Protest, America! Our Biggest Risk is the Disaster Caused by State Governors

America is rushing down the rails toward a smashup.

We live now in states, a country, and a world gripped by the “madness of crowds.”  America is rushing down the rails toward a smashup. And that smashup is not a single impact occurring in a single moment; it is happening now and continuing to unfold.
 

The record, as I interpret it, shows:

1. A novel virus that causes COVID-19 broke out in China and started spreading around the world, probably from December 2019. We had seen new viruses before, most recently, MERS and SARS. The mortality rate for MERS is 34 percent (of those who contract the illness) and for SARS is 10 percent—sky high as compared with COVID-19, with a mortality rate estimated at under 2 percent. But in the new virus’s initial race to its “peak,” cases have been more numerous than were cases of MERS and SARS. For comparison, the mortality rate for seasonal flu in the United States is around 0.1 percent (one-tenth of one percent) of those who contract the illness.
2. Analysts using computer models seized the very earliest data to project tens of millions of deaths. It will take time, and a calmer frame of mind, to say exactly why they went so wrong. To get headlines? Because such models fall prey to linear projections, uncomplicated by qualifying factors? Because projections have tremendous potential as ammunition for political attacks?
3. Certain localities, from Italy to New York City, were hit hardest by COVID-19 for local reasons. Italy has the oldest average population in the European Union, and the oldest-old account for some 80 percent of COVID-19 fatalities. New York City housing policy since the end of WWII, beginning with rent control and then every conceivable control, has left it a victim of the socialist curse of perpetual scarcity. Now, NYC, thanks to “making our city safe for the poor,” has the least square feet of living space per person, at the highest cost, of any comparable U.S. city. There is no social distancing at home in the average NYC household. (Other suggestions, none convincing, are that the city fell victim to a new strain of the virus, is wide open to visitors and immigrants, and has the biggest subway system.)
4. New York City, the planet’s media capital, embraced the most “blessed” media story since 9/11. The media went into 100 percent panic-inducing mode. Over some three months, that has steadily increased. Every channel, personality, celebrity, aspiring celebrity—and thousands of human-interest stories and every talk show—have gone Coronavirus/COVID-19. Except for Fox News, there is a more or less single opinion on everything. If you are wondering why, see Media Wars: The Battle to Shape Our Minds.
5. With projections of millions of deaths (the climate alarms had made apocalyptic predictions normal), governors made an unprecedented decision. Led by New York State Gov. Andrew Cuomo, long known for his presidential ambitions, they decided that maximal control over everything equated with maximal management of the crisis, which equated with maximal safety. There is a close parallel with proposals that only socialism-by-government-planning, not government-ownership, (fascist style socialism) can save us from climate doom. A New York Times columnist writes that President Trump has become a “science denier” whose “most destructive legacy” had seemed to be his “climate denial”—until his “epidemic denial” came along. In both cases, he has resisted a wartime mobilization of the U.S. economy demanded by the latest devotees of doom. (Michelle Goldberg, “We Are All Casualties of Trump’s War on Science.”) If you have understood “big climate alarmism,” and its anti-capitalist roots and animus, but are uncertain, as yet, about the pandemic—well, look for the striking similarities.
6. The policy in many states with Democratic governors (i.e., the Northeast and West Coast) became “lockdown.” It is an assertion of governmental emergency powers unprecedented in America. The arguable legitimacy of government quarantining infected individuals during an epidemic, suddenly—overnight—became quarantine of the healthy, as well. Everyone politicians did not deem “essential.” The dictates shuttering businesses, voluntary organizations—everything—proclaiming that life is to be saved by stopping it. Like all life-threatening government dictates, its slogan was “Stay safe!”
7. The righteous aggression of the Democratic governors (and mayors), their insistence on police-enforced lockdowns, cannot be understood without its political context (see insights numbered four and five here). America is headed for the 2020 Presidential election with Donald Trump up for reelection. Liberal-left Democrats and the media establishment live and breathe for nothing but to defeat Trump, and if possible imprison him. And the prospects of success look dismal. The economy was surging, with historically low unemployment, soaring profits, and surging financial market gains. The ludicrously large field of Democratic presidential hopefuls progressively had eroded to leave as Democratic champion 77-year-old Joseph Biden. The dearest, desperate, heart-stopping hope of the liberal-left Democrats and media to seize power, again, looked forlorn.
8. And then came salvation: the pandemic. If the governors, media, pundits, and bureaucrats have appeared to be oblivious to a collapsing U.S. economy—damage easily dwarfing records set in the Great Depression—just remember that the economy was the unassailable obstacle to defeating President Trump in 2020. Now, some 38 million Americans are out of work, well over 20 percent of full– and part-time employees. Bankruptcies are cascading. Profits plunging. And Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has announced he is changing his campaign platform to fighting the effects of the lockdown—and to do so, he will incorporate both the socialist ideas and socialist economic staff of Sen. Bernard Sanders.
9. The crisis is over. The stated goal of the governors and of scientists, notably Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was to “flatten” the rising trajectory of COVID-19 cases. Note: the goal was not to reduce total cases and deaths. It was to prevent medical and hospital services from being overwhelmed. The models had predicted, as NYS Gov. Cuomo said daily, commandeering the national media for hours, that hospitals would be unable to handle cases and people would lay dying at their doors. Based on the models, he estimated that New York City would need 10 times as many hospitals as it turned out to need.
10. A nation that social democrats admire, Sweden, refused to quarantine the healthy, to take the wheels off its economy, and, instead, took the long-established, classic approach to epidemics, which was determined tracing of contacts, quarantine, and treatment. Sweden’s record of COVID-19 cases and deaths has been about average. For example, the same as its nearest lockdown neighbor, the Netherlands. And so, the record shows that response by totalitarian lockdown, as in some states in America, and by classic focus on the ill and who they may have infected, produces about equal results. But the restrained system does not take the wheels off the economy …. Quite a difference, yes?
11. The crisis is over. The coronavirus will persist along with other viruses. People will continue to fall ill with COVID-19. Some, the great majority of them among the oldest-old in senior care facilities, will die. On that population, we should concentrate all our resources for protection and care. They need intensive special attention. The population under 60 never should have been legally prevented from working.
12. Hospitals have not been overwhelmed. Ironically, though, many thousands of nurses and technical personnel are being laid off because of the ban on “non-essential treatment.” In the worst hit of all areas, the death toll of COVID-19 has been one-tenth of one percent of the population. (To take an example of scary linear projection: If that 0.1 percent were applied to the world’s entire population, it would mean 8.0 million deaths. But that is impossible. The most under-emphasized reality about the entire epidemic is that those under 60 face next to no risk of death from the virus.) In any case, we are past the peak. Hospitalizations for the illness in the worst-hit areas have been three-tenths of one percent. And we are far beyond that peak. The crisis is over.
13. The prayer of the liberal-left Democrats self-righteous windbags in the media has been answered. The performance of the economy that made President Trump politically invincible has been bombed into oblivion—not by the virus, the illnesses, but the authoritarian political response to it.
14. Meanwhile, at the federal level, President Trump, unlike the Democratic governors, has refused to dictate a national lockdown. He has become the identified leader of the “open up the economy” movement. But, with his acquiescence, Congress has put America $3.0 trillion further into debt to “help,” assist,” and “save” businesses and workers that government dictates have destroyed. In the House, now, a bill has been passed to add another $3.0 trillion to our debt.
15. The likes of Gov. Cuomo doggedly extend the lockdown, garnering hours a day of free media time to play savior to their constituents and gain political “face time” that ordinarily would cost them millions of dollars as outright campaign advertising.

