Been a daily reader of Coffee & Covid email list for over a year. Author and lawyer Jeff Childers sends dispatches home from the front lines. Really well written and would recomend it to anyone interested in the behind-the-scenes truth. Subscribe here: Coffee & Covid
Today? Jeff hit it out of the park. Action without representation - from the website:
THE MANDATE GOLD RUSH
Over the last two years, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how mandates work, where they come from, and why politicians go along with them. My thinking started with the covid mandates — masks, distancing, jabs, and all their odious relatives — but I quickly realized the mandate problem began much, much earlier than that. Like with wacky energy regulations that hollowed out our appliances since the 1970’s or so, ultimately leaving wet cups and silverware dripping in my expensive dishwasher EVERY SINGLE TIME we run a load (but neatly creating a brand-new endless market for liquid drying agents).
The loopy European Union recently pushed the appliance technique a little too far by mandating that toasters must make the bread perfectly limp instead of toasty, which arguably led to the whole unfortunate Brexit incident.
Famously, and more recently, Obamacare mandated that everyone buy expensive health insurance. But long before government mandated health insurance, it mandated auto insurance, seat belts, motorcycle helmets, corn additives in gasoline (“ethanol”), safety features in cars increasing prices to starter home levels, and mandatory devices to “clean up” your auto exhaust while also helping out by making your car run more inefficiently so you burn more fuel, creating more exhaust.
So here is my basic theory: We’ve allowed our capitalist Republic to be hijacked by a mutant form of neo-fascism, wherein corporations bribe or convince local and federal governments to mandate consumers purchase or consume their products, making the corporations fabulously wealthy while slowly leaching out our liberties through a million mandatory pinholes in our bank accounts.
First I’ll prove it exists. Then I’ll explain why this problem should be high on our list of issues to deal with, because so many of our other problems can be traced directly back to this one.
A bit of a long read but an excellent one. Jeff is a lawyer and knows how to do his research - the facts are backed up. We have our work cut out for us. There is hope though - he ends today's post with the following observations:
The pandemic gave world governments a chance to declare an international emergency, which started a mandate gold rush that makes the original one look like a grainy 1960’s sci-fi movie.
So long as the government can unaccountably spend our money on anything they can describe as “for our own good,” we are involuntary toboggan riders, heading straight down, fast, toward socialism or full-on fascism. I wish I were exaggerating.
The good news is our opponents are not, well, intellectual dynamos.
So true - even BillG is not that smart. Something I have commented on before.
Truly interesting times...
