Lockdowns Are Back

Lockdowns are back. Great Britain has imposed a totalitarian shutdown for at least a month. “Blue” states in the U.S. like New Jersey are already threatening to reimpose lockdowns. The events of 2020 tell us that 21st Century tyrants keep their word on their threats. Sure, the presidential election in the U.S. has something to do with it all. But tyranny is here to stay, so long as we keep permitting it, and no presidential election will change that. Note that Britain’s prime minister is the Conservative party leader who won in a landslide. It doesn’t matter. Putting a time limit on the lockdown, which will almost certainly be extended, is probably his idea of being “moderate” on the subject.

Lockdowns are like Communism, in that they extend total government control over every last detail of human activity in daily life. If lockdowns were necessary, and effective, then the lockdowns of last spring and early summer should have killed the virus. Or at least kept it from coming back in full force. Of course, that didn’t happen. Now we’re told the virus is stronger than ever, and more dangerous than ever. No, death rates are NOT going up. But we’re still supposed to believe it’s mortally dangerous. Yet if that’s true, then how effective have lockdowns been? And what reason is there to believe the next lockdown will be any better?

Under Communist regimes, the more the government intervenes and controls economic activity, the poorer people become. Eventually people starve, because a strangled economy cannot deliver the goods. It’s the rational miracle of CAPITALISM, private property and profits that deliver us the Amazon goods — not the Department of Health & Human Services in D.C. The government’s answer, when its policies of command and control fail? Does the government change its way? Or relinquish power? Of course not. Instead, the government says we need MORE control, and more time for the controls to take effect. And things get worse. In Soviet Russia, this went on for 75 years until the system finally imploded. In Venezuela and Cuba, it’s still going on. THOSE are the economic models of lockdowns. Lockdowns are Communism and Marxism — just for a different reason. The virus scares people into accepting a Marxist system they never otherwise would have accepted. It’s fear, not a virus, that will bring us down, on our current course.

The virus is not life-threatening for the vast majority of people who get it. But even if it were, it wouldn’t make sense to shut down all human activity for the entire population. Yet that’s where we’re going. Politicians are stopping the motor of the world. If Joe Biden and the Democrats win on Tuesday, massive lockdowns will be nationwide and international — for a long, long time to come. Masks and locked up restaurants and health clubs will be the least of it. “Look at the bright side,” they’ll say. “At least now there won’t be any climate change.” How can you have climate change if virtually all human activity stops? Of course, we’ll all be dead, too. Not from a virus. But from the massive and destructive consequences of shutting down a world economy upon which billions depend for survival.

Life was pretty great before all this started. COVID hysteria was an international act of suicide. When you hear of a seemingly happy person’s suicide, that’s how it is with America and the rest of the civilized world. Future generations will say, “America was doing so well. The world had come so far. Why did they kill themselves?”

Why, indeed?