“One of the first lessons in an economics class is every action has a cost,” wrote the great libertarian economist Walter E. Williams in his final column in December 2020, which I ran as the centerpience of the Dec. 13, 2020 Opinion section.

“That is in stark contrast to lessons in the political arena where politicians virtually ignore cost and talk about benefits and free stuff. If we look only at the benefits of an action, policy or program, then we will do anything because there is a benefit to any action, policy or program,” he continued.

Williams noted what by then was already widely known: that the harms of COVID-19 disproportionately fell on specific segments of the population and that for most people COVID posed relatively little risk, especially for schoolchildren.

He also observed that, given this information, further lockdowns would likely do more harm than good, that locking kids out of schools would yield poor and uneven outcomes and that government would again be in the position of picking winners and losers on the economic front by taking a sweeping approach to the pandemic.

“By the way, the best time to scare people, be wrong and persist in being wrong is when the costs of being wrong are borne by others,” he concluded.

Confidence in government should be permanently marred by the way government officials and agencies handled this pandemic.

From botching and stalling the rollout of COVID testing in the early months of the pandemic to the uneven messaging throughout, who can honestly say the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did a good job?

Here in California, we have seen the consequences of ceding extraordinary power to a government that does not value freedom of choice.

While business groups and businesses tried to work with state and county officials to reopen, they were often rebuffed and ignored, even when their proposed practices were consistent with what was working in other states and other countries.

The consequences were predictable. Tens of thousands of businesses across the state vanished, permanently. In the first year of the pandemic, one-third of restaurants in California were put out of business permanently.

Meanwhile, we saw government officials routinely violate their own orders and rhetoric — from Gov. Gavin Newsom’s infamous dining with lobbyists to Nancy Pelosi visiting a shuttered hair salon to Los Angeles County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl going out to dine after voting to ban outdoor dining (despite, admittedly, having no scientific reason for doing so). None of them care. Obviously, they’re all not only powerful, but rich and out of touch.

We’ve also seen the further decimation of California’s already failed K-12 system. Before the pandemic, California’s education system lagged the rest of the country and left especially low-income, Black and Latino students with low levels of proficiency in math and English.

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During the pandemic, we saw many teachers unions use their power to deprive students of an education for longer than was true in other states as leverage for giveaways. The harms to students of that will be seen for years to come.

Unfortunately, I can’t say I see any signs that Californians will do anything to change things.

The recall was a justifiable middle finger to our special interest-dominated, one-party state establishment, but the political math of the state remains what it is despite the devastation of California’s policies.

I can only point to the same quote referenced by Williams in his final column, from H.L. Mencken: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

That was true when Mencken wrote that a century ago, and is clearly true today.

Sal Rodriguez can be reached at [email protected].