Connect with us
[bsa_pro_ad_space id=12]

Brownstone Institute

The Economic Disaster of the Pandemic Response

Published

30 minute read

This article originally published by the Brownstone Institute

BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER

On April 15, 2020, a full month after the President’s fateful news conference that greenlighted lockdowns to be enacted by the states for “15 Days to Flatten the Curve,” Donald Trump had a revealing White House conversation with Anthony Fauci, the head of the National institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease who had already become the public face of the Covid response.

“I’m not going to preside over the funeral of the greatest country in the world,” Trump wisely said, as reported in Jared Kushner’s book Breaking History. Two weeks of lockdown was over and the promised Easter opening blew right by too, Trump was done. He also suspected that he had been misled and was no longer speaking to coronavirus coordinator Deborah Birx.

“I understand,” Fauci responded meekly. “I just do medical advice. I don’t think about things like the economy and the secondary impacts. I’m just an infectious diseases doctor. Your job as president is to take everything else into consideration.”

That conversation both reflected and entrenched the tone of the debate over the lockdowns and vaccine mandates and eventually the national crisis that they precipitated. In these debates in the early days, and even today, the idea of “the economy” – viewed as mechanistic, money-centered, mostly about the stock market, and detached from anything truly important – was pitted against public health and lives.

You choose one or the other. You cannot have both. Or so they said.

Pandemic Practice

Also in those days, it was widely believed, stemming from a strange ideology hatched 16 years earlier, that the best approach to pandemics was to institute massive human coercion like we have never before experienced. The theory was that if you make humans behave like non-player characters in computer models, you can keep them from infecting each other until a vaccine arrives which will eventually wipe out the pathogen.

The new lockdown theory stood in contrast to a century of pandemic advice and practice from public-health wisdom. Only a few cities tried coercion and quarantine to deal with the 1918 pandemic, mostly San Francisco (also the home of the first Anti-Mask League) whereas most just treated disease person by person. The quarantines of that period failed and so landed in disrepute. They were not tried again in the disease scares (some real, some exaggerated) of 1929, 1940-44, 1957-58, 1967-68, 2003, 2005, or 2009. In those days, even the national media urged calm and therapeutics during each infectious-disease scare.

Somehow and for reasons that should be discussed – it could be intellectual error, political priorities, or some combination – 2020 became the year of an experiment without precedent, not only in the US but all over the world with the exception of perhaps five nations among which we can include the state of South Dakota. The sick and the well were quarantined, along with stay-at-home orders, domestic capacity limits, and business, school, and church shutdowns,

Nothing turned out according to plan. The economy can be turned off using coercion but the resulting trauma is so great that turning it on again is not so easy. Instead, thirty months later, we face an economic crisis without precedent in our lifetimes, the longest period of declining real income in the post-war period, a health and educational crisis, an exploding national debt plus inflation at a 40-year high, continued and seemingly random shortages, dysfunction in labor markets that defies all models, the breakdown of international trade, a collapse in consumer confidence not seen since we have these numbers, and a dangerous level of political division.

And what happened to Covid? It came anyway, just as many epidemiologists predicted it would. The stratified impact of medically significant outcomes was also predictable based on what we knew from February: the at-risk population was largely the elderly and infirmed. To be sure, most everyone would eventually met the pathogen with varying degrees of severity: some people shook it off in a couple of days, others suffered for weeks, and others perished. Even now, there is grave uncertainty about the data and causality due to the probability of misattribution due to both faulty PCR testing and financial incentives given out to hospitals.

Tradeoffs

Even if lockdowns had saved lives over the long term– the literature on this overwhelming suggests that the answer is no – the proper question to have asked was: at what cost? The economic question was: what are the tradeoffs? But because economics as such was shelved for the emergency, the question was not raised by policy makers. Thus did the White House on March 16, 2020, send out the most dreaded sentence pertaining to economics that one can imagine: “bars, restaurants, food courts, gyms, and other indoor and outdoor venues where groups of people congregate should be closed.”

