The covid-19 pandemic hit the US with full force one year ago. Our country was unprepared. Those who were in charge of US response failed dramatically in their jobs, and the same is true throughout most of the Western world.
There is a wonderful account on Twitter called “Covid One Year Ago” (@YearCovid). It retweets official statements from exactly one year ago, allowing us to relive the early days of the pandemic. It is a sobering reminder of the incompetence of our health institutions, academia, the press, and the government.
We could go on but the litany of errors gets tiresome. The incompetence of public health officials is only matched by their arrogance and smug condescension with which they talk down to the public.
The hallmark of good government is accountability. You get more of what you reward, you get less of what you punish. If you punish failure and reward success, you’ll get more success and less failure. If, on the other hand, you tolerate failure, reward incompetence, and punish challenges to the entrenched powers, you’ll get more failure. You’ll get 500,000 dead Americans.
I’m yet to see any sign that our public health authorities will be held accountable. Nobody has been punished, nobody has even resigned. Their shamelessness knows no bounds. They are encouraged by a belief, very likely to be proven right, that they will never be held to account. Their reward for causing more American deaths than World War 2 will be more powerful and expanded budgets.
If you think that is a depressing thought, I have a real chaser for you. Speaking to my friends who are familiar with the workings of various levels of American government, public health departments are among the less dysfunctional parts of our bureaucracies. The rot is much deeper in the rest of the overbearing, creaking structures that deign to rule our lives. It’s just more hidden, harder to see.
When you contemplate the likely future fiscal and monetary actions of the US government, consider that the people in charge are products of the same bureaucratic environment that gave us Dr. Fauci. Like him, they have been selected for their aptitude in backstabbing, politicking, avoiding responsibility, and deflecting blame. Like him, they’re comically inept at the ostensible purpose of their jobs. Can you name one government regulator who lost his job for overseeing the run-up to the financial crisis in 2008? That’s right, they were all promoted, and their departments grew because of the wave of new regulations washing over the financial industry. They are now more powerful than ever, assuring us that the fiscal deficit is nothing to worry about and that inflation is not a problem, actually, there’s far too little inflation. Do you feel assured?