 At the risk of understatement, 2020 was a brutal year. I don't know about you, but I'm pretty glad we've made it to 2021. I'm not usually interested in these kinds of milestones, but new years are always a good time to do a little reflection, take stock of where we're at and ponder what lies ahead. And as I look back over the social and economic destruction that's occurred over the last several months, there's a lot of reflection to do. In the wake of the pandemic, governments all over the world instituted drastic and largely unprecedented restrictions on their citizens, imposing enormous cost on everyone that most of us still have yet to fully understand. And with very few new movies and shows to talk about, and tectonic shifts in the industry still disrupting the production and distribution of entertainment, and just about everything else, I figured that it might be a good time to talk about the future. But in order to do that, I'm going to have to revisit some of our previous videos and talk about one of my favorite movies from the past, Ghostbusters. I'd understand if you're struggling to imagine what this movie has to say about dealing with the situation we're in right now, but if you stick with me, I think you might just be surprised how relevant it is. So hit that subscribe button, ring the bell icon, and let's take a serious look at the state of the world and a not so serious look at a great film on this episode of Out of Frame. Before we get to a movie released in 1984, let's just go back a year and talk about a different episode of this series. In the video we did on Captain America Winter Soldier, I asked everyone the following question. Is the promise of a perfectly secure world worth the price of our individual rights? At the time, it was already clear that a lot of people were shockingly happy to answer yes. They were scared. They wanted security. And I don't totally blame them. In the last year, our governments and news media rediscovered the secret to commanding attention and convincing people to give them more power. Abject terror. Day after day for months, we've all been blasted with huge case numbers and macabre death tolls without being told much in the way of relevant context. For example, article after article announces new cases, but we get few reminders that over 80% of those cases are mild or entirely asymptomatic, or that just 0.5% are people in serious or critical condition, according to international statistics. We've been led to believe that COVID is extremely deadly to everyone in contact with it, but it's actually only a high risk for elderly people and those with substantial pre-existing conditions and a very low risk for everyone else. In fact, nearly 40% of all deaths from COVID have come from just 1% of our population, people living in long-term care facilities. And yet, most countries and states not only failed to adequately protect their highest risk population, but actively threw them into harm's way by sending infected patients back to nursing homes instead of keeping them separated from healthy, high-risk individuals. Worse still, we've been told that if we leave the house, fail to wear a mask, go back to work, go to the gym, or go visit family for the holidays, we could be directly responsible for killing people we love. But we're never told that the data shows people were already social distancing even before any mandates or that around 80% of people in the US have been consistently wearing masks for months. That's higher than all the Nordic countries, Australia and the UK. Predictably, the selective presentation of information has created a massive amount of fear and anxiety for everyone. So we saw a lot of support for mandated stay-at-home orders and shutdowns. And ironically, with emerging evidence that vitamin D deficiencies contribute to severe symptoms, it seems that just as failing to protect nursing homes caused a lot of unnecessary harm, telling people to stay inside was some of the worst advice the media could have pushed. Now, I'm highly aware that what I'm saying isn't very popular. But it's all true. Not that that's mattered a whole lot. A survey by the strategic communications firm Kext-CNC, conducted in July, found that the average American believed that there had been 20 times the number of cases confirmed by the CDC at that point, and 225 times more deaths than we actually had. Other countries had similar misconceptions. So many people all over the world have spent most of the last year in a state of extreme panic. And yet, I'd argue that most of that panic has been built on misinformation. Fee has a lot of articles on this point already, and I don't want to get too sidetracked here, but I definitely encourage you to check out some of the links in the description if you want to know more. What I really want to talk about in this video are the consequences of all this fear. But at this point, you're probably wondering what all this has to do with Ghostbusters. Well, let me explain. I have to assume that everyone has already seen the film, but for those who haven't, Ghostbusters is one of my all-time favorite comedies, and you should correct that situation immediately. Written by Dan Akroyd and Harold Ramis and directed by the brilliant Ivan Reitman, Ghostbusters is a story about a group of disgraced academics turned entrepreneurs who first prove the existence of ghosts and then start a business where they find them, trap them, and store them in a custom-built containment system. Like most small businesses, they struggle at first, risking their life savings to build the equipment they need to do the job, advertise their services to the public, and figure out how to create value for their customers. It's not easy. Personally, I like the university. They gave us money