Ian Vásquez: COVID Accelerated the Global Decline in Human Freedom

Overall human freedom peaked in 2007, according to the Cato Institute, and governments' COVID response merely exacerbated the trend toward a radically less-free planet.

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Ian Vásquez: COVID Accelerated the Global Decline in Human Freedom

The good news is that President Joe Biden has officially signed legislation declaring the end of "the national emergency related to the COVID-19 pandemic." The bad news? Governmental responses to the pandemic were "a catastrophe for human freedom" all over the globe, says the Cato Institute's Ian Vásquez.

He's the lead author of Cato's annual Human Freedom Index, which tracks personal, civil, and economic freedom in 165 countries. The latest version uses data through 2020, and Vásquez says that year saw the single-greatest drop in freedom in the past two decades.

In this podcast version of our weekly The Reason Livestream, my colleague Zach Weissmueller and I get into the specifics with Vásquez about how Covid ran roughshod over freedom everywhere from Armenia to Zimbabwe—including the United States, which dropped down seven slots and out of the top 20 freest countries. Worse still, Vásquez says overall human freedom peaked in 2007, so COVID has merely exacerbated the trend toward a radically less-free planet.

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Comments

[Diane Reynolds (Paul.)]

That darned COVID, reducing all that freedom!

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[Zeb]

I hope we're just using "COVID" as shorthand for all the stupid shit people did in response to the virus. Because the disease didn't do shit to freedom, that was all things people with power chose to do.

[Brandybuck]

A good crisis is at the heart of all government expansion and the loss of freedom. Sometimes the government has to make up crisis (war on drugs, etc), but sometimes the crisis is legit (drought, covid, etc). Regardless, it's still the government that is the problem.

Now it could be argued that government does have a role to play during a crisis. I won't argue that here. But what is clear is that government role needs to be rolled back once the crisis is gone. And that so rarely happens I'm having problem thinking of any instances of it.

The emergency of the pandemic was over in three months. We successfully "flattened the curve". We got viruses out by the end of the year. The government action of Operation Warpspeed" was not actually a government action, but of government stepping out of the way ever so slightly. After that point there was simply no more need for government intervention (except perhaps to provide for free vaccines, but that's really a separate issue). But regardless, waiting three full years before ending the emergency is beyond stupid.

p.s. I say this as one who is currently in day five of his own COVID-19 infection. Yup, I pretty much waited until Sleepy Joe called off the pandemic before I caught it. But I never claimed the virus wasn't real, just that the government's response was overblown.

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[Mike Laursen]

Hope you are over it soon.

[JesseAz]

But I never claimed the virus wasn’t real, just that the government’s response was overblown.

Cite?

[DesigNate]

The weird thing about that sentence is it’s like Brandy is trying to call out people here, when nobody here ever claimed the virus wasn’t even real.

[Overt]

Throughout the pandemic, we had ostensible libertarians using the crisis and The Science! (tm) to claim that the rest of us were selfish assholes and morons. They were wrong on the science of course, and today they will still accuse us of being selfish morons because we weren't arrogant and duped (i.e. selfish morons) like they were.

[Overt]

This is another reason why you should be concerned when people are insisting that you act because of some appeal to authority such as The Science! ™.

You cannot science your way into national policy. You need to act morally and ethically. Pragmatism is not a substitute for moral clarity.

It doesn’t matter how effective a vaccine is- forcing people to take it is morally wrong. It doesn’t matter how effective masking is- forcing people to mask is wrong. As is lock down. As is punishing businesses that allow people to freely exchange services and goods. Science is nothing more than data that people can consider when exercising their free choice.

And what the moral scolds learned during the lockdown is that all of their moral preening about The Science! ™ makes them look foolish as well. They have no shame, of course. Which is why they will be back tomorrow insisting that The Science! (tm) is on their side about something else- trans studies for example.

Don't get roped into their bullshit. Argue the morality, not the statistics.

[Diane Reynolds (Paul.)]

No one was *checks previous threads* force-forced to take the vaccine or wear a mask.

[Zeb]

There was that woman in Canada who was murdered by police for not wearing a mask.

[Brandybuck]

IT wasn't libertarians who killed her. Get fucking real.

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[Zeb]

What do you think I was saying? Am I missing something here?

[Diane Reynolds (Paul.)]

For God's sake, be reasonable!

Is Face Mask Skepticism Beyond the Pale?
A rational debate requires acknowledging both the strengths and the weaknesses of the scientific evidence.

JACOB SULLUM | 8.18.2021 12:01 AM

Like many Americans, I do not like wearing a face mask, which hurts my ears, fogs my glasses, and makes my bearded face itch. And while I think businesses should be free to require face coverings as a safeguard against COVID-19, I am skeptical of government-imposed mask mandates, especially in K-12 schools.

At the same time, I recognize that my personal peeves and policy preferences are logically distinct from the empirical question of how effective masks are at preventing virus transmission. From the beginning, however, the Great American Mask Debate has been strongly influenced by partisan and ideological commitments, with one side exaggerating the evidence in favor of this precaution and the other side ignoring or downplaying it.

[...]

While conceding that "private companies have the right to ban me if they want to," Paul said he was troubled by the fact that the leading social media platforms, partly in response to government pressure, seem to be insisting that users toe the official line on COVID-19. He has a point.

Paul's criticism of cloth masks was stronger than the science warrants, reflecting a broader tendency on the right to dismiss them as mere talismans without seriously addressing the evidence in their favor.

