A new report titled “COVID Lessons Learned: A Retrospective After Four Years” was just published. The authors are Scott W. Atlas, Steve H. Hanke, professor of economics at Johns Hopkins, Philip G. Kerpen, and Casey B. Mulligan, professor of economics at the University of Chicago.

The report cites a 2021 Danish study titled “Emergencies: on the misuse of government powers,” which concluded the following:

“We find that the more advantages emergency constitutions confer to the executive, the higher the number of people killed as a consequence of a natural disaster, controlling for its severity. As this is an unexpected result, we discuss a number of potential explanations, the most plausible being that governments use natural disasters as a pretext to enhance their power. Furthermore, the easier it is to call a state of emergency, the larger the negative effects on basic human rights. Interestingly, presidential democracies are better able to cope with natural disasters than parliamentary ones in terms of lives saved, whereas autocracies do significantly worse in the sense that empowerment rights seriously suffer in the aftermath of a disaster.”

Four years ago, while watching New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti exercise emergency power over their jurisdictions, I was reminded of this speech by the newly minted dictator in Woody Allen’s film “Bananas.” Though satirical and hyperbolic, the scene nevertheless expresses a profound truth about human nature.

Reposted from John Leake’s Substack