The Bitter Fruits of America's Disintegration
The lunatics are in charge of the asylum, and have set it on fire.
Almost 250 years ago, a relatively small but determined band of revolutionaries overthrew British rule of the colonies that became known as the United States of America. The act of defying the Crown and establishing a new government was an open conspiracy, but it was nevertheless a conspiracy because it arose from “an agreement to perform together … [a] subversive act.” That conspiracy, of course, was the American Revolution.
Now, twelve score and six years since that conspiracy was announced to the world in the Declaration of Independence, the resulting polity — the United States of America — is approaching a crisis that is the result of another conspiracy, which I have described here.
What the conspirators seek is a secular theocracy, in which they are the high priests and theologians. If that reminds you of Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany, the USSR, Communist China, and similar regimes, that’s because it’s of the same ilk: leftism
Leftists have a common trait: wishful thinking. Thomas Sowell calls it the unconstrained vision; I call it the unrealistic vision. It’s also known as magical thinking, in which “ought” becomes “is” and the forces of nature and human nature can be held in abeyance by edict; for example:
California wildfires caused by misguided environmentalism.
The excremental wasteland that is San Francisco. (And Blue cities, generally, because of the encouragement of homelessness.)
The killing of small businesses, especially restaurants, by minimum wage laws.
The killing of jobs for people who need them the most, by ditto.
Bloated pension schemes for Blue-State (and city) employees, which are bankrupting those States (and cities) and penalizing their citizens who aren’t government employees.
The idea that men can become women and should be allowed to compete with women in athletic competitions because the men in question have endured some surgery and taken some drugs.
The idea that it doesn’t and shouldn’t matter to anyone that a self-identified “woman” uses women’s rest-rooms where real women and girls became prey for prying eyes and worse.
Mass murder on a Hitlerian-Stalinist scale in the name of a “woman’s right to choose”, when she made that choice (in almost every case) by engaging in consensual sex.
Disrespect for and attacks on the police and military personnel who keep the spoiled children of capitalism safe in their cosseted existences.
The under-representation of women and blacks in certain fields is due to rank discrimination, not genetic differences (but it’s all right if blacks dominate certain sports and women now far outnumber men on college campuses).
Peace can be had without preparedness for war.
Regulation doesn’t reduce the rate of economic growth and foster “crony capitalism”.
The cost of health care will go down while the number of mandates is increased.
Every “right” under the sun can be granted without cost (e.g.,
affirmative actionracial-hiring quotas, which penalize blameless whites; the Social Security Ponzi scheme, which burdens today’s workers and cuts into growth-inducing saving).
Closely related to magical thinking is the nirvana fallacy (hypothetical perfection always seems better than feasible reality), large doses of neurotic hysteria (e.g., the overpopulation fears of Paul Ehrlich, the AGW hoax of Al Gore et al.), and rampant adolescent rebelliousness (e.g., instant protests about everything, the post-election tantrum-riots of 2016).
But to say any of the foregoing about the left’s agenda, the assumptions and attitudes underlying it, the left’s strategic and tactical methods, or the psychological underpinnings of leftism, is to be “hateful”. (In my observation, nothing is more full of hate than a lefitst who has been contradicted or thwarted.) So, through the magic of psychological projection, those who dare speak the truth about leftism are called “haters”, “racists”, “fascists”, “Nazis”, and other things that apply to leftists themselves.
Labeling anti-leftists as evil “justifies” the left’s violent enforcement of its agenda. The violence takes many forms, from riots (as in the George Floyd “protests”), to suppression by force (e.g., Stalin’s war on the Cossacks), to genocide (e.g., the Holocaust), to overtly peaceful but coercive state action (e.g., forced unionization of American industry, the J6 committee’s Stalinesque “show trial”, suppression of religious liberty and freedom of association in the name of same-sex “marriage”, and the vast accumulation of economic regulations).
In a word: disintegration.
THE “GREATEST GENERATION” AND THE WASP ESTABLISHMENT SET THE STAGE FOR DISINTEGRATION
Every line of human endeavor reaches a peak, from which decline is sure to follow if the things that caused it to peak are mindlessly rejected for the sake of novelty (i.e., rejection of old norms just because they are old). This is nowhere more obvious than in the arts.
