Let's get real. Americans should prepare for 15 months of fascism, assuming that we get an affordable, safe, effective Wuhan vaccine next year and that riots and grocery store looting are relatively mild in the meantime, which is highly improbable. People are already pissed off and accusing each other of bad behavior, college kids getting stoned and frisky on Florida beaches and crowds of surfers and bikini-clad shielas smiling on Bondi Beach in Oz. Police were dispatched and beaches barricaded on three continents. The Cannes film festival was canceled and Spanish sun worshippers hustled back into mandatory confinement.
No auditor or economist could estimate the wreckage on Wall Street or Main Street. Massive government intervention, trillions injected by the NY Federal Reserve to goose bond market liquidity, a snap embargo on flights to and from Europe, and closure of all Broadway shows, giant strides toward naked fascism. Powerless sheep went bonkers. WalMart was stripped of toilet paper, Disneyland closed, all sports suspended, 90% of domestic flights canceled, Las Vegas and Atlantic City casinos boarded up, tens of thousands of colleges and schools shut, all restaurants and bars emptied, millions of workers laid off. Banks are closing branches and limiting access to drive-up. America has screeched to a halt, because fake experts and fake journalists ran around in circles with their hair on fire, pointing at Italy, where thousands of Chinese textile workers returned from their Chinese New Year visits to Hunan and infected thousands of Italians. The death rate was 8%, all hospitals overwhelmed and military trucks called to carry off hundreds of body bags stacked in a church. The same tragedy unfolded in Iran. Chinese workers spread deadly Hunan infection, untold number of dead. You're next! Millions of Americans will die, according to fake U.N. worst case statistical models.
This might make sense if we had adequate evidence of a medical crisis in America, but we don't. Federal agencies bungled testing. A smattering of deaths were reported, 30 of them in a single nursing home. The Wall Street crash was less a response to the Wuhan virus than the global disaster of oil falling from $70 a barrel to $20, instantly bankrupting U.S. frackers and threatening supermajors like Exxon, BP, Chevron, and Shell. Airlines, hotels, and banks were hammered. Overvalued tech stocks cratered as traders sold positions to cover losses in blue chips. When the Fed cut overnight rates to zero, it signaled catastrophe, shattering investor confidence. NYSE circuit breakers tripped repeatedly, and no one knows how ugly the bottom might be. Martial law? Seems likely in traditionally busy gutzy New York and sunny California after a month of mass lock-down, no different than solitary confinement, forbidden to work or to travel any farther than a grocery store with empty shelves. Goldman Sachs estimated a contraction of -25% GDP in the second quarter, but that was before Cuomo ordered 100% of the NY workforce to go home, bankrupting every small business in the state and crippling big ones like General Electric, Eastman Kodak, and IBM. Sickening if the U.N. mob is deemed an "essential service" exempt from Cuomo's order to do nothing. Will it apply to Black Rock and 30 Rock? Presumably yes. Oh, shit, Connecticut has followed suit, ordering everyone home. Hartford has the largest life and casualty insurance companies in America. And now Illinois! -- John Deere, Sara Lee Kraft, Allstate, the city of Big Shoulders, industrial and commercial hub of transcontinental trade, from meat packing to interstate natural gas distribution.
Holy hell! -- a friend just told me that Boeing is still building planes in Everett, despite total lock-down in Seattle, hundreds of skilled workers jammed together in tight spaces, no air circulation in fuselages and compartments being wired and equipped, no way to wipe down and disinfect complicated surfaces. Fifteen Boeing workers already tested positive.
For an anarchist, the question is how a free society would handle the threat of an epidemic. We might as well ask how libertarians would deal with war or an invasion of impoverished, illiterate caravans from Central America. The short answer is that "sovereign government" failed to halt a multi-decade tidal wave of narcotics, dangerous migrants, urban crime, and endless bloodshed in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Sane people don't applaud incompetent government solutions. It doesn't matter how much borrowed sugar Trump pours on cruise lines, casual dining, biker bars, opera companies, and movies. None of them are productive industries. Funding airlines to transport no one, $1200 tips for furloughed bartenders, and blank checks payable to state and local bureaucrats is fiscally insane and inflationary. Why weaken the U.S. dollar? A trillion here and a trillion there, pretty soon you're talking about worthless Benjamins and wheelbarrows. A rational alternative is staring us right in the face, and it doesn't need a dime of public payola or a single word of emergency guidelines.