The results are legion. The lockdowns kicked off a whole range of other policy disastrous decisions, among which an epic bout of government spending. What we are left with is a national debt that is 121% of GDP. This compares to 35% of GDP in 1981 when Ronald Reagan correctly declared it a crisis. Government spending in the Covid response amounted to at least $6 trillion above normal operations, creating debt that the Federal Reserve purchased with newly created money nearly dollar for dollar.

Money Printing

From February May 2020, M2 increased by an average of $814.3 billion per month. On May 18, 2020, M2 was rising 22% year over year, compared with only 6.7% from March that year. It was not yet the peak. That came after the new year, when on February 22, 2021, the M2 annual rate of increase reached a staggering 27.5%.

At the very same time, the velocity of money behaved as one would expect in a crisis of this sort. It plummeted an incredible 23.4% in the second quarter. A crashing rate at which money is being spent puts deflationary pressure on prices regardless of what happens with money supply. In this case, the falling velocity was a temporary salvation. It pushed the bad effects of this quantitative easing – to invoke a euphemism from 2008 – off into the future.

That future is now. The eventual result is the highest inflation in 40 years, which is not slowing down but accelerating, at least according to the October 12, 2022 Producer Price Index, which is hotter than it has been in months. It is running ahead of the Consumer Price Index, which is a reversal from earlier in the lockdown period. This new pressure on producers heavily impacted the business environment and created recessionary conditions.

A Global Problem

Moreover, this was not just a US problem. Most nations in the world followed the same lockdown strategy while attempting to substitute spending and printing for real economic activity. The cause-and-effect relationship holds the world over. Central banks coordinated and their societies all suffered.

The Fed is being called up daily to step up its lending to foreign central banks through the discount window for emergency loans. It is now at the highest level since Spring 2020 lockdowns. The Fed lent $6.5 billion to two foreign central banks in one week in October 2022. The numbers are truly scary and foreshadow a possible international financial crisis.

The Great Head Fake

But back in the spring and summer of 2020, we seemed to experience a miracle. Governments around the country had crushed social functioning and free enterprise and yet real income went soaring. Between February 2020 and March 2021, real personal income during a time with low inflation was up by $4.2 trillion. It felt like magic: a lockdown economy but riches were pouring in.

And what did people do with their new-found riches? There was Amazon. There was Netflix. There was the need for all sorts of new equipment to feed our new existence as digital everything. All these companies benefited enormously while others suffered. Even so we paid off credit card debt. And much of the stimulus was socked away as savings. The first stimulus went straight to the bank: the personal savings rate went from 9.6% to 33% in the course of just one month.

After the summer, people started to get the hang of getting free money from government dropped into their bank accounts. The savings rate started to fall: by November 2020, it was back down to 13.3%. Once Joseph Biden came to power and unleashed another round of stimulus, the savings rate went back up to 26.3%. And just fast forward to the present and we find people saving 3.5% of income, which is half the historical norm dating back to 1960 and about where it was in 2005 when low interest rates fed the housing boom that went bust in 2008. Meanwhile credit card debt is now soaring, even though interest rates are 17% and higher.

In other words, we experienced the wildest swing from shocking riches to rags in a very short period of time. The curves all inverted once the inflation came along to eat out the value of the stimulus. All that free money turned out not to be free at all but rather very expensive. The dollar of January 2020 is now worth only $0.87, which is to say that the stimulus spending covered by Federal Reserve printing stole $0.13 of every dollar in the course of only 2.5 years.

It was one of the biggest head fakes in the history of modern economics. The pandemic planners created paper prosperity to cover up for the grim reality all around. But it did not and could not last.

Right on schedule, the value of the currency began to tumble. Between January 2021 and September 2022, prices increased 13.5% across the board, while costing the average American family $728 in September alone. Even if inflation stops today, the inflation already in the bag will cost the American family $8,739 over the next 12 months, leaving less money to pay off soaring credit card debt.

Let’s return to the salad days before the inflation hit and when the Zoom class experienced delight at their new riches and their work-from-home luxuries. On Main Street, matters looked very different. I visited two medium-sized towns in New Hampshire and Texas over the course of the summer of 2020. I found nearly all businesses on Main Street boarded up, malls empty but for a few masked maintenance men, and churches silent and abandoned. There was no life at all, only despair.

