Pirate's Cove

In other 1st World nations

You paying attention, Joe? Because what we're doing is not working https://t.co/RBLb4rCSBe

— William Teach2 ??????? #refuseresist (@WTeach2) February 6, 2022

But, here in the U.S., Progressives have something else on their minds

Like it or not, the government needs greater power to fight pandemics

“The army is sickly with the smallpox,” fretted General George Washington in 1776. He wasn’t exaggerating when he called the contagion our “most dangerous enemy” — smallpox and other diseases accounted for 90 percent of his army’s deaths. Ultimately, Washington commanded the troops to get inoculated despite their fear of the procedure.

Contagion is, once again, our most dangerous enemy. COVID-19 has killed more Americans than any war, right back to the Revolution. And, as Washington learned, pandemics threaten the United States as much as an enemy in the field. We normally reckon America’s competition with China, for example, by comparing military power and economic might. The rivalry may ultimately turn on how well each copes with the new world of global contagions.

Ordinary Smallpox had a mortality rate of 30%. Other forms were almost certain to cause death. Survivors were left with a bunch off issues through their lives. The vaccine also stops people from getting smallpox, from carrying it, and transmitting it. Period. Early work also dealt heavily with natural immunity measures.

Why is the world’s great superpower failing? Because it is not organized to face the danger. The Constitution does not prepare a complex globalized society to control pandemics. The founders were acutely aware of military threats and gave presidents sweeping authority to meet them. Alexis de Tocqueville was astonished by the commander in chief’s power. “The President of the United States,” he wrote, “possesses almost royal prerogatives” over the military.

But the Constitution conveys no such authority to combat biological threats whose casualties dwarf those of modern wars. The Supreme Court recently enforced the limitations when it struck down an OSHA requirement that large employers require vaccines or tests to combat COVID. The Court’s liberal dissenters put their finger on the national dilemma: “As disease and death continue to mount, this Court tells the agency that it cannot respond in the most effective way possible [and] undercuts the capacity of the responsible federal officials … to protect American workers from grave danger.”

You can guess where they want to go with this, right?

What should we do? First, there’s no getting around the need for a centralized authority to act in the face of a national crisis. Our political system evolved in an era when no one could have imagined an infectious threat that would rip through North America a week after it was first detected on the tip of Africa. Facing the problem will take changes in executive authority, Congressional process and bureaucratic capacity. Over time and hard experience, Americans vested their national government with sweeping powers over both war and the economy. Today infections pose as grave a threat as a military invasion, domestic insurrection, or economic crash. And the contagions will only get worse. We need to rethink the constraints on national leadership.

Go ahead and run with this, Democrats. We didn’t invest the power, they took it, and it’s very hard for citizens to fight back against the behemoth of the federal government. Give it a whirl on COVID, see how that goes. You think people are rebelling now? The same people called Trump an authoritarian, and the GOP Fascists, yet, they want more centralized authority for COVID, climate change, the economy, you name it.