Joanna Pennyfeather
“War is the health of the state”, declared Randolph Bourne in his essay The State, written during the First World War.
The central thesis of the essay is that the state thrives during conflict. Crises and conflicts are the food that fuels the growth of the state, which allows it to arrogate powers and authority.
This is easy to accomplish.
Simply present the conflict and its source, and offer a solution. The solution will always involve the state assuming more power and expanding its field of influence, whether by increased taxation, more regulatory powers or by nationalising some industry, to combat this new enemy. It doesn’t matter whether the enemy is an invading force, a virus, a group of people inside the country that do not want to conform &8211; the script and the intent are the same.
When people are confronted with the above, they will often bend over backwards to explain that the state’s newfound powers are merely emergency powers. They will say they are temporary measures required to solve the problem at hand, and the state will give them up once the crisis is over.
But as Robert Higgs makes clear in his work Crisis and Leviathan, this is at best a half-truth.
While it is generally true that the state will return some power after the crisis is over, it will not return all power. Inevitably, it will keep some of the power permanently. Thus the state has accomplished its objective: it has permanently grown in size and now has more control over your life and freedom.
Another way to phrase it is that there is nothing more permanent than a temporary government programme.
And ultimately, when the crisis is over, what you will have lost, the state will have gained.
History is littered with examples of temporary emergency measures becoming permanent features of government. We don’t even have to go particularly far back.
The 11th of September 2001 was 20 years ago. Yet you are still not allowed to bring a bottle of water through airport security, to say nothing of the massive surveillance programmes that were rolled out on the back of that, or the wars that were fought and all the lives that were lost in the process.
And while we’re on the subject of travel restrictions, did you know that the original intent of passports was not to make it possible for people to travel, but rather to stop people from travelling? During the First World War, passports were implemented as a temporary measure to stop smart, and thus to the state ‘useful’, people from leaving. Now people are completely unable to understand how travel would ever be possible without passports! Yet it wasn’t that long ago that you could travel from the south of the Iberian peninsula all across Europe and never once have to show your papers.
Or what about the VAT (value-added tax)? Again, the VAT was first implemented during the First World War as a way to collect money to fund the war machine. It is still with us today, and many times higher than it was when it was first implemented.
These days, the War on COVID has led to a massive amount of government overreach. The Health Bill that was passed last year looks to be amended and extended until May 2023. It allows, among other things, government goons to pull you out of your house if you are deemed a threat to public safety. Indeed the law is written in such a way that what the government is allowed to do is “without limitation”.
If “without limitation”doesn’t make you worried, I don’t know what would.
Then we have the vaccine passports, which look to become something that we will all have to learn to live with – whether that means that you are unvaccinated and thus segregated from society, or that you are vaccinated and continuously have to show your papers in order to partake in society.
Lastly, New Zealand businesses are currently busy lobbying the New Zealand government to be exempted from the Bill of Rights, the Privacy Act, and the Human Rights Act. This will allow them to discriminate on who they allow to visit their premises, without risk of being sued for discrimination. One would imagine that if what you are proposing to do goes against these three fundamental laws, it would give you pause to think that maybe, just maybe, you will end up on the wrong side of history.
Alas, no such realisation seems forthcoming.
Indeed, rather than it being necessary to be exempted from those laws in times of crisis, they actually exist precisely for situations like this. They serve little to no purpose when everything is going well. However, they become absolutely crucial in any civilised society when the going gets tough and mass hysteria kicks in. They give us something to lean on when our fellow citizens and leaders, whether in business or politics, suggest that doing away with human rights is sound policy. They allow us to draw a line in the sand and say, ‘here, but no further’.
COVID truly is the health of the New Zealand state.
Even though the current propaganda from The Single Source of Truth makes it appear as if this is a forever-pandemic that will require ongoing restrictions and government action, the fact is that it will eventually stop. When it does, it will not be because the underlying health data has informed the government that a change of course is warranted, but rather when enough people have had enough, and it is no longer politically opportune to continue The Narrative.
And while it is true that the government at that point will give up some of the power it has arrogated during the crisis, it is guaranteed that it will keep some of it permanently.
What laws and measures the New Zealand government ends up keeping is anyone’s guess.
But I do know this. When this particular crisis is over, we, the people, will be worse off. We will be poorer, and we will be more at the mercy of our leaders, whether it’s Team Blue or Team Red. At the same time our leaders, and the faceless bureaucracy that they serve, will have been rewarded with a bigger machine of oppression, to be used with impunity as they see fit.
And so it goes until the machine becomes too large to sustain itself and collapses under its own weight.
I pray for this day of reckoning to be soon, but I fear that it’s a long time away.