The look of most of America in those days – not even Florida was yet open – was post-apocalyptic, with vast numbers of people huddled at home either alone or with immediate families, fully convinced that a universally deadly virus was lurking outdoors and waiting to snatch the life of anyone foolish enough to seek exercise, sunshine, or, heaven forbid, fun with friends, much less visiting the elderly in nursing homes, which was verboten. Meanwhile, the CDC was recommending that any “essential business” install walls of plexiglass and paste social distancing stickers everywhere where people would walk. All in the name of science.

I am very aware that all of this sounds utterly ridiculous now, but I assure you that it was serious at the time. Several times, I was personally screamed at for walking only a few feet into a grocery aisle that had been designated by stickers to be one way in the other direction. Also in those days, at least in the Northeast, enforcers among the citizenry would fly drones around the city and countryside looking for house parties, weddings, or funerals, and snap images to send to the local media, which would dutifully report the supposed scandal.

These were times when people insisted on riding elevators alone, and only one person at a time was permitted to walk through narrow corridors. Parents masked up their kids even though the kids were at near zero risk, which we knew from data but not from public health authorities. Incredibly, nearly all schools were closed, thus forcing parents out of the office back home. Homeschooling, which has long existed under a legal fog, suddenly became mandatory.

Just to illustrate how crazy it all became, a friend of mine arrived home from a visit out of town and his mother demanded that he leave his Covid-infested bags on the porch for three days. I’m sure you have your own stories of absurdity, among which was the masking of everyone, the enforcement of which went from stern to ferocious as time passed.

But these were the days when people believed the virus was outdoors and so we should stay in. Oddly, this changed over time when people decided that the virus was indoors and so we should be outdoors. When New York City cautiously permitted dining in commercial establishments, the mayor’s office insisted that it could only be outdoors, so many restaurants built an outdoors version of indoors, complete with plastic walls and heating units at a very high expense.

In those days, I had some time to kill waiting for a train in Hudson, New York, and went to a wine bar. I ordered a glass at the counter and the masked clerk handed it to me and pointed for me to go outside. I said I would like to drink it inside since it was freezing and miserable outside. I pointed out that there was a full dining room right there. She said I could not because of Covid.

Is this a law, I asked? She said no it is just good practice to keep people safe.

“Do you really think there is Covid in that room?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said in all seriousness.

At this point, I realized we had fully moved from government-mandated mania to a real popular delusion for the ages.

The commercial carnage for small business has yet to be thoroughly documented. At least 100,000 restaurants and stores in Manhattan alone closed, commercial real estate prices crashed, and big business moved in to scoop up bargains. Policies were decidedly disadvantageous to small businesses. If there were commercial capacity restrictions, they would kill a coffee shop but a large franchise all-you-eat buffet that holds 300 would probably be fine.

So too with industries in general: big tech including Zoom and Amazon thrived, but hotels, bars, restaurants, malls, cruise ships, theaters, and anyone without home delivery suffered terribly. The arts were devastated. In the deadly Hong Kong flu of 1968-69, we had Woodstock but this time we had nothing but YouTube, unless you opposed Covid restrictions in which case your song was deleted and your account blasted into oblivion.

Health Care Industry

To talk about the healthcare industry, let’s return to the early days of the frenzy of the Spring of 2020. An edict had gone out from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to all public health officials in the country that strongly urged the closing of all hospitals to everyone but non-elective surgeries and Covid patients, which turned out to exclude nearly everyone who would routinely show up for diagnostics or other normal treatments.

As a result, hospital parking lots emptied out from sea to shining sea, a most bizarre sight to see given that there was supposed to be a pandemic raging. We can see this in the data. The healthcare sector employed 16.4 million people in early 2020. By April, the entire sector lost 1.6 million employees, which is an astonishing exodus by any historical standard. Nurses in hundreds of hospitals were furloughed. Again, this happened during a pandemic.

In another strange twist that future historians will have a hard time trying to figure out, health care spending itself fell off a cliff. From March to May 2020, health care spending actually collapsed by $500 billion or 16.5%.