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[Zeb]

That didn't age well.

[Overt]

Yup. For the record, Pauls criticism was accurate. And Sullum's insistence that masks are more than "mere talismans" was incorrect according to the latest research.

One of the main conceits of Reason is that we use rationality in selecting our positions. But time and again, it is clear that the Reasonistas are letting emotion carry the day. Rationally speaking, questioning the efficacy of masking is not "beyond the pale". Full stop. And yet Sullum just had to slip in his disavowals of the icky deplorables like Rand Paul. And it made him look foolish. Just as Ms Wolfe looked foolish yesterday spending a bunch of time shooting down (strawman) arguments from the "right" against public funding of NPR when she ostensibly was writing an article about how we shouldn't be publicly funding NPR.

[DesigNate]

But what about driving around with bears in trunks? That’s a violation of the NAP!

[Ronsch]

Masks and vaccines became politicized with the result the Republican Covid death toll rose far higher than for Democrats. Republicans exercising their freedom was killing them. https://politicsofthelastage.blogspot.com/2022/12/update-on-covid19-mask-and-vaccine.html

[Brandybuck]

Who are those "ostensible libertarians"? I never ran across any. Many did claim, rightfully, that the virus was genuine and real. But all that shit from the CDC about first not masking and then mandatory masking and mandatory rent moratoriums and classifying people according to their essentialness and all that shit was NOT libertarian. It was the opposite in fact.

[DesigNate]

People here questioned the severity of it and the reported numbers, but as far as I can remember, nobody denied it’s existence.

[Overt]

"Who are those “ostensible libertarians”? I never ran across any."

Oh there were plenty. DOL, Chemjeff and Mike were among the ones arguing that if you declined to mask or vaccinate it was being selfish. Here is one of many threads:

"...masks work to prevent the spread of airborne viruses, and impose a very low cost to implement. If you go against that, everyone else perceives (and is backed by science) that you are placing them at risk for your own selfish and petty desires."

https://reason.com/2020/06/30/supreme-court-declares-another-abortion-law-unconstitutional/?comments=true#comment-8325970

That is one of my favorite threads because it has so many of the usual suspects just flat insisting that others were morons, or social signaling asshats, or selfish (or all of the above) because those people weren't obeying an incorrect read of the science. There was lots of that during the pandemic.

"Many did claim, rightfully, that the virus was genuine and real."

Yeah you are full of it Brandy. They did way more than that. They insisted (as above) that masks reduce the likelihood of infection- a fact that was roundly rejected by scientific studies as far back as the Spanish Flu.

Still others claimed that the risk of breakthrough infections for the vaccinated was miniscule. You agree that was incorrect, right?

[Ronsch]

Masks and vaccines were politicized with the result the Republican Covid death toll rose far higher than for Democrats. Republican freedom was killing them.
https://politicsofthelastage.blogspot.com/2022/12/update-on-covid19-mask-and-vaccine.html

[JesseAz]

You were one of the yelling ones to Trust the Science, 2 weeks, trust government.

Oh wait youre not libertarian. Never mind.

[MWAocdoc]

I am skeptical about freedom indexes. Can one really compare freedom for a person living in central Africa earning a dollar a day and nothing to buy even if she were paid more, with a man living in the US earning $123,000 a year surrounded by stores chock full of necessities and luxuries? How do you compare the freedom of a Saudi woman living under sharia with an Australian man living under socialism? Are the metrics they use meaningful everywhere in the world, and comparable over a decade? Even the concept of freedom itself is complex! Free to do what? What are the consequences of your doing something you want to do? If you hurt yourself doing something dangerous, is it the same as being shot by your victim while exercising your freedom to commit armed robbery? Are the consequences imposed by an enforcer under the law, or are you less free when your neighbors shun you for your opinions? So I’m skeptical.

[Sevo]

Agreed that it's an extremely difficult metric to define in specific terms, but as a person living in a supposedly free country, having an unelected agency taking control of the automotive industry in the coming X years certainly leaves me less free than I was. a
And we're not yet counting the additional penalties which inevitably arise when a government agency 'plans' some part of the economy, pace greaseball Newsom and CA's economy.

[MWAocdoc]

I just worry about pseudoscience, that's all. It's so easy to "prove" something that isn't so with scientific-sounding gobbledygook.

[NOYB2]

A freedom index where Denmark, Australia, and New Zealand come out near the top is pretty much worthless.

[TJJ2000]

Emergency POWER always does.
Ref; Democrat induced Great Depression and FDR 'New Deal' [Na]tional So[zi]alism.

[MattCollins]

This "freeedom index" is completely bogus, the Freedom Index doesn't account for the right to keep and bear arms at all. Come back when you have something that takes all factors into account.

[Childhood reader of SCOTUS opinions, really]

Eva Vlaardingerbroek said this better, don’t you agree? Or is it that she’s Dutch and just converted to Catholicism.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PWODhnctFYhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7HUpc-jIiY

Skimming the comments I see no realizations that the surest guarantee of rights is — and this is independent of “God arguments” — is that they are God-given.

Consider the current SCOTUS case : Groff’s case involves Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits religious discrimination in employment.

This boils down to the government and Amazon and the Post Office colluding for purely monetary reasons to subsidize and enrich Amazon by letting them take over the Post Office. As I recall even super-liberal clownish Robert Reich (!!) was appalled.