LF: Do As We Say Not As We Do

As axiomatic with government – that is to say, the people with titles and badges and guns who are “the government” – there is an interesting double standard with regard to the Corona’ing of life in what was, just two weeks ago, still more or less America.

We are ordered to shutter our businesses; to not gather in groups of ten or more. Are ordered – at gunpoint – to accept house arrest, styled “shelter in place” – because that enables people to avoid facing up to what they’re really being ordered to accept.

But what about them?

Are the people with titles and badges and guns who are issuing and enforcing these orders following them?

Are they “sheltering in place”? Shuttering their “business” (in quotes to emphasize the absurdity).

Of course not.

Just as armed government workers threaten people with murderous violence for “speeding” and failing to “buckle up for safety” do not themselves obey speed limits or laws requiring us to “buckle up.”

And no worries about their jobs, eh?

Because government never closes and unemployment is no worry when you have the legal power to force other people to pay you no matter what. When the rent never comes due, because you live in a house paid for by other people – who have no choice about paying you.

This at the very least generates an empathy gap between us and them. They will of course warble that they “care” – recall The Chimp’s progenitor, for instance. But this is at best a theoretical construct, in the manner of a person riding in the back of a limo seeing a shivering homeless person, rolling down the window and passing them $5.

They have no personal skin in the game.

At worst, it breeds a careless effrontery that enables them to simply play with people’s lives – and to destroy them, as they are doing right now.

These closures and “shelter in place” orders are likely going to end up killing more people than the worst things that have ever happened in America, none of which have anything to do with getting sick for a week or two.

Millions of unemployed people will mean millions of people without food – which will mean social chaos, food riots, looting and (inevitably) martial law. Millions of people are going to lose their homes, which they will no longer be able to pay for – including the endless property tax payments the government makes them pay, so as to keep the government’s pockets nicely full. Many people will not be able to heat their homes next winter, things like electricity and gas and propane not being provided for free.

This idea that the government will simply pay for it all and no worries is a product of wishful and infantile thinking. It is based on the idea that the government – those people with titles and badges and guns – can simply generate wealth at their whim when in fact all they can do is transfer and undermine it.

The first method is obvious enough. Take from A and “give” to B and claim credit for the “giving,” which the people with titles and badges and guns didn’t.

But the second method is much more clever and insidious. It is to confect money – which is a very different thing than to generate wealth, something that requires productive effort, the creation of a product or service people are willing to exchange their productive effort to purchase.

It is easy to confect money when you can simply print it. Or add a few zeros to a digital balance sheet, presto!

The problem, of course, is that as the money increases the value of money decreases, because money generated has no value as such. The government sends Americans who haven’t got any $1,000. Why not make it $100,000?

Wouldn’t that salve the problem?

It will actually make the problem very much worse as the money sent becomes less useful for obtaining anything of value – until its only remaining value is its value as paper. Perhaps in lieu of toilet paper, once people run out of that.

Meanwhile, the people with titles and badges and – most of all – guns – will not miss a meal or even be turning down their thermostats. At the height of the famine engineered by Stalin and his Bolshevik thugs in the 1930s, Stalin and his Bolshevik thugs put on weight. They toured around in armored Packard limos, well-protected by heavily armed men. The Soviet proletariat had no arms – no Packards – and often, nothing to eat, either.

The famine was engineered – as this panic is appears to have been. It is certainly being exploited – with the end result being the same.

If you have just lost your job or are about to; if you see the life’s work of your small business being flushed down the Corona Fever toilet – take a moment to consider the people with titles and badges and guns, who won’t be hurting the least little bit as your life falls apart around you – on the orders of the people with titles and badges and guns.

. . .

Got a question about cars, Libertarian politics – or anything else? Click on the “ask Eric” link and send ’em in!

So, here you go again, displaying your epidemic overuse and misuse of one of your verbal tics – the word: “apparently.”

Consequently, your use of the predicate “apparently” has the interpretation that it is a positive implication that's all that you know – and you take no responsibility for the actual truth.

You constantly let this tic find its way into your posts. Since good writing should always be clear and precise – you need to develop a rich vocabulary whereby you don’t have to rely on this cliché.

Some of the overused tic words are simply that — overused. While others are used completely incorrectly. You have incorrectly used the word “apparently” once again by making a grossly false assumption.

You really need to banish the word “apparently” – which you continually use as an expression – from your any and all posts and you’ll become a stronger writer.

Besides – and most importantly – the word “apparently” denotes uncertainty.