This created an enormous financial problem for hospitals in general, which, after all, are economic institutions too. They were bleeding money so fast that when the federal government offered subsidies of 20 percent above other respiratory ailments if the patient could be declared Covid positive, hospitals jumped at the chance and found cases galore, which the CDC was happy to accept at face value. Compliance with guidelines became the only path toward restoring profitability.

The throttling of non-Covid services included the near abolition of dentistry that went on for months from Spring through Summer. In the midst of this, I worried that I needed a root canal. I simply could not find a dentist in Massachusetts who would see me. They said every patient first needs a cleaning and thorough examination and all those have been canceled. I had the bright idea of traveling to Texas to get it done but the dentist there said they were restricted by law to make sure all patients from out of state quarantine in Texas for two weeks, time I could not afford. I thought about suggesting to my mother, who was making the appointment, that she simply lie about the date of my arrival but thought better of it given her scruples.

It was a time of great public insanity, not stopped and even fomented by public health bureaucrats. The abolition of dentistry for a time seemed to comply completely with the injunction of the New York Times on February 28, 2020. “To Take on the Coronavirus, Go Medieval on It,” the headline read. We did, even to the point of abolishing dentistry, publicly shaming the diseased on grounds that getting Covid was surely a sign of noncompliance and civic sin, and instituting a feudal system of dividing workers by essential and nonessential.

Labor Markets

Exactly how it came to be that the entire workforce came to be divided this way remains a mystery to me but the guardians of the public mind seemed not to care a whit about it. Most of the delineated lists at the time said that you could keep operating if you qualified as a media center. Thus for two years did the New York Times instruct its readers to stay home and have their groceries delivered. By whom, they did not say, nor did they care because such people are not apparently among their reader base. Essentially, the working classes were used as fodder to obtain herd immunity, and then later subjected to vaccine mandates despite superior natural immunity.

Many, as in millions, were later fired for not complying with mandates. We are told that unemployment today is very low and that many new jobs are being filled. Yes, and most of those are existing workers getting second and third jobs. Moonlighting and side gigging are now a way of life, not because it is a blast but because the bills have to be paid.

The full truth about labor markets requires that we look at the labor participation rate and the worker-population ratio. Millions have gone missing. These are working women who still cannot find child care because that industry never recovered, and so participation is back at 1988 levels. They are early retirements. They are 20 somethings who moved home and went on unemployment benefits. There are many more who have just lost the will to achieve and build a future.

The supply chain breakages need their own discussion. The March 12, 2020, evening announcement by President Trump that he would block all travel from Europe, UK, and Australia beginning in five days from then started a mad scramble to get back to the US. He also misread the teleprompter and said that the ban would also apply to goods. The White House had to correct the statement the next day but the damage was already done. Shipping came to a complete standstill.

Supply Chains and Shortages

Most economic activity stopped. By the time the fall relaxation came and manufacturers started reordering parts, they found that many factories overseas had already retooled for other kinds of demand. This particularly affected the semiconductor industry for automotive manufacturing. Overseas chip makers had already turned their attention to personal computers, cellphones, and other devices. This was the beginning of the car shortage that sent prices through the roof. This created a political demand for US-based chip production which has in turn resulted in another round of export and import controls.

These sorts of problems have affected every industry without exception. Why the paper shortage today? Because so many of the paper factories which shifted to plywood after that had gone sky-high in price to feed the housing demand created by generous stimulus checks.

We could write books listing all the economic calamities directly caused by the disastrous pandemic response. They will be with us for years, and yet even today, not many people fully grasp the relationship between our current economic hardships, and even the growing international tensions and breakdown of trade and travel, and the brutality of the pandemic response. It is all directly related.

Anthony Fauci said at the outset: “I don’t think about things like the economy and the secondary impacts.” And Melinda Gates said the same in a December 4, 2020 interview with the New York Times: “What did surprise us is we hadn’t really thought through the economic impacts.”

The wall of separation posited between “economics” and public health did not hold in theory or practice. A healthy economy is indispensable for healthy people. Shutting down economic life was a singularly bad idea for taking on a pandemic.

Conclusion

Economics is about people in their choices and institutions that enable them to thrive. Public health is about the same thing. Driving a wedge between the two surely ranks among the most catastrophic public-policy decisions of our lifetimes. Health and economics both require the nonnegotiable called freedom. May we never again experiment with its near abolition in the name of disease mitigation.

