Let's chat about the value of "good" Government — by examining its opposite in the United States — COVID masks, for example

© 2021 Peter Free

 

26 January 2021

 

 

The "race" to competent government — why China is probably going to win

 

I'll start with a mundane example of the United States' COVID ineptitude.

 

And build a case from there.

 

 

This really should infuriate you

 

Dr. Fauci — that splendid example of an American apparatchik — says that double COVID masking is good. Just common sense, he adds. See:

 

 

Today, Dr. Fauci: Double masking against mutant coronavirus ‘just makes common sense’, NBC News (25 January 2021) (pertinent statement begins at 05:00 minutes into embedded video clip)

 

 

So, here we are a full year into COVID's American misery — and the US has still not geared up to produce the volume of N95 masks (or any other protective gear) — that would actually work to accomplish the goals that American leadership pretends to be pursuing.

 

 

It ain't all Trump's fault

 

Not by a long shot. American institutions have been abysmally failing for decades.

 

Trump did not turn the CDC, NIH and FDA into the miserable incompetencies that they have become, all by himself.

 

 

Square one — societal basics

 

For those who have forgotten, or never knew, what mildly effective Government looks like, watch this video from Professor Richard D. Wolff:

 

 

Democracy at Work, Economic Update: The Economics Lesson Taught by the Pandemic, YouTube (25 January 2021)

 

 

Government that gets necessary things done — is a commonsense endeavor

 

But in the United States, effective Government has been intentionally stamped out.

 

Instead, we have been propagandistically busy letting Free Market ideologues, rampaging Corporatists and Oligarchy-owned Congress strip our lives away.

 

Government is "bad" in the US because corporations, Fat Cats and their lackeys in Congress and the Presidency have (on purpose) made it so.

 

 

"Freedom"

 

I have repeatedly attacked COVID Maoists in the US, not because Government should not have intervened in the pandemic — but because American interferences were:

 

 

completely half-assed

 

capriciously imposed

 

inequitably distributed

 

not based on evidence

 

and even

 

intentionally avoided gathering evidence . . .

 

 

. . . thus resulting, in total, in a massive and epidemiologically ineffective squashing of have-nots to benefit haves.

 

 

Contrast

 

Contrast everybody's favorite obscenely totalitarian regime, the People's Republic of China.

 

It used past Asian experience with SARS (first type) to make "best guess" (admittedly draconian) interventions, when COVID showed up.

 

These were equitably imposed. Everyone got blasted with imprisonments at home. No nonsense allowed anywhere.

 

Pertinently, with regard to governmental credibility (accorded by citizens to national leadership) — as Professor Wolff points out — the biggest difference between the US and China has been that China's government has been rapidly pushing most of its population "upward" in material wealth for decades. Its citizens recognize that.

 

Chinese authorities are accorded respect that American leadership lacks because China's government can make a reasonably defensible argument that it has the interests of the entire population at heart. And furthermore, it is competent enough to achieve what it says it is going to.

 

Chinese folk have (hypothetically) traded American ideas of individualistically expressed freedoms for a strong government that raises the entire "community" upward. In return, for example, China's economy is the only economy that expanded, during the COVID pandemic.

 

Talk about effective Chinese leadership.

 

 

Meanwhile, in the US . . .

 

. . . crickets.

 

One year into the pandemic, and Americans are still essentially being told to turn our cotton underwear into double-layered COVID masks.

 

Pathetic.

 

 

Do you think that this American model of rapacious corporatism . . .

 

. . . and continually battling (propagandistically inspired) divisiveness — is going to keep up with China's authoritarian, but community-inspired economic competence?

 

We already know the answer to this question.

 

This is why the American Military Industrial Complex is fomenting war with the People's Republic.

 

The corporate leeches — who comprise the MIC — recognize the downward spiral that American greed, imperialistic parasitism and gross incompetence have inscribed in our easily predictable future.

 

When everything (and everyone) is just a body to be pillaged, one soon runs out of bodies.

 

 

This difference . . .

 

. . . between:

 

 

actively generating and enhancing community

 

versus

 

fostering individually exercised parasitism . . .

 

 

. . . is the primary contrast between economically developed Asian cultures and our own.

 

Community matters in developed Asia. This is true, whether one is in "free" South Korea and Taiwan, or in "totalitarian" China.

 

And, as a direct result of that emphasis on community's wellbeing, leadership in these nations is expected to be competent. When it is, the "Social Contract" remains in credible effect.

 

 

The moral? — Irony

 

Sadly, for us, that the concept of trading some libertarian (individual) freedoms in favor of creating an effective and Government-involved community is best demonstrated in Asia. And not at all in the (so-called) west, which created and then ignored it.

 

So, be sure to make your double-layered mask. No N95s for you in the United States.

 

And maybe you can raid a warehouse for your dose of undistributed COVID vaccine. Or something.