What Were the Economic Consequences of the Unjustifiable COVID Lockdowns?

Exploring the decades of "You Will Own Nothing and Be Happy"

Story at a Glance:

•Over the last 50 years, there has been a sustained push to transfer all wealth to the upper class and to economically enslave the rest of the population—an approach favored as it provides the most cost-effective way to enslave the populace.

•Because of this, over and over, we see terrible policies be enacted with inevitably make everyone poorer. In turn, as the decades have gone by we’ve become much poorer and must struggle more and more to make ends meet.

•The way COVID-19 was handled, particularly the lockdowns was one of the worst economic assaults on the working class in American history. It was devastating for many, and as time moves forward, its damage continues to worsen and everything that used to be affordable is becoming unaffordable.

•Understand where this economic warfare came from will allow us to both understand how to resist it and how to resist falling prey to the economic servitude it creates.

Over the last few months, I’ve heard many of my physician colleagues lament how difficult it is to buy a house–something I never heard prior to COVID.  Given that physicians are some of the highest wage earners in the country (the lowest paying specialties all make it to the top 5% income bracket), this is quite extraordinary and speaks to how almost everyone is slowly moving towards the reality of “You Will Own Nothing and Be Happy.”

I’ve put a lot of thought into why this is happening, and I believe the severely misguided COVID lockdowns served as the catalyst for this widespread economic disenfranchisement.  However, at the same time, I do not believe it could have happened without the broader context that proceeded it.

Economic Feudalism

Shortly after the Trilateral Commission was founded in 1973, someone in my uncle’s circle give him a copy of some of the founding documents which laid out a blueprint for the decades to come.  Not long after Carter was elected and many members of administration belonged to the Trilateral Commission.  My uncle then gradually watched unbelievable thing after thing come to pass, and before long he started telling his family members (myself included) what else was planned.  I in turn could not help but notice that much of what he told me has in fact come to pass as the decades have gone by.

Given the eerie accuracy of those predictions, I’ve tried to confirm the authenticity of those documents.  I must admit that I was never able to do so (e.g., my Uncle no longer had them when I learned about this and the individual who shared it with my uncle was no longer alive when I tried to track them down). However, I am nonetheless inclined to believe in their authenticity due to their accuracy and that much of what was originally put forward there precisely matches what the World Economic Forum is now pushing forward (which leads me to believe the WEF essentially took over the Trilateral Commission’s role).

Prior to the advent of Democracy, monarchies were the rule, and monarchies had absolute power over everyone.  Conversely, ever since Democracy become the default mode of government, the ruling class has always had a yearning to return to the days of Kings and Queens and there has been a constant effort to chip away at the power Democracies give to the people.
Note: one of the earliest examples I’ve found of this can be found in the Robber Barons, the story of cut-throat industrialists who, in the post-Civil War era, monopolized America and birthed much of the predatory capitalism we see to this day (e.g., Rockefeller and Carnegie played pivotal roles in creating the modern medical monopoly).  After the Robber Barons became the wealthiest individuals in history and had more money than they knew what to do with, one thing they were well known for was throwing lavish balls where each participant acted out being a European aristocrat.

During the age of monarchies, kings and queens assigned regions of their kingdom to lords (e.g., a duke) who each had their own army, land, and serfs to work the land for the kingdom.  The serfs were not treated well (e.g., they had poor living conditions along with minimal human rights) and had to work quite hard each day in the service of their lord.

For this system to retain its control, the serfs needed to be unaware there were other options for how governments could be run (an awareness of which eventually unravelled the feudal system) and to be so destitute they felt they had no choice to comply with it. In essence, it was not that different from many of the other common strategies the ruling class has used for control throughout history.

After World War 2, two historical abnormalities emerged.

The first was that technology had increased the destructive capacity of warfare to the point it became too costly (e.g., if a war destroy’s a country industry you can’t make money off it in the future) and risky (e.g., due to nuclear weapons) for it to be to the benefit of the ruling elite to conduct it on a large scale.

