I was sitting in the green room in a Manhattan television studio on the day that the storm seemed to hit. It was Thursday, March 12, 2020, and I was waiting anxiously for a TV appearance, hoping that the trains wouldn’t shut down before I could leave the city. The trains never did shut but half of everything else did.
On this day, everyone knew what was coming. There was disease panic in the air, fomented mostly by the media and political figures. A month earlier, the idea of lockdown was unthinkable, but now it seemed like it could happen, at any moment.
A thin, wise-looking bearded man with Freud-style glasses sat down across from me, having just left the studio. He was there to catch his breath following his interview but he looked deeply troubled.
“There is fear in the air,” I said, breaking the silence.
“Madness is all around us. The public is adopting a personality disorder I’ve been treating my whole career.”
“What is it that you do?” I asked.
“I’m a practicing psychiatrist who specializes in anxiety disorders, paranoid delusions, and irrational fear. I’ve been treating this in individuals as a specialist. It’s hard enough to contain these problems in normal times. What’s happening now is a spread of this serious medical condition to the whole population. It can happen with anything but here we see a primal fear of disease turning into mass panic. It seems almost deliberate. It is tragic. Once this starts, it could take years to repair the psychological damage.”
I sat there a bit stunned, partially because speaking in such apocalyptic terms was new in those days, and because of the certitude of his opinion. Underlying his brief comments were a presumption that there was nothing particularly unusual about this virus. We’ve evolved with them, and learned to treat them with calm and professionalism. What distinguished the current moment, he was suggesting, was not the virus but the unleashing of a kind of public madness.
I was an early skeptic of the we-are-all-going-to-die narrative. But even I was unsure if he was correct that the real problem was not physical but mental. In those days, even I was cautious about shaking hands and carrying around sanitizer. I learned later, of course, that plenty of medical professionals had been trying to calm people down for weeks, urging the normal functioning of society rather than panic. It took weeks however even for me to realize that he was right: the main threat society faced was a psychological condition.
I should have immediately turned to a book that captivated me in high school. It is Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles Mackay (1841). I liked reading it because, while it highlighted human folly, it also seemed to indicate that we as a civilization are over that period in history.
It allowed me to laugh at how ridiculous people were in the past, with sudden panics over long hair and beards, jewelry, witches, the devil, prophecies and sorcery, disease and cures, land speculation, tulips, just about anything. In a surprising number of cases he details, disease plays a role, usually as evidence of a malicious force operating in the world. Once fear reaches a certain threshold, normalcy, rationality, morality, and decency fade and are replaced by shocking stupidity and cruelty.
He writes:
In reading the history of nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities; their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first. We see one nation suddenly seized, from its highest to its lowest members, with a fierce desire of military glory; another as suddenly becoming crazed upon a religious scruple; and neither of them recovering its senses until it has shed rivers of blood and sowed a harvest of groans and tears, to be reaped by its posterity…. Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.
After 2005 when the Internet developed into a serious repository for human knowledge, and it became accessible via smartphones and near-universal access, I too was tempted by the idea that we would enter into a new age of enlightenment in which mass frenzies would be quickly stopped by dawning wisdom.
You can see evidence of my naivete with my April 5, 2020 article: With Knowledge Comes Calm, Rationality, and, Possibly, Openness. My thought then was that the evidence of the extremely discriminatory impact of the virus on plus-70 people with underlying conditions would cause a sudden realization that this virus was behaving like a normal virus. We were not all going to die. We would use rationality and reopen. I recall writing that with a sense of confidence that the media would report the new study and the panic would end.
I was preposterously wrong, along with my four-month-old feeling that all of this stuff would stop on Monday. The psychiatrist I met in New York was correct: the drug of fear had already invaded the public mind. Once there, it takes a very long time to recover. This is made far worse by politics, which has only fed the beast of fear. This is the most politicized disease in history, and doing so has done nothing to help manage it and much to make it all vastly worse.
We’ve learned throughout this ordeal that despite our technology, our knowledge, our history of building prosperity and peace, we are no smarter than our ancestors and, by some measures, not as smart as our parents and grandparents. The experience with COVID has caused a mass reversion to the superstitions and panics that sporadically defined the human experience of ages past.
Eventually, people have and do come to their senses, but it is as Mackay said: people “go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research. This article appeared at aier.org
Many millions of people have spent the last four months in sadness and depression. It’s hard to watch the world shattered by the bad behavior of governments – and to see too many among us cheer the destruction – and not feel a sense of despair.And yet the human mind is an incredible thing. If we work at it, we can figure out a good takeaway from terrible events. Doing so – it takes effort – can brighten the spirits and point the way forward out of the morass.I’ve taken three positives out of this experience.First, I’m completely over my decades-old addiction to news. I always loved the news, even from when I was a kid. For years, I read the Washington Post with my morning coffee. Then I switched to the New York Times, and learned how to tease truth out of their biased but comprehensive coverage. Then I added the Wall Street Journal. When home assistants came along, I programmed mine to play 8 hours (if I needed it) of nonstop news: BBC, NPR, NYT, and so many others. It felt like such a luxury.The turning point came for me on February 28, 2020, when the New York Times podcast (which used to be my favorite) sent out a piece of panic porn that predicted that the coronavirus would kill 8.25 million Americans, or “six of your friends.”It came as a shock suddenly to realize that they turned over their main podcast to whipping up a public fear to back a lockdown. Explicitly. This was the agenda. They more or less admitted it. I knew at that moment that the paper had signed up to contribute to a malicious plot to enact an unprecedented social/political experiment.The Times led the way. Pretty soon, the mainstream media became universally pro-lockdown, probably for political reasons. A widespread and mild virus, dangerous mostly to a particular demographic with low life expectancy and nearly harmless to everyone else, was rendered daily and hourly as a new bubonic plague.
I might have listened for a couple of more days. Then I stopped. The scales fell from my eyes. I decided, suddenly and shockingly for me, to stop filling my head with nonsense. The “news” was not getting me information to help me understand the world; it was clouding my ability to think clearly. A few months later, like clockwork, the revolution at the New York Times was complete when its opinion editor, hired to diversify the opinions in the paper, was unceremoniously fired for diversifying opinion in the paper. (The critical theory crowd has discovered new love for the right of institutions to fire people, contradicting decades of left-wing opposition to the same.)
I started getting my information by digging for it, finding reliable accounts on Twitter to follow, spending my time on statistical pages, and otherwise finding facts, reading history, and educating myself more deeply rather than just trust the media.
At this point, I can say that I’m never going back. My addiction to “the news” is over. I’m better off for it. It was painful but I’m glad.
Some readers are now saying: it’s about time. The news has always been about getting eyes and ears and selling advertising. It’s just entertainment. It became especially true with the 24-hour news cycle.
I don’t disagree. I should have given it up years ago. Even now, I can almost immediately tell the difference between a person who watches TV news or listens to mainstream radio vs. those are actually informed about what’s going on.
In any case, I count this as a real victory, courtesy of the lockdown.
Second, I’ve saved a tremendous amount of money from not going to restaurants, bars, and movies. I’m sad for all the places that have closed. It’s unjust and evil. But from my own perspective, I’ve learned to live a good life while spending probably 30% less than I did before. I’ve fallen back in love with cooking, homespun cocktails, and reading.
It’s all to the good. I doubt that I will go back, now that I can make all my favorite meals at a fraction of the price I used to pay. Now that things are opening, I perhaps will make my way out to some restaurants but I doubt I will ever go back to the way things were.
Third, I’ve learned a hugely valuable lesson that civilization can be dismantled in a matter of months. It can happen again if there are not passionate voices out there who understand its basis and can defend it with intellectual integrity, facts, and rhetorical power. I never imagined that anything like this could happen. I thought it was impossible with a Constitution, a tradition of liberty, and a people who would never allow human rights to be taken away so suddenly and cruelly. It did happen, and knowing this has given me renewed passion for my lifetime project of loving, understanding, and spreading the idea of liberty.
