Politics

Eric Boehm | 12.31.2025 1:00 PM

The 2020s, so far, have been one long and often painful lesson in what happens when policymakers tell economists to shut up and go away.

From the COVID-19 pandemic through Bidenflation and onto the Trump 2.0 trade wars, each successive administration to occupy the White House during this decade has made a critical error by assuming it could ignore economic principles—or simply substitute them for a different set of underlying assumptions. Those errors have been made in different ways and for different reasons, yes, but they share this common characteristic: a belief that economics is optional, and that tradeoffs can be eliminated if your motives are in the right place.

But that is simply not true, as circumstances have shown again and again.

Start with COVID, which is undeniably the defining story of the first half-plus-one-year of the 2020s. When the Trump administration and myriad state and local officials implemented lockdowns under the "15 days to slow the spread" promise in March 2020, it was largely at the behest of public health advisers.

The dominant attitude driving lockdown policies that closed schools, businesses, churches, playgrounds, and more was well articulated by Jon Allsop in the Columbia Journalism Review's newsletter. There is "no choice to be made between public health and a healthy economy—because public health is an essential prerequisite of a healthy economy," he wrote in April 2020 as debate over "reopening" was ongoing.

That all-or-nothing approach reveals

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