I have written elsewhere that 1963 (or thereabouts) was a “year zero” in American history. It was then that the post-World War II promise of social and economic progress, built on a foundation of unity (or as much of it as a heterogeneous nation is likely to muster), began to crumble.
At first, the “adults in the room” forgot their main duty: to be exemplars for the next generation.
As I wrote here,
the world in which we live … seems more and more to resemble the kind of world in which parents have failed in their duty to inculcate in their children the values of honesty, respect, and hard work….
I subscribe to the view that the rot set in after World War II….
The[] sudden emergence [in the 1960s of “campus rebels”] was due to the failure of too many members of the so-called Greatest Generation to inculcate in their children the values of honesty, respect, and hard work. How does one do that? By being clear about expectations and by setting limits on behavior — limits that are enforced swiftly, unequivocally, and sometimes with the palm of a hand. When children learn that they can “get away” with dishonesty, disrespect, and sloth, guess what? They become dishonest, disrespectful, and slothful. They give vent to their disrespect through whining, tantrum-like behavior, and even violence.
But the rot goes deeper than that. Wallace S. Moyle, writing in The New Criterion (“Facing the Music: On the Decline of the WASP Establishment”, September 2022), takes Averill Harriman as an exemplar of his class:
H]eir to an immense railroad fortune, a polo champion, and a Groton graduate, Harriman had been the first man in his class tapped for Yale’s Skull and Bones society…. Harriman … founded Brown Brothers Harriman, implemented Roosevelt’s National Industrial Recovery Act, and served as the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union. Later, he was elected governor of New York and advised Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter.
… E. Digby Baltzell, the preeminent exponent of the “Protestant Establishment” and the coiner of the term “wasp,” lamented in the early 1980s that the United States no longer boasted patricians with the moral authority to keep down the McCarthyite rabble, then newly ascendant, in Baltzell’s depressingly conventional opinion, in the figure of Ronald Reagan.
Harriman at the same time deplored Reagan as much as Baltzell did. In 1983, at the age of ninety-one, he traveled to Moscow just to reassure Communist Party General Secretary Yuri Andropov that not all Americans saw the Soviet Union as an “Evil Empire.” Before Reagan emerged, Harriman’s bête noire was Richard Nixon, whose success in exposing communists in the U.S. government was unforgiveable. Mercifully for their poor, quivering souls, neither Baltzell nor Harriman lived long enough to witness the rise of Donald Trump….
Exactly what Harriman and his brethren stood for politically is not easy to discern. Harriman’s politics shifted throughout his life. He voted for Harding in 1920. It was only at the urging of his fashionably engagée sister that he even entered the Roosevelt administration. Harriman went from Cold War hawk in 1946 and champion of George Kennan’s long telegram to dove in the aftermath of Vietnam. Unable to identify what principles wasp leaders stood for, their defenders frequently praise their dedication to what they call “service.”… [Harriman] sniffed at men who “didn’t do a damn thing.” “Service,” “giving back,” and “doing things”: these of course are polite euphemisms for exercising power. If power had to be wielded at all, America’s mid-twentieth-century Wise Men reasoned, it naturally ought to be in their hands.
Their upbringing made that an easy assumption. By the early twentieth century, the American upper class had constructed a cursus honorum as rigid as that faced by any Roman senator’s son….
The system was designed to produce custodians rather than leaders….
Having thrived in a system that rewarded conformity, the final generation of wasp leaders lacked what George H.W. Bush, the acknowledged last of their breed, called “the vision thing.”… When in the mid-1960s a guest expressed support for Vietnam protestors, Harriman denounced her as a traitor. Just a few years later, he was joining them….
From time to time, outsiders would plead with the Protestant Establishment to recover some moral fortitude. In God and Man at Yale, William F. Buckley Jr., a Catholic, warned that Yale was not only failing to uphold what Buckley called “individualism” (i.e., the free-enterprise system) and Christianity, but was also actively undermining them. For his trouble, Yale’s leaders denounced him as a reactionary bigot. McGeorge Bundy—yet another Bonesperson—called the book “dishonest in its use of facts, false in its theory, and a discredit to its author.” As a national security advisor in the Vietnam era, Bundy would go on to become literally the textbook example of policy failure. Later in life, he defended the spread of affirmative action….
