Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows!
– Allen Ginsberg, “Howl”
You’ve got to hand it to The Australian’s Adam Creighton: he’s one of the few mainstream journalists brave enough to tell the truth about the basic uselessness of lockdowns. Now, he’s belatedly cottoning on to what I wrote over a year ago: our governments’ Covid policies are the Moloch Option.
The young and healthy, who are at almost no risk from the Wuhan virus, are the ones who are being asked to shoulder the bulk of the sacrifice to protect the elderly and infirm. Make no mistake: when Covid panic-merchants bluster “save lives”, they really mean “save old people”.
Most notably, the Moloch Option Covid policies are the complete opposite of the pieties blithered by the same control-freak nanny-staters when it comes to the mostly imaginary threat of “dangerous” climate change.
The need to act on climate change is the fundamental moral imperative of our age, animated by the idea our sacrifices today will save the planet in the future. Yes, energy costs may be higher and some people will lose their jobs, but it’s worth it for the grandkids.
Curiously, the grandkids haven’t been given much thought in our response to Covid-19. Our generation has foist extraordinary costs on future generations in a vain attempt to save lives from a disease that is lethal to a few.
A very few. Even of the grey-haired cohort who are so selfishly demanding that everyone else give up their work, their social life, their most basic freedoms, to protect them.
“The great majority of people … even in their 80s … will survive,” Britain’s chief scientific adviser Chris Whitty said in March last year, before collective psychosis took hold. “Even in the most vulnerable, oldest groups, in a very stressed health service … the great majority of people who catch the virus – and not everyone will – survive it,” he told a parliamentary committee, having analysed the data from China and Italy.
That was true then and it’s true now. Covid-19 was never an existential threat[…]But we have behaved like it was, racking up trillions in extra debt and trashing norms of liberal democracy that might not quickly, if ever, return.
When the first cruise ship discharged its cargo of Covid Marys, a friend asked me if I thought the government would impose martial law. I pointed out that there is no provision in the Australian Constitution for martial law, and that nothing like it has ever been tried in Australia since Federation. In hindsight, I grossly underestimated the ingenuity of our Little Hitler politicians and bureaucrats.
The idea that Sydney would be locked down in September 2021 or that American pediatricians would insist anyone over two years old wear a mask outside, to anyone living in February last year would have seemed ridiculous. Yet both, seemingly, are true. On this trend, silencing different scientific opinions or mandating individual tracking devices, all in the name of “saving lives”, may no longer be considered far-fetched.
All of this is imposing the shackles of staggering debt on younger generations. The Boomers really are living up to their boast of “spending the kids’ inheritance”.
By 2030 the government’s gross debt burden is forecast to be more than 51 per cent of GDP, compared with 15 per cent forecast in 2019, according to the Intergenerational Report released last month.
By 2060, interest payments on federal debt will have doubled as a share of the economy, if interest rates start to return to more normal levels, it forecasts. A warmer planet won’t be the only burden we’re leaving for the grandkids.
The Covid panic may yet hold more grim surprises for us.
Who would have foreseen, for instance, a surge in babies being admitted to hospital in New Zealand for an “immunity debt” potentially caused by the government’s closed border policy?
One thing we do know: the draconian Covid responses – imposed by people immune to their costs, or even benefiting from them – have fundamentally altered our supposedly free societies. We have become nations of snitches, “mask Karens” and “vaxholes”.
Protesters in Sydney last weekend were condemned as selfish. But taking basic precautions and living with a minuscule increase in personal risk may be the more selfless position.
Using the coercive power of the state to force others to behave against their will for months, at massive ultimate cost to future taxpayers, may be more selfish.
The Australian
As always, though, those who punish us “for our own good”, are doing so with the approval of their own consciences. They really do think they’re on the side of the angels, even as they’re sending us all to hell in a handcart.
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