Tag Archives: covid

Like Covid lockdowns, a tariff recession would punish and reward the wrong companies

Equity markets continued to sell of Monday morning as Trump economic advisor Peter Navarro told CNBC that even a 0% tariff offer from Vietnam would not be enough for the Trump administration to change its tariff policy toward that country.

“Let’s take Vietnam. When they come to us and say ‘we’ll go to zero tariffs,’ that means nothing to us because it’s the nontariff cheating that matters,” said Navarro.

Non-tariff cheating refers to subsidizing domestic manufacturers, currency manipulation, and other measures designed to give a country’s domestic producers an advantage over potential exporters to that country.

Navarro’s comments seem to indicate the administration is committed to maintaining tariffs not only until trading partners lower or eliminate their own, but rather until no trade deficit at all exists between the U.S. and that country. This means that even countries with a natural comparative advantage in some export – or no need for many potential U.S. imports – may see U.S. importers of their products taxed indefinitely.

Stock market selloffs don’t always mean a recession is imminent, but they usually precede one. And to the extent that the input costs may be artificially higher for not only importers of finished goods but also of components for products manufactured in the U.S., a recession would be natural result.

While recessions are always painful those who go out of business or lose their jobs, they can be healthy for the economy as a whole in terms of liquidating malinvestment. According to the Austrian theory of the business cycle, recessions are the market’s way of redirecting unproductive deployments of capital to product ends. The mistakes are made during the artificial boom caused by monetary inflation by the central bank.

Artificially low interest rates and an overabundance of currency mislead entrepreneurs into expanding production more than real savings will support or investing in ventures that would not be profitable at all under natural market circumstances. The market eventually forces these mistakes to be acknowledged, and entrepreneurs must make the necessary adjustments – cutting production or filing for bankruptcy – so that the misallocated capital can flow to profitable projects.

Since all this takes time, recessions are painful. But at the end, capital is redirected towards better use instead of continuing to be wasted on unprofitable endeavors.

The problem with the tariff recession, if there is one, is that it is not being driven by natural market forces. As with Covid lockdowns, it is being imposed by government edict and therefore, also like Covid lockdowns, it has the potential to do the opposite of what a market-driven recession would do.

Read the rest on Tom’s Substack…

Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

Job Creation Still Hasn’t Recovered from the Useless Covid Lockdowns

“Dow closes at record high after blow-out jobs report” proclaimed NBC News on Saturday. It is not surprising the story would ignore all historical perspective, even history within the past few months. Incumbent presidents routinely take credit for job creation during their administrations and the gullible American public largely believes them. Perceived as prospectively continuing the policies of the Biden administration, good news from the jobs report helps Kamala Harris’s election chances.

It isn’t just ignoring that only two months ago, the Bureau of Labor statistics revised downward their previously reported number April 2023 – March 2024 by over 800,000 jobs (around 27 percent)*. It’s the surreal practice of even talking about supposed job creation over the past four years as if most of it weren’t just recovering jobs lost during the 2020 Covid lockdowns.

During March and April of 2020, the BLS reported net job losses of almost 22 million. Of course, these were not the type of job losses sustained during the 2008 financial crisis. These were people ordered to stay home by the government as part of a suite of responses to Covid that did nothing but harm.

As people were allowed to go back to work, there were several months for which the BLS reported millions of “jobs created.” But everyone understood these were mostly just people previously ordered to stay home returning to work. At least while Trump was still president.

But once Joe Biden was inaugurated, the national media started ignoring that reality and treating higher than usual jobs reports as vindication of “Bidenomics.” The truth is it took years just to recover the number of jobs lost during March-April 2020. The 22 million jobs reported lost during that period were not added back until September 2022.

That’s 31 straight months of zero jobs created on net while millions of undocumented mouths to feed entered the country. That is an economic blow the likes of which modern Americans have never experienced in their lifetimes. And the problems it created were by no means solved after September 2022 when the economy finally began adding new jobs on net. One cannot just start counting jobs created after September 2022 as “net jobs.” One also has to recognize the opportunity costs of the lockdowns.

Read the rest on Tom’s Substack…

Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupidand Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness? 

