If some free person can figure out a better (cheaper, faster, safer, more reliable, more efficient, more comfortable, more beautiful) way to get from location X to location Y, that is good. If some free person can devise an amusement that is more fun, more relaxing, more healthful, more restorative and helps one work better, that is good. If one can freely cook tastier food and provide it to people more efficiently than their own kitchen efforts, so that they have more time and energy to devote to tasks they wish to engage in, that is good. All of this and far more happens in free markets, and it’s all to the good. Freedom and free markets are the essential condition for these good things to happen. And they are all morally right.
What is not good and what is morally wrong is the suppression of all of this free activity. It reduces trade. It reduces well-being. It ends progress. It literally kills people. This suppression is called LOCKDOWN. A lockdown is the very opposite of free markets. It destroys all that is good.
Every step that’s taken by a business to raise its profits by finding better ways to serve customers is crushed when lockdowns single out that business. Moderate and small-sized businesses, self-employed people, restaurants, entertainnment venues, travel businesses, bars, and many other businesses that autonomously improve lives have been crushed by lockdowns. Indirectly, millions of people have been adversely harmed by lockdowns. Free markets improve lives. Lockdowns destroy lives.
Lockdowns have been a disaster for the lives of millions of people, and even a primitive understanding of social and economic structures of society would have warned against lockdowns. Such an understanding was not brought to bear at all. Instead, we were exposed to headlines like this in March of this year: “Experts Say The U.S. Needs A National Shutdown ASAP”. Even in August, a Federal Reserve official advocated a new shutdown: “Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari is advocating a full economic shutdown for up to six weeks to halt the Covid-19 spread.”
The country’s information system, its knowledge system, and its national decision-making system are all in an alarmingly bad way when the experts who have the power and who make headlines so drastically misunderstand a situation.
Joe Biden is one of these people. He is seeking power and he is suggesting all the wrong things.
Can a moral case be made that lockdowns save lives? Not at all. A case can be made to quarantine a person known to be a threat to others because of a bad contagious disease. A lockdown is not a quarantine. It is a veto of any and all activity, regardless of the risk or the threat. It is an indiscriminate use of force. It is like locking everyone up in their homes because there’s a robber on the loose and the robber might rob you if you go about your business. The moral way is to handle the risk of robbery and the hunt for the robber without locking everyone up. Ask if it’s moral for you to lock your neighbor up so that you can patrol the streets looking for the robber. Obviously, you have no such right, and you would have right on your side if the shoe were on the other foot and your neighbor locked you up. Therefore, the government can have no such right to lock you and your neighbors up, because it acts as the agent of each of you, and it cannot morally do what it is not morally right for you or your neighbor to do.
Joe Biden wants a mask mandate. It follows that he also wants lockdowns. He has said this openly in August. He said “I would shut it down; I would listen to the scientists.” One may as well elect Fauci.
A Biden lockdown would be another and worse disaster. It would lead to government taking complete control over the society and economy, and this would be done in conjunction with regimentation and price controls handled by a big business/government combine. A Biden lockdown leads directly to fascism under the Democratic party. A high degree of control over money, industry, education and work is exactly what Democratic leaders want, and this is why they are accurately to be seen as totalitarians. They cannot put their programs into operation without totalitarian measures that replace free markets by detailed and widespread regimentation. A new nationwide lockdown is a means by which to gain such total political, legal, social and industrial control.
Biden has told us that the virus will be his lever to bury the free market under total control: “I will be prepared to do whatever it takes to save lives because we cannot get the country moving until we control the virus.”
“That is the fundamental flaw of this administration’s thinking to begin with. In order to keep the country running and moving and the economy growing, and people employed, you have to fix the virus, you have to deal with the virus.”
Biden’s rationale is wrong. “Whatever it takes” is dictator talk. It is not constitutional talk. “Whatever it takes” is immoral talk. The ends do not justify the means. He’s wrong to say that the country can’t move ahead “until we control the virus”. That’s absurd. Trying to control the last jot and tiddle of the virus is an insane criterion, morally and in utilitarian terms. Biden’s thought here is extremely far from what a sensible leader in the White House should be thinking.
The truth is more nearly the opposite. Restore free markets and people will deal with the virus. They will fix it. Already, companies are finding ways to do business in a contactless mode or a mode that minimizes contacts. If the government were to get out of the vaccine and testing business, we could expect very rapid innovations to hit the market. Restore free markets in education and media and a more accurate knowledge of the virus will result. Repair of our information and knowledge systems is essential.
Biden has told us his rationale in advance, but what he hasn’t told the American public in advance is that “to fix the virus” means general LOCKDOWN, and that LOCKDOWN means a totalitarian revolution, a top to bottom revolution. And this means implementing the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, tax increases, a revolution in corporate control and the rest of the Democratic agenda.
Biden means to make slaves of everyone. If he doesn’t do it, Harris will, in conjunction with Democrats in Congress. This is what we face at the prospect of a Biden-Harris victory and sweep of Congress.
The totalitarian drive has also surfaced in the form of people like Fauci, WHO, Big Pharma, many Hollywood celebrities, leftist media figures, big social media and big information tech leaders, global magnates like Soros and Gates, and in the UN, as seen in figures like secretary-general António Guterres who keeps hammering away on international government. The “virus” for them all is their friend and accomplice in moving forward their agenda. None of them in the least wants free markets and free market solutions to want and disease.
5:38 pm on October 3, 2020
