LF: Reopen... and Reject

People who own small businesses put up with government edicts pre-Corona because on the whole it was worth it.

They complied with the onerous regulations.

They paid the taxes, including the taxes styled “business licenses” – i.e., the extortion called by a more benign-sounding euphemism, to make it go down easier.

But it amounts to the same thing. A worse thing, actually – because it is done by the entity that is supposed to protect honest people from being shaken down. Which means there’s no protection from being shaken down.

The owner of a gym or restaurant or hair salon is told they must pay out a large sum of money in order to avoid being shut down by goons with guns. How this differs from what Don Corleone does is a hard thing to discern. Except for the difference that the government’s shakedown is “legal” – and euphemized.

The Don is a more honest man.

At any rate, they pay it – because having paid it, they were allowed to open their doors. That’s the deal, right?

It was worth paying the extortion – and complying with all the rigamarole – because people could come through those doors. Which made it possible to do enough business to pay the extortion and keep the doors open. There was positive cashflow. The business could afford the extortionist and their employees. Pay the rent; pay suppliers.

And pay themselves.

On the whole, it was better than not bothering to get out of bed.

Now the extortionist has closed their doors anyhow – even though they paid to be allowed to open them. So why bother getting out of bed?

Better yet, why bother paying for the “license”?

Why put up with any of it?

The “inspectors” looking for “violations” – not of anyone’s rights but of “codes”? The arbitrary – usually expensive – decrees regarding how the business may (italicized to emphasize the despicability) do business? The obnoxious interferences with free association (e.g., the freedom to go through the doors of a bar that allows smoking – and be just as free to go down the street to a bar where it is not allowed)?

Why not ignore all of it?

Why not just do business? Offer what you’ve got to sell – and if people are willing to buy it, sell it to them. No one’s being coerced. No one’s being hurt.

Everyone is free to come – and go.

Imagine that!

What are they going to do? Close you down?

Well, they already have – which is something not even Don Corleone does . . . so long as you pay up. The Don doesn’t close you down after you pay up. And the Don doesn’t tell you how you’ll run your business.

Only the Dons of government exude that kind of effrontery.

The Don only wants to squeeze you – not close you – because it’s contrary to his interests for you to go out of business.

The Dons of government, on the other hand, have a different agenda. They want small businesses out of business.

In order to squeeze out independence. Options, end runs. The ability to economically exist with a degree of latitude.

Everything must be the same – and under the same control.

Understand this and you will understand why the Dons who are the government have begun allowing (italicized to emphasize the toxicity) small businesses to partially re-open. Heavily conditional. At half or less capacity. In other words, a mandatory 50 percent reduction of their business – but without a 50 percent reduction of the cost of the extortion.

So why pay it? Why obey any of it? The “deal: is no longer worth it.

What are they going to do? Close you down?

Got news for you, amigo. But maybe you’ve already noticed. The objective of this exercise – one of them, at any rate – is not to squeeze small businesses but to close them, permanently. For the sake of big business, which is the same thing as for the sake of government, whose Dons are really puppets.

The corporations, the big box retailers and other such that haven’t been shut down – did you notice?. They don’t want the competition from small business.

Not so much for customers as for workers.

They want workers to not have options. For everyone (including the former small business owner) to work for – and so be owned by – the corporations. Which ownership will be manifested – as ownership always is – in the form of control.

Do as we tell you – or no paycheck for you. Hell, no shopping for you. No existence for you.

Corporate workers keep their heads down and do as they know they must – without even having to be told. “Reporters” who work for corporate media, for instance, know they must not raise or even hint at certain questions as doing so will cost them their jobs.

And so they do not raise them.

Questions like: Why is a Corona virus with a fatality rate half or less that of the 1968 Hong Kong Corona virus – which didn’t result in any businesses’ doors being forcibly closed by the government – treated as if it had a fatality rate 20 times as high?

Or: How is it that Bill Gates – the software equivalent of the Maytag Man and with just as much competence to prescribe medical treatment – all-of-a-sudden America’s Vaccine Czar? Does he have an interest in forcing people to be vaccinated?

Corporate people also know not to raise their heads.

They know to keep them down.

They submit to Fear Masking even though it is embarrassingly evident that Fear Masking is “theater” – in the words of the sexiest man alive, Dr. Fauci himself. Because if they don’t they haven’t got a job anymore.

This being another form of . . . extortion.

They will submit to being extorted to submit to vaccination and tracking, too – when there is no option to get another (non-corporate) job, the small business jobs having been eliminated, the small business owners cop-opted.

Just as corporate workers already submit to humiliating pee tests to prove they’re not using arbitrarily illegal drugs – or even legal ones, like cigarettes – as a condition of their employment.

Corona is about sickness, all right. It is about making small businesses very ill.

Ideally, fatally.

But there is a cure.

It is to say no. And to open the damn doors. Let as many people who want to do business with them – eat food, shop – come through those doors, without masks and without any conditions.

Small business owners had better come to grips with the reality that if they don’t decide to resume doing business at 100 percent, without conditions, without begging permission, without paying for permission to operate at 50 percent capacity while being forced to pay 100 percent extortion – they will soon be out of business.

Because what are they going to do?

Close them down?

. . .

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Eric Peters should vow to fly only on small, charter planes flown by burned-out, dope-smoking, pothead pilots. Then (If he survives), maybe he'll begin to understand why sensible government regulation prohibits judgement-altering substance consumption for certain critical occupations... It's all about public health & safety, douche..