[T]he wasps seemed to have erected institutions that uniquely selected for men who, as baseball scouts used to say, looked good in a uniform. Harriman may have earned middling grades and may not have been able to speak a single foreign language, but from adolescence on he looked the part of an ambassador. Harriman thus rose to the top of his Yale class. Thirty years later, he was negotiating with Stalin on behalf of the United States.
The 1960s generation is often blamed for contemporary woes. But it was the last generation of wasps that set in motion the forces that, as Buckley predicted, would lead the United States to ruin. Affirmative action, the tolerance of vagrancy (redubbed “homelessness” in the Lindsay era), the dishonoring of Christianity in public life, living constitutionalism in law, the ever-spreading blight of modern architecture, and the sacking of our cities by criminals: all of these features of the American regime were instituted by wasp patricians. America may have won the Cold War against communism, but within a generation it has fallen to a woke Marxian regime of its own making.
The wasp’s ancestors created the freest, most prosperous nation in history. By the time of the Protestant Establishment’s fading, its luminaries had left a nation ugly, depraved, and enthralled. They received a goodly heritage and squandered it.
THE NEW “ESTABLISHMENT” BECOMES THE ENEMY
The “establishment” has diversified over the years. As the “old boys” of Harriman’s generation died off, they were replaced by new men — and women. What we have is a new “elite” that has found a new way to distinguish itself from the “masses”.
Richard Hanania analyzes the phenomenon:
The American culture war is part of a global trend. The German far right marches against covid restrictions and immigration. In France, Le Pen wins the countryside and gets crushed in urban centers. Throughout the developed world you see the same cleavages opening up, with an educated urban elite that is more likely to support left-wing parties, and an exurban and rural populist backlash that looks strikingly similar across different societies….
Increasing wealth causes class differentiation and segregation. One thing people with money buy is separation from poor people or others not like them, while assortative mating moves these trends along.
With modern communications technology and women playing a larger role in intellectual life, genetic (i.e., true) explanations of class differentiation are disfavored, as is anything that would blame the poor or otherwise unfortunate for their own problems [i.e., leftist condescension].
Despite social desirability bias leading to the triumph of egalitarian ideologies, the natural tendency towards a kind of class consciousness does not go away. The higher class therefore becomes more strenuous in defining itself as aesthetically and morally superior to the lower classes….
The more egalitarian the official ideology, the harder the upper class has to work to find some other grounds on which to differentiate itself from the masses, leading to an exaggeration of the moral differences between the two tribes….
Thence the use of governmental power — directly and indirectly — to impose the left’s ideology on the “masses”. There is a government-corporate-technology-media-academic complex that moves together not just in matters of military spending or foreign policy, but in matters fundamental to the daily lives and livelihoods of Americans — “climate change”, energy policy, gender identity, the definition of marriage, immigration policy, the treatment of criminals, and much more. The approved positions on such matters are leftist, of course, and so the new establishment consists almost entirely of persons, corporations, foundations, and think-tanks that are effectively organs of the Democrat Party.
Thus did the establishment — old and new — allow, encourage, and abet the disintegration of America that is now in full spate.
In the remaining sections of this post I will trace a few of the symptoms and consequences of disintegration: military failure, economic rot, and the rise of psuedo-science in the service of leftist causes. There’s no need for me to say any more about social disintegration, the evidence of which is everywhere to be seen.
MILITARY FAILURE AS A SYMPTOM OF NATIONAL ROT
A critical element of America’s disintegration has been the unalloyed record of military futility and defeat since the end of World War II. No amount of belligerent talk can compensate for the fact that the enemies of America see that — with the exception of the Reagan and Trump years — America’s defense policy is to balk at doing what must be done to win, to disarm at the first hint of “peace”, and then fail to rearm quickly enough to prevent the next war.
The record of futility and fecklessness actual began at the end of World War II when an enfeebled FDR, guided by the Communists in his administration, gave away Eastern Europe to Stalin. The giveaway was unnecessary. The U.S. had been relatively unscathed by the war; the Soviet Union's losses in life, property, and industrial capacity had been devastating. The U.S. (with Britain) was in a position to dictate to Stalin.
