Although we have many questions to ask the bat lady Shi Zhengli, head of China’s Wuhan virology lab, we can’t do that because, just like the Wuhan scientist Doctor Li Wenliang, who was among the first to identify the disease, also suddenly died during the beginning of this whole affair last year.
The odd thing about all this is that it’s ironic that two of the most important humans on the face of this planet who could have given REAL answers to this tragic outbreak can no longer be approached.
If THAT doesn’t appear as though China is hiding something then I just don’t know what would then.
The planned economy was all the rage in 1937, when Prentice-Hall published a 1,000-page tome on The Planned Society: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: A Symposium by Thirty-Five Economists, Sociologists, and Statesmen. The “question that confronts us today is not if we shall plan, but how we shall plan,” wrote Lewis Mumford in the Foreword. All the contributors—Keynesian, socialist, communist, and fascist—agreed with that point, including such luminaries as Sidney Hook, Benito Mussolini, and Joseph Stalin.
But the book was honest. It linked Stalin and Keynes, fascism and the New Deal. The plans were not identical, of course, but all agreed on government “rationality” as versus the “chaos” of the free market.
Most of the authors advocated the “mixed economy,” Mises’s name for an admixture of capitalism and socialism. Such a combination, he showed, is necessarily unstable, and our own mixed economy is tilting towards statism, with such regulatory disasters in the last few years as the Clean Air Act, the Americans With Disabilities Act, and the Civil Rights Act.
Today, no part of the economy is left untouched by the President’s budget and the swarm of regulatory agencies. Buttressed by most of the economics profession, the regulatory state today rules and ruins America. Communism lost, but social democracy won.
In the American mixed economy, it is the job of the planner to: ensure “full employment” (as federal policies create joblessness); encourage technological innovation (not through markets, but through subsidies); ensure a “fair” distribution of wealth (rewarding parasites and punishing the productive); manage international trade (though it needs no more management than domestic trade); and keep “public goods” out of private hands (even though public ownership must always be less efficient than private).
The planner has taboos as well. He must never mention private property, praise the coordinative function of prices, criticize pressure groups unless they’re anti-big-government, be cynical about the uses of power, call for a tax cut, or identify the real source of prosperity as the free market.
Charles Schultze, President Carter’s chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, adheres to these rules and taboos in his book and “guide to macroeconomics” Memos to the President. He sets out these rules for every policymaker to follow in the future.
In the entire work, he has not one good word to say about the market, private property, or the price system. His central assumption is that the government must manage the economy to prosperity. According to Schultze, we should believe that: the Federal Reserve protects the dollar, when our money has lost 94% of its value since the Fed was established; the Fed can cure business cycles, when every decade or so, it causes a serious economic setback; the government can create full employment, even as it causes unemployment with such welfare measures as the minimum wage and civil rights; the government can develop new technologies, even though bureaucracy is a proven technology killer; we can trust the government to improve our standard of living, though our standard of living has fallen for nearly twenty years; the government protects us from monopolistic capitalists, even while government creates and sustains destructive monopolies from the post office to the schools; regulatory agencies do protect us from dirty air, unsafe drugs, and lead poisoning, while everywhere government is biggest, from Moscow to D.C., life is dirty and unsafe.
Naturally, mainstream economists—the useful idiots of the interventionist state—advise presidents on economic policy. Today, these economic planners see their primary task as “keeping supply and demand in balance.” That doesn’t mean allowing the market to work, of course, but rather pushing and releasing buttons on the planning machine.
There are two views on how to do this, one mainstream and one rival. The mainstream view says that a decrease in overall demand causes economic downturns, and so demand should be increased by government spending and money creation. This is supposed to make up for the deficiencies of the private sector.
The rival view says declines are caused by a fall in overall supply, caused by any number of factors, including an irrational fear of investment. So, boosting overall demand through spending or inflation only exacerbates the troubles.
The second view has better policy implications, but both are misguided. They assumed that there is something called overall demand conglomerating the values of consumers and producers alike. This obscures the real economy.
The obscurantist aggregations don’t stop with “supply” and “demand.” The planners also discuss such categories as capital and investment as if they were homogeneous, representing these very diverse groupings as single letters in their macroeconomic models.
Both views also assume that government managers are smarter than the market. Imagine that you had to plan the household finances of your next-door neighbor, with little or no information about their income, tastes, and talents, all of which can and do change. Yet the planners have been trying to do this for decades, to the entire economy.
