The Practical Politics of Swine Flu

These stories have me worried — US declares public health emergency for swine flu and WHO declares international concern over swine flu.

I'm worried not about swine flu, mind you, but about those who are stoking fears about it. Observed H. L. Mencken, "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

In a used bookstore, I once came across a book on communicable diseases promulgated by the F.D.R. régime. It was an informative read. The final chapter, however, was a propaganda piece suggesting that the reader must surely agree that these diseases were so terrible that nothing but a strong central bureaucratic state could protect people from them.

Let us remember that the last time "swine flu" was in the news, in what some statists have called "the finest hour of America's public health bureaucracy," it is alleged that "hundreds of Americans were killed or seriously injured by the inoculation the government gave them to stave off the virus" — 1976: Fear of a great plague.