Adam Smith contrasted the invisible hand of the marketplace with the iron fist of government, and he questioned what the king could possibly know, given that planning his own life was already a full-time job. Jenny Beth Martin's point in this segment is that Americans no longer have to reach for the Soviet Union to picture the iron fist. Everyone in the country over the age of six just lived through it.
Her account is specific. She grants the grace anyone should grant to officials responding to a genuine emergency in its first weeks. Then she describes what came next: a big box store like Home Depot could open, and the local seed store or toy store could not, and the people drawing those lines had mostly never met a payroll in their lives, had never run a business, and did not understand market forces at all. She contrasts the governor of Georgia, a small business owner who said he was not going to let people sit at home and go broke, and Governor DeSantis in Florida, a constitutional attorney, against what happened in Michigan, California and New York.
Reed's answer is that if Adam Smith had been around during the lockdowns, his first words would have been, I warned you. The whole episode is a testament to dispersed information, private initiative and choice, and against a top-down, one-size-fits-all national approach. He raises the states that forced people with COVID into nursing homes when everyone already knew age was the risk factor. And he names the deeper flaw: central planners are not flexible. When they get it wrong they hunker down and keep going, where a market listens to the signals and changes course.
Watch the full episode at jennybethshow.com. Learn more at teapartypatriots.org.
00:00 — The invisible hand versus the iron fist
00:23 — What everyone in America over the age of six just lived through
01:09 — Home Depot could open, your local store could not
01:27 — Most of them had never met a payroll
02:04 — What Adam Smith would have said during the lockdowns
02:50 — A top-down, one-size-fits-all approach that failed
03:01 — The governor who would not let people sit at home and go broke
03:30 — Florida, and a governor who knew the constitutional principles
03:47 — Georgia and Florida against Michigan and California
04:09 — Sending COVID patients into nursing homes
04:47 — Washington state showed what happens, and New York did it anyway
05:15 — Central planners do not pivot when they are wrong
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