Category: Harsh But True

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“I believe in freedom and a level playing field of competition. If you want to change that playing field to your advantage, you have basically given me license–through your example–to do what I need to do. Because when I come back at you, I’m going to destroy your side of the playing field.”
– Marvin Heemeyer

Once again, experience is the best teacher, and the best experience is someone else’s.

Once Again, The Israel-Hamas War Shows the Futility of Gun Control

Last year, I wrote an article exploring some practical lessons from the initial attack on Israel from the Gaza strip. The biggest thing was that, as usual, a country had slid into anti-gun complacency. Everyone thought that it was somebody else’s job to protect people, so targets of all kinds were left vulnerable.

But, this time, the tables have turned. An Israeli operation at a hospital in the West Bank managed to drive the point home yet again. Instead of Hamas proving that gun control is worthless, Israel waltzed right into a hospital and proved it again.

I don’t bring this raid up because I want to comment on whether it was wrong or right to do this. Some people are saying they violated international law. Others are saying this was just a police action within their own borders to take out a threat that was using the hospital as a human shield. Everyone is entitled to either of those opinions or any other.

Instead, I want to take a look at the security situation in that hospital and compare it to most any hospital in the United States. Are there metal detectors at the doors? No. Are there armed guards who would stop people from simply walking right in with a rifle? Nope. Are there police there? Also, a big no in most places. The only thing stopping people from simply walking right in and doing whatever they want with a rifle is them choosing not to.

Sure, in many places, hospitals are off-limits to guns by some legal means or other. In this case, there may be some international agreement or something prohibiting soldiers from going in. In the case of U.S. hospitals, it’s often a sign that any private property owner can post prohibiting guns. In some jurisdictions, there’s a law on the books specifically banning guns from all hospitals.

But, do those signs have some magical quality that zaps guns into oblivion as the person carrying them crosses the threshold? Definitely not. The only thing that can stop people from hiding a rifle under a coat or in a violin case is someone who both physically checks everyone for guns and has the means to stop people should they reveal a gun and use it. Clearly this hospital (like almost all others) doesn’t have either of those things.

At the end of the day, a mixture of people’s goodness and people prepared to deal with those devoid of goodness is what keeps people safe. There are very few people who would enter a hospital with a gun and the intent to harm people. The rest of us either don’t carry a gun in or don’t do anything evil with it. For the rare person who isn’t good, there needs to be a good person (or multiple good people) ready to step in and stop bad things from happening.

In this particular hospital, the opposite was true. Instead of having good guys with guns, they were hiding bad people with guns. The Israelis, like this or not, went in there and took care of the problem before these guys could hurt any more innocent people.

Dr. Eli David
Dear Palestinians,

Two decades ago Israel withdrew from Gaza, and gave you full autonomy on every inch of it. Tens of billions of dollars of international aid money were given to you to build a prosperous future.

You built terror tunnels and rockets instead. You continued educating your children to become murderers. You cheered as you slaughtered 1,200 Israelis. You celebrated as hundreds were kidnapped.

You proved to the world what you are capable of. You showed how a “Palestinian state” would look like.

You don’t deserve a state. You don’t deserve autonomy. When you pursue and glorify misery and bloodshed, that’s the only thing you’ll have.

You, and you alone are responsible for your suffering.

The Likely Lab Leak and the Covid Cassandra.

I thought I was done with writing about Covid-19. But Covid-19 isn’t done with me—or with any of us.

I’m writing this precisely four years after Chinese health officials first announced the emergence of a mysterious new form of pneumonia in the city of Wuhan. “No obvious human-to-human transmission has been observed,” the officials added in that December 30, 2019, release. (Already, the Chinese were lying.) Today, Covid cases are ticking up for the umpteenth time. And documents keep coming to light that expose how American officials and scientists similarly suppressed unsettling facts about the pandemic’s origins.

While the death rate from each new wave of Covid keeps dropping, the disturbing revelations about our public health leaders keep getting worse. In December 2023, a new disclosure revealed how leading U.S. virus experts lobbied to conduct dangerous gain-of-function research at the substandard Wuhan Institute of Virology laboratory. The latest leak provides yet more evidence that the pandemic likely emerged from a lab experiment gone awry, and that U.S. scientists actively covered up their possible role in that world-historical catastrophe.