The second was America’s intact industrial base (due to it being too far away to be bombed during the war) allowed it to rapidly become the world’s leading economy.  As a result, a massive degree of wealth flowed into the United States, and before long everyone prospered from it (e.g., an African American high school drop out could make enough working reasonable hours in a factory to buy a house and support a stay at home family—now married college graduates both working full time often cannot do any of that).  This made it much harder to control the population since they were no longer impoverished.

To “solve” these problems, a system of economic feudalism was enacted where lords were replaced with transnational corporations and physical warfare was replaced with economic warfare.  This required:

•Changing the laws so corporations assumed more and more unchecked power.

•Exporting America’s manufacturing base and wealth to the rest of the world so the common American people could no longer enjoy the economic prosperity that had previously allowed them to chose what they wanted to do with their lives.

•Eliminating more and more employment options outside of large corporations.

•Creating so many financial interdependences that it would be impossible to back out of this new corporate form of government or to profit from starting a large scale war.

•In addition to financial self-sufficiency, other anchors to reality (e.g., the family structure) that had previously provided social cohesion and allowed the citizenry to remain strong against tyranny were also systemically removed from the society.

By enacting each of these, it was almost guaranteed that more and more workers would succumb to the economic pressure to become serfs to their corporate lords. One of the best illustrations of this agenda can be seen with the vaccine mandates.

Corporations throughout America made receiving a dubious COVID-19 vaccine be a condition of employment, despite many of their workers not wanting to receive it under any circumstances (e.g., because they had seen others die from it). Many workers eventually agreed to the mandates because they felt they had no other choice to keep food on the table, and I personally know of numerous people in those circumstances who were severely injured and deeply regret submitting the mandate. This is a perfect illustration of corporate serfdom.

Note: the legality for those mandates was highly questionable, and the federally imposed ones were later outlawed by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Coincidence or Conspiracy?

One of the challenges I always have when looking at a complex event is deciding if it was the result of an organized conspiracy or a naturally emergent phenomena, as in many cases, a good (and plausible) case can be made for each.

For example, many people believe a coordinated group of sociopaths were responsible for all the bad things that happened with COVID-19, and depending on who you ask, the sociopath’s motivation was either to make as much money as possible, or gain power over the world. Conversely, a good case can also be made that a collective hypnosis took over much of the political leadership and then the general population, leading all of them to fanatically believe many of the atrocious things they were doing were actually in the best interests of society (this is known as the mass formation hypothesis).

When I look at problems like this, I often think warfare prior to the development of gunpowder. At that time, it was well known that battlefields were chaotic, and completely unpredictable outcomes could happen there. Generals were selected on the basis of their ability to direct the flow of battlefields to an outcome favoring their side. However regardless of how much things were planned out, there was always a certain flow that emerged on its own no general could directly control, and in many ways a general’s task was to create a wave in the battlefield and then guide it as best as they could in the hope a favorable outcome would occur.

In turn, often when I observe events occurring in the public sphere, I feel something similar is happening, where those in positions of power are trying to use the limited tools at their disposal to guide the flow of the current social change to a process which benefits them—but at the same time, to some extent they are helpless against the tide of what is happening in the general populace and unpredictable things they never set out to do happen on their own.

In the case of COVID-19, I believe something similar happened; a group of people seeking to use the pandemic for their own agenda worked to push things to move in one direction, but before long, particularly once the fear they stoked set in, a current formed with its own momentum (which was aided by officials not wanting to admit they screwed up).

I share these analogies to illustrate how hard it often is from looking at the outside to determine what actually caused things to happen and whether or not your explanation for a series of events is indeed accurate. In situations like these, I often go by the rule that if a theory accurately predicts an unknown that happens in the future, the theory should be utilized until new evidence emerges that argues for adopting a different theory.

Planned Economic Destitution

One of the biggest reasons why I believe in the Trilateral Commission theory is because year by year, I’ve watched policies be enacted which took wealth away from America’s working class or small businesses and moved it oversees or to the global elite. Despite the effects of those policies being fairly predictable, very few leaders have ever done anything to challenge their implementation.