Comprehensive Study on Government Covid Policies Concludes They Did Nothing (but harm)

As Covid authoritarians attempt to weasel out of accountability for the destruction they visited upon American society, new data continue to suggest Covid “conspiracy theorists” were right all along. A comprehensive study published in Science this month by Standford Professor of Medicine Eran Bendavid and Harvard Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics Chirag Patel was no exception. The study made use of “daily data on 16 government responses in 181 countries in 2020–2021, and 4 outcomes—cases, infections, COVID-19 deaths, and all-cause excess deaths—to construct 99,736 analytic models” and concluded, “we find no patterns in the overall set of models that suggests a clear relationship between COVID-19 government responses and outcomes.”

In case the sanitized, academic language reduces the impact of that statement, allow me to translate it into plain English: the maniac bureaucrats who run most civilized countries shut down society for over a year, destroyed small businesses, kept loved ones from visiting dying parents and grandparents, permanently damaged an entire school-aged generation, loosed the worst inflation upon the public in fifty years, and transferred trillions of dollars in wealth to the richest one percent of society and it was all for nothing.

All. For. Nothing.

The study is only concerned with whether the measures affected Covid outcomes. It does not consider the societal effects of the measures. But no one needs a clinical study for that. Neither do the perpetrators of this crime against humanity substantively deny the negative fallout from the Covid Regime. That’s why disgraced former New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo was out doing media hits claiming lockdowns and other mandates were “really all voluntary,” while his idiot brother Fredo calls for a government commission to investigate the responses.

Cuomo has since been called before a Congressional committee to answer questions about his handling of nursing home Covid patients. Cuomo infamously ordered New York nursing homes to admit patients who tested positive for Covid, allegedly causing the deaths of over 15,000 nursing home residents. In a vacuum, this is a good thing. If 15,000 people died who otherwise might not have, there should be accountability.

But too much focus on this ostensible error is a distraction from the main issue: neither politicians nor the government’s bureaucrat “experts” should have had the power to do any of what they did during 2020-21 – which again accomplished nothing.

Many of these petty tyrants are now hiding behind the excuse, “We didn’t know a lot in 2020 and 2021; now, we know more.” There are two problems with that.

Read the rest at Tom’s Substack…

Read the rest at Tom’s Patreon…

Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupidand Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness? 

Why Democrats Weren’t Punished in the Midterms for Covid Tyranny

The biggest news coming out of the midterm elections is the failure of the Republican Party to win a more decisive victory. They had predicted a “red wave” since well back into 2021 (an immediate reason to be skeptical) but will at best have a modest advantage in the House and a razor thin majority in the Senate.

Not only were the Republicans denied a resounding victory, but the Democrats did better in a first term midterm election than either party has while holding the White House in decades. There is no denying this was a good night for the Democrats.

This has many scratching their heads. This election was supposed to be, at least in large part, a referendum on the massive damage done to the American economy and society in general by Covid tyranny imposed by Democrats. “Never forget what they did to you” said many a meme on social media in the days before the election, especially after Emily Oster’s infamous plea for amnesty.

There is only one problem with that narrative. Covid lockdowns and other mandates were, with a few notable exceptions, largely bipartisan.

Where resistance won

Where it was possible for Covid lockdowns to be put on the ballot, they were. Governor Kristi Noem, who never locked down her state a single day in 2020, improved upon her three-point victory in 2018 with a thirty-point trouncing of her Democratic rival on Tuesday.

During her victory speech, she said, “Here in South Dakota, we protected your constitutional rights. I trusted in you to use personal responsibility and take care of each other.” The vote totals speak for themselves.

The less libertarian but more well-known Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida also won in a landslide in traditionally purple Florida. Desantis was elected by a razor thin margin in 2018. As governor, he famously convened a panel of non-government epidemiologists in September 2020 and dropped all Covid restrictions based on their televised recommendations.

Governors Gregg Abbot of Texas and Kim Reynolds of Iowa, both of whom dropped Covid restrictions in early 2021, were re-elected by comfortable margins. Senator Rand Paul, who grilled Fauci during multiple congressional appearances, also won easily.

By contrast, Republican Lee Zeldin, whom some polling indicated had a real chance to defeat incumbent Democrat Kathy Hochul in deep blue New York, didn’t really compete on Tuesday. He was forced to campaign mostly on traditional Republican tough-on-crime talking points because that’s all he could do. He certainly couldn’t run a strident anti-lockdown campaign after failing to question lockdowns at all during 2020.

