A Truly Stupid Move

 Suppose it was drawn to your attention that something you had done had adversely affected a large number of people.   It had not affected them all in the same way and to the same degree however.   Some of the people had been merely inconvenienced, others had been seriously injured.   Would it make sense to try to rectify this situation by taking further action to injure those who had merely been inconvenienced?

I would hope that your answer was no.   This is the sort of crazy move that ought to make sense only to socialists, egalitarians in general, or, to be somewhat redundant, madmen.   It appears, however, that it also makes sense to Brian Pallister, Premier of the province of Manitoba and to his Public Health Commissar Brent Roussin.   I don't know what, if any, political views Roussin holds, but Pallister is the leader of the Progressive Conservative Party, which, should anyone think I have a partisan  motive in the strong criticism I have sent his way this year, is the closest thing that exists in Manitoba to something I would affirm as my own party.   This is not very close since my party would be fully and genuinely Tory rather than watered-down conservative and would be reactionary or anti-progressive rather than progressive.    Margaret Thatcher once told Brian Mulroney that he put too much emphasis on the adjective and not enough on the noun in his party's name.   While I agree with what the Iron Lady was saying, much as I hate to correct her this is an instance where her grammar was off.  In the name of the party both Progressive and Conservative are adjectives.  Party is the noun.   My point in bringing all of this up, however, is to say that this famous line also seems to apply to Pallister.   Perhaps it has something to do with the name Brian.   It is also true of Winnipeg city mayor Brian Bowman.

To properly explain what I mean by that we need to think back a month or two to when the cases of Chinese bat flu (Wuhan flu or Wuflu are also acceptable) started to rise in the province.   At the time Brent Roussin said that he would not impose another lockdown on the province.  He acknowledged, as even some officials of the Communist-dominated World Health Organization that first advised the lockdowns have done, that lockdowns do too much positive harm to be a viable strategy in combatting the spread of infectious disease.   As he has done many times in the past, however, Roussin has flip-flopped.   When the media began to hype the rise in case numbers, he began imposing restrictions, then piling restrictions upon the previous restrictions, each more ineffective than the last, until finally we were back under full provincial lockdown and a more severe one than the earlier to boot.   He has tried to disguise this by calling it other things than a lockdown.   While the rose of Shakespeare's Juliet may smell as sweet under any other name, the pungent stink of lockdown remains attached to Roussin's public health orders whatever he chooses to call them.

When he placed us back into lockdown, restaurants were forced to close their dining rooms again - the rapid approach of winter makes patios impractical - bars, theaters and gyms had to close, and small retailers of goods deemed "non-essential", except to the extent that they could provide curbside pickup and/or delivery, were ordered to close as well.

When this happened a number of small businesses complained -and rightly so - that this would drive them out of business.  They had not been able to fully recuperate from the previous lockdown, especially since, to be allowed to re-open, they had to strictly limit the number of people allowed inside and make all sorts of other changes, sometimes rather expensive ones.   These business owners drew attention to the fact that the big box stores which are part of large chains owned by mega-corporations, were allowed to remain open because they sold groceries and medicine and other "essentials" but they also sold the sort of things the small retailers that were ordered to close specialized in.   This, the small businesses argued, gave an unfair advantage to the larger stores which, unlike themselves, have the resources to survive a lockdown.   It has also been pointed out that Roussin's orders made no sense because someone is far more likely to catch the virus in a large supermarket than in a small store that in compliance with the previous, crippling, public health orders, could only allow a few people in at a time.

All of this was perfectly fair, reasonable and legitimate.   The government led by the phony Conservative Brian Pallister, however, decided to redress the situation, not by doing anything that would help the small stores, such as allowing them to remain open, but by taking a page from the book of Gretchen Whitmer, liberal Democrat Governor of Michigan, by telling the big stores that they could no longer sell "non-essential" goods.

There are two things wrong with this approach.

The first, which has already been stated but is worth repeating, is that this does nothing, absolutely nothing, to help the small stores which Roussin's evil public health orders - yes, they are evil - has so grievously injured by placing their solvency in jeopardy. Preventing other people from selling what they would  have sold if they were allowed to be open will not help them in any way to survive the month of forced closure.

