“Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.”
- H.L. Mencken
California is going back on lockdown — once again serving up a backwards role model of command-and-control Federalism for the rest of the country. Meanwhile, politicians like Governor Newsom and NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio are epitomizing “Restrictions for thee, but not for me,” with their forced apologies for dining out and going to the gym respectively while regular Americans are being fined or even arrested for similar behavior.
Jon Miltimore is not having it. The Managing Editor of the Foundation for Economic Education is something of a modern day H. L. Mencken. Miltimore has been a stalwart voice of humor and reason during the past 9 months of dour superstition from the mainstream media and government authorities.
His latest article contradicts the rationale for new rounds of draconian business closures — citing three studies in prestigious medical journals that all agree: Lockdown stringency has no effect on actual COVID mortality. [ 3 Studies That Show Lockdowns Are Ineffective at Slowing COVID-19 — Foundation for Economic Education Dec. 9]
In another series, he “debunks the debunkers” who claim that Sweden’s light-handed approach, recommending rather than mandating avoidance of large indoor gatherings, etc., has failed. Although the media eagerly reported this headlines, it turned out not to be true.
And of course there is the issue of masks, which are already mandatory for Californians, and may soon be mandated nation-wide if Biden gets his way. Some county sheriffs are refusing to arrest otherwise law-abiding citizens (following the proper Federalist formula), but where orders are being followed, government force is being revealed as the unjustified farce that it really is. Look no further than the 22-year-old mother who has wrestled to the ground for not wearing a mask in NYC, or the Canadian restaurant owner who was arrested for trespassing on his own property.
Mencken would have had a field day. Thankfully, we have people like Jon to expose these abuses of force and the farcical figures behind them.
Transcript
Bob Zadek: Here we are on the first day of the end of the pandemic. I heard in the early morning news that the trucks are rolling out with the -70 degree temperature storing the vaccine as it goes out to be distributed to the public, in some order of distribution decided by politicians. So this is the first day of the end of the pandemic. Happy end of pandemic day, everyone.
Now there is already a chance to look back on what we have done in the pandemic. How have decisions been made, what has been the quality of the decision making in handling the pandemic? Specifically, the decision with the most massive consequences, mostly bad, maybe none good at all, which is the decision to impose an indeterminate lockdown.
This is the first time in our country’s history that the entire country or a high percentage of the country was put under house arrest. We didn’t have enough money for ankle bracelets for everybody. So we were on our honor, more or less, even though we did nothing wrong and we weren’t even sick, we were put under house arrest simply because all layers of government had decided that we are grossly incompetent to make even the most basic decisions about our lives – whether we should ourselves or have our family go to the supermarket, visit with friends, go to church, go to a synagogue to pray, go to work, go to the park… in short, whether we were competent. The answer is that we are a bunch of idiots. We are not competent. Therefore, the government had to make that decision for us. That is the essence of progressive government.
What were the not so obvious adverse consequences of the lockdowns? I’m happy to welcome to the show Jon Miltimore, who is the managing editor of the foundation for Economic Education. He has written extensively on economic matters, specifically including the lockdown, and he has given this more thought than probably any elected official, although he has regretfully considerably less power than the elected officials have. We will discuss that in detail this morning. So Jon, welcome to the show this morning.
Jon Miltimore: Thanks a lot for having me on Bob.
Flashback: The Original Purpose of the Lockdown
Bob Zadek: Never before in American history have we had a circumstance where the population at large was quarantined and restricted under pain of criminal penalty to go out, go to work, go to church, socialize with friends and socialize with family members, even though they did nothing wrong and they themselves were not sick. We have had quarantines but we quarantined the sick so they do not infect somebody else. We long since decided that as an appropriate role of government. There is no question about that. But here we have quarantined the healthy for the first time. There have been profound effects. The original lockdown was imposed for a very narrow and specific purpose. This has been forgotten. What was the original reason for the lockdown?
