Trust the People

For John, BLUF:  "If we’ve learned anything from the pandemic and earlier disasters, we ought to be doing precisely the opposite by enacting new limits on government power during emergencies. Americans need what Swedes have enjoyed:  legal protection against autocrats posing as saviors."  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Lockdowns:  the Self-Inflicted Disaster

Here is the sub-headline:

Governments’ use of the pandemic to claim sweeping new emergency powers has had destructive effects.

From City Journal, by Author John Tierney, 6 July 2023.

Here is the lede plus two:

Long before Covid struck, economists detected a deadly pattern in the impact of natural disasters: if the executive branch of government used the emergency to claim sweeping new powers over the citizenry, more people died than would have if government powers had remained constrained. It’s now clear that the Covid pandemic is the deadliest confirmation yet of that pattern.

Governments around the world seized unprecedented powers during the pandemic. The result was an unprecedented disaster, as recently demonstrated by two exhaustive analyses of the lockdowns’ impact in the United States and Europe. Both reports conclude that the lockdowns made little or no difference in the Covid death toll. But the lockdowns did lead to deaths from other causes during the pandemic, particularly among young and middle-aged people, and those fatalities will continue to mount in the future.

“Most likely lockdowns represent the biggest policy mistake in modern times,” says Lars Jonung of Lund University in Sweden, a coauthor of one of the new reports. He and two fellow economists, Steve Hanke from Johns Hopkins University and Jonas Herby of the Center for Political Studies in Copenhagen, sifted through nearly 20,000 studies for their book, Did Lockdowns Work?, published in June by the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA) in London. After combining results from the most rigorous studies analyzing fatality rates and the stringency of lockdowns in various states and nations, they estimate that the average lockdown in the United States and Europe during the spring of 2020 reduced Covid mortality by just 3.2 percent. That translates to some 4,000 avoided deaths in the United States—a negligible result compared with the toll from the ordinary flu, which annually kills nearly 40,000 Americans.

Our response to COVID-19 was based on the twin pillars of "trust the experts" and don't trust The People.  And throw in a pinch of don't trust President Trump.♠  This seems just the opposite of the basis for our Republic, which is based, in large part, on trusting the People.

In honor of all those people who died unnecessarily in nursing homes in New York, or Veterans Homes in Massachusetts, we should dedicate ourselves to not letting timid Elected Officials and officious bureaucrats take away our freedoms and from feeding us false information,♥ and along with media, censoring debate.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  As exemplified by Speaker Nancy Pelosi decrying President Trump saying COVID-19 (Wuhan Flu) came from China and we should stop flights from there.
♥  As exemplified by the Government statements that we didn't need masks, followed by a mask mandate.