The cause of the recent inflation seems clear, but a lot of people are getting it wrong. Kamala Harris is blaming price gouging, dismaying even people who are trying to cheer for her. Donald Trump, in his interview with Elon Musk, pointed to oil price increases as the main driver of inflation – which is plausible enough to deserve an actual refutation, since transportation prices do drive up the price of other things, and oil is also a chemical feedstock. But the early-2000s oil price jump was much larger, with the price of oil roughly tripling, yet the effect on overall inflation was much less than the 20% of the Covid years.

Elon blamed government spending, which is a lot closer to the truth; but still, what directly drives inflation is printing money. Government spending doesn’t have to be done by printing money: it can be done by taxing or by borrowing, neither of which is particularly inflationary: they have major downsides, but inflation is not one of them. But when the government prints money, the result is direct: the more money there is, the less each bit of it is worth. (“Printing money” these days is mainly done electronically rather than with ink and paper, but the result is the same.)

In this case, the government did indeed finance the Covid lockdowns by printing money. They didn’t really have much choice: one of the first things that happened when it became clear Covid would be a serious problem was a market crash as speculators anticipated economic troubles. (“Speculators” is a dirty word in leftist circles, but thinking of the future is an inherently speculative activity, so I use the word here in a neutral sense.) The crash was stopped by the Federal Reserve, essentially by printing money and using it to buy government bonds. This did not produce immediate inflation: the private sector was decreasing the quantity of money – financial crashes do that – so the newly printed money just compensated for it. But the fact that this intervention was necessary made it clear that financing the Covid lockdowns by borrowing wouldn’t have worked: it would have meant selling government bonds, the reverse of that action, likely provoking another crash.

It is entirely possible and reasonable to wish for an economy that is not so fragile – not so highly leveraged, and thus not so needy of Federal intervention involving printing more money. But when the government finds itself with a highly-leveraged economy and a market crash, it has to intervene; the only alternative is deleveraging via the crash, which is hugely destructive even of things that do not at all deserve destruction. Hard decisions have to be made as to which investments to give up on, and in a financial crash there’s just no time to make those decisions properly.

To pay for the lockdowns, the government disbursed trillions of dollars, borrowing the money, but with the Federal Reserve printing money to buy government bonds: a two-step process, but one that resulted in about the same outcome as if they had just printed the money and spent it.

The upshot is that to argue against inflation one really has to argue against the lockdowns. One could try to argue against lockdown subsidies rather than lockdowns themselves, but that would mean insisting that people should have been prevented from working and yet not provided with any compensation: that they should have just suffered. Of course many could have lived off savings, and many more could have borrowed. But sudden mass borrowing by individuals has similar effects to sudden mass borrowing by the government; and sudden mass withdrawal of savings does something very similar, since savings are what banks lend out. So even those would have led either to a crash or to more money being printed. The only real way to have avoided that would be the way people with no savings and no credit would be forced into: suffering. That’s a relative term: a lot of what Americans consider suffering is just normal life for many in foreign countries – so to call it suffering is not to absolutely rule it out; it’s just to say it would be political suicide for any politician today to advocate for it.

During the lockdowns themselves, prices were also driven up by actual shortages, the result of industries being shut down. But that does not explain prices remaining high even now that those shortages are past; that’s due to the printing of money.

The lockdowns were initially sold as “just two weeks to flatten the curve”, but that was never good math: there was no reason to think that after two weeks were up the situation would be much different. The number of cases would be reduced, but with containment relaxed, exponential growth would quickly restore it. So after two weeks, they looked again at the situation, and the lockdowns weren’t lifted… but without apologizing for the initial “just two weeks” sales pitch, supplying a new rationale, or even saying how much longer it would be.

Frankly, what we were doing with the lockdowns was aping China. Western epidemiologists had had a doctrine that respiratory diseases were unstoppable and so it wasn’t worth trying (despite the first SARS having been eradicated globally). But lockdowns had worked for the Chinese, so we imitated them. With manufacturing, China has often been accused of copying Western ideas – largely fairly, but also largely unfairly, since turning ideas into practice is usually the hard part. (They often did also copy the turning-into-practice part of our knowledge, and even had considerable Western help, which is why the criticism as a whole has a lot of fairness to it.) But here the shoe was on the other foot: we copied them, and so poorly that copying isn’t even the right word, since we didn’t copy the key ingredient: the killer instinct.

A lot of things can be muddled through, making constant compromises between two competing views, dithering, going back and forth, adopting ideas from one side or the other. But with pathogens, either you’re trying to eradicate them or you’re not. The Chinese were trying for eradication, and succeeded. When mild measures didn’t work, they ramped up the intensity. In Wuhan in the early days, disinfection trucks roamed their streets emitting clouds of disinfectant – probably not usefully, but it was something to try, and was in the right direction, so they tried it. Their propaganda had them “building hospitals” in ten days, which was always a bit ridiculous: yes, the Chinese build fast, but they’re not superhuman; real hospitals, fully laid out in hospital fashion and filled with real hospital equipment, take more than ten days. What they really built were better described as warehouses for mild cases: people who didn’t need any serious health care but were being forcibly isolated so that they couldn’t spread the disease.

Throughout the pandemic, we chose the weaker form of isolation: telling people who tested positive to stay at home. The Chinese tried this at first, very quickly found that it didn’t work well enough, so shifted to forcible confinement. At some times and places, even people who weren’t sick were not allowed to go out on the streets. There were videos of lone walkers being admonished by drones with loudspeakers for being outdoors. Apartment buildings had doors and gates welded shut so that people could not get out. (Presumably they left one entrance open but guarded: still a severe hazard from a fire safety point of view, but worth it if done only for weeks to eradicate a killer disease.) They tracked people via their cell phones, forcing everyone to run an app which assigned each person a color-coded risk status based on where they’d been.

