Day 123: COVID-19 Where is the Equilibrium?

 

The economy is a social thing. Politics is a social thing. Everything is a social thing. Whether we approve or not, life going forward is the sum of quadrillions of individual decisions. Adoption of and maintenance of collective structures have individual decisions at their base. Those decisions may be coerced, but they are still individual decisions.

The time of decision for each of us has come. The incontrovertible evidence is that COVID-19 is not going to kill us all. It might kill me, and, from my perspective, that would be the end of the universe and totality (unless I am wrong about the lack of sentient eternal life). But the world will go on.

But will the structures we have built continue? Will our constitutional process remain?

We are in a race to equilibrium. The process of progressives is to either create or exploit disruption as a means of imposing a new equilibrium centered around greater central control. The American Revolution created a new equilibrium on the American continent for self-government as opposed to rule by kings and queens. There is an argument that human DNA favors the collective over self-reliance. Human history suggests there is an eternal conflict between those poles with neither extreme being infinitely sustainable. It was, and remains, a relatively small group of humans that can set up and sustain self-government against the forces of tyranny.

The triumph of free markets over central planning in the latter half of the 20th century was remarkable but is not a guaranteed and permanent organizing principle. Globalism arose on the backs of free markets and the inability to spread self-government principles and commitments along with those free markets has resulted in the dominance of the CCP and the European Union over masses of people governed without representation. That unrepresented governance has, in turn, distorted the operation of markets to the advantage of the powers that be. And in the US, what was de jure representational government has become de facto government by the unelected through the efforts of corporatism and politicians to empower an administrative state.

And so we arrive at an epidemic promoted by two viruses: SARS-CoV-2 and progressivism. The first is to make us fear, and the second is to make us trade our G-d given human rights for safety and security. If we can conquer our fear, we can defeat progressivism and retain our civil rights. We must set the center point of our equilibrium back to individual liberty. That is what our Constitution says, and that is what we must enforce.

I will be participating in another effort to petition government this weekend at the state capitol in Sacramento. I choose liberty.

Join me if you can. Join another group where you are if they are coming together to petition. Put a sign on your lawn if nothing else. Now is the time, before people become grateful for the few “rights” that governors, in their magnanimity, restore.

[Note: Links to all my COVID-19 posts can be found here.]

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  1. RightAngles Member
    RightAngles
    @RightAngles

    Yay! Good for you!  Another great post. I’m going to email that “Fears” list to some friends if that’s ok.

    • #1
  2. Rodin Member
    Rodin
    @Rodin

    RightAngles (View Comment):

    Yay! Good for you! Another great post. I’m going to email that “Fears” list to some friends if that’s ok.

    OK by me. I grabbed it from FB. My handwriting is not that good.

    • #2
  3. Jim McConnell Member
    Jim McConnell
    @JimMcConnell

    Another great post, @rodin. Inspiring and thought-provoking. Thank you.

    • #3
  4. MarciN Member
    MarciN
    @MarciN

    Our forebears paid an extraordinary price to keep the candlelight of individual freedom lit for each of us. The debt is personal.

    • #4
  5. Rodin Member
    Rodin
    @Rodin

    MarciN (View Comment):

    Our forebears paid an extraordinary price to keep the candlelight of individual freedom lit for each of us. The debt is personal.

    @marcin, thank you for that. If we give up our liberty we dishonor the sacrifice.

     

    • #5
  6. MarciN Member
    MarciN
    @MarciN

    Rodin (View Comment):

    MarciN (View Comment):

    Our forebears paid an extraordinary price to keep the candlelight of individual freedom lit for each of us. The debt is personal.

    marcin, thank you for that. If we give up our liberty we dishonor the sacrifice.

     

    I read somewhere on the Internet (I love to start sentences that way) that the rest of the world is laughing at us and ignoring us because we are not taking a leadership role in fighting the virus. 

    Hah, I say to you laughers. Watch where the vaccines come from and the freedom to refuse them. :-) He who laughs last, . . . 

     

    • #6
  7. Bob Thompson Member
    Bob Thompson
    @BobThompson

    I say it’s time to open everything. No more money from Washington. Any further delay or any more money will work against Donald Trump’s re-election. Counter arguments are welcome.

    • #7
  8. Jules PA Inactive
    Jules PA
    @JulesPA

    PA goes Yellow on June 5. Some of the PA counties will go green.

    This is happy news, and a step in the right direction. Where I live has been red since Mid-March. 

    Also just got a voice mail from the voting commission that mail-in voting ballots can be dropped off in person at polling places. I planned to vote in person all along. Our Primary is June 2. Not sure how important the primary is for me, but I’m going just to be among those counted and make my desire to vote in-person visible. 

    • #8
  9. Misthiocracy got drunk and Member
    Misthiocracy got drunk and
    @Misthiocracy

    The image in the OP is missing Flesh-Eating Disease.