The second problem with this whole approach is that the distinction between "essential" and "non-essential" is just as wrong and nonsensical when applied to goods and services as it is when applied to the businesses that sell them.   Government is not competent to decide for everybody what is "essential" and what is "non-essential".   While there are some basic needs that are common to all  people, the sum total of any given person's needs will differ from the sum total of the next person's needs, because people are different and have different needs.   Government is capable of identifying the common needs of all people, but not the specific needs of each and every person whom they govern.   Even a city's government would be incapable of this, much less the government of a province the size of Manitoba.   Ludwig von Mises' argument that centrally planned socialist economies cannot arrive at just prices for goods because they lack any mechanism, such as exists in the market, for accurately processing consumers' subjective preferences applies as much here as in its original context. (1)  All "one size fits all" decisions made by government and imposed on everyone are bad.   This is the lesson of the myth of Procrustes.   Pallister and Roussin would do well to study that ancient story and Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s modern update, Harrison Bergeron, until they understand it.   

Pallister was interviewed on television a few days before the ban on "non-essential goods" which, coming as it does at this time of year, translates into a ban on Christmas shopping, perhaps as a prelude to an even Grinchier move, was announced.   In the snotty, arrogant, bullying tone of voice that has become all too common with him as of late, he lectured Manitobans that stores had been allowed to remain open so they could buy their groceries, not a new stereo system.   As grating as his hubris is - his whole stinking attitude of I am allowing these stores, which I am perfectly in my right closing, to stay open, so do as I say, you ingrates - there are those, probably many, who would be inclined to think that he has correctly distinguished between "essential" and "non-essential" here.   People cannot live without food - they can get by without stereos and other entertainment technology.   Such people, however, have not thought the matter through as thoroughly as it warrants.

The reasoning that groceries are "essential" because people cannot live without food, but entertainment technology is "non-essential" because we can survive without it, while it might be true under ordinary circumstances is invalidated by those of the lockdown.   Pallister has ordered everyone to stay home for a month.   He does not want them  socializing during that month.   Socializing outside of the immediate household has been forbidden.   All of the "third places" as Ray Oldenburg used the term - places other than home or work such as churches, coffee shops, libraries, etc. where people meet and socialize in a more relaxed, neutral atmosphere - have been closed.   There are many more people now than in previous times who live by themselves.    Under this combination of circumstances entertainment technology no longer seems so "non-essential".   Imagine someone who lives by himself, whose job has been deemed non-essential, who can no longer go to any of his regular haunts, and whose television breaks down the first day of lockdown.   With a month of lockdown ahead of him, he cannot replace the television because Pallister and Roussin, the people imposing these conditions on him, consider it to be "non-essential".

Rather than helping small businesses, all that Pallister's ban on the in-person selling of "non-essential" goods will accomplish will be to drive the entire market for such goods online.   If we think that saving small, family-owned, local businesses is a good things, which is one of the rare times when communitarians of the right, such as myself, and communitarians of the left, agree, this as a further step down the same wrong road in which huge, corporate owned, and unrooted chain retailers  represent an earlier step.   

The bottom line is that governments are not competent at deciding for each and every person what is "essential" and "non-essential" and ought not to try.   Socialists may think otherwise, but we have a socialist party in Manitoba already, the NDP, and we don't need the Conservatives following their example.   

If they really want to help the small stores they will lift this Satanic lockdown and allow those stores to re-open.

(1) See Mises' Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (1949) and Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (1922, English 1936).

Freedom is Essential

We have been hearing a lot of talk about “essential” and “non-essential” these days. The health totalitarians, who have decided that the COVID-19 pandemic is just and sufficient cause for suspending civil rights and liberties and placing the entire populace of cities, provinces, and whole nations under house arrest, insist that only “essential” businesses be allowed to remain open. Of course, these same health totalitarians are themselves the ones who get to decide what is “essential” and what is “non-essential.”

The distinction is a fraudulent one. The idea underlying the distinction is that there are some goods and services which people need to survive – food, water, and the like – and others which they can get by without. The majority of goods and services available on the market fall into the latter category. While it is true that nobody is going to die because he cannot buy the latest video game, DVD, novelty t-shirt, or any other of countless examples of the like, this ignores an obvious truth. For those whose business is to provide these goods and services which people can get by without, the provision of those goods and services is how they put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads. They are hardly “non-essential” to them.

