Episode 208: “How Policy Responses to the Pandemic Continue to Shatter Our World” with Jeffrey Tucker

The world has suffered and continues to suffer catastrophic economic and social damage from the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020 - but not from the virus itself. 

Rather we’re in the midst of a continuing global crisis created by governments’ policy responses to the pandemic. 

• Trillions of dollars of Federal “relief” spending

• Financed by the Federal Reserve massively increasing the money supply

• And the countless coercive rules and restrictions implemented to stop a Covid virus that came anyway.

The result is the highest inflation in 40 years, which is not slowing down but accelerating. Of course there are other forces at work, like the Biden Administration’s war on fossil fuels, but the root causes of inflation were in place before that.

To understand this better and what we need to be concerned about next, in this episode I talk with the great Jeffrey A. Tucker, the founder of the Brownstone Institute and author of the recently published “Liberty or Lockdown.” Our topic: his speech at Hillsdale College and related article about“The Economic Disaster of the Pandemic Response.”

From the beginning - and starting with Donald Trump’s response - the idea of “the economy” – viewed as mechanistic, money-centered, mostly about the stock market, and detached from anything truly important – was pitted against public health and lives,” reminds Jeffrey.

When governments started declaring some businesses essential and others non-essential what they did not understand is that everything in a economy is interconnected. It's woven. It’s never obvious, but if you cut even one thread, all of a sudden the whole fabric can start to unravel. You cannot just turn off an economy and expect that you can restart it with a snap of your fingers.

The same thing was done with medical procedures and treatments and hospital beds. Some were declared “essential”, others not. Perversely, spending on healthcare plummeted during the pandemic. Non-virus health conditions worsened and life expectancy in America fell.

“We lost two years of education, substance abuse and addiction rose and hundreds of thousands of businesses were destroyed,” says Jeffrey. “Vaccine mandates led to more than a million people being displaced from their jobs.”

In the almost three years after the virus emerged from Wuhan China, “we face an economic crisis without precedent in our lifetimes, the longest period of declining real income in the post-war period, a health and educational crisis, an exploding national debt plus inflation at a 40-year high, continued and seemingly random shortages, dysfunction in labor markets that defies all models, the breakdown of international trade, a collapse in consumer confidence not seen since we started tracking it, and a combustible level of political division.”

So here we are. We all need to be deeply concerned about not just this one crisis, but authorities response to the inevitable next “crises” as well. 

“To this day, the educated elites in the public health establishment defend every last thing they did. Not a single power that they used to lock us down before has been diminished,” worries Jeffrey. “Yes, the courts have cut this policy or that policy a little bit here and there, too little, too late. But in general, all the policy, all the powers that they had before, they have now still, and they will use them again.”

We can’t afford to sit on the sidelines and let this happen. Listen in as Jeffrey and I explore what happened and what we need to do to prevent it next time.