and facilities. We didn't have to produce anything. You've never been out of college. You don't know what it's like out there. I've worked in the private sector. They expect results. For whatever reasons, Ray, call it faith. Call it luck. Call it karma. I believe that everything happens for a reason. I believe that we were destined to get thrown out of this dump. For what purpose? To go into business for ourselves. Fortunately, once they get set up, the Ghostbusters start providing a valuable service, and over time, they find more clients and more notoriety. Their business grows to the point where they need to hire more people. Ghostbusters, what do you want? Eventually, they've caught and contained so many ghosts for so many people that they're starting to run out of storage. But right at the peak of their emerging fame and success, that's when the government steps in. I'm Walter Peck. I represent the Environmental Protection Agency. Frankly, there have been a lot of wild stories in the media, and we want to assess any possible presence of noxious, possibly hazardous waste chemicals in your basement. Now, you either show me what is down there, or I come back with a court order. Walter Peck has no idea what the Ghostbusters are doing or how they do it. He has no functional understanding of their business, the science behind it, or the consequences of shutting it down. But he shuts it down anyway. Hey, Gun. I tried to stop them. He says they have a warrant. Excuse me. This is private property. Shut this off. Shut these all off. I'm warning you. Turning off these machines would be extremely hazardous. I'll tell you what's hazardous. You're facing federal prosecution for at least a half a dozen environmental violations. Now either you shut off these beams or we shut them up for you. Try to understand this. This is a high-voltage laser containment system. Simply turning it off would be like dropping a bomb in the city. Thanks to Peck's arrogance, hundreds of otherwise safely contained ghosts are released, creating chaos throughout the city, while the one thing that could have kept them at bay is destroyed. Meanwhile, they have an even bigger problem. An ancient, interdimensional, evil god named Gozer the Destructor has returned to Earth to wreak havoc. What's Gozer? Gozer was very big in Samaria. Well, what's he doing in my icebox? I'm working on that. But even though the ghostbusters are already on the case, Walter Peck puts them in jail. So there's nothing they can do about it until it's too late. Are you a cop? All of this could have been prevented if the government hadn't shut down the ghostbusters business and simply allowed them to continue to serve their customers. Nothing was improved by Walter Peck's petty display of dominance. Unfortunately, over the last several months out here in the real world, these kinds of abuses of power have become incredibly common around the country. And we've seen the kind of damage they can do. And I'm not just talking about harm to entrepreneurs and small business owners or the people they employ. Going back to that video from April, I also said, when people feel fear, they're much more willing to accept anything that makes the world seem a little safer. And although it's rarely something they are actually capable of, that's quite often the sales pitch politicians use to acquire and hold on to power. Last year, everybody was terrified. So they accepted two weeks to flatten the curve. They accepted bans on events and travel. They accepted the idea that the government could now dictate whose jobs and businesses were or were not essential. They quickly adopted lockdowns, social distancing, and mask wearing. Emotions ran hot and many people turned all of this into a moral crusade. Treating anyone who disagreed or questioned the surprisingly weak evidence supporting these kinds of policies into heretics who had to be silenced, censored, and shamed into submission. And speaking as someone who tried very hard to have critical conversations about what we were giving up, the one thing that it's always felt like no one wanted to talk about were the costs. In terms of money, sure, but also in terms of mental health, social stability, and the long-term future of our society. Policies that made a lot of people feel safer were enough to justify every devastating power grab. But in May, I did make a video describing the harm these actions could cause. In it, I pointed out that viruses have been a part of the human experience since the beginning of time. But what we've done in response to this one is completely unprecedented. I think that, like most recessions and depressions throughout history, what's happening today is overwhelmingly man-made. We are all interconnected and essential. And when we allow governments, no matter how well intended, to decide which businesses can operate and which can't, we are allowing them the power to create compounding problems that have earth-shattering consequences for billions of people. I'm sad to say on this I was right. Instead of rushing towards draconian policies with no consideration for what unintended consequences they might have, we could have taken a much more nuanced and targeted approach, focusing our attention on protecting the elderly and other high-risk people instead of locking everything down. Had we done that, I think we could have avoided a lot of the problems we're experiencing now. But we didn't. And now it's too late. The trade-offs we've made were never just lives versus the economy. They were always lives versus other lives. And the consequences have been earth-shattering. Fair warning, what I'm about to say is going to be pretty depressing. Between March and September, just in the United States, over 163,000 businesses closed down. And