Which demonized country did ten times better?
One of the truly great voices coming out of the United Kingdom since March 2020 has been that of Jonathan Sumption -- or, Lord Sumption, former senior judge who sat on the Supreme Court of the UK from 2012 to 2018.
"The UK's public finances are in a worse state than at any time since the Second World War," Sumption just wrote, but Official Opinion wants to blame interest rates, Ukraine, or "just about anything other than the main culprit lurking in the background: the lockdowns of the last two years."
It's not hard to prove what he's saying, since "government expenditure associated with the pandemic has been by far the largest contributor to the current deficit."
People lazily blame "the pandemic" for all the problems we've faced since, but of course the problems are instead the results of the lockdowns themselves.
"Less than a quarter of the NAO’s figure represents the extra cost of health and social care," writes Sumption. "Most of the rest is the cost of supporting people prevented from working and businesses prevented from operating. At the height of the pandemic, the government was spending about twice as much per month on paying people to do nothing as the entire cost of the NHS."
In Sweden, meanwhile, which Sumption reminds everyone did not succumb to the madness, the per-person pandemic expenditure was one-tenth as great as the UK's. And "their results in terms of both cases and deaths were a lot better than ours."
"Excess deaths," he says, "are currently running at about 10 per cent above historic rates, almost all from conditions other than Covid. By far the biggest contributor is dementia, a condition aggravated by loneliness and lack of stimulation.
"The long-term impacts on education, inequality, relationship breakdown, sociability and the arts are harder to quantify but they are serious and will be felt for years to come."
Meanwhile, a million people have left the workforce. Sumption says these are mostly older people who simply gave up during the lockdowns.
This week our friend Jay Bhattacharya, professor of medicine at Stanford University, triumphed decisively in an Oxford-style debate at Gene Epstein's Soho Forum on the very same topic -- the lockdowns. (An Oxford-style debate has an objective winner: the audience is polled before and after the debate, and the winner is the person who changes more minds.) He'll be joining me tomorrow on the Tom Woods Show to discuss it.
Despite the manifest harms (and uselessness) of the lockdowns, you know for a fact what the establishment is going to try to do. The official narrative will be that the "experts" who locked us down deserve credit for saving eleventy bajillion lives.
We are expected to accept the Official Version of Events, or face banishment from polite society.
But this isn't anything new; from the moment we set foot in the regime's schools, we're being hit with propaganda -- sometimes subtle, sometimes obvious -- designed to persuade us of the official narrative. When no other perspective is offered, it's no wonder so many people reflexively accept what they're told.
My friend Connor Boyack, who publishes the Tuttle Twins book series for children, seeks to inoculate kids against bad ideas by teaching them good ones.
His Black Friday sale, going on this very minute, takes 75% off two big book bundles, so help fortify a child's brain by clicking here:
http://www.tomwoods.com/twins
Tom Woods