One of the rare exceptions was Ross Perot, a billionaire who used his wealth to run in 1992, becoming the most successful third party candidate in history. A key part of Perot’s campaign was speaking against many of the predatory policies (e.g., NAFTA—the North American “Free Trade” Agreement) that were transferring America’s wealth to the upper class and that both the Democrat (Clinton) and Republican (Bush Sr.) uniparty presidential candidates supported.

If you watch their 1992 Presidential Debate, it’s fascinating how much of what Perot said was just as true then as it was now. If anything it’s actually worse—for example at the time our overpriced but ineffective medical system was called out by Perot for amongst other things, globally ranking 22nd for infant mortality, whereas now it is 44th (which I believe is largely due to the rapid proliferation of childhood vaccines that happened in 1988 after their manufacturer’s liability was removed). Likewise, everything Perot said would happen with NAFTA (that everyone else denied) ultimately did.

Note: In 2016, Trump ran on a populist platform very similar to Perot’s. Since the issues Perot highlighted became much worse in the time since his campaign occurred, much of the American public was very receptive to Trump’s message of economic nationalism. Unfortunately, once Trump became president, as retold in Joe Navarro’s memoir, much of the Republican party and the Whitehouse staff did not support this, which significantly hampered his ability to enact those policy changes. Likewise, the media and those outside his party were even more strongly opposed to those policies. Given that the economic conditions have significantly deteriorated in the last 3 years, it is likely Perot’s message will be even more popular in this election cycle—something already demonstrated by the unprecedented popularity of RFK Jr.’s presidential campaign.

When my uncle explained the theory of economic feudalism to me, he told me that as the years went forward, people would become poorer and poorer and that unless you planned out how to prevent yourself from becoming an economic slave it would happen to you too Decade by decade, I’ve watched the economic trajectories of each subsequent generation and seen how things the previous generation took for granted have become unobtainable dreams for later ones that followed.

Yet, they rarely see what the upper class is doing to them (since they keep on being torn apart by having the basic anchors of their identity such as community or family be taken away). Instead, they are taught to focus on attacking other demographics within the working class they’ve been told by the media to blame for all their problems.

Medical Serfdom

One of the most memorable pieces of graffiti I ever saw said:

Sick people are easier to control.

In turn, I believe the medical system is one of the primary tools being utilized to realize our economic enslavement. Specifically:

•When you are sick, especially with a condition that affects your ability to make money or to think clearly (both of which are quite common) it becomes much harder to resist something which is occurring around you and you do not agree with.

•By having every treatment be expensive, something that is taken forever and something you cannot go without, members of the population are forced to become economic slaves in order to receive the medical care they need.

•Modern medical care often causes creates more illnesses that disable you and require spending even more of your savings on medical care (e.g., many vaccine injured individuals I know have had to spend their life savings on treatments for their injury which have only partially helped them).

Note: a 2019 study helps put the above points into context—it found 66.5% of all bankruptcies were tied to medical issues.

COVID-19 Lockdowns

I believe one of the fundamental problems in our society is that we rarely have an honest conversations with each other about how we know something is true—a question an entire (but largely forgotten) branch of philosophy, epistemology, exists to address. Since the truth is often murky and hard to uncover, tools like critical thinking and epistemology are needed, but more and more, instead of developing those tools, we are taught to settle those questions by simply trusting the most trustable expert.

When the COVID-19 lockdowns were proposed, they didn’t make any sense and much of the public was opposed to them. To overcome this opposition, gradually increasing goal posts were introduced. As you might remember, they were first sold to the public as two weeks to slow the spread, and when any factual objection was raised, the response was normally a combination of “two weeks is not a big deal” and “how could you be so selfish as to chose avoiding a minor inconvenience over saving a lot of lives.” Yet, once the public assented to that, the propaganda switched, they were extended indefinitely and eventually the dangerous and unproven vaccines were offered as the solution to this new “problem.”

If we take a step back, we should consider what the epistemological basis was for the lockdowns many of us were tricked into agreeing to.

