Another way in which the Administrative State burdened liberty during the Covid-19 pandemic was through the creation and enforcement of arbitrary lockdown rules. Governors utilized the full extent of their emergency powers (and then some) during the pandemic. Many bypassed the appropriate legislative channels to implement mandates in the name of “public health.” City mayors…

Federal agencies never let a good crisis go to waste, unless you are talking about wasting taxpayer dollars. Among many ways they exploited the Covid-19 crisis was to raid the treasury and stick taxpayers with the bill for illegal giveaways to their most dependable voting blocks. Consider the Biden Administration’s mass “forgiveness” of outstanding student…

Exaggerating the fatality risk associated with Covid-19 and portraying unscientific guesses as unqualified facts stood out as key Administrative State failures in the early days of Covid. Take the Administrative State’s early statements regarding Covid case fatality and mortality rates. A case fatality rate is a ratio of how many people infected with a particular…

When Covid arrived in the United States, all 50 governors declared a state of emergency They shut down schools, offices, stores, churches, and public parks—initially justifying these unprecedented restrictions as the now-familiar “two weeks to flatten the curve.” With few exceptions (e.g., Georgia, Florida) these emergency orders quickly morphed into abuses of power that continued…

In stark contrast to widely accepted understandings of what constitutes science, “the Science” that emerged during the Covid era eschewed unbiased observation, systematic experimentation and debate, replacing those careful, deliberative processes with rushes to judgment and stifling of opposing viewpoints.[1]  By the time Covid-19 reached epidemic proportions in the United States, public health authorities had concluded…

The Framers understood that property rights comprise an indispensable bulwark against government.  Covid taught us, however, that bureaucrats believe that bulwark ought to be more notional than real.  After state-level bureaucrats imposed on our liberties by confining us to our homes, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) imposed further by forbidding landlords from…