After both the 1986 Challenger explosion and the 9/11 attacks, bipartisan commissions were convened to investigate the disasters. Covid has killed more than a million Americans and has cost our economy at least $14 trillion. And yet we see no great urgency to investigate the pandemic’s murky origins or prevent a recurrence. Republicans in Congress continue to hold productive hearings. But, according to the New York Times, the Biden administration is “privately resisting” pressure to create a 9/11-style commission on the pandemic. The press has largely moved on. And the public health officials most deeply involved in the debacle—including Anthony Fauci and his National Institutes of Health (NIH) colleague Francis Collins—continue to tap-dance around the truth, even after leaving their posts.

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Benjamin Franklin, on Monday, September 17, 1787, the last day of the Constitutional Convention.

“ I confess that there are several parts of this constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them: For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise.

It is therefore that the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment, and to pay more respect to the judgment of others. Most men indeed as well as most sects in Religion, think themselves in possession of all truth, and that wherever others differ from them it is so far error.

Steele, a Protestant, in a Dedication tells the Pope, that the only difference between our Churches in their opinions of the certainty of their doctrines is, the Church of Rome is infallible and the Church of England is never in the wrong. But though many private persons think almost as highly of their own infallibility as of that of their sect, few express it so naturally as a certain french lady, who in a dispute with her sister, said “I don’t know how it happens, Sister but I meet with no body but myself, that’s always in the right — Il n’y a que moi qui a toujours raison.”

In these sentiments, Sir, I agree to this Constitution, with all its faults, if they are such; because I think a General Government necessary for us, and there is no form of government, but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered; and believe further, that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic government, being incapable of any other. …..”

Spike Cohen:
Ben Franklin straight up warned us, at the Constitutional Convention, that this government will end in despotism if we tolerate it……. And here we are.

State Dept. Reveals Horrific Reason Female Hostages Haven’t Been Released by Hamas

The State Department revealed Monday the reason why Hamas continues to hold hostages  underground is the Gaza Strip. More specifically, why they are refusing to release female hostages.

According to State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller, the Iranian backed terrorist organization isn’t releasing additional female hostages, who were violently taken from their homes and a music festival in Israel on October 7, because they know and have experienced too much while in captivity. In other words, they don’t want them speaking out about what has been done to them.

“Right now Hamas is refusing to release civilian women who should have been part of the agreement and it is that refusal by Hamas that has caused the end of the hostage agreement and therefore an end to the pause in hostilities,” White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan added during the daily press briefing, saying the administration is still working to get Americans out. “Israel is insisting on the release of those women.”

The revelation comes 24 hours after Democratic Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal downplayed the atrocities during an interview with CNN.

Hamas is still holding a number of Americans hostage. The White House claims they are still working to get them home.

Anti-Semitism and the Quran

Many Americans have been led to believe the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a conflict over land when it is a religious conflict rooted in Quranic doctrine; a doctrine consumed with Jew hatred throughout its numerous passages.

The formation of Islam began with Mohammad in 610 A.D. in the city of Mecca where he attempted to convince the local pagan population he was sent by God to be his messenger.  During his time in Mecca his messages were relatively peaceful as demonstrated in the following verses:

“You cannot guide those you would like to but God guides those He wills.  He has the best knowledge of the guided.” (Quran/28:56); “God does not forbid you from being good to those who have not fought you in the religion or driven you from your homes, or from being just towards them.  God loves those who are just.” (Surat al-Mumtahana,8);

Nevertheless, his messages were received with resentment by a population of idol worshippers.  He and a few of his followers were driven out of town and forced to flee to Medina where he gained a following with the aid of the three residing Jewish tribes (the Qurayzah) who falsely assumed their financial aid given to him would protect them from the fate meted out to others.

Mohammed’s attempts to mollify the Medina Jews resulted in a series of conciliatory passages that contradict the vast majority of Quranic references to Jews: “O children of Israel! call to mind My favor which I bestowed on you and that I made you excel the nations.” (Muslims try to explain away these through the Doctrine of Abrogation, which nullifies certain passages in the “perfect” Quran, something not required by either the Old or New Testaments.)

In fact, while in Medina, Mohammad and his followers were reported to have pillaged villages while raping and capturing the women to be used as sex slaves, and although the three Jewish tribes feared him, they continued to cling to their Judaism.  As a result, in 627, a mere five years after Muhammad arrived in Medina, he oversaw the beheading of approximately 900 Jewish men in the marketplace on trumped-up charges of conspiring with the enemy.  The captured Jewish women became sex slaves, and their children were taken into slavery.

