LETTER: Government power and a ‘public’ health crisis
While most of us are suffering through the worst period of our lives, government people are feeling like it’s Christmas morning.
In only five short months, with the help of a media greedy for eyeballs, government officials have taken a fairly ordinary virus and created a health crisis. Look what they’ve done: They’ve gutted economic output, driven unemployment to new records, destroyed international travel, set public education back by at least a year and destroyed businesses large and small. They’ve made millions of Americans depend on government checks to eat and government intervention to avoid eviction.
But that’s just the public. Look at what government officials get: They now know that they have only to discover something that can be called a “public-health crisis” and, if reaction to the crisis destroys commerce, then unlimited amounts of money can be created and distributed to those favored by the government.
How many of us think they have the freedom Janis Joplin described in her song about Bobby McGee: “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose”?