It’s remarkable how it all happened.
The government and its champions took on a subject about which the public is today largely ignorant and fearful – a virus and the claim that 8.25 million Americans will die – and exploited that ignorance to cause people to give up their rights. Even though this whole thing was mapped out 14 years ago, perhaps as a way of finding some rationale for continued and growing presence of government in our lives despite its otherwise growing irrelevance, many on the pro-liberty side of things were caught off guard and didn’t know how to respond.
Many people – even people employed with the job of “promoting liberty” – just went silent. For months. Just when their voices were most needed. That was a tragedy. I’ll be forever grateful to the pages of AIER which at times in these months felt like a lone voice of sanity out there.
This third lesson – to be grateful for our liberties and civilization and never think they can be taken for granted – is perhaps the most valuable. I’m thinking too that my experience in learning these lessons is not unique. I suspect that many intelligent people have lost faith in the news, rediscovered frugality, and found a new way to commit themselves to the defense of liberty and human rights. In the coming days, we are going to need stronger and smarter minds to fight the battles of the future. These terrible months might have been the preparation we need to make sure that truth and freedom eventually prevail.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research, where this article first appeared.
For this piece, we have to enter the official world (of the insane)—where everyone is quite sure a new coronavirus was discovered in China and the worthless diagnostic tests mean something and the case numbers are real and meaningful. Once we execute all those absurd maneuvers, we land square in the middle of yet another scandal—this time at our favorite US agency for scandals, the CDC.
The Atlantic, May 21, has the story, headlined, “How could the CDC make that mistake?”
I’ll give you the key quotes, and then comment on the stark inference The Atlantic somehow failed to grasp.
“We’ve learned that the CDC is making, at best, a debilitating mistake: combining test results that diagnose current coronavirus infections with test results that measure whether someone has ever had the virus…The agency confirmed to The Atlantic on Wednesday that it is mixing the results of viral [PCR] and antibody tests, even though the two tests reveal different information and are used for different reasons.”
“Several states—including Pennsylvania, the site of one of the country’s largest outbreaks, as well as Texas, Georgia, and Vermont—are blending the data in the same way. Virginia likewise mixed viral and antibody test results until last week, but it reversed course and the governor apologized for the practice after it was covered by the Richmond Times-Dispatch and The Atlantic. Maine similarly separated its data on Wednesday; Vermont authorities claimed they didn’t even know they were doing this.”
“’You’ve got to be kidding me,’ Ashish Jha, the K. T. Li Professor of Global Health at Harvard and the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, told us when we described what the CDC was doing. ‘How could the CDC make that mistake? This is a mess’.”
“The CDC stopped publishing anything resembling a complete database of daily [COVID] test results on February 29. When it resumed publishing test data last week [the middle of May]…”
First of all, the CDC’s basic mission is publishing disease statistics on an ongoing basis. Reporting partial data flies in the face of what they’re supposed to be all about.
But the big deal, of course, is combining results from two different tests—the PCR and the antibody—and placing them in one lump.
I’ve read the Atlantic article forwards, backwards, and sideways, and it appears the experts believe only PCR viral tests should be used to count the number of COVID cases.
So here is a takeaway I find nowhere in the Atlantic article: COMBINING THE TWO TESTS WILL VASTLY INFLATE THE NUMBER OF CASES.
I’m not talking about categories like “rate of infection” or “percentage.” I’m talking about plain numbers of cases.
Some PCR tests will indicate COVID and some antibody tests will indicate COVID, and adding them together will pump up the number of cases. You know, that big number they flash on TV screens a hundred times a day.
“Coronavirus cases jumped up again yesterday, and the grand total in the US is now…”
THAT number.
The number media and government and related con artists deploy to scare the people and justify lockdowns and use to stop reopening the economy.
The brass band circus with flying acrobats and elephants and clown numbers.
Therefore, I’m not characterizing what the CDC is doing as a mistake. They’ve managed to create the illusion that absolute case numbers are higher than they should be.
Somehow, these “mistakes” always seem to result in worse news, not better news. The “errors” are always on the high side rather than the low side.
Case in point: the computer prediction of COVID deaths in the UK and US made by that abject failure, Neil Ferguson, whose track record, going back to 2001, has been one horrendous lunatic exaggeration after another. His 2020 projections of 500,000 COVID deaths in the UK and two million in the US were directly used to justify lockdowns in many countries.
The CDC, back in 2009, stopped reporting the number of Swine Flu cases in the US—while still claiming that number was in the tens of thousands. I’ve written in great detail about the scandal, which was exposed by then-CBS investigative reporter, Sharyl Attkisson. The CDC stopped counting cases, because the overwhelming percentage of tissue samples from patients was coming back from labs with no sign of Swine Flu or any other kind of flu. And yet, in a later retrospective “analysis,” the CDC claimed that, at the height of the “epidemic,” there were 22 MILLION cases of Swine Flu in the US.
Going all the way back to 2003 and SARS, the CDC and other public health agencies around the world hyped the dangers to the sky; the final official death count, globally, when the dust cleared? 800.
There is a tradition of lying on the high side, blowing up figures in order to create the illusion of destruction.
CDC? Mistake? The agency is certainly incompetent. But that’s just the beginning of the story.
The only time they say there is no danger is when they’re lying about the effects of vaccines.
My headline for the Atlantic article would read: SO HOW MANY COVID CASES SHOULD WE SUBTRACT TO GET THE ACTUAL NUMBER?
And the first paragraph would go this way: “Just when governors are trying to reopen their economies, a gigantic case-counting deception at the CDC is taking the wind out of their sails. The millions of Americans suffering financial devastation could be pushed back into a hole. Who is screaming to high heaven about THAT on the nightly news? No one. Why not?”
Does anyone still believe what they read in the New York Times or watch on any major television network news broadcast? Because for millions of Americans, the credibility of those news sources is at an all-time low. The internet hive mind, even in the face of blatant censorship by search engines and social media monopolies, simply offers too many verifiable, alternative facts for establishment media to get away with the kind of lying they do, and yet they persist. Exposed and discredited, they keep on lying, betting that an exhausted populace simply will not verify every single thing they report.
Writing for the American Conservative, Arthur Bloom recently published a critique of American media with the not-so-subtle title, “They Really Are Lying to You.” His opening sentence: “The most effective kind of propaganda is by omission.”
Bloom is probably right, especially when one considers how much the media obsessed, for years, over what ultimately were nonstories—think “Russian collusion” or “Ukrainian impeachment.” And then there are the overblown stories—think “8 million COVID deaths in the United States by this time next year,” and now, “the nation is reeling under an epidemic of systemic racism” that suddenly, so very suddenly, have been urgent crises for, well, forever.
What will be next week’s crisis of the century? And what is really going on behind these blinding lunges from one overwhelming and orchestrated media fixation to the next? What events of greater consequence are being obscured, ignored, or omitted in favor of this coverage?
Media Making News
It doesn’t take a sleuth to watch ABC News anchor David Muir go through his nightly pattern—he curates the same stories, on the same themes, as every other major establishment network—to know that something’s going on. Why is there so much unity? Across the networks, the same facts? The same phrases? And it doesn’t take a numbers genius to realize that Muir and his “experts” have made stunning misuse of statistics to spread agenda-driven panic, first over COVID, and now over “systemic racism.”
America’s mass media aren’t reporting on mass panics and mass protests, they are creating them. They only secondarily “report” on them. Maybe COVID is the pandemic of the century. Or maybe not. The only thing we know for certain is that we can’t trust anything we hear about it on ABC Nightly “News.”
Arthur Bloom’s article is a well-documented exposé of how the media has lied in recent, and not so recent years. He alludes briefly to conspiracy theories, making the tantalizing suggestion that the media elites are trying to discredit conspiracy theorists by seeding conspiracy theories with information that is so fantastic as to be obviously false. He even suggests this tactic is what’s behind QAnon, which has, as he writes, “a remarkable ability to absorb all other conspiracy theories that came before it.”