Thus, it is worth noting, the refusal of Jews some 1400 years ago to accept Mohammad as a prophet has enshrined Islam with contempt and Jew hatred for all of eternity. The Quran stipulates that Jews were rebellious disbelievers to the teachings of Allah and that they sinned against him.  It can be found in the following passage:

“Those among the children of Israel who disbelieved were cursed.  That was because they disobeyed Allah and the Messengers and were transgressing beyond bounds.” Quran 5:78-82

Throughout the Quran Jews are depicted as inveterately evil and bent on destroying the wellbeing of all Muslims.

“They are the strongest of all people in enmity toward the Muslims” (5:82) “They fabricate things and falsely ascribe them to Allah” (2:79; 3:75, 3:181) “They disobey Allah and never observe his commands” (5:13) “Hiding the truth and misleading people” (3:78); “Staging rebellion against the prophets and rejecting their guidance” (2:55); “Giving preference to their own interests over the teachings of Muhammad” (2:87).

The most hostile passage can be found in the sayings of Mohammad referred to as the “Hadith.”  In Bukhari Volume 4 Book 52, Number 176 Allah’s Apostle said “You Muslims will fight the Jews till some of them hide behind stones. The stones will betray them saying ‘Oh Abdullah (slave of Allah)!  There is a Jew hiding behind me; so, kill him.”  This passage often cited by Jihadists in their quest to annihilate the Jews.

Christians too are negated for worshipping a false messiah, Jesus, “Quran (8:39) — “And fight with them until there is no more fitnah (disorder, unbelief) and religion is all for Allah.” But Jews are to be loathed and slaughtered.  They are referred to as apes and pigs, disbelievers, cowards, liars, and they are set up as a target who can run and hide but cannot avoid the sword of the Islamic warrior.

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BLUF
For the last couple of generations, we in the West have told ourselves that we have changed. We told ourselves that we are beyond violence. And we told ourselves that everyone else was too. But that was a lie.

Accept That Savagery Is the True Nature of the World – and Deal With It

If you want an indicator of how lost Western civilization has become, go to your kids’ school and check their rules on fighting. Most likely, you’ll find out if two kids get into a fight, both get suspended, regardless of whether one was a punk bully who started it and the other was simply defending himself or some little kid. This is a moral disaster, of course – violence in the defense of what is right is a moral obligation and a symbol of a greater rot within society. This is the kind of rule created by middle-aged, divorced cat women who can neither find nor satisfy a man and live in a tranquil bubble of affluent, frivolous safety and security created by their harder, worthier forbearers who understood the world’s true nature.

The true nature of the world is savagery.

The world’s true nature is that good is forever pitted against evil.

That has never changed. What happened over the last 70 years or so was an interregnum of peace in the West, created by violence against barbarians and facilitated by people willfully looking away from the butchery still continuing at the fringes of the map. The West managed to build a civilization that was – for the first time in history since perhaps the Pax Romana – generally internally peaceful. And the West convinced itself that this was normal.

But it was not normal. It was an anomaly, a glorious one, but an anomaly nonetheless. The world is not a peaceful place, and it never was, and it never will be. Despite the best efforts of the arrogant left, human nature has not changed. Human nature is vicious and cruel. Rousseau’s noble savage nonsense, which we are still dealing with today in the form of eager sophomores in Che t-shirts slobbering over Hamas psychopaths – is a giant fraud. Savages are not distinguished by their nobility. Their savagery distinguishes them. And we need to find the moral strength to do what is necessary to defeat them.

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The Day the Delusions Died 

A lot of people woke up on October 7 as progressives and went to bed that night feeling like conservatives. What changed?

When Hamas terrorists crossed over the border with Israel and murdered 1,400 innocent people, they destroyed families and entire communities. They also shattered long-held delusions in the West.

A friend of mine joked that she woke up on October 7 as a liberal and went to bed that evening as a 65-year-old conservative. But it wasn’t really a joke and she wasn’t the only one. What changed?

The best way to answer that question is with the help of Thomas Sowell, one of the most brilliant public intellectuals alive today. In 1987, Sowell published A Conflict of Visions. In this now-classic, he offers a simple and powerful explanation of why people disagree about politics. We disagree about politics, Sowell argues, because we disagree about human nature. We see the world through one of two competing visions, each of which tells a radically different story about human nature.

Those with “unconstrained vision” think that humans are malleable and can be perfected. They believe that social ills and evils can be overcome through collective action that encourages humans to behave better. To subscribers of this view, poverty, crime, inequality, and war are not inevitable. Rather, they are puzzles that can be solved. We need only to say the right things, enact the right policies, and spend enough money, and we will suffer these social ills no more. This worldview is the foundation of the progressive mindset.

