Everybody in the Western world is either already thinking this or will be in the next few weeks, and there's no guidance on what to do. I think the public health authorities have convinced themselves that permanent lockdowns will be viable. That delusion will come crashing down. https://twitter.com/conorsen/status/1250565201759555597

Yesterday you saw large scale protests in North Carolina. Today traffic ground to a halt in Michigan's capital due to a protest action. The political anger is already boiling up. Whitmer's Michigan administration is banning the sale of gardening equipment for crying out lout.

It's irrational for a bunch of Proud Boys in MAGA hats to sit around in an intersection, but we can always expect stupid stuff from that crowd. It's equally irrational to ban the sale of garden products products, but that's what we see from the supposed adults in the room.

I keep beating the drum about the potential for serious and irreversible political discontinuities because every day of unaddressed, state-mandated economic collapse that goes by makes those discontinuities more likely. We are playing with the pin of a political hand grenade.

Almost everybody in officialdom who didn't listen to warnings that covid was getting geometrically worse months ago is now downplaying or outright ignoring warnings that the economic and political situation is getting worse nonlinearly.

The administrative state at nearly every level is *still* asleep at the wheel. Covid did not wake anybody up. We are careening along the edge of a ravine filled with unknown unknowns, and the passengers of the car are getting understandably freaking out.

There will obviously need to be significant restrictions on in-person commerce for the foreseeable future. But the idea that we can just put the economy on pause is ludicrous. I'm terrified that that seems to be the base assumption of these policies.