Coronavirus and the Perils of Big Government
(Chronicles from the early days of the Pandemic: April 18, 2020)
Imagine this: drones buzzing overhead, with their remote operators barking commands at innocent bystanders in American cities like Elizabeth, N.J., and Daytona Beach, Fla. Parents being handcuffed in front of their children at public playgrounds. People calling local government hotlines to tattle on their neighbors for “social distancing” violations. Police threatening to break up Easter services and other religious gatherings, a direct violation of the First Amendment. Jobless claims reaching 16.8 million in three weeks. Family businesses closing up shop, unable to pay their rents.
This scenario sounds like a hackneyed dystopian novel one might read in high school, but it’s all too real — and it’s been brought to us by disastrous federal, state and local government responses to the spread of the novel coronavirus.
The past month has certainly been surreal, truly a “black swan” event that nobody — no politician, no bureaucrat, no government scientist — saw coming. The global reach of the coronavirus is indeed very serious, as thousands have fallen ill and lost their lives, tragically.
The good news is that COVID-19 seems to have a much lower mortality rate than early reports suggested. Almost all of the models — most notably the University of Washington IMHE model that actually takes into account “social distancing” measures — are being proven wrong. And they’re not just “wrong,” but egregiously pessimistic (some estimates for American mortality numbers were as high as 1.5 million).
Despite the good news, many of the crushing problems we’re now facing have been caused or amplified by government planners, politicians and technocrats. Government strategies have been based upon the glaringly incorrect, worst-case-scenario models, and many Americans are hurting as a result of draconian measures.
In Washington, D.C., the belief seems to be that it’s better to try to operate on a “patient” with one giant, blunt machete rather than 330 million surgical scalpels. We are living under a de facto one-size-fits-all national lockdown that requires almost every American to cower in place while the economy is driven into the ground. Unemployment numbers could reach levels not seen since the Great Depression. This lockdown approach, which is not unlike measures put into place in China and other authoritarian regimes, forces the same top-down solution on places as different as rural Montana and Manhattan and everywhere in between. Yet, many Americans are demanding even more government control, as if living under the largest, most bloated government in the history of the world isn’t already happening.
To that end, Republicans and Democrats in Congress recently passed a handful of so-called “stimulus” and relief bills totaling well over $2 trillion, replete with corporate bailouts and numerous pork projects. The Orwellian CARES Act famously costs more than $6,000 per American citizen, yet only provides $1,200 checks for adults, and $500 per child, to some families.
Supposedly, there is another $2 trillion infrastructure bill coming soon. The federal government no longer operates under the illusion that this money is ever going to get paid back. The Federal Reserve is now committed to buying junk bonds and lending hundreds of billions of dollars to corporations, and it appears that there will be quantitative easing ad infinitum. Welcome to the hazardous world of Modern Monetary Theory.
This immoral orgy of spending comes right after the federal government bungled coronavirus testing for Americans. Back in February, the CDC was inadvertently sending out defective test kits, and the FDA had rules in place preventing the development of additional diagnostic kits in state and commercial labs. For a time, Big Government’s monopoly on testing put millions of Americans at heightened risk.
To all those who like to quip that the era of small government is over, I’d ask, when was the last time America actually had a “small government”? Do the benefits of empowering all levels of government to control our daily lives actually outweigh the costs of government failures? Is it right to rack up trillions of dollars in debt and then send the bill to our children and grandchildren? Perhaps we should heed the words of James Madison, who said that “It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties.”