COVID-19 was a godsend for left-wingers around the world. The “pandemic” justified anything and everything. Shut down schools, even though kids were not at risk? Check. Shut down small businesses? Check. Shut down churches? Check. Make people wear idiotic masks? Check.
Shut down liquor stores? Don’t even think about it! Shut down Targets and Walmarts? No way. Shut down left-wing protests and demonstrations? Of course not.
The whole thing was obviously political, and was intended to advance statism. It was Rahm Emanuel who said, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Whether covid was a serious crisis is debatable–I don’t think it was–but liberals certainly didn’t let it go to waste. They jumped on it with both feet, asserting previously unknown powers over the rest of us.
To take just one example, on March 25, 2020 Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota issued a long executive order that deprived residents of Minnesota of fundamental rights, starting with this:
Beginning on Friday, March 27, 2020 at 11:59 pm through Friday, April 10, 2020 at
5:00 pm, all persons currently living within the State of Minnesota are ordered to stay
at home or in their place of residence except to engage in the Activities and Critical
Sector work set forth below in Paragraphs 5 and 6.
It is extraordinary to realize that here, in the USA, a governor literally ordered everyone in his state to remain in his or her house except as permitted by that governor’s orders. And yet, it happened.
In my opinion, covid-era executive orders had little to do with public safety, and a great deal to do with the Left’s insatiable appetite to control the lives of normal citizens. Expanding government power was not a byproduct, it was the point all along. And the growth of government power that leftists brought about during that dark era is still with us.
From the Unleash Prosperity Hotline:
The latest edition of the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World Report is out, with data through 2023. Freedom’s march over the past several decades took a huge hit from the Stalinist global COVID lockdowns of 2020-21. Even worse: the blow to human liberty still hasn’t recovered from those evil edicts.
Make no mistake: the restraints on our freedom that various governments imposed, using covid as an excuse, were not a mistake. They were not inadvertent. They were not due to an excess of caution. They were malicious, the expression of a conscious desire to expand government power at the expense of the rest of us.
Government’s covid-era expansion must be thoroughly repudiated, and all remaining vestiges of that expansion should be dismantled. Our freedoms depend on it.