This is based on a presentation at Hillsdale College, October 20, 2022, to appear in a shortened version in IMPRIMUS

Author

  • Jeffrey A. Tucker, Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute, is an economist and author. He has written 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He writes a daily column on economics at The Epoch Times, and speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

Todayville is a digital media and technology company. We profile unique stories and events in our community. Register and promote your community event for free.

Follow Author

Brownstone Institute

A Potpourri of the World’s Unexposed Scandals

Published on

From the Brownstone Institute

By  Bill Rice  

How many genuine, shocking – and unexposed – scandals actually occurred in the last four years?  To partially answer this question, I composed another of my List Columns.

The Most Epic of Scandals Might Be…

The world’s most epic scandal might be the massive number of citizens who’ve died prematurely in the last four years. This scandal could also be expressed as the vast number of people whose deaths were falsely attributed to Covid.

My main areas of focus – “early spread” – informed my thinking when I reached this stunning conclusion:  Almost every former living person said to have died “from Covid” probably did not die from Covid.

The scandal is that (unreported) “democide” occurred, meaning that government policies and deadly healthcare “guidance” more plausibly explain the millions of excess deaths that have occurred since late March 2020.

My research into early spread suggests that the real Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) of Covid should have already been known by the lockdowns of mid-March 2020.

If, as I believe, many millions of world citizens had already contracted this virus and had not died, the Covid IFR would be the same, or perhaps even lower, than the IFR for the common flu – said to be 1 death per 1,000 infections (0.1 percent).

Expressed differently, almost 100 percent of people who contracted this virus did not die from it – a fact which could and should have been known early in the “pandemic.” The fact this information was concealed from the public qualifies as a massive scandal.

Evidence That Would ‘Prove’ This Scandal

Furthermore, one does not need early spread “conjecture” to reach the conclusion that only a minute number of people who were infected by this virus later died from Covid.

After April 2020, a researcher could pick any large group or organization and simply ascertain how many people in these groups later died “from Covid.”

For example, more than 10,000 employees work for the CDC. About 10 months ago, I sent an email to the CDC and asked their media affairs department how many of the CDC’s own employees have died from Covid in the past three-plus years.

This question – which would be easy to answer – was never answered. This example of non-transparency is, to me,  a massive “tell” and should be “scandalous.”

To be more precise, if the CDC could document that, say, 10 of their employees had died from Covid, this would equate to a disease with a mortality risk identical to the flu.

My strong suspicion is that fewer than 10 CDC employees have died from Covid in the last four years, which would mean the CDC knows from its own large sample group that Covid is/was not more deadly than influenza.

I’ve performed the same extrapolations with other groups made up of citizens whose Covid deaths would have made headlines.

For example, hundreds of thousands if not millions of high school, college, and pro athletes must have contracted Covid by today’s date. However, it is a challenge to find one definitive case of a college or pro athlete who died from Covid.

For young athletes – roughly ages 14 to 40 – the Covid IFR is either 0.0000 percent or very close to this microscopic fraction.

One question that should be obvious given the “athlete” example is why would any athlete want or need an experimental new mRNA “vaccine” when there’s a zero-percent chance this disease would ever kill this person?

The scandal is that sports authorities – uncritically accepting “guidance” from public health officials – either mandated or strongly encouraged (via coercion) that every athlete in the world receive Covid shots and then, later, booster shots.

Of course, the fact these shots would be far more likely to produce death or serious adverse events than a bout with Covid should be a massive scandal.

More Scandals

Needless to say, all the major pediatrician groups issued the same guidance for children.

In Pike County, Alabama, I can report that in four years no child/student between the ages of 5 and 18 has died from Covid.

I also recognize that the authorized  “fact” is that millions of Americans have now “died from Covid.” However, I believe this figure is a scandalous lie, one supported by PCR test results that would be questioned in a world where investigating certain scandals was not taboo.

Yet another scandal is that officials and the press de-emphasized the fact the vast majority of alleged victims were over the age of 79, had multiple comorbid conditions, were often nursing home residents, and, among the non-elderly, came from the poorest sections of society.

