… is from page 14 of Robert Higgs’s 2007 book, Neither Liberty Nor Safety:
At every point, opportunists latch onto existing fears and strive to invent new ones to feather their own nests. Thus, public-school teachers and administrators agree that the nation faces an “education crisis.” Police departments and temperance crusaders insist that the nation faces a generalized “drug crisis” or at times a specific drug crisis, such as “an epidemic of crack cocaine use.” Public-health interests foster fears of “epidemics” that in reality consist not of the spread of contagious pathogens, but of the lack of personal control and self-responsibility, such as the “epidemic of obesity” or the “epidemic of juvenile homicides.”
DBx: Indeed. And so imagine the extra relish with which public-health authorities and crusaders greeted the arrival on the scene in early 2020 of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. There’s nothing like widespread fear that enables government officials to seize power over the populace. And an unusually large portion of individuals who seek out and keep government power disproportionately have a savior complex; they thrill to lording it over the hapless masses who, obviously, yearn to be saved by their betters. And so you can bet that, however genuine or conjured-up is the danger du jour, government officials will exaggerate it and abuse the power that they thereby accumulate.
