Lockdowns provided a fantastic pretext for governments all over the world to do to their citizens what they wanted to do anyway, which is to restrict human rights and control every movement of the people. This time they could do it in the name of public health, and with the blessing of science.
SHARE | PRINT | EMAIL“Endemicity” is not a word that rolls off the vernacular tongue. Still, its new prominence in the halls of governments around the world is a huge ray of hope. It means that governments have at long last begun to regard the pathogen as potentially a manageable part …
The Astonishing Failure of Government Virus Control Read More »
We need desperately to rethink the panicked ideology that consumed the nation last year and still consumes the world today. Liberty and health go together. These plans to eradicate the next germ to come along eradicate instead everything we love about life, namely its liberty and our rights to choose.
A system that would severely damage human psychological health and thus, morality would be one that dramatically uproots every freedom that people had previously taken for granted. The phrase “unleash hell” comes to mind; that is literally what lockdowns did to this country. We see it in surveys of mental health and it manifests itself in crime and the general collapse of public morals.
The biggest problem was an intellectual failing, and it was one shared by media elites and high-end intellectuals. They had not come to terms with the core truth that pathogens are part of the world around us and always have been. New viruses come along and their trajectory follows certain patterns. In humanity’s delicate dance with them, we need intelligence, rationality, and clarity in order to avoid the illusion of control – none of which are strengths of government.
Not only economists but also medical professionals and especially politicians need to step up and admit where they were wrong and work to make sure nothing like this is repeated again. If it does happen again, it should not happen with the blessing of economists, even if they have high-end positions at Ivy League universities.
In England in the 14th century, when the marauding Flagellants came to town, good members of the community found these people amusing and rather ridiculous, and otherwise they went about their lives, having fun and building a better and more prosperous society.
Brownstone Institute is a 501(c)(3) Nonprofit registered in the US under EIN: 87-1368060
BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE
2028 E BEN WHITE BLVD, #240-3088
AUSTIN, TX 78741
+1-469-842-8976
—
WEST HARTFORD, CT
Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
For reprints, please set the canonical link back to the original Brownstone article
en
de
da
sv
pl
pt
es
it
nl
fr
ro
iw
ja
ru
hy
hi
ar
sw
cn