These revelations – which would not advance the desired narrative that everyone should be very afraid – are similar to many great scandals that have been exposed from time to time in history.

Namely, officials in positions of power and trust clearly conspired to cover up or conceal information that would have exposed their own malfeasance, professional incompetence, and/or graft.

This Might Be the No. 1 Scandal of Our Times

As I’ve written ad nauseam, perhaps the most stunning scandal of our times is that all-important “truth-seeking” organizations have become completely captured.

At the top of this list are members of the so-called Fourth Estate or “watchdog” press (at least in the corporate or “mainstream” media).

In previous articles, I’ve estimated that at least 40,000 Americans work as full-time journalists or editors for mainstream “news organizations.” Hundreds of MSM news-gathering organizations “serve” their readers and viewers.

In this very large group, I can’t think of one journalist, editor, publisher, or news organization who endeavored to expose any of the dubious claims of the public health establishment.

When 100 percent of professionals charged with exposing scandals are themselves working to conceal shocking revelations…this too should qualify as a massive scandal.

To the above “captured classes” one could add college professors and administrators, 99 percent of plaintiffs’ trial lawyers, 100 percent of CEOs of major corporations, almost all elected politicians, and, with the exception of perhaps Sweden, every one of the public health agencies in the world, plus all major medical groups and prestigious science journals.

Or This Might Be Our Greatest Scandal

Yet another scandal – perhaps the most sinister of them all – would be the coordinated conspiracy to silence, muffle, intimidate, bully, cancel, demonetize, and stigmatize the classes of brave and intelligent dissidents who have attempted to reveal a litany of shocking truths.

The Censorship Industrial Complex (CIC) is not a figment of a conspiracy theorist’s imagination.

The CIC is as real as Media Matters, News Guard, The Trusted News Initiative, the Stanford Virality Project, and the 15,000-plus “content moderators” who probably still work for Facebook.

Government officials in myriad agencies of “President” Joe Biden’s administration constantly pressured social media companies to censor content that didn’t fit the authorized narrative (although these bullying projects didn’t require much arm-twisting).

Here, the scandal is that the country’s “adults in the room” were identified as grave threats to the agenda of the Powers that Be and were targeted for extreme censorship and punishment.

When people and organizations principled enough to try to expose scandals are targeted by the State and the State’s crony partners, this guarantees future scandals are unlikely to be exposed…which means the same unexposed leaders are going to continue to inflict even greater harm on the world population.

This Scandal Is Hard to Quantify

Other scandals are more difficult to quantify. For example, it’s impossible to know how many citizens now “self-censor” because they know the topics they should not discuss outside of conversations with close friends.

This point perhaps illustrates the state of the world’s “New Normal” – a now-accepted term that is scandalous if one simply thinks about the predicates of this modifier.

It should be a scandal that the vast majority of world citizens now eagerly submit to or comply with the dictates and speech parameters imposed on them by the world’s leadership classes.

The “New Normal” connotes that one should accept increasing assaults on previously sacrosanct civil liberties.

What is considered “normal” – and should now be accepted without protest – was, somehow, changed.

As I routinely write, what the world has lived through the past four-plus years is, in fact, a New Abnormal.

This Orwellian change of definition would qualify as a shocking scandal except for the fact most people now self-censor to remain in the perceived safety of their social and workplace herds.

The bottom line – a sad one – might be that none of the above scandals would have been possible if more members of the public had been capable of critical thinking and exhibited a modicum of civic courage.

As it turns out, the exposure of scandals would require large numbers of citizens to look into the mirror (or their souls) and perform self-analysis, an exercise in introspection that would not be pain-free.

It’s also a scandal our leaders knew they could manipulate the masses so easily.

Considering all of these points, it seems to me that the captured leadership classes must have known that the vast majority of the population would trust the veracity of their claims and policy prescriptions.

That is, they knew there would be no great pushback from “the masses.”

If the above observation isn’t a scandal, it’s depressing to admit or acknowledge this is what happened.

To End on a Hopeful Note

What gives millions of citizens hope is that, belatedly, more citizens might be growing weary of living in a world where every scandal cannot be exposed.