Private actors combined in local, regional, and national voluntary enterprises would defend their own interests, not unlike American colonial pioneers. Hostile savages were fenced out and shunned. Invading foreign armies from England and Mexico were fought. Independence was cherished, price no object. In the aftermath of our Civil War, all government Federal and state were bankrupt and easily bribed. The Gilded Age was a long interval of freedom that built cities, factories, railroads, and skyscrapers. Liberty conferred wealth and vast diffusion of knowledge. American ability to understand science and public health was bequeathed by private research, private universities, and competitive medicine that flourished during the Gilded Age when government was weak, stupid, and corrupt.
Nothing has changed except the perfidy of elevating government to supremacy, attributing to it an honorability and superhuman intelligence that it does not possess and never did. We killed two million Vietnamese for what reason? We invaded Iraq for what reason? Democrats want to eliminate internal combustion engines. Name any problem in history or the current state, and then try to justify corrupt boobs like LBJ, Shrub, or Lunch Bucket Joe as national patriarchs with plenary police powers. In 2009, Obama did nothing until 1000 people died in the H1N1 epidemic. Little was achieved by declaring an "emergency," except briefing books by bureaucrats who stumped for Obamacare that regulated and taxed private health care. 12,500 Americans died from H1N1. Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi think that government should spend more and tax more and handcuff private initiatives to deal with the Wuhan virus. Stay home and put on an N95 mask, citizen. Food rations will be delivered by troops in hazmat suits. You will die if you go to work, or school, or church, or visit friends and family. All human interaction must be electronic until further notice. Your smartphone is being monitored to track where you go, who you encounter, and what you text in criticism of 15 million Federal, state, and city bureaucrats who can't be fired, have called in sick, and are cowering at home, fearful of amply deserved torches and pitchforks.
Initially, Trump did the sensible thing. He freed hospitals from regulation, enlisted private labs, Walgreens, WalMart, and Target to accelerate testing. It was clear as centrifuge glass that CDC and NIH couldn't test their way out of a paper jam. Unfortunately, Trump foolishly heeded the hysteria of CDC bureaucrats and declared a national "emergency." Mayors and governors took the bait and abolished civil liberty, echoing the panic and kindergarten logic emanating from bureaucrats. "I don't want anyone to die!" bartender-in-chief Sean Hannity wailed in surrender to wholesale suspension of common law civil rights.
Shit. Next it will be a door to door search for weapons. U.S. sporting goods and farm supply stores are 99% sold out of .223 and 9mm ammo, 99% sold out of handguns, 100% of it legal sales to experienced shooters, many of whom have had tactical training and carry concealed. They will never surrender their weapons, no matter what Congress or CDC says, about 40 million armed white people. If blacks go feral, they'll be cut to ribbons by rednecks.
With or without collapse of civil society, with or without 100,000 deaths from Wuhan virus, let's apply some public health common sense. Over half a million Americans die each year. Tens of thousands are drug overdoses, tens of thousands in car crashes, but most die from cancer, chronic diseases, and various complications of old age. Some succomb to childhood illness or accidental drowning. Construction is one of the most dangerous jobs in America. What kind of dumbshit proclaims "I don't want anyone to die!" when 80% of homicides go unsolved in Detroit, and 50,000 Americans die from ordinary colds and flu every winter?
I know it's tough, that the Wuhan virus will kill people, maybe a lot of them. Private choice matters more than dictatorial edicts. I have no desire to party in a pub, and smart barkeepers will close up. Maybe a lot of shopkeepers will pull the shade down, put a sign in the door, and disappear for a few months. Hopefully, plumbers and electricians won't. With a little extra care and less paperwork, we need big rig drivers to restock grocery stores, and we need grocers to keep their doors open, with cops and doctors and nurses on deck to save as many lives as possible. But personal safety and happiness matter, individual decisions to work overtime or walk away, to go home and wash off the filth and sorrow of duty, to embrace a loved one and rest, no matter how loudly a manager begs or threatens punishment.
