any of those.

The US ‘Surgeon General’ officially defines himself, presumably based on some law or regulation, as ‘the national doctor.” His office is a strange creature (as it is history also reveals):

As Vice Admiral of the US Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, the Surgeon General oversees the activities of the US Public Health Service Commissioned Corps (USPHS), an elite group of more than 6,000 uniformed officers serving throughout the federal government and whose Its mission is to protect, promote and advance the health of our nation.

Like most public health bureaucrats, he and his office are not particularly well-versed in economics. His latest “advice” is titled Gun Violence: A Public Health Crisis in America. Although surgeons general have opinions on many topics and lifestyles, they have never discussed the social implications of free speech or due process. (However, the current Surgeon General did publish advice on this social media And health misinformation. His advice on gun violence contains no mention of the word “economics” and appears to refer to only two limited economic studies. Could I have missed something in the report’s 110 footnotes (there is no separate bibliography)? In any case, it appears that the Surgeon General believes himself to be the physician of a vast organism of which ordinary individuals are the organs or cells.

Economics and other rational choice approaches to society have undermined the prescientific idea that society can be studied as a biological organism. Émile Faguet, the great French literary critic, historian of political ideas, essayist and academic, was not an economist, but he knew enough to mock the kind of “zoological politics” implied by the social organism: “You think that you are a man’ He wrote; ‘In fact you are a foot’ – ‘Vous vous make a homme; vous êtes un pied”(Liberalism, Paris, 1902/1903). Mine Independent assessment article “The impossibility of populismillustrates the danger of this prescientific error.

Of course, we can hope that individuals will make informed choices about their trade-offs between risk and happiness, especially when children are indirect victims. Minimal government intervention in the form of unbiased information could probably be justified, assuming it is possible. But impartial information and the protection of children are not what public health is about. An article in the current issue of The economist“Trans medicine research has been manipulated,” provides an example of what public health activists typically mean by information and research.

What we now call ‘public health’ emerged around the turn of the 20th century, slightly earlier in Germany. It is not a scientific undertaking, but an ideological and political movement. (I developed this idea in a Regulation article,”The dangers of public health”, and an article from the Reason Foundation: “Public health models and related government interventions.”) During the Progressive Era, the public health movement and at least one Surgeon General advocated eugenics and mandatory sterilization. In an article about “UVA and the History of Race: Eugenics, the Racial Integrity Act, Health Disparities”, P. Preston Renolds, professor of medicine and nursing at the University of Virginia, mentions how the fifth Surgeon General of the United States, Hugh Smith Cumming (see the image accompanying this post), with two assistant surgeons generals,

brought eugenic racism to the tobacco fields of rural Alabama. Here they conducted the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study, which followed nearly 400 black men for forty years in an effort to document how the disease manifested in black individuals left untreated. The tragedy is that after the discovery of penicillin as a cure for syphilis after World War II, these men were never informed of their disease nor offered curative therapy.

Public health is an ongoing movement that has used or inspired emergencies to increase state power. On March 13, 2020, just two hours before President Donald Trump declared a Covid-19 emergency, Surgeon General Jerome Adams, who had already declared youth vaping an “epidemic,” spoke at an anti-tobacco conference. He opined:

It is important for us to understand that more people will die from smoking-related diseases in the next hour than have died from COVID-19 in the United States to date.

So much for bureaucratic wisdom. In many ways, “public health” is the label for the fashionable lifestyle coercively imposed by the government. It is government coercion with a human face. It is a surreal experience to see the Surgeon General, dressed in the uniform of his authoritative Vice Admiral, passing judgment on the lifestyle choices his nation’s patients should make (see “American gun violence is a public health crisis, the surgeon general warns,” Wall Street JournalJune 26, 2024).

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