So many great columns in 2022. This was, in my view, the best.

Today’s read is from Jeffrey A. Tucker, founder and president of the Brownstone Institute and a daily columnist on economics for The Epoch Times. He is the author of 20 books, including Liberty or Lockdown. Here’s an excerpt:

Needless to say, the consequences (of 2020) were profound. Coercion can be used to turn off an economy. But given the resulting trauma, turning an economy back on is not so easy. That is why, 30 months later, we are experiencing the longest period of declining real income since the end of World War II, a health crisis, an education crisis, an exploding national debt, 40-year high inflation, continued and seemingly random shortages, dysfunction in labor markets, a breakdown of international trade, a dramatic collapse in consumer confidence, and a dangerous level of political division. 

We could write books listing all the economic calamities directly caused by the disastrous pandemic response. We will be suffering the results for years. Yet even today, too few people grasp the relationship between our current economic hardships—extending even to growing international tensions and the breakdown of trade and travel—and the brutality of the pandemic response.

Read the entire column here.