This morning Milady and I were discussing current events and the topic turned to the current trend of pretty much everything being someone else’s business. I blame politics, personally, and the expansion of political power to more and more mundane areas of life. After all, if the feds have an opinion as to the design of your toilet, can you really deny that they have the power to regulate pretty much anything they want?
When certain people, lets call them statism cultists, perceive a problem in society (which is to say a personal habit they consider a vice because there is no society without individuals and their actions), they demand that We Must Act, which means that they find some political hack that wants attention and they introduce a law. No matter if that law stands in direct violation of constitutional limits, it’s important, you see, so we must expand our power to meet the new threat. It doesn’t even matter if that “new threat” has been a part of the culture for a thousand years, as long as it can be packaged as getting worse, or a bigger threat to the young. And they only need a foot in the door these days; as we’ve seen from local politics in Colorado, we can vote something down and if our municipal masters they decide they want it anyway, well GFY, because we’re doing it. We gave you a chance to go quietly, but your gonna go. Period. Seems kinda evil, doesn’t it? Aren’t they supposed to do what we tell them when we vote on something?
So they no longer want to let us vote on that kind of thing. Next, we use regulation; some anonymous expert can now write some administrative law to force compliance. The big problem with that, however, is the limited reach and that they have to pass a law to regulate that sector before they can go mad. It’s doable, but slow. It also lacks the veneer of respectability that an elected politician has. It has been used to great effect for some time now, it’s just not flashy.
That’s why these “emergencies” are such a god-send to them; they no longer have to ask. You are MANDATED now. By people whose only claim to power is that they won a rigged popularity contest. And their opinions are being guided by one of the most consistently vainglorious occupations around, the bureaucrat-doctor. They are experts, and powerful people listen to them. It doesn’t matter if their track record is absolute dogshit (I’m lookin’ at you, Neil Ferguson), or if they don’t take into account that there are other things in life that pose risk greater than an easily survivable virus (especially if people had been working on reducing comorbidities all year instead of staying inside being afraid), if it gives them an opportunity to preen, look important, threaten skeptics, and most important of all, impose their will, they will DO THAT SHIT.
Every time.
After all, that’s exactly what they want, and why they ran for office in the first place; because they want to be in charge, and they think they know better than you how to conduct your affairs. And if they bankrupt you, or make you miss a cancer diagnosis, or if their bad decisions end up starving people, they will simply give you an “Oops! Sorry our policies ended up harming so many people, but we were working with the best information we had at the time and did the best we could. Our response was the best. Please re-elect me!”
