The Morning Rant: Minimalist Edition

The Wuhan Flu hysteria gave those who seek power over us a golden opportunity to exercise it, consolidate, grow it...but to what end?

As usual, George Orwell had the answer:

The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power.

Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

But what have we lost? What is the opportunity cost of shutting down an economy; killing many thousands of the vulnerable aged; isolating our children from their friends; wearing masks everywhere in public, and a thousand other degradations of our lives?

The insult to our freedom and liberty is self evident, but there are other losses. We will have a generation of children who have lost more than a year of their intellectual and social development. Just imagine a toddler and his boundless curiosity...absorbing everything available...but not being able to play with his friends at recess and being unable to watch people as they speak, and having an imaginary wall placed between him and human contact. That will retard his ability to communicate, and color his interactions with the world. Is it temporary? Who knows?

And that same toddler and his older siblings missed out on the simple but wonderful pleasures of sitting next to their grandparents and sharing a bit of candy and silly faces and napping on the couch.

But what about those kids' parents? Perhaps a year of income lost, never to be regained. That means a decrease in their standard of living, and economic opportunities that can never be recovered. Extrapolate that a bit and you will discover inventions that were never tested by the market, businesses that were never begun, and businesses that failed that could have been wildly successful.

That means cars never purchased and houses never built and families never started and charities never funded and friends never made and the loss of all those interactions that are the backbone of economies and societies.

But the real answer is that we will never know what has been lost; all we know is that we have lost more than a year of our lives; sacrificed on the altar of power.

posted by CBD at 11:00 AM

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