First, a model was put forward asserting that a global catastrophe would occur if strict lockdowns were not immediately implemented, and that model was largely responsible for convincing leaders around the world they had no choice but to enact the reprehensible lockdowns. To give you an idea of just how “accurate” it was:

Note: much of the existing evidence suggests lockdowns increased rather than decreased the COVID-19 death rate.

Many things should have called the Imperial model’s predictions into question (e.g., its author had for decades repeatedly made extreme overestimations of the severity of previous infectious disease outbreaks, and the model itself made no sense). Yet despite its repeated failures to accurately predict COVID-19, it was never challenged nor updated as data became available showing its assumptions were wrong. Instead leaders didn’t think the argument through and simply took the most trustable experts at their word.
Note: One of the few the exceptions was Ron DeSantis who actually considered the dissenting voices and tried on his own to make sense of the existing data.

Sadder still, let’s consider what the WHO had to say about this in 2019.

The evidence base on the effectiveness of NPIs (non-pharmaceutical interventions) in community settings is limited, and the overall quality of evidence was very low for most interventions. There have been a number of highquality randomized controlled trials (RCTs) demonstrating that personal protective measures such as hand hygiene and face masks have, at best, a small effect on influenza transmission. However, there are few RCTs for other NPIs, and much of the evidence base is from observational studies and computer simulations. School closures can reduce influenza transmission but would need to be carefully timed in order to achieve mitigation objectives. Travel-related measures are unlikely to be successful in most locations…and travel restrictions and travel bans are likely to have prohibitive economic consequences. 

The most effective strategy to mitigate the impact of a pandemic is to reduce contacts between infected and uninfected persons, thereby reducing the spread of infection, the peak demand for hospital beds, and the total number of infections, hospitalizations and deaths. However, social distancing measures (e.g. contact tracing, isolation, quarantine, school and workplace measures and closures, and avoiding crowding) can be highly disruptive, and the cost of these measures must be weighed against their potential impact. 

The WHO’s guide in turn suggested:

Note: I believe setting up UV lights (with the UV appropriate wavelength) would have done more to prevent to prevent the transmission of COVID indoors (e.g., see this study and this review) than any other intervention we did—most of which were ultimately useless. More importantly, unlike the other options, the affordable UV approach was not disruptive to our daily lives.

Beyond the existing evidence again and again arguing against the lockdowns, common sense did as well. Consider each of these scenarios:

1. If border controls were implemented prior to a single case of COVID entering an area, they could potentially stop an epidemic (although the evidence for this was quite weak). At the start of COVID-19, there were numerous calls for travel restrictions from the countries affected by COVID-19 (some of which Trump implemented), but all of them were stonewalled by the same people who later became rapid lockdown advocates. I believe this was the most justifiable argument for lockdowns, but by the time lockdowns were being considered, we were long past the window where they could be used to prevent COVID from entering communities.

2. Once COVID was in a country, in the absolute best case scenario (assuming lockdowns worked 100% and everyone complied with them—neither of which was true), lockdowns could only pause the spread of the disease. However, since lockdowns could not be sustained indefinitely, they would eventually have to be broken, at which point all the people who had been “protected” from COVID would get it anyways. This approach hence only made sense if either:

•It was possible to build up the surge capacities of the hospitals (which its not in the USA) so they would be prepared for soon to arrive COVID surge once the lockdowns were lifted.

•Breakneck work was being done to identify a treatment for COVID so it could be released in tandem with the lockdowns being lifted. Sadly, our leaders did the opposite and actively suppressed or censored each therapy independent investigators successfully identified.

•A time would emerge in the near future where people were at a much lower risk of developing complications from COVID and pausing the spread until that time would create the safest way to get herd immunity to the disease (and have it mutate to a less harmful variant). As it so happened, that applied to the summer season, but despite widespread pleas to drop the restrictions over the summer, individuals were instead encouraged to avoid being outside around others at that time. This in turn led to many instead catching COVID over the winter when their bodies were much more vulnerable to the disease and they had not gotten an outdoor vitamin D boost over the summer.

