Perhaps [Neil] Ferguson never believed the world’s most powerful governments would take his predictions seriously. The world had not acted on his past predictions, so maybe he expected more of the same. This time, however, the media — breathlessly reporting on hospital overflow in Northern Italy; bolstered by fear-driven groupthink on social media —had created the perfect environment for his paper to flourish. Whether by some powerful design or unintentionally, all humanity grasped at Ferguson’s recommendations like a lifeline. COVID would kill 2.2 million Americans and 500,000 Britons, we were told, unless we adopted Ferguson’s new type of NPI called “suppression.” If we did that, we could cut the death toll in half.
Inspired by de Tocqueville, Mary Anastasia O’Grady laments Chile’s turn away from liberalism. A slice:
For sure heavy doses of Marxist indoctrination at Chilean universities and income “equality” claptrap from intellectuals and the media have tilted the country to the left.
But Alexis de Tocqueville put his finger on something in “Democracy in America,” when he wrote that “the hatred that men bear to privilege increases in proportion as privileges become fewer and less considerable, so that democratic passions would seem to burn most fiercely just when they have least fuel. . . . When all conditions are unequal, no inequality is so great as to offend the eye, whereas the slightest dissimilarity is odious in the midst of general uniformity.”
My Mercatus Center colleague Christine McDaniel has three wishes for trade policy.
