Tag: economy

The Economic Performance of Coronavirus Sweden

In Iceland, aggressive track-and-trace policies, effective quarantining, and closed borders had the country’s infection peak in early April. Soon enough we all forgot about them and their single-digit deaths. 

Instead Sweden became the black sheep. The stubborn outlier kept its society comparatively open. Shops and cafés and workplaces introduced some changes, like putting screens between customers and shop-workers. The Scandinavian nation leveraged its high internet accessibility to work from home, and public policy and persona alike appealed to common-sense behavior – like staying at home if ill, keeping physical distance, and using sanitizer (though not as religiously as the Icelanders). 

While pundits of either ideological persuasion lined up to defend it or attack it, Sweden’s elderly population kept dying. The strategy’s focus on openness, we were told, was directly to blame for care homes being unable to shield their vulnerable residents. 

Except, it turned out, that the elderly and those in nursing homes elsewhere were dying all the same: in New York, in England, in Italy, in New Orleans, stringent government restrictions or not.

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Health bureaucrats have crippled America

Look around. America the free is America the stifled.

And what’s perhaps the saddest about this reality is the stifling has come not by law, not by ordinance, not by duly passed legislation by duly elected officials — but by the whims and wishes of unelected, largely unaccountable medical bureaucrats.

If face masks are the great godsends of COVID-19 protections they’re made out to be, why don’t legislators pass mandates the American constitutional way — by proposing bills, openly debating the bills, publicly voting on the bills and going on record with votes for these bills that allow the people to hold them accountable? Why don’t local boards of supervisors and city councils?

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