•The lockdowns were only done to those with the highest risks of complications from COVID-19 while those with a lower risk were allowed to be exposed and develop a natural immunity to the disease (making it less contagious and hopefully cause it to mutate to a less harmful variant). This also did not happen, and when it was proposed, it was relentlessly attacked by the public health authorities.

3. If lockdowns were implemented once the virus was already prevalent throughout the community, the chance they had of preventing transmission throughout the population was virtually non-existent. Nonetheless, this was frequently the stage at which lockdowns were implemented.

Given how irrational the lockdowns we saw were, it led many to quickly conclude their primary purpose was to psychologically prime the population to agree to the experimental COVID vaccinations—which is ultimately exactly what happened.

The Adverse Effects of Lockdowns

In medicine, I’ve accepted there will always be therapies that are widely utilized but offer no benefit to patients—instead I try to focus my energy on the ones that actively harm patients. In the case of the lockdowns, their complete irrationality was never my primary concern. Rather, their potential costs were far more concerning.

First off, it is well known that a significant number of people cannot tolerate isolation, so it was very likely that many pre-existing psychiatric issues would worsen, and many of us heard tragic stories of this (e.g., youth suicides significantly increased). Consider for a moment what the WHO had to say on this subject:

In the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, global prevalence of anxiety and depression increased by a massive 25%, according to a scientific brief released by the World Health Organization (WHO) today.

Note: While it’s harder to quantify, I believe the most devastating psychological impact was towards the elderly, shown by the fact many stated they would rather risk dying than be separated from their families. Likewise, I heard many tragic stories of an elder being prevented from being with their family at the moment of their death, something which for spiritual reasons, I believe is one of the worst things that can be done to someone.

There were also many health issues I and many of my colleagues noticed from the prolonged isolation and inactivity. These included:

•A general worsening of metabolic health (e.g., one study found people gained an average of 2 pounds per month of lockdowns).

•An increase in musculoskeletal pain throughout the body (e.g., consider this study).

•Immune suppression from not being exposed to the sun, exercising, or being stimulated by germs from your peers.

•Delayed evaluation and treatment of critically important diseases (e.g., cancer). At the time this concern was raised, it was dismissed, but now it is being cited as the cause of the spike in cancer which followed the vaccination campaign.

There were also many other severe consequences to those who were locked down. For example, domestic abuse rose by 8.1% during the lockdowns. Likewise, school closures (which were completely unjustified as children had no risk for COVID-19) had devastating effects on the educational development of students across America—particularly the poorest children. Given that a successful education is one of the most important tools to prevent poverty, this was quite concerning.

In short, when you consider the known non-benefits of the lockdowns in contrast to the known harms of them, it is really is quite the mystery as to exactly why so many ardently insisted on them.

The Immediate Costs of Lockdowns

While the effects in the previous section are tragic, the greatest concern with the lockdowns were economic in nature. Many knew from the start they would be catastrophic for the poor and thrust many into poverty. When it was all said and done:

•They caused a “historically unprecedented increase in global poverty” of close to 100 million people, and a 11.6% global increase of extreme poverty. The impact of this is hard to even begin to put into words.

•150 million people no longer had the food they needed. The magnitude of this wave of global starvation in another thing that is almost impossible to put into words.

•One third of American’s small businesses closed. These were often sources of generational wealth and more importantly, an alternative to corporate serfdom.

•We witnessed the largest transfer of wealth in history. From 2020 to 2021, billionaires went from owning slightly over 2% of the global household wealth to 3.5% of it.

At the times these arguments were raised to oppose the lockdowns, the common talking point used to dismiss them was that human lives were more important than money, so if we had to hurt the economy to save American lives it was worth it.

Yet this point ignored a well known fact—poverty and economic distress is not good your health. For example:

•Poverty is the fourth leading cause of death of death in the United States, responsible for an estimated 183,000 deaths here in 2019 among people 15 years and older.

•Widespread economic distress significantly increases the death rate. For example, when the Soviet Union collapsed and many former Soviet nations were thrust into poverty because their economies collapsed, the death rates spiked (in some cases doubling).