according to Yelp, 60% of those, nearly 100,000, are permanent. Millions of jobs have disappeared and won't be coming back. The U.S. unemployment rate reached almost 15% at its peak. And even now, it's still double what it was a year ago. Meanwhile, we've seen a massive increase in drug abuse and overdoses. There's been an enormous increase in reported feelings of isolation, depression, and suicides. This is especially true for teens, but more recently, it's also become a problem for elderly people who have been cut off from their families. As if that weren't bad enough, violent crime and homicides have spiked across the country. While civil unrest, protests, and riots have contributed to billions of dollars in property damage and numerous deaths in most of our major cities. Throughout 2020, with so many businesses shut down, we've predictably seen shortages of all kinds of goods and services. As a result, food insecurity in the U.S. is up to nearly 25%, which is more than double what it was last year. Of course, in as rich a country as ours, a term like food insecurity doesn't mean starvation. Instead, it typically means that people have had to change their eating habits or reduce their intake of certain types of foods. But in other parts of the world, this problem is much, much more deadly. For the first time in decades, global hunger is increasing instead of decreasing. And perhaps worst of all, shortages and fears of overcrowding led many governments to actively dissuade or outright prevent people from going to see their doctor or go to the hospital for anything that wasn't related to COVID. So millions of people have had serious illnesses, like cancer and heart disease, go untreated for months. On a personal note, one person very close to me is probably going to be on permanent dialysis because of kidney problems that went untreated when multiple doctors' appointments were canceled, thanks to lockdowns. What I'm saying is, it's bleak. And it has a lot of people talking about new, new deals and a great reset. But that's not really the right way to think about how to solve these problems. When I talked about all this in May, I used movie theaters as an example, pointing out that with no ability to legally operate and no customers, they wouldn't be able to survive forever. And even after they were allowed to reopen in a lot of places, they were subject to all kinds of restrictions and the news never stopped terrorizing people about going out in public. So unless something changes instantaneously, it looks like some of the largest chains, like AMC, are about to declare bankruptcy and shut down thousands of theaters. Gyms, dance studios, bars and restaurants, nightclubs, concert halls and music venues, sports arenas, and mom and pop shops all over the world are going to do the same thing, closing their doors for good. As that happens, the whole web of companies that they work with and support will also wither away, putting millions more out of work and creating new shockwaves that will ripple across the economy. Meanwhile, huge companies that have gotten exemptions from shutdown orders or which had already built a massive online infrastructure have only gotten bigger. We're going to end up with a world that looks very different from the one we had in 2019. But while it's tempting to think that we need even more government programs to fix these problems, that's a lot like asking Walter Peck to clean up the mess he made. Not gonna work. While there's probably an argument to be made that the government should have to compensate people whose businesses their policies destroyed, the problem is that all the money they'd need to pay those businesses would first have to be taken from other citizens. All that really does is spread the pain around, imposing new costs on other people who may not have had any say in which jobs were deemed non-essential. Plus, as we've already seen, we'd be opening the door to an incredible amount of waste, fraud, and corruption. But considering some of the alternatives I've seen people advocate, this might end up being one of the best bad ideas. For example, a few of my friends have suggested a new deal for the arts, artists, and other types of businesses that got shut down. But contrary to popular belief, the new deal was not an economic miracle. Instead of saving people from the Great Depression, it significantly prolonged the damage by freezing prices, discouraging people from adapting their consumption and production behavior, and delaying incredibly necessary changes to the whole structure of the economy. The new deal literally had the government pay farmers to burn crops and kill their own livestock in order to keep food prices high. And yet, it also made it illegal for companies to raise wages for their workers. And it set the stage for decades of government interventions that have caused all kinds of major problems ever since, like dramatically inflating the cost of healthcare and education, creating a Byzantine labyrinth of red tape and regulatory bureaucracy, spending tens of billions of dollars a year on corporate welfare, and even setting up a lot of the conditions for future recessions. If the government becomes the primary funding source for new and existing companies, the only thing it will accomplish is creating more zombie businesses, which will exist to serve political interests instead of customers. This isn't a good thing. But the calls for nationalization, redistributionism, or just paying for everything by printing so much money we get hyperinflation, like in Venezuela or Weimar Germany, are so much worse, for reasons I've discussed on this series at least a dozen times already. Fortunately, there is a better way to solve these problems, and it's exactly the same solution we get at