Joe Biden, should he end up capturing the White House, has begun assembling his comrades for the subsequent effort of subduing the country. One of those is Dr. Michael Osterholm, head of the Center for Infectious Disease Research at the University of Minnesota. And he has an idea not just for subduing the country, but for locking it down by eliminating the constitutionally protected rights of all Americans.
Speaking to Yahoo Finance, Osterholm, who has joined the Biden camp as an “expert” science advisor on coronavirus issues, said that he favored a strict lockdown lasting up to six weeks to combat COVID-19.
Asked about current state-level actions versus a national approach, Osterholm said Americans need someone to tell them what to do.
“We need FDR moments right now. We need fireside chats. We need somebody to tell America this is what in the hell is gonna happen. And this what we gotta do about it in a way that they believe it, they understand it, they feel it, and they see that somebody is trying to lead them.”
This, alone, is quite an outrageous statement. The United States is not a dictatorship (yet), but here is Osterholm calling for a Stalin or a Mussolini to tell Americans what is going to be done to them.
And what he thinks should be done to all Americans is to put them out of work, close their businesses, stop their travel, and lock them in their homes under house arrest while putting everyone on the federal dole.
“We have a big pool of money out there that we could borrow at the historic low interest rates by the federal government. We could pay for a package right now to cover all of the wages, lost wages, for individual workers, for losses to small companies to medium-sized companies, for cities, states, county governments — we could do all of that. If we did that, then we could lock down for 4 to 6 weeks.”
This is a disastrous plan, of course. No amount of fiat money from the Federal Reserve can make production happen and supply chains operate if people are not allowed to work and live normal lives. The economic system cannot be planned and will break down and fail under such conditions. Economic planning — for that is what lockdown entails — leads to economic devastation including supply shortages of goods and services, hunger, poverty and general misery.
That lockdowns are disastrous is something that Osterholm once recognized. In an op-ed in the Washington Post on March 21, he and co-author Mark Olshaker warned of the dangers of lockdowns.
“Consider the effect of shutting down offices, schools, transportation systems, restaurants, hotels, stores, theaters, concert halls, sporting events and other venues indefinitely and leaving all of their workers unemployed and on the public dole,” Osterholm and Olshaker wrote. “The likely result would be not just a depression but a complete economic breakdown, with countless permanently lost jobs, long before a vaccine is ready or natural immunity takes hold. We can’t have everyone stay home and still produce and distribute the basics needed to sustain life and fight the disease.”
Now, Osterholm has flip-flopped on the idea and is ready to impose just that kind of disaster on the American people.
In August, Osterholm laid out his plan in more detail in a New York Times op-ed he coauthored with Neel Kashkari, head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
“To successfully drive down our case rate to less than one per 100,000 people per day, we should mandate sheltering in place for everyone but the truly essential workers,” Osterholm and Kashkari wrote. “By that, we mean people must stay at home and leave only for essential reasons: food shopping and visits to doctors and pharmacies while wearing masks and washing hands frequently.”
Note the ominous reference to “truly essential workers.” Whoever these people are, they are not in the majority. Citing the leftist Economic Policy Institute, a “think tank” that has been heavily funded, historically, by labor unions, and which currently receives a large amount of funding from left-wing NGOs such as the Ford Foundation and the Soros Open Society Foundations, Osterholm and Kashkari state that “39 percent of workers in the United States are in essential categories.” Put another way, 61 percent of Americans are thus “non-essential.”
This should send chills down the spines of all Americans, as it is a very short leap from the concept of “non-essential” to “useless eater.” Everyone knows what, historically, left-wing socialists have done to those they’ve so deemed.
In general, Americans have never had to worry about whether or not their government would turn on them. But if a future ruling party believes only 39 percent of Americans are essential, what might they do to the other 61 percent?
Perhaps nothing. But the blatant disregard for the rule of law implied by the Osterholm plan points in an ominous direction.
The United States Constitution sets out the powers of the federal government, and splits them between the three branches, and splits them once again even within the legislative branch. The Founders did this to make it as difficult as possible for a ruling party to exercise uncontrolled power over the nation. Moreover, the Constitution’s first 10 amendments, the Bill of Rights, specifically limits the powers that the federal government may exercise.
As judge Andrew Napolitano observed in a recent column, the result is that “if governments interfere with our personal choices — and we have not consented to their power to interfere — the interference is invalid, unlawful and, because our personal choices are essentially protected from governmental interference by the Bill of Rights, unconstitutional.”
Succinctly, a national lockdown as proposed by commissar Osterholm is illegal. But, clearly, he does not care. The law, he appears to believe, does not apply to him or to those to whom he owes his allegiance and who would rule the country.
That way lies dictatorship. And as history so amply demonstrates, dictatorship is far more dangerous than any virus.