But what is really behind the curtain? America’s media lies all the time, and they do it in lockstep with one another. Sometimes they lie by omission. Sometimes they manipulate statistics. And other times they distort their coverage, present quotes or report activities in an unrepresentative context, or engage in selective editing. Most often they just adopt a smug tone that lets the compliant or lazy listener absorb a clear message: this is a bad guy, this is a good guy. Why are they doing this?
Fifty years ago, a slim book, almost a pamphlet, was written and within a few years it sold more than 6 million copies. Authored by freelance journalist and conservative Gary Allen, None Dare Call it Conspiracy was first published in 1972. During that election year and for years afterward, the book was required reading for anyone who thought there were untold stories and unnamed forces driving current events. It is remarkable how relevant this book is today.
The historical narrative and players identified in None Dare Call it Conspiracy cannot be summarized briefly. Suffice to say that what Gary Allen described back then is similar fare to what you’ll get if you watch Alex Jones today, as well as many of the videos now coming from the QAnon network. And if you watch these sources today, remember this: Maybe instead of being seeded with information so fantastic as to be obviously false in order to discredit the entire body of work, the obviously ridiculous content is added in order to protect the body of work. Discard the ridiculous, but consider the rest, as absurdity protects it from the censors.
False Choices
While Allen’s discussion of specific players and events defies brief explication, he made several other points that are especially relevant today. While only conspiracy theorists may have believed Allen back in 1972, today there is nearly a consensus on some of these points. The first of these concepts is what Allen called the false choice between Left and Right, between Communism and fascism.
The chart shown below, taken from page 29 of the third edition published in April 1972, shows the conventional political spectrum compared to what Allen believes is a more accurate political continuum. He writes:
“We are told that on the far-Left of the political spectrum is Communism, which is admittedly dictatorial. But, we are also told that equally to be feared is the opposite of the far Left, i.e., the far-Right, which is labeled Fascism . . . this is absurd. Where would you put an anarchist on this spectrum? Where would you put a person who believes in a Constitutional Republic and the free enterprise system? He is not represented here, yet this spectrum is used for political definitions by a probable ninety percent of the people of the nation.”
Allen’s point is that if all you can choose are points in between communism on the far-Left, and fascism on the far-Right, then all you really are doing is choosing between international socialism and national socialism. Only by placing both of these forms of socialism on the Left, and by placing pure anarchy on the far-Right, do you create room within the continuum for free-market capitalism and limited government to exist.
There’s a reason for the promotion of this false choice, according to Allen, which gets to one of the main points of his book. He argues that socialism is not a share-the-wealth program, but is, in reality, a method to consolidate and control the wealth. He writes:
The seeming paradox of rich men promoting socialism becomes no paradox at all. Instead it becomes the logical, even perfect tool of power-seeking megalomaniacs. Communism, or more accurately, socialism, is not a movement of the downtrodden masses, but of the economic elite.
This insight would explain a lot of current events in America and other Western democracies. Again quoting Allen, “Radical movements are never successful unless they attract big money and/or outside support…the Left is controlled by its alleged enemy, the malefactors of great wealth.”
Gems of wisdom abound in this book that enjoyed huge but fleeting popularity during the Vietnam era, but is perhaps more relevant today than when it was written. Allen explains that by concentrating power in government, wealthy insiders will actually increase their economic power and political influence. “One must draw the distinction between competitive free enterprise, the most moral and productive system ever devised, and cartel capitalism dominated by industrial monopolists and international bankers…the cartel capitalist uses the government to force the public to do business with him. These corporate socialists are the deadly enemies of competitive private enterprise.”
Sound familiar?
The next chart, taken from page 125 of the book, offers a visual explanation of how wealthy insiders fund and manipulate naïve radicals to apply pressure to the middle class from above and below. Some but not all of the names Allen noted 50 years ago will change, but the dynamic stays the same. Perhaps one may add the names Soros, Bloomberg, and Gates to the names on top, and swap for the names at the bottom the 2020 versions of the original groups: Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and the Democratic Socialists of America. And along with race and class as salient issues to incite the mob, add the “climate emergency.”
This strategy is diabolically clever: Identify the most hardened, potentially violent fanatics in a nation, and surreptitiously give them money and training. As they destabilize society, exploit the backlash that desires order to increase the size and power of government.
What Gary Allen diagnosed and wrote about 50 years ago was not unfounded. Without commenting on the conspiracy aspects, but merely on the process he identified, he was prescient, wrong only in his belief that it would happen faster than it actually did. What slowed down the process is anyone’s guess, but some broad cultural shifts come to mind: The Reagan revolution, the growing activism of the religious right, conservative intellectuals finding their voice, conservative talk radio mobilizing millions, and more recently, the power of the internet.
What has decisively changed between 1972 and today is the fact that millions of Americans, if not most Americans, now realize that there is a phony war between establishment Democrats and Republicans and that they cannot trust the media.
History will judge whether or not the election of Donald Trump marked a restoration of American sovereignty and a resurgence of America’s middle class. All that is certain today is that with rare exceptions, every establishment player, every wealthy special interest, every corporate-controlled media outlet, every billionaire, every influential actor or entertainer or athlete, all of them, have lined up to oppose President Trump with every ounce of energy they’ve got. Why?
Allen’s answer is both easy and difficult. Easy, because “conspiracy” contextualizes everything going on with no further analysis required. Difficult, because if you attempt to ferret out the entire intricate history of these alleged global insiders, you will enter an abyss of infinite pathways and unlimited possibilities. And how much does it really matter? How much difference is there between a conspiracy among elites, and a general consensus among elites? What would be handled differently, if anything?
There is an alternative answer, more hopeful and also more practical, which is simply to fight—heedless of whatever underlying conspiracies may exist—to convince more people to vote for the preservation of America’s freedoms and to stop the assault on America’s middle class. To do that requires allocating energy to exposing the fraud and hidden agenda underlying leftist policies, and convincing all people of goodwill that better alternatives exist.
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, minorities have disproportionately suffered from the virus’s health effects. A new study reveals that the government-mandated economic lockdowns have also hit minorities hardest.
In response to the outbreak and under the guidance of federal agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control, state and local governments imposed quarantine orders and mandated shutdowns for many businesses deemed “non-essential.” Whether one supports lockdowns as a public health measure or not, they undoubtedly resulted in tens of millions of Americans and counting filing for unemployment and a sharp economic downturn.
Like all government interventions into the economy, the unprecedented shutdown has not affected everyone equally. The government’s response to this crisis contained clear carve-outs and favoritism for politically connected large corporations, yet imposed disproportionate negative impacts on less politically influential minority-owned small businesses.
A new paper from Professor Robert Fairlie of the University of California, Santa Cruz exposes this reality for all to see.
“The number of active business owners in the United States plummeted by 3.3 million or 22 percent over the crucial two-month window from February to April 2020,” Fairlie found in his analysis of nationally representative government survey data. “The drop in business owners was the largest on record, and losses were felt across nearly all industries and even for incorporated businesses.”
This is a troubling economic observation in and of itself, yet the data are even more concerning when broken down along racial lines.
“African-American businesses were hit especially hard experiencing a 41 percent drop. Latinx business owners fell by 32 percent, and Asian business owners dropped by 26 percent,” the professor reports. For context, white business owners only faced a 17 percent drop.
“Simulations indicate that industry compositions partly placed these groups at a higher risk of losses,” Fairlie continues. “Immigrant business owners experienced substantial losses of 36 percent. Female-owned businesses were also disproportionately hit by 25 percent.”
(Source: Robert Fairlie, University of California, Santa Cruz)
Remember that these abstract figures represent millions of actual people whose livelihoods were destroyed by the COVID-19 response. And as revealed in new reporting from the New York Times, the massive government programs passed as COVID-19 “relief” and “stimulus” efforts—we’re set to add a whopping $8 trillion in debt—are failing to help many of those who are most in need.