the end of Ghostbusters. The smartest thing the mayor of New York City does in that whole movie is kick Walter Peck out of his office and turn our heroic ghost catching entrepreneurs loose on the problem. They have the most knowledge, the best tools, and the right incentives to stop Gozer and clean up the government's mess. So, what I'm saying is, it's time to kick the petty tyrants out and unleash the power of entrepreneurship. That may not be the answer everyone wants to hear, but it's really the only way out of the situation we find ourselves in. It's also pretty much the opposite of what we've done so far. Human sacrifice, dogs and cats, living together, mass hysteria! I've said this so many times on Out of Frame, but no one person has all the right answers to complex problems. People need to be free to offer different solutions in a context where they have skin in the game and actually get meaningful feedback about whether or not their ideas have value from the people who actually know best, their customers. That's the whole point of entrepreneurship. Throughout this pandemic, we've seen some incredible innovations in how people do business. Restaurants quickly shifted to outdoor dining, curbside delivery, takeout, and took different approaches to social distancing before anybody required them to. Artists and musicians found new ways of interacting with their fans by performing online concerts and creating other digital products. A lot of offices went all remote, and most stores figured out ways of allowing shoppers to have more space. But at the same time, a ton of businesses simply weren't allowed to keep operating or to find creative solutions to managing risk, even when there was no evidence that they were doing anything that was particularly unsafe. At some point, there's no way for a company to survive when the government makes it illegal. So if we want any kind of recovery, the first thing we need to do is stop making things worse. There are millions of incredibly talented and creative entrepreneurs out there who are more than capable of finding new ways to do business that balance people's concerns about possible health risks against the necessity of actually producing the goods and services we all value. And they'll do it without any kind of central plan or government mandate. They just need to be free. In fact, some of them are already out there serving new customers, creating new opportunities and jobs in the process. Some of us will take more risks, others will be more cautious, but we'll all weigh the trade-offs and choose which companies to support or reject based on our own values and needs. This puts decisions in the hands of people who are actually in a position to see the benefits and bear the potential costs of their choices, instead of the hands of people who have no incentive or means to care about either. Once we do that, unemployment rates will come down, personal autonomy will improve, social connections will be reformed, people will feel less stress and isolation, they'll have the means to take better care of their health, and all of those goods and services that we haven't been able to get for the last several months will start to become available again. And that means we'll start seeing improvements on the bigger global problems, like hunger and suicide. All we really need to do to get these results is stop crushing everybody under the destructive boot of bad policy and tone down the daily drumbeat of fear that's led people to radically overestimate the risks of leaving the house. Entrepreneurs and individuals all over the world will take care of the rest. We came, we saw it, we kicked it. There are creative opportunities for rebuilding our sanity, relationships, health and economy all around us right now. New deals and great resets are false solutions that will end up enriching the powerful and politically connected at the expense of everyone else. Worse, they'll prevent our economy and society from adapting and correcting the damage organically, and that will result in stagnation and the creation of long-term instability that will end up plaguing us for years to come. We need a different approach, and it's pretty simple. The government needs to stop hurting people and taking their stuff. The vast majority of people need to be free to choose what risks they're comfortable taking, and everybody needs to shut off the news so their concerns and anxiety are more in line with reality. We can do all of this while still taking reasonable precautions and protecting the highest risk people, and we must, because that's the only way back to a healthy society. Hey everybody, thanks for watching this episode of Out of Frame. I'm sure a lot of you are going to want to debate some of the things I said in this video, so we're going to be sure to put a ton of links and resources in the description. Check those out, and if they don't answer your question, leave a comment and I'll try to get back to you. Since it's a new year, I also have a bunch of news for the channel. Firstly, I want to thank our supporters on Patreon, especially our Associate Producers. So to Connor McGowan, Dallin Case, Himang Tana, Richard Lawrence and Matt Tabor, thank you. But I'd also like to announce that we've created a subscribe star page for those of you who want to support the show, but don't like the Patreon platform. All the perks will be the same, so you'll get access to bonus content and to the new Discord server where you can talk to me and the crew whenever you want. The link for that is in the description too. And of course, don't forget to check out our Behind the Scenes podcast, which comes out every Friday, and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and for the first time, TikTok. I'll see you next time.