Government has no right to our work, play, or spiritual life. We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. When a government becomes destructive of these ends, it is our right, it is our duty to throw off such tyranny.
An interesting idea popped into my mind, laughing at an idiotic Congressman on the radio who sounded like a 22 year old pajama boy. I'd like to open a Manhattan speakeasy, call it the Testing Lab. Plenty of Broadway showgirls and classy waiters out of work. Massive pent-up demand among millionaires and wise guys for nighttime entertainment, say midnight to five. All I need is a silent partner, an NYPD vice captain maybe, and an old brownstone on Huston. Not expensive to put in gaming, a bar, a showroom and stage for torch singers and muzos, no crap hip hop bullshit, Depression-era ballads and 60's show tunes, a couple big bouncers in white tie and lab coats. Screen the members and staff for negative virus test in a first floor Testing Lab office managed by an evil Jane Russell type in thigh high lace-up boots.
Bwahahaha.
I've had some experience running a private nightclub, in Nevada. Charter members were the county Sheriff, a newspaper editor, and the state Speaker of the Assembly. We had poker tables, live music, cute waitresses, a kitchen, and a well stocked bar. I also had eye-opening fun as a guest member at a private nightclub in Philadelphia, operated by Puerto Rican crime bosses, and another private club in Sydney. Interesting things happen in nightclubs. Ooo. I forgot Peter Stringfellow's nightclub in Covent Garden, dinner with Mel Gibson, half naked waitresses in tutus, bouncer at the door, a dignified maitre'd in tux, and a big mirrored disco downstairs. Ah, the Candy Store in Los Angeles, black mafia and NBA stars. The Page Four on Rodeo, hookers and Motown people. Bananarama in Amsterdam (use your imagination).
Ahem. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It doesn't matter which frankenstein drugs government toys with in "compassionate use," or how sympatico the chipmunks on NPR bemoan heroes hiding in cramped Castro flats. Moored hospital boats and converted Fantasy Island cruise ships are going to be prisons, the first 50,000 inmates homeless bums and drug addicts with every imaginable disease except Wuhan. Normal people infected by the new virus will be told to self-quarantine, talk to an unintelligible Nigerian doctor on Skype, and cough quietly on a waiting list with a couple million others, while obese black women jam the ER lobbies bellowing that they's sick and rival gangs paint the streets red in drive-by gun battles, an exceptionally high body count of innocent bystanders waiting six feet apart in front of a Rite-Aid to buy cough drops and generic Cold & Flu pills made in China. Wait and see what happens when jails are emptied to "socially distance" the correctional staff.
Good policy to steer clear of big cities or bug out. Truly awful news bulletin: Sen. Rand Paul has tested positive, the sole libertarian voice in Congress. National Guard deployed in New York, California, and Seattle, Democrat machine pols as amateur military commanders.
Now it'll be unanimous in Sacramento, Albany, Washington, Westminster, and Brussels that central banks have to print money on a truly breathtaking scale, to support industry with no customers, households with no jobs, and the entire continent of Africa which has no testing kits, laboratories, doctors, nurses, gowns, masks, intensive care units, clean water, modern sanitation, or food. Ooops. I forgot the 3 million trapped in Gaza, 20 million Syrian and Libyan refugees, a billion paupers in Venezuela, Haiti, Dominica, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, Bolivia, and Brazil; another billion devout Muslims and Hindus in southeast Asia and Indonesia; and a billion Indians who are accustomed to consulting untrained storefront quack "doctors." The Wuhan pandemic will kill hundreds of thousands in the Third World. It still remains to be revealed how many slave laborers died in Red China.
At the lowest, worst moment of my life, I said it out loud to get me and a heavy crate of tools off the roof of a hotel: "I swear by my life and my love it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine!" That was 20 years ago. I was being paid $35 a climb to risk my life, point a satellite dish at a new bird, so restaurants and banks could listen to Elton John and James Taylor, terrible crap that I despised -- and I despaired of my miserable life, 49 years old with sore feet and an aching back, driving a borrowed pick-up, a penniless wage slave. So I understand hardship and humiliation. Maybe it's different that I was a literate white American. The following year launched me around the world on a U.S. passport that became cluttered with visas and entry and exit stamps on every page, renewed at an overseas U.S. embassy in a country where wage slaves had no legal right to travel.
