When fear is fueled, principle is abandoned
And the Left is lovin’ it.
Consider, for a moment, what ideas Americans seem to have generally accepted in the last few weeks.
First, there seems to no longer be a question as to whether or not the government has a responsibility to ensure health care for American citizens. The prospect of some hospitals, in some specific locales, exceeding health care capacity has caused the bulk of the American economy, at the behest of government, to simply stop functioning in order to avoid it. In other words, the health of a comparative few is of far greater importance than the personal, financial, and social interests of the many. If we accept that as gospel and the creed of our governance, as it seems we have, then how is Medicare-for-All anything less than a moral imperative?
Secondly, there no longer seems to be any question as to whether our government needs to act swiftly and decisively to defend against an invisible threat which presents an unknown, and unknowable, future impact, even if that means destroying American free enterprise, and the lives and livelihoods of countless millions. Green New Deal, anyone?
Thirdly, this crisis appears to have nullified any devotion to the concept of individual liberty among Americans. A friend in Chicago tells me that he and his young daughters daren’t risk even walking to the park that his tax dollars built, as he risks a $500 fine for doing so. The stiffest resistance encountered by the government officials imposing these infringements upon law-abiding citizens is the quiet grumbling that exists beneath all these loud sermons about “social distancing” and “flattening the curve.”
And finally, as Americans are left unable to care for themselves because the government is prohibiting their free association in the economic marketplace, the government is now facilitating a massive transfer of wealth from taxpayers as cash payments to Americans below certain income thresholds.
It is not a coincidence that the greatest economic depression and the greatest expansion of the federal government’s power in American history occurred at precisely the same moment in time (see: New Deal Era). Once you understand that, why American progressives seem all-too-willing to sacrifice Americans’ economic prosperity while promising government-issued security blankets during the crisis shouldn’t be a mystery to anyone.
Americans are being asked to not only accept unnecessarily rigid social restrictions, but to also accept an indefinitely disabled economy for as long as the government sees fit, even though its continued disability has the potential to destroy our free enterprise system and fundamentally alter the American citizen’s relationship with the government.
To justify all of this, Americans are routinely presented the false metaphor that we are at war, and that this war requires sacrifices on our part. But millions of Americans aren’t enduring economic strife, social anxiety, and government-imposed quarantines because modern-day Nazis are looking to enslave humanity. No, we are enduring all of those things as a result of our blanket government policy responses to this pandemic, which apparently require bigger, broader, and more dangerous government policy responses to rectify.
You guys know what I always say: when the Left is winning, America is losing. In a time when government is using panic to expand its reach and power by orders of magnitude, conservative “principles” are old, stale news as the putative Right joins the general stampede to clamber aboard the Big Government bandwagon. All of which means the Left is winning.
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