Has Captain Airhead Finally Learned to Count?

On Thursday evening, Captain Airhead, who sometimes goes by the nom de scène Justin Trudeau and whom we in the Dominion of Canada have, whether as a result of some voodoo spell by our enemies or as divine judgement for turning our backs on God, been cursed to have had as the Prime Minister of Her Majesty's government in Ottawa for the past five years, made a phone call to the provincial premiers.   Why they bothered to pick up remains a mystery.   Perhaps Caller-ID was temporarily down all over the country.

We know what Captain Airhead told the premiers because he himself broadcast it on Friday morning.   "One of the things that I did highlight is that our resources are not infinite at the federal government" he said.   We shall return to those words momentarily.  First, take note of the fact that this was in reference to the Chinese bat flu.   He gave as specific examples of the resources which he has newly discovered to be finite, support for contact tracing, PPE, military and the Red Cross.   The last mentioned seems odd in this context since, although the Red Cross has royal patronage here as in the United Kingdom and receives some government funding, it is, the last I checked, an international private charitable  organization and not a branch of government.   That is beside the point however.   Captain Airhead spoke of the Dominion government as being there to support the provinces in the pandemic but added "there is a threshold beyond which when the cases spike too much, we might have to make really difficult choices about where to deploy the limited resources we have."

That the resources available to the government are limited rather than infinite is a truth of which prior to this Captain Airhead has given no indication that he was aware.    

Does this mean that Captain Airhead has finally come to appreciate the austerity that he always denigrated and deplored in Stephen Harper's premiership?

Hardly.   It is a tactic to bully the provincial governments into imposing stricter, harsher, lockdowns.

"Controlling the virus now reduces the impossible decisions and choices we might have to make down the road" he went on to say.   The translation of this out of smooth, polished, political talk back into Airhead's native dialect is "I'm gonna make you an offer you can't refuse.  Take away everyone's basic freedoms now or I will be cutting you off of federal support."

That Captain Airhead has not had some sort of epiphany about the limits of government resources or even taken a crash course in basic arithmetic from Count von Count is evident from the basic contradiction in his message.

The contradiction is simply this: the kind of lockdowns that Captain Airhead wants the premiers to impose will only use up the government's limited resources faster.

In the prairie provinces, including my own Manitoba, we are seeing the hospitals and intensive care units fill up with bat flu patients.   This is not typical of most places experiencing the so-called "second wave" which generally has seen numbers of positive cases going up without a significant spike in people getting seriously sick.  In Manitoba, at least, this can be attributed to this being the province's first real wave.   We did not see our hospitals and ICUs fill up when other places did back in March and April.  The desire of public health officials, both Dominion and provincial, to impose a second lockdown on us, if we charitably albeit, perhaps, naively, attribute to them the most benign possible of motivations, comes from a concern that the hospitals and ICUs will be overwhelmed and the system will crash.    This is the drain on public resources that they wish to avoid and it will be such a drain to be sure.   

One problem with their reasoning is that the addition to public expenses that will be produced by the lockdown measures themselves will exceed any possible reduction of the expenses due to the hospital overload.   Lockdowns are insanely expensive.   Far more so than crashing the health care system.   If people are not allowed to open their businesses or go to their jobs because of government orders, the government must compensate them.   The Dominion government already ran a record deficit doing this in the earlier lockdown this year, driving our national debt burden to the point where the federal debt alone will exceed a trillion dollars by the end of the year.    Whatever stress on the health care system new lockdowns might relieve, and it is doubtful that it will provide any significant relief at all, it will not sufficiently reduce the demand on our resources represented by the hospital/ICU crisis itself to offset that which will be created by the lockdowns.

The other problem with the "we need to lockdown or we won't have the resources to deal with the outbreak" reasoning is that lockdowns don't just add to the public expenses enormously themselves.   They also attack the other side of the ledger by severely reducing public revenue.   Public revenue is derived from taxes and it is the economy which generates the wealth that pays those taxes.   Lockdowns, however, are economy killers.   Businesses deemed "essential" are allowed to be open but at severely reduced capacities, currently 25% in Manitoba.   Retailers and restaurants classified as "non-essential" are allowed curbside and delivery service only.   Everybody else must close.   However, the distinction between "essential" and "non-essential" is not legitimate.   People cannot survive without food although they as individuals can get along without television sets but it is the production of goods such as television sets that pays for the production of goods such as food.   The so-called "non-essential" part of the economy is what pays for the so-called "essential" part and you cannot shut down the former without endangering the latter and severely reducing the source of public revenue causing the government to go further into debt (printing more money is merely a way of disguising the debt for the new inflated currency is now backed by wealth produced in the future, i.e., debt, rather than wealth that has already been produced). (1)

So no, Captain Airhead has not learned how to count.   He is simply doing what he always does, exercising his freedom-hating, totalitarian muscle, from behind his "sunny ways" mask.

(1) Should anyone object that it is a case of "lives" versus "the economy" I have shown many times in the past that this is a false dilemma.   Lockdowns kill.  While there has not been a whole lot of excess mortality this year compared to the immediately previous years, certainly not as much as one would expect from all the grims and alarmings and shockings the lying newsmedia use to describe the Chinese bat flu, there has been a lot of excess suicides, people drinking themselves to death, deaths by drug overdoses, and every other source of death one would expect to arise as the result of increased loneliness.   Lockdowns, not the virus, are the bigger killer this year.