An Epidemic of Socialism
COVID didn't crush the economy.
Government crushed the economy.
— Kristi Noem (1971), Govenor of South Dakota, CPAC, 2021.
[You] need to control the virus to get people back to work.
— Alan Kohler (1952)
Gigi Foster
Associate Professor of Economics, UNSW Business School.
PhD (Economics), University of Maryland.
BA (Ethics, Politics, and Economics), Yale University.
Are Lockdowns a Crime Against Humanity?
The Nuremberg code [is] a code of ethical standards …
It's something that, essentially, the war criminals of period during the WWII atrocities were facing, in the 1950s kind of period, to try to draw them to account for the massive damage they had done, the genocides.
And this code is something that requires governments defend the actions on the basis of public health.
So the sixth Nuremberg code demands that the decision maker must have a reasonable view that the benefits of an intervention will be higher than the costs, and failure to abide by that is a crime against humanity …
Museum Note:Have you seen a cost-benefit analysis produced by the government to defend its decisions during this period?
On August 19, 1947, the judges of the American military tribunal in the case of the USA vs Karl Brandt et al … confronted the difficult question of medical experimentation on human beings. …
Although the [Nuremberg] code addressed the defense arguments in general remarkably none of the specific findings against Brandt and his codefendants mentioned the code.
Thus the legal force of the document was not well established.
The uncertain use of the code continued in the half century following the trial when it informed numerous international ethics statements but failed to find a place in either the American or German national law codes.
Nevertheless, it remains a landmark document on medical ethics …
Permissible Medical Experiments:
The degree of risk to be taken should never exceed that determined by the humanitarian importance of the problem to be solved by the experiment.
(Nuremberg Code, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)
To strip people of their liberties.
To close schools.
To shut borders.
To cease trade.
I went for months waiting for that and finally produced one on the back of a cocktail napkin basically myself [in approximately … 15 hours in August 2020.]
[You can't assume] that it was those tough early restrictions that, as a package, created the outcomes we've seen.
My reading of the data is that pretty much how well or not you did in this period health-wise and economics-wise was kind of unrelated whether you locked down really hard or not so hard or whatever.
In fact the best thing to do probably would have been to target of our protection and our attention to the people who were actually vulnerable to this virus, and to invest in things like prophylactic treatments evaluation and evaluation of what can we do, medicines we can use, not just vaccines, but all sorts of cheaper things, when somebody gets the virus to prevent them getting serious symptoms. …
[We're] an island nation …
But there are many [other] reasons why the virus didn't run like it did, in the US for example, here that have nothing to do with our policy responses and you can compare Victoria to NSW if you want to get a sense of what's possible without locking down. …
[We] knew that this thing was killing mainly older people … which is why … in March of last year I called for the radical protection of older people, people in danger from this virus, and everybody else be allowed to go about their business as they deemed fit …
And the thing is, it's very uncomfortable right now to admit that we messed up.
For the politicians to admit it …
(Lockdowns and the path forward , ABC The Economists, 24 June 2021)
If you look at the people who have died from [COVID-19, they] have 5-6 years on average still to live …
How much does a developed society typically spend in normal times per [Quality Adjusted Life Year?]
Usually somewhere between $50,000 and $150,000 per QALY. …
Office of Best Practice Regulation:[So] every death we [prevent] from COVID-19 is [worth] around $500,000 and $600,000. …
Willingness to pay is the appropriate way to estimate the value of reductions in the risk of physical harm – known as the value of statistical life.
Based on international and Australian research a credible estimate of … the value of statistical life year is $195,000 in 2018 dollars.
(Best Practice Regulation Guidance Note: Value of statistical life, Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Australian Government, October 2018)
William Viscusi (1947):
Unlimited personal freedoms will lower our well‐being, particularly when confronting crises for which collective, responsible behavior is desirable.
Mortality costs of COVID‐19 in Australia as of January 1, 2021
(Table A1 extract)Number of deaths 909 VSL ($ millions) 8.6636 VSL × deaths ($ millions) 7875 VSL = Value of a Statistical Life
(Economic lessons for COVID‐19 pandemic policies, South Economic Journal, 4 March 2021)
Then you have a currency. …
Then you can say … when we do this lockdown:
- [Firstly,] are we actually preventing that many more deaths?
- [Secondly,] whatever number we are saving [we] multiply that by whatever the amount is we're willing to spend in normal times to save that amount of lives, that quality of life.
And then we can say: …
Is the economic cost of implementing these measures less than that?
- [If] so — good idea.
- If not — let's think about it more.
What Have The Capitalists Ever Done For Us?
[Shutdowns are] very much a cure that's worse than the disease …
We had Trump saying that, by Easter, he wants things to be back on game …
He's right … to try to give a stopping point, to try to increase a bit of certainty about what to expect.
Because businesses … are in free freefall — people are stressed and they're going to be dying from that at some stage. …
This is the way that economies in communist systems organise …
[Whereas, Capitalism] has kept us all doing so well and having such luxurious lives, by historical and international comparisons, for so long. …
We know GDP is a huge predictor of [longevity.]
[Life] spans have increased over the last 100 years … on the back of rises in GDP per capita that pay for research and development, and health … and education services, and better roads, and everything that makes our lives better …
We giving that up with every day we are in shutdown …
[The global response to COVID-19] is actually killing people …
I'm talking about statistical lives lost.
Human welfare which is tanking because the economy is tanking. …
[Keeping the economy running] saves many more lives than are saved by quarantining the entire economy …
[The tradeoff is] not lives against money, it's lives against more lives. …
We need to be aggressively targeting isolation of older people, because those are the people who are dying. …
But to say to young people you should stay home and worry, and not go to pubs, is … absolutely a disgrace.
[These people] won't die from it — under 40 it's a 0.2% death rate …
[When Boris Johnson] could not stay that ["herd immunity"] course in the face public opinion — that was an entirely political move. …
The young people who lived through this, the coronavirus cohort, they are going to see negative effects throughout their lives because of what has already happened.
The longer this goes on, the worse off those people are going to be, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years …
I just want to see us open for business as soon as possible.
(As the coronavirus marches on, can wartime measures save us from a depression?, ABC The Economists, 26 March 2020)
