cross-posted from: https://exploding-heads.com/post/87213

“What the ‘Swedish model’ really suggests is that pandemic mitigation measures can be effectively deployed in a respectful, largely non-coercive way,” writes Balloux.

This is as close to an admission of “Sorry, we were wrong” as we’re likely to see in the New York Times.

After all, the non-coercive measures Balloux mentions are precisely what proponents of Sweden’s approach, including signers of the Great Barrington Declaration, had advocated all along. (Wallace-Welles is correct when he notes that Sweden never adopted a “let it rip” approach, as many claim.)

Sadly, most countries instead adopted highly-coercive measures, even tyrannical ones, believing they had the knowledge to plan society. In doing so, they ignored the warning of Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek, who cautioned that “if man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of events possible.”