May 28, 2020 - Dennis Prager Show
03:15
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Let me ask you, then, of course, I want to get to your book, because what you write is important. | |
| Again, his book, by the way, Matt Ridley's book, is up at DennisPrager.com. | |
| It's pretty important, how innovation works and why it flourishes in freedom. | |
| I can't imagine it flourishing in non-freedom, but I'll talk to you about that in a moment. | |
| What are your thoughts on the lockdown in UK? I think we're making a mistake. | |
| I think we're prolonging the lockdown too long. | |
| And I suspect the original policy may have been a mistake. | |
| Now that we know more about the virus and how it spreads and how it has particularly been a problem within the hospital and care home system, it seems to me that... | |
| The key priority was to keep it out of the hospitals, whereas, in fact, the measures we took made sure that it got into the hospitals and care homes. | |
| And so we allowed too much freedom for the virus in the hospitals, but then we locked. | |
| Everybody down at home where they weren't so much at risk. | |
| And actually, you know, the relatively voluntary measures, which with a certain amount of coercion, banning large gatherings, stopping quite a lot of travel and generally telling people to wash their hands and keep a safe distance would have been enough, I think. | |
| On top of that, to tell people to give up their work and stay at home was probably unnecessary and very damaging to the economy. | |
| Has your economy been as damaged as ours? | |
| I would say our economy has definitely been as damaged as yours. | |
| We haven't seen it yet because we have an extremely generous government. | |
| That means that most public sector employees are at home. | |
| Well, it turns out that it's... | |
| Easier to scare people than to unscare them. | |
| That's right. | |
| And our government did a very good job of terrifying people about this virus and saying, you must stay at home! | |
| And now it's not even trying very hard to say you must go back to work. | |
| It's saying, well, it's still dangerous out there, but if you really insist, you can perhaps go back to work as long as you're really careful. | |
| And I'm afraid that's not good enough. | |
| If we're going to get people to go back to work, most people are not following the details. | |
| They're just hearing there is something scary out there and we need to stay at home to shelter ourselves. | |
| And that seems, you know, we've seen that with other scares in the past. | |
| The idea that something is dangerous lodges very quickly in the public mind. |
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