Read the rest on Tom’s Patreon…

Read the rest on Tom’s Substack…

Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

Due Process, Not ‘Amnesty’

It is one week until the U.S. mid-term elections and some members of the Regime seem worried that, for once, elections might actually have consequences. The smart money still says that if there is a “red wave” on November 8, Republicans will enter Congress next January and do precisely nothing about what has happened to the American people over the past 32 months. Criticism of the Ukraine War is as likely to be of the “Biden is not tough enough on Putin” variety as it is cutting off the Ukraine Gravy Train to Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.

Still, there are some signs insiders are worried something different may be afoot, as demonstrated by the plea for “amnesty” in The Atlantic by Covid Regime propagandist Emily Oster. According to this alternative reality take, “We need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID.”

No, “we” need do no such thing. The lies, tyranny, and aggression all ran one way during the pandemic – towards those who, it turns out, were never “in the dark.” Whether those mandating lockdowns, masks, and later vaccines were honestly mistaken – “mistaken” seems wholly inadequate here – or acting in bad faith and with malice aforethought should be the subject of a formal investigation.

We have been subjected to six straight years of investigations into hoaxes and hobgoblins, from the nonexistent “Russa collusion” to the inconsequential Ukrainian “quid quo pro” to the farcical “insurrection.” It is past time for an investigation into the real crimes against humanity perpetrated against the American people under the pretense of fighting Covid-19.

Such an investigation would include sworn testimony as to the origins of the virus itself, whether or not data supporting lockdowns and vaccine mandates were knowingly corrupted and/or whether data contraindicating same were knowingly suppressed.

The existence of alternative treatments for Covid would have legally prohibited the issuance of any Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for the Covid vaccines, developed in record time under the government program known as “Operation Warp Speed.” Were alternative treatments prohibited and their proponents deplatformed to ensure these EUAs could be issued? Did people die who otherwise could have been successfully treated had these alternative treatments been made available?

These questions need to be answered. Both Anthony Fauci and his co-conspirators along with deplatformed experts like Robert Malone, M.D. and Peter MCullough, M.D. must be put under oath and questioned, preferably on live television so the American public can judge for themselves who is telling the truth and who is not.

Throughout 2021, Rep. Thomas Massie publicly asked the CDC to change information on its website indicating the Pfizer mRNA vaccine was effective for those previously infected with Covid-19 because the FDA’s review of Pfizer’s clinical trial data clearly showed it wasn’t (pg. 30). To this writer’s knowledge CDC website was never corrected. The Pfizer vaccine was among those later mandated by President Biden for large swaths of the U.S. workforce.

Massie, those he spoke with at the CDC, and the person(s) responsible for refusing to correct the false claims must be put under oath and questioned. If fraud was committed, charges should follow.

These are just a few of the egregious lies, distortions, and obfuscations perpetrated against the public in support of the Covid Regime. Studies in support of the government mandates were intentionally flawed. Even the integrity of the data has been called into question. Both freedom and the future of science itself depend upon these issues being settled once and for all via an adversarial process with penalties for lying.

The government response to Covid-19 was the most egregious assault on liberty in modern history. Hundreds of thousands of businesses closed forever. The U.S. economy is approximately 5 million jobs short of the number that would have been created to employ its growing population had the lockdowns never occurred.

An as yet unknown number of people died as a direct result of lockdowns and vaccine mandates. That number must be established and those responsible for the deaths held accountable if the investigation shows they acted in bad faith.

We are constantly regaled with the vapid, “we must ensure this never happens again” after a mass shooting or other tragedy, always in support of new government power that will punish the innocent and do nothing to achieve the stated goal.

For once, that hackneyed appeal is appropriate. What must never happen again is the dystopian nightmare visited upon Americans by their federal, state, and local governments over the past two years. The only way to ensure that is to hold those responsible for it accountable. It is time for due process, not amnesty.

Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

Stop calling the media “the corporate press”

It is not an exaggeration to say Americans were terrorized by their federal, state, and municipal governments during the Covid pandemic. Never before had society been locked down so brutally and for so long as during 2020-21. Not during the Spanish flu, where business closures in my hometown lasted three weeks. Not during the 1968 flu pandemic, which killed a significantly larger percentage of the population of the time.

