James Bovard unmasks problems with the new mask mandate imposed on visitors to U.S. National Parks. A slice:
Captain Sara Newman, NPS director of Office of Public Health declared, “Getting outside and enjoying our public lands is essential to improving mental and physical health, but we all need to work together to recreate responsibly.” But the latest mask rule will empower legions of zealots to accost, harass, and possibly assault people for failing to obey the latest Pandemic Security Theater mandate.
Jonathan Sumption is understandably worried about the consequences of Covid Derangement Syndrome. Two slices:
Despite the optimism created by the vaccines, powerful voices are still exploiting public fears to keep us locked up for longer and impose distancing rules indefinitely in pursuit of the mirage of zero Covid.
There is concern that medical scientists are moving the goalposts, changing their objectives in a way that would keep us locked up for longer, perhaps indefinitely.
Those of us who point to the staggering collateral cost of such policies are drowned out by outbursts of emotion and abuse from people who behave as if nothing matters except reducing the Covid death toll.
As a society, we have been urged to suppress the most basic instinct of the human spirit – our interaction with each other. In the process, we turned a public health crisis into something much worse: a public health crisis AND an economic, social and educational crisis.
Our economy is being laid waste, with small businesses snuffed out and job prospects destroyed for a generation of young people. Yet no society ever reduced deaths by making itself poorer.
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Panic is infectious. This is the root of most of our current problems. What’s more, as this was not in line with long-standing policy, there was no contingency planning or impact assessment. The Government had no idea of the economic, social or educational consequences, or its impact on mental health or diseases such as cancer.
Generally, it is a sound principle of government not to make drastic decisions without knowing where they might lead. But our Government crashed into the lockdown seemingly blind to everything but the headline Covid death toll.
The most serious consequence has been to make it impossible to concentrate containment measures on the old and clinically vulnerable.
Toby Young replies again to Christopher Snowdon.
Jeffrey Tucker decries the destruction of capital caused by lockdowns. A slice:
In the normal course of economic life, capital structures are constantly adapting to changed conditions. Changes in available technology, consumer demand, labor pools, and other conditions require entrepreneurs to stay constantly on the move. They need the freedom to act based on the expectation that their decisions matter within a market framework in which there is a test for success or failure. Without this ability, writes Ludwig Lachmann, “a civilized economy could not survive at all.”
When governments attack capital by making it less secure, denying its own volition over how it is deployed, or it comes to be depleted through some other shock like a natural disaster, capital cannot do the work of creating wealth. This is a major reason for poverty. Start a business, make some money, employ some people, and a powerful person or agency comes along and steals it all. People get demoralized and give up. Society can’t progress under such conditions. Take it far enough and people end up living hand to mouth.
Lockdowns seem focused on expenditures and consumption but fundamentally they attack capital. The restaurant, the theater, the stadium, the school, the means of transport, all are forced into idleness. They cannot return a profit to the owners. It’s a form of theft. All that you have done to save and work and invest is voided.
A German journalist describes the mainstream-media bubble. A slice:
Our newsroom also adopted all these counting methods with a sleepwalking naturalness. Everything that was communicated by the health authorities, the district administration and the regional government was adopted and reported without questioning and without doubt. Almost all critical distance disappeared, and the authorities became supposed allies in the fight against the virus.
I have to point out, however, that I have never been called or written to directly by politicians to influence me in any way. There were only the usual press releases from the ministries and offices, which are of course written from their point of view. Nor have I been pressured by superiors, at least not directly. The whole thing is far more subtle, as will be shown.
March was the start of the first restrictions: major events were banned and soon after the first lockdown was imposed. Almost all journalists of the “mainstream”, so the so-called “leading media”, including my editorial team, seemed to immediately develop an ‘inhibition to bite’ towards politicians and the authorities. Why this uncritical reluctance among journalists?
I can only explain it to myself that particularly the pictures from Bergamo and New York also put the experienced editors and reporters into an emotional state of shock, even if they might not admit it. But they, too, are only people who are afraid of illness and death, or who worry about elderly or sick relatives; this was repeatedly an issue in conversations with colleagues. They rallied around the government, the RKI (Robert-Koch-Institute; the German equivalent of the CDC; S.R.) and the health authorities, as if one really had to stick together now to combat this dire, external threat.
You couldn’t throw a club between the legs of those in charge, who were having a difficult time already, by fundamentally questioning their measures – that was how the attitude seemed to me.
In our conversations, too, it was said more and more frequently that “the government is really doing a good job”. Most were firmly convinced that the lockdown and the restrictions of our fundamental rights were necessary and certainly only temporary. I heard only a few skeptical voices.
