Ananish Chaudhuri
ananishchaudhuri.com
Ananish Chaudhuri is Professor of Economics at the University of Auckland and the author of Nudged into lockdown? Behavioural Economics, Uncertainty and Covid-19.
Among the many foibles of human nature exposed by the Covid-19 pandemic is the hypocrisy that lies at the heart of contemporary progressivism.
In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder the Black Lives Matter protests flared in the US. This was in the middle of the ongoing pandemic. While some worried that these events may become super-spreader events, progressives were unconcerned and it transpired that the protests did not cause an uptick in cases. It was important, and it certainly was, that people have the right to protest such systemic injustice.
Fast forward a few months to the protests organized by the Freedom and Rights Coalition in New Zealand; once again protesting the deprivation of a range of fundamental rights. But how different the response! What sacrilege! Do these people not realise that they are spreading the virus? This in spite of the fact that by and large there was little violation of social distancing protocols at most of these events, which were being held outdoors on warm sunny days with attendees spread out across public parks. Not unexpectedly, these events did not become super-spreader events either.
It is arguable that the singing and dancing involving large groups of mask-less individuals, including the NZ Director-General of Health, that took place in the close confines of a TV studio during the government-sponsored Super Saturday vaxxathon was more of a super spreader event than the protests in public parks.
It appears that whether protests are super-spreading events or not depends very much on the identity of the protesters.
Even the newly elected Leader of the Opposition piled on in expressing his disdain for the protesters. No wonder that fundamental rights are at risk in New Zealand given the agreement between the ruling and the opposition parties about their dispensability.
Progressives make fun of conservatives for simultaneously opposing abortion and supporting the death-penalty; it is amusing that conservatives are pro-choice for some and pro-death for others.
Yet those same progressives do not perceive the contradiction in saving Covid lives at all costs even if that meant more deaths elsewhere. It has been reported widely how the lockdowns have led to postponements and cancellations of scans and surgeries.
Evidence suggests that, across 24 OECD countries, those countries with more stringent lockdowns are reporting more total deaths, both from Covid and from other causes.
For New Zealand, John Gibson of the University of Waikato has shown that following a reduction in deaths in the latter half of 2020, there was a surge in deaths in early 2021 resulting in significant excess mortality as a result of lockdowns.
The average age of death for Covid victims is not different from life-expectancy for most high-income countries, with the US being one notable exception. For most countries, Covid has not changed underlying mortality patterns, implying that this is not excess mortality: simply displaced mortality.
People die from myriad different causes. This past year many died from Covid but fewer died from other respiratory diseases, which is why the underlying mortality picture has not changed radically. In any given year between 50 and 60 million die around the world. In 2019 the number was around 59 million, implying around 162,000 deaths per day around the world.
Progressives are hurt and dismayed when someone is subjected to discrimination but this sensitivity extends only to those that agree with them. If not then you are out of luck.
The same with the rule of law. Progressives are all about upholding fundamental rights as long as they are for the deserving. If you happen to be unvaccinated against the virus, regardless of cause, it is absolutely fine that you are discriminated against and your rights are nothing that progressives need to worry about.
The same people who protest against overreach by the heavy hand of the government and systematic injustice cheer lustily when their hero and role model Jacinda Ardern admits with a smile to a reporter that her aim is to create a segregated society.
Progressives care about transparency and accountability, yet their laws need to be passed under urgency with minimal debate or public scrutiny.
Progressive experts ask us to trust science when it comes to dealing with the pandemic, but when a group of scholars ask whether Matauranga Maori is the same as science, those same progressives tell us to disregard science since science, after all, is a tool of the coloniser.
Progressives hate inequality. Yet they are all for lockdowns even though all available evidence suggests that this will significantly exacerbate inequality. Lockdowns have barely touched white-collar workers, the so-called “laptop class”, who kept on working from home while devastating blue-collar workers who did not have the luxury of self-isolation.
The laptop class could afford to get food and groceries delivered to the safety of their homes. What about those doing the delivery? Their lives are clearly not worth as much. After all, “some animals are more equal than others”.
Governments around the world engaged in printing large amounts of money to keep interest rates low. What happened? In the midst of a pandemic, we saw house and share prices sky-rocket. Who benefited? Not the young person stocking shelves at the local Countdown, someone with a young family struggling to get a foothold on the property ladder. But the white-collar laptop class that already had millions in home equity exploited the low interest rates by buying more property and shares.
The lockdowns, of course, also resulted in a massive redistribution of wealth from the local butcher and the greengrocer to the big supermarket chains.
Progressive governments all around the world, including our own, got busy redistributing wealth away from the less well-off to the ones who were already rich: all along cheered on by their progressive acolytes and defenders.
As C S Lewis wrote:
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”
