A few months, at the start of the lockdowns, back I published an article about how the state mandated lockdowns were ravaging the lives of everyone, especially the poor. I further predicted that the longer the lockdowns went on, the worse things would become for everyone. Unfortunately, recent news has only proven me correct. Here I will review the situation as it stands today, review some other examples of pandemic response sin history for why they didn’t cause similar problems, and explore solutions to the problems that will benefit every person on the planet.
Starving The Poor – American Style
The prices of everything are rising, but perhaps the worst rise is in terms of the cost of food. And those prices are happening everywhere. There are multiple reasons for this. In the wake of the the government ordered lockdowns just about every place to eat outside the home shutdown. As people were now at home more they began to cook more, leading to a rise in the demand for groceries. But this isn’t really the whole cause, or even the most important cause for the rise in prices. The rise in prices comes from the devastation wrought by government polices that have hindered the transportation of food from the farms and ranches it is produced to the stores and markets where it is bought for consumption. Food is rotting and being destroyed because government orders have made it too expensive or impossible to get food to people. As a result, prices are rising and people are going hungry. Dr. James R. Harrigan and Dr. Antony Davies explain it this way:
In declaring some jobs “necessary” and others not, in focusing on one supply chain versus another, policymakers show how little they know about the nation’s economy. In their view, they can simply declare things they want to happen, and then those things will happen. But that is not how economies work. An economy is the sum total of everyone’s activities, and when the government declares that something must happen, all kinds of other things happen too.
Consider how all the “non-essential workers” have been sent home for the past two months. Who gets to declare which workers are non-essential to the economy, and by what standard? Most assumed that politicians had the correct answers to these questions. But, as we are discovering, there is no such thing as “non-essential” workers. All workers are essential. How do we know? Because their jobs existed. Profit-driven businesses do not create non-essential jobs. Those people’s jobs were essential to their employers. Further, those people’s jobs were incredibly essential to the people themselves. They need their wages to pay the rent, buy their food, make their car payments, and for everything else that makes their lives livable.
But policymakers simply declared them non-essential, as if there would be no fallout from that decision.
In the same way that each person is supposedly connected to every other by no more than six degrees of separation, each business is connected to every other in exactly the same way. We cannot declare one business “unnecessary” without, by extension, declaring unnecessary every other business that relies on it, and every business that relies on those businesses. Food is necessary, and because of that delivery trucks are necessary, and because of that engine fuses and wiper blades are necessary, and because of that plastic packaging in which fuses and blades are sold is necessary, and on and on. Our economy is not a series of individual supply chains. It is a single, unified supply web. Cut the web in any place and the whole structure weakens.
And politicians have been cutting the web in myriad ways since this began. And what has happened? Food is not being delivered, and now politicians wonder why. What they really need is a mirror and an introductory economics text.
The supply chain/web is collapsing all across the nation as “freight carriers are struggling to deliver goods by land, sea or air as the coronavirus pandemic forces Western governments to impose lockdowns, threatening supplies of vital products including medicines into the most affected areas[.]” The result of this has been devastating on American food prices and on American shoppers:
From February to June, meat and poultry prices rose nearly 11%, with beef and veal prices seeing the highest rise, spiking 20%. For pork the increase was about 8.5%. People are paying more for other staples, too: During the same time period, egg prices shot up 10%, and shoppers shelled out 4% more for cereals and fresh vegetables.
…On Thursday, the Department of Labor will release data that is expected to show that another 1.4 million workers filed for first-time unemployment benefits last week, which is similar to the prior week’s statistics. Meanwhile, unemployed Americans are losing a financial lifeline, as the government’s weekly $600 boost to regular jobless benefits ran out on July 31.Food insecurity in particular is a growing problem.
Nearly 30 million out of 249 million respondents told the US Census Bureau they did not have enough to eat at some point in the week before July 21 — the highest number of people reporting insufficient food since the Census started tracking that data in early May.
