Stop trying to make lockdowns happen again.
The world can't afford it.
The governors of Texas and California, the nation’s two most populous states, recently reimposed coronavirus lockdowns despite falling death rates and health-care capacity far beyond hospitalization rates. Numerous other governors have delayed re-openings or reversed them in similar situations.
Lockdowns are not necessary to prevent coronavirus deaths, since the current capacity for treating cases is far above what is needed and people are going to get this disease until there’s a cure. Further, lockdowns accelerate systemic weaknesses such as our national debt, poor education, large numbers of working-age men who do not work, failure to pay for decades of overspending at both the national and state levels, tendency to bail out corrupt institutions such as schools, big business, and hospitals, and bloated health care system.
The Chinese Communist Party knows of all this. That is why it has expertly manipulated American corporate media’s anti-American biases to undermine their biggest competitor for control of the world.
Lockdowns of Western nations, and chiefly of the United States, are China’s only hope for achieving this long-term plan in its coronavirus-weakened state. Thus, continuing to play into this mass-murdering regime’s hands through cuckolded American leadership will have far more deadly consequences than coronavirus. This is why the lockdowns need to end now, and never come back again.
Keeping a Knee on Our Economy Will Kill Our Country
A July 13 New York Times article says the re-shutdowns are killing the willpower of small business owners to keep their doors open, even after Congress threw $660 billion in deficit spending at them.
“We did everything we were supposed to do,” Texas karaoke club owner Mick Larkin told the Times. “When [Gov. Rick Abbott] shut us down again, and after I put out all that money to meet their rules, I just said, ‘I can’t keep doing this.’”
Estimates say between 66,000 and 110,000 small businesses may already have closed for good during the coronavirus panic.
“Small businesses account for 44 percent of all U.S. economic activity, according to the S.B.A., and closures on such an immense scale could devastate the country’s economic growth,” the Times observes. “…Many small businesses are also finding it onerous keep up with constantly changing local guidelines, while others are deciding that no matter what their local officials say, it just is not safe to keep going.”
There is a hard limit to how much fake economic activity current and future taxpayers can float. We had already reached it before coronavirus hit. A bailout economy will crash irrevocably at some point. No matter how much Congress thinks they can suspend the laws of nature, never-ending economic inflation through accelerating claims on future American earners’ incomes is utterly unsustainable.
Americans cannot afford a Potemkin economy. The first step toward getting to a real economy is to end lockdowns and never impose them again.
We Have No More Equity to Mortgage Our Kids’ Futures
Keeping schools shut down, or only partially opening them, also suffocates our economy by making it difficult for two-income families and single parents to support themselves. It is simply not possible to work full-time and teach children full-time, which is what online schooling requires of working parents.
School shutdowns also hobble American society long-term, as they and online schooling both significantly reduce how much children learn, especially in math. Math competence strongly predicts a nation’s economic future, to the point that one estimate finds if U.S. kids just learned as much math as Canadian kids do, our nation would increase its gross domestic product by $77 trillion over the next 80 years.
It’s therefore quite reasonable to assume that setting kids back in math by a year or two, as continued coronavirus schooling will do (it’s already set them back in math almost a year), will short our economy tens of trillions of dollars — right at the time trillions in unfunded entitlements for Baby Boomers will come due. We simply can’t afford that, and China knows it.
Besides harming our country, shutdowns harm children. There is next to zero risk to children’s health of going back to school, as evidence from myriad first-world countries show. There is a massive risk to kids’ futures of depriving them of a good education. One estimate found keeping U.S. kids’ math knowledge to pre-pandemic levels instead of raising it to Canada’s would deprive them of an estimated 20 percent in additional income for every year of their lives that they work.
Doing what China wants in continued lockdowns will not just hamstring American kids financially, it will bequeath them a far more dangerous world in which an aggressive, mass-murdering regime that deliberately sent a deadly virus abroad grows in power as their nation’s ability to deflect that power decays. In 20 years, America’s kids will not be impressed that we spared grownups some unsubstantiated unease in return for condemning the next generation to a much higher likelihood of poverty, a bankrupted social safety net, and a homeland at the mercy of a bloodthirsty global power.
Media Push U.S. Politicians to Fulfill Communist Plans
In urging lockdowns, therefore, U.S. media has amplified and helped implement Communist goals. The Chinese Communist Party endorsed, promulgated, and lobbied for strict lockdowns with the goal of kneecapping foreign competitors, including the United States. As Michael P. Senger pointed out on Twitter based on a June New York Times article, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) “launched a massive social media campaign in Italy to advertise its coronavirus lockdown measures in early March.”
Democrats spent three years spinning a presidential impeachment out of a few Facebook memes from Russian trolls and bots in 2016. This NYT article and a long ProPublica report provide evidence that the CCP has been using a far bigger propaganda campaign to destroy the United States through economic suicide and destruction of social cohesion. And it’s working.
It is no exaggeration to say that the world’s future depends on the United States acting strategically to counter Chinese propaganda and aims rather than strangling ourselves on lies. Our economy and military sustain the world. China is the number one beneficiary if we choke, and it has been wanting to challenge the United States for dominant global power for decades. They needed another generation or two to be able to get there.
The CCP strategy for achieving that has been promising its citizens political competence and economic advancement in exchange for severe repression that allows for directing the nation’s entire economy into soft and hard global power. Coronavirus strikes at the heart of both these strategies. That’s the CCP’s main leverage over the Chinese (besides terrorizing people). So the only way Xi Jinping staves off losing his head over mismanaging this outbreak is by bringing the world down with him.
The CCP is fighting for its life and its 100-year plan to get us to stay locked down. Keeping freedom alive for the world requires that they don’t win. Key to fighting back is following Sweden and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem’s successful coronavirus management strategies: End government lockdowns, and allow American citizens to act on their own judgments about coronavirus risks.
