Every time I read about another rich guy cozying up to Jeffrey Epstein, I flash to 2020.

That may seem strange. Hear me out. You may vaguely recall I didn't like Covid lockdowns – and said so once or twice. Some people disagreed. Journalists sure did.

But journalists lean hard left (by lean I mean fall over). The data were clear. Covid posed a moderate risk to most adults, lockdowns were doing major economic harm, and Covid couldn't be contained anyway. We had agreed to manage respiratory virus outbreaks as medical problems, not societal threats. We just needed to follow our own advice.

As the spring of 2020 ground on, I waited for the people I still thought of back then as the grownups — executives running public companies, big Wall Street investors, successful tech entrepreneurs and scientists — to speak out.

After all, they were mostly political moderates. They could see the same data and run the same analyses I could. Tens of millions of Americans were being laid off. Their companies were at stake. The economy was at stake.

They had to speak. And they had cover. After all, Elon Musk, among the world's most successful entrepreneurs, had already spoken out. So I waited for them to join him.

And waited.

But they didn't. They never did, really.

The tech bros and the hedge funds had cynical reasons to stay quiet. The tech companies saw immediately how lockdowns increased our dependence on screens. The smartest investors stopped caring about the impact lockdowns would have jobs or ordinary Americans very quickly.

They realized the Federal Reserve would need to pour massive liquidity into the financial system to stop a depression, and that liquidity would drive an equally massive increase in asset prices. Bitcoin was trading at about $7,000 before Covid, at the end of 2019. It briefly dipped as the panic spread in March 2020, but by March 2021 was at $50,000.