Dead Wrong About Everything

Analysis finds every element of pandemic response counterproductive at best.

A new report titled Covid Lessons Learned: A Retrospective After Four Years was just published. The authors are Scott W. Atlas, Steve H. Hanke (Professor of Economic at Johns Hopkins) Philip G. Kerpen, and Casey B. Mulligan (Professor of Economics at University of Chicago).

The report cites a 2021 Danish study titled Emergencies: on the misuse of government powers, which concluded the following:

We find that the more advantages emergency constitutions confer to the executive, the higher the number of people killed as a consequence of a natural disaster, controlling for its severity. As this is an unexpected result, we discuss a number of potential explanations, the most plausible being that governments use natural disasters as a pretext to enhance their power. Furthermore, the easier it is to call a state of emergency, the larger the negative effects on basic human rights. Interestingly, presidential democracies are better able to cope with natural disasters than parliamentary ones in terms of lives saved, whereas autocracies do significantly worse in the sense that empowerment rights seriously suffer in the aftermath of a disaster.

I am not surprised by the findings of the Danish authors. With few exceptions, politicians seek office not because they possess any particular understanding or competency, but because they enjoy receiving public attention and possessing power. Giving such people enhanced power will always result in enhanced bungling with innumerable negative, unintended consequences.

Four years ago, while watching New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti exercise emergency power over their jurisdictions, I was reminded of this speech by the newly minted dictator in Woody Allen’s film Bananas. Though satirical and hyperbolic, the scene nevertheless expresses a profound truth about human nature.