Donald Trump winning a presidential election by margins “too big to steal” is a sign of national hope.

Mr. Trump nominating RFK, Jr. to supervise the CDC, NIH, and FDA is definitely a sign of hope, an appointment that must outrage and terrify the world’s previous leadership classes.

For far too long, America’s greatest scandal has been that no important scandals can be exposed. Today, however, it seems possible this state of affairs might not remain our New Normal forever.

Republished from the author’s Substack

Author

Bill Rice, Jr. is a freelance journalist in Troy, Alabama.

Continue Reading

Brownstone Institute

Freedumb, You Say?

Published on

From the Brownstone Institute

By Gabrielle Bauer 

“Authorities have attacked, detained, prosecuted, and in some cases killed critics, broken up peaceful protests, closed media outlets, and enacted vague laws criminalizing speech that they claim threatens public health”

Didn’t give much thought to freedom until four years ago, at age 63. Freedom was just there, like the water surrounding a goldfish. And then the Covid-19 pandemic blew in, the world locked down, and admonitions to “stay the ‘$^#&’ home” blazed through social media. No freedom was too important to discard in the name of public safety: jobs, family businesses, artistic endeavours, public meetings, social connections that kept despair at bay, all took a backseat to the grim business of saving grandma (who ended up getting Covid anyway). No discussion of moral or practical trade-offs, no pushback from the press, nothing. It felt wrong to me on a cellular level.

Apparently I was the only one in my middle-class liberal circle to harbour misgivings about this astonishing new world. If I tried, ever so timidly, to articulate my concerns on Facebook or Twitter, the online warriors shot back with a string of epithets. “Go lick a pole and catch the virus,” said one. “Crawl back into your cave, troglodyte,” said another. And my all-time favourite: “You’re nothing but a mouth-breathing Trumptard.”

From the get-go, I perceived Covid as more of a philosophical problem than a scientific one. As I wrote on more than one occasion, science can inform our decisions, but not dictate them. What ultimately powers our choices are the values we hold. I saw Covid as a morality play, with freedom and safety cast as the duelling protagonists, and it looked like safety was skipping to an easy victory.

It was a heady time for the health bureaucrats, whose increasingly arcane rules betrayed a naked impulse to control: the Canadian high-school students required to use masks on both their faces and their wind instruments during band practice, the schoolchildren forced (for hygiene reasons) to study on their knees for hours in an Alaska classroom, the “glory-hole” sex advised by the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control. The lack of public pushback against these absurdities heightened my awareness of the fragility of our freedoms.

One of the earliest memes to surface during the pandemic was “muh freedumb.” The locution became a shorthand for a stock character – a tattooed man wearing camo gear and a baseball cap, spewing viral particles while yelling about his rights. A selfish idiot. The memes kept coming: “Warning, cliff ahead: keep driving, freedom fighter.” “Personal freedom is the preoccupation of adult children.” Freedom, for centuries an aspiration of democratic societies, turned into a laughing stock.

Eventually, pro-freedom voices began trickling into the public arena. I wasn’t alone, after all. There were others who understood, in the words of Telegraph writer Janet Daley, that the institutional response to Covid-19 had steamrolled over “the dimension of human experience which gives meaning and value to private life.” Lionel Shriver decried how “across the Western world, freedoms that citizens took for granted seven months ago have been revoked at a stroke.” And Laura Dodsworth brought tears to my eyes when she wrote, in her 2021 book A State of Fear, that she feared authoritarianism more than death.

Once the vaccines rolled out, the war on freedom of conscience went nuclear. If you breathed a word against the products, or even the mandates, you were “literally killing people.” The hostility towards the “unvaxxed” culminated in a Toronto Star front page showcasing public vitriol, splashed with such sentiments as: “I honestly don’t care if they die from Covid. Not even a little bit.”

This, too, felt viscerally wrong. I knew several people who had refused the vaccine, and they all had well-articulated reasons for their stance. If they didn’t fully trust the “safe and effective” bromide recycled by all government and pharmaceutical industry spokespeople, I could hardly blame them. (And I say this as someone who writes for Big Pharma and got five Covid shots.)

