OUR DARKEST HOUR - Why the COVID scare is a pale cardboard cut-out of the coming moment of truth for governments and the economies.

 

OUR DARKEST HOUR



Why the COVID scare is a pale cardboard cut-out of the coming moment of truth for governments and the economies.



I understand. It's an immediate peril over which individuals have no control.

These kind of crisis are the REAL “suspension of disbelief”, since the value of cooperation, however imperfect, is now much higher than “freedom”. That's where all the extraordinary measures limiting people come from. However, we should not forget a number of problems, some about the past, and some about the future.

In reality, the problems of the past are two:

One, we had SARS in 20031; Yet, no one so far has done an After Action Report on the inadequacy of the plans about pandemic defence, plans for which all countries set up between 2004 and 20072. Just to put my two cents in: When lock-down was enacted, the general population had no clues about how to act in a lock-down, what kind of medical and non medical supplies one should stock at home, what kind of behaviour was the best to avoid exposure, etc. Of course, I am the kind of person who stocks Potassium / Iodine tablets (if you are an impressionable person: DON'T GOOGLE IT!), but it's far easier to help people if they are aware of the kind of help they need than issuing Decrees (or Ukase or Firman) on an accelerated schedule.



Then, from where I sit there is a second and more worrying problem: COVID has emerged in the open between January and March, and governments the world over still call it an “Emergency”. Nope, kids: and emergency is when something that wasn't there before happens suddenly. Yet, the Italian government is determined to enact emergency powers lasting well into 20213. For the sake of peace let's disregard, for the duration of the COVID problem, all my worries about power grabs and relaxation of democratic guarantees, yet at least a parliamentary check should be warranted, at least to save face. Interestingly enough, we can see what happens where there are lingering traces of independent judiciary: the Michigan High Court voided a state emergency declaration by Gov. Whitmer

on the ground that extending the terms would nullify their “emergency” status.4 But the most beautiful part was a quote:

the Michigan Supreme Court quoted Montesquieu: “When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty.”

Clearly, Liberty is not Italy's guiding light.



But enough of the current gloom, plenty of pundits are working on that already. How about the FUTURE gloom?



You see, there are a number of things distinctly lacking in all those “Emergency measures”. One is a clear reference to any proof of usefulness, which given that since the start of the epidemic practically all measures have been implemented in some sort on a sufficient scale somewhere, should not be that hard to research and include in general information: Why masks? Why masks in the open? What kind of distancing works? Yet, like Roman Dictators, political authorities are immune to responsibility, even when time doesn't press any more.

Then there's the other big issue, the one that keeps me awake at night: No reference to a return to normalcy, nay of a definition of normalcy is ever described in the decrees. Non Italians should be aware at this point that Europe lacks a proper “Bill of Rights”, exactly in the same way that Italy lacks that part of the Constitution: The individual is not PROTECTED from the state, but it (and I use “It” on purpose, given the relative powers) is allowed to go through the judiciary to obtain eventual justice years down the road. In Italy, “YEARS” should be written in capital letters, since after a first degree judgement has been passed against someone, there is NO statute of limitations.... and Justice can go back up to ten years.

That, coupled with the fact that the Recovery Fund is anything but since it neither seeks recovery nor it is a “fund” (it's in fact additional indebtedness), caught me asking: “what will happen when we are finally OUT of COVID?”

In none of the emergency measures there is anything but token “lapse” clauses, that are not exactly reassuring since they enshrine that the powers that be are never liable for any bad mistake they do in enforcing them, while the general population (especially the true dispossessed of our age, small business owners) WILL pay for their mistakes. In today's news, there were protests in Paris at a possible lock-down of Restaurants and other amenities. Expect that to become widespread. So, when the economic wreckage succeeds the pandemic, it is very hard for me to foretell a clear dawn to a new era of individual freedom.

If anything, I am afraid that wresting at least a measurable chunk of the emergency powers back may take something more visible than voting for Y or X, especially for Italy, which adds a very old penchant for having the state reign as supreme to the bad consequences of belonging to the European Union, which having lost in the UK the last lingering remnant of the free market school of Lady Thatcher and Ronald Reagan looks more and more like a mainland China with some minor error correction. For example, the siren song of “unity” and “coordinated responses” have all but quashed any form of check on which initial measures worked or did not work. My daughter lives in Sweden, she was duly scared by the initial deafening campaign depicting that country something between North Korea and Somalia in terms of its COVID response, and when the storm abated, due to the data coming out of all countries, she went back to her usual smiling self and becoming almost impossible to contact due to her frenetic social life (Yes, I tried to set up a call today. Answer: “I am leaving for an Island, can we do tomorrow?”). Yet, no country is questioning its own response, if not by adhering to higher authorities, which is alas the standard bureaucratic response. On top of “raising taxes”, of course.

I think that when COVID will either be defeated or simply vanish, as all flu types do, irrespective of the casualties and solutions, populations trained to obey in hardship will find they do not have either the chance or will to fight to get the economic and personal freedom back . And that will be a HUGE economic problem, since contrary to lore, economists and politicians do NOT engineer growth. Enterprising individuals do, and if you train that trait out of them, they won't have even that quite small amount of initiative necessary to build new things. Moreover, it would be helpful if those few souls were even moderately numerate in basic micro and macroeconomics. Yet, if they do, they might decide that they don't like the new legal and debt setup very much. In a weird romantic way, I still think new enterprise formation is a key indicator of economic health, and what I see two years down the road is not what I like.









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