When men play at God, this is where we arrive. Our liberties, our economy, our society and our democracy trashed overnight by the fear of what ? DEATH
Death comes to us all. It is a fact of life. You cannot put it off. It is inevitable. It is a matter for our Maker to determine. Not us.
Now please do not misunderstand me. We should respect life and the welfare of others. Personally I am prepared to give these draconian measures 6 weeks, allowing the government the benefit of the doubt. For the sake of others. For the sake of governments which are genuinely nonplussed and worried, and trying to do the right thing.
But it is all being done and decided in a state of alarm, according to questionable models and data.
One minute governments are ignoring all the warnings coming out of China – flights continued; people came and went in their thousands etc.
Now they want to lock us all down.
They are responding to alarm, not sober assessment of the facts.
Taking measures that trash our economy, our liberties, our social intercourse and which bypass all the established norms in which democratic governments work, is unwarranted and extreme.
For what ? Something they cannot quantify properly; cannot test for properly; something which they assume to be so bad that it is worth multiplying crises, not just at the demographic social level but in the economic and political too. Crises way beyond the damage that an unchecked Covid-19 outbreak will do. Way beyond.
To take just one aspect. Governments cannot underwrite the economy in the way they propose. To spend as they propose to spend means printing even more money. That means inflation on a serious level. If this health crisis is as bad as they believe, then there will be a serious culling of the population. That means that you will have less people, and even more money in the economy which means phenomenal inflationary pressures. That is historically the case where plague has coincided with increased money supply.
They are on the verge of tipping the world into a crisis the like of which we have never seen. A man made crisis at that; a man made crisis which does not need to happen.
The insanity of world wide destruction in the Second World War – the most devastating event in world history to date – came about in the fight to preserve us from what ?
Uncivilised totalitarian control by authoritarian sadists.
Are we really saying this disease is worse than that ?
Certainly the price we are being asked to pay is far too high. In the second world war, our elders fought for what had to be fought for. The price they paid, had to be paid. Imagine a world dominated by Nazi Germany and a Japanese Divine Supreme Ruler.
No thank you.
But the measures now being anticipated by the UK government – and what has already been done in France – are going to have an unprecedented effect, unless they are curtailed to a brief and intense quarantine period of 6 weeks.
Whoever heard of quarantine beyond 2 or at most 3 weeks. 6 weeks is ample. And 6 weeks is already too long for the impact on the economy and the impact on our liberties.
No-one to date seems to have recognised that a deadline MUST BE GIVEN for all our sakes.
Everyone needs to know where they stand; decisions have to be made; expectations have to be managed in every domain of life. This is psychologically critical to maintain civilised stability.
It is downright negligent of governments to think they can overturn the norms of our psychology because they listen to what certain scientists are saying, and lay aside the broader picture.
The most apposite and sensible expert assessment I have seen on this Covid-19 crisis is by a Stanford expert in such matters, to be found at
Do read it !
“Ray” Catlin
Conservatism Institute 