America, open it up. Live again.

America, open it up. Live again. Outside of a very few local areas, your vulnerability to the virus is now the same as in any ordinary flu season.

Open businesses, open social meetings. Claim the U.S. Constitution as your sanction to live in freedom.

This lunge for power by politicians and the media has been like the famous blitzkrieg of Nazi forces. Intended as a swift knockout blow to the Trump administration and its supporters, it has succeeded all too well.

All of the snarling faces and bitter voices proclaiming America “selfish,” “unequal,” “racist,” “sexist,” “ruled by one percent,” “xenophobic,” and “cruel” have  gotten airtime and microphones to proclaim at last we are “all in this together, our “heroes” are delivery boys and grocery clerks, that at last we are a “love generation,” that in truth life itself is a crisis that must bring us all together in egalitarian mutual sacrifice. And that that is a beautiful thing, which, now discovered, must never be relinquished.

There are indications of resistance. Businesses re-opening at the risk of fines. There have been marches and demonstrations. Some local law enforcement officers have refused to try to enforce vague, sweeping dictates. But, so far, compared with the assault on liberty, the protests are limited. The reason, I think, is that the pretext for authoritarian measures has a reality, a legitimacy. Quarantine of the infected can be justified in an epidemic. The leap to quarantine of the healthy—i.e., everyone—had not been imagined. In fact, how could one imagine government dictating who shall work and who shall not, who shall do business and who shall not, who shall attend church and when?

How it came about will have to be investigated in the aftermath of the crisis. This is one of the most brutal abuses of government power in American history.

Total control of the economy (the phrase was “mobilization” during WWII) had been urged by climate alarmists; overnight the idea became the model for dealing with the virus.

America never was in an epidemic crisis. It was experiencing the spike typical of new virus epidemics. The model makers induced panic, with projection of a million of deaths. President Trump reacted with consistent restraint, for which he has been savaged. Liberal-left Democrats reacted with a panic probably seeded for years by the daily “panic” over the climate change catastrophe. Same kind of models, same panic.

Total control of the economy (the phrase was “mobilization” during WWII) had been urged by climate alarmists; overnight the idea became the model for dealing with the virus. Except that the sweeping dictates at the state level were aimed not at maximizing production, as in WWII, but regimenting the economy’s lockdown.

The perpetrators of this blitzkrieg attack on economic freedom, the alpha authoritarians like Cuomo and Bill de Blasio, should be stopped. Lose at the polls. And go down in history as self-aggrandizing commissars in the story of the virus that caused economic suicide.

Related Posts:

1. Could This Be the Most Startling News of the Pandemic Yet?
2. 20 Things New to Me about George Washington
3. The Moral Case against Vaccine Passports

   

About the Author: Walter Donway

Walter Donway contributes to Savvy Street on political economy, science, and trends in fiction, film, and culture. Walter Donway’s most recent book is Donald Trump and His Enemies: How the Media Put Trump in Office (Romantic Revolution Books: New York, September 2017). His Amazon profile can be found here