Every step of the way, from “two weeks to flatten the curve” to “you better hold off on Christmas” to “maybe a small gathering on July 4 (2021), if you’re vaccinated,” the media stood in lockstep with the totalitarian state, uncritically repeating its lies and endorsing its edicts.

The media lied about every aspect of the Covid pandemic, including the virus itself, the government’s mitigation measures, and the vaccines. They continue to lie every day for as long as each lie can maintain the faintest plausibility, after which it is quietly surrendered, waiting for resurrection after the amnesiac public forgets.

Anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear has seen the transition from “Covid emergency” to “climate emergency” coming from a mile and two years away. And unlike Covid, the climate emergency won’t end.

This carries far graver implications than merely which septuagenarian Boomer occupies the White House. These lies are being used to manufacture acquiescence to an attack on civilization itself. Anyone who participates in such a scheme to subjugate the people en masse can only be described with one word: “enemy.” Touché, Donald Trump. You were right about that.

Thus, it is understandable to want to alert people to the fact the media is not their friend. Many, even “good libertarians,” have taken to calling the media “the corporate press.” This isn’t just unhelpful to the public. It’s counterproductive to freedom.

First, let’s consider what information is conveyed to the public when the word “corporate” is added to “press.” Regardless of intention, the overwhelming majority of people hear: “privately owned and operating for profit.” The problem with the media is they are for profit enterprises that are not owned or at least more heavily regulated by the government.

This is an anti-capitalist message the public is unfortunately too ready to embrace. But it’s neither true nor particularly helpful to encourage their belief that seeking profits is fundamentally at odds with the good of society. It’s just one more confirmation to those already so inclined that seeking profits in any undertaking is fundamentally problematic.

Libertarians may say that is not their intention, but what exactly is their intention? Do they really know? When asked, many will reply that “corporations are creatures of the state.” True enough. But they’re not referring to the guy who fixes their sink as “the corporate plumber” or the place they buy their groceries the “corporate grocer.” Yet both are almost certainly incorporated in the states wherein they operate.

Businesses aren’t incorporated for the same reasons they were hundreds of years ago. At one time, corporate status and its privileges – often a government-enforced monopoly – was granted because of a supposed “public benefit” derived from allowing the company to incorporate.

Today, companies incorporate mainly to limit liability and protect the owners from runaway juries in government-run courts. Creditors of today’s corporations enter relationships with the firms in full knowledge the shareholders’ personal assets are protected from liability. And while it is true third parties who never agreed to such release can be harmed and may have a natural right to seek compensation from the shareholders, they would never get the awards from corporations they get in government courts in any conceivable private court system.

Regardless, the media’s corporate status is no more relevant to their malfeasance over the past several years than malfeasance in any other business.

Another common excuse for the “corporate press” moniker is to point to the business relationships between the media and other corporations and call them “bought off” or words to that effect. Pharmaceutical companies, for example, spends billions on national TV advertising. Critics point to this and say it affected the way media reported on the Covid vaccines. “That’s why I call them the corporate press,” they say.

This is just another argument for why the free market doesn’t work. Certainly, in an anarcho-capitalist society, there would be no restrictions at all on this type of relationship and there wouldn’t be much more, if any, in a laissez faire minarchist society. This has nothing to do with the media being “corporate” and the antidote is not them being something else. The antidote is competition.

If the problem is a lack of competition, that also has nothing to do with the press being “corporate” and everything to do with the New Deal regulatory state, which decides which media is allowed to broadcast and which isn’t. Calling the media “the corporate press” distracts the public’s attention away from the government and misdirects the blame towards the private sector.

But honestly, there is plenty of competition, all the establishment’s attempts at “deplatforming” notwithstanding. The public holds the ultimate power here in simply refusing to consume – or fund – the establishment media. Everyone who objects to the content offered on cable television is free to cancel their cable subscription. Likewise their newspaper or other media subscriptions. Imposing this market discipline in lieu of complaining will do far more to change behavior.

In case you haven’t noticed, the one, common characteristic of the enviro-nazi, medical totalitarianism, and anti-western culture movements is their anti-capitalism. By some strange “coincidence,” the only solution to the supposed problems each of these seeks to solve is less capitalism. And regardless of any pedantic arguments to justify the expression, when people hear “corporate press” they hear “capitalist press,” period.

Referring to the media as “the corporate press” encourages all the bad instincts in the public that inspire them to go along with every incursion into our freedom. Let’s come up with a better pejorative.   

Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

Will Americans ever stop believing Washington’s lies?

Anyone inclined to question their federal and state governments, the national media, and corporate America – aka, “the establishment” – wonders how much longer the American public can possibly go on believing what they’re told. The long-suspected “liberal bias” of the media has morphed into outright falsehoods told the public about Covid-19, Ukraine, “climate change,” and a host of other issues.

One after another, previous narratives enforced by de-platforming dissenters has crumbled, although the establishment seeks to cling to as much of the previous narrative as minimally plausible.

For example, natural immunity to Covid was at first ignored as if it didn’t exist at all. Then, it was reported as waning faster than vaccine immunity. Once it was undeniable that natural immunity was broader, more robust, and more durable than vaccine immunity, the focus was shifted to the superiority of vaccine immunity and natural immunity together over merely natural immunity.

Why at that point were people with only natural immunity excluded from participating in large swaths of civil society while those with only the inferior vaccine immunity not excluded? A few people screamed about it; most did not. The dissenters were censored or simply drowned out by establishment information.

A particularly egregious lie perpetrated throughout 2020 and 2021 was that immunity to previous infection no longer existed after antibodies were no longer detected in the blood. Forty years after my last biology course, I knew this had to be wrong. Doesn’t the body remember previous infection even after antibodies disappear from the blood?

Of course it does. It’s called T-cell and B-cell immunity. B-cells produce new antibodies upon new exposure to the same virus and T-cells kill infected cells directly. This is not new or controversial information. But even now, people seem to operate on the assumption that immunity from previous infection ends once antibodies are no longer detected in the blood. The establishment does everything it can to encourage this false belief.

Then, there are the “safe and effective” vaccines themselves. Americans were told by no less than the president himself, in addition to presumably more reliable sources, that the vaccines would keep them from getting infected with and spreading Covid. When that untruth was no longer defensible, the establishment tried to tell us they had never said any such thing, that the vaccines would only prevent serious illness from infection.

This begged the question of why, if they did not prevent infection and transmission, the vaccines would be mandated for employment and/or admission into publicly accessible spaces. If the risk to others is the same with or without the vaccines, what is the justification for the mandates?

Again, a few people asked; most did not.

Now, evidence is mounting that the vaccine is not only ineffective, but not as safe as previously advertised. Certainly, it is important to question all claims about the vaccines, positive and negative. The theory that Covid vaccines are a plot to depopulate the earth don’t seem to jibe with reality. But neither does the claim they are completely safe.

Alex Berenson was recently reinstated on Twitter following settlement of his lawsuit for de-platforming based on his reporting on all the lies of the Covid Regime, including the exaggerated danger of the disease itself, the ineffectiveness of the nonpharmaceutical interventions (lockdowns, mask mandates, etc.), and the ineffectiveness and danger of the Covid vaccines. Had the company been able to definitively disprove any of his reporting, no settlement would have been made.

“Promoter of misinformation” Steve Kirsch is willing to pay any “doctor, professor of medicine, epidemiologist, or public health official anywhere in the world” $50,000 to demonstrate on camera where his information on vaccine deaths is incorrect. There have been no takers.

Kirsch recently presented evidence from multiple sources of massive spikes in daily deaths five months after significant vaccine rollouts.
 

Read the rest at Tom’s Patreon…

Read the rest at Tom’s Substack…

Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

Forget recession, what is the definition of “dystopia?”

NBC, ABC, and CBS today all feature stories about the FBI returning Donald Trump’s passports, seized in its August 8 raid on Mar-a-Lago. This just four days after the Washington Post reported that federal agents were looking for “nuclear documents” among the boxes of materials taken from the White House during the raid.

Wait. Both those statements can’t be true, can they? Is it really plausible the Justice Department genuinely believes or ever believed there are nuclear secrets among the documents taken from Mar-a-Lago but was willing to return Trump’s passports just a few days later?

It has now been eight days since the raid. Were there “nuclear documents” among the materials seized or not? Certainly, the Justice Department knows the answer to that question. Why has no reporter asked?

If there were a genuine national security threat to the United States among those papers, the government would have known it within hours of taking possession of them. It would have assigned as many agents as necessary to review the documents and confirm or deny the threat immediately. Had a genuine threat of that magnitude been confirmed, a flurry of other national security activity would have been reported in the days since the raid.