Jon Miltimore: That is a great question. This has never been done in American history before. But I go a step further. This has never been tried in human history, to our knowledge. This has never been tried before. We’ve looked at this a lot of people have, and we can’t find an instance of where it happened before China imposed their lockdown in February.
If you look back at news articles and at public health experts, and if you look back what they were saying in February, they were saying China’s strategy is not going to work. They were saying this is a virus, this isn’t something that you can contain by trying to tell people to stay in their houses and in closing shops and things like this. There was a great deal of skepticism about that in February. That changed in March. The CDC published research just recently saying the virus could have been here before Christmas in 2019 and people were not aware.
But in March there was nonstop coverage about this thing that people didn’t really understand. In some ways, it was worse than 9/11, because at least 9/11 was an event we saw and understood. With this virus we saw scary numbers being projected and did not know what it was going to do to people. We thought of worst case scenarios.
So we did what China did.
As you pointed out, it was never going to be some sort of permanent strategy. The goal was to flatten the curve and go back to normal. But obviously that didn’t happen. After the politics of this issue go away we’ll look back 5 years and wonder how we could try to fight a virus in this manner and think that there were not going to be just horrible, catastrophic consequences.
Bob Zadek: You said, “flatten the curve.” That was like something in my past. Remember the line, “no taxation without representation”? The goal was to flatten the curve in hospitalizations and ICU usage, and in deaths.
Leaders were frightened that as a purely practical matter, we were going to simply run out of hospital beds. The panic instinct was that as the curve creeps up, let us flatten the curve. Let us not eliminate the virus, but contain the spread, tough it out, and not run out of hospital beds.
This reason quickly disappeared, and instead the lockdown became the tool to cure the virus — to eliminate the virus. How utterly absurd. That will never happen. I thought of the war on terror. I said to myself, “how will we ever declare victory? Do we have to wait until we can say, today, the last terrorist on earth just died? We’ve won.”
How will we declare that the war on the virus has ended, so that the emergency measures we have adopted will then be rescinded? Will they ever be rescinded? The decision to flatten the curve was temporary and was done through the emergency powers, which most levels of government bestow upon the executive.
I’ve paid a lot of attention to emergency powers. Emergency powers, federal state or local, are aberrations. They are extraordinary measures bestowed upon the executive until the legislature can take control because the source of all laws is the legislature, not the executive. Here, however, legislators never met, never even deliberated. No decisions were ever made from March until today by the legislature. Isn’t this a gross misuse of our core system of division of powers?
Jon Miltimore: Absolutely. Some governors have been slapped down, right? The courts have forced them in some cases to work with legislators to get approval. Now, that’s not everywhere, but at least you’ve seen in some places courts have blasted governors who rule things like a little dictator. The government comes in and they assume all these powers during an emergency, and afterwards, they don’t give all those back. Today’s vaccine day, the day that coronavirus goes away, and I think we both know that’s not going to happen.
A vaccine isn’t suddenly going to make all these things go away. Hopefully, lockdowns are going to be a thing of the past. Although I’m not convinced of that either. A lot of this power is not going to be given back. They will use this to keep their influence in a lot of spaces.
On the bright side, I think that this has been a wake up call for Americans. I think a lot of Americans are realizing for the first time that that government is actually an evil, a necessary evil. The late Walter Williams has so many great things on this point. He wrote that we need to remember that that government is a necessary evil that is far more capable of ruining our world in our lives than of making it a better place. This virus has reminded Americans of that.
The Intended and Unintended Consequences of the Shutdown
Bob Zadek: The lockdown did not accomplish what it was supposed to accomplish while it did accomplish lots of adverse consequences that nobody anticipated. The fact that nobody anticipated it means that the fault lies clearly in government. When the government exercises draconian powers, that harms many more people than a wrong decision made by any other organization. So summarize for us what the lockdown didn’t do that it was supposed to do, and what it did do that it wasn’t supposed to do?
Jon Miltimore: The assumption is that by shutting down businesses, we’re going to be slowing this virus down. These measures might be painful, but they are there for a greater good, they’re achieving something. The problem with that is that the more you look at the data, the lockdowns are not doing that. We have a lot of good data on this. There are three studies published recently.