By contrast, those who see the world through a “constrained vision” lens believe that human nature is a universal constant. No amount of social engineering can change the sober reality of human self-interest, or the fact that human empathy and social resources are necessarily scarce. People who see things this way believe that most political and social problems will never be “solved”; they can only be managed. This approach is the bedrock of the conservative worldview.

Hamas’s barbarism—and the explanations and celebrations throughout the West that followed their orgy of violence—have forced an overnight exodus from the “unconstrained” camp into the “constrained” one.

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It’s No Accident The Southern Border Is Collapsing, It’s Intentional.

A clip of comedian Louis C.K. on the Joe Rogan show has been circulating on X (formerly Twitter) this week in which he goes on and on about how opening up the southern border would be a good thing because Americans shouldn’t have such a high standard of living compared to the rest of the world, how poor people in other countries just want what Americans have, and how it’s not fair that we have so much. “It shouldn’t be so great here,” he says. So open the border and let them pour in.

It’s possible he’s joking, that it’s just a comedy bit he’s practicing. That’s what my friend Inez Stepman thinks. Get liberals to nod along in agreement and then expose the consequences of such an insane idea. You can judge for yourself:

I don’t think it comes off as a joke but as an almost perfect distillation of globalist liberalism. Louis C.K. cannot fathom why Americans should have a say about who comes into their country and who does not. He clearly has no real allegiance to his country or countrymen, and is actually embarrassed by their prosperity — and presumably his own as well.

There is nothing special about America, according to this view, and no reason the rest of the world should not enjoy her ill-gotten riches. Opening the border is the least we could do for the cause of justice.

Whether it’s a joke or not, the substance of what Louis C.K. articulates is the logical endpoint of leftist ideology. It’s what the mainstream left actually believes — and the Biden administration has been actively working to accomplish at the southern border.

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Growing Concern Vaccine Heart Damage in Adolescents May be Permanent.
Hong Kong study finds 58 percent of COVID-19 vaccine myocarditis confirmed by MRI not resolved at one year

Almost every day the news brings another story of a young person dying of cardiac arrest. It is a sickening realization that COVID-19 vaccine-induced myocarditis could leave a zone of scar in the heart, risking the chance of ventricular tachycardia, ventricular fibrillation, and cardiac arrest at any time. Recently Hulscher, et al. have conclusively shown by autopsy that COVID-19 vaccine-induced myocarditis can be fatal.

Now a Hong Kong study by Yu and colleagues have found that of young persons who had heart damage confirmed by MRI [magnetic resonance imaging] and who underwent a second scan one year later, 58 percent had residual abnormalities suggesting a scar could be forming in the heart muscle.

Forty adolescents, mean age of 15, mostly boys, were evaluated. It was notable that 73 percent had no cardiac symptoms, so without an evaluation, the parents would have had no idea their child was suffering heart damage from the COVID-19 vaccine. Approximately 18 percent of cases initially had reduced left ventricular ejection fraction indicating they were at risk for the development of heart failure.

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Study Shows Gun Laws Don’t Matter, Race Does

33 people were shot over the weekend in Chicago. Urban gangland violence like that is what real “mass shootings” look like and finally a Journal of the American Medical Association paper addressed the problem by shifting the blame to something it calls “structural racism”.

The JAMA paper, which was quickly picked up by CNN as “Structural Racism may Contribute to Mass Shootings” and by Bloomberg as “Mass Shootings Disproportionately Victimize Black Americans”, acknowledged what conservatives have been saying about gun violence.

“There was no discernible association noted in this study between gun laws and MSEs [mass shootings] with other studies showing similar findings,” it noted.

The issue wasn’t gun laws, it was race. “The study found that in areas with higher black populations, mass shootings are likelier to occur compared to communities with higher white populations,” CNN reported. “The findings disrupt the nation’s image of mass shootings, which has been shaped by tragedies like the Las Vegas festival shooting and Sandy Hook in which most of the victims were not black,” Bloomberg added.

Faced with an immovable statistical object and the unstoppable force of equity, the JAMA paper blames the whole thing on structural racism. The study correlates urban areas and neighborhoods with high concentrations of single-parent households” to mass shootings. It then demonstrates that “structural racism” must be at fault because of “the percentage of the population that is black.” Black people in the study are interchangeable with racism.

Such is the state of woke medical science which tries to fix racism with more racism. The study never comes up with any plausible explanation of how structural racism causes people to shoot each other. At one point it claims that “racial residential segregation practices are predictive of various types of shootings” in a country where segregation had been abolished since 1964.

