Page 7 - Discover Summer 2022

because employers are not paying enough.
That might be plausible if people were
applying for jobs, but they’re not. I’m aware
of several local businesses that have not
had anyone come in to apply for advertised
positions. It’s hard to blame pay rates when
nobody even asks how much you are paying.
To assist struggling businesses, the
government then began offering financial
grants to businesses, but for the most part it
was only to those businesses that employed
people. If a business was a one-man sole
proprietorship, apparently no help was
needed. Again, this money was pulled out of
thin air.
Other restrictions that were placed on
commerce soon resulted in a disruption of
supply chains. We all know the rule about
supply and demand, even those of us who
don’t think it is a valid economic tenet. The
fact is, anything that is in short supply will
have greater value than it would if it were
abundant. We see this in the real estate
market, which is now a “seller’s market”.
More people want to buy homes in this area
than there are homes available for sale, which
sometimes results in bidding wars.
I’m reminded of the poem about the old
lady who swallowed a fly. To catch the fly, she
swallowed a spider, and to catch the spider she
swallowed a bird, and so on, swallowing ever
increasingly large animals, each to catch the
previously swallowed critter. She finally dies
after swallowing a horse. Nonsensical though
it may be, it is an allegorical reflection of the
problems we are facing today as a nation.
Every time government steps in to save us,
things get worse. Our national economy took
a full scale beating in order to “flatten the
curve”. Children, who are the least susceptible
to COVID, were forced to stay locked in
their homes. Government then decided that
it must mandate vaccinations, in spite of the
debilitating side effects of at least one of the
vaccine variants, which resulted in a number
of deaths, and was eventually pulled from the
market.
The most frightening part of this entire
debacle is that anyone who questioned the
wisdom of the prescribed response was
silenced, and even threatened. The mere
statement of certain inconvenient facts
was considered borderline criminal. In the
meantime, greater than 99.7% of those who
were infected with the virus survived it.
Those who succumbed were people who had
“comorbidities”, a fancy way of saying that
they were in extremely poor health in one
form or another. So the government decided
that healthy people needed to fear this virus,
and be willing to be subjugated in order to
survive.
Some pundits have posited that all of
these efforts to save people may actually have
resulted in more deaths than if we had just
taken the usual steps to quarantine the sick,
instead of quarantining the healthy. Violent
crime is on the rise, inflation is spiraling,
goods are in short supply, domestic violence
and substance abuse have skyrocketed, and
demands on local charities have hit an all
time high. Government’s answer: Let’s double
down on the out of control spending. Yeah,
that’ll fix it.
We are getting ready to swallow a horse.
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