March 16, 2020 - A Date Which Should Go Down In Infamy - Much More So Than December 7, 1941 - Because That's The Date The US Government(s) Turned Against Their People

This makes it interesting if people think that Trump is some kind of "savior" when he quite obviously hasn't been- the bad stuff got kicked off in his Administration. Pointed questions should be asked

When people ask why the Russians don’t rise up, throw out their corrupt, dictatorial regime (including Putin and his oligarchs), they need look no farther than into a mirror, because the same sort of tyranny - including mass jailing of political prisoners whose Constitutional rights were and still are being ignored - was enacted here without significant resistance or protest, and for which now no accountability has beenimposed (at the very least) and no actions under the criminal laws (which for this abuse of powers should be the norm) have been enacted or even demanded.

Right now, the US remains a turnkey dictatorship: “Understand that if active duty military actually get deployed within the United States, that weapon is not just going to be pointed at other people, other countries, it’s pointed at you. … If you do not get in your house when I tell you to,” Bronson warned, “you become the enemy. Martial law. You know, when your rights get curtailed?” — SSGT Cindy Bronson, US Army

And every law enforcement agency has the duty to protect and serve the government which pays for it - and that duty does not extend, nor has it ever extended, towards the governed. All that military gear and vehicles and weapons which you pay for, goes to support select militias in support of whatever government pays them - and “government property” is not your property.

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“This month marks the fourth anniversary of one of the most disastrous assaults on human rights in American history. It was on March 16, 2020 that the President Trump issued “guidelines” for “15 days to slow the spread” which stated that “Governors of states with evidence of community transmission should close schools in affected and surrounding areas.” The administration instructed all members of the public to “listen to and follow the directions of your state and local authorities.”

It was at this time that an American president, for the first time in American history, introduced the idea that it was possible—and perfectly legal—for government institutions to “close down” the economy by forcibly shutting, en masse, countless businesses, schools, and churches. Trump stated repeatedly in press conferences that it was up to government officials to decide “if we open up.” It quickly became standard procedure for health bureaucrats, governors, and media figures to casually speak of “closing the economy” or “opening up” as if we were talking about a coffee shop deciding on closing time.

Meanwhile, across the country, local law enforcement officers willingly worked to arrest or harass business owners, worshipers at church, soccer moms at the park, and anyone else with the temerity to venture outdoors for activities not approved by the ruling class.

The small minority of Americans that remained committed to human rights and private property soon discovered how powerless they really are. Many dissenters were dismayed by a lack of action from the courts, and how elected officials were apparently unwilling or unable to rein in the vast new powers of “health” officials. Was there nothing that could limit the state’s power? This was confusing for many people because many have been (and remain) enamored of the idea that written constitutions limit state power when it matters most.

“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.” —Frank Zappa

Many dissenters learned a valuable lesson from the experience, however: during the Covid Panic of 2020 and 2021, it became abundantly clear how little constitutional government and the so-called “rule of law” actually limit a regime’s power in times of perceived emergency. It is during emergencies, in fact, when we learn who really holds political power, and how ineffective are constitutional measures designed to limit it.

True Power Is Revealed by Emergencies

As the Covid Panic revealed to us, the real, de facto ruling class is the Administrative State, both at Federal and State levels, which effortlessly ruled by decree during the covid crisis. This ruling clique—an oligarchy of governors, academic “experts,” media billionaires, and countless nameless and faceless unelected bureaucrats—has illustrated in recent years how irrelevant elected lawmakers can be to the use of political power.

This problem is not new, nor have scholars only recently noticed it. Political power in times of emergencies is exercised by individual persons who are unconcerned with abstract limits on their power. This fact is fundamentally at odds with the abstractions of the constitutionalists who imagine that the state monopoly on coercion can be rendered relatively harmless via written constitutions. That it, the constitutionalists believe the written law will somehow restrain the ruling class, even in emergencies.

In practice, however, this doesn’t happen. Lottieri and Bassani explain what the constitutionalists get wrong:

The constitutional thought of classical and contemporary liberalism has constantly tried to neutralize politics, but it has failed. … [T]he real sovereign is the political group that has the final decision about the critical situation, in the state of emergency. The locus of sovereignty thus becomes the political entity (which in our time is the State), and the decision on the state of emergency is the ultimate test of sovereignty.

[“What have we to fear from state legislatures or even from states, when we are armed with such powers, with a president at our head? (A name we thought proper to adopt in conformity to the prejudices of a silly people who are so foolishly fond of a Republican government, that we were obliged to accommodate in names and forms to them, in order more effectually to secure the substance of our proposed plan; but we all know that Cromwell was a King, with the title of Protector).” Antifederalist Paper #9 (see previous post).]