The study’s definition of segregation is so senseless that it lists majority black cities like Detroit, a 77% black city, as being 73% segregated, and Baltimore, a 62% black city, as being 64% segregated. A city with a strong black majority and black leaders is racially segregated and its people are suffering from “structural racism”. That’s why there are so many mass shootings.

But if segregation is the issue then why does Atlanta, which had actual segregation, have only 18 mass shootings, while Chicago has 141? Southern cities show up as less segregated and less violent in the paper’s data. A history of segregation is clearly not the issue. This isn’t about the past, whether it’s the historical revisionism of the 1619 Project, or any other.

If segregation were the issue, crime would have been far higher during segregation than after it.

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Suspension of Disbelief
Experts and the Power of Self-Deception

Recently, a friend fretted about what she perceived to be the dismal state of the world, based on the pronouncements of “experts” but, anticipating my response, added, “But you tend to dismiss ‘experts.’” I said she misjudged my sentiments, and that:

“I don’t dismiss experts. I simply don’t worship them. I don’t wish to grant them authoritarian power. And, out of a sense of risk-aversion and a knowledge of history, I want them kept on short leashes. As I wrote sometime back, science is a fine expert witness and a bloody dangerous judge.”

Experts are ordinary human beings, with all the fallibilities that come with membership in our species. Like everyone else, experts sometimes suppress truth and disseminate falsehoods for self-preservation or personal gain. Sometimes, they do so in service to some larger cause. Experts, short on time or resources, may cut corners, publishing information they hope is correct, while knowing it may not be. In all these situations, the expert knows his or her information is or may be false.

More interesting, more likely, and more dangerous are those situations where the expert sincerely believes his or her falsehoods to be correct, owing to the lure of self-deception. Paul Simon’s “The Boxer” sings:

“I have squandered my resistance
For a pocketful of mumbles
Such are promises
All lies and jest
Still a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest”

I don’t “dismiss” experts but am wary of their tendency to squander their resistance, hearing what they wish to hear and disregarding the rest. Such is the sway that the still small voice of self-deception holds over all of us. And that voice is not muted by a doctorate or academic chair. In Duck Soup (1933), Chico Marx asks Margaret Dumont, “Who ya gonna believe? Me, or your own eyes?” I know enough history (and enough experts) to know that one’s own eyes are often at a distinct disadvantage versus a thing devoutly to be wished.

Self-deception can be conspiratorial, communal, or solitary and can be remarkably persistent. Self-deceived expertise is extraordinarily dangerous when issued blank-check authority by governmental or religious authorities. In Bastiat’s Window, “1,600 Years of Medical Hubris” explored the groupthink that ossified Western medicine between the 2nd and 19th centuries, plus the collectively reinforced misinformation that impeded the proper treatment of autism, ulcers, and prion-borne diseases in the 20th century. In “When Sterilization Was Dogma,”

Ted Balaker

and I discussed groupthink, eugenics, and contemporary challenges. “Gloomy Saints and Wandering Virtues” recounted how Alexander Graham Bell dispensed nonsense about the heritability of deafness—contradicted by the genetic histories of his mother and his wife.

To illustrate the powers of self-deception, I’ll offer three stories:

  1. Anna Anderson, who successfully impersonated Russia’s Grand Duchess Anastasia for over 60 years,
  2. Harry Houdini, who persuaded thousands of viewers that he could make an elephant vanish from an open stage, and
  3. Scottie Ferguson, the fictional detective in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, who blindly missed the true connection between two women with whom he was destructively in love.

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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.

Lockdowns: the Self-Inflicted Disaster: Governments’ use of the pandemic to claim sweeping new emergency powers has had destructive effects

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.

Even that small effect may be an overestimate, to judge from the other report, published in February by the Paragon Health Institute. The authors, all former economic advisers to the White House, are Joel Zinberg and Brian Blaise of the institute, Eric Sun of Stanford, and Casey Mulligan of the University of Chicago. They analyzed the rates of Covid mortality and of overall excess mortality (the number of deaths above normal from all causes) in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. They adjusted for the relative vulnerability of each state’s population by factoring in the age distribution (older people were more vulnerable) and the prevalence of obesity and diabetes (which increased the risk from Covid). Then they compared the mortality rates over the first two years of the pandemic with the stringency of each state’s policies (as measured on a widely used Oxford University index that tracked business and school closures, stay-at-home requirements, mandates for masks and vaccines, and other restrictions).

