John Tamny - When Politicians Panicked: The New Coronavirus, Expert Opinion, and a Tragic Lapse of Reason

Advance P raise for
When Politician s Panicked

A society or a civilization which is poorer will be less capable of coping with a public health crisis. Now, if that seems like a commonsense observation, well that is because that is exactly what it is. To anyone who has lived through what passes for health and economic policy in 2020, though, John Tamnys provocative bookbased as it is on that observationwill come as a shock. Tamnys book is an excellent contribution to the conversation that the world will need so that the mistakes made during this epidemic are never mad e again.

Jay Bhattacharya, Pro fessor of
Medicine, Stanford University

John Tamny bravely describes the terrible and senseless economic pain caused by politicians panicking in the face of a health concern thatlets be realis no worse than a bad flu season.

Rich Karlgaard, Publisher of Forbes

The response of governments around the world to the coronavirus has been a colossal policy errorprobably the worst in humanitys history. Well be struggling to understand what went wrong for the next fifty years. When Politicians Panicked will bring essential clarity.

Toby Young, LockdownSce ptics.org

John Tamnys myth-shattering new groundbreaker, When Politicians Panicked isnt really about COVID-19 but a radically yet stunningly older, better way to envision it, innovation, healthcare and its evolution, economics, wealth creation, and our overall cultureboth by what is normally seen and unseen.

Ken Fisher, Founder and Executive
Chairman, Fisher I nvestments

Tamny writes a provocative book exposing critically important issues arising from the coronavirus pandemic, beyond the destruction of families and tragic loss of life.

Scott Atlas, Hoover Institution,
For mer Chief of Neuroradiology at Stanford Medi cal Center

John Tamny makes a convincing economic case for lockdowns being suicidally self-dest ructive.

Lionel Shriver, Author of
The Mandibles

The intellectuals often get things wrong but it is the politicians that weaponize their errors. Read Tamnys riveting account of what is surely the greatest failure of politics in many generations. And work to make sure nothing like this ever happen s again.

Jeffrey Tucker, Author of
Liberty o r Lockdown

A POST HILL PRESS BOOK

ISBN: 978-1-64293-837-1

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-64293-838-8

When Politicians Panicked:

The New Coronavirus, Expert Opinion, and a Tragic Lapse of Reason

2021 by John Tamny

All Rights Reserved

Cover art by Cody Corcoran

This book contains economic commentary and financial assessments that are not intended to replace the services or advice of financial professionals; therefore, it is strongly suggested that the reader perform independent research and/or speak to a qualified economic professional for further information. This book also contains research and commentary about COVID-19, which is classified as an infectious disease by the World Health Organization. Although every effort has been made to ensure that any medical or scientific information present within this book is accurate, the research about COVID-19 is still ongoing.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

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Published in the United States of America

For Reed, who entered the world in March 2020. May your generation turn its collective nose up to panic as the response to problems, real and imagined.

Contents

I m relieved to report that righteous scriveners and saner doctors, academics, and statisticians across the land are publishing books debunking the tragic COVID madness that needlessly wrecked the lives of so many. With cogent authority, these books present all the statistical arguments on the insignificance of COVID compared to earlier, more deadly epidemics that brought no lockdowns or ma sk edicts.

Now John Tamny, Director of FreedomWorks Center for Economic Freedom, and libertarian star of RealClearMarkets , has unleashed a devastating tract that you now hold in your hand, When Politicians Panicked .

Naming names and describing the endless carnival of outrageous overreach, Tamny vividly details the doings of politicians and experts reveling in power like so many Charlie Chaplin Fuhrers. To Tamny, the centralization of power in the hands of the very few was and always will be the definition of crisis. Markets work precisely because they factor in the decentralized knowledge of millions, and realistically billions. This is a lesson members of the political class have never learned, and didnt lear n in 2020.

Having decided that the spread of the new coronavirus was a crisis, politicians and their expert enablers quickly fulfilled their prophecy with lockdowns, stringent rules for businesses allowed to operate, and other decrees from the Commanding Heights. It turns out central planning still doe snt work.

Tamny is not much interested in COVID-19 data not because it doesnt discredit the breathy alarmism of the Ruling Class, but because he reasonably fears that a debate won with statistics sets the stage for future lockdowns. Politicians embody this time is different, and as there will always be camera-addicted experts ready and willing to gull the elected, Tamny argues that freedom must be the first and last answer to any governmental response.

At the same time, Tamny uses data to help readers understand that the political panic had no reasonable basis. Nothing offers any answer to the all-cause death data that show COVID to have been a trivial event in medical terms, with perhaps a million lives lost, average age over eighty, in the face of some 58 million global all-cause deaths in 2019. COVID deaths, even according to the Imperial College of London, were going to be quite a bit fewer in 2020 than the some 1.4 million new tuberculosis deaths resulting from the lockdowns and COVID hospital di stortions.

As Tamny points out, the relative triviality of COVID-19 was blatantly evident as early as March 18, 2020, when Fred Smith, the venerable FedEx founder-CEO, was interviewed by Fox News Bret Baier. Smith had extensive operations in the epicenter of the virus in Wuhan, China, and 907 employees there, delivering packages for weeks all over the stricken city. All employees were tested for the virus and only four tested positive. Of those four, two proved to be false positives. None of the FedEx workers got exceptionally sick and all recovered.

Adding to Tamnys point, Tesla founder Elon Musks early skepticism about lockdown hysteria was similarly rooted in his companys extensive operations in China. Tesla has a major supply chain in China that employs thousands, yet like Smith, Musk thankfully encountered a virus that was ra ther meek.

Tamny concluded: That [Smiths Wuhan] employees were largely spared the viruss spread, and that none had died from it, reads as a reasonable market signal going back over two months (and realistically much longer than that) [discrediting] the presumed lethality of COVID-19. COVID seems chiefly to threaten people already dying and physicians who expose themselves repeatedly to a load-dependent vir al attack.

What we have undergone is an egregious and perhaps criminal and certainly unconstitutional power grab by politicians. Whether merely stupid or demagogic or driven by polls or by a nefariously political media, the politicians from Trump on down simply blundered like no others in the history of publ ic policy.