The fear over COVID-19 has gone ballistic. We have moved from rational
precaution to mass insanity in a matter of days. The speed with which those
seeking power are moving is astounding.
With each passing day another person is jumping up, Alexander
Haig like, to assume powers they do not have to demand control over the
population they legally govern.
And it always seems to be in places with a particular type of
government. They are the ones with the most advanced social safety nets, most
outwardly compassionate policies and the ones with the most corrupt and failing
infrastructures.
They are the ones that have squandered the hard-earned wealth of
generations while trumpeting their own wisdom and foresight. And now that they
are facing threats they cannot possibly manage, they expect to arrogate even
more power to obfuscate the fact that they have failed to provide even the most
basic services for the trillions wasted.
You might think I’m
talking about California or New York, and in some ways I am. But, in reality,
I’m talking about Europe.
Europe stands at the brink of monetary and economic collapse. Its
rot is far more advanced than that of the U.S. and China. And because of that
the spread of COVID-19 there can have the most devastating effects. Therefore
they are justified in shutting down whole countries.
But the counter argument
is also valid, if not more valid. It says quite clearly that by keeping the
economy flowing, by keeping people productive and working you retain the
infrastructure necessary to save more people than would die otherwise, despite
the threat of transmission.
We are living through a time when the democratic socialist
nation state, a concept less than three hundred years old, is on trial. How
countries respond to COVID-19 will be a litmus test. And I can assure you that
anyone not openly embracing full on Fascistic control over their countries will
be lambasted as heartless do-nothings.
Why? Because we’re already there.
Any temperance exhibited
by local leadership is met with hysterical cries of murder. We’re seeing it
here in the U.S. President Trump, rightly, didn’t order a national top-down
approach to COVID-19, he left it up to the states to handle.
Some have reacted like Europe. Others not. And the amount of
vitriol and political axe grinding going on in the U.S. to this point is
ridiculous. And again, I’m seeing it quickly becoming a cudgel to bludgeon
skeptics by all-knowing, smug authoritarians seeing the opportunity to justify
their worldview.
In
Europe, for the past seventy years or so The Davos
Crowd have been obsessed with creating a European superstate to
entrench their own power at the top of an unelected bureaucracy.
But they have failed.
Their political union is failing. The
economy of Europe is quickly imploding into something only seen in a dystopian
science fiction movie. And they need something to keep the dream alive. From
their perspective COVID-19 is the kind of deus ex machina that can save that dream.
Whole countries are being put
on lock down, nominally, to stem the spread of a disease whose biggest threat
is overwhelming a woefully prepared medical infrastructure not killing a large
swath of the population.
But it’s not about compassion. Every dead Italian or German is
grist for the mill of saving socialism from itself. The EU leadership is using
this crisis right now to set up centralizing economic control over the whole of
Europe by breaking the will of the German people in the face of a
civilization-ending pandemic that, to date, hasn’t killed more people worldwide
than the flu does in the U.S. annually.
By setting the wheels in motion to cancel cash, outlaw gold
buying and digitize the entire money supply. How again is this part of saving
lives afflicted with COVID-19?
Oh right, it doesn’t.
Congress is paralyzed by partisan bickering seeing this
opportunity. They’ve overwhelmed social media with patent nonsense on both
sides. The Republicans are wrapping themselves in the moral high ground of
sending out UBI checks and the Democrats decry corporate handouts.
While I’m not interested in the least in seeing $1.8 trillion in new spending coming from the
Federal government it’s clear this time the Democrats only
blocked the first vote to play games.
And guess what? Not one bit
of the spending is necessary. It’s just more socialist destruction of wealth
through debt issuance while we all go broke sitting in our homes in fear of a
bug.
Whatever happens, you can bet
that whatever form of the bill passes, and one will pass, it will be materially
worse than the one just shot down. Such is the way of ‘bipartisanship’ in D.C.
In the U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s response has been the
most reasonable, refusing to shut the country down. But he may soon succumb to
the insanity of newly-minted virologists on Twitter screaming ‘flatten the
curve!’
It’s so painfully obvious
that this is now a crisis actively being made worse to distract us from the
root cause of the economic meltdown that was already here.
Our near completely socialized capital markets, the furthest
things from free markets, are imploding because their multiple layers of Ponzi
scheme have been revealed as fictions. COVID-19 just blew up their false
assumptions.
They exist to support through
bureaucracy and taxation the desperate promises of governments acting like
absentee parents buying their children presents instead of being proper role
models and leaders.
That’s what these ‘aid’
packages being discussed in capitols around the world right now are, just more
unpaid-for promises of dysfunctional absentee Boomers, trying to buy our love
for another day.
But, the truth is staring
us in the face. The institutions of socialism are revealed to be inadequate.
Make no mistake, as I said in my last article, that’s no reason
to suppress your humanity. The threat of COVID-19 is real, but it isn’t
existential.
And I applaud the
diversion of our economic output to support fighting this disease and helping
as many people survive it as possible. And that means not locking everyone
indoors and shutting down their lives.
It doesn’t mean
nationalizing every manufacturing plant to make N-95 masks and PPE. And it
certainly doesn’t mean prepping the country for the suspension of civilian rule.
By turning the amp up to eleven on fears of a biblical plague
they are doing what all good screenwriters do as the movie goes along. They
raise the stakes. COVID-19, while by all reports is a tough virus to beat,
isn’t world ending. But it’s being treated as such.
This isn’t The Stand, folks. It’s not the Simian Flu from Planet
of the Apes. Yes, the hospitals and medical community will be overworked. They
will need help. And we need to be able to provide that help however we can.
In some cases it means
staying at home if you can. In others it means donating your time, money,
energy to help your community get through this. And in still others it means
being brave enough to show up for work.
But it doesn’t mean
allowing power-hungry maniacs to run roughshod over us because we’re fearful of
a plague we can name rather than the ones that dog us every year.
But to sell this fear to us and save themselves, they keep telling
us that markets don’t work. That individuals cannot be trusted. And that only
the State can coordinate such a monumental task such as saving humanity from
nature.
Because without the State we would be left in a Hobbesian state
of ‘war of all against all.’
If you listen very closely to their carefully prepared hysterics
you’ll hear the echoes of Agent Smith telling Morpheus that the real virus we
are fighting here is humanity itself.
And that a little culling of the bad people who won’t get with
their Brave New World is what we have to accept to survive.
In Europe they are cynically using this pandemic to lock down
countries where the civil unrest was already at the breaking point — France,
Spain, Italy.
The stories coming out of Germany now are designed for maximum
fear. Chancellor Angela Merkel shook hands with the wrong person, she’s in
quarantine. Germany has knuckled under, finally, to new fiscal rules. The EU
commission is finally allowing massive government spending. The U.S. will
authorize, in the end, tens of trillions in new loans, handouts, bailouts and
bribes.
All to try one last time to paper over the broken promises and
false hope of socialized markets to maintain the one-way trades of a few
thousand oligarchs.
Because some pigs are more equal than others.
And when the worst of the COVID-19 spread is over. When the
hospitals finally see fewer cases we will be looking at a much different world.
The decisions we allow our governments to take now will determine what that
world looks like then.