I’m coming increasingly to the conclusion that our reaction to this Wuhan virus, if it keeps the economy comatose for any appreciable length of time, will do more damage than anything the disease itself might have wrought.
On the more benign end of the scale, we have at minimum a crisis that has already been invoked to justify emergency powers and extraordinary government action. This is, in general, a ratchet: it is rare for governments to relinquish all of the authority they arrogate during emergencies — and so the State grows bigger and more powerful, crisis by crisis. (I’ve previously mentioned the book Crisis and Leviathan, by Robert Higgs, which examines in scholarly detail the action of this monotonic process in the United States over the previous century. I recommend it to you all.)
Giving that Leviathan another shot of growth hormone would be bad enough — and of course we have already wiped out perhaps a trillion or more of wealth, including the life-savings of countless older people who have no chance to start over — but there could be far worse consequences if this lockdown persists for months or longer. The worst case is very bad indeed: that one day not far off we will find that we have given such a terrible, shocking injury to the organic balance of our civilization that it really will begin to break down and die.
Here are some things I think you should read:
— First, an article by Peter Hitchens that’s been making the rounds today.
— Next, an item linked in the Hitchens piece: an article, by a professor of epidemiology and biological data science, about the poor quality of the data we are using to make these enormously consequential choices.
— Third, a piece by Richard Epstein also suggesting we might be doing more harm than good.
— Here, too, is Heather Mac Donald’s attempt to put this outbreak in perspective.
Finally, with a hat-tip to the indefatigable ‘JK’: have you thought about what a real collapse of America’s social order might look like? This fellow has. (Pour yourself a drink first.)
4 Comments
Overkill? You don’t say! Almost as if the trivial birdemic was just an excuse to make the whole world a totalitarian prison and destroy the global economy.
Thing is, it’s likely that already more than enough has been done to plunge the world economy into irreversible and massive – terminal – collapse.
This may well rebound to our overall spiritual benefit, but in material terms there will (surely?) be a catastrophe unlike anything before, because seven billion people.
And let’s not forget linking to VDH
https://amgreatness.com/2020/03/22/the-virus-is-not-invisible-but-its-exposing-whos-irreplaceable/
Both the Matt Bracken pieces were good. Two different scenarios of how a civil war could happen and what its development would be. As one who has been predicting a civil war but somewhat differently, I see his ideas as more plausible than mine.
“I’m coming increasingly to the conclusion that our reaction to this Wuhan virus, if it keeps the economy comatose for any appreciable length of time, will do more damage than anything the disease itself might have wrought…”
Is that not the whole object?
It seems not complicated to me.
The Human Extinction Movement really hates for us to have nice things. They do everything within the scope of their power and treason to deny us nice things. They lower everything to the lowest common denominator, including our money.
Last week they wiped out every gain in the stock market from the first day of the God Emperor’s reign.
They can’t have power, over happy prosperous people.
Why the Fabian’s have spent 245 years sneaking up on destroying America by destroying our economic motive power & audacity by central bankster control of our system of wealth exchange, the creation of fiat, fractional casino banking, and weaponizing debt, ie, instruments of wealth transfer.