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June
29
2023

What’s Really Making Many Americans Fat, Sick, Poor, and Stupid
Doug Casey

International Man: Nearly half of Americans have at least one chronic condition—and that number is growing.

One in three Americans are either overweight or obese.

Why do you think so many Americans are overweight and sick?

Doug Casey: I don’t pretend to be a medical expert. But I can assure you that it’s better to be young, healthy, rich, and smart than old, sick, poor, and stupid.

It’s obvious that the latter increasingly defines Americans.

There’s no doubt that they have problems with weight and lack of exercise. This has been a problem for decades, but things really got out of control with the COVID scamdemic.

Not only were the gyms closed, but you could forget about even going for a walk in many places. You were supposed to stay in your apartment, wear a pathetic little paper mask, and huddle in a corner to hide from some crazy virus trying to hunt you down like a rat.

Americans were not only forced to put their lives on hold but couldn’t even get into a hospital or see a doctor to handle real medical conditions. I’ll guess that the average American gained 10 to 20 pounds of weight.

Weight is easy to gain but hard to lose in today’s America.

The excess deaths attributed to COVID, and a general degradation of health, were not due to COVID itself, however. COVID was just a severe flu that mostly affected old, fat, and sick people. In fact, government actions killed many more people than the vaunted plague, short term, and long term.

Everything that government touches degrades and degenerates. A good case can be made that government is at least partly responsible for the poor health of Americans. Perhaps it started with the invention of the so-called food pyramid.

Bureaucrats told Americans to consume lots of grains, usually in the form of sugary breakfast cereals and white bread. All of it is heavily processed. Fresh vegetables and fruits only played a minor part in the recommended American diet.

Lobbyists from major corporations found it much more profitable to promote convenience foods than fresh fruits and vegetables.

Before World War 2, the average American woman stayed at home to raise a family and manage the household, cooking meals from scratch. It was a full-time job. Women also acted as a backup system if the male, the main breadwinner, couldn’t work.

Now, however, most women work. They no longer have time to take care of the house and children and cook three edible meals a day for the family. This has given rise to convenience foods.

Convenience foods are processed, preserved, and pre-packaged. They’re very heavy in sugar, fat, salt, and processed carbs. Over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, when starvation was the norm, these things were rare. Now they’re ubiquitous. But we’re genetically programmed to seek them out.

Processed, preserved, and packaged food tends to be heavy in calories and light on fiber and nutrients. We don’t really get food from farmers anymore but from large corporations, which are in a partnership with the State.

Don’t worry; I’m not a “granola” or a back-to-nature hippy. But large urban populations in industrial societies require some adjustments, and not all of them are welcome. That said, if an unregulated free market was allowed—which is not the case—there’s every reason to believe foods would be both vastly better and cheaper.

I think those are some reasons people are overweight today.

International Man: What is the relationship between Big Pharma and the government?

How could pharmaceutical companies operate in a free market?

Doug Casey: Big government, which has become as fat as the people that it rules over, naturally likes to deal with big corporations.

A consequence of the unwholesome partnership between big government and big corporations is that when corporations need approvals, favors, or subsidies, they’re in a good position to get them much more easily than the “little people” can.

And subtly, often not so subtly, government employees are rewarded with lucrative corporate jobs, directorships, and consulting contracts for having made their corporate buddies rich. Look at the contemptible Tony Fauci and his coterie. One hand washes the other.

In the US and most of today’s world, Mussolini’s fascist dream of a partnership between big government and big corporations has become reality on a vast scale.

That’s absolutely, maybe especially true for pharmaceutical companies.

How would they operate in a free market?

In a free market, there would be no subsidies. There would be no government purchases of products that corporations want to sell. There would be no Medicare or Medicaid. So, there wouldn’t be a constant pipeline of money from the government to corporations. Obamacare made this much worse.

Of course, in a free market, the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) wouldn’t exist. I prefer to call the FDA the Federal Death Authority because they probably kill more people every year than the Defense Department does in a typical decade. Why? The multibillion-dollar costs and the typically 10-year delay they impose on the development of valuable drugs and technologies. Most of it is cover-your-ass procedures imposed by lawyers and bureaucrats, not scientists. They’re not actually protecting the consumer from dangerous food and drugs.

In a free market, entrepreneurs and medical companies would spend those billions of dollars effectively rather than in ways that only make sense because State approval is needed.

What drugs you take should be between you and your doctor, without the dead hand of the government laying on top of both of you.

It often starts with censorship of valuable information, as happened during the COVID hysteria when it became impossible, or at least dangerous, to even discuss the nature of the problem. Doctors were unable to prescribe inexpensive, safe drugs like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. Instead, hundreds of millions were squandered on expensive and deadly remdesivir and ventilators at the start of the COVID hysteria. The only thing that stayed healthy was a giant self-sustaining bureaucracy.