One was published in The Lancet in July. The Lancet is one of the oldest medical journals in the world. It goes back to 1823. Researchers say there is no correlation between lockdown stringency and lower mortality rates for COVID.
A few months later there was another European medical journal that found the same thing. They saw correlation in some things, in life expectancy, whether or not someone smoked, demographics, geography, etc. They found no correlation between whether or not countries had a lockdown in place, or how strict it was and lower mortality rates.
The University of Tel Aviv came out with another study just a month before that. They measured cell phone data, they crunched a lot of data, they looked into that, and said “we can’t find any correlation at all.”
We don’t close down an economy completely. Certain businesses get closed down. Basically, the businesses that have the least political power. I mentioned the mall earlier. I live up in the Twin Cities. The Mall of America is still open up here. Lots of other things are closed. The local restaurants, gyms, and schools are closed. The hardware store up by my house is closed. The Mall of America is still open.
The local restaurants, gyms, and schools are closed. The hardware store up by my house is closed. The Mall of America is still open.
I shared pictures recently on Twitter. It’s packed. When we look at lockdowns, we should not assume that they’re achieving this goal of slowing the spread. The data says they do not.
The second half of your question is about the consequences of lockdowns. Nobody denies those. And in fact, you know, Melinda Gates, Bill’s wife said we should have thought through the economic ramifications of these a little bit more. As far as the unintended consequences go, it’s a long, long list, and it’s a very sad one.
The World Bank has researched out this as 150 million people are going to slip into extreme poverty by the end of the year. 150 million people. We don’t feel the pain as much. In 2020 Americans are suffering from a lot of depression. Social isolation is very bad for human beings. Suicide rates look very troubling. We have all these damaging effects.
Our children are suffering from depression in ways that we have never seen before. So there are a lot of effects, and a lot of these we won’t see for a decade. People had to forego surgeries or cancer screenings during this. Rates of alcoholism and drug use are already surging. People that have poured their life and hearts and souls into businesses that are suddenly gone. Was all that in vain?
Bob Zadek: When I hear you speak, I truly feel intense pain and discouragement at the failure of government. What are the stark governmental structural lessons we can learn from this? A lot of power was transferred to mayors and governors. We have chief executives, mayors and governors. There is no question that politicians are number one in the most reviled and despised occupations in the country. That is objective data.
What do we expect of a governor or mayor? We don’t expect them to be all knowing. We don’t expect them to be an epidemiologist. We don’t expect them to be economists. We do, however, expect them to use their power wisely after collecting objective information. In other words, we expect them to follow science. That’s what we expect. That’s the only task. It’s kind of an easy job. You consult with experts.
Think of Washington DC. The President has a cabinet of people who have access to a lot of very technical information. They all supply their specific technical information and the President or the governor or the mayor collects the information and makes a decision.
What really happened here is they started with the decision they wanted, then they dragged out some epidemiologist, put them in front of a camera in order to justify their decision, and then say, “I am doing what science tells me.”
The Hypocrisy of Following “The Science”
What science and what scientist? Did even one mayor or governor drag in front of a camera an economist? No. Was there any indication that any elected official ever brought in front of the camera or relied upon the wisdom of economists? If not, what could have been different public policy had economists been consulted?
Jon Miltimore: To my knowledge, I can’t remember anyone standing with an economist and discussing what might be the fallout from some of these things. Economists are seen to represent evil markets or money or things like this. Even the visual of having one there was probably undesirable. You are right that politicians are not all knowing, even though people assume they are.
If you really want to understand what is happening with this pandemic, and what happened in 2020, just go to Wikipedia and read a little bit on public choice theory. This is the idea that politicians are like everyone else. They act and make decisions on self interest. They are going to make decisions to cover themselves. If someone died and ended up on the local news, the politician would have been blamed. So they shut everything down to cover themselves.
