Smart people—the ones who haven’t completely lost their heads over the Chinese coronavirus—have been asking why the world’s greatest economy is willingly committing economic suicide in real-time. And yet eight weeks later, here we are. We’ve put ourselves into this situation by accepting garbage data and assumptions from a papered idiocracy of “experts.” And by papered idiocracy I mean those with pieces of paper from this or that indoctrination center of higher learning that stopped teaching people how to question and think rationally decades ago.
Across the country, amidst conflicting information and the mainstream media’s created hysteria for the purpose of placing a massive political albatross around President Trump, we accepted these peoples’ “facts” and “statistics” without question. In fact, we should have been questioning the entire premise that listening to any of them is obligatory.
We just saw jobless claims climb to over 30 million with real unemployment probably already at 20 percent. For perspective on that number consider that we did not pass 10 percent unemployment during the Great Depression until we were two years into it, when it eventually reached 15 percent in 1931. We blew past that number in the first six weeks of this economic takedown.
But the other numbers surrounding this economic disaster are even more staggering. We—meaning the government—have already spent $6 trillion on all of this. If you throw in the potential GDP decline of 8 percent, off a GDP of $22 trillion, then tack on another $1.8 trillion or so in losses, that drives the cost to $7.8 trillion.
For a more human perspective on what that looks like that’s an additional debt of over $60,000 per household.
But let’s break it down by coronavirus cases and deaths. Even if you accept the numbers being reported—which to be clear, I do not, as the real case number is much higher and the number of real deaths from coronavirus is much lower—there are roughly 1.1 million cases in the United States and it has cost us over $7 million per case. With 72,133 fatalities (again, a questionable figure), that cost would come out to more than $107 million per death.
That’s right, kids. The real cost per death is over one hundred million dollars.
Are we insane? Have we completely lost our minds? People act like great nations never fall, that somehow, in defiance of history, they exist in perpetuity. If you believe that, I have Greek, Holy Roman, Aztec, Hapsburg, and British Empire souvenirs to sell you.
Either we believe in natural rights, consent of the governed, and in having a healthy dose of skepticism about most of everything the media and many of the political leaders spin at us or we don’t.
Centuries of history tell us nations end all the time. And while some nations fall to outside forces despite their best intentions, many nations decay from within, from moral decay and economic chaos, crumbling in the face of outside pressure when it eventually comes.
As the economy craters in the face of the devastation of so many failed “expert” models, we now find ourselves blithely watching big government and big tech take even more invasive steps to destroy privacy while they censor the information that doesn’t meet their approval. Many of the “wartime” conservatives were part and parcel to this, simpering and whining that “If it saves lives, if it protects the most vulnerable, we must accept this.” And they shouldn’t act like they weren’t part of this: they gave the statists and the Left the weapon they needed by hyping the virus.
It’s hard to not choke on the incoherent inconsistent gibberish some of them are spouting on Twitter and other outlets, but the silver lining in situations like this reveals who we are as a people and what we actually believe. Actions authenticate beliefs; you can say you believe something, but do you live those beliefs out? Let’s just say that, in action, the authentic ranks of true wartime conservatives are much smaller than originally thought.
Let’s be clear: 7,000 to 8,000 Americans die from something every day. That number has increased due to the Chi-Com COVID. Nevertheless, on average, more than 200,000 Americans die every month, year after year.
We are a society where a minority of ghoulish policymakers have allowed hundreds of thousands of abortions to occur every year. For more than 50 years, Democrats, liberals, leftists, progressives—whatever you want to call them have—purposely sought to dull our senses about our culture of death and dying, to push Malthusian and climate change claptrap to get societies to a point where they were happy to allow people to die to reduce the “carbon footprint” and cull the number of stomachs to feed.
Now these same people are saying and expecting us to believe they think “every life is precious”? Are you serious? The hypocrisy is staggering, so I’m sorry if I’m just a little skeptical. It’s time to end this before their real agenda, the destruction of the American economy, is achieved.
This stress test of the Chinese coronavirus has shown us many weaknesses, from our manufacturing capacities to our immigration politics to our inept bureaucrats to the confused conservative movement to who we have become as an American people. Either we believe in natural rights, consent of the governed, and in having a healthy dose of skepticism about most of everything the media and many of the political leaders spin at us or we don’t.
We are going to find out a lot about how authentic our beliefs are with us this year: we are either going to slink and slouch towards statism or are we going to “stand athwart history yelling, Stop!”