Riot Maker

"I'm a ticking time bomb and I'm read to explode. Let's solve my problem."
--Henry Wayne (Exit Wounds)

After a black man was allegedly killed by a white cop while under arrest on the streets of Minneapolis last week, protests broke out across the US. Many of these protests subsequently morphed into riots, with likely hundreds of million$ of property damage and theft--particularly in large urban cities across the country.

Many are comparing the violence to the riots of 1968 following the deaths of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy.

It is straightforward to connect the extremity of this reaction to the COVID lockdowns. Ryan McMaken suggests three ways that the lockdowns paved the way for the riots.

COVID lockdowns (1) threw millions out of work, (2) increased police harassment of peaceful people, (3) cut people off from key institutions that reduce social conflict. This made a volatile situation far worse. | @ryanmcmakenhttps://t.co/7OJhQq8uwz

— Mises Institute (@mises) June 3, 2020

Lockdowns created large scale unemployment almost overnight. Economic hardship fosters desperation, frustration, and often criminal behavior. If you have less, then you are prone to be envious of others who have more. As rioting looters have demonstrated over the past week, you will also be more likely to take what isn't yours.

By confining people to their homes, lockdowns also destroyed social institutions such as churches, coffee shops, and beauty parlors that researchers have long found serve as 'safety valves' for people to blow off steam. Absent these mechanisms for defusing social tension and problems, many people likely found protests and riots as viable outlets for cutting loose.

Finally, enforcement of lockdown rules in most jurisdictions fell primarily on state and local police. When working, leaving home, or engaging in trade is deemed a criminal act by authorities, enforcement of those rules by police takes on the look of harassment. Police become bad guys and subject to close scrutiny by people seeking to preserve their liberty.

Would we have seen protests following the Minneapolis incident regardless of our locked down state? For sure. But the scale and associated degree of violence?

Likely not.