During the last year I have been convinced that the media obsession with COVID-19 and governmental attempts to mitigate it by lockdowns have been driven by hysteria and fear of death which, as a Christian, I reject as unreasonable and damaging. It has been encouraging to have my instincts confirmed by John Tamny who has just published a book which should be read by all city, county, state and federal officials. WHEN POLITICANS PANICKED: The New Coronavirus, Expert Opinion and a Tragic Lapse of Reason reviews the events and the historical context that has caused the economic damage that has affected the whole world.

He quotes New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo who feared overreaction and the worry about unnecessarily severe limits on movements and civil liberties that politicians would push for travel bans, overbroad quarantines or other measures that might not be supported by the science. The book’s argument is that even if the virus was lethal (which it is not if you are under 65, and in reasonably good health), there was no need for forced lockdowns of any kind. People do not need laws to protect their health. They will take whatever measures they need on their own. Instead politicians fought potential illness and death with unemployment, bankruptcy and mass desperation through a forced contraction of the economy. They would not allow individuals and businesses to work and produce.

He argues that there was never in 2020 an economic crisis born of a spreading virus; rather a spreading virus proved oxygen for politicians on all levels to show that they could act and keep their constituents safe. Having prevented ordinary people from working and created unemployment for the poorest they then piled on national debt to compensate for their actions. Unnerved by something they didn’t understand, they substituted their extraordinarily limited knowledge for that of the marketplace on the way to putting tens of millions out of work in the U.S. alone. Having engineered an economic contraction that wiped out the livelihoods of tens of millions, those same politicians then doubled down as they extracted trillions of dollars from the private economy in a panicked effort to throw money indiscriminately at a problem of their own making.

This then affected the whole world. In 2019 millions of Indians, Filipinos, Mexicans and others from developing countries working overseas sent a record $554 billion back to their home countries. The lockdowns put tens of millions out of work around the world. The result was greatly reduced remittances. It is believed that 135 million human beings starved because of the lockdowns supposedly to save lives from COVID. Arif Husain, chief economist of the United Nations’ World Food Program projected in April 2020 that 285 million people could be pushed to the brink of starvation by the end of 2020. Those with the least were hit the hardest. This was the consequence of an upper middle class elite (and employees with salaries paid by taxpayers) that was making decisions for everyone and for whom the lockdowns were a mere inconvenience at worst and a vacation at best.

“For the longest time chin-scratching intellectuals have searched for signs of ‘decadence’ in the United States. The view here is that the U.S. happened upon it in the spring of 2020 when, in response to a virus, well-to-do politicians with access to trillions decided to take a months-long vacation from reality…Proper history will indicate that what took place in 2020 was a global debacle – a human rights tragedy of remarkable scale. When politicians panicked, those with the least suffered in unimaginable ways. Consider the unseen globally. What the U.S. does matters…. The speculation from your author is that a brave face from the U.S. would have given politicians around the world the necessary cover to avoid economy-wrecking lockdowns…. What makes it all the worse is that the suffering was so unnecessary. If people had just been allowed to adapt, a global contraction could have been avoided. If anyone doubts this, they need only consider yet again the businesses and sectors that were ‘allowed’ to remain open. They adjusted and did just fine….What would churches, sports, schools, hospitals, businesses and people have done, and how would they have innovated if they’d been left alone to work and live around the virus? …The view here is that the reaction of politicians to the coronavirus amounted to the biggest twenty-first century crime against humanity….The biggest enemy of life – by far– is poverty. Let’s never again fight disease with the taking of freedom and wealth so essential to knowledge, prosperity, and by extension, life.”