Editorial #173 What is Essential?
What is essential and what is non-essential? A better question: What is discretionary and what is non-discretionary? Essential sound like a dictator while discretionary is up to our good judgment. That decision should be made by whose money is being spent, not by bureaucracies who are more interested in their survival by telling us what to do. Their paycheck will still cash regardless of what happens to us.
During this pandemic the government took an unprecedented step to shuts down all non-essential businesses: non-essential for whom? For the government to declare what is essential is insulting as they are treating us like children who can’t decide for ourselves.
I laugh when the government shuts down during budget negotiations. They announce only essential government functions are to remain open. The joke is few realize the difference when all these non-essential government function are gone. So why are they there in the first place?
This cure for this pandemic is becoming worse than the disease. The government is acting like an incompetent fire department, and I can’t thank firefighters enough for what they do, but if your home is not destroyed before the fire department arrives, it will be after they leave.
This shutdown is forcing very undesirable human traits to infect the public psyche: apathy, greed and complacency! Socialism does not work because they always run out of people who want to work for their money. The government is giving away our money, like a drug, to addict the country to a socialistic government system. It is reaching the point where they want to keep this gravy train going to soak the country for more money to bailout poorly managed state governments.
These bureaucrats, who are the non-essential functions in government, know this. They want to elect sugar daddies into power by making it worse so they can claim they know how to fix it. Why was the country shut down for this pandemic? Sweden did not shut down and a similar percentage of deaths per capita have occurred.
There is an old investment adage: it is never the one who figures it out, but the one who figures it out FIRST will make the money. Sooner or later we will all realize what is happening, but usually after the point of no return is reached.
Einstein always looked for similarities and consistencies when trying to solve a problem. Differences are noise that is not useful. He always look for consistencies that caused the difference to predict a logical outcomes. This situation is not different. Free market forces and risk analysis need to be used again. That is what made this country great, not feel good populism by being overly risk adverse.
Please shelter in place and social distance if you feel vulnerable. The unintended consequences of trying to stop the inevitable, will be considerably worse unless we get back to work.
This is Keith Kube wishing you the best in making the world a better place.
Bumper: Keith has a regular commentary on WJAG 780 radio at 7:40 on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. Check his website www.keithkube.com for past editorials.
