During America’s first-ever national lockdown, thousands of unelected bureaucrats, as well as federal and state governments, assumed enormous powers not usually accorded them.
They picked and chose which businesses could stay open without much rationale. They sent the infected into rest homes occupied by the weak and vulnerable.
Their rules of prosecuting those who violated social distancing, sheltering in place, mask-wearing, or violent protesting hinged on political grounds. Their spending bills on “infrastructure” and “health care” were excuses to lard up redistributive entitlements.
Conservatives moaned that left-wing agendas were at work beneath the pretenses of saving us from the pandemic. And the giddy Left bragged it was true.
After the 2008 panic and meltdown, Barack Obama promised to “fundamentally transform” the country. Now he is back, weighing in on the panic-driven, massive multitrillion-dollar spending that has pushed America’s debt to nearly $30 trillion:
“There’s a teachable moment about maybe this whole deficit hawk thing of the federal government,” Obama pontificated. “Just being nervous about our debt 30 years from now, while millions of people are suffering—maybe that’s not a smart way to think about our economics.”
Translate Obama’s incoherence into English: He means that borrowing tons of money in a pandemic and not worrying too much about paying it back is a new, better way of economics
California Governor Gavin Newsom on April 20, 2020, boasted similarly about leveraging his own statewide quarantine. “There is opportunity for reimagining a progressive era as it pertains to capitalism, a new progressive era and opportunity for additional progressive steps,” Newsom babbled. “So yes, absolutely, we see this as an opportunity to reshape the way we do business and how we govern.”
Newsom himself resonated what Hillary Clinton gushed at about the same time of the then two-month-old pandemic:
“That this would be a terrible crisis to waste as the old saying goes. We’ve learned a lot about what our absolute frailties are in our country when it comes to health justice and economic justice.”
Hillary’s “old saying” was actually a recycled quote from old Clintonite Rahm Emanuel who was Obama’s chief of staff. He too bragged of the 2008 panic that would empower the Obama transformation project: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”
Three, behind the fancy slogans like not wasting crises, “teachable moments,” and “resets” is the panic porn reality that these initiatives are not popular in normal times because they are mostly absurd and defy common sense.
If Americans tried Obama’s new economics with their own family budgets they would either go broke or go to jail—after piling up tens of thousands of unpaid debts. Only elites, with security guards and the money and influence to keep safe, talk of resetting or defunding the police. Few of the woke who fly their carbon-spewing jets into Davos ever fly economy class. Fewer have Obamacare health plans. None live near an open border.
Four, our rich revolutionaries have no record of policy success. So far, the left-wing reset of open borders, massive borrowing, increasing government powers of coercion, restrictions on personal freedom, higher taxes, and more regulations don’t appeal to Americans. Brexit and pushbacks against the European Union suggest the same is becoming true abroad.
Most of our familiar reset left-wingers—the Clintons, Newsom, and Obama—long ago became multimillionaires by monetizing their political careers through lucrative insider networking.
Yet a cynic might conclude they didn’t go full reset until as good capitalists they first got filthy rich—allowing them not to live like, think like—or listen to—the rest of us.
Three, behind the fancy slogans like not wasting crises, “teachable moments,” and “resets” is the panic porn reality that these initiatives are not popular in normal times because they are mostly absurd and defy common sense.
If Americans tried Obama’s new economics with their own family budgets they would either go broke or go to jail—after piling up tens of thousands of unpaid debts. Only elites, with security guards and the money and influence to keep safe, talk of resetting or defunding the police. Few of the woke who fly their carbon-spewing jets into Davos ever fly economy class. Fewer have Obamacare health plans. None live near an open border.
Four, our rich revolutionaries have no record of policy success. So far, the left-wing reset of open borders, massive borrowing, increasing government powers of coercion, restrictions on personal freedom, higher taxes, and more regulations don’t appeal to Americans. Brexit and pushbacks against the European Union suggest the same is becoming true abroad.
Most of our familiar reset left-wingers—the Clintons, Newsom, and Obama—long ago became multimillionaires by monetizing their political careers through lucrative insider networking.
Yet a cynic might conclude they didn’t go full reset until as good capitalists they first got filthy rich—allowing them not to live like, think like—or listen to—the rest of us.