To explain their way out of this problem, the planners separate the “micro” economy from the “macro” and claim the decisions of individuals have nothing to do with the overall picture. It’s true that no one individual can, for example, change the net rate of savings in the economy, but there would be no net rate of savings without individual decisions.
It is out of the millions of decisions of real people that the economy is created, and it is the job of the economist to understand and explain how that happens, not to encumber it.
The planners of the mixed economy like to talk about supply and demand as if they needed the government to coordinate them. Yet supply and demand describe the natural pattern of economic behavior in the absence of government interference.
If there is a chicken plague, the price of eggs will soar. The consumer doesn’t have to read the “Chicken Health Update” to know that he should economize on eggs. The price tells him that, and he can then look for substitutes.
Conversely, if Frank Perdue genetically engineers a superchicken that lays many more eggs than the normal bird, the price of eggs will plummet. But the consumer doesn’t need to read “Techno-Poultry Weekly” to know that. He need only look at the price.
In a free market, there is no need for planners to bring supply and demand into line. The daily transactions of millions of consumers do so, leavened by the risk-bearing entrepreneurs. It is the mixed economy itself that creates the demand for economic planners to run it. Massive deficits destabilize the economy, leading to calls for government to stabilize it.
The “entitlement” programs are interventions as well. Government spending may increase the demand for some goods and services, but it drains resources from the private economy just as surely as taxes. Yet the “opportunity costs” of confiscating these resources never factor into the planners’ models.
How much does the mixed economy cost us? We can’t know. Despite the well-intentioned attempts of some economists to figure it out, no one can know the effects of technologies never created; firms never started; people never hired; others hired by government fiat; central bank–created recessions; and higher prices from taxes, regulations, and government-generated demand. We can only know that the effect is gigantic, harmful, and growing.
Government intervention can be criticized on a number of other grounds that the mixed-economy planners do not mention:
First, politicians and bureaucrats are self-interested. In the private sector, self-interest works to the common good. In the public sector, it means expansion of the government’s budget and power, which attacks the common good.
Second, the market can sometimes anticipate the planners, negating the effects of government action. If the Federal Reserve increases the money supply, the market can take account of the likely inflationary effects and prices will rise sooner and higher than the managers thought.
Third, intervention increases the incentive to evade the law, thereby enlarging the less-efficient and societally unfortunate underground economy.
Fourth, intervention distorts the price system and the interest rate, which work to coordinate the use of resources. Price controls and regulations cause misallocation, and Fed-lowered interest rates cause businessmen to make bad investments.
Fifth, intervention undermines the division of labor, preventing people from doing the tasks they are most suited for because regulation prevents employers from hiring on merit.
If the mixed economy is such a disaster, why do we have one? Because it enables the well-connected to loot the rest of us in a social democracy disguised as “democratic capitalism.” To get away with the looting, the mixed-economy state attacks all countervailing institutions: families, neighborhoods, businesses, private schools, and charitable and religious organizations. The result is the barbarism and increasing poverty we see all around us.
The Planned Society didn’t mention that, but it is the inevitable outcome of what it recommended, and what the U.S. government practiced in 1937 and still does so to this very day. PERIOD. END OF STORY.
That is how the media approached Covid. Be afraid of everything, from ice cream to semen. Be afraid of being tall. Be afraid of being bald. Be afraid of going to the shopsand accepting home deliveries. And if you’re a man, it’s not just semen you should worry about, but also your testicles, your erectile function and your fertility. Even your toes are in danger.
The fearmongering is relentless. Be afraid of your pets. Be afraid for your pets. Just be afraid.
The media have served us a cornucopia of frightening articles and news items about Covid-19 in 2020 and 2021. While writing my new book, A State of Fear: How the UK Government Weaponised Fear During the Covid-19 Pandemic, I encountered a panoply of doom-mongering headlines. These were an indication of the significant role the media have played in creating our state of fear.
Of course, news media should not shy away from reporting frightening news during a pandemic. They should make us aware of the numbers of deaths, the policies being implemented to tackle the pandemic and the latest scientific developments. But during Covid, the media went beyond reporting on the pandemic. Instead, they appeared beholden to the old commercial imperatives, ‘If it scares, it airs’, and ‘If it bleeds, it leads’. It seems fear does sell.PODCASTWhy biological sex mattersSPIKED
The anxious, frightened climate this has helped to create has been suffocating. Death tolls were constantly brandished without the context of how many people die every day in the UK, and hospital admissions were reported while recoveries were not. As a result, Covid often appeared as a death sentence, an illness you did not recover from – even though it was known from the outset that Covid was a mild illness for the majority of people.