The Korean War was unnecessary, in that it was invited by the Truman administration’s policies: exclusion of Korea from the Asian defense perimeter (announced by another “old boy”) and massive cuts in the U.S. defense budget. But it was essential to defend South Korea so that the powers behind North Korea (Communist China and, by extension, the USSR) would grasp the willingness of the U.S. to maintain a forward defensive posture against aggression. That signal was blunted by Truman’s decision to sack MacArthur when the general persisted in his advocacy of attacking Chinese bases following the entry of China into the war. The end result was a stalemate, where a decisive victory might have broken the back of communistic adventurism around the globe. The Korean War, as it was fought by the U.S., became “a war to foment war”.
Anti-war propaganda disguised as journalism helped to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in Vietnam. What was shaping up as a successful military campaign collapsed under the weight of the media’s overwrought and erroneous depiction of the Tet offensive as a Vietcong victory, the bombing of North Vietnam as “barbaric” (where the Tet offensive was given a “heroic cast”), and the deaths of American soldiers as somehow “in vain”, though many more deaths a generation earlier had not been in vain. (What a difference there was between Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite and his sycophants.) Unlike Korea, U.S. forces were withdrawn from Vietnam and it took little time for North Vietnam to swallow South Vietnam.
The Gulf War of 1990-91 began with Saddam Hussein’s invasion of oil-rich Kuwait. U.S. action to repel the invasion was fully justified by the potential economic effects of Saddam’s capture of Kuwait’s petroleum reserves and oil production. The proper response to Saddam’s aggression would have been not only to defeat the Iraqi army but also to depose Saddam. The failure to do so further reinforced the pattern of compromise and retreat that had begun at the end of World War II, and necessitated the long, contentious Iraq War of the 2000s.
The quick victory in Iraq, coupled with the coincidental end of the Cold War, helped to foster a belief that the peace had been won. (That belief was given an academic imprimatur in Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man.) The stage was set for Clinton’s much-ballyhooed fiscal restraint, which was achieved by cutting the defense budget. Clinton’s lack of resolve in the face of terrorism underscored the evident unwillingness of American “leaders” to defend Americans’ interests, thus inviting 9/11. (For more about Clinton’s foreign and defense policy, go here and scroll down to the section on Clinton.)
What can be said about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan of 2001-2021 but that they were conducted in the same spirit as the wars in Korea, Vietnam, and the earlier war in Iraq. Rather than reproduce a long post that I wrote at the mid-point of the futile, post-9/11 wars, I will point you to it: “The War on Terror as It Should Have Been Fought”. Subsequent events — and especially Biden’s disgraceful bugout from Afghanistan — only underscore the main point of that post: Going to war and failing to win only encourages America’s enemies.
The war in Ukraine is a costly sideshow that detracts from the ability of the U.S. to prepare for a real showdown with Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea — a showdown that has been made more likely by the rush to arrange an unnecessary confrontation with Putin.. There are, in fact, good reasons to believe that (a) he is actually trying to protect Russia and Russians and (b) he has the facts of history on his side.
The axis of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea can play the “long game”, which the U.S. and the West demonstrably cannot do because of their political systems and thrall to “public (elite) opinion”. By the time the axis is ready to bring the West to its knees, an outright attack of some kind probably won’t be necessary, as Putin has shown by cutting off vital fuel supplies to western Europe.
The only way to ensure that the U.S. isn’t cowed by the axis is to arm to the teeth, have a leader with moral courage, and dare the axis to harm vital U.S. interests. What is more likely to happen, given America’s present course, is a de facto surrender by the U.S. (and the West) — marked by significant concessions on trade and the scope of military operations and influence.
America — once an impregnable fortress — is on a path to becoming an isolated, subjugated, and exploited colony of the axis.
ECONOMIC ROT
The wisepersons who wrought America’s military decline are of the same breed as those who wrought its economic decline. In the first instance they rushed into wars that they were not willing to see through to victory. In the second instance they rushed into policy-making whose economic consequences they could have foreseen if they hadn’t been preoccupied with “social jutice” and similar hogwash.
