Who Will Stand for Freedom?

The public have come to associate freedom with death, and lockdown and restriction with life. But the data doesn’t support this association. So why is it so pervasive?

In the year of our Lord 2020, an entire global civilization turned its back on freedom.

Freedom will kill everyone, we were told. The World Health Organization gushed praise for the way China had handled its outbreak, and tough as it might be, we all had to do the same — China was the model.

Lock down, hard and fast. It was the only way.

And, after all, it was only temporary, right? A brief pause, just a few weeks of authoritarian rule, the virus would cease to be, and then we could go back to being free again.

We complied. We were frightened. After all, this could be another Spanish Flu, which killed 50 million people, and they kept telling us we were “due” for another. We regarded a temporary loss of freedoms as regrettable but necessary. We closed our schools and offices and restaurants. We shut down our air traffic, clos…