Tweet [1]
Given that the priority of policy-makers should be dead-set on reopening our economy and overseeing a rapid recovery from the pandemic, you might be naïve in thinking that much of the $908 billion was prioritized for COVID-19 mitigation and the rollout of vaccines. You would be wrong. In fact, 94.4 percent of “COVID relief” spending has nothing to do with pandemic mitigation, vaccine distribution, or vaccine procurement. Clearly, the priority of policymakers is elsewhere.
George Will is among those who are disgusted with Washington’s fiscal incontinence [3].
And Eric Boehm adds his clear voice to those who decry today’s fiscal incontinence [4].
Thank capitalism and commercialization for saving Christmas [6]. A slice:
“As soon as Santa Claus entered the picture,” says Prof. Nissenbaum, “people had to go shopping.” Santa Claus [7]was part of a broader movement to domesticate the holiday by creating a warm, comforting family event centered around giving gifts to children. Mayors, merchants and the middle class all wanted to get the violent Christmastime gangs off the streets.
“There’s a general taming of the holiday that goes on throughout the 19th century,” says Penne Restad, author of “Christmas in America” and a retired historian at the University of Texas, Austin. The mass marketing of Christmas gifts, she says, was “a way of creating boundaries.”
As the holiday became about giving gifts to family and friends, rather than about seizing food and drink from strangers, the seasonal street gangs faded away. The rise of department stores in the mid-19th century enabled even the poor to become consumers by giving—and receiving—gifts.
Newspapers, eager to attract advertising, rhapsodized about the virtues of Christmas giving.
Jeffrey Tucker looks back with justified dismay and disgust at 2020’s derangement and tyranny [10]. A slice:
The hubris of the disease planners has been appalling to behold. They could not bring themselves to admit failure. So they kept doubling down. No amount of social and economic carnage seemed to shake them. Cancer screenings and vaccinations collapsed, dentistry services fell 70%, suicide ideation and drug overdoses soared as predicted, the arts fell apart, 100,000 businesses are dead, and even the murder rate reversed its decades-old declining trajectory and shot up. That’s right: when you destroy the basis of civilization, you become uncivilized.
It was a year in which we were all invited to experience the dismantlement of the good and free society in real time and by force of government power. Folly is too weak a term. Calamity and catastrophe – these terms are more suitable. And yet it was all caused by the institution that so many for so long claimed was a machinery of compassion, justice, equality, fairness, and high regard for human dignity, the essential bulwark that keeps civilization afloat. These values were tossed out this year. And let’s eschew the passive voice here and speak more pointedly: governments tossed them out.