One of the most deplorable casualties of Covid culture was freedom of expression, a core principle in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Experts speaking publicly about the harms of lockdown faced systematic ostracism from mainstream media, especially left-wing news outlets. By early 2021, Human Rights Watch estimated that at least 83 governments worldwide had used the Covid-19 pandemic to violate the lawful exercise of free speech and peaceful assembly.

“Authorities have attacked, detained, prosecuted, and in some cases killed critics, broken up peaceful protests, closed media outlets, and enacted vague laws criminalizing speech that they claim threatens public health,” the group wrote in a media release. “The victims include journalists, activists, healthcare workers, political opposition groups, and others who have criticized government responses to the coronavirus.”

But what about misinformation? Doesn’t it kill people? Newsflash: misinformation has always existed, even before TikTok. It’s up to each of us to sift the credible folks from the cranks. The best defence against misinformation is better information, and it’s the policy wonks’ job to provide it. Modern science itself depends on this tug-of-war of ideas, which filters out weaker hypotheses and moves stronger ones ahead for further testing.

Besides, misinformation comes not just from cranks, but from “official sources” – especially those tasked with persuading the public, rather than informing it. Remember when Rochelle Walensky, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the US, asserted that “vaccinated people do not carry the virus?” Or when Anthony Fauci maintained that getting vaccinated makes you a “dead end” in the chain of transmission? I rest my case.

The marketplace of ideas is like a souk, with a lot of hollering and arguing and the odd snatched purse – and that’s exactly how it should be. It’s an ingenious and irreplaceable process for getting to the truth. There are few ideas too sacrosanct to question or too ridiculous to consider. That’s why, unlike just about everyone in my left-leaning circle, I take no issue with Elon Musk’s shakedown of the old Twitter, now the Wild West of X.

Under Musk’s algorithms, my feed has become a true philosophical souk, with wildly disparate views smashing into each other, leaving me to sift through the rubble in search of a gold nugget or two. Love him or hate him, Musk offers a much-needed counterweight to the ideological lockstep in much of the mainstream media. And when it comes to free speech, Musk has put his money where his mouth is: when media personality Keith Olbermann recently hopped on X, where he boasts a million followers, to call for Musk’s arrest and detainment, Musk made no move to censor him. Works for me.

While the “old normal” has thankfully returned to our daily lives, save the odd mask in a shopping mall or subway car, the stench of censorship that blew in with the pandemic has yet to dissipate. An obsession with disinformation permeates the zeitgeist, spurring lawmakers in several Western countries to censor the flow of thoughts and ideas that gives a free society its pulse.

We cannot excise personal freedom from a democratic society, even in the interests of the “public good,” without poisoning the roots of democracy itself. Article 3 of UNESCO’s 2005 Universal Declaration of Bioethics and Human Rights states this plainly: “The interests and welfare of the individual should have priority over the sole interest of science or society.” In our post-pandemic reality, the statement seems almost quaint. Nonetheless, it expresses an enduring truth: that a democracy must never discard the idea of freedom – even in a pandemic.

Freedom desperately needs a comeback from its current incarnation as an expendable frill. In my own small way I’m trying to make this happen: never much of an activist before Covid, I’m now part of a small group preparing to launch a Free Speech Union in Canada, modelled after the highly successful one in the UK. The organisation will offer legal advice to individuals facing censorship, cancellation, or job loss because of their words. I look forward to supporting people caught in this anti-freedom web, including those whose words I heartily disagree with.

My newfound respect for free speech is also what propels me to keep talking about Covid. The response to the pandemic exceeded the bounds of public health, and we need to expose the forces that drove it. Here’s Daley again: “The world went crazy. There is no other way to account for what was an almost nihilistic dismantling not just of particular liberties and rights, but of the very idea of liberty.” We can’t let it happen again.

Republished from Perspective Media

Author

Gabrielle Bauer is a Toronto health and medical writer who has won six national awards for her magazine journalism. She has written three books: Tokyo, My Everest, co-winner of the Canada-Japan Book Prize, Waltzing The Tango, finalist in the Edna Staebler creative nonfiction award, and most recently, the pandemic book BLINDSIGHT IS 2020, published by the Brownstone Institute in 2023

Continue Reading

Trending

X