The real threat posed by COVID-19 lockdowns | TheHill

People all around the world are expressing a growing discontent with needless lockdown policies that have separated people from their families, obliterated millions of jobs worldwide, caused untold death by limiting or eliminating access to health care services and shortchanged our children.

As many have now observed, lockdowns have a host of deadly consequences. For example, British journalist and businessman Matt Ridley writes, They cause more deaths from cancer, heart disease and suicide as well as job losses, bankruptcies, social disintegration and mental illness especially among the young, who are at least risk from the virus. Further, a recent UNICEF report limns a shadow pandemic of violence against women and children, with vital services to these vulnerable groups being among the most commonly disrupted. The World Health Organization has said that lockdowns should not be the primary means of control of this virus, noting a lockdown consequence too frequently overlooked this year: making poor people an awful lot poorer.

Americans imagine that they live under, as it is famously put, a government of laws, not of men, meaning that through the government created by the Constitution, we have left behind the arbitrary rule of kings and their whims. Over the past several months, however, it has become increasingly clear that we do indeed live under the arbitrary and despotic rule of a vanishingly small number of oppressors who make law by fiat, outside of any proper legislative process. Worse still, these would-be tyrants do not see themselves as bound by the rules they have dictated for the rest of us. They flout their own rules whenever the mood strikes. 

via thehill.com