67: 1. When Politicians Panicked: The New Coronavirus, Expert Opinion, and a Tragic Lapse of Reason. John Tamny discusses the severe economic contraction initiated by mandated lockdowns, such as Governor Cuomo's March 20, 2020, order in New York. Tamny argues

The John Batchelor Show

John Batchelor

Arts, Society & Culture, Books, News

4.5 • 2.8K Ratings

🗓️ 9 November 2025

⏱️ 11 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

1. When Politicians Panicked: The New Coronavirus, Expert Opinion, and a Tragic Lapse of Reason. John Tamny discusses the severe economic contraction initiated by mandated lockdowns, such as Governor Cuomo's March 20, 2020, order in New York. Tamny argues that politicians caused the crisis by forcing successful businesses to cease operations. These sudden actions by major economies forced global investors to fundamentally rethink the future value of businesses. Although early market signals from China suggested the virus was not highly lethal, pivotal political decisions, like the cancellation of South by Southwest, triggered panic, leading markets to realize that political action, not reality, was the primary threat. Markets digested these fears and corrected before rebounding.
1918

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	I'm John Bachelor. This is the new John Bachelor show on CBS Audio Network, and John Tamning, his new book, when politicians panicked.
0:17.1	The new coronavirus, expert opinion, and a tragic lapse of reason. John, two examples you
0:23.2	provide about the payroll protection program and the grants to businesses. Sidwell Friends,
0:29.0	the Distinguished Private School in Washington, with an endowment, I think, more than $50 million,
0:36.7	received $5.2 million from the government
0:39.8	programs, the combination of them. The John Burroughs School of St. Louis received another
0:45.0	distinguished private school, received $2.55 million. There are many examples of excesses,
0:50.7	people who apply. But the payroll protection program, did it work, John?
0:55.7	Does government have an opinion of it today?
0:58.4	Because as we know, they continue to vote more and more money to be handed out to their idea of who needs it.
1:08.9	If something worked because maybe it saved a few businesses, sure, perhaps, but that's not
1:16.1	a worthy way of looking at it because we always have to ask what businesses died, what
1:20.8	businesses never got funding because government was just indiscriminately propping up anything
1:26.1	that had an effective strategy for going online
1:29.5	and asking for P.P. money and working through a bank that was well tied to the government and was
1:35.2	able to get that money out to them. Again, we'll never know what would have been otherwise,
1:41.1	and it would have been much better because rather than government as the allocator,iscriminately propping up private schools, propping up Harvard, propping up the
1:49.0	Los Angeles Lakers, we would have had actual market forces at work.
1:53.0	The Federal Reserve had its own version of PPP. I think it was called Main Street Lending,
1:59.1	providing large sums of money to businesses to stay open.
2:03.1	It appears, John, a year later, that there was much, much attention to jobs, to the loss of jobs,
2:11.1	than there was to the value of sustaining businesses that were troubled or permitting businesses to sustain themselves.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from John Batchelor, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of John Batchelor and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.