Overreacting to COVID.

• Author: Henderson, David R.

When Politicians Panicked: The New Coronavirus, Expert Opinion, and a Tragic Lapse of Reason

By John Tamny

286 pp.; Post Hill Press, 2021

John Tamny bravely describes the terrible and senseless economic pain caused by politicians panicking in the face of a health concern that--let's be real--is no worse than a bad flu season." So writes Forbes publisher Rich Karlgaard in his blurb for John Tamn/s latest book, When Politicians Panicked. Let's see: The worst flu season in the last 100 years was in 1957-1958, when the Asian flu (technically H2N2) killed between 70,000 and 116,000 Americans. If a flu today killed the same percentage of the U.S. population, the death toll would be between 135,000 and 223,000. As this goes to print, the official U.S. death toll from COVID-19 is nearing 600,000, which is almost three times the upper limit of the worst flu in a century. It's Karlgaard who should "be real."

After reading that blurb, I didn't expect to find Tamny's book impressive. Fortunately, I did. The highest compliment I can give it is that it's Hayekian. Friedrich Hayek, in his 1945 article "The Use of Knowledge in Society," argued that central planners could not successfully plan an economy because they didn't have the necessary knowledge of people's individual circumstances. Although I read every page and every footnote of When Politicians Panicked, I didn't see Tamny ever reference Hayek. (The book doesn't have an index.) But his book is thoroughly Hayekian. He argues that government officials didn't know enough, and couldn't know enough, to shut down whole sectors of the economy. He also argues quite persuasively that government policies like the Paycheck Protection Program badly misallocated both labor and capital, making us poorer than otherwise.

Lockdowns / Tamny completely opposes any lockdowns and even any restrictions on large, dense gatherings of people. How does he justify that? Absent such government regulations, wouldn't people have simply continued to get together and ignore the danger? He argues that "the more lethal something is presumed to be, the less authorities need to do or say anything." He notes, quoting several sources, that much of the decline in restaurant meals, travel, and mass entertainment events happened before any mayor or governor had acted to limit or restrict such activities. The NBA and NHL interrupted their regular seasons and the NCAA cancelled its men's and women's basketball tournaments before...