People all across the country are suffering as their ability to get food has shrunk dramatically because of artificially created, government mandated scarcity and its resultant price inflation:
Ruth Webb used to supplement her grocery shopping with a monthly trip to a local food pantry, where she would get fresh produce like potatoes, onions and carrots. “It would help out on the groceries,” said Webb, who lives in Benson, North Carolina. “Every once in a while there would be some instant mashed potatoes.” Then the coroanvirus hit, and safety precautions forced the food pantry to shutter its doors. …”There were times that — I don’t want my husband hearing this — I made sure he had food,” she said. “I just ate enough to keep going.”
Before the pandemic, there were an estimated 37.2 million Americans who were potentially food insecure, according to Katie Fitzgerald, chief operating officer of Feeding America, a national network of 200 food banks and 60,000 food pantries and meal programs. But the group projects that food insecurity will only worsen in the months ahead. “We believe that over the next 12 months we are looking at 54.3 million Americans who will be estimated to be food insecure,” Fitzgerald told CNN. “That’s 17 million more Americans, about a 46% increase.”
While it is likely that without state action that Covid-19 would have had a negative impact anyway, we know the reason things are this severe is tied directly to the lockdowns. We can see this in the published reports by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Information published by the BLS shows that every month since the lockdowns began (sometime in March depending on which state you live in) the price of food has increased by dramatic amounts. The first month there has been any decrease in prices was in July, though July’s decrease of .4 is still lesser than June’s increase of .6 which means overall that prices still rose by .2 in the last few months. This makes sense as many states began easing lockdown measures and/or lifting stay-at-home orders in mid-to-late May, the result of which would be an increase of production and transportation in June and a price reduction, even if a tepid and minimal one, in July. (And none of this even touches on the other ways that the lockdowns are killing people.)
But this is only America we are discussing, a generally wealthy nation nation where capitalist production, hobbled as it is, has led to greater food production and storage, which has allowed us to, for the time being, keep food costs lower than they could be. Elsewhere in the world the suffering caused by the lockdowns is even more astronomical and a lot more acute.
Starving The Poor – Worldwide
Oxfam is warning that if things continue this way then by “the end of the year 12,000 people per day could die from hunger linked to COVID-19, potentially more than will die from the disease itself.” They also provide an example of how state mandated lockdowns destroy the ability of the poor to provide for themselves and doom their children to suffering, starvation, and death:
“COVID-19 is causing us a lot of harm. Giving my children something to eat in the morning has become difficult,” said Kadidia Diallo, a female milk producer in Burkina Faso. “We are totally dependent on the sale of milk, and with the closure of the market we can’t sell the milk anymore. If we don’t sell milk, we don’t eat.”
Lori Hinnant and Sam Mednick, of the Associated Press, describe how this horrible possibility of the lockdowns has already become a nightmarish reality for some people:
Hunger is already stalking Haboue Solange Boue, an infant who has lost half her former body weight of 5.5 pounds (2.5 kilograms) in the last month. With the markets closed because of coronavirus restrictions, her family sold fewer vegetables. Her mother is too malnourished to nurse her.
“My child,” Danssanin Lanizou whispers, choking back tears as she unwraps a blanket to reveal her baby’s protruding ribs. The infant whimpers soundlessly.
All around the world, the coronavirus and its restrictions are pushing already hungry communities over the edge, cutting off meager farms from markets and isolating villages from food and medical aid. Virus-linked hunger is leading to the deaths of 10,000 more children a month over the first year of the pandemic, according to an urgent call to action from the United Nations shared with The Associated Press ahead of its publication in the Lancet medical journal.
