Your Facebook friends are Wrong about the Lockdown

A Non Hysterics Guide to Covid-19 by Tom Woods – https://tomwoods.com/

You can download the ebook here, free of charge

If you prefer to resume living a normal life, or not see everything you’ve spent decades building destroyed in a matter of months, or want your children not to waste away in a world of computer screens and “virtual playdates,” you must want to kill people’s grandmothers.

This is how discourse is actually being carried on in the United States right
now.

Don’t believe me? Take a glance social media. Fact-free hysteria, and
accusations of murder, are everywhere.

I myself was initially very concerned about COVID-19, and my Twitter feed
bears this out. I am still concerned, and I think vulnerable people should take sensible steps to protect themselves. But when I observed how people I now call the Doomers conducted themselves, I began to wonder: if this is such a home-run case, why are they acting like this?

Wild, exaggerated predictions carried the day. In Florida, my state, we were told we’d have 465,000 hospitalizations by the end of April. We had about 5500. Our governor closed down the state two weeks later than the Doomers wanted, so the Doomers predicted piles of corpses. These never materialized. Some people tried to say: why, the reason we’ve done so much better than the predictions is that we’ve done such a good job living like vegetables – er, “social distancing.” But the models generally assumed perfect compliance with social distancing, so they can’t be saved that easily.
Then I noticed that good news from around the world was greeted almost
angrily. I have never seen anything like this. It’s as if some people need the virus to be an apocalyptic problem.

I would ask questions and get curt answers. “Wait two weeks,” I’d be told.
Then, I was assured, I would see that some country or state that hadn’t joined the lockdown cult would get what was coming to it.

And then…nothing. (More on this in the chapters that follow.)

The technical ins and outs of precisely how a completely free society would
handle a pandemic have been discussed on the Tom Woods Show, the Monday through-Friday podcast I have been producing since 2013. For that material, which is rather technical, I refer you to episode 270.

A book will someday be written about the regulatory thicket that slowed the
response to the virus, though the number of headlines about government rules having to be suspended time after time for the sake of saving lives is a good early indicator of what we’ll find when the full story is told.

This book brings together a few of my favourite articles about the virus, along with transcripts of a couple of episodes of the Tom Woods Show.