It isn’t just that the government and its media apparatus got it wrong or provided information that turned out to be inaccurate later. They lied. They said things they knew at the time they said them weren’t true and continue to do so.

On Friday, Newsweek reported that the former president was “digging his legal hole “deeper and deeper” by calling the reporting on nuclear documents “a hoax,” according to legal expert Glenn Kirschner, a former federal prosecutor,

Kirschner was lying, too. First, being a former prosecutor, Kirschner is well aware that statements Trump makes to the media when not under oath cannot damage him legally. More important, Kirschner knew that if there were anything of consequence among the seized documents, Trump wouldn’t be at liberty to post his statement on Truth Social.

He wouldn’t be at liberty at all.

The “digging his legal hole deeper and deeper” statement smacks of the avalanche of headlines 2017-19 indicating that Special Counsel Robert Mueller was “closing in” on Trump for conspiring with Russia to influence the 2016 presidential election. Week after week, month after month, “anonymous sources” confirmed the latest strand in the rope that would hang Trump had been woven into place.

Mueller was never “closing in on Trump.” The media that reported he was knew it. The “anonymous sources” claiming to leak inside information of the investigation knew it. And deep down, a large portion of the public who wanted to believe Trump was a Russian agent, knew it, too.

Yet, they all kept saying it in unison.

Like “recession,” there may not be one, official definition of “dystopia.” But a society in which every public institution, along with a good percentage of the population, not only regularly repeats assertions they know to be false but persecutes anyone who dissents is at least in the ballpark. When the lies form the bases for coercive government policies, then, like two quarters of negative GDP indicating a recession, you have a “good rule of thumb.”

It certainly doesn’t matter what “dystopia experts” say.

Read the rest on Tom’s Patreon…

Read the rest on Tom’s Substack…

Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

True federalism would have prevented Covid lockdowns

In one sense, the Covid-19 era revitalized American federalism. While every U.S. state except South Dakota at first followed the advice of the federal government’s various national public health agencies and their spokesman, Anthony Fauci, M.D., eventually more and more diversity began to emerge in the way individual states responded to the virus.

In September of 2020, after televising a roundtable of non-government scientists from Harvard and Stanford, Governor Ron DeSantis reopened Florida completely and banned local jurisdictions from fining people for noncompliance with mask mandates.

Observing the political gains DeSantis enjoyed from lifting restrictions and the absence of disaster predicted by all opposed to DeSantis politically, Iowa’s governor lifted all restrictions in February 2021, followed closely by Gov. Abbot of Texas the following month.

While states with Republican governors trumpet their states as “free states” due to generally less severe and shorter-lived lockdowns, and proponents of decentralization from across the political spectrum point to this as a triumph of local government, federalism completely failed in the most important respect. Every United States citizen, regardless of the decisions of their state and local elected leaders, is being forced to pay for lockdowns equally.

Although Covid relief was federally funded, it wasn’t paid for with higher taxes. It would have been impossible to collect more taxes from a society producing considerably less wealth. Instead, the money was created by the Federal Reserve and handed out through programs created by the CARES Act and subsequent legislation.

We are feeling the effects of that money creation combined with decreased production now. Although his Republican critics would like to blame President Biden for rising prices today (and he has certainly contributed to them, especially energy prices), the majority of the spending authorized and new money created occurred while Trump was still in office.

M1 showed the supply of dollars at $4 trillion in February 2020. It was $16 trillion by May 2020 and $18 trillion when Trump left office in January 2021. It was just over $20 trillion as of January 2022.

President Biden, on the other hand, has largely failed to get most of the spending he wanted beyond an early Covid relief bill similar in size to the CARES Act. However, due to the mechanics of the way money gets spent by the federal government after it is appropriated by Congress, even much of the money appropriated in 2020 wasn’t spent until 2021.

That and the general lag between new money creation and the resulting rise in consumer prices is why price inflation only began in earnest in 2021. But this is not to lay the blame at Trump’s or Biden’s doorstep. Rather, it was the very bipartisan departure from reality, including by most the American public, that a large percentage of the economy could be turned off while people went on consuming as they did before.

Many otherwise “fiscally conservative” people threw up their hands and justified Covid bailouts on the grounds that those ordered to close their businesses or stay home from their jobs weren’t “at fault,” and therefore were entitled to bailouts.