The UN estimates that as many as 132 million more people are estimated to be in danger of starving to death and that food stocks in some parts of the world are already empty or nearly so. And that doesn’t include those whose livelihood has been decimated by the lockdowns ordered in response to the virus. As UN Chief Economist for the World Food Program Dr. Arif Husain explains it:
“COVID-19 is potentially catastrophic for millions who are already hanging by a thread. It is a hammer blow for millions more who can only eat if they earn a wage. Lockdowns and global economic recession have already decimated their nest eggs. It only takes one more shock – like COVID-19 – to push them over the edge. We must collectively act now to mitigate the impact of this global catastrophe.”
In another interview, Dr. Husain explains in even more detail how state mandated lockdowns destroy the lives of the poor and reduce them to starvation:
I’m talking about low- and middle-income countries. And, within these countries, think about people who work in the informal sector—that’s the service sector, the manufacturing sector. Think of the garment industry in Bangladesh, for example. Think of the mining industry in Zambia. People in these sectors usually are already living hand to mouth—if they don’t work, they don’t eat, their families don’t eat. Now, suddenly, they have a situation where they’re not only dealing with losses of tourism and things like that but also lockdowns. So the combination of these two things means that their purchasing power very, very, very quickly is gone. And that’s the “people” side of this crisis.
…If you’re going to do lockdowns, then you need to make sure that you are able to help people who are in the lockdowns, so they don’t have to make these tough choices, to see themselves and their children starving in the lockdown or to try to go out and earn a living.
…I will keep on saying this: things like export bans, things like import subsidies—experience after experience has shown that they are counterproductive and they always backfire. And, in the interconnected world, it’s never a good policy to starve your neighbor, because you’re dependent on them. If not for food, you’re dependent on them for something else. And why is that so important right now? It is because the last thing you want to do is to artificially increase prices of things, because that then triggers panic buying and all of that. And while your purchasing power is so suppressed, because of millions upon millions of job losses, countries should not even think about it. So, in the global world right now, we need coordinated policies. And, if we have that, we minimize some of this pain. If we don’t do that, we are going to exacerbate an already very, very, very difficult situation.
…The real solution is when affordable testing and treatment is available to everybody. But, until that time, we need to make sure that we are saving people’s lives and we are saving people’s livelihoods. So, if you start closing borders, you’ll obviously disrupt the supply chains. You’re going to lose more lives, and you’re going to have a bigger cost, and that cost is not only to one nation—it is going to be across the world.
Dr. Husain here lays out some basic facts that should scandalize people on the Left and Right of the political spectrum. the first quoted paragraph lays out exactly how lockdowns destroy the ability of people to take care of their family and throws them into extreme poverty and starvation. The second quoted paragraph very specifically says that children will starve because of the lockdowns. This immediately should shut up every single Leftist calling for more lockdowns or portraying lockdowns as the only safe or humane solution. The exact opposite is true. Then the next two quoted sections destroy Rightist support for tariffs and trade barriers. All they do is cause more suffering, both for the country with the barriers and all those who trade with them. Trade barriers ensure more of your own people suffer, starve, and die. The lockdown polices -both domestic and international- are destroying the lives of the very people they are supposedly supposed to be protecting. To continue to demand any of these kind of polices is only to insist that you either hate poor starving people, including those in your own native land, and want them to die or that you do not care if they do as long as you get to impose your will on the world.
The governments of the world are starving their people to death.
The Alternative
The first thing is to realize that not only are the lockdowns horrific, but they’re also unnecessary. They do not do anything we have been promised they should do in terms of saving peoples lives from the virus or preventing its spread as Dr. Thomas Meunier explains in this paper evaluating the lockdowns and their effect on the ultimate spread of Covid-19:
This phenomenological study assesses the impacts of full lockdown strategies applied in Italy, France,Spain and United Kingdom, on the slowdown of the2020 COVID-19 outbreak. Comparing the trajectory of the epidemic before and after the lockdown, we find no evidence of any discontinuity in the growth rate, doubling time, and reproduction number trends.Extrapolating pre-lockdown growth rate trends, we provide estimates of the death toll in the absence of any lockdown policies, and show that these strategies might not have saved any life in western Europe. We also show that neighboring countries applying less restrictive social distancing measures (as opposed to police-enforced home containment) experience a very similar time evolution of the epidemic.