International Man: Americans used to be skeptical of Big Pharma.

However, after the COVID hysteria, it seems many have become useful idiots—or worse—for Big Pharma.

What is responsible for this change in attitude, and what are the implications?

Doug Casey: An excellent illustration of the power of government is provided by this video compilation. I urge everybody to watch it.

People have been taught to rely on credentialed experts as opposed to listening to their bodies and doing their own research. Doing your own research—called “reading”—is actively discouraged today. If you’re a thinking person, of course, you’re skeptical of Big Pharma. My co-author John Hunt, M.D., and I go into this in our novel Drug Lord.

The fact is that many of the drugs that they’ve come up with, despite many years and billions of dollars of FDA approval process, are actively dangerous.

An excellent example of this is the over 100 hundred psychiatric drugs which are supposed to assuage mental illness. In most cases, they just cover up psychological problems that have causes in people’s diet or habits. Things like Zoloft, Prozac, and hundreds of others are heavily prescribed. They often turn people into zombies.

Americans should be suspicious of these things. Health is something you achieve for yourself. Medical intervention is something between you and your doctor when necessary. The State should have no role in either.

International Man: The US is clearly experiencing a steep economic, cultural, and social decline.

How does the average American’s health decline fit into the overall trend?

Doug Casey: At this point, it almost seems that the-powers-that-be would prefer to see the useless mouths put in cubicles where food and entertainment can be doled out while they collect their universal basic income, only coming out to vote or riot when called upon.

This seems to be the way things are going. It’s as if life is following the plot of a dystopian sci-fi movie.

I generally don’t believe in conspiracies simply because it’s hard enough to have four friends agree on which restaurant to go to—much less get hundreds of miscreants to conspire.

But ultimately, along with reducing 90% of the population, the kind of people that get into government, or go to Davos, simply want to control other people. State “health” mandates are an important part of that.

International Man: What do you recommend individuals do to buck this trend and stay physically healthy?

Doug Casey: First thing to do is recognize that the words surrounding the subject need to be used accurately.

People conflate “healthcare” with “medical care.” Medical care is what you need and want when you’re confronting an acute illness or a serious accident.

Healthcare is very different. It’s something that you provide for yourself. Your primary possession is your own body, and it’s something that you’re personally responsible for. You—not the government, not Medicare, not Medicaid.

It’s a corruption of language to call medical insurance, health insurance. It makes everybody think that if they get health insurance, their health will somehow be insured.

That’s not the way it works. Your health is something that you are responsible for. The costs of medical care, however, can be insured. But medical care is only necessary when some serious extraneous event overtakes your life. It shouldn’t be a consideration of day-to-day living. For instance, it’s absurd that the average family pays about $2500 a month for “health insurance” provided by a now collapsing medical system.

But that’s a subject for another conversation.

 

As the impetus behind the International Man project, Doug Casey is an American-born free market economist, best-selling financial author, and international investor and entrepreneur. He is the founder and chairman of Casey Research, a provider of subscription financial analysis about specific market verticals that he has focused his investing career around, including natural resources/metals/mining, energy, commodities, and technology.

Since 1979, he has written, and later co-written, the monthly metals and mining focused investment newsletter, The International Speculator. He also contributes to other newsletters, including The Casey Report, a geopolitically oriented publication.

Doug Casey is a highly respected author, publisher and professional investor who graduated from Georgetown University in 1968.

Doug literally wrote the book on profiting from periods of economic turmoil: his book, Crisis Investing, spent multiple weeks as #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and became the best-selling financial book of 1980 with 438,640 copies sold; surpassing big-caliber names, like Free to Choose by Milton Friedman, The Real War by Richard Nixon, and Cosmos by Carl Sagan.

Then Doug broke the record with his next book, Strategic Investing, by receiving the largest advance ever paid for a financial book at the time. Interestingly enough, Doug’s book, The International Man, was the most sold book in the history of Rhodesia.

He has been a featured guest on hundreds of radio and TV shows, including David Letterman, Merv Griffin, Charlie Rose, Phil Donahue, Regis Philbin, Maury Povich, NBC News and CNN; and has been the topic of numerous features in periodicals such as Time, Forbes, People, and the Washington Post.

Doug, who divides his time between homes in Aspen, Colorado; Auckland, New Zealand; and Salta, Argentina, has written newsletters and alert services for sophisticated investors for over 28 years. Doug has lived in 10 countries and visited over 175.

In addition to having served as a trustee on the Board of Governors of Washington College and Northwoods University, Doug has been a director and advisor to nine different financial corporations.

Doug is widely respected as one of the preeminent authorities on “rational speculation,” especially in the high-potential natural resource sector.

www.internationalman.com