“Black-owned businesses also appear to be benefiting less from federal stimulus programs,” the paper reported. “Only 12 percent of black and Hispanic business owners polled between April 30 and May 12 received the funding they had requested.”
“It’s unfortunate that the businesses that need the funding, help and assistance the most are not receiving it,” the owner of a hair salon in the Bronx told the Times. “It’s like the Titanic. Where was the water coming up first? It was coming from the bottom. The people on the bottom were drowning first.”
Meanwhile, wealthy corporations are benefiting mightily from tax carve-outs in the congressional COVID-19 relief bill that was passed, the CARES Act.
Companies will receive more than $155 billion in benefits. This includes a whopping $862 million tax refund for the massive multinational corporation Boeing.
“The tax breaks were supposed to help ease companies’ red ink and keep paychecks flowing for workers,” Axios reports. “But most of the companies mentioned above, for example, have either furloughed employees or are pushing for buyouts.”
The lesson here is quite clear. When the government launches massive interventions into the economy and then passes 300+ page bills to “fix” the problem it helped create, political distortions will result in costs disproportionately borne by disadvantaged groups in society and benefits that skew toward the well-connected.
“I believe crony capitalism—the alliance between business and government—is the biggest problem of our age,” said economic historian Robert Higgs. “Crony capitalism, unfortunately, has a very active, organized, well-funded, and vocal constituency. It is the greatest threat to our prosperity and our freedom.”
“A free-market thwarts lobbying by taking the power that corporations seek away from government,” former Libertarian presidential candidate Mary J. Ruwart once said. “The only sure way to prevent the rich from buying unfair government influence is to stop allowing government to use physical force against peaceful people. Whenever government is allowed to favor one group over another, the rich will always win, since they can “buy” more favors, overtly or covertly, than the poor.”
The facts offered by this new paper and emerging COVID-19 data confirm theoretical predictions and offer a warning as to the unequal costs associated with mandating another lockdown if a “second wave” of COVID-19 emerges.
“Since bills keep piling up even when revenue isn’t coming in, many of these small [minority-owned] businesses face an uphill climb as it is,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board notes. “If they’re now getting back to work, and if they think they’ve taken the necessary precautions to do so safely, then the last thing they need is a politician ordering them to close shop for another month or two.”
Government lockdowns amid public health crises are ultimately a question of cost-benefit analysis. Whether one supports future pandemic lockdowns or not, we should all keep in mind that Americans do not bear the consequences of big government equally.
Brad Polumbo is a journalist and the Eugene S. Thorpe Writing Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education, at whose website this article first appeared.
Strategas’s Jason Trennert has pointed out over the years that ADP, a payroll processing company, produces at no cost to the taxpayer an extraordinarily thorough accounting of U.S. employment before the Bureau of Labor Statistics does. ADP is very much in the business of knowing what the BLS spends hundreds of millions to know.
This column has pointed out that Visa produces endless reports on consumer spending, borrowing, levels of debt, debt in arrears, etc. Well, of course it does. As a credit card company, there’s a reason for Visa to know these things, and to know them as far in advance as possible. Translated, Visa doesn’t wait for the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis to calculate consumer spending. Neither do sophisticated investors. Bank on it.
All of this should offer a clue to readers of something that’s not been said enough over the last several months. Markets don’t wait. The new coronavirus was a news item in January. It was known then that the virus had originated in China. U.S. companies derive enormous amounts of sales from the very Chinese customers who produce so much for American consumers. To export is to import, by definition. This is a long, or short way of saying that investors had a good sense long before politicians panicked in March that irrespective of the growing alarmism among politicians and doctors, the virus wasn’t terribly lethal. If it had been, there’s no way that U.S. equity markets would have reached all-time highs in late February. Again, markets don’t wait for politicians to respond, nor do they wait for doctors and entities like the CDC.
This truth brings to mind what Ken Fisher routinely tells audiences he speaks to. What you know, assuming it’s true, is already priced. Markets are relentless processors of information, good and bad. What you think, or what someone told you at a party to think is, if valid, already processed.
This is worth a thought in consideration of the growing investor focus on “volatility.” As the Wall Street Journal’s Gunjan Banerji explained it on Saturday, “In recent years, volatility has gone from a specialty of derivatives traders to a vehicle for trading in its own right. Investors big and small are wagering hundreds of billions of dollars on volatility.” Call it the politics trade.
Volatility speaks to big lurches in market sentiment rooted in surprise. Since markets are on their own feverishly processing information, it’s not as likely for the day-to-day vicissitudes of life to produce too much surprise. Markets yet again don’t wait, so it’s logically true that “news” about unemployment, shrunken sales, mild or lethal viruses, and reduced production in Bangalore is already known and priced well ahead of when we read about these things in newspapers.
To offer up yet another example, former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan was known to call FedEx CEO Fred Smith with great regularity. To export is to yet again import, so Smith has a keen sense of global economic activity based on shipments, and well before official figures are released.
Notable about Smith, and as was pointed out here a few weeks ago, his company has a big, 907 employee operation in Wuhan. Smith knew long before the hideous lockdowns that the virus had thankfully not killed any of his Wuhan employees. Had it proved extraordinarily lethal, we consumers of news would have known this truth long before March given the exposure of all-too-many public companies to China, along with Wuhan, the virus’s epicenter. These realities, good or bad, would have reached equity prices first, only for them to reach newspapers and news organizations after. Professional investors are paid not for being late to information, but for being early. That there was no market alarm in January or February about the coronavirus should once again have readers wondering….
Bringing it back to the Journal’s Banerji, he contends that markets “were once dominated by bulls who thought stocks would go up and bears who thought they would go down.” Investors focused on volatility don’t much care about the direction of shares as much as they care about big movements. In short, volatility traders are focused on politics.
Politicians are the wildcard. Way-too-powerful responders to news that markets have already processed, their responses to information that investors have been pricing for a lot or a little time helps create the volatility that is increasingly a trade. Because politicians are powerful, their decisions have economic impact.
But since politicians are members of the human race, it’s not always predictable what they’ll do. If it were, or if their power was limited, they couldn’t create volatility. Unfortunately, it’s neither true that their actions can always be known in advance, nor is it true that their power is so hemmed in that their actions don’t matter.
Which to a high degree explains volatility. Big market movements are a function of surprise, and politicians responding to yesterday’s news create the surprise.
Imagine then, the economic growth lost to the volatility trade that is in so many ways a politics trade. Think how much further along the global economy would be if hundreds of billions weren’t directed toward hedging the volatility of statesmen, and instead toward the ideas and businesses that drive progress. Most of all considering the troubled present, imagine where the global economy would be today if politicians had listened to the markets over their own, highly emotional and vain, selves.
John Tamny is editor of RealClearMarkets, Vice President at FreedomWorks, and a senior economic adviser to Toreador Research and Trading (www.trtadvisors.com).
In April 2005, Charles Duelfer, the CIA’s top weapons inspector in Iraq, admitted in the CIA’s final report that after an extensive search, no weapons of mass destruction could be found.
“After more than 18 months, the WMD investigation and debriefing of the WMD-related detainees has been exhausted,” wrote Duelfer, the leader of the Iraq Survey Group. “As matters now stand, the WMD investigation has gone as far as feasible.”
Today it’s generally accepted that the presence of WMD was the primary basis for the Iraq War. Naturally, the absence of such weapons shook the world. The media blamed the politicians, the politicians blamed US intel, and the intelligence actors involved mostly defended their work.
The official word, chronicled in the Robb-Silberman report, concluded that “the Intelligence Community didn’t adequately explain just how little good intelligence it had—or how much its assessments were driven by assumptions and inferences rather than concrete evidence.”
The Iraq War WMD debacle is arguably the greatest expert “fail” in generations. The holy triumvirate—lawmakers, bureaucrats, and media—all failed to sniff out the truth. If any of them had, a war that cost trillions of dollars and claimed the lives of 100,000-200,000 people likely could have been avoided.
It would be difficult to surpass the Iraq blunder, but emerging evidence on COVID-19 suggests the experts—again: lawmakers, bureaucrats, and media—may have subjected us to a blunder of equally disastrous proportions.
