Study: Lockdowns Had Largest Impact in Destroying Economic Activity – Foundation for Economic Education

Economists Robert W. Fairlie and Frank M. Fossen used state data from all taxable sales in California during the first two quarters of 2020, finding a drop of $152 billion in the second quarter alone, a 17.5 percent decline from the previous quarter.

Leading the way in sales losses was the accommodation sector (91 percent), followed by bars (86 percent). Entertainment venues saw sales drop 83 percent, while full-service restaurants saw a decline of 61 percent.

Early in 2020 Ryan McMaken of the Mises Institute pointed out that the 2020 pandemic was starkly different from the pandemics of 1918 and 1957-58, both of which were incredibly deadly.

“Yet we will see that neither produced economic damage on a scale we now see as a result of the government-mandated lockdowns,” McMaken observed. “This thoroughly undermines the claims that the lockdowns are only a minor factor in economic destruction, and that the virus itself is the real culprit.”

“The horror of a command economy is not that officials will make mistakes,” Mamet observed, “but that those mistakes will never be acknowledged or corrected.”