Stopping the Spread: Bad Ideas Edition

“We need to learn about – and learn how to defend - good ideas.  We need to make these ideas popular.  Good ideas that aren't defended will languish.” – The Tuttle Twins Guide to The World’s Worst Ideas

In March 2020, hundreds of millions of businesses saw mass closures, while people sheltered in their homes to slow the spread and flatten the curve, as the COVID pandemic traversed quickly around the world.  Slowing the spread was meant to reduce the increase in the number of cases and stop the disease from advancing.  In the end, however, keeping the public from their jobs did more harm than good.  Not only did it fail to stop the spread, but it destroyed the economy. 

To ignore history is to be doomed to repeat it, as we have seen in how bad ideas continue to negatively affect people's lives.  Yet despite their continuous harm to society, people refuse to reject them, as bad ideas are often tribally enforced and then socially accepted.    

In Connor Boyack’s 2025 book, “The Tuttle Twins Guide to the World’s Worst Ideas”, Boyack recounts the many bad ideas that have come to define the American experience.  From neoconservatism, central planning, and climate change alarmism, each has led to concentrated power in the federal government and less freedom for the masses. 

In politics, like life, there is always a conflict of visions, with groups and individuals advancing different solutions to societal problems.  While competing influences differ based on value systems, they always seem to empower those in positions of authority.   

And as they are tied to power, it should be unsurprising that the worst ideas have allowed for the growth of unchecked power, where government and elites increasingly control our destinies.  By counting on bureaucrats and their experts, the public has allowed them too much rope in which to hang us.    

The biggest problem with bad ideas is that they usually don’t work.  For example, government welfare, instead of creating equality, creates dependency and unaccountability.  Taxes thwart the necessary productivity and innovation for an economy to grow.  Eminent domain laws violate private property rights.  Civil forfeiture laws don’t allow due process, while the surveillance state violates privacy.  Most of all, however, the majority of bad government policies actually violate the Constitution. 

Whether or not these bad policies are the result of good intentions, they almost always have the result of creating bad incentives. Government schools reduce quality and provide poorer outcomes.  Central banks distort free markets, while occupational licensure creates barriers to entry into careers.  Minimum wage laws hurt small businesses and prevent low-skilled workers from entering entry-level jobs.  And interventionist foreign policy produces harmful outcomes, mainly more war and more death. 

Governments often put short-term benefits above long-term consequences, knowing they will be long out of office before the costs of their policies are ultimately revealed.  Instead, they offer quick and simple fixes that provide immediate benefits in an attempt to buy votes.  By applying a one-size-fits-all approach to a diverse group of people, they end up removing personal autonomy and individual choices. 

Governments are also rarely subjected to the consequences for their actions, for their errors and their mistakes: their thwarting of innovation, their shifting of responsibility, their removing of incentives, and their loss of economic opportunities.  Bad government policies have also resulted in the freezing out of social institutions, from the family to the church, and the community. 

As it relates to the American experiment, bad ideas drive us further from the Founders' ideals for America.  As government grows, there is more power to the authoritarians, and less freedom for the people. The further we wander from liberty, the harder it is to stop bad ideas. 

Just as sunlight is the best disinfectant, exposing the myths and flawed thinking of government policies is key to their reversal.  We must first put an end to ideas and policies that are unconstitutional, giving too much power to the government at the expense of the citizens.  Once the faulty logic of government is exposed, we must further defend and fight for better ideas.  Like restoring incentives to reinvigorate and increase economic opportunities.

Stopping the spread of COVID during its destructive years from 2020–2024 was a means of infection control and public health.   Stopping the spread of bad government ideas is also a way to not only improve the health and welfare of the public, but to save the republic.