A new NPR report suggests the global response to COVID-19 may have been reached on a flawed premise.
Mounting evidence suggests the coronavirus is more common and less deadly than it first appeared.
The evidence comes from tests that detect antibodies to the coronavirus in a person’s blood rather than the virus itself.
The tests are finding large numbers of people in the US who were infected but never became seriously ill. And when these mild infections are included in coronavirus statistics, the virus appears less dangerous.
“The current best estimates for the infection fatality risk are between 0.5% and 1%,” says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
That’s in contrast with death rates of 5% or more based on calculations that included only people who got sick enough to be diagnosed with tests that detect the presence of virus in a person’s body.
Many people will recall the fatality risk debate that took place prior to and in the early stages of the lockdowns. There was much discussion over how deadly the virus was and what the collective response to the virus should be.
Some voices exercised caution.
“The public is behaving as if this epidemic is the next Spanish flu, which is frankly understandable given that initial reports have staked COVID-19 mortality at about 2–3 percent, quite similar to the 1918 pandemic that killed tens of millions of people,” Jeremy Samuel Faust an emergency medicine physician and an instructor at Harvard Medical School, wrote in Slate. “Allow me to be the bearer of good news. These frightening numbers are unlikely to hold.”
Similarly, on March 5 vaccine expert Paul A. Offit, who holds the Maurice R. Hilleman Chair of Vaccinology at the University of Pennsylvania, told Factcheck.org that he believed that the World Health Organization’s 3.4 percent fatality rate figure was too high, suggesting it was well below 1 percent.
“We’re more the victim of fear than the virus,” Offit said, adding that the world was witnessing a “wild overreaction” to the disease.
Voices like those of Faust and Offit were quickly drowned out, however. The 24-hour news cycle fanned collective fear and outrage that more was not being done. Runs on toilet paper and masks ensued. Neil Ferguson, professor of mathematical biology at Imperial College London, predicted millions would die in the “best-case scenario.”
Following the example of China, one of the most authoritarian regimes in the world, most of the developed world was placed in indefinite lockdown by their own governments.
The social and economic costs of the lockdowns soon became apparent. The US alone has seen 40 million jobs lost, many of which aren’t coming back. Recession looms. Hundreds of thousands of businesses have already been wiped away. The federal debt has surged to $26 trillion.
Unfortunately, the COVID disaster and the aforementioned Iraq War fit a familiar pattern. As the historian Paul Johnson has observed, most of the worst events of the 20th century were perpetrated by experts who used collective power to shape world events in a direction they believed was beneficial.
“One of the principal lessons of our tragic century, which has seen so many millions of innocent lives sacrificed in schemes to improve the lot of humanity, is—beware intellectuals,” Johnson wrote in The Intellectuals. “Not merely should they be kept away from the levers of power, they should also be objects of particular suspicion when they seek to offer collective advice.”
Nobody denies the immense cost of the lockdowns, but what was gained by them remains a subject of contention.
A May report from JP Morgan, as well as other evidence, suggests the lockdowns had little to no impact on the spread of COVID-19.
Marko Kolanovic, a physicist and strategist for JP Morgan, pointed out that a majority of nations saw declines in infection rates after the lockdowns were lifted.
“Unlike rigorous testing of new drugs, lockdowns were administered with little consideration that they might not only cause economic devastation but potentially more deaths than Covid-19 itself,” Kolanoviche said.
Jon Miltimore@miltimore79
Most nations saw Covid infection rates go down after lockdowns were lifted, a recent @jpmorgan analysis found.
Similarly, a Bloomberg analysis in May found “little correlation between the severity of a nation’s restrictions and whether it managed to curb excess fatalities.” Meanwhile, Norway’s top health official recently stated that lockdowns were not a necessary step to tame the virus.
On the other hand, the Washington Post this week cited studies claiming the lockdown orders prevented hundreds of millions of COVID-19 infections and saved millions of lives.
These findings come with caveats, however. First, one of the studies was submitted on March 22—well before the vast majority of COVID cases had even occurred. The other study was conducted by researchers at the Imperial College of London, the same school from which Ferguson hailed. (He has since resigned after it was discovered that he broke the lockdown protocol he helped design by allowing his married lover to come to his home.)
Ferguson, who in 2005 said up to 200 million might die from bird flu (about 100 did), was asked by The New York Times in March what the best-case scenario was for the US during the COVID pandemic.
As of June 10, Ferguson is off by about a factor of ten. Why we should continue to listen to schools that have already proven to be so disastrously wrong is anyone’s guess. The “chicken little” story comes to mind.
In 2003, state actors led the world into a bloody, years-long struggle in Iraq to protect the world from nuclear weapons that didn’t exist—only to eventually learn how little US intel experts actually knew about Iraq’s nuclear capabilities.
In 2020, central planners from around the world decided to shut down the global economy to protect people from an invisible, highly contagious virus that will result in no or mild symptoms for up to 90 percent of its carriers.
Since the beginning of the year, the corona crisis has monopolized news coverage to the extent that a lot of very important stories and developments either went underreported or were ignored altogether. One such example was the very surprising ruling that came out of the German Constitutional Court in early May, which challenged the actions and remit of the European Central Bank (ECB).
In essence, the court’s decision made it clear that the ECB’s quantitative easing (QE) program did not respect the “principle of proportionality,” abusing the ECB mandate, while the German government failed to challenge the bank’s policies as it should have. The ruling also mentioned the side effects of the program and of the ECB’s overall ultraloose policy direction, such as the penalizing of savers and pensioners. As was highlighted in the official decision, “the ECB fails to conduct the necessary balancing of the monetary policy objective against the economic policy effects arising from the program. Therefore, the decisions at issue…exceed the monetary policy mandate of the ECB.” As a result, the court issued an ultimatum and directly asked the Bundesbank to comply with its ruling and therefore to stop buying government bonds under the ECB’s QE program in the next three months.
Although the German court ruling had nothing to do with this latest wave of easing and money printing triggered by the coronavirus crisis, its timing puts the present situation in a different perspective.
This crisis has served as a “judgment day” of sorts. It has revealed the countless failures, the incompetence, and the disarray at the very core of most institutions, not just in Europe, but globally. The more decentralized nations fared relatively better than those with a high degree of centralization, the latter unfortunately being the majority. In the more centralized nations the lack of consistency and of clear leadership, the contradictory messages, the failures of public healthcare that cost countless lives, and the political decisions that cost millions their jobs and livelihoods all exposed the defects of centralization and the unreliability of both national governments and international organizations. And that’s just the first wave of disasters, the ones immediately seen and felt. There are even more grave consequences and aftereffects in the pipeline, which most citizens haven’t even realized yet, such as the inevitable breakdown of welfare systems and the debt time bombs in most major economies.
Specifically in the EU, the moral shortcomings, the small-time power games, the hypocrisy, and the sheer panic of the bloc’s leadership were laid bare for all to see. All that talk of friendship and cooperation between European nations, all the speeches about “solidarity” and the great European family, instantly proved shallow when this perfect union was confronted with the COVID threat. Shipments of medical supplies destined for one nation were seized in transit by its neighbor, drugs were hoarded, borders were shut down, trade was frozen. The first and hardest-hit member of the “family” went unaided and was helpless for weeks. The first EU rescue package, meant to help keep the economy alive in the face of the forced shutdown, was delayed by political horse trading, all while entire industries were decimated and millions rendered unemployed.
