Dr. Anthony Fauci makes waves before the Senate. Los Angeles makes moves to lockdown until,

well, forever, and Democrats push a $3 trillion wish list. I'm Ben Shapiro. This is The Ben Shapiro Show.

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ExpressVPN.com slash Ben. All righty. So, Dr. Anthony Fauci went before the Senate yesterday. And this caused all sorts of controversy. Now, frankly, I'm sort of perturbed at the controversy. The reason being, I don't think that Fauci is a bad guy. I don't think that Fauci is out to ruin the American economy. I don't think that he is a malign influence on President Trump. I think that Dr. Fauci is an epidemiologist. And his job is to be an epidemiologist. His job is to be a doctor of public health when it comes to pandemics. His job is not to balance all of the risks and rewards. When you go to a doctor and you look for a diagnosis. Usually, the doctor puts before you a fair number of choices,

and it is now your determination as to which choice you seek, right? The doctor puts before, you have cancer, God forbid. And the doctor says to you, okay, so here are the choices. You could have a surgery. Here are the risks and the possibilities. You can have chemotherapy. Here are the risks and the possibilities. Or depending on your age, maybe the best thing is to sort of let it take its course.

If you're 85 years old and you have prostate cancer, maybe the treatment is actually worse than the disease. And now you have a bunch of choices in front of you. It is not the doctor's job to make the final determination. When it comes to public policymaking, our elected officials are elected to make exactly these determinations. Why? Well, because they're answerable to we.

They are answerable to us. They're answerable to we the people.

The fact that we are now looking to sort of delegate all decision-making authority to the experts

is the tail end of the progressive era stupidity that suggested that if we just gave all power to the quote

unquote experts in government, then everything would magically be solved. Now, experts are good

for what experts are good for. Experts are good for knowing a lot of things about one particular

subject. But they're not famous for knowing lots of things about lots of particular subjects.

If you ask Dr. Fauci about Keynesian versus Milton-Fribunesque economics,

my guess is that he wouldn't know much more than the average guy. But if you ask him about disease vectors, then he probably knows a lot more than the average guy. Asking him to be the sole policymaker is really foolhardy. And even Dr. Fauci knows this. And so he sort of move from the left to appoint Dr. Fauci the head of government when he is not the head of government or to use him as a club to wield against elected officials, whom, again, all of whom are answerable to us. The fact that people on the left want to do that. And then the fact that people on the right are responding to that by blaming Fauci, as though Fauci is to blame for lawmakers abdicating their

duty and just pointing to Fauci and going, well, he's going to solve all of our problems. It's stupidity. I mean, frankly, I think that Dr. Fauci would be the first person to say that it's stupidity. He is there to provide medical knowledge and guidance. And then it is up to us to determine what risks we are willing to undertake as a society. What this means that when

people like Dr. Fauci, when public health experts testify publicly, they are always going to testify

on behalf of caution because their job is first do no harm on a public health level, not an economic

level, not on a freedom level, not on a constitutional level, not in a governmental level.

Their first job is to say, how do we save the most lives? Well, in a middle of a pandemic, the easy answer, if you're not looking at any of the other factors, is stay home until we have some sort of therapeutic or until we have some sort of vaccine. But of course, there are other factors to take into account when it comes to public policymaking, such as the fact that we may never have a vaccine or a therapeutic may not be all that effective, and the fact that 30 million people have lost their jobs in the last six weeks, and that their accounts are surveilling costs to people losing their jobs, losing their livelihoods, 100,000 small businesses shutting down. This is where it is up to our public officials, the people who we actually elect, our elected officials, to weigh the evidence that Dr. Fauci is providing and his advice with the evidence provided by economists with the values that we hold dear as a nation. I mean, just take a different example for a second. In a war time, let's say that you were to ask a public health expert in wartime, what is the best policy? Well, public health expert's job is to save as many lives as possible. And so the public health expert would say, best strategy here is probably not to do the war, right? No war is good because that means few people are going to get shot and killed. But if you are an elected official in it's World War II, you know that there are going to be a certain number of people who are going to have to risk their lives on the beaches of Normandy. This is not to suggest that the public health experts are wrong about everything.

This is to suggest that everybody has their own specific area of expertise and to pretend

that this means a broad area of expertise is really foolish. And in a republic, we rely on the

notion that a diffuse level of value judgment among the American population is going to be

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