There are no firm numbers but it is possible 25–40% of small businesses closed permanently. Dreams were shattered and millions of jobs were disrupted or destroyed.

As a result, retail trade (declared nonessential except for chosen businesses) has yet to recover in employment, despite the frantic hiring. Neither has hospitality. However, the information sector (declared essential across the board) is larger than ever.

The American economy is supposed to rest on competition as an ideal. This was the opposite.

Lockdowns were the bolstering of industrial cartels, particularly in the information sector. Even today, all these companies benefit from this period in which they were able to deploy their unfair advantages against their smaller competitors. The entire disaster was an attack on property rights, free enterprise and the competitive economy.

Incredibly, the regulators offered a public-health rationale. They were issuing every manner of edict concerning ventilation, social distancing, plexiglass, silly stickers everywhere and capacity restrictions. Later these companies added vaccine mandates.

These all benefited the large corporations and exterminated the small businesses that could not afford to comply or could not risk alienating labor with shot demands.