The costs of the great COVID-19 lockdown continue to generate previously unimaginable levels of economic dislocation: job and income losses, plunging national incomes, uncountable government debt leading to Canada’s credit-rating cut, massive corporate and institutional upheaval, ballooning central bank balance sheets and growing human health impacts.
The daily news machines stream with monotonous regularity that all this and more has been brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, the killer virus that is killing the global economy. Even the World Bank is promoting the idea: “The COVID-19 pandemic has spread with alarming speed, infecting millions and bringing economic activity to a near-standstill.”
But blaming the coronavirus for devastation brought on by The Great Lockdown, as the International Monetary Fund has called the global economic crisis, is at best misleading. The global economy has been brought to its current perilous condition by specific and deliberate government actions.
The virus didn’t do it. The virus kills some people, not the economy. Governments and politicians did that when they effectively adopted ideas imbedded in a 30-year-old controversial — some would say pernicious — political and environmental concept that’s rarely debated today, the precautionary principle.
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See Also:
(1) Pandemic fines top $13 million, study says; punitive approach criticized
(2) Study finds Canada’s proportion of LTC deaths double the average of other nations