The scale of the economic disaster is only now starting to become clear, and the future looks bleak even without all the risks being understood and accounted for yet. The deterioration and the economic downturn that is just beginning is projected to be comparable to or possibly worse than the Great Depression, and it could last longer too. Already the eurozone economy has seen the steepest decline in its history, according to Eurostat figures, while the unfolding recession is projected to be much worse than the last crisis. The “cures” that worked before are unlikely to stop this tsunami, while the unprecedented levels of spending we now see in most member states are not sustainable. The “emergency checks” and worker protections cannot stick around forever. Not unless they are formalized and normalized as we saw in Spain, where a basic income scheme is being introduced, the first ever in Europe, which the Spanish government hopes will indeed “stay forever.” This of course is no “solution,” but simply the nationalization of the economy. Central planning, income redistribution, and the state takeover of the private sector are all at the core of various “rescue” efforts and ideas being pushed at the moment, and we know where this road actually leads. If the countless historical examples aren’t enough to demonstrate the inevitable and inescapable results of these policies, one only need look at contemporary China.
Still, the economic pain is already so widespread that demonstrations and new movements are starting to have an impact. Antilockdown protests, rent strikes, and clashes with police have all been increasingly frequent in many European capitals. The political winds are also shifting, and once again public sentiment is turning decisively against the EU. According to a recent survey by Tecné, 42 percent of Italians said that they would leave the EU, up from 26 percent in November 2018, while 88 percent felt that the EU failed to support their country. Over in France, around six out of ten people “do no not trust” Brussels according to a Jacques Delors Institute study.
Therefore, this idea of nations taking back control of their economies couldn’t have come at a worse time for the EU and those who see an opportunity to push for further centralization in the corona crisis. Support for measures that would lead to tighter integration and even more power handed to Brussels is high among institutional figures; however, these plans are very unlikely to be popular among citizens.
Although the north-south economic divide has grown exponentially deeper in just a few months, the corona crisis has arguably managed to bridge political gaps. Citizens of the hard-hit south, especially in countries such as Italy and Spain, have become markedly more mistrustful and disillusioned with the EU and are turning away from it, as they feel that it turned away from them in their hour of need. On the other hand, citizens of the more prosperous north see exactly how this “rescue” effort is going to end, as it has a thousand times before, with them having to foot the bill to support southern economies that were already failing long before the coronavirus ever made it out of Wuhan.
What Lies Ahead
Overall, it is unlikely that the legal challenge from the German court will make a practical difference in the unlimited QE plans of the ECB. Especially at a time like this, negative interest rates and money flooding the markets are simply a fact of life, and there is no conceivable way for the ECB to just stop, the same way that it is impossible for governments to reverse course in their massive spending sprees anytime soon. The scale of the damage that has been done to the economy, the destruction of any kind of private productivity, the job-killing shutdowns, and the desperation among officials to plug the holes of a sinking ship all render these measures necessary, both politically and realistically.
What the court’s ruling might achieve, however, is not a monetary change, but a political one. It could serve as a signal that national sovereignty is still on the table, still worth debating and defending. In this regard, we do seem to be approaching a crossroads and there’s a choice to be made.
We either passively accept a centralized future, where the individual becomes irrelevant, valueless, and expendable, or we reclaim control, through the principles of subsidiarity, in which decisions are made on the lowest possible level and all voices are heard. In the aftermath of the corona crisis the latter option already seems to be gaining momentum, and understandably so. After so many were let down, betrayed, and ignored, after basic rights were trampled and the promise of security in exchange for freedom has proven to be a very bad deal indeed, it is no wonder that alternatives are sorely needed and that a hard turn toward individual responsibility, independent thought, and decentralization is already underway.
There were many reasons to oppose the COVID-19 lockdowns.
They cost human lives in terms of deferred medical treatment. They cost human lives in terms of greater suicide and drug overdoses. Domestic abuse and child abuse have increased. There is also good reason to believe that lockdowns don’t actually work. The lockdown activists capitalized on media-stoked fear to push their authoritarian agenda based not on science, but on the whims of a handful of experts who insisted that they need not present any actual evidence that their bizarre, draconian, and extreme scheme was worth the danger posed to human rights, health, and the economic well-being of billions of human beings.
Those who lacked the obsessive and irresponsible tunnel vision of the prolockdown people warned that there were other dangers as well, in terms of social and political conflict.
It didn’t require an especially clear crystal ball to see that destroying the livelihoods of countless millions while empowering a police state to harass and arrest law-abiding citizens would create a situation that maybe—just maybe—could lead to greater social and political conflict.
Specifically, there are three ways in which the lockdowns laid the groundwork for our current state of unrest.
The Lockdowns Created an Economic Disaster
The COVID-19 stay-at-home orders, business closures, and other forms of coerced social distancing have so far led to job losses for well over 30 million Americans. The unemployment rate has risen to levels not seen since the Great Depression. Food banks are under strain as Americans line up for free food. Thanks to government moratoria on evictions in many areas, it is still unknown to what extent homeowners and renters are unable to pay mortgages and rents, but a wave of delinquencies is almost certainly coming.
To advocates of lockdowns, this is all “worth it” even though these sorts of economic stresses often lead to suicide, stress-induced disease, and death. But impoverishment, unemployment, and financial ruin are all merely “inconvenient,” as described by head lockdown advocate Anthony Fauci.
To someone who isn’t enamored of lockdowns, however, it is clear that millions of job losses are likely to worsen a variety of social ills, sometimes even resulting in violence. Moreover, the current job losses appear to be affecting the young and those who earn lower incomes most.
Lockdown advocates have attempted to avoid responsibility for all this by claiming that it is the pandemic itself that has caused the current economic disaster, and not the lockdowns. This is a baseless assertion. As has been shown, neither the pandemics of 1918 or 1958 led to the sorts of job losses and decline in economic growth that we’re now seeing.
The Lockdowns Destroyed Social Institutions
Another outcome of the lockdowns has been the destruction of American social institutions. These institutions include schools (both public and private), churches, coffee shops, bars, libraries, barbershops, and many others.
Lockdown advocates continue to claim that this is no big deal and insist that people just sit at home and “binge watch” television shows. But researchers have long pointed to the importance of these institutions in preserving peace and as a means of defusing social tensions and problems.
As much as lockdown advocates may wish that human beings could be reduced to creatures that do nothing more than work all day and watch television all night, the fact is that no society can long endure such conditions.
Human beings need what are known as “third places.” In a 2016 report, the Brookings Institution described what these places are:
the most effective ones for building real community seem to be physical places where people can easily and routinely connect with each other: churches, parks, recreation centers, hairdressers, gyms and even fast-food restaurants. A recent newspaper article on McDonald’s found that for lower-income Americans, the twin arches are becoming almost the equivalent of the English “pub,” which after all is short for “public house”: groups of retirees meeting for coffee and talk, they might hold regular Bible study meetings there, and people treat the restaurant as an inexpensive hangout.
Third places have a number of important community-building attributes. Depending on their location, social classes and backgrounds can be “leveled-out” in ways that are unfortunately rare these days, with people feeling they are treated as social equals. Informal conversation is the main activity and most important linking function. One commentator refers to third places as the “living room” of society.
Yet, these third places cannot simply be shut down—and the public told to just forget about them indefinitely—without creating the potential for violence and other antisocial behavior.
Indeed, third places act as institutions that provide a type of social control that is key to a well-functioning society. In his trenchant book The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, historian and social critic Christopher Lasch described the importance of third places in communicating political and social values and conventions to young people, and in setting the bounds of acceptable behavior within the community. Lasch notes that these institutions are also important in defusing violent impulses among the young. Also of great importance is the fact that third places provide a means of social control that is voluntary and not a form of state coercion.
Writing in the 1990s, Lasch was lamenting the decline of third places, although he emphasized their importance even in their modern reduced form. Thanks to the lockdowns, however, these places have been crippled far beyond what Lasch might ever have imagined.
The Lockdowns Empowered the Police State
The lockdowns have created a situation in which millions of law-abiding citizens have been deemed criminals merely for seeking to make a living, leave their homes, or engage in peaceful trade.
In many areas, violations of the lockdown orders have been—or even still are, in many places—treated as criminal acts by police. This has greatly increased negative interactions between police and citizens who by no moral definition are criminals of any sort.