In short, you simply cannot crush society long enough to develop a cure for such a disease, if such a treatment is even possible. Eventually you must open up and the virus will inevitably spread in similar ways, no matter what country you’re in. The only thing you can truly do it try and mitigate it by encouraging people to learn and practice basic precautions. Then you have to let people live their lives and build herd immunity. Those most at risk will protect themselves as necessary. Individuals know best what they need to do based on their lifestyle and where they live. And trying to force what you think are the best precautions on them is only going to cause them to rebel against you and resist doing anything at all. When you politicize something by using political power to try and make it happen the natural, inevitable result is that people will resist where they wouldn’t have if you had use persuasion over compulsion.
This is why there is a whole masking controversy right now. Aside from the issue that science is a lot messier than people treat it, the major reason people are resisting masking in the US is because they feel that it violates their individual liberty to be forced by the government to wear one. And they aren’t wrong there. But why is that even a concern? Because the government is forcing them to do it. And it isn’t just in the US- virus lockdowns have become the justification for true totalitarianism across the planet as state police forces beat and murder anyone who even looks like they might violate lockdown orders. Closer to home, people have been imprisoned for exercising basic natural and legally guaranteed human rights all across the country. The fear that the loss of freedom and the growth of brutality to enforce state mandates isn’t irrational when you can see it happening throughout the world and in your own country. But people wouldn’t be resisting, wouldn’t need to resist, wouldn’t feel the desire to resist if force wasn’t an element to begin with. Social conformity alone is an incredibly powerful tool if it would be allowed to function without having to compete with other more powerful urges, such as the preservation of human liberty, and would ensure most everyone would wear a mask whether they privately liked it or believed in their efficacy or not.
In terms of economics, the Mises Institute’s Ryan McMaken has an excellent article on the 1918 and 1985 pandemics and why they didn’t destroy the economy in the same way that Covid-19, a far less dangerous illness, has today. (I’ll give you a hint: There were no lockdowns for either the 1918 or 1958 pandemics.) Dr. Richard Ebeling, has a great in depth article looking at what we have to do in the long term to repair the damage the lockdowns have done and reverse the tide of human suffering they’ve caused in the world. Today the real hope here is that fear, ignorance, and medical delusions will not lead to more lockdowns in an impossible effort to stop the spread of the inevitable second wave of virus (as opposed to sanely managing care for those most at risk while the rest of us live our lives and build herd immunity) which in turn would lead to even greater rises in prices and millions of more people losing their jobs. There are some hopeful signs that this may be the way we are moving. But it isn’t enough to merely ease lockdowns, not if we really want to make things better. To do that we have to reverse the idiotic decisions that have already been made and reopen society immediately. Totally and completely. Not in a month. Not next week. Not tomorrow. Now. The sooner we do so, the sooner we reduce the world’s suffering and save lives.
And we absolutely should hold those politicians who enforced them accountable before earthly tribunals for the mass evils they have wrought. In parents can be held accountable for starving their children, even when they claim they didn’t mean to do so, then politicians should likewise be held accountable for the millions they will slaughter through starvation, whether they “meant to do it” or not. It is only a sign of the sick, brainwashed mentality we have towards the government and those in power that so many would rather watch children starve to death in what amounts to one mass human sacrifice to preserve the apparatus of the state than save potentially millions of lives by ending the lockdowns now, no matter what. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t hope. The active mass protests and riots both signal that the populaces of nations across the world are tired of this abuse and demonstrates the ability of the people to completely upend the supposed power of the state when we act together. These illegal and inhumane lockdowns, and the deaths caused by them, will continue only as long as we allow them. I pray that we make the right choice and end them not later, not sooner, but now, and to Hell with the politicians and the lies they tell.