It doesn’t matter who was at fault for lockdowns. Goods that are not produced cannot be consumed. One cannot consume more than one produces unless someone else provides the difference. Scarcity does not make exceptions for assignment of blame, political theories, or feelings. Even if lockdowns significantly reduced Covid deaths, which they didn’t, one still had to face the reality that producing enough to survive takes priority over avoiding the virus.

The truly “federalist” approach to Covid-19 would have been to allow each state to decide and pay for the policies it chose to implement in response to the virus. Politicians spoke in absolutes, saying lockdowns were “necessary.” Well, producing enough to survive was more necessary. This would have been true even if the virus had turned out to be as deadly as it was originally touted.

Had governors been forced to face reality and decide how to respond to lockdowns without external bailout money, there may not have been any lockdowns at all. If there were, they would have been fewer, of less severity, and of shorter duration.

This would not have made a bit of difference overall in the number of Covid deaths, as the retrospective comparisons of “open” vs. “locked down” states so clearly show.

Like TARP in 2008 and every other bailout, profits have been privatized and costs socialized. People who elected governors who took a more realistic approach to Covid and who themselves balanced the personal risk of contracting the disease more realistically with the responsibility of supporting themselves are paying the same cost in runaway inflation as those whose governors closed their economies completely and kept them closed for much longer periods of time.

Today, Americans are being asked to again support a departure from reality. The U.S. government, the most prolific invader of foreign nations in the past seventy years, has proclaimed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine beyond the pale and imposed drastic sanctions in response. President Biden has acknowledged this will have a cost to American citizens, although he has vastly understated the cost.

The president and others have tried to shift the blame for present economic pain onto Putin. This is dishonest for two reasons. One, it is not Putin’s invasion but the sanctions in response to the that will cause economic hardship, just as it wasn’t “Covid” but the government response to the virus that caused the economic fallout we’re experiencing now.

Most importantly, the economic consequences of Biden’s Russia sanctions have not even begun to be felt by American consumers. They are just now suffering the effects of Covid lockdowns. The Russia sanctions could have far more onerous economic consequences, especially if they result in a new world economic order where a significant portion of the global population no longer uses the U.S. dollar as its reserve currency. That is a reality Americans are not ready to face.

Regardless of whether Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was justified, America may not be able to afford the combined cost of Biden’s sanctions and the Covid lockdowns. Ignoring that reality may have fatal consequences for both America’s economy its political order.

Tom Mullen is the author of It’s the Fed, Stupid and Where Do Conservatives and Liberals Come From? And What Ever Happened to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?

The Night Before New Normal Christmas (from An Anti-State Christmas by Tom Mullen)

‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the town

Not a creature was stirring, all were safely locked down;

The masks were all hung by the chimney with care

In hopes that St. Fauci soon would be there;

The children were nestled all snug in their beds,

While visions of booster shots invaded their heads;

And mamma in her kerchief, and I in my cap,

Lay six feet apart for a long winter’s nap,

When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,

I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter.

Away to the window I flew like a flash,

Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.

The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow

Gave the lustre of mid-day to objects below,

When, what did my wondering eyes see arrive,

But a government agent, walking straight up my drive,

As bureaucrats go, he was lively and quick,

And I despaired in a moment of avoiding the prick.

More rapid than eagles had the variants come,

And he whistled, and shouted, and called one by one:

“Now, Alpha! now, Beta! now, Gamma and Delta!

On, Eta! on, Epsilon! Kappa and Lambda!

I have the new shot; there’s no reason to stall.

I’ve got the jab that will dash away all!”

He was dressed very badly, from his head to his toe,

It was hard to imagine a girl dating this schmo;

A bundle of needles he had flung on his back,

And he looked like a peddler just opening his pack.

He was chubby and plump, from his tax-derived pelf,

And I cringed when I saw him, in spite of myself;

The dim look in his eye and small size of his head,

Soon gave me to know I had plenty to dread;

He spoke not a word, but tried straight away,

To stab all our arms with the new mRNA,

But laying a finger on each side of his nose,

I gave it a squeeze and got him up on his toes;

He sprang to his car as my boot hit his rear,

And away did he drive almost too fast to steer.

To the neighbors I shouted, ere he drove out of sight,

“Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night.”

Get a FREE copy of An Anti-State Christmas here!