Forty years of freedom slipped away so quickly in the COVID panic

I recall a lunch I had with an economist probably 15 years ago. He was likely the world’s leading expert on global development. I asked him what could happen to dislodge the course of history from its upward march, with ever more food and health and long lives for the world. His short answer: nothing. At least nothing that is likely to happen. The networks supporting trade and human rights are too strong to be broken at this late stage.

And in that same vein I wrote books about our Jetsons World, the Beautiful Anarchy all around us, the tweaks and fixes that could improve things even more, but I mostly spent those years urging all of us to better appreciate the blessings of liberty everywhere in evidence. I believed that this is all that was required to keep progress on track. Though I noted and warned of grave threats on the horizon, and there were plenty of dark days after the turn of the millennial, there was no way to know just how real and how close they were. The path to the light still seemed achievable.

Then came 2020. In a matter of weeks, the progress of decades was crushed underfoot. Hardly anyone could have predicted the trigger: fear of a virus plus an intellectually preposterous response, followed by an appalling three years of lies and coverups that continue to this day.