Given the wall-to-wall doom, it is therefore no surprise that the British were one of the most frightened populations in the world. Various studies showed that we were more concerned than other countries about the spread of Covid and less confident in the ability of our government to deal with it. One survey in July 2020 showed that the British public thought between six and seven per cent of the population had died from Covid – which was around 100 times the actual death rate at the time. Indeed, if six or seven per cent of Brits had died from Covid, that would have amounted to about 4,500,000 bodies – we’d have noticed, don’t you think?
While researching A State of Fear, I interviewed members of the general public about how they were impacted by the ‘campaign of fear’ during the epidemic. Many talked of how the media had elevated their alarm.
‘There wasn’t much to do’, Darren told me, ‘so we’d watch TV and we saw programmes about disinfecting your shopping when it arrives, and having a safezone in the kitchen. The nightly bulletins on the TV about death tolls, the big graphs with huge spikes on them, came at us “boom, boom, boom!”. It was a constant barrage of doom and gloom. My fear of the virus went through the roof.’
Sarah told me she had to stop watching the BBC. As her daughter put it, ‘If you just watched or listened to the BBC every day, what hope would you have had?’. Jane, meanwhile, described the ‘gruesome headlines’ that came at her ‘thick and fast’.
The fearmongering about Covid began even before the pandemic hit the UK. We were primed by videos from Wuhan in China, which were then widely circulated by UK-based media outlets. These painted an apocalyptic picture, featuring collapsed citizens, medics in Hazmat suits, concerned bystanders and a city grinding to a halt. In one memorable video, which went viral, so to speak, a woman fell, stiff as a board, flat on her face, on a pavement. The split second where she falters is a giveaway – this was a set-up. If the rest of the world had Covid, China had ‘Stunt Covid’.
These videos were carried by and reported on by major UK newspapers online without their authenticity being verified. Headlines referred to ‘zombies’, a ‘killer bug’ and the ‘apocalypse’. Over and over again, reports and commentaries described these Chinese Covid videos as ‘disturbing’. The coverage was saturated by horror-film and ‘end of days’ references. A Sun headline ‘Zombieland’ travelled with the speed of a virulent sneeze through the copycat global media.
The media have a responsibility to inform us. But they also have a responsibility to be balanced. That didn’t happen when Covid first emerged in China. And it didn’t happen when it hit the UK. Instead, we were treated to contextless coverage of daily death tolls. Add this to the ghoulish headlines and the scary graphs, and the media had left us adrift in a monoculture of fear. Some of the people I interviewed told me about the considerable negative effect this coverage had on their perception of the world, not to mention their mental wellbeing. The media should serve the public. But over the past year, they have been terrorising us.
Newspapers, news shows and so on owe their readers and viewers the best available version of the truth. Something that can be ascertained by careful questioning. So what has gone wrong?
Journalists are human, of course, and subject to the same worries as the rest of us. We are all made of the same psychological stuff. Perhaps their own fears clouded their judgement and reporting. Maybe they did not have time, in the teeth of the crisis, to investigate every image and video supplied by the picture desk with the requisite thoroughness, or to provide the Covid data with the necessary context.
But alongside journalists’ own fears and their lack of time, there are other factors that might explain the widespread media fearmongering. One of which is the financial incentive to be as sensationalist as possible. As one broadsheet comment writer put it to me, when I asked him why newspapers used so many doom-laden headlines: ‘Narcissism and greed drive this.’ He went on: ‘Pay rises are linked to the top-performing articles. The journalists who get the highest views for articles and the most subscriptions generated for the paper get the biggest pay rises. So you want your stories to get the most views.’ Compensating writers for clicks might not lead to the most balanced news reporting.
A pro-lockdown media
The No10 press briefings were often characterised by bland and unchallenging questions from journalists, such as ‘When will the epidemic be over?’. Little wonder that when the Press Gazette ran a poll asking, ‘Do you think journalists have done a good job of holding the government to account during the daily UK Covid-19 press briefings?’, 70 per cent answered ‘No’.
