The Department of Don't Do Something, Just Stand There

For Throwback Wednesday, NDAI's annual tradition

I wrote the column below in April 2020. My syndicator wouldn’t run it.

I was right.

The “experts” were wrong.

I employ facts, evidence, logic, and reason to understand — and predict the unintended consequences of — public policy.

They employ lies, plunder, and hysteria to line their pockets and order people around.

Remind me why No Dowd About It doesn’t have 29.7 million subscribers?

Enjoy!

■ ■ ■

A few days before 2020 arrived, writer John Tierney and psychologist Roy F. Baumeister recommended “a resolution that could actually work: Go on a low-bad diet.”

Noting the pervasiveness of “negativity bias … the universal tendency for bad events and emotions to affect us more strongly than positive ones,” the authors of The Power of Bad exhorted The Wall Street Journal’s readers to celebrate “long-term trends instead of viscerally reacting to the horror story of the day” — a habit that would make its practitioners “wiser” and “happier.”

How do you think that’s going?

As the response to SARS-CoV-2 demonstrates, negativity bias is harmful for an individual, but catastrophic when wielded by government. With data beginning to mount that draconian, one-size-fits all measures were unnecessary responses to the virus, it is time, once again, to examine politicians’ dangerous susceptibility to worst-case-scenarioing.

The invasion/occupation of Iraq was the bloodiest and costliest manifestation of Washington’s orgy of imbecilic reactions to 9/11. But there were many smaller fiascos. In July 2002, professional threat inflator Bill Gertz, of The Washington Times, breathlessly “reported” that “U.S. intelligence agencies” were “watching several groups of Middle Eastern men thought to be part of an infrastructure of as many as 5,000 al Qaeda terrorists and their supporters in the United States.” Two weeks later, Cox Newspapers revealed that senior officials at the FBI “believe there are now no more than 200 hard-core Al-Qaeda members worldwide.” (“Everyone tries to tie everything into 9-11 and Al-Qaeda,” one source said. “There was a recent report suggesting that Al-Qaeda is about 5,000 strong. It is nowhere near 5,000 strong.”) The “sleeper cells,” we now know, never struck.

Seven months later, the newly minted U.S. Department of Homeland Security, panicked about Al Qaeda’s nonexistent “weapons of mass destruction,” sparked Black Friday-esque melees after advising Americans to prepare for the next terrorist atrocity. The Los Angeles Times observed that hoarders were “stripping stores of flashlights, blankets, can openers, Sterno canned fuel and battery-powered radios,” with plastic sheeting and duct tape “also in short supply because federal officials … recommended that families pick a room and keep materials on hand to seal its cracks and vents in case of biological, chemical or radioactive attack.”

A low-possibility “threat” of a wholly different kind was peddled by mental-health and law-enforcement professionals in the 1980s and early 1990s. Far too many gullible parents uncritically swallowed claims that “stranger danger” was rampant, daycare centers were havens for molesters, and cultists were secretly sacrificing newborns to The Devil. The hysteria ran so deep, it manufactured its own time machine, and journeyed into the past. “Recovered memories” of abuse — often alleged to be perpetrated by family members — attained broad acceptance. It took years before credible researchers were able to document the moral panic’s laughable implausibility. A lengthy report by a supervisory special agent at the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit concluded that there was “little or no evidence” for “large-scale baby breeding, human sacrifice, and organized satanic conspiracies.” (Sorry, Geraldo.) Snatching children off the streets, it turned out, was an exceedingly rare crime. Widespread ownership of daycare centers by pedophiles, thanks to crusading journalists such as Dorothy Rabinowitz, was thoroughly debunked. Repressed recall of traumas inflicted long ago made for cheesy drama on Melrose Place, but in the real world, it was usually confabulation.

As for environmental scares, where to begin? Thoughtful analysts picked apart the “overpopulation” myth almost at, er, birth. Remember the “coming ice age” of the 1970s? In 1991, media critic Howard Kurtz wrote that “a 10-year study by … an inter-agency body created by Congress in 1980 to settle once and for all the debate over the effects of acid rain” concluded that it “has caused far less damage to the nation’s forests and lakes than previously estimated.” However, “the report was virtually ignored by The Washington Post and given scant attention by most other major news organizations last year, even while Congress debated and approved new acid rain controls that will cost as much as $4 billion a year.”

Negativity bias + media hype + reelection at all costs = appallingly poor policy. So what’s the solution? At the very least, the Executive Office of the President needs an entity tasked with exploring unintended consequences and opportunity costs when a “crisis” looms. An Office of Negativity Bias — an “Office of Overreaction Avoidance” is probably too on the nose — makes sense for state and local governments, too.

Silly? Great Depression 2.0 might change your mind.