Flattening the Curve is Today’s WMD
18 years ago.101 years ago.
Same problem, but not without solutions. And, no, illegally quarantining people is not one of them.
There is so much relevant historical perspective here, even if at first peering through the looking glass of history it does not seem as such.
Almost a score ago, the Bush administration, run by anti-luminaries like Cheney, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, plied away at concocting the weapons of mass destruction myth so as to cast a spell over the American people and dance before the world that a second war was needed in Iraq. Second, that is, if you don’t count the perpetual and sometimes wag-the-dog bombing campaigns of the elder Bush and Clinton years that destroyed that country and its Baathist regime which was a U.S. ally before the elder Bush gave Saddam Hussein carte blanche to end Kuwaiti lateral drilling into Iraq. Beware allies–if the former CIA director-president gives you permission to do something, that is code for “we are going to invade your country…”
I remind you afterwards, that for the sake of what, democracy (?!), nebulous freedom (?!), President Clinton’s own Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright claimed that killing 500,000 Iraqi children “was worth it.”
Imagine what the government would do if half a million Americans were to die–not contract–but die in a similar, horrific fashion as those Iraqi children did due to COVID-19. Why, there’s no limit to the scope of a problem the state can concoct and then use to destroy civil rights in the process of “resolving”.
And, how many times does the reel, foreign and domestic, have to play out before the drugged American people wake up?!
Samantha Power orchestrates a CIA coup in Ukraine; Russia responds. Well, that means that Russia is again America’s eternal foe. When the next president does not launch a war against them, well, he is then a Russian asset. Well done, CIA, FBI, and the other 15 intelligence agencies which WE DON’T EVEN KNOW ABOUT but do know nonetheless exist.
Barack Obama did create ISIS in Iraq War, Take III. And when ISIS–supported by the United States–undertook the invasion of Syria to topple the Assad regime there to “balance things out”, the Obama Administration and his real co-Secretary of State John McCain, pined for war with Syria.
The Orange Man perpetuates a Saudi-led genocidal war against Yemen. Where’s the outrage?! I guess if Yemeni children were dying by the hundreds of thousands from COVID instead of cholera, we would do something, right?! Bullshit.
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Five score and two years ago, the United States and world suffered from the real pandemic of the Spanish flu and then a real, rather than manufactured, deep recession in 1920-21.
Oh, for the days of the Harding Administration!
Rather than turning to fascism and socialism (where we are now), the Harding Administration resolved to remove the boot of Wilsonian progressivism from the neck of the American public, and let freedom reign.
As Tom Woods points out here, it was Harding’s dedication to free market enterprise that ensured the recession of 1920-21 would not perdure.
Harding did as president what he had promised when he sought the Republican nomination in 1920:
We will attempt intelligent and courageous deflation, and strike at government borrowing which enlarges the evil, and we will attack high cost of government with every energy and facility which attend Republican capacity. We promise that relief which will attend the halting of waste and extravagance, and the renewal of the practice of public economy, not alone because it will relieve tax burdens but because it will be an example to stimulate thrift and economy in private life.
Let us call to all the people for thrift and economy, for denial and sacrifice if need be, for a nationwide drive against extravagance and luxury, to a recommittal to simplicity of living, to that prudent and normal plan of life which is the health of the republic. There hasn’t been a recovery from the waste and abnormalities of war since the story of mankind was first written, except through work and saving, through industry and denial, while needless spending and heedless extravagance have marked every decay in the history of nations.“
Instead, today, the Trump administration and Congress are embarking on the anti-thesis of this program, and we are to be the victims.
When nudge came to push, the apparatchiks in Washington gloat about wasting away TRILLIONS of dollars from the productive labor of the middle class for GENERATIONS, so as to fund big banks and corporations. Of the (as of this writing) $60000 of debt per American family created by the recent “stimulus bill”, individual households will see, at most, about $5000 of it. Where did the rest go? Wait, I already answered that.
They are not all Keynesians. They are all corporatist-socialists now.
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Real leadership in a crisis would resemble that of Harding, or even the Panic-striken Congresses and presidents of the 19th century–Monroe, Van Buren, Grant, Cleveland (of course) to name a few–who resisted calls for state governance of the economy and society, denounced cries for radical and rampant inflation, and who knew they were not gods.
Such humility, such an inclination and an air of deference for liberty is in such short supply today that we are all in desperate need of a respirator.