The Long Term Costs of Lockdowns

As depressing as the short term economic costs of the lockdowns were, the long term ones appear to have been even worse. The most concerning one is the rapid inflation throughout our economy, which has happened at a rate not seen since 1981. To put its effects into context:

For those who are more affluent, these increases are very manageable, but for everyone else, especially those living paycheck to paycheck (or say on a fixed income due to being on social security), they are life changing. All of this helps to explain why so much populist anger is now emerging (e.g. the most popular song in America speaks to these themes and reached its popularity without any mainstream promotion).

Note: this inflation was likely due the lockdowns closing many small businesses, the lockdowns freezing the global supply chain (something known to cause major depressions), and the massive massive deficit spending that was done to mitigate the consequences of the lockdowns—in the first 3 years of COVID-19, the national debt increased by 8.42 trillion, which increased our total debt 35.4%. All of these consequences of the lockdowns and the inevitable inflation that would follow were known ahead of time but nonetheless ignored.

In parallel to this rapid inflation and the loss of many longstanding jobs during the lockdowns, we are also seeing many signs a recession is on the horizon (e.g., unprecedented layoffs are hitting workers big tech). All of these together make things extraordinary challenging for those who were already struggling to make ends meet.

Housing Costs

One of the fastest forms of inflation during the lockdowns happened in the housing sector. As a result, many Americans who had previously would have been able to afford buying a house are no longer were able to—and a generational gap in home ownership was created. The current attempt our government has made to reverse it—spiking the interest rates has not achieved its intended target (instead the price increase has only slowed), but it has made houses even more unaffordable as the increased monthly payments resulting from higher interest rates are now beyond many family’s budgets—hence making home ownership only feasible for rich investors who have the funds available for cash payments.

If you take a step back and consider this from the perspective of economic feudalism, it makes perfect sense. People that are not property owners who need to somehow earn their paycheck each month to have a place to live are much more likely to comply with unjust dictates from an employer (e.g., corporate vaccine mandates).

Conversely, there has been a longstanding belief amongst the constitutionalists that property ownership is necessary for Democracies as that causes the property owners to be invested in the success of the society around them in parallel to having degree of independence that allows them to be able to see and then vote for what is in the best interests of society. This speaks to a broader issue, which is that successful democracies require a thriving middle class, whereas corrupt governments with far fewer personal freedoms typically have much greater wealth disparities (a small extravagantly wealthy elite alongside a large impoverished general population). From a feudalistic standpoint, the latter is again the desirable outcome.

What Spiked Housing Costs?

One of the challenging things about economics is that it’s very easy to assert something caused something else and then provide a sound rationale for why that happened, but its much harder to prove the validity of that argument (hence why we have many different schools of economic thought). That said, what follows are the most plausible explanations I’ve identified for the housing spike:

1. The rise of remote working and the desire to get away from cities (e.g., for increased quality of life, to escape the lockdowns or to be in less contagious areas) caused many more highly paid workers (e.g., those from the coast in tech) to invest in previously ignored real estate markets (e.g., Boise Idaho’s home prices went up by 40% over the first two years of COVID). That spike never really went away (as no one wanted to sell at a loss) and in many parts of the country became the new normal while wages remained largely the same.

Recently, I spent a week investigating exactly what happened in Maui with the fires so that I could use my platform to provide something which could help the people there:

What Really Happened In Maui

One of the less appreciated facets of the story was that the people of Maui had been under enormous economic pressure since COVID-19 started. This was because:

•The home prices spiked, likely due to many who could work remotely wanting to move there. According to the Maui Retailer Association, from 2019 to 2022, the median single home price increased from $741,355 to $1,105,000 (a 49% increase) and the average price increased from $1,081,560 to $1,706,571 (a 57.8% increase).

•In addition to that spike making home ownership impossible for many who had lived in Hawaii, it also drove rent prices up, with many parts of Maui experiencing a 16% increase during that period.

•At the same time this happened, since Hawaii’s traditional economy is primarily in tourism, the pandemic (which closed tourism in Hawaii) was devastating to the existing population, and put many who had lived in Hawaii for years into the situation where they were priced out and either became homeless (which is a significant issue in Hawaii) or had to move back to the mainland.

