Remember: All of this is because we shut down the world over a virus with a 99%+ survival rate

It cannot be stressed enough.

It can be easy to forget, roughly two-and-a-half years later, the sheer insanity of the COVID lockdowns. Most of us can probably remember watching Wuhan get shut down in January of 2020 and being marginally unsettled but thinking, “Well, that’s just Communist China, of course they’re welding people inside their apartments, they’re communists it’s what they do.” Then about six weeks later Italy did it, and the rest of the dominoes fell, and suddenly every sniveling little U.S. governor was eager to hold an 11:30 a.m. press conference announcing a “stay-at-home order” meant to “stop the spread of coronavirus.” And now here we are:

The Federal Reserve has issued another super-sized increase to interest rates in a move intended to fight inflation, but which deepens the risk of a sharp economic downturn and job losses.

At the end of its two-day policy meeting on Wednesday, the US central bank raised its policy rate by 75 basis points for the third time, to a range of 3 percent to 3.25 percent, the highest level since the 2008 financial crisis. 

The Fed is attempting to cool down the economy in order to tame rampant inflation, which remains stubbornly high at 8.3 percent -- but as interest rates climb, the path to a so-called 'soft landing' is narrowing.  

Economists are increasingly projecting a 'hard landing' marked by a sharp increase in unemployment, and Fed Chair Jerome Powell admitted on Wednesday that achieving a soft landing will be 'very challenging'. 

'We have always understood that restoring price stability, while achieving a relatively modest...increase in unemployment would be very challenging,' he said. 

'No one knows whether this process will lead to a recession, or if so, how significant that recession would be,' he added.

All of this is due to the lockdowns. Of course it is. We shut down the world, printed up about $20 trillion in the U.S. alone, wrecked the delicate system of commercial lifeblood that we’ve spent a century-and-a-half building up, whacked the labor market into a contorted ruination, and permanently scared probably 15% of the population from setting foot in stores and shops and restaurants. And now we’re teetering on the edge of a possibly “significant” recession. Of course we are.

I suppose it might be prudent to ask lockdown supporters if all of that was worth all of this. But, you know, maybe it doesn’t matter. The impetus for lockdowns was already so comprehensively divorced from a rational premise that I suppose any negative externalities can be justified at this point. Remember, pretty much everyone—world leaders, national leaders, local leaders, neighbors, friends, family, clergy, everyone—they were all okay letting elderly grandparents die alone and scared in empty hospital rooms rather than allow a single loved one in there to hold their hand; they had no problem ending critical, time-sensitive therapeutics for vulnerable disabled children; they didn’t mind condemning countless cancer patients to early deaths so that medical facilities could cease any and all “non-essential” procedures. These things were sneeringly dismissed as essentially mere trivialities compared to the need to “stop the spread of coronavirus.” What’s a little recession compared to that? Seriously.

Well, here it comes. I tend to be a fundamentally optimistic man, and I have my doubts that it will be as bad as some of the most pessimistic economists are predicting. But those doubts have grown increasingly smaller as time has gone by—and in any event even the possibility of a recession on this basis is so far beyond the bounds of acceptable contingencies that it beggars belief. Remember: By March of 2020 we knew both how COVID spreads and how survivable it ultimately is. We knew this, very well; if you weren’t willing to trust the data out of China you could at least trust it out of Milan. The justification for lockdowns was always based on a virus that nearly 100% of people will survive, with or without a vaccine; we knew it; and they locked us down anyway, and now we’re talking about a global recession of indeterminate severity and duration.

I would like to think that, as painful as it would be, maybe a major economic downturn would chasten enough of us that something like this will never happen again. But how likely does that seem? It strikes me that most of the people who were gung-ho for shutting down the world would probably be gung-ho for doing it again, if there was enough hysterical, pseudo-authoritative discourse on the matter, enough scary graphs shared on social media, enough mass panic fomented by “experts.” Do we have any evidence to the contrary?

I do not like to ignore silver linings and I would love to be persuaded that we’ve all learned something from this, or that we might still yet learn something. If anyone has any ideas to that effect, you should be preparing to deploy them in the months ahead, when the fallout from this crisis may be exceptional, the pain stemming from those indefensible lockdowns may be especially acute, and people might, possibly, be finally prepared to listen.