During the coronavirus hoax and the George Floyd riots, most people kept their comments and criticisms to private conversations and internet postings. They didn’t respond to forced lockdowns or violence in the streets with violence of their own, although many of them have the ability and capacity to do so. Their restraint has been the primary force keeping whatever remains of the peace in this country.
The restraint stems from respect for that peace, their stake in maintaining it, and a fading hope that things will eventually get back to normal. People who run businesses, have jobs, own property, and are engaged in honest production have a vested interest in civil order. Only reluctantly will they overtly oppose unjust and idiotic government measures or rampaging rioters. Keeping their cold rage on ice, the vast majority will be moved to action only when they feel they have no other choice.
That day is coming. Consider the philosophical obscenity of governments renouncing their only justified reasons for existence—protecting individual rights, particularly the foundational rights of security for people and property. The Minneapolis city council voted to disband its police force and other jurisdictions are considering defunding theirs. Minneapolis and Seattle abandoned police stations to mobs. No word yet if criminals are going to swear off crime and embark on productive pursuits, or where they’ll find such pursuits with 30 plus million unemployed. The only certainly is that official appeasement will elicit nothing but what appeasement always elicits—contempt.
The criminals will fill the void as any remaining police retreat from law enforcement that might subject them to personal danger as well as official recrimination and punishment. As slums and ghettoes become “no-go” areas akin to Islamic “no-go” districts in Europe, the criminals and their gangs will thrive while the innocent will suffer, forced to either leave or cower in place. Eventually entire cities will be “no-go.”
The government officials pushing to eliminate or defund police are slitting their own throats. The praetorians of any government—the police and military—are always just as corrupt as the government of which they are a part. However, the de facto first duty of the praetorians is to protect the government itself, and that becomes more paramount as the government becomes more corrupt. Appeasing violence by renouncing one’s defenses against it guarantees more violence and the eventual elimination of the renouncers, i.e.useful idiots.
It’s already happening in once great cities that have been governed by statist stooges for decades. Their governments are crumbling and the cities are dissolving into chaotic hellholes before their eyes, if they’d open them up and look. Many cities are already shunned by anyone seeking freedom and its fruits: individual rights, honest production, voluntary interaction, wealth, security, and peace.
City and state governments and the federal government are flat broke and technically bankrupt. Coronavirus totalitarianism and the George Floyd riots have destroyed businesses, jobs, and property values—the tax base—while at the same time increasing the demand for support payments, social services, and public safety. Governments are presently running deficits and their future medical and pension liabilities are far greater than their means to pay them.
Insolvency will be anti-government revolutionaries’ staunchest ally, not requiring them to lift a finger but merely watch as governments spend and borrow themselves into ruin. This will undoubtedly inflict a great deal of misery on the populace, but governments are not their people. The latter will still have productive assets and skills; the former produce nothing.
The coronavirus response, monetary debasement, and George Floyd riots have clearly demonstrated to the honest and the productive that governments offer them less than nothing. For decades they’ve been told they have to put up with governments’ protection racket. Taxes, coerced redistribution, and funny money would keep the rabble at bay and protect whatever governments left them of their businesses, incomes, and wealth. By and large they put up and shut up.
Now governments can’t or won’t protect themselves and officials are taking the knee in hopes they’ll be spared by the marauding horde. We’ll see how that works out. Many of their constituents who still have spines have gone full rooftop Korean—stocking up on guns and ammo to protect the homes and businesses governments won’t. They’ve seen the futility of governments as protection racket, and of putting up and shutting up.
The marauding horde and its rhetorical and political enablers have told a vast swath of the population that their jobs, businesses, safety, and lives do not matter, except as fodder for the horde. Predictably, the horde is setting up its own protection racket: show us the money…or else.
Or perhaps before the collapse of the cities spreads to the rest of the country, before cold rage erupts into hot rage, before the financial and economic system completely fails, and before wars erupt and governments are overthrown, we need to have a conversation about divorce. Here’s a proposal that will never be peaceably implemented, but it’s important to understand why it won’t be.
Anyone who has watched a baby, a kitten, a puppy, or any other animal being born has witnessed the miracle of new life. For humans, those precious moments open the gates to all the amazing potential of the human mind, spirit, and soul. The possibilities on this extraordinary journey called life are endless—to be met with anticipation and realized with joy.
Such is a healthy human spirit. What is the animating spirit of coercion, power, subjugation, and totalitarianism? No truism was ever truer: misery loves company. Those who privately bear their suffering out of strength of spirit and quiet consideration for the rest of us deserve a salute. Miserable, malignant souls have no strength of spirit or consideration for others. They exercise power for power’s sake, their cancer feeding on submission and domination.
A strong human spirit recoils in instinctive loathing at ritual exactions like wearing a mask or taking a knee. At least 90 percent of the masks worn are ineffective, and 100 percent adversely affect wearers, who are rebreathing their own respiratory waste and affirming mindless group-think.
Such power always insists, at the point of a gun if necessary, on complete submission in thought, word, and deed. Those scheming for control of CHOP, a city, a state, the United States, or the entire world are overjoyed that millions submit to Covid-19 tyranny and that government officials, corporate executives, celebrities, and other “important” people genuflect to orchestrated violence.
Does anyone think all this taking of knees would have happened if there had been peaceful protests but no riots? The lesson our would-be rulers, or more correctly, our would-be dictators, will take from this: fear works on both the masses and the elite.
The translation of “laissez faire” is “let go.” Unfortunately for those of us who want the freedom to live our lives as we see fit, malignant souls don’t let go and won’t allow us to live in freedom, pursuing our own happiness. Even a laissez-faire district the size of CHOP wouldn’t receive the tolerance that collectivist CHOP has so far. The police or troops would clear it out as quickly as they could.
The point of coronavirus totalitarianism and orchestrated riots is surrender, humiliation, and submission, not for the sake of health or justice, but for the sake of surrender, humiliation, and submission.
The choice for each of us couldn’t be clearer: resist or submit.
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