America’s economic rot can be traced to the early 1900s, when the toll of Progresssivism (the original brand) began to be felt. It is no coincidence that a leading Progressive of the time was Teddy Roosevelt, a card-carrying member of the old establishment.
Consider the following graph, which is derived from estimates of constant-dollar GDP per capita that are available here:
There are four eras, as shown by the legend (1942-1946 omitted because of the vast economic distortions caused by World War II):
1866-1907 — annual growth of 2.0 percent — A robust economy, fueled by (mostly) laissez-faire policies and the concomitant rise of industry, mass production, technological innovation, and entrepreneurship.
1908-1941 — annual growth of 1.4 percent — A dispirited economy, shackled by the fruits of “progressivism”; for example, trust-busting; the onset of governance through regulation; the establishment of the income tax; the creation of the destabilizing Federal Reserve; and the New Deal, which prolonged the Great Depression.
1947- 2007 — annual growth of 2.2 percent — A rejuvenated economy, buoyed by the end of the New Deal and the fruits of advances in technology and business management. The rebound in the rate of growth meant that the earlier decline wasn’t the result of an “aging” economy, which is an inapt metaphor for a living thing that is constantly replenished with new people, new capital, and new ideas.
2008-2021 — annual growth of 1.0 percent — An economy sagging under the cumulative weight of the fruits of “progressivism” (old and new); for example, the never-ending expansion of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security; and an ever-growing mountain of regulatory restrictions on business. (In a similar post, which I published in 2009, I wrote presciently that “[u]nless Obama’s megalomaniacal plans are aborted by a reversal of the Republican Party’s fortunes, the U.S. will enter a new phase of economic growth — something close to stagnation.)
Had the economy of the U.S. not been deflected from the course that it was on from 1866 to 1907, per capita GDP would now be about 1.4 times its present level. Compare the position of the dashed green line in 2021 — $83,000 — with per capita GDP in that year — $58,000.
If that seems unbelievable to you, it shouldn’t. A growing economy is a kind of compound-interest machine; some of its output is invested in intellectual and physical capital that enables the same number of workers to produce more, better, and more varied products and services. (More workers, of course, will produce even more products and services.) As the experience of 1947-2007 attests, nothing other than government interventions (or a war far more devastating to the U.S than World War II) could have kept the economy from growing along the path of 1866-1907. (I should add that economic growth in 1947-2007 would have been even greater than it was but for the ever-rising tide of government interventions.)
The sum of the annual gaps between what could have been (the dashed green line) and the reality after 1907 (omitting 1942-1946) is almost $700,000 — that’s per person in 2012 dollars. It’s $800,000 per person in 2021 dollars, and even more in 2022 dollars.
That cumulative gap represents our mega-depression.
I have identified the specific causes of the mega-depression elsewhere. They are — unsurprisingly — government spending as a fraction of GDP, government regulatory activity, reductions in private business investment (resulting from the first two items), and the rate of inflation. Based on recent values of those variables, the rate of real GDP growth for the next 10 years will be about -6 percent. Yes, that’s minus 6 percent!
Is such a thing possible in the United States? Yes! The estimates of inflation-adjusted GDP available at the website of the Bureau of Economic Analysis (an official arm of the U.S. government) yield these frightening statistics: Constant-dollar GDP dropped at an annualized rate of -9.3 percent from 1929 to 1932, and at an annualized rate of -7.4 percent from 1929 to 1933.
In any event, the outlook is gloomy:
PSEUDO-SCIENCE IN THE SADDLE: SOME EXAMPLES
The Keynesian Multiplier
It is fitting to begin this section with a summary of “The Keynesian Multiplier: Fiction vs. Fact”. When push comes to shove, the advocates of big government (which undermines economic growth) love to spend like drunken sailors (with other people’s money), claiming that such spending will stimulate the economy. And, by extension, they claim (against commons sense and statistical evidence), that government spending is economically beneficial, as well as necessary (as long as it’s not for defense).
