Dennis Prager Show - Washing Hands & Keeping Distance Would Have Been Enough ⎜The Dennis Prager Radio Show
Aired: 2020-05-28
Duration: 03:15


=== Prolonged Lockdown Debate (03:15) ===

[00:00:00]  Let me ask you, then, of course, I want to get to your book, because what you write is important.
[00:00:04]  Again, his book, by the way, Matt Ridley's book, is up at DennisPrager.com.
[00:00:11]  It's pretty important, how innovation works and why it flourishes in freedom.
[00:00:16]  I can't imagine it flourishing in non-freedom, but I'll talk to you about that in a moment.
[00:00:20]  What are your thoughts on the lockdown in UK? I think we're making a mistake.
[00:00:27]  I think we're prolonging the lockdown too long.
[00:00:30]  And I suspect the original policy may have been a mistake.
[00:00:33]  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...
[00:00:46]  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.
[00:00:56]  And so we allowed too much freedom for the virus in the hospitals, but then we locked.
[00:01:03]  Everybody down at home where they weren't so much at risk.
[00:01:07]  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.
[00:01:25]  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.
[00:01:34]  Has your economy been as damaged as ours?
[00:01:40]  I would say our economy has definitely been as damaged as yours.
[00:01:43]  We haven't seen it yet because we have an extremely generous government.
[00:01:48]  That means that most public sector employees are at home.
[00:02:12]  Well, it turns out that it's...
[00:02:32]  Easier to scare people than to unscare them.
[00:02:36]  That's right.
[00:02:36]  And our government did a very good job of terrifying people about this virus and saying, you must stay at home!
[00:02:44]  And now it's not even trying very hard to say you must go back to work.
[00:02:48]  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.
[00:02:55]  And I'm afraid that's not good enough.
[00:02:56]  If we're going to get people to go back to work, most people are not following the details.
[00:03:00]  They're just hearing there is something scary out there and we need to stay at home to shelter ourselves.
[00:03:06]  And that seems, you know, we've seen that with other scares in the past.
[00:03:11]  The idea that something is dangerous lodges very quickly in the public mind.