In general, mainstream journalists approached the epidemic as if the lockdown was the only correct response. They didn’t investigate and interrogate the idea of lockdown in general. When journalists did challenge the government, almost performing the role of the unelected opposition, they didn’t challenge the lockdown orthodoxy, or the safetyism that underpins it. They merely urged the government to go further, and lock down sooner and harder. Close businesses? What about closing schools? Tier Three? Why not Tier Four? It was as if journalists had come to see themselves as political activists whose job it was to hold prime minister Boris Johnson to account for not being sufficiently pro-lockdown. Some have even attempted to turn the pandemic into a simplistic morality play, with Covid deaths held up as proof of the evil Tories’ failure to lock down soon enough.
By and large, journalists have shied away from asking more challenging questions of the response to the pandemic. This may be because of the proximity of mass media to political and economic power, as Noam Chomsky has it in Manufacturing Consent. As well as editor and proprietor bias, journalists might feel pressured to maintain good relationships with press officers who, in return, will release privileged information to them, often late in the day. And then there’s the fact that the government and Public Health England became two of the biggest advertisers in the UK. Did the media dare to bite the hand that fed them?
In addition to proprietor bias, the influence of advertising revenue, the lure of the clickbait headline and the journalist’s own tendency to feel the fear and allow that to influence reporting, another worrying factor affected media coverage of the epidemic — state pressure.
On 23 March 2020, Ofcom, the UK’s communication regulator, issued strict guidance about Covid coverage. It asked broadcasters to be alert to ‘health claims related to the virus which may be harmful; medical advice which may be harmful; accuracy or material misleadingness in programmes in relation to the virus or public policy regarding it’. This will have inhibited any media outlets thinking of pursuing any stories that ran counter to government advice.
It was hardly a surprise to find that a Dutch study on our fear of Covid had concluded that our exposure to media increased our fear. ‘Stronger messages in the media may induce more fear and therefore more compliance with the social distancing and lockdown policies imposed’, it stated. ‘However, we caution against using media messages to induce more fear in the general public… as this may only increase distress. Furthermore, a substantial proportion of respondents in our sample were concerned about the role of (social) media, mass panic and hysteria. Hence, fear-appeals in the media should be used carefully.’
This is not advice the UK government and its advisers have heeded. The media have actively induced fear, and therefore prompted more compliance with lockdown measures. But not only did the Fourth Estate help to shape citizens’ behaviour during lockdown, it is also now impeding our exit from lockdown.
Dangerous times ahead
Even though the vaccine rollout is proving a success, the media are still fearmongering about Covid. The language in headlines and articles continues to play up the risks and threats on the horizon. As Bloomberg had it recently, ‘We must start planning for a permanent pandemic – with coronavirus mutations pitted against vaccinations in a global arms race, we may never go back to normal’.
And those who do not conform to the safety-first orthodoxy continue to be demonised. It feels as if dangerous times are ahead.
In Israel, for instance, Haaretzdescribed ultra-Orthodox Jews who do not follow the state’s rules as ‘Covid insurgents’ and ‘terrorists’. In a particularly hyperbolic description, ‘maskless individuals’ were accused of setting off ‘epidemiological time bombs’. Once we feared bombs that might be dropped on us following the pressing of a red button in a faraway country. Then we feared bombs strapped to terrorists. Now human beings are bombs.
Back in the UK, media coverage of Covid has taken a similarly bio-political turn. People are being conjured up as threats, indeed biohazards. A recent Times headline – ‘Hunt for mystery person who tested positive for Brazilian Covid-19 variant, then vanished’ – evoked an image of a hunt for a person carrying a new Covid variant as if it was a weapon. As Nick Cohen wrote in the Guardian, ‘It is only a matter of time before we turn on the unvaccinated’. History reverberates with examples of deliberate attempts to dehumanise and divide people and it has never ended well. It is a worrying development. Let us observe how we report on events in our time and consciously choose to write a better story.
There is much talk right now of the forthcoming inquiry into the handling of Covid. While there should be a great deal of focus on the government and the state, it might be wise to consider the role of the media, too. Something seems to have gone seriously awry. Bad news has had too many wings. The media have not been dispassionately reporting on the pandemic – they have been making fear fly. Perhaps in the future, the media need new imperatives: if it leads, let it be vigorously fact-checked; and if it airs, let the sources be verified. And please, don’t try to make us afraid.
fox files 
Written
on 30.May.2021.