… is from page 227 of Robert Higgs’s September 1986 Freeman essay, “To Deal With A Crisis: Government Program or Free Market?” as this essay is reprinted and slightly retitled and revised in the excellent 2004 collection of some of Bob’s essays, Against Leviathan:
It is instructive to consider how we have dealt with past crises. Since the early twentieth century, the usual method by which Americans (and many others) have responded – namely, by creating emergency government programs – has resulted in permanent losses of economic freedoms and permanent impairments of economic institutions.
DBx: Indeed.
And yet when March 2020 arrived very many people justified or excused the lockdowns and other covid mandates as if these unprecedented authoritarian hammer-blows would inflict little or no permanent damage on the liberal market order.
To my dying day I will never begin to understand the willingness with which so many people allowed themselves to be manhandled by the likes of Fauci, Birx, Trump, Trudeau, Boris Johnson, and other government officials – allowed themselves to be mistreated as dimwitted and contemptible animals – allowed themselves, with almost no resistance, to be abused and fed lies.