{"id":256489,"date":"2023-05-07T20:59:02","date_gmt":"2023-05-07T18:59:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=256489"},"modified":"2023-05-07T20:59:12","modified_gmt":"2023-05-07T18:59:12","slug":"dear-washington-post-editorial-board-the-experts-were-the-crisis-in-2020","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=256489","title":{"rendered":"Dear Washington Post Editorial Board, the Experts Were the Crisis In 2020"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From Real Clear Markets<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By\u00a0John Tamny<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
FILE – Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, arrives to speak about the coronavirus in the James Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House, April 22, 2020, in Washington. Fauci steps down from a five-decade career in public service at the end of the month, one shaped by the HIV pandemic early on and the COVID-19 pandemic at the end. (AP Photo\/Alex Brandon, File)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

“On the field of war what is at stake is the thing that matters most to any man – the saving of his own skin.\u201d <\/em>Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace<\/em>, p. 889<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The quote from Tolstoy\u2019s\u00a0War and Peace<\/em>\u00a0is a useful way to begin addressing the\u00a0Washington Post<\/em>\u00a0editorial board\u2019s confident assertion that \u201c\u2019A collective national incompetence in government\u2019\u201d was at the root of the U.S.\u2019s alleged failure vis-\u00e0-vis the coronavirus in 2020. According to the\u00a0Post<\/em>\u00a0quoting from a recently released report (\u201cLessons from the Covid War\u201d), \u201cThe United States started out \u2018with more capabilities than any other country in the world,\u2019 but \u201cit ended up with 1 million dead.\u201d Were he still around, one guesses Tolstoy would mock the conceit of the\u00a0Post\u2019s<\/em>\u00a0editorialists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s the case because \u201cthe thing that matters most to any man\u201d is \u201cthe saving of his own skin.\u201d That this needs to even be said speaks to how wrongheaded the\u00a0Post\u2019s<\/em>\u00a0editorial board\u2019s approach to the virus was, and still is. It implies we have dead because government didn\u2019t act properly, as though free people eager to live were unequal to a virus that the right kind of collective governmental action was more than equal to. Ok, but what was government going to do? Better yet, what if the virus had struck in 2015 when\u00a0Barack Obama<\/em>\u00a0was still in the White House. What would\u00a0he<\/em>\u00a0have done? Would he have instructed a virus that was spreading faster than the flu to take a \u201ctime out\u201d?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The simple truth missed by the Post<\/em> is that as humans we\u2019re wired to preserve ourselves. On the matter of life and the presumption of death, government is excess. Whatever solution Obama might have come up with, or whatever Donald Trump did come up with, or (try not to laugh) whatever Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer would have done if the virus had revealed itself in 2021 would have been vastly unequal to the solutions crafted by free people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Deep down the\u00a0Post\u2019s<\/em>\u00a0editorialists must know the above is true. Indeed, it\u2019s not that the Soviet Union lacked experts, or that Cuba lacks experts now. The problem was and is that the remarkable knowledge of very few very smart people will never measure up to the collective knowledge of the citizenry. That\u2019s why communism failed so impressively in the Soviet Union, and it\u2019s why it fails in Cuba. Translated for those who need it, the people are the market and markets work. As I make plain in my 2021 book\u00a0When Politicians Panicked<\/a>,\u00a0<\/em>the problem was experts and politicians substituting their limited knowledge for that of the people.\u00a0That was the crisis<\/em>. Not so, according to the\u00a0Post<\/em>\u00a0and the report they cite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Supposedly the \u201cleaders of the United States could not apply their country\u2019s vast assets effectively enough\u201d such that \u201c1 million died.