We’re focusing just on what’s happening with the virus. We’re not paying a lot of attention to the businesses being shuttered. We’re not paying attention to the World Bank study that shows how drastically this is impacting the global economy and poverty around a lot of parts of the world.
We’re not too worried about those workers that the restaurant worker who’s suddenly out of work whose can’t pay his rent or his utility bill. All of that is unseen. What we’re seeing is we have the ticker of the fatality case numbers and fatalities of COVID. We want to blame someone, and politicians aren’t stupid, they know that they’re going to get blamed. So the safest thing they can do is take a lot of these restrictive measures even if they’re not effective.
They give the appearance that the governor is in control. We see people want a tough stance against it. For a politician, it might not be effective but it is probably the smart thing to do, at least in the short term. The Governor of South Dakota took a risk and did not shut things down, and she got hammered in the press.
Bob Zadek: All I’m asking for or have been asking for is for a politician to exercise their enormous power the way that everybody listening to this show exercises, their power in their private life when they make decisions. What will you do and who will you seek out if you need a surgery? You will consult with a doctor as to what the recommended course is, and you will then contemplate how long you will be out of work, how long the recovery will be, whether you can make it through economically, etc.
You will balance all of the competing considerations and you will make a decision. What governors and mayors have done, and I will always remember the infamous quote by Andrew Cuomo, Governor of New York, “Even one life is invaluable,” is they have said there is no expense too great to save even one life, which is the utmost hypocrisy one can possibly state.
We could never make that kind of have that kind of decision making in our private lives, we would perish. We would fail that in our life. Mayors and governors have never shown us the data. They have never told us how exactly they made the decision because it’s too embarrassing.
They have never told us how exactly they made the decision because it’s too embarrassing.
Show us the data. Once you say this, they will wilt, because they don’t have the data. That is the perfect antidote to bad decisions by governors and mayors.
A Look at Sweden: Proof Lockdowns Don’t Work
Bob Zadek: You have done a lot of studying and there has been a lot of press about Sweden. Sweden is a perfect example because it is one of several Scandinavian countries that all have similar size, similar demographics, and of course, similar weather. There are a lot of things the same. Sweden, unlike Finland and Norway, made a decision not to impose mandatory lockdowns and not to even impose mandatory mask wearing.
When Sweden appeared to many to have failed in that decision, those people who are pro-lockdown were looking at Sweden as proof that lockdowns work. Share with us the results of your analysis that you reviewed regarding Sweden.
Jon Miltimore: Sweden is very interesting. They did not lockdown. If you look at Sweden it was very similar to their other Nordic neighbors. We forget that with lockdowns, all they are trying to do is force people to social distance. Sweden from the beginning didn’t force the issue. They took a more laissez faire approach. They kind of became the world target like Kristi Noem was in South Dakota, they became the cautionary tale of the pandemic.
Sweden’s numbers weren’t great but they weren’t horrible either. People see with Sweden what they want to see. They’re about 25th in the world in mortality rates. They’re better than a lot of European countries that did lock down. They are better than Belgium. Better than France, the UK. They’re better than Spain and Italy. All those countries had these lockdowns that were very stringent. They had higher mortality rates than Sweden.
Sweden, if you compare it to its Nordic neighbors, is much higher. But you can measure the stringency of all these lockdowns by country. Finland and Norway, who are compared to Sweden, have actually had fewer government restrictions than Sweden. Even though Finland and Norway briefly locked down, they have had the least restrictive policies in the world since June and they have a lower mortality rate than Sweden. Sweden is actually locking down more than Finland and Norway right now. I think it is largely from political pressure.
They have been badgered for months and months on this. Their numbers are actually low if you compare it to the cases in Europe. In short, I think the Sweden case matters because if you look at what people were predicting would happen in Sweden, 100,000 people dead and so on, that never happened. They lost 6,500, maybe 7,000. So the earlier predictions were garbage. For most people this virus is going to be a bad flu. The draconian steps being used to contain it are doing a huge amount of harm.
A Post-Covid Libertarian Golden Age?