Most of the world is unfair, downtrodden, brutal, and heartbreakingly sad, the plaything of dictators. Americans and Europeans have done everything in their power to liberate and save every soul. Our farmers doubled world population. Our expat teachers and missionaries and doctors labored to ameliorate ignorance. Our armies and spies fought dictators and funded democrats, asking nothing in return. Sometimes it made it a difference. Arguably, we won the Cold War and freed Eastern Europe, tempted Red China to modernize and trade with us. We were chumped repeatedly -- in Turkey and South Africa and Nigeria, in Iran and Iraq and Afghanistan, in East Africa and Argentina, in Russia, Venezuela, and most of all China.
Now we're faced with global disaster, a consequence of outsourcing and decades of liberal largesse. It comes at a time when the United States and Europe are bankrupt, powerless to save ourselves or billions of primitives we couldn't save in the past with a flood of finance and goodwill and free food and university training of their best and brightest, rescuing and pampering 100 million Third World migrants in America, Germany, Britain, Italy, Belgium, Holland, and France. There is no way to reverse history. A weaponized virus escaped from a Chinese laboratory made possible by Kissinger and Nixon, Bill Clinton and General Motors and Apple. Tens of millions will die. World trade has crashed, starving hundreds of millions, inflicting pain and sorrow equal to war on the poorest and least free in Brazil, Keyna, Egypt, and mainland China, whose apparatchiks lied to us for months and who continue to lie about widening infections and body bags. Wuhan is still on lock-down, a city of 11 million under martial law, forbidden to leave their apartments, nothing to read except state propaganda. Ghastly to see it happen in New York City, in glaring shame and betrayal of Lady Liberty.
It will be difficult to reassert the American Way of liberty and justice, under martial law and unending economic hardship. If you're too old (like I am) to open a speakeasy in Manhattan, your best bet is to escape, if you can, to the self-reliant, sensible, and fiercely independent Heartland, birthplace of Dwight Eisenhower and Abe Lincoln and Thomas Alvah Edison.
A personal item. A smarmy but sincere radio announcer just noted the death of a Hunan virus victim in Cincinnati, said every death was tragic, somebody who was loved by others. That doesn't apply to me. When I die, no one will mourn. It's the price one pays for autonomy, the privilege of living for my own sake. I'd prefer to be remembered for the ideas I discovered, but that's unimportant. My thoughts are simple and should be obvious to everyone.
Live free or die, the New Hampshire state motto.
Finally, I'd like to pass along something that a NYC detective told me. As a young cop, he had to report every morning for a briefing. One day on his way to work, he chased and collared a purse snatcher, brought him in. The sergeant was pissed off about this unexpected delay. "Quit creating crime!" the boss bellowed angrily. Moral of the story? Cops aren't what you think they are. They don't want to stop a car, stolen or otherwise, without back-up, not even for something as trivial as a burned out tail light. That's why you see three or four squad cars attending a fender bender. They are extremely worried about Wuhan viral exposure, being coughed or sneezed on by a suspect or a little old lady asking directions to a deli. Cops are ordinary people. In New York, they have to watch their backs constantly. During Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans police disappeared to look after their families. Three of them were caught looting. When shit comes to holler, cops put on riot gear and stand together tightly, like a football team, shoulder to shoulder, and do as little as possible, a mostly theatrical show of force, not interested in arresting protestors, unless they're attacked. Don't rely on policemen to save you when things fall apart. LAPD let Los Angeles burn during the Rodney King riots. Wilshire Blvd was defended by Korean shop owners firing rifles from rooftops.
Commercial fishing boats loaded with tuna catches have been denied permission to dock in San Diego. Wholesalers have been shuttered, no demand at empty restaurants. Bananas are rotting in Philadelphia warehouses, no schools or company cafeterias open to buy them.
This is far worse than government or media is prepared to admit, not a medical crisis, but a tragedy of pusillanimous politically correct social rot, chickens coming home to roost, trading liberty for fascism, rationality silenced by gender fluidity and infantile cries for safety. Our colonial and frontier American ancestors would be shocked and disgusted.
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