[From the 2020 Supporters Summit, presented at the historic Jekyll Island Club Resort on Jekyll Island, Georgia, on October 9, 2020.] Today I’m going to talk to you about what’s been going on in our country for over half a year now, not just in the United States, but around the world. Some of this we all know, but we’ve been getting, let’s say, not the entire story for much of the time and we’ve had to wait to hear additional experts chime in to say, Wait a minute, maybe the first experts were all wrong. It’s been hard to know exactly what to think and what numbers we ought to be looking at when it comes to this covid-19. Should we be looking at cases, should we be looking at percent positive rates, hospitalizations, deaths? All kinds of numbers have been thrown at us, some with context, some without. So, I’m going to spend a little time reviewing this and making a bit of a clarion call to enjoy human life the way it’s meant to be enjoyed. Now since March, we’ve experienced lockdowns and restrictions of various kinds, supposedly all in the name of science, you understand. If you don’t support these things, you must hate science. That’s the intellectual level of the conversation. We were told, We need fifteen days to flatten the curve—fifteen days. I believe we’re on day number 209 of fifteen days to flatten the curve. Remember the old days when the concern was, We don’t want to overwhelm the hospitals? We can’t cure this thing, but at least we could get the hospitals in the condition they need to be in and allow them to be able to cope with reasonable numbers of people, and we would flatten out the number of hospitalizations and deaths over time, so as to allow the hospitals to be able to cope with them rather than have everybody arriving at the hospital all at once. OK. Then, you start to see on social media all your friends saying the hospitals are overwhelmed. It was like a memo had gone out that the word we were all going to use was “overwhelmed.” Like your friends couldn’t even be creative enough to come up with a different word; they all had the same word: the hospitals are overwhelmed. Because their other friend said the hospitals are overwhelmed, because the other friend said that. What actually happened was that in April alone, 1.4 million jobs in healthcare were lost, because far from being overwhelmed, the hospitals were mostly empty. As a matter of fact, in May, NPR ran a story with this headline about all those field hospitals that they built because of all the overflow that was supposedly going to happen. Headline: “US Field Hospitals Stand Down, Most without Treating Any COVID-19 Patients.” Hmm, what was going on here? The hospitals were never overwhelmed at any time, with the possible brief exception of New York City. In California, we began to see how the goalposts began to be changed. What they were worried about at the time they were telling us about flattening the curve was thirty thousand hospitalizations. We really have to be careful about hitting that number. The current hospitalization number in California as of this time—we’re in October 2020—is just over three thousand and they’re still so panicked that they won’t open anything. They’ll open a little tiny thing and you have to put your mask on in between bites while you’re eating at a restaurant. So, it’s one-tenth what they feared. There’s state after state after state. Washington, DC, not a state, but nevertheless, Washington, DC, that’s an example of one of many places in the US where the numbers all indicate, have indicated for months, that the state is clearly at the phase justifying reopening. The numbers clearly indicate, from what they said at the beginning—we need to reach such and such—well, they’ve reached it, and now they keep changing it. Now it’s not hospitalizations anymore, now it’s “cases” and as we’ll talk about, the way that testing is being done even the New York Times had to say Maybe your coronavirus test shouldn’t have been positive. Even the New York Times was reduced to admitting this—that as many as 90 percent of the tests, because the testing is so sensitive, are yielding just viral debris that isn’t infectious at all. But you’ve got to go and isolate yourself for X number of days for no reason. And we’re going to use this number, and we’re going to wait till this number hits zero, which even just given the problem of false positives is impossible. So, you can’t have your life back in some states unless you more or less take it back. That’s what they’ve done to us. Also, in Washington, DC, the public schools have been closed, but they put a cap of eleven students per room on private schools, no matter how big the room is. That basically cripples the private schools, for no reason. There’s no scientific basis for that. Then it became You can have your life back once there’s a vaccine. What? There might never be a vaccine. As Martin Kulldorff of Harvard Medical School puts it, “The timeline for a vaccine is anywhere between 6 months from now and never.” So, at some point, we have to figure out how to live with this kind of situation. Well then, when it started to look like maybe we might get a vaccine, then the story became Even with a vaccine, you can’t have your life back. And if you object to that, you’re the problem. You’re not listening to the science. Everything that brought people joy was abruptly taken away and every time it looked like it might creep back in, you get another headline about how you can’t have this back, you can’t have that back, this’ll never be the same, maybe we’ll never have sports again, maybe we’ll never do…And it’s almost like they take a perverse delight in this. Well, if ever there were a use of the expression “get bent,” I would say it’s right about now. Now, of course people will say, Wait a minute, what, do you just want people to die? Again, this is the intellectual level of the conversation. You just want people do die. How do you talk to somebody like that? So, in order to do that, I’m going to appeal to the above midwit-level population and I’m going to remind people of the important lesson in Henry Hazlitt’s great book Economics in One Lesson. This is a book that’s sold millions of copies and Hazlitt’s one lesson, as we all know in this room, is that if you’re going to evaluate an economic policy, it’s not enough to evaluate the short-term consequences for one earmarked group. Any blockhead can do that. If you want to know the long-term consequences or the real consequence of it, you look at the long-term effects on everybody, not the short-term effects on an earmarked group. For example, suppose the government taxes the public to build a stadium. Well, the midwit will simply point to the stadium and say, “Hey, look at this wonderful thing that the government did. It’s a stadium.” And yes, we can all see with our physical eyes that there’s a stadium there, but they think that’s the entirety of the analysis: a stadium has somehow appeared. There’s no thought of costs, opportunity costs, where the money came from, where it would have gone otherwise—none of that is even considered, because those things can’t be seen with your physical eyes. To understand the fullness of the policy, you have to be able to think and see with your mind’s eye. Likewise, with rent control people think, You impose rent control and people get lower rents, and that’s the entirety of the analysis as far as they’re concerned. There’s nothing further we need to consider. We just take these fat cats and just force them to lower rents, and then everybody gets lower rent and that’s, as far as the midwit is concerned, that’s the end of the discussion, because that’s what he sees with his physical eyes. But, for people capable of seeing with their mind’s eye, they ask other questions like, How many people are going to start building low-cost rental housing if they know that this ceiling has been imposed? There will obviously be far less housing built, which will make the problem of housing people worse. We also know that at these particular rates, you have a million people and surfeit of demand, so if you’re a landlord, you can be a jerk, you don’t have to fix that leaky pipe, you don’t have to do any maintenance, because if somebody’s upset about it, you got 8 million other people who would be very happy to take that person’s place. So, in other words, if you see with your mind’s eye, you understand that rent control is a lot more complicated than just Duh, we forced them to lower the rent and it’s low for everybody. And in fact, if, for some reason, you wanted to lower rents through the means of government impositions, you would actually want to do the exact opposite of rent control. You would want to control every single price in the entire economy except rents, because that would make entrepreneurs not want to go into the production of anything other than rental property because everything else would be unprofitable. The one thing they could produce would be rental property, which would lead to a collapse in rental prices, which would be great for everybody. So, literally the opposite of what these people recommend would be the best thing. But the point is, we have to think about all the consequences for everybody. Well, the same thing goes for public health, because my talk could be called “Public Health in One Lesson.” Because yes, if you simply focus monomaniacally on one virus, you might be able to say, Look at what we did for this one virus. You might be able to say that. I’m not even sure they can say that, but they might be able to say, Look what we’ve done for people with this one virus, and then, being midwits, they leave the discussion right there. They don’t bother to investigate
