We can forget about seemingly simple fixes, like giving politicians the right to fire civil servants on the spot. Besides, giving clueless and corrupted politicians yet more power is not going to make matters better. Real reform will have to be dramatic, and it will come about only in dramatic circumstances.
In this essay, written from a broad economics perspective that incorporates an understanding of incentives, institutions, information, and power, we address the following three broad questions: (1) What were the roles and responsibilities of our institutions when faced with a threat like Covid? (2) What were the costs and benefits of the response that transpired? (3) What is the need and potential for institutional and social reform?
All those dreaming of control like to believe that they should rule the world in order to save it from some great danger. At the end of the day, this is simply a selfish fascist fantasy. The West is now encumbered by huge layers of parasites whose living is made out of exaggerating fears and stealing from people under the guise of saving them. The EU Commission is a particularly glaring example of such a group, but they are everywhere today: people just trying to make a buck, but costing their society dearly.
While the inner world of the Truth Speaker might be our last refuge, even if we feel we have nothing else and are completely overpowered by fanatical totalitarians who deny us all other space and companionship, we need to think and act much bigger. We are not that small or downtrodden, nor as isolated. We can win, and we will.
The reality is that people do still vote for their captors. They really do not want to admit the damage they have been party to, even if that damage is to their own children, their own businesses, and their own communities. The big takeaway is that what Charles MacKay said in 1841 really does hold: “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.” Recovering senses takes years, not months.
Newspapers, television, internet sites and social media have become merely instruments of manipulation at the service of elite interests. We have seen Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, and other commercial information companies which started out a mere decade or two ago with promises of independence and open media, end up as our censors in the past two years, enthusiastically adding their contributions to the long and bleak history of totalitarian deletions.
You can bet that this real transfer of power to the people will be strongly resisted by most elite individuals and institutions. They will loudly proclaim every single reason they can think of for why it is a crazy, impossible idea, and get “experts” from their networks to loudly profess the silliness of even proposing the notion. This vitriolic denigration is exactly the measure of how badly we need to loosen their grip on power and change the system they have entrenched for their own benefit.
The hounds have been released on Elon and that they won’t be called back because overt rebellion must be seen to be punished, lest he try again or others are encouraged by his example. But Elon has successfully powered through a lot of threats already, and seems to have locked in many new political alliances that can help tide him over during threats like those he presently faces. If he now lays low enough, he will eventually be forgiven.
This is the first clear instance of a globalist coup attempt. It would subvert national sovereignty worldwide by putting real power into the hands of an international group of bureaucrats. It has long been suspected that the authoritarian elites arisen during covid times would try to strengthen their positions by undermining nation states, and this 75th jamboree is the first solid evidence of this being true.
For young Germans, the covid period has a bittersweet silver lining. It has become clear, again, that the Nazis of the 1930s were entirely normal people, and that everyone else in the world can be a Nazi too. The Germans can release themselves from the belief that there is anything abnormally evil about being German. There is a potential Nazi in all of us.
The total disconnect between what Schwab’s pandemic conference said should be done and what actually happened during covid times is once again proof that Klaus is not led by his principles. If he were, he would have been loudly protesting what has gone on over the past two years. Instead, he is merely riding his “good luck” that the leaders who came to drink champagne at his events have now embraced him as their supposed figurehead.
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