**No, Washington Post, The Experts Were The Whole Problem**

No, Washington Post, The Experts Were The Whole Problem

_Authored by John Tamny via The Brownstone Institute,_ (https://brownstone.org/articles/washington-post-experts-were-whole-problem/)

> _"On the field of war what is at stake is the thing that matters most to any man - the saving of his own skin.”_

>

> \- Leo Tolstoy, _War and Peace_, p. 889

The quote from Tolstoy’s _War and Peace_ is a useful way to begin addressing **the _Washington Post_ editorial board’s confident assertion that “’A collective national incompetence in government’” was at the root of the U.S.’s alleged failure vis-à-vis the coronavirus in 2020.**

According to the _Post_ quoting from a recently released report (“Lessons from the Covid War”), “The United States started out ‘with more capabilities than any other country in the world,’ but “it ended up with 1 million dead.”

Were he still around, one guesses Tolstoy would mock the conceit of the _Post’s_ editorialists.

**That’s the case because “the thing that matters most to any man” is “the saving of his own skin.”**

That this needs to even be said speaks to how wrongheaded the _Post’s_editorial board’s approach (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/04/24/covid-pandemic-government-response-report/) to the virus was, and still is.

**It implies we have dead because government didn’t act properly, as though free people eager to live were unequal to a virus that the right kind of collective governmental action was more than equal to.**

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**Ok, but what was government going to do? Better yet, what if the virus had struck in 2009 when _Barack Obama_ was still in the White House. What would _he_ have done? Would he have instructed a virus that was spreading faster than the flu to take a “time out?”**

The simple truth missed by the _Post_ is that as humans we’re wired to preserve ourselves. On the matter of life and the presumption of death, government is excess. Whatever solution Obama might have come up with, or whatever Donald Trump did come up with, or (try not to laugh) whatever Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer would have done if the virus had revealed itself in 2021 would have been vastly unequal to the solutions crafted by free people.

**Deep down the _Post’s_ editorialists must know the above is true.** Indeed, it’s not that the Soviet Union lacked experts, or that Cuba lacks experts now. The problem was and is that the remarkable knowledge of very few very smart people will never measure up to the collective knowledge of the citizenry. That’s why communism failed so impressively in the Soviet Union, and it’s why it fails in Cuba. Translated for those who need it, the people are the market and markets work.

As I make plain in my 2021 book _When Politicians Panicked (https://www.amazon.com/When-Politicians-Panicked-Coronavirus-Opinion/dp/1642938378/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1682727290&sr=8-3),_ **the problem was experts and politicians substituting their limited knowledge for that of the people. _That was the crisis_.** Not so, according to the _Post_ and the report they cite.

Supposedly the “leaders of the United States could not apply their country’s vast assets effectively enough” such that “1 million died.” Wrong. Over and over again. To see why, imagine if 10 million Americans had died in March of 2020. Can the _Post_ editorial board think of what government might have done that would have somehow improved on a feverish individual desire to survive against long odds? The simple truth glossed over by the _Post_ is that the more threatening a virus is (and the _Post_ seems to view what most didn’t know they were infected with as wildly threatening), the more superfluous government action is.

**Really, who reading this needs to ever be forced to avoid behavior that might result in sickness, or even death?** And if the reply to this question is that some people _DO_ need to be forced, you’re making the best case of all for unfettered freedom. Think about it. Those who reject expert opinion are the most crucial “control group” as a virus spreads. By going against the grain, we learn from their freely arrived at actions if the virus is as lethal as presumed, or not, how it spreads, how to perhaps avoid its spread, and all manner of other important bits of information suppressed by one-size-fits-all national solutions.

It cannot be stressed enough that free people crucially produce information. Instead of allowing them to produce it in abundance in 2020, the response arrived at by Democrats _and_ Republicans was to lock people in their homes, thus blinding a na…

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/no-washington-post-experts-were-whole-problem