The researchers found no statistically significant effect from the restrictions. The mortality rates in states with stringent policies were not significantly different from those in less restrictive states. Two of the largest states, California and Florida, fared the same—their mortality rates both stood at the national average—despite California’s lengthy lockdowns and Florida’s early reopening. New York, with a mortality rate worse than average despite ranking first in the nation in the stringency of its policies, fared the same as the least restrictive state, South Dakota.

Meantime, the lockdowns did have other significant effects on health. Rates of smoking, drinking, and obesity increased. The number of excess deaths from non-Covid causes in the U.S. rose by nearly 100,000 annually due to extra deaths from stroke, heart attack, diabetes, obesity, drug overdoses, alcohol-induced causes, homicide, and traffic accidents. Many of these excess deaths, which occurred disproportionately among working-age adults, were presumably related to the lockdowns’ disruptions in people’s lives and in medical treatments. The delays in screening for heart disease and cancer will continue to have a deadly impact in the years ahead.

So will the economic and social consequences of the lockdowns, which showed up clearly in the Paragon Health Institute comparison of states’ performance. The researchers found that states with the more stringent pandemic restrictions had worse declines in economic output and higher rates of unemployment, and that children in those states lost more days of in-person schooling. These disruptions contributed to a substantial increase in domestic migration, the Paragon researchers found, as people escaped from the more restrictive states and moved to states with less stringent policies.

The lockdowns were the most radical experiment in the history of public health, implemented without evidence that they would work. (In fact, before Covid, officials at the Centers for Disease Control and other nations’ health agencies had specifically advised against lockdowns in their plans for dealing with a pandemic.) The experiment was promoted by computer modelers who projected that 2 million Americans would die by the end of the summer in 2020 unless governments mandated lockdowns, which they estimated would reduce mortality by 80 percent or more. Both estimates turned out to be absurdly wrong—and so was the modelers’ assumption that government mandates were the only way to change people’s behavior.

“Studies early in the pandemic assumed that without lockdowns everyone would be infected because people wouldn’t make any voluntary changes in their behavior,” says Herby, a coauthor of the IEA report. . “But in fact the voluntary social distancing and other changes in behavior had a huge impact, much larger than the lockdowns.” He points to Sweden, where elderly people drastically reduced their shopping and other activities outside the home without being ordered to do so. By avoiding lockdowns and school closures, Sweden fared as well or better than the rest of Europe in preventing Covid deaths while allowing younger people to go on with their lives. It also suffered less social and economic damage: while more people were dying from non-Covid causes in the U.S. and the rest of Europe, that rate of excess mortality declined in Sweden.

Swedes avoided lockdowns partly because of the wisdom of their public-health leaders, and partly because of a provision in the Swedish constitution guaranteeing freedom of movement to citizens. Constraining the power of government officials improved Sweden’s ability to cope with Covid. That lesson applies to other emergencies, too, according to Christian Bjørnskov, a Danish economist who has compared casualty rates in natural disasters around the world.

Bjørnskov and a German colleague, Stefan Voigt, have found that fewer people die from natural disasters in countries with laws that restrict the power of national leaders during an emergency. If leaders are unconstrained—if they can suspend people’s personal and economic liberties—then the disruptions hinder people’s voluntary efforts to deal with the disaster. After a hurricane, for instance, local officials and citizens will normally aid their stricken neighbors, but they’re less inclined to act if the national government takes charge by suspending property rights to commandeer boats, vehicles, and other local resources. “Civil society is more likely to help if the authorities are not allowed to run roughshod over private citizens,” Bjørnskov says. “It is also much more likely that the authorities will misuse their emergency powers for their own uses, diverting resources toward purposes that have nothing to do with the emergency. They increase spending and regulation, and it takes longer for the country to get back to normal.”

That was certainly the case during the pandemic, as politicians went on budget-busting binges that showered money on special interests and pet projects that had nothing to do with Covid. To reward teachers’ unions for their support, politicians kept schools closed long after it was obvious that they could be safely reopened. The inflationary effects of the spending have slowed the economic recovery from the pandemic, and the school closures have set children back so far that many will never catch up. One estimate suggests that the average American student will earn 6 percent less over the course of a lifetime because of learning loss during the pandemic.

Predictably, the officials responsible for the damage are ignoring these consequences and seeking even more power in the future. CDC officials are planning to be more aggressive in the next pandemic, and the World Health Organization wants countries to sign a new pandemic treaty giving the WHO the authority of international law to order lockdowns and other measures.

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.