{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":"Episode 208: \u201cHow Policy Responses to the Pandemic Continue to Shatter Our World\u201d with Jeffrey Tucker","description":"The world has suffered and continues to suffer catastrophic economic and social damage from the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020 - but not from the virus itself.  Rather we\u2019re in the midst of a continuing global crisis created by governments\u2019 policy responses to the pandemic.  Trillions of dollars of Federal \u201crelief\u201d spending Financed by the Federal Reserve massively increasing the money supply And the countless coercive rules and restrictions implemented to stop a Covid virus that came anyway. The result is the highest inflation in 40 years, which is not slowing down but accelerating. Of course there are other forces at work, like the Biden Administration\u2019s war on fossil fuels, but the root causes of inflation were in place before that. To understand this better and what we need to be concerned about next, in this episode I talk with the great Jeffrey A. Tucker, the founder of the Brownstone Institute and author of the recently published \u201cLiberty or Lockdown.\u201d Our topic: his speech at Hillsdale College and related article about\u201cThe Economic Disaster of the Pandemic Response.\u201d From the beginning - and starting with Donald Trump\u2019s response - the idea of \u201cthe economy\u201d \u2013 viewed as mechanistic, money-centered, mostly about the stock market, and detached from anything truly important \u2013 was pitted against public health and lives,\u201d reminds Jeffrey. When governments started declaring some businesses essential and others non-essential what they did not understand is that everything in a economy is interconnected. It's woven. It\u2019s never obvious, but if you cut even one thread, all of a sudden the whole fabric can start to unravel. You cannot just turn off an economy and expect that you can restart it with a snap of your fingers. The same thing was done with medical procedures and treatments and hospital beds. Some were declared \u201cessential\u201d, others not. Perversely, spending on healthcare plummeted during the pandemic. Non-virus health conditions worsened and life expectancy in America fell. \u201cWe lost two years of education, substance abuse and addiction rose and hundreds of thousands of businesses were destroyed,\u201d says Jeffrey. \u201cVaccine mandates led to more than a million people being displaced from their jobs.\u201d In the almost three years after the virus emerged from Wuhan China, \u201cwe face an economic crisis without precedent in our lifetimes, the longest period of declining real income in the post-war period, a health and educational crisis, an exploding national debt plus inflation at a 40-year high, continued and seemingly random shortages, dysfunction in labor markets that defies all models, the breakdown of international trade, a collapse in consumer confidence not seen since we started tracking it, and a combustible level of political division.\u201d So here we are. We all need to be deeply concerned about not just this one crisis, but authorities response to the inevitable next \u201ccrises\u201d as well.  \u201cTo this day, the educated elites in the public health establishment defend every last thing they did. Not a single power that they used to lock us down before has been diminished,\u201d worries Jeffrey. \u201cYes, the courts have cut this policy or that policy a little bit here and there, too little, too late. But in general, all the policy, all the powers that they had before, they have now still, and they will use them again.\u201d We can\u2019t afford to sit on the sidelines and let this happen. Listen in as Jeffrey and I explore what happened and what we need to do to prevent it next time. ","author_name":"The Bill Walton Show","author_url":"https:\/\/www.thebillwaltonshow.com","html":"