The Keynesian multiplier is a pseudo-scientific product of the pseudo-science of macroeconomics. It is nothing more than a descriptive equation without operational significance. What it is supposed to mean is that if spending rises by X, the rise in spending will cause GDP to rise by a multiple (k) of X. What it really means is that if the relationship between GDP and spending remains constant, when GDP rises by some amount spending will have necessarily risen by a fraction of that amount. This relationship holds true regardless of the kind of spending under discussion — private investment, private consumption, or government. But proponents of government spending prefer to put “government” in front of “spending”, and then pretend (or uncritically believe) that the causation runs from government spending to GDP and not the other way around.
“Climate Change”
Here is a case of scientists becoming invested in an invalid hypothesis. The hypothesis in question is that atmospheric CO2 is largely responsible for the rise in measured temperatures (averaged “globally”) by about 1.5 degrees Celsius since the middle of the 19th century. The hypothesis has been falsified (i.e., disproved) in so many ways that I have lost count (though one will do.) You can read dozens of scientific rebuttals here, and some of my own contributions here, here, and here.
As one writer puts it,
the “science” behind the claim that human carbon emissions are heading us toward some kind of planetary catastrophe is not only not “settled,” but actually non-existent.
None of that matters — so far — because the “climatistas” have brainwashed Western political “leaders”, Western bureuacracies, and the media-information industry, which is doing its damnedest to suppress and discredit “climate deniers” (i.e., people who actually follow the science). The cost of having the “climatistas” in charge has been revealed: soaring fuel prices and freezing Europeans. There’s worse to come if the “climatistas” aren’t ejected from their positions of influence — vast economic destruction and the social distruption that goes with it.
The Response to COVID-19
I’ll start with a Washington Monthly article:
While most countries imposed draconian restrictions, there was an exception: Sweden. Early in the pandemic, Swedish schools and offices closed briefly but then reopened. Restaurants never closed. Businesses stayed open. Kids under 16 went to school.
That stood in contrast to the U.S. By April 2020, the CDC and the National Institutes of Health recommended far-reaching lockdowns that threw millions of Americans out of work. A kind of groupthink set in. In print and on social media, colleagues attacked experts who advocated a less draconian approach. Some received obscene emails and death threats. Within the scientific community, opposition to the dominant narrative was castigated and censored, cutting off what should have been vigorous debate and analysis.
In this intolerant atmosphere, Sweden’s “light touch,” as it is often referred to by scientists and policy makers, was deemed a disaster. “Sweden Has Become the World’s Cautionary Tale,” carped The New York Times. Reuters reported, “Sweden’s COVID Infections Among Highest in Europe, With ‘No Sign Of Decrease.’” Medical journals published equally damning reports of Sweden’s folly.
But Sweden seems to have been right. Countries that took the severe route to stem the virus might want to look at the evidence found in a little-known 2021 report by the Kaiser Family Foundation. The researchers found that among 11 wealthy peer nations, Sweden was the only one with no excess mortality among individuals under 75. None, zero, zip.
That’s not to say that Sweden had no deaths from COVID. It did. But it appears to have avoided the collateral damage that lockdowns wreaked in other countries. The Kaiser study wisely looked at excess mortality, rather than the more commonly used metric of COVID deaths. This means that researchers examined mortality rates from all causes of death in the 11 countries before the pandemic and compared those rates to mortality from all causes during the pandemic. If a country averaged 1 million deaths per year before the pandemic but had 1.3 million deaths in 2020, excess mortality would be 30 percent….
The Kaiser results might seem surprising, but other data have confirmed them. As of February, Our World in Data, a database maintained by the University of Oxford, shows that Sweden continues to have low excess mortality, now slightly lower than Germany, which had strict lockdowns. Another study found no increased mortality in Sweden in those under 70. Most recently, a Swedish commission evaluating the country’s pandemic response determined that although it was slow to protect the elderly and others at heightened risk from COVID in the initial stages, its laissez-faire approach was broadly correct….
One of the most pernicious effects of lockdowns was the loss of social support, which contributed to a dramatic rise in deaths related to alcohol and drug abuse. According to a recent report in the medical journal JAMA, even before the pandemic such “deaths of despair” were already high and rising rapidly in the U.S., but not in other industrialized countries. Lockdowns sent those numbers soaring.
