Freedom or lockdown: Countering the brutalism of the lockdown The Manila Times – The Manila Times

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AS part of his polemic against the lockdown, author Jeffrey Tucker applies the term brutalism to this policy and strategy against the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19).

Brutalism denotes a style of architecture or art characterized by a deliberate plainness, crudity, or violence of imagery. The term was first applied to functionalist buildings of the 1950s and 1960s that made much use of steel and concrete in starkly massive blocks.

In the context of the pandemic, brutalism connotes the image of the state imposing what it wills on the people, and the people submitting to draconian orders.

A stark choice between liberty and lockdown

Tucker continued his polemic in his book Liberty or Lockdown (American Institute for Economic Research, New York, 2020) in this vein:

The politicians panicked. They feared being blamed for any and all deaths from this one virus while forgetting other ailments. The Covid-19 fear drove out every other consideration. It was madness but it was only supposed to last a couple of weeks until it turned out to last six months and longer.

Why didnt we revolt? Part of the reason was that most of us were in shock. We had to believe that there was some good reason, some rationale, for these policies. But as the weeks and months rolled on, the terrible truth began to dawn on more people. This was all for naught. We destroyed the country, and much of the world, and everything people had worked hard for centuries to build, to try out something that had never been tried before. It didnt work. The virus took its own path. And today we are left with the wreckage.

As I type today (Sept. 1, 2020), Im feeling ever vindicated by the research, and ever more optimistic that we are going to get through this, the world will open up again, and we can begin the rebuilding. The work that is before us is not only national, institutional and economic. It is also psychological. Our lives have been shattered in incredible ways.

We are not the first to go through this. It is something experienced by prisoners, and by previous populations under lockdown.

How do we come back from this? By reflecting, learning and acting on the promise of renewal. It can happen, but only once we fully come to terms with the stark choice between liberty and lockdown. Liberty is right and it works. Lockdown is wrong and it does not. Its not complex, but it takes courage and determination to live out that principle.

This book is assembled from my writings over these past months, placed in an ordering that makes sense, and edited to update the information. They cover history, politics, economics and the relevant science as it pertains, and especially on this latter topic Ive been very careful to rely on the expertise of others from whom Ive learned so much.

They were all published by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), which found itself in the position of being a major distributor of research and critical analysis of the greatest government-caused crisis in our lifetimes. AIER was perfectly positioned to do this but I must tell you that it has not been easy. Weve been subjected to denunciation, censorship, shaming, threats and even worse, from people who didnt believe there should be any dissent.

The virus will vanish from the public mind as viruses do: inauspiciously as our clever immune systems incorporate its properties into our internal resistance codes. But we will have another struggle facing us in the years ahead concerning what precisely we are going to tolerate from our state officials and how much of a priority we are going to place on retaining our rights and liberties. This choice is something we must all face in our own lives, and then work to see instantiated in the legal structures of societies we hope can maintain their freedom.

Worst human rightsTragedy in 21st century

To conclude this column on the thinking of Jeffrey Tucker on the coronavirus pandemic, I want to highlight excerpts from a review of Liberty or Lockdown by John Tamny, which was published in Forbes magazine on December 18. Tamny wrote:

Jeffrey Tucker has provided a forum at the American Institute for Economic Research (where hes editorial director) for an impressive team of economic thinkers to make a case for freedom, and against forced economic desperation as a way to combat what causes illness in some, and in the rarest of circumstances, death.

Tuckers tireless work proved crucial for providing people around the world with information that put them in the position to comfortably and confidently push back against acceptance of unemployment, starvation and death as punishment for the spread of a virus that over half infected dont even know theyre infected with.

Without Tucker, the response to tyranny would be much less informed, and quite a bit less confident. We also wouldnt have the Great Barrington Declaration, which Tucker organized, and that millions around the world have signed. When histories are written about the tragedy foisted on the world by inept politicians, Tuckers name will loom large as someone who led the shell-shocked back.

Liberty or Lockdown is an essential and very excellent read that will deeply inform its lucky buyers.

Its no reach to say that whats taken place over the last nine months is easily the worst human rights tragedy of the still young 21st century. The numbers back this up. As the New York Times reported last summer, 285 million of the worlds inhabitants are rushing toward starvation. Hundreds of millions more are being reacquainted with the poverty they had worked so diligently to escape. Poverty is easily historys greatest killer, at which point we have to contemplate the unseen deaths related to so much focus on the coronavirus; as in how many will be brought to an early grave by tuberculosis, malaria, diarrhea, and other killers thanks to global health officials paying less attention to some of the worst health challenges in the world after poverty and starvation

In Tuckers words, weve been subjected to a sadistic social experiment in the name of virus mitigation. So true

Lost in all the hysteria about a virus that traveled around China is that there are few ways to fight a virus. The book confirms what Tucker already knew; that there are only two ways to defeat a virus: natural immunity and vaccines. Translated, viruses eventually die out because enough people get them only for those infected to develop immunity to them.

As Tucker makes plain, no vaccines were ever developed for viruses that spread in 1918, 1957 and 1968. Theyre still with us, but society has grown naturally immune by staying together as opposed to pursuing the life-and-nature wrecking path of living apart.

As the world contracted amid broad takings of personal and economic freedom, politicians piled on. It wasnt just a shutdown of global travel, it was also limits on travel within countries, including the US.

A virus cares nothing about borders, executive orders, and titles.

Common sense means nothing to politicians, and those who enable them. Were talking about a class of people that believes cheap rent can be decreed, that healthcare cost curves can be bent downward, and that expensive credit can be made easy via central banks.

And so they proceeded to try and fight the virus with borders, executive orders, and titles. It mocked them. Arguably to our betterment. As Tucker explains it, A virus is a thing to battle one immune system at a time, and our bodies have evolved to be suited to do just that. Historically this is what families that couldnt afford to be ridiculous did: when one family member got sick, others were required to not separate from the ill. Family immunity is arguably what revealed itself before the better known population immunity or herd immunity.

Politicians eventually did discover the virus, only to lose their minds in the cruelest of ways. Their hysteria will exist forever as a reminder that emotion in front of the camera combined with force doesnt correlate with positive outcomes. Tucker knows this intuitively simply because he knows that central planning logically fails precisely because it suffocates the immense knowledge that is a consequence of a decentralized, free society.

Tucker didnt need the central-planning tragedies of the 20th century to open his eyes to the certain failure of centralized force.

Tucker is clear that there is no relationship between lockdowns, transmission of the virus and death. Whether a country locked down or not had as much predictive power over deaths per million as whether it rains today is related to the color of my socks.

Which is why Tucker is for freedom first and foremost. Just as free people produce abundance that has always enabled a much more than fair fight against death and disease, so does freedom produce abundant health advances precisely because decentralized experimenting and decision-making always trumps one-size-fits-all.

Tucker concludes that we must reject the wickedness and compulsion of this current moment in American life. It needs to counter the brutalism of the lockdowns.

This excellent book is filled to the brim with information about the meek nature of the virus, how ineffective the lockdowns were, how typically feckless government officials were.

Much as the numbers about the virus work in our favor, we risk winning the argument while losing the battle. Thats the case because as Tucker acknowledges, this wont be the last virus to reveal itself. Numerical and lethality arguments are fascinating, but they set the stage for future lockdowns

Which is why Tucker is most right and most compelling when he calls for the countering of the brutalism of the lockdowns. Thats the only answer. No more lockdowns. Never again. Any other argument fails.

yenobserver@gmail.com

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Freedom or lockdown: Countering the brutalism of the lockdown The Manila Times - The Manila Times