The ongoing COVID-19 outbreak that emerged from Wuhan, China in 2020 has seen unprecedented restrictions on civilian populations in many countries in the attempt to curtail the spread of the pandemic. A recently developed model of general collective intelligence predicts the properties of group decision-making systems that are required to optimize collective outcomes, along with predicting that authoritarian systems of decision-making might tend to be restricted to non-optimal group outcomes in ways that are somewhat hidden in that they require an understanding of this new and relatively unknown model of general collective intelligence. In light of this model of general collective intelligence, the economic restrictions imposed to combat the pandemic take on a new light, since these restrictions have not only resulted in economic lockdowns for some countries, but in some cases have also effectively imposed martial law. The hidden cost of this reduction in civil liberties is explored from the perspective of the cost of an authoritarian decision-making system resulting in non-optimal group outcomes as theorized by this model of general collective intelligence, using models of government inefficiency to assess the cost of those non-optimal group outcomes, and therefore the hidden cost of reduced civil liberties.