Complicating the issue is the apparent fact that police have not enforced social distancing edicts “uniformly.” Some have alleged, for example, that the NYPD has lopsidedly targeted nonwhites in enforcement:
of the 40 people arrested [for social distancing violations in Brooklyn between March 17 and May 4], 35 were African American, 4 were Hispanic and 1 was white. The arrests were made in neighborhoods—Brownsville, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Cypress Hills and East New York—which have large concentrations of blacks and Latinos.
This may or may not reflect the reality of the general situation, but the fact is that the lockdowns created the perception among many that this is just yet another case of law enforcement targeting certain populations over small-time violations.
Moreover, it is quite plausible that lower-income populations have more often been on the receiving end of state harassment in the name of social distancing. After all, compliance with lockdowns is something of a luxury reserved for higher-income, white-collar residents who can work from home and remain comfortable for long periods in their roomy houses. Working-class people and those with fewer resources are far more likely to need to find income and venture outside during lockdowns. This attracts the attention of police.
Lockdown advocates, apparently in their usual state of extreme naïvete, perhaps believed that further empowering police to violently enforce government decrees against petty infractions would not lead to any unfortunate side effects down the road. Yet criminalizing millions of Americans and subjecting them to heightened police harassment is not a recipe for social tranquility.
Worsening a Volatile Situation
Of course, my comments here should not be interpreted as making excuses for rioters. Smashing up the property of innocent small business owners—or worse, physically harming innocent people—is reprehensible in all circumstances. But this isn’t about making excuses. We’re talking about avoiding extreme and immoral government policies (i.e., police-enforced lockdowns) that remove those institutions and conditions which are important in helping minimize conflict.
Some may insist that the riots would have occurred no matter what, but it’s easy to see how the lockdowns made a bad situation worse. Yes, some of the rioters are lifelong thugs who are always on the lookout for new opportunities to steal and maim. But experience suggests that the pool of people willing to engage in riots is often larger during periods of mass unemployment than during other periods. In addition, those people who exist on the margins of criminality—the sorts of people for whom third places serve an important role in moderating their more antisocial tendencies—are more likely to be swept up in these events when third places are abolished. And, as we have seen, lockdowns also create more opportunities for police abuse that ignite riots of the sort we’ve seen in recent days.
It’s true the responsibility for the riots lies primarily with the rioters. But we cannot deny that policymakers fuel the flames of conflict when they outlaw jobs and destroy people’s social support systems by cutting them off from their communities. It’s also wise to not provoke people by pushing for widespread human rights violations and additional police harassment. But this is what lockdown advocates have done, and their imprudence should not be forgotten.
A hundred years ago in response to the horror of WWI, the great Randolph Bourne famously pronounced the truth that “War is the Health of the State.” Said Bourne,
War is the health of the State.
It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate co-operation with the Government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense. The machinery of government sets and enforces the drastic penalties, the minorities are either intimidated into silence or brought slowly around by a subtle process of persuasion which may seem to them to really converting them……
Other values such artistic creation, knowledge, reason, beauty, the enhancement of life, are instantly and almost unanimously sacrificed and the significant classes who have constituted themselves the amateur agents of the State are engaged not only in sacrificing these values for themselves but in coercing all other persons into sacrificing them.
In a nation at war, every citizen identifies himself with the whole, and feels immensely strengthened in that identification. The purpose and desire of the collective community live in each person who throws himself whole-heartedly into the cause of war. The impeding distinction between society and the individual is almost blotted out.
A century later it appears that Randolph Bourne needs an update: Apparently, Sickness is the Health of the State, as well.
During the past 10 weeks, state control of economic and social life in America has erupted like never before. The stay-at-home and lockdown orders decreed by mayors and governors intrude into every nook and cranny of daily life, essentially subjecting tens of millions of Americans to house arrest and/or entombment in six-foot cylinders of social control.
The historic quasi-regimentation and suppression of dissent that occurred domestically during both world wars, for instance, pales by comparison.
The pretext, of course, has been that the coronavirus presents a dire threat to the very life and limb of the American public, and that exigent and invasive controls on individual action and daily commerce are necessary to stop its spread.
But that’s a gargantuan lie. The risk of death to an average healthy person under 60 years of age is no greater than that entailed in commuting 50 miles per day by car to work and back.
And besides, once a highly contagious virus gets loose among the general population— which the coronavirus had done long before Lockdown Nation was launched on March 13—its spread cannot be stopped, anyway.
In fact, it shouldn’t be stopped. When the virus is already out the barn-door and is relatively benign among 95% of the population which contracts it, the right course of action is to let freedom reign. That is, enable its natural spread among the healthy population and thereby foster the herd immunities that the human organism and social community have been deploying to combat such diseases for millennia.
Stated differently, the very high threshold of across-the-board threat to the health and life of the citizenry that would be required to suspend their liberties and pursuit of economic livelihood has not been remotely reached by the Covid. So what has and is still happening in Lockdown Nation is a case of grotesque and malign disproportion.
That’s evident enough in any random sample of the social controls and “nonessential business lockdowns” that have been hastily stood up coast to coast. But these excerpts from the lawsuit of an Illinois businessman capture the intrusive absurdity being foisted on the public as well as any:
I won’t get COVID if I get an abortion but I will get COVID if I get a colonoscopy.
Selling pot is essential but selling goods and services at a family- owned business is not. Pot wasn’t even legal and pot dispensaries didn’t even exist in this state until five months ago and, in that five months, they have become essential but a family-owned business in existence for five generations is not.
A family of six can pile in their car and drive to Carlyle Lake without contracting COVID but, if they all get in the same boat, they will.
We are told that kids rarely contract the virus and sunlight kills it, but summer youth programs, sports programs are cancelled. Four people can drive to the golf course and not get COVID but, if they play in a foursome, they will.
If I go to Walmart, I won’t get COVID but, if I go to church, I will.
Murderers are released from custody while small business owners are threatened with arrest if they have the audacity to attempt to feed their families.
These are just a few examples of rules, regulations and consequences that are arbitrary, capricious and completely devoid of anything even remotely approaching common sense. But this kind of arbitrary state invasion of economic and personal life is what happens when officialdom and politicians are green-lighted by an overpowering Big Lie.
In the case of Illinois, the state has its own bully-boy, Donald Trump wanna-be master of the universe in the state house. Governor J. B. Pritzker is the entitled scion of a brass knuckled family of Chicago business speculators who is used to getting his way, and has decided that it is his job job to quash the coronavirus—the rights of the state’s citizens and needs of the economy be damned.
But it is worth noting that the WITH Covid mortality rate in Illinois as of May 27 was just 40 per 100,000, which is only slightly above the US average and far below the level in hard hit states, where the apparent mortality rates are far higher.
It’s also about the same as Sweden, which hasn’t closed its schools, businesses and places of social congregation; and it is well above a variety of other US states and countries including Japan and South Korea, which have not employed anything remotely resembling the sweeping Lockdowns imposed by the state of Illinois:
WITH Covid Mortality Rates Per 100,000 (as of May 28)
New York: 153;
New Jersey: 128;
Connecticut: 107;
Massachusetts: 95;
Rhode Island: 64;
Sweden: 42;
Illinois: 40;
Georgia: 18;
Florida: 11;
Germany: 10;
Texas: 6;
Switzerland: 4;
Russia: 3;
Belarus: 2;
Japan: 0.7;
South Korea: 0.5
Indeed, the sweeping range of mortality rates among these jurisdictions tell you that intrusive lockdowns designed to stop the virus’ spread don’t have much to do at all with actual outcomes. Public health measures in Georgia, Florida, Texas, Japan, Belarus and South Korea, for example, were not a fraction as intrusive and comprehensive as those in the state of Illinois.
Even then, fully 50% of the WITH Covid deaths in Illinois have been in nursing and other long-term care facilities—places outside the reach of the general public lockdowns, anyway.
So if you set aside the long-term care deaths, the general population mortality rate in Illinois is actually about 20 Covid deaths per 100,000. That’s only slightly higher than the year-in and year-out suicide rate of 15 per 100,000 and not even 3% of Illinois’ annual mortality rate from all causes of about 875 per 100,000.
