Norman, OK, police are now beginning to issue citations to businesses who are deemed “non-essential” yet refuse to shutter their store. A grave injustice is being committed against the majority of small businesses by forcing them to close, throwing many out of work and into desperation. The livelihoods of these “non-essential” workers should have been valued more highly when making a decision on the appropriate response to COVID-19, but it appears that at every level of government, it wasn’t even taken much into account. “Flatten the curve at all costs!” is turning out to have a tragically high price, one that our governing class is forcing the lower and middle classes to pay. And all in service to a fantastically unrealistic fear of an illness with a mortality rate almost identical to the seasonal flu. Why not quarantine the elderly and immunocompromised and allow the younger, healthier, employed citizens return to work? We might’ve avoided a total collapse of economic life, and the coming wave of “deaths of despair” that will hit by the tens of thousands.
Of course, Walmart and other big box chain stores are open for business,where we are all still free to congregate en masse, even if we can’t go to church. This begs the question: won’t these stores become hot zones for COVID-19, and won’t we all just contract it from the stores that remain open?
No government should have the power to deem anyone “non-essential”. It has been made clear that this power’s only function is to destroy lives.
We must also look more closely at the unchecked power of local governments. Mayors throughout the country have transformed overnight into tinpot authoritarians, reveling in their new-found power to bully non-compliant residents.
