Losing Our Fears

I wrote yesterday about what I perceived to be unreasonable, and unreasoning fear of the effects of the Covid-19 virus.  I attribute this unreasonable fear to the constant drum beat of the mainstream media constantly reporting the rising number of deaths and the supposedly rising number of cases.  But the cases are rising because more people are being tested.  As the testing continues, the actual rate of deaths as a subset of the number of cases continues to fall.

Today, Victor Hansen Davis, writing at Townhall.com has an article making the same points I did, but much more effectively, entitled Losing Our Fears In War and Plague. In that article, Davis correctly labels FDR a neo-socialist. Indeed, Roosevelt's New Deal not only did not mitigate the effects of the great depression, but arguably made it worse. Nevertheless, Roosevelt was on to something when he said that the only thing we needed to fear is fear itself. Fear is the thing that paralyzes us, causes us to doubt our abilities, and prevents us from taking actions in our own best interest. I said that Davis's article was much more effective. Let me give you a quote or two to illustrate what I mean:

A sleeping America was neutral, but it was beginning to realize it was weak and mostly unarmed in a scary world.

But by 1943, a booming U.S. economy was fielding vast military forces from Alaska to the Sahara. Britain and America were bombing the German heartland. The Soviet Red Army had trapped and destroyed a million-man German army at Stalingrad.

...snip...

Yet the key to victory was the U.S. economy. It would eventually outproduce all the major economies on both sides of the war combined.

But how did the U.S. arm so quickly, build such effective weapons so soon, and from almost nothing field a military some 12 million strong?

Neo-socialist President Franklin D. Roosevelt unleashed American business under the aegis of successful entrepreneurs such as Henry Ford of the Ford Motor Company, William Knudsen of General Motors, Henry Kaiser of Kaiser Shipyards and Charles Wilson of General Electric.

Davis goes on to recount the miracle that was WWII. Seen in retrospect, it was inevitable, but seen from the perspective of Americans in December 1941, it was anything but inevitable. The key to American success during WWII was that by and large, Americans lost their fear. Davis then goes on to point out that today we are again living in fear, the fear that "we're all gonna die!" And while that it true for each of us, it doesn't mean today.  But if we want to survive, we must lose our fear and get back to work.

Most importantly, Americans lost their fears.

From 1929 to 1938, the U.S. economy was in ruins. FDR's New Deal could not restore economic growth or consumer confidence. As late as 1938, economic growth had sunk to negative 3.3 percent. Unemployment soared to an unsustainable 19 percent.

Only the threat of war terrified Americans into taking a gamble -- to work feverishly and to ramp up industry.