Some may try to rebut what I have just pointed out by arguing that it is only true of small business owners and not of the large corporations that control most of the now shut-down economy and produce most of the “non-essential” goods. In response, I would say that what is true of the owners of small businesses is also true of the employees of the large corporations. They depend upon their jobs to put food on the table and pay the rent. I would also make the following obvious observation for those who think that this shut down is corporate, consumerist, capitalism finally getting what it deserves. It is the much despised corporations that have the accumulated capital to weather the shutdown for months and survive. It is the small businesses which will have to file for bankruptcy if forced to remain closed for much longer than a few weeks.

Others, might make the rejoinder that Justin Trudeau has promised financial assistance to small businesses. To which I would reply that Justin Trudeau has at no point in the past demonstrated that he or anyone else in his cabinet knows anything at all about small businesses and how they differ from large corporations. We are talking about the government that slapped taxes upon small businesses several years ago claiming that they were going after the “rich” and which got into a huge scandal last year because it tried to change the rules to prevent a large, Quebec-based, corporation from being prosecuted for bribing a foreign power.

What is true of us as individuals is also true of us collectively as communities, societies, nations, and countries. The so-called “non-essential” goods and services are how we pay for the so-called “essential” goods and services. If we eliminate the “non-essential” sector then we must force the “essential” sector to pay for everything including itself. It cannot bear this burden for long without collapsing under the additional stress. I, like many others, enjoy mocking the way in which the aggressive advertising that saturates our consumeristic, commercial society is constantly turning yesterday’s luxuries into today’s necessities, but the reality is that all of these goods and services which individually we might consider to be unnecessary, taken together perform a function that is essential.

It is not the government’s place to tell anyone that his business is “non-essential.”

What I have been saying about business is all the more true with regards to freedom. We often refer to such freedoms as our freedom of assembly, freedom of association, freedom of worship, and freedom of motion as our “basic freedoms.” I do not think very highly of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In my opinion, it thwarts the Common Law foundation of our rights and freedoms and makes them less secure. It conditions us into thinking of our rights and freedoms as being limited to those which the government permits us to have, rather than limited only by what the law prohibits. It gives the government far too much power to bypass our basic rights and freedoms and undermines the sovereignty of Queen-in-Parliament, the capstone of the entire Common Law system, by giving too much power to the Supreme Court. I shall leave these considerations aside, for the moment, to note that Section Two of the Charter refers to such freedoms as freedom of expression, freedom of religion, freedom of thought, freedom of belief, freedom of peaceful assembly, and freedom of association as our “fundamental freedoms.” “Fundamental”, like “basic” is another word for “essential.”

It would appear that the Dominion government, our provincial governments, and, sadly, a very large portion of our populace, think that these freedoms are not that essential when there is a virus running amok. For these are the very freedoms which our governments are curtailing – or eliminating entirely – in their hasty, poorly thought out, irrational efforts to contain the coronavirus and we, for the most part, are cheering them on as they do so.

There is no “freedom of peaceful assembly” when the government is telling us we can meet in groups no larger than fifty, ten, or single digit numbers, as the case may be. There is no “freedom of association” when “extreme social distancing” is mandatory. How can there be “freedom of religion” when churches are not allowed to assemble and worship? The closing of the churches is particularly appalling. Only a very depraved and evil mind would judge the state to be “essential” but the church to be “non-essential.”

It used to be that an essential part of raising young people involved teaching them that our traditional institutions and our basic freedoms stand and fall together and instilling in them such a love and reverence for these institutions and freedoms that in the unfortunate event that a war were to arise they would be willing to sacrifice their lives and die horrible deaths lest we lose these things. It speaks very poorly of us today that we are now willing to sacrifice all those freedoms in order to save our lives.

Freedom is absolutely essential. To sacrifice our freedom to stop COVID-19 is to sacrifice our humanity. Stopping COVID-19 is not worth that price.

Those who would give up their own essential freedoms in the name of empowering the state to deal with the COVID-19 emergency do not deserve their essential freedoms. Those who would force others to give up their own essential freedoms to achieve the same end deserve neither their freedoms nor the sorry lives they seek to save.