Because of these existing factors, the Lahaina fires were particularly devastating to the economically vulnerable members of the state, as the fires:

•Significantly reduced the available housing on the island (much of what burned down had previously belonged to lower income families)—hence making the remaining housing even harder to obtain.

•Destroyed many of the traditional jobs (Lahaina was the tourist district and many were employed there).

•Froze the entire island economy because the initial government messaging said to stay away from Maui during the fires. For those already struggling to make ends meet, that loss of work was devastating.

As a result, the most likely consequence from those fires is for the traditional members of Maui’s population to either leave or transition to a lower standard of living while an affluent elite displaces them. This increase in wealth disparity linked to housing in-affordability is something we are likely to see continue to increase and happen in more and more places as time continues to move forward.

2. Residential real estate is being seen as the safest investment and thus being driven up by investors not seeking the home for their own families, a problem best synopsized by this video discussing the concerning rise of homebuyers being outbid at the last moment by cash offers from outside investors:

There are a few ways to interpret the trend of large investors moving to buy up the housing market. They include:

•Commercial real estate had previously been a bedrock investment for large institutions. Because the pandemic decimated the commercial real estate market (e.g., since many are now working from home businesses no longer need to rent as much office space, and the transition to online shopping closed many physical retail locations) a new investment area needed to be found. Residential housing was a logical alternative for many.

•The massive spike in housing prices created by the lockdowns made that market look like an ideal investment to many.

•Concerns over inflation and the devaluation of the dollar (due to how much our debt increased in the last few years) has made many want to have their dollars be parked in physical assets that will not be devalued by further deficit spending.

Conclusion

In addition to the previous two explanations, it is also possible that there is a deliberate attempt being made to displace the working class from home ownership (so they are forced to live paycheck to paycheck as corporate serfs who own nothing), or that those who desired that outcome used their influence to direct the COVID response so it would increase the likelihood that it would happen.

Ultimately, it’s impossible to know, but regardless of the exact reason for why it’s happening, as the previous decades have all shown, I believe we can reliably predict that it will keep on happening unless we as a people fundamentally change how we approach this issue.

One of the things I’ve found immensely frustrating about advocates for the poor and working class is that typically they only provide lip-service to the issue and do nothing to actually fix it, leading to the problems continuing to get worse and worse (once again consider the 1992 presidential debate I cited above). When the COVID lockdowns were proposed, it was amazing to watch how ardently the progressives who claimed to be doing everything they could to protect the vulnerable members of our society did not give a second thought to the known economic costs of the lockdowns.

Now, we are all experiencing the harms of those policies, and just like each previous time, very few are speaking out against the increasing economic feudalism we are experiencing. Rather, since COVID-19 we’ve watched the birth of a massive censorship apparatus which is aggressively censoring any rational viewpoints which argue against policies that enrich the upper class at everyone else’s expense.

Fortunately, I believe the egregiousness of this situation has in parallel created a much greater willingness in the population to question the audacious lies that are pushed on them. As a result, the independent media now is outpacing the influence of the legacy media, which for decades has been able to control the narrative of the country, but now is losing that power.

I am thus very hopeful, we may at last be arriving at a point where the public political will exists to reverse the unchecked greed and economic feudalism we’ve watched proliferate over the last 50 years. However, at the same time, because the stakes are now so high (e.g., those invested in the old model do not want to relinquish their power), it is very likely whatever transition occurs will be quite rock, and I hope each of us can play our critical roles in helping to guide our society in the direction that most benefits everyone.

Finally, I wanted to thank each of you for your support of this Newsletter—we’ve now passed 61,000 subscribers and I’m starting to periodically meet people who share that they read it (so a few of my Midwestern readers have met me without realizing it).

I have been trying to get information like this out to patients for years but over and over doing so was like trying to climb an impossibly high mountain and I never imagined I would have the opportunity to do so. Much of that has been due to each of you sharing this publication with people who you believe could benefit from it, and to thank each of you who has, I’ve set it up so that Substack will automatically provide complimentary subscriptions to you for referring this newsletter to your friends.