Anti-vax and antitrust are falling into the same trapPluralistic: Anti-vax/anti-trust (09 Sep 2026)

Measles is sweeping back through America, children are paying the price, and millions still insist vaccines are a hoax. The author finds this maddening but understandable: vaccines succeeded so completely that measles became a 'little rash' and flu a 'bad cold,' and people forgot how terrifying they once were.

Invisible cause and effect

The problem is the long causal chain. Smoking doesn't grow tumors instantly, and vaccine harms and benefits are decades apart. Humans are notoriously bad at reasoning about slow causality, so tobacco companies and vaccine skeptics find room to sow profitable doubt. When the state fails at its basic job, people are left helpless, lacking both expertise and a reliable process for settling expert disputes.

Regulators you can't trust

The author recalls his own worst vaccine reaction—combining shingles, flu, and covid shots against doctor's orders—and says it was a day of feeling like dogshit, well worth avoiding the agony his grandmother's boyfriend Rusty endured from shingles. But not everyone has such a story to weigh the trade-off.

Monopoly is the same hole

135 years ago, monopolists ruined workers, corrupted politicians, and poisoned customers, so anti-monopoly laws were created. But they worked so well that people forgot how corrosive monopolies were. When Reagan-era economists touted 'efficiencies' of big corporations, the debate shifted to whether monopolies lower prices, ignoring that once they crush competitors and capture government, prices rise—because too big to fail is too big to jail.

Remember, before it leaks

The author quotes an old joke: 'When it don't rain the roof don't leak; when it's raining, I can't hardly fix it.' We let antitrust die because we forgot how bad oligarchs were, and now that they're driving civilization off a cliff, they seem omnipotent. But it can be fixed, just as ancestors tamed robber barons—and it starts with remembering.