\u201d Wrong. Over and over again. To see why, imagine if 10 million Americans had died in March of 2020. Can the\u00a0Post<\/em>\u00a0editorial board think of what government might have done that would have somehow improved on a feverish individual desire to survive against long odds? The simple truth glossed over by the\u00a0Post<\/em>\u00a0is that the more threatening a virus is (and the\u00a0Post<\/em>\u00a0seems to view what most didn\u2019t know they were infected with as wildly threatening), the more superfluous government action is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Really, who reading this ever needs to be forced to avoid behavior that might result in sickness, or even death? And if the reply to this question is that some people\u00a0DO<\/em>\u00a0need to be forced, you\u2019re making the best case of all for unfettered freedom. Think about it. Those who reject expert opinion are the most crucial \u201ccontrol group\u201d as a virus spreads. By going against the grain, we learn from their freely arrived at actions if the virus is as lethal as presumed, or not, how it spreads, how to perhaps avoid its spread, and all manner of other important bits of information suppressed by one-size-fits-all national solutions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It cannot be stressed enough that free people crucially produce information. Instead of allowing them to produce it in abundance in 2020, the response arrived at by Democrats and<\/em> Republicans was to lock people in their homes, thus blinding a nation \u201cwith more capabilities than any other country\u201d to the best approaches to a spreading virus. Please keep all of this in mind with the report\u2019s assertion that the \u201cmost important and fundamental misjudgment\u201d about the virus was how it spread. You think? Of course, the muscular assertion ignores yet again that if knowing how a virus spreads is of utmost importance, the only credible answer is freedom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the matter of the Trump administration, the Post<\/em> supports the report\u2019s conclusion that \u201cThe administration abdicated its wartime responsibilities to lead\u201d only to leave the coronavirus battle to \u201cstates and localities.\u201d If only. Back to reality, President Trump signed into law a $2.9 trillion bill that subsidized shutdowns across the country, thus locking people in their homes far longer than would have otherwise happened, and at the expense of untold amounts of economic output. Consider the latter in light of the statement of the obvious that all advances in medicine have always been born of matching doctors and scientists with the abundant fruits of wealth creation. In 2020, rather than encourage the very wealth creation that has long been the biggest foe of death and disease (by far), panicky politicians quite literally chose economic contraction as a virus mitigation strategy. Historians will marvel at the abject stupidity of the U.S. political class, but not the Post\u2019s<\/em> editorialists or the authors of a report that the editorialists remarkably find insightful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rather than acknowledge the obvious about government and experts as the crisis, the Post<\/em> editorialists and the experts they kneel before bemoaned a national abdication of \u201cwartime responsibilities.” One gets the feeling Tolstoy would chuckle yet again. In his words, “The course of a battle is affected by an infinite number of freely operating forces (there being no greater freedom of operation than on a battlefield, where life and death are at stake), and this course can never be known in advance; nor does it ever correspond with the direction of any one particular force.” In short, on matters of life and death government control is wretched, crisis-inducing excess.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

John Tamny is editor of RealClearMarkets, Vice President at FreedomWorks, a senior fellow at the Market Institute<\/a>, and a senior economic adviser to Applied Finance Advisors (www.appliedfinance.com)<\/a>. His latest book is The Money Confusion: How Illiteracy Ab<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“On the field of war what is at stake is the thing that matters most to any man – the saving of his own skin.\u201d\u00a0Leo Tolstoy,\u00a0War and Peace, p. 889<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":121246920,"featured_media":256496,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","_crdt_document":"","advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[691819393,691819395,691819394],"class_list":{"0":"post-256489","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","6":"hentry","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"tag-coronavirus","9":"tag-coxid-19","10":"tag-lockdown","12":"fallback-thumbnail"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/00drfauci.jpg?fit=2000%2C1300&ssl=1","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paxLW1-14IV","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":208001,"url":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=208001","url_meta":{"origin":256489,"position":0},"title":"Bad citizen China hid and spread four pandemics","author":"uwe.roland.gross","date":"10\/07\/2022","format":false,"excerpt":"We wonder is the West so addicted to cheap, slave made goods they will accept deceit, bad practice, and bioweapons? 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