In the West there was an Apple/Google initiative to do cell phone contact tracking, in anonymized fashion, via Bluetooth sensing of nearby phones. It was something that people were suspicious of, and didn’t get used much. Suspicion was indeed appropriate, but here was misdirected: the publicized initiative wasn’t actually the problem. Indeed, it erred on the wimpy side. The information it delivered wasn’t very useful: it told an app user if another app user who had been near them had just been diagnosed with Covid, relying on users themselves to tell the app that they’d just been diagnosed. It could only really have been useful if everyone had the app and was conscientious about telling it about their diagnosis. Even then, “you might have been infected” is not a particularly useful piece of information for the victim to know; and (due to privacy concerns) the victim was the only person notified. The Chinese app, in contrast, was made mandatory and was required as a sort of passport for travel.

The reason suspicion of Apple and Google was actually appropriate was that both companies were already tracking their users and could easily have parlayed that tracking data into a Chinese-like risk assessment / method of control. This anonymous app initiative was just a fig leaf to hide their vast tracking databases, to preserve those for their really important use: selling advertising.

Throughout, the Chinese realized that eradication was the only worthwhile goal. This applied even at the end: when Omicron defeated their control measures, outside observers were astounded that rather than abandoning those measures gradually like we had done, they did so completely and all at once, letting the disease run wild. But it was the right move: those measures could only be justified as part of a complete package aimed at eradication.

The Chinese did wait far too long to abandon control: they battled Omicron for months with harsh lockdowns in cities that were vital to their economy. But before Omicron, for more than a year, they achieved nearly full eradication, letting life go on normally. There is Chinese propaganda that Covid was originally introduced from the West via frozen food; this is not at all plausible as regards its original origin, but entirely plausible as regards the occasional outbreaks they had during the period where they’d otherwise eradicated the disease. Transmission via frozen food is too rare to see in our own statistics; but when the disease is eradicated locally, even rare forms of transmission from foreign countries become evident.

Besides Omicron’s increased transmissibility, there was another reason for it to signal relaxation of control measures: it is much less deadly, inflicting about a quarter the death toll of the original variant, putting it in flu territory. One of the great failings of public health information has been not telling people this, with the result that many people still think Covid is a bigger menace than it currently is, and many others think that it was never a big menace.

This mortality difference is no secret; there are published papers (such as this one or this one) on it. Those papers do control for prior immunity: though Omicron is good at infecting people with prior immunity (whether from vaccines or from infection), and although that is a big reason why the Omicron wave infected so many more people yet was so much less deadly, it’s not the explanation for the results of those studies; they tease out the inherent deadliness of the strain in people of equal immune status.

Even the mechanism for the difference is known: Omicron enters cells in a different way (not using the enzyme TMPRSS2), giving it more affinity for the upper respiratory tract and less affinity for the lungs. Becoming more of an upper respiratory tract disease explains the greater transmissibility: the nose is an easier place for germs to get to (and an easier place for them to leave) than the lungs are. But lung infections are more deadly.

Though no secret, this still represents a failure in public messaging: those responsible (both in government and in the press) were too scared to share the good news. I heard it in good time from one of Peter Attia’s podcasts, but those are technical discussions which don’t reach a mass audience.

So though the Chinese waited too long to end their control measures, they probably saved a lot of deaths from the pre-Omicron variants. But our “lockdowns” were much less severe than the Chinese ones, so they didn’t come anywhere near eradicating the disease. Large numbers of “essential” businesses were allowed to keep working, including liquor stores. Whatever impetus there was towards making restrictions more severe was lost in the George Floyd riots: conservatives looked at the tolerance extended to rioters’ lockdown violations and concluded that the people pushing for lockdowns weren’t really serious. Even from a nonpartisan point of view the riots served as a reminder that we have a large and unruly lower class, accustomed to lawbreaking, which would serve as a reservoir of infection even if the upper and middle classes did everything right; it would have taken something like martial law to change this.

People like Anthony Fauci are commonly blamed for the lockdowns, with Elon Musk even calling for him to be prosecuted. But being a public health jackass is not actually a crime. It wasn’t even Fauci’s job to consider the economic downsides of lockdowns; that’s the job of politicians. They needed to take the attitude that Clemenceau exhibited during World War 1 when he said “War is too important to be left to the generals”. Public health authorities aren’t experts on the economy, so can’t be trusted to weigh economic factors against health factors; that’s their bosses’ job.

The lockdowns continued for quite a while. No definite cutoff can be named, since they were gradually relaxed and the schedule varied from state to state. But six months is something like a ballpark figure for the half-life of the whole lockdown phenomenon in the US. This had to be paid for: the first federal spending bill allocated two trillion dollars, and subsequent bills added more trillions to that. Compared to the initial talk of “two weeks”, six months cost quite a lot.

In this, both parties have a large degree of complicity: at first both fully signed on to it. Republicans were first to start murmuring, and then all-out opposed the final dose of pork, but perhaps only Thomas Massie can boast (as he does 46 minutes in to this interview with Tucker Carlson) of having opposed lockdown subsidies from day one. All this makes the inflation an ideal political football: neither party can truly get to the root cause since that would implicate them too. Also, by now the inflation is pretty much over, killed by the Fed’s raising of interest rates, so whatever nonsense politicians now promulgate as a remedy, they’ll be able to announce victory.