NEW ZEALAND A VICTIM OF BUREAUCRATIC “HUBRIS.”

The latest series of Covid-19 blunders is a timely reminder that the entire premise of the lockdown was hubris. The bureaucrats went from flattening the curve to believing that they could eliminate the virus and quarantine a population of 5 million people indefinitely from the 7 billion other people on the planet.

They can’t. The inevitability of this program’s failure, however, does not mean we will abandon it easily. But we will abandon it.

Governments don’t walk away from a policy merely because it isn’t working. They simply re-double their efforts, imposing more costs and stripping away more freedoms while the populace cheers them on to ever-greater acts of idiocy until we all exhaust ourselves and move on to the next crisis.

New Zealand is not especially well-governed.