H. L. Mencken Was Right

Sitting at home these last few weeks, and wanting to keep in touch with people even though I don't necessarily see them on a daily or weekly schedule, I re-opened my facebook account.  And while having my facebook account open and seeing that others are doing well, as is Mrs. PolyKahr and I, I notice a lot of people that seem to be buying into the idea that staying at home, hunkering down, and not going out is the safest course of action.  I find myself being somewhat of a contrarian, however.

First, so far the statistics do not bear out that this particular coronavirus is especially deadly.  Of course, it has killed, but then so does the common cold and the seasonal flu.  And there are yet more deadly things out there that we don't necessarily go to defcon 1 over.  As Kevin McCullough explains in an article today at Townhall.com entitled It'sNot What She Said! It's 'Why Would We Ever Do It That Way?'

For some unexplained reason Birx/Fauci et al, are counting deaths and attributing their cause to COVID-19,even if the actual cause of death was not COVID-19.

For example: A patient gets admitted to the hospital for organ failure due to late stage cancer. If the patient comes into contact with COVID-19 in the hospital and the virus shows up in a test either before or after death, that’s a COVID-19 fatality. Same with a heart attack/heart disease. Same with fill in the blank.

Never mind that as a nation we lose 54,000 persons a month to heart disease, and 50,000 per month to cancer.

See what I mean? While each death is a tragedy to those that knew and loved him, or her, it is not a reason to abandon our normal duties which both allow us to feed and clothe ourselves and loved ones, and still serve the public at large by providing needed products and services.  And then there are the deaths of the unborn who are aborted every year.  Those deaths account for an estimated 620.000 deaths every year.  Yet no one is keeping these death totals and reporting them on the evening news.

Which brings us to the point of this post which is yet again to raise the issue of the loss of our Constitutional rights and civil liberties.  William Sullivan today, over at the American Thinker has a piece that asks a number of questions if we are to find the answer to whether governments at all levels have the right to shut down our economy in the name of saving us. The article can be found at Does A Health Emergency Give Government The Extraordinary Power To Violate Our Rights? Sullivan raises a number of issues that we should all consider, but concludes with this:

However, “after the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment,” the Bill of Rights was “made applicable to the states through the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,” according to Cornell’s Legal Information Institute. Therefore, according to the Supreme Court’s modern jurisprudential standard, individual Americans are equally protected by the incorporated Amendments of the Bill of Rights at the state and local level, much as they are protected at the federal level. In that sense, the suggestion that “municipalities and states” can legally infringe upon the constitutional protections of Americans is, in the modern lens, unequivocally false.

The Constitution certainly doesn’t enumerate federal powers to trample our protected rights (and heretofore, President Trump seems to be refreshingly aware and respectful of that limitation), and the modern comprehension of the Bill of Rights explicitly says that the state and local governments don’t have that power, either (despite most state and local government officials seeming drunk on this power that they imagine themselves to have).

So, since we can prove that state and local governments everywhere have no legal right to abuse our constitutional rights as they are currently doing on a daily basis, and it seems nothing short of obvious that America cannot sustain this complete economic shutdown for much longer without spending its future into oblivion and making dependents and subjects of its citizens -- now what?

I suspect that one of more of the cases of people who have been arrested will wind their way through the courts, which will find that the actions of these governments have been Unconstitutional. But by the time that happens, it will be old news. The media will give a giant yawn, and the next time there is a scare, the same thing will happen.

It just proves H. L. Mencken right: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”