That is what the post-coronavirus environment can be expected to look like, if, as governments hope, the recovery is V-shaped. If not, then greater interventions will be visited on the population to protect it from itself.
While not necessarily intentioned, there has been and will continue to be a dramatic transfer of freedom from individuals to the state, which the state is always reluctant to let go when the crisis passes. The evocation of a war against the virus is to facilitate the transfer of peoples’ freedom to the state, because that is what is required to fight a war. But when it’s over, the bureaucrats’ instincts are never to return freedoms.
In the vast majority of cases, win or lose, following a war it is usual for a nation to retain the measures adopted, dropping none of them. It might be called a transitional economy, kept in place with all the war-time restrictions until an exit path, inevitably to greater socialism, can be devised. And for America there is a war still to be fought against China for global domination, justifying yet more control.
Nanny meets fascist socialism
Welcome to the new post-coronavirus intensified socialism. As individuals we have given the state enormous power over our lives, which will almost certainly be consolidated. The direction of travel is clear. Not only can big brother censor us, but it can now track our movements more effectively than the old KGB. If you leave your home, leave your smartphone behind. Wear a wide-brimmed hat and change your gait, avoiding the cameras. Your money in the bank, or more correctly in your about-to-be-nationalised bank’s money credited to your account, can only be disposed of for state-regulated products by means of traceable transactions instead of old-fashioned cash.
Instead of the soviet, we have the nanny state. Nanny knows best. This is the real world of the 2020s. It is unnatural and will therefore eventually fail. In previous articles I have written about one aspect of its failure, and that is the impending collapse of unbacked state currencies. I have pointed out that central banks, and especially the Fed responsible for the world’s reserve currency, are embarking on an exercise in inflation designed, above all, to uphold the state by maintaining the values of its debt and therefore all other financial assets. If they fail, and they will because the task is too great, the currencies will fail as well, and remarkably quickly. Until then, free markets are a primal threat to the system and must not prevail.
Doubtless, deep state operatives everywhere believe that the threats from their own people can be contained. Taking that for granted, they are now moving on to contain threats from other states that don’t conform to the West’s democratic model. There is now much more propaganda coming out of America and the UK about the evil Chinese than the evil Chinese are disseminating about America and Britain.
The story being managed is of a devious state, somehow stealing our souls by selling us their technology. Mobile 5G puts China into our homes and controls our internet of everything. It will allow the Chinese to control us. What is not explained is why it is in China’s interest to abuse its customers in this way. What is not explained is why we, as individuals, will be better off not having Chinese goods and technology. And when Britain’s GCHQ intelligence and security division took Hua Wei’s equipment apart, they couldn’t find any evidence of Chinese state spyware anyway.
The irony in all this is that our democratic model, the nanny state, is cover for the same internal policies as those deployed by the Chinese, admittedly less vicious; but that is changing. Rather than communist-socialist, both Chinese communism and Western democracies are, properly defined, fascist-socialist. With communism, the state owns your cow and tells you what to do with it. With fascism, you own the cow and the state tells you what to do with it. In these simplistic, but not inaccurate terms, our governments increasingly follow the fascist creed adopted by the Chinese Communist Party after Mao’s death. Give it time and the intense Chinese-style suppression of free speech could become the defining feature of nanny’s management style as well.
Here we must note a fundamental truth. Socialists of either extreme do not see free markets as a rival, because they believe they are useful for progressing socialism towards desired ends. The true rival to your socialism is someone else’s socialism. Newly energized Western state socialism is to be pitted against Chinese state socialism. The World is about to get more dangerous.
- Source, Alasdair Macleod via James Turk's Goldmoney