Lottieri further notes that the fantasy of a neutral regime constrained by mere legal barriers is “simply impossible.” Yet, the naive view has often made the state appear less dangerous and has convinced many to accept the state’s monopoly of violence.

This is illustrated in the fact that the efforts to implement lockdowns in the United States were thoroughly bipartisan. Opposition to lockdowns was virtually nonexistent within regime institutions themselves. The Trump administration, the CDC, the legacy media, social media, state medical boards, state governors, and local health officials were all more or less in lockstep in March and April 2020. Resistance came overwhelmingly from non-elites; from ordinary people who were being persecuted by state agents—i.e., law enforcement officers and health officials—for opening businesses and attending church. It was only after non-elite political opposition began to look uncontrollable that some state institutions began to relent.

Yet, even as some pockets of resistance appeared, national elites remained virtually untouched and the federally declared “state of emergency” persisted until May 2023.

Perhaps the most important tool of the elites during all this—the monopoly power over the creation of money—was strengthened to levels never before seen. In a normal world, the power to destroy countless Americans’ livelihoods by decree would have faced fierce and immediate—and perhaps violent—opposition. The elite’s ability to create money via the central bank, however, essentially provided a means of bribing the public into compliance. It worked, and much of the public still doesn’t even make a connection between this ruse and the current impoverishment of the public via price inflation.

The Regime Is Still in Control

Now, nearly four years later, the regime and its elites have faced so real reckoning over their nearly untrammeled attacks on human rights and private property. Federal courts have been extremely cautious to avoid any ruling that might significantly reduce the emergency powers of the regime. The courts have taken exception with how the regime executed certain policies, such as when the court struck down the administration’s attempt to impose a nationwide vaccine mandate via OSHA. Yet, most challenges to government mandates were left unanswered because legal challenges were declared moot as the regime ended its mandates—for the moment. As a result, these powers will remain available to the regime the next time it decides to declare an emergency.

"There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters."
—Daniel Webster

Moreover, in times of crisis, regimes can justify virtually anything using a complex legal system in which interpretations are extremely flexible. We see this, for example, in the federal moratorium on evictions which relied on paper-thin legal claims. Whether or not the legal claims seem plausible to a normal—i.e., a person outside the ruling class—is immaterial. What matters is that the ruling regime is able to twist legal meanings and interpretations to its own purposes to essentially rule by decree during the crisis.

Unfortunately, we find very few of the powers seized and exercised during this period are convincingly curtailed. Most of these powers—especially those of the central bank—will return in force during the next “emergency,” even if the regime has to rely on slightly different legal claims and methods.

The Regime Will Take Whatever Power It Can

The regime’s efforts to exercise vast new powers were supercharged by the fact that the public offered so little resistance. The “free money” from the central bank helped in this, but the bribery was only part of the equation. The unfortunate fact is much of the public accepted the claims of the elite “experts” that the lockdowns and mandates were all perfectly legitimate and fully necessary.

During the Covid Panic, we saw Ludwig von Mises’s views on political power played out in real time. Mises understood that political power is not limited by words on parchment or legal theories. Power is limited only by ideological resistance to the state that then manifests as practical political opposition.

We have every reason to believe that federal, state, and local covid-related emergency powers would have been exercised with far greater enthusiasm by the regime had it not been for the resistance of the vocal minority.

If we want to know what really limited the regime’s power during the Covid Panic, we must look to the “do-not-comply” activists who were willing to lose jobs and social status as a result of their opposition to the regime. It was primarily the people portrayed as crazed malcontents by the regime who stood between the regime and the full use of its power.

The US Constitution and the Bill of Rights played virtually no role in limiting the state’s power during the emergency. The naive view of constitutionalism would have us believe that everything worked as designed as the “balance of powers” maintained a rule of law. That’s not what happened. What remains of freedom today was saved by nothing other than the limited amount of public resistance that made the regime think twice about extending indefinitely its experiment in tyranny.

This partial victory does not mean the regime has been defeated, of course. The elites have been slightly chastened, but they have kept most of their powder dry and simply wait for the next emergency during which these powers can again be exercised with at least as much vigor.” Covid Showed Us Who Really Rules America, by Ryan McMaken, Mises Institute, March 5, 2024, at https://mises.org/mises-wire/covid-showed-us-who-really-rules-america