The Benevolent With The Guillotine
“Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends.” -Isabel Paterson
As Fed chairman Jerome Powell pointed out this morning people are staying home for the “Public Good”. But when is helping, harming? We all want to help each other, be the hero, and save a life. Humans are like that. However, Isabel Paterson was correct. Good intentions often cause harm and we are seeing it more than ever these last few weeks.
As of this morning, the Department of Labor reported 3.28 million unemployment claims.
Not only is this data from a week ago, but it also doesn’t factor in:
* People who don’t qualify
* People still trying to apply
*People who do qualify but think they don’t
Those numbers are about to get a whole lot worse and people will be clambering to the government for more safety, to the very people who caused them to lose their job in the first place.
Our overlords can’t save us, as Isabel Paterson pointed out:
“The government is thus supposed to be empowered to give ‘security’ to the needy. It cannot. What it does is to seize the provision made by private persons for their own security, thus depriving everyone of every hope or chance of security. It can do nothing else, if it acts at all. Those who do not understand the nature of the action are like savages who might cut down a tree to get the fruit; they do not think over time and space, as civilized men must think.”
Not only can the overlords not save us, but any time a crisis happens the government's love of power grows. As Jim Fedako so eloquently put it
“The virus has unleashed petite tyrants to haunt their tiny jurisdictions, using the cover of crisis to arrogate powers belonging to the people.”
Robert Higgs had a great theory for this, he called it “The Ratchet Effect.”
The theory is that after a crisis has passed state power goes back to ‘normal’ but often doesn’t return to the “old normal” but instead a “new normal” with government retaining additional powers. Thus each ‘emergency’ allows the government’s reach to grow more powerful and tyrannical with each new crisis.
Not only are we losing freedoms, but millions are also facing starvation and wondering how they will pay for their medication next month and we are goose-stepping to the beat as Jeff Deist noted:
“Crises simply provide an opportunity to ratchet up their (government) power and also to accustom the public to being ordered around and taking cues from centralized government sources.”
How many more will suffer not because of the virus but because of the government’s cure for the virus? When will a “good citizen” wake up to the realization that saving a few may ultimately hurt more people?
Our benevolent government says that they wish to keep us “safe,” as they march each of us to the recession guillotine. As Isabel Paterson put it:
“The philanthropist, the politician, and the pimp are inevitably found in alliance because they have the same motives, they seek the same ends, to exist for, through, and by others. And the good people cannot be exonerated for supporting them. Neither can it be believed that the good people are wholly unaware of what actually happens. But when the good people do know, as they certainly do, that three million persons (at the least estimate) were starved to death in one year by the methods they approve, why do they still fraternize with the murderers and support the measures? Because they have been told that the lingering death of the three millions might ultimately benefit a greater number. The argument applies equally well to cannibalism.”
Politicians are deciding right now who lives and who dies. Politicians are deciding who works and who doesn’t. Politicians are creating massive debt for your children and grandchildren. Politicians’ response is worse than the virus. Let people go back to work if they wish. It won’t save the economy, but it will help those who need help now, not when the government decides to “help.” Otherwise, we might as well build the guillotine ourselves.
