It was on August 21, 2020 when Biden said “I would shut it down; I would listen to the scientists. We’re going to do whatever it takes to save lives.” Biden is a dumb man and an ignorant man who is saying things that are designed to be comforting and vote-getting. But in the real world, he has no clue how to listen to scientists who differ in their opinions and then come up with a policy that somehow is right for everyone; and he has no idea how to weigh the advice of doctors who conflict against economic advice offered by Austrian economics. He doesn’t know how to lock down the country to save lives without at the same time destroying its financial pathways and causing mass starvation and death.
The free market has long since found ways to handle all sorts of problems, and one of these ways is to leave it to individual doctors to deal with individual patients and to form their own networks of doctors by which to spread information about means of prevention and cures. Biden would overturn and suppress all of this with an order from above. It is his kind of thinking that has suppressed the use of HCQ, zinc and vitamin therapies, in favor of drugs that do not work, and therapies such as ventilators that killed people. Biden is in the same category as Cuomo, the nursing home murderer, and Whitmer with her irrational detailed orders.
Biden’s doing “whatever it takes” means abandoning established ways, means and principles at all costs. Does “whatever it takes” make sense in the existing situation? It presumes that the threat is so gigantic that everything must be thrown into the battle against it. But is this threat that huge, that mammoth? Is it so massive that the economy must be sacrificed, with its own massive costs? And even if that sacrifice is made, how will that “beat the virus” as Buttigieg put it? If Americans routinely handle flu bugs and automobile deaths and criminals and nuclear threats and marital breakups, why can’t they handle this novel virus without simultaneously destroying themselves, their work, their families, their happiness, their businesses and their manifold relationships? Of course they can handle it. The people who have failed the challenge are primarily the politicians who implemented drastic and drastically wrong policies. Biden and Harris want more of the same.
Pete Buttigieg, the Democratic mayor of South Bend repeated this today, saying “everything has to be on the table in order to keep Americans safe.” Buttigieg postulated “the first rule of virus economics is to beat the virus or else you won’t have an economy.”
Biden’s statement is dumb. Buttigieg’s statement is dumb. These men are saying extremely dumb things that, if carried out, are incredibly destructive while completely failing to “beat the virus”.
These guys apparently don’t read, don’t listen, cannot think straight, have no idea how the world works and don’t digest information. They have no correct ideas about COVID. They have no understanding of how the country has dealt in the past with diseases and no idea of what’s going on now in comparison. They are completely clueless about how free people can cope with disease threats without being locked up in their dwellings while they physically and mentally deteriorate. They have no idea how adaptable people are who make their own decisions.
Buttigieg is nuts about beating the virus by locking down. The economy will function, it will go on working, without first attempting to exterminate a disease, any disease, be it the Black Death, TB, Polio, Pellagra, or Plague. In fact, it is only as a consequence of there being economic activity that carries on despite impediments, bombings, ice ages, floods, blitzes, diseases, and malign government rules like price and wage controls, lockdowns, and quotas that people seek and discover ways to mitigate the evils bombarding them. A virus is one of many such threats to lives and livelihoods, and Mayor Pete is totally ignorant when he says you won’t have an economy until you beat the virus. This has never been true when we faced numerous threats, including those from viruses and contagious diseases. The fact is that you are assured of not having an economy if you lock it down in a vain attempt to beat a virus, whatever that means. And you are assured of preventing people from adapting to the situation of threat or disruption, whatever it may be. For example, people left to their own devices will clear the streets of rioters faster than any government will or has in the recent episodes. Locking down people from having guns and organizing self-defense is a sure way, for example, to prolong riots and their expansion.
Biden has no idea how to process contradictory information coming from conflicting studies and scientists. Saving lives by “whatever means it takes” is no principle that he can implement either.
These politicians should not be listened to. They are quacks. They offer snake oil and poisons as remedies.
Lockdown is a simple word that became prominent as a means of closing down a school facing a threat of a shooter. It gained currency in the Boston manhunt for the Marathon bombers. It wasn’t clear in these cases whether even this level of lockdown made any sense.
Still less does it make any known sense to lock down an economy. The term doesn’t apply. Everyone just stop working, traveling, and producing?? This is sheer madness. People will soon run out of food, medicine and everything else, including vital services, if a lockdown is actually made to be effective by force of law and penalties. The result of a real biting lockdown will be rebellion of the populace. There would be total chaos. We didn’t have total chaos but we did get partial chaos or a taste of chaos from the lockdowns we did endure. Most of us saw firsthand the shortages that occurred right away, including a shortage of coins. There were stores that would not make change or required a card.
What exactly do Biden and Buttigieg conceive is “on the table”? They conceive that they will use their powers in an anti-virus campaign. But for what end? Clearly the end is to augment these powers and hold on to them indefinitely. The end is not to destroy the whole economy, because that’s senseless, but to shift the political map in their favor. If that takes destroying whole parts of the economy, they’ll do it. The result will be rebellion.
3:45 pm on November 1, 2020