    • #9
  10. Rodin Member
    Rodin
    @Rodin

    Misthiocracy got drunk and (View Comment):
    Flesh-Eating Disease

    Well you can pencil it in for 2004 & 2011 which are missing from the list. From wikipedia:

    • 2004 Don Rickles, American stand-up comedian, actor, and author, known especially for his insult comedy, contracted the disease in his left leg. He had six surgeries and later recovered. The condition confined him in his later years to performing comedy from a chair. [23]
    • 2004 Eric Allin Cornell, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics, lost his left arm and shoulder to the disease.[24]
    • 2011 Jeff Hanneman, guitarist for the thrash metal band Slayer, contracted the disease. He died of liver failure two years later, on May 2, 2013, and it was speculated that his infection was the cause of death. However, on May 9, 2013, the official cause of death was announced as alcohol-related cirrhosis. Hanneman and his family had apparently been unaware of the extent of the condition until shortly before his death.[28]
    • 2011 Peter Watts, Canadian science-fiction author, contracted the disease. On his blog, Watts reported, “I’m told I was a few hours away from being dead…If there was ever a disease fit for a science-fiction writer, flesh-eating disease has got to be it. This…spread across my leg as fast as a Star Trek space disease in time-lapse.”[29]
    • #10
  11. Mark Camp Member
    Mark Camp
    @MarkCamp

    This article was for me a seven-course meal of American intellectualism and activism.  Brilliant.

    • #11
  12. Unsk Member
    Unsk
    @Unsk

    We must set the center point of our equilibrium back to individual liberty. That is what our Constitution says, and that is what we must enforce.

    Damn right! But we must realize that achieving that goal is going to be very difficult with all the roadblocks and obstacles the our elected Marxist Political class and entrenched bureaucracies have put in place. This is going to be one hell of a fight for  the Left will not give up easily. 

    • #12
  13. Bob Thompson Member
    Bob Thompson
    @BobThompson

    Unsk (View Comment):

    We must set the center point of our equilibrium back to individual liberty. That is what our Constitution says, and that is what we must enforce.

    Damn right! But we must realize that achieving that goal is going to be very difficult with all the roadblocks and obstacles the our elected Marxist Political class and entrenched bureaucracies have put in place. This is going to be one hell of a fight for the Left will not give up easily.

    Politics has never been my game. It does appear to me that after the Reagan Administration the Democrat Party really began to operate under a, perhaps not unified, but surely a common shift leftward. This has included much antipathy toward what until that point had been a traditional view of the American way stemming from the founding principles. What has really made this effective is the coalescing of leftists of all stripes especially evident since Trump has been President. So Democrats, having assumed the very publicly acceptable label as ‘liberals’, now include all ideological positions favoring government control over the people, including Communists. This appears to have gotten organized with momentum during the Clinton Administration.

    While this has been going on the Republican Party has been all over the place culminating in the election of Donald Trump, a candidate unacceptable to a large part of the Republican establishment. This has changed the Republican Party in some ways that may not be clear until after the 2020 election.

    JanieB: Too much of the political class (I’m naming no names) has outsourced its brain to chosen experts and crossed its fingers and wished upon a vaccine that “the Economy” (whose breadth and complexity they never came close to grasping) will somehow survive long enough to a) snap back to its former glory, or b) surrender to a total makeover. It’s not likely that either of those things will happen. More likely is a dysfunctional hybrid.

    Well, the former glory was a dysfunctional hybrid of its own. Even as such, it always represented a threat to the state. Why do you think the opposition to Donald Trump has been so rabid? 

    All of what I have bolded above is from my comments on two other threads where the current political contest was the discussion point. The Democrats, following their Communists heroes, are pushing this lockdown in hopes of tearing down all of that which Obama would say ‘you didn’t build that’. Those people and businesses not being allowed to open in many states are exactly those deemed ‘not essential’ by the state and, if you recall, @ejhill protested that declaration almost immediately pointing out that these individuals and businesses represented people’s livelihoods. This is a fight for the Constitution and the American way.

    • #13
  14. MISTER BITCOIN Inactive
    MISTER BITCOIN
    @MISTERBITCOIN

    Bob Thompson (View Comment):

    I say it’s time to open everything. No more money from Washington. Any further delay or any more money will work against Donald Trump’s re-election. Counter arguments are welcome.

    1000% agree: open everything!

     

     

    • #14
  15. MISTER BITCOIN Inactive
    MISTER BITCOIN
    @MISTERBITCOIN

    In Los Angeles, flatten the curve turned into wait for a vaccine

    total b.s.

    and no one in the mainstream media has written about the director of Los Angeles county public health having zero training in medicine and/or contagious disease, Barbara Ferrer (PhD in social welfare)

     

    • #15
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