The Coming Post-COVID Reckoning
There will be a price to be paid for the poor epidemic response and its effects
As we come to the 1 year anniversary of “15 days to stop the spread”, it is appropriate to reflect on our world has changed in that year. All over the world in the past year, most of us are poorer with a worse quality of life, even if we have not contracted the disease. Many of us around the world know someone who has died from this virus. Civil liberties have been curtailed all over the world. In short, it has been a miserable year for the average person.
But it hasn’t been a terrible year for everyone. We have written here how many of our politicians and other government officials have exempted themselves from their own COVID mitigation rules. The world’s wealthiest people have managed to get even wealthier. Amazon head Jeff Bezos in particular has managed to become much wealthier as people around the world turned to his company in order to maintain something resembling a decent quality of life while locked down.
There will be a reckoning for the politicians that destroyed so many livelihoods with so little evidence to support it in the name of public health. There has to be a reckoning for the politicians who utterly failed in one of their basic jobs, which is not to make a pandemic worse through their policies. There must be a reckoning for those politicians who used this crisis to expand their own power and reward their friends in the name of relief.
In some ways, there already have been people punished because of the coronavirus. Donald Trump’s defeated bid for reelection was likely caused in part because of his administration’s mishandling of the COVID epidemic.
As for New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, here’s Hannah Cox at FEE describing his failures:
New York Governor, Andrew Cuomo, has been heralded by the media as the hero of the pandemic and even received an Emmy and a lucrative book deal for his performance as a politician who cared about his people.
While Governor Cuomo is admittedly smooth on camera, time has revealed he is an atrocious leader whose policies got people killed in more ways than one.
At the height of the pandemic, Cuomo’s administration forced nursing homes to accept sick patients— a response likely influenced by their overflowing public hospitals. As industry experts warned, nursing homes did not have the capacity to both house these patients and prevent the spread of the disease in their facilities, leading to an outbreak among vulnerable populations that killed seniors in droves.
To make matters worse, Cuomo’s office then worked to suppress the true number of nursing home deaths, and advocated legislation that prevents victims of its policies from suing facilities over the deaths of their loved ones.
Well, karma is apparently coming for Andrew Cuomo. As of writing, three women have accused him of sexual harassment. It is impossible to see how Cuomo survives this given his own logic.
What about those who haven’t come up for reelection yet? Their time is coming as I pointed out in a very good conversation on Twitter (yeah, I know how weird that sounds).
Their time will come. Just today Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) released her wealth tax plan.
A wealth tax is a very popular idea. It’s also a very bad idea. For example, it is very easy to take wealth offshore in order to avoid a wealth tax.
The point is that populist progressives like Warren and Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) know that people are angry out there. They saw wealthy, politically-connected elites become richer while they became locked down and poorer. Those of us who embrace free markets need to realize this and come up with our own answers to a justifiably angry people.
What should we propose? We have to be strong opponents of cronyism. The reason why politically-connected elites have profited off of the coronavirus is because of their connections to the government. We need to sever those ties wherever possible.
We also need to propose measures to genuinely help people instead of destructive ideas. We should champion things such as the negative income tax instead of the bureaucratic mess of welfare programs we have now. Most people who need help could use some cash more than seeing a paper-pushing bureaucrat.
We also need to champion free-market solutions to serious problems such as the high cost of housing and daycare. We also need to reform our healthcare system in a market-friendly fashion. Finally, we need to be champions of cleaner, cheaper, and more reliable energy.
Most importantly, we need to make sure this hell never happens again. We should never go through the destruction of the past 12 months ever again.