JOHN TIERNEY: Lockdowns: the Self-Inflicted Disaster: Governments’ use of the pandemic to claim sweeping new emergency powers has had destructive effects. “Long before Covid struck, economists detected a deadly pattern in the impact of natural disasters: if the executive branch of government used the emergency to claim sweeping new powers over the citizenry, more people died than would have if government powers had remained constrained. It’s now clear that the Covid pandemic is the deadliest confirmation yet of that pattern.” (Bumped).