Never Let a Plague Go to Waste BY VICTOR DAVIS HANSON for PJ Media
During America’s first-ever national lockdown, thousands of unelected bureaucrats, as well as federal and state governments, assumed enormous powers not usually accorded to them.
They picked and chose which businesses could stay open without much rationale. They sent the infected into nursing homes occupied by the weak and vulnerable.
Their rules for prosecuting those who violated social distancing, sheltering in place, mask wearing or violent protesting often hinged on political grounds. Their spending measures on “infrastructure” and “health care” were excuses to lard up redistributive entitlements.
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Conservatives moaned that left-wing agendas were at work beneath the pretenses of saving us from the pandemic. And the giddy left bragged that it was true.
After the 2008 financial meltdown, Barack Obama spoke of “fundamentally transforming” the country. Now he’s back, weighing in on the panic-driven, multitrillion-dollar spending that has pushed America’s debt to nearly $30 trillion.
“There’s a teachable moment about maybe this whole deficit hawk thing of the federal government,” Obama said in a recent interview with Ezra Klein of The New York Times. “Just being nervous about our debt 30 years from now, while millions of people are suffering — maybe that’s not a smart way to think about our economics.”
He apparently means that borrowing tons of money in a pandemic and not worrying too much about paying it back is a new, better approach to economics.
Last year, California Gov. Gavin Newsom boasted about leveraging California’s statewide quarantine.
“There is opportunity for reimagining a progressive era as it pertains to capitalism,” Newsom said. “So yes, absolutely, we see this as an opportunity to reshape the way we do business and how we govern.”
Hillary Clinton said something similar early in the pandemic: “… This would be a terrible crisis to waste as the old saying goes. We’ve learned a lot about what our absolute frailties are in our country when it comes to health justice and economic justice …”