Bob Zadek: This is maybe the clearest example of how a libertarian approach to governance would have produced infinitely and measurably better results. The lockdown was done under the idea that we are incapable of making personal behavioral decisions that are best for us. Therefore, one who is equally incompetent, a governor or a mayor, they are somehow more well suited to decide we are not.
This lockdown was not to protect the public from me, it was to protect me from myself. It was done with utter disregard to the negative consequences, which Jon has pointed out. This will show how incompetent government is at making our personal decisions for us.
Jon referred to Melinda Gates. Melinda Gates gave a long form interview to the New York Times. She and the Gates Foundation were very strong proponents of the lockdown on a worldwide basis. I’m going to read through the one-sentence quote because Jon referred to it and it is so telling. She said, “What did surprise us is we hadn’t really thought through the economic impacts.”
She said, “What did surprise us is we hadn’t really thought through the economic impacts.”
Oh my God. Hadn’t thought through the economic impacts of a total lockdown and the loss of small business in America? We haven’t thought it through?!?
That’s because she didn’t want to know. The information was available. Just imagine. That comment could have been said by any governor, any mayor, and any county executive, because it was true for all of them. There’s a subject COVID-related, that is just hitting the news now. The trucks with the vaccinations are rolling out now, as we speak. They’re hitting the streets, and they’re going to their destinations in the states. Now comes the next battle. Who gets the vaccination first? The federal government is paying for the vaccination. The states are free to decide who gets it and in what order.
The state’s seem to be deciding that healthcare workers get it first. I’m kind of surprised, I would have thought it would have been members of the assembly of the senate and the executive branch who got it first. But maybe that’s going to happen and we won’t know about it.
The Airline Workers Union is claiming to be essential to the economy, because it is travel. They want to be in the first tranche. So now the battle becomes who gets the virus first? You watch the battle.
So my question for Jon, as a libertarian, Jon, if you were the vaccination Tsar, how would you decide who in your state gets the virus first?
Jon Miltimore: I haven’t thought a whole lot of the vaccine. I would say first, you do not have to take it if you do not want to. But I’m kind of thinking about the people that are most at risk of dying. The people that have preconditions, the people that might be my age demographic, or this is a very nasty and deadly virus. We know young people are hardly at risk for this. So I would look at the people most at risk and try to save the most lives.
Bob Zadek : I’ve given it a bit of thought. This is just the kind of fun intellectual exercise that I found myself doing, as I was starting to read about the system states will adopt.
You give it to the 20 somethings and 30 somethings and teenagers. Why? Because they are asymptomatic. They were the spreaders. They were the ones who were spreading the disease, because they were asymptomatic and nobody knew they had it. They also were going to work and they were socializing the most. The reason I would give it to them is because that would fire up the economy the fastest. They would be the spenders, they would be the workers, and therefore, the economy would take off much faster. There would be a powerful economic bang for the buck by giving them the vaccination first.
Jon Miltimore: I read that asymptomatic spread almost never happens. I’d want to know the answer to that question better.
Bob Zadek: Jon, we are running out of time, but tell people how to follow your writing?
Jon Miltimore: Check out our Fee.org. and follow me I’m on Twitter, @Miltimore79 is my handle.
Originally published at http://bobzadek.com on December 11, 2020.
Links:
- Jon Miltimore | Foundation for Economic Education
- Twitter: @Miltimore79
- 3 Studies That Show Lockdowns Are Ineffective at Slowing COVID-19 — Foundation for Economic Education Dec. 9, By Jon Miltimore, FEE.org
- Gavin Newsom Apologizes for Breaking His Own COVID Rules. Other Californians Went to Jail Nov. 18, By Jon Miltimore, FEE.org
Related Shows:
- Unprepared: Government Failure at the CDC/FDA with Alex Tabarrok
- Big government can’t save us from coronavirus with Jeffrey Tucker, February 2020
- How to Stay Sane as a Libertarian on Lockdown, with Jacob Sullum, March 30, 2020
- The Single Most Common Economic Fallacy in COVID-19 Reporting, with Don Boudreaux, April 5, 2020
