- Whether or not this “trip” (pandemic response) was necessary or is forgivable based on best guesses and erring on the side of caution — we can’t go through this again — either in the fall if Wuhan does come back as is predicted — or with the next new respiratory virus
- We can be hopeful about the degree the economy will come back,
- We can be hopeful about the degree the economy will adapt to the shakeout
- We cannot be complacent about the extent of the emergency powers being exercised to protect us
- As President Trump has said, the cure can’t be worse than the disease
- Here in Iowa it is supposed to be “Our Liberties We Prize and Our Rights We Will Maintain.”
- We will offer a critique of Governor Reynolds executive order regarding the ChiCom virus outbreak in a future post
Below is a foreboding article by Streiff writing at RedState. We share his concerns and added a brief comment yesterday (appended to his article herein as well).
We Have Sacrificed Our Constitutional Freedoms to Fight a Virus, Will We Ever Get Them Back
Smarter people than me have noted over the years that totalitarianism always arrives wearing a smiley face. Ronald Reagan was fond of saying, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.” I fear we are on the cusp of totalitarianism taking root in America and it has not come on the strength of $100,000 in Facebook ads bought by a Russian troll farm. It has been propelled here by a virus that most likely represents an interspecies jump of an everyday virus from some pre-soup bat at a live market in Wuhan, China, to a human.
The extent to which the government, at all levels, driven on by the frenzied bleating of our national media has used this virus to lay siege to our civil liberties has been nothing short of astounding. The degree to which Americans have gone along with this slow-motion revolution has been shocking.
Ridiculous shelter-in-place orders are zealously enforced:
The official government slogan of 30 Days to Slow the Spread has been in effect for 32 days, as of today, and shows no signs of an end in the near future.
Don’t be deceived. We will not be allowed to return to the status quo ante after this bug is just part of the ecosystem any more than Germany was allowed to return to the status quo ante after Marinus van der Lubbe kept his appointment with the fallbeil. We have been fundamentally changed as a nation.
This pandemic has shown that our government not respect civil liberties or recognize any concept of personal agency. The First Amendment, which guarantees our right to peaceably assemble, has been absolutely shutdown by politicians and bureaucrats declaring that it was illegal to do so. It is no more permissible to forbid people from going to the beach because of some inchoate and ill-defined risk to themselves than it is to prevent them from holding political rally…something which would also be forbidden. This is power that Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon never dreamed of exercising during the height of the Vietnam War protests and the “Days of Rage.”
If churches are locked, with the complicity of their clergy based upon government fiat and pastors are arrested for holding church services (sadly, no Catholic priests have yet stepped forward to do their duty to their flocks in the face of the obeisance of their hierarchy to Caesar), then freedom of religion has been defined down to a personal hobby from a human right in a way that Barack Obama could never have dreamed.
If a mayor can forbid a store to sell merchandise because of Wuhan virus, then he or she can forbid a store from selling merchandise for any other ‘public health crisis.’ And let’s be serious here, the limiting of merchandise that can be sold has zero to do with transmission of the Wuhan virus and everything to do with government staking out its right to control your life. Once you are in the store, your risk of spreading or contracting the virus neither increases nor decreases based upon the goods you buy any more than a 9 p.m. curfew keeps you safe.
And this is the start. The people pushing this are watching and observing and taking notes and are very happy with what they see.
The course of action charted by the federal and state governments here have inflicted hardship all out of proportion to the damage potential of the virus. And they have done it in a way that guarantees we go through this again in November. Widespread infection, when some 80% of everyone catching the virus recovers completely with few or no symptoms would build the herd immunity we need to render the Wuhan virus irrelevance. The social distancing nonsense simply preserves a large population with no immunity that will be as susceptible to the virus in the autumn as it is now and give rise to yet another round of social controls. (Amazingly, in short, we’ve devastated the economy and spent trillions of dollars and sacrificed our liberties and our birthright and we have nothing to show for it, not even the proverbial mess of pottage.)
Now that government knows that it can do this and that our elites and our media will stand idly by…along with the great mass of the citizenry as well…as precious liberties are sacrificed on the altar of ephemeral fear, fear will be our constant companion as government refuses to give up its newly won power.
Our comment as revised:
Most go along with these edicts because no one wants to think they were part of causing vulnerable people to die and because we were told by “experts” that this was the way to prevent it. We casually suspended some of our rights (suspend hopefully being the operative word).
A lot of people rolled over on the work closures because they thought it a vacation and Uncle Sugar will pay unemployment and everything will be back to normal in a couple of weeks. So many thought.
Hopefully the draconian extent if not absurdity of so much of it, including the emperor-has-no-cloths aspect to the experts is setting in.
The politicians that were not opportunists or downright malevolent feared being accused of not doing enough. That is how the left manipulated them. What we need to do know is to tie the hands of the elected and bureaucratic controllers.
Perhaps they can be “feared” into agreeing with a populist and principled move to do that. Give them only certain more limited parameters in emergencies and for a limited time (30 days?). Statutorily delineate what public health regulations can be initiated.
Civil liberties must be maintained.
Consider: If clusters of people are bad during a purported pandemic why are they good anytime as any such congregation could serve as ground zero for the next potential pandemic. GROUPS ARE DANGEROUS TO PUBLIC HEALTH!
That said there are some things that can reasonably be done – perhaps more rigorous cleaning by businesses in order to achieve some standard rating as to their cleanliness regime that people can be aware of. Perhaps mask alert levels (varied by city or county) and ready availability of masks during outbreaks.
What say you readers?