The U.S. response to COVID was the worst of both worlds. Shutting down businesses and closing everything from gyms to nightclubs shielded younger Americans at low risk of COVID but did little to protect the vulnerable. School closures meant chaos for kids and stymied their learning and social development. These effects are widely considered so devastating that they will linger for years to come. While the U.S. was shutting down schools to protect kids, Swedish children were safe even with school doors wide open. According to a 2021 research letter, there wasn’t a single COVID death among Swedish children, despite schools remaining open for children under 16….
Of the potential years of life lost in the U.S., 30 percent were among Blacks and another 31 percent were among Hispanics; both rates are far higher than the demographics’ share of the population. Lockdowns were especially hard on young workers and their families. According to the Kaiser report, among those who died in 2020, people lost an average of 14 years of life in the U.S. versus eight years lost in peer countries. In other words, the young were more likely to die in the U.S. than in other countries, and many of those deaths were likely due to lockdowns rather than COVID.
And that isn’t all. There’s also this working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, which concludes:
The first estimates of the effects of COVID-19 on the number of business owners from nationally representative April 2020 CPS data indicate dramatic early-stage reductions in small business activity. The number of active business owners in the United States plunged from 15.0 million to 11.7 million over the crucial two-month window from February to April 2020. No other one-, two- or even 12-month window of time has ever shown such a large change in business activity. For comparison, from the start to end of the Great Recession the number of business owners decreased by 730,000 representing only a 5 percent reduction. In general, business ownership is relatively steady over the business cycle (Fairlie 2013; Parker 2018). The loss of 3.3 million business owners (or 22 percent) was comprised of large drops in important subgroups such as owners working roughly two days per week (28 percent), owners working four days a week (31 percent), and incorporated businesses (20 percent).
And that was more than two years ago, before the political panic had spawned a destructive tsunami of draconian measures. Such measures made the pandemic worse by creating the conditions for the evolution of more contagious strains of the coronavirus.
The correct (i.e., scientific) approach would have been to quarantine and care for the most vulnerable members of the populace: the old, those with compromised immune systems, those with diseases that left them especially vulnerable (heart disease, COPD, morbid obesity, etc.). As for the rest of us, widespread exposure to the disease would have meant the natural immunization of the populace through exposure to the coronavirus and the development of antibodies through that exposure.
In the end, millions of people have been made poorer, deprived of education and beneficial human interactions, and suffered and died needlessly because politicians and bureaucrats couldn’t (and can’t) resist the urge to do something — especially when something means trying to conquer nature and suppress human nature.
(For much more on this subject, see David Stockman’s “The Macroeconomic Consequences Of Lockdowns & The Aftermath”, reproduced at ZeroHedge.)
The Wages of Pseudo-Science
The worst thing about fallacies such as the three that I have just discussed isn’t the fact that they are widely accepted, even by scientists (if you can call economics a science). The worst thing is they have been embraced by politicians and bureaucrats eager to “solve” a “problem” whether or not it is within their power to solve. The result is the concoction and enforcement of economically and socially destructive policies. But that matters little to cosseted elites who — like their counterparts in the USSR — can live high on the hog while the masses are starving and freezing.
CODA
Is there hope for an American renaissance? The upcoming mid-term election will be pivotal but not conclusive. It will be a very good thing if the GOP regains control of Congress. But it will take more than that to restore sanity to the land.
A Republican (of the right kind) must win in 2024. The GOP majority in Congress must be enlarged. A purge of the deep state must follow, and it must scour every nook and cranny of the central government to remove every bureaucrat who has a leftist agenda and the ability to thwart the administration’s initiatives.
Beyond that, the American people should be rewarded for their (aggregate) return to sanity by the elimination several burdensome (and unconstitutional departments of the executive branch), by the appointment of dozens of pro-constitutional judges, and by the appointment of a string of pro-constitutional justices of the Supreme Court.
After that, the rest will take care of itself: Renewed economic vitality, a military whose might deters our enemies, and something like the restoration of sanity in cultural matters. (Bandwagon effects are powerful, and they can go uphill as well as downhill.)
But all of that is hope. The restoration of America’s greatness will not be easy or without acrimony and setbacks.
If America’s greatness isn’t restored, America will become a vassal state. And the leftists who made it possible will be the first victims of their new masters.