Heather Mac Donald on government failures: lockdowns and riots

                       

One of our free subscriptions is to Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.  In the latest issue, Heather Mac Donald just published “Four Months of Unprecedented Government Malfeasance” and it is now available online.  She is addressing the unnecessary and arbitrary shutdown due to COVID-19, as well as the passive, not to say complicit, government role with the Black Lives Matter-fueled rioting. 

Over the last four months, Americans have lived through what is arguably the most consequential period of government malfeasance in U.S. history. Public officials’ overreaction to the novel coronavirus put American cities into a coma; those same officials’ passivity in the face of widespread rioting threatens to deliver the coup de grâce. Together, these back-to-back governmental failures will transform the American polity and cripple urban life for decades.

Before store windows started shattering in the name of racial justice, urban existence was already on life support, thanks to the coronavirus lockdowns. Small businesses—the restaurants and shops that are the lifeblood of cities—were shuttered, many for good, leaving desolate rows of “For Rent” signs on street after street in New York City and elsewhere. Americans huddled in their homes for months on end, believing that if they went outside, death awaited them.

This panic was occasioned by epidemiological models predicting wildly unlikely fatalities from the coronavirus.

On March 30, the infamous Imperial College London model predicted 2.2 million deaths in the U.S. by September 1, absent government action. That prediction was absurd on its face, given the dispersal of the U.S. population and the fact that China’s coronavirus death toll had already levelled off at a few thousand. The authors of that study soon revised it radically downwards.

Too late. It had already become the basis for the exercise of unprecedented government power. California was the first state to lock down its economy and confine its citizens to their homes; eventually almost every other state would follow suit, under enormous media pressure to do so.

Never before had public officials required millions of lawful businesses to shut their doors, throwing tens of millions of people out of work. They did so at the command of one particular group of experts—those in the medical and public health fields—who viewed their mandate as eliminating one particular health risk with every means put at their disposal.

If the politicians who followed their advice weighed a greater set of considerations, balancing the potential harm from the virus against the harm from the shutdowns, they showed no sign of it. Instead, governors and mayors started rolling out one emergency decree after another to terminate economic activity, seemingly heedless of the consequences.

. . .

The full essay is here.  [Note: my only criticism of MacDonald’s essay is that she implies that the behavior of the police officer who restrained George Floyd was “grotesquely callous and contrary to sound tactics.” However, based on the police complaint, the medical examiner’s report with toxicology report, and reasonable analysis by Clarice Feldman, Floyd died of a heart attack while in police custody; the neck restraint was consistent with police training in Minneapolis when an officer is trying to prevent a suspect exhibiting drug-related “excited delirium syndrome” from inflicting injury on himself.]

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