Fear that Flatlines the Patient: The Rooseveltian Oath= Do All Harm

How weak is a civilization that the free functioning of people and their commerce can be crippled, and perhaps in the end destroyed, by hapless morons parading their power yet simultaneously revealing their incompetence? The backdrop is a manufactured pandemic that pseudo-intellectuals assert–based on flawed World Health Organization numbers–is more virulent and deadly than the seasonal flu.

So, let’s let the Gavin Newsome’s, J.B. Pritzker’s, and Bill de Blasio’s of the world, in the most illegitimate and illegal fashions shut down our lives! This is the real sickness. This is the real insanity.

What is really going on here, socially, politically and most importantly economically?

Listen to Tom Woods and Peter Schiff (experts on the causes of the last economic meltdown, 2008). Read from Reagan White House economic genius David Stockman, who pulls not one punch here. And finally, on broader implications for our world, Lew Rockwell hammers it all home.

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Pressed for time? Unless you have kids needlessly at home, suffering with you from exhausting cabin fever, you have time. But, I’ll bullet point their arguments for you:

• COVID-19 is just the pin that burst the everything-bubble or water balloon inflated by Keynesian governments and central banks since 2008, and well before that. Now, as wealth–much of it artificial and speculative–evaporates before our eyes, governments the world over are attempting to re-inflate a busted balloon with easy credit, stimulus, and demand-side initiatives. This only renders the patient in greater septic/credit shock.
• Notice, per Robert Higgs yet again, that none of the proposed solutions speak of rolling back the size, scope, expense, authority or role of government? Why, we need a new amorphous war with nebulous goals and no idea of what constitutes victory! Just like Vietnam, the Gulf Wars, the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs, the War on Terrorism–try rallying Americans and the people of the world to that cause. The Forgotten Man is quickly becoming the Trampled Man.
• Economics is the dismal science because righteous and talented practitioners of it must teach/reeducate every successive generation–and in the end, especially in crises such as this–whatever is gleaned from sound instruction flies out the window tout de suite! That’s depressing. But, economists should try their hands at history instruction to quell their depression. Most modern people are dopes in both, but good thing they memorized Mercutio’s Queen Mab monologue in 9th grade… That will help us all now.
• Mises, Hayek, Rothbard all had it right; namely, time preferences of economic agents have been all screwed up by the mechanizations of central banks, crony capitalists, and bureaucratic behemoths.
• This is not like World War II. World War II was much, much worse for nearly every fathomable reason. But, make no mistake about this, the United States emerged (somewhat) victorious and resurrected after the war not because of FDR magic which was always actually toxic, but rather because the American saver, the American worker, the American taxpayer footed the bill, one that by the way amounted to more than twice the expenditure of the U.S. government in its existence dating back to the ratification of the Constitution. But, with the Federal Reserve obviating the dollar’s value for decades and monstrous government choking the private sector for the same duration, upon what savings and credit are we to depend now to fight another Depression?
• As much as Trump is acting like Nixon and Bush before him (Tricky Dick was right–they’re all Keynesians in perpetuity it seems…), his re-election is a long-shot now because Biden and his socialist running mate will simply out-promise, out-Roosevelt, out-New-New Deal, out-handout the Orange Man.

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Final note and by far the most important one: A civilization unmoored from the divine unravels at the slightest of threats.

Remember when the hierarchy of the Catholic Church was counter-cultural, when it directed people’s attention to the Cross, to eternal salvation in His Blood, His Eternal Sacrifice? Remember when it was counter-cultural, not wrapped up in materialism? The mammon of this life? Me neither.

Bishops: instead of cancelling (as if you could) access to the Bread of Life and closing church doors even for Easter, it’s time to take the gloves off.