So you have the worst of both worlds: The Illinois lockdowns do not account for its moderate mortality rates because if plenary lockdowns were efficacious, the mortality figures for New York and New Jersey would be drastically lower.
At the same time, destroying an economy and personal liberties and livelihoods on account of a 3% share of the state’s normal mortality rate gives the idea of overkill and disproportion an altogether new meaning.
To take another example, the WITH Covid mortality rate of 15.7 per 100,000 in Virginia is only a tad above its annual suicide rate of 13.9 per 100,000.
But that hasn’t stopped its power-grabbing governor, Ralph Northam, from imposing a sweeping lockdown on the state’s residents, including an edict that after Friday all Virginians over 10 years of age will wear the Mask pretty much everywhere. As one acerbic critic rightly noted,
Or else! Gesundheitsfuhrers – health police – will do the enforcing, handing out misdemeanor fines and presumably Hut! Hut! Huts! to the non-compliant.
Needless to say, even as the state balloons with its puffed up health police, the private sector has literally imploded. With today’s weekly report on initial unemployment claims, we have now reached a milestone which was not attained even during the darkest moments of the Great Depression.
To wit, during the past ten weeks 40.7 million workers have filed for state unemployment benefits, a figure which is nine times greater than the worst 10 months of the Great Recession; and when you add in the 4.5 million workers newly eligible under PUA (Pandemic Unemployment Assistance), the total is close to 45 million.
The total employed work force on the eve of Lockdown Nation in February 2020, however, was just 158.7 million.
So, actually, 28.3% of employed workers in what was alleged to be the Greatest Economy Ever have now received pink slips, and in a ten-week flash of the eye.
Still, this needless calamity gets us to another avenue by which sickness have become the Health of the State.
After the Donald’s camarilla of malpracticing doctors green-lighted the Governors and Mayors to lockdown their economies in Mid-March and conducted daily coronavirus task force briefings which became the fodder for the MSM to generate hysteria among the general public, the Washington politicians experienced their own version of fear contagion. That is, they passed sight unseen a $3 trillion Everything Bailout which has literally eviscerated the public finances of the nation.
Consequently, and unlike even the worst period of the Great Recession, lockdown starved US Treasury receipts of $3 trillion in FY 2020 will amount to only 40% of Bailout bloated outlays, which will exceed $7 trillion. That’s not even worthy of banana republic style finance.
Needless to say, the Covid-fighters on Capitol Hill held no hearings, took no expert testimony, had the benefit of no professional analysis or even a cursory reading of the bills.
So they apparently didn’t bother to find out, for instance, that there were 71 million American workers last year whose paychecks averaged less than the new combined Federal/state benefit of $1,000 per week; and that there were 17 million workers in the hospitality and leisure sector as of February 2020, who averaged less than 25 hours per week on the clock and got paychecks of less than $350.
So now the state’s Virus Patrols are confronted with a new variety of ailment that may be afflicting millions of workers. To wit, the discovery that it pays big time to get furloughed.
As one widely circulated commentary on the social media put it: Thank Heavens for the Covid! Before COVID I was miserable.
I had a job working $14.75/hr and hated waking up most days. I’ve since been laid off (obviously) but am one of those who is making much more by NOT working.
I used to make $550-600 per week depending on my hours but since COVID began, I’m clearing just over $1000/week. My gf is in the same situation and she’s also clearing just over $1000.
Today we plan to do some hiking since it’s going to be so nice out and I’ll be using my new grill to cook up some steak tonight. The gf is kind of a wine snob so she likes to splurge on really nice reds (which I’ll definitely be having later as well).
I really don’t understand people who say they’re more stressed or are fighting with their gf/wife more than before. It makes absolutely no sense to me. These have been the best 2 months I’ve had in a while. I can’t imagine going back to my old life and way of doing things. NOT HAPPENING!
The only thing that isn’t ideal right now is not being able to travel normally but I only vacationed once or twice a year before due to work/money issues. Now I’m able to save $800-1000/month with COVID stimulus and bonus so we’ll definitely be taking a nice vacation at some point this summer.
So the question recurs: Why the Lockdowns?
House arrest and the 6-foot cylinder of social control that have been stood up to thwart the spread of the virus are inherently unmatched to the task, which is illicit in the first place. But they will inherently clobber the economy and the livelihoods of millions— notwithstanding a lot of brave talk about the “new normal”.
As the Wall Street Journal detailed in a story about the travails of the restaurant industry, the so-called re-opening will only be a short bridge to oblivion for large segments of the industry:
Across the U.S., dining rooms are reopening and some customers are returning, industry data shows. But restaurants say they expect months of sales losses ahead due to capacity constraints imposed to contain the new coronavirus. They are also buying plexiglass walls to separate tables, hiring cleaning staff and turning fewer tables to give booths deeper scrub downs between customers, expenses that draw on a shallower pool of revenue.
Of the 30 states that have allowed restaurants statewide to resume serving customers indoors, 15 have limited capacity to 25% or 50%, according to market-research firm Gordon Haskett. The rest are mandating social distancing that have the effect of reducing capacity, or have yet to release guidance. Restaurant executives expect the limits to last at least through the summer.
Independent restaurants face even greater challenges than sit-down chains because they tend to have less room to cordon off customers and fewer seats to remove. A survey of 250 Colorado restaurant operators earlier this month found that nearly half expected to permanently close in less than three months at the 50% capacity cap that the state set on Wednesday. A study of 483 New York City venues found that 61% couldn’t make it with occupancy limits below 70%.
For a typical 75-seat sit-down restaurant in New York, an occupancy cap of 50% would allow for just 20 diners after accounting for employees, said James Mallios, a New York City restaurateur and attorney.
He said the number drops to around five diners at a 25% capacity limit. New York City hasn’t yet eased stay-at-home orders or set final capacity guidelines for restaurants.
Then again, there are 275 million Americans 64 years and under who face virtually no risk of death or serious illness. As of May 16, the CDC’s own data show that the WITH- Covid mortality rate for this massive share of the population was just 4.9 per 100,000— about in line with the annual toll of traffic and other accidents.
By contrasts, the serious illnesses and deaths are occurring mainly where the Lockdowns aren’t. Persons 65 and older account for 16% of the population but 81% of the WITH-Covid deaths; and 32% of deaths have been among those 85 and older, which account for just 2.0% of the population—most of whom are in long-term care homes, and do not frequent restaurants.
The reason for high mortality and low public socializing, of course, is that the 22,543 persons 85 and older who died WITH Covid were pretty sick already. To wit, among them were—
8,267 cases of influenza and pneumonia;
11,250 cases of chronic lower respiratory and other pulmonary illnesses;
4,075 cases of high blood pressure;
4,000 cases of cardiac arrest and arterial arrhythmia;
5,800 cases of other circulatory diseases;
1,870 cases of diabetes and obesity;
3,650 cases of dementia;
1,700 cases of sepis and cancer;
1,025 cases of Alzheimer;
1,175 cases of renal failure; and
8,000 cases of other serious ailments including accidents and poisonings.
In all, the deceased over the age of 84 years had 50,800 of cases of classifiable diseases, most of them life-threatening. That’s an average of 2.25 each.
Needless to day, sickness is a condition of life—especially of advanced age; and it needs to be fought with medical care and personal health practices, not society-wide social engineering.
But when it becomes the Health of the State, as during the current Covid Hysteria, it is now apparent that the State becomes a greater mortal threat to liberty and prosperity than even during times of military war.
And we are quite sure that Randolph Bourne would heartily agree.
STAY IN THE KNOW
Fill out the form below to get the CFI Newsletter delivered to your inbox.
Leave us your contact information below to recieve a free copy of CFI's 10-Point Manifesto for Individualism
Join the CFI Mailing List using the form below to recieve a free Sample Chapter of Hunter Hastings' The Interconnected Individualism
Leave us your contact information below to recieve a free copy of Reliving We The Living
