USA 2020 Elections: Thread

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Govt Leftists don't actually care about the poor...

City On Fire: Over Half Of LA County Blazes Caused by Homeless
“The amount of crime is so out of hand that it is literally not
possible for the police to deal with"
California is run by Democrats for decades.


https://cdn.mises.org/Intellectuals%20and%20Socialism_4.pdf
https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2021/05/20/2020_exploded_the_myth_about_left_wing_love_of_the_poor_777954.html

2020 Exploded The Myth About Left Wing Love Of The Poor
Jeffrey Tucker

An axiom everyone picks up in college – and in nearly the whole of
media culture too – is that people who favor a market economy
disregard everyone but the privileged rich (itself a euphemism). It’s
a great rhetorical trick because the presumption keeps backers of
freedom on the hot seat, permanently.

You know the ropes. Trickle down is a myth, so why are we shilling for
the rich? What’s this fetish for big business? Why do we disregard the
poor, the workers, the marginalized, the vulnerable? Why is our
thinking so solipsistically exclusionary of people unlike ourselves?

If the experience of 2020 doesn’t change this fake narrative, nothing
will. The reality is that with few exceptions, the people who identify
as “left of center” became the champions of lockdowns, as if this were
a normal policy any civilized country would deploy in the event of a
new pathogen.

I never would have believed it, and some of my friends on the left are
shocked by it all. They are in the minority among their tribe. Still
there it was, a clear ideological bias for lockdowns that strongly
tilted left.

Let us begin with the great slogan of Spring 2020: “Stay home and stay
safe.” Twitter even invented a little house icon that appeared when
you typed it. It became a kind of mantra that the way to control this
disease is not to leave your house. Have your meals delivered. Watch
your church services on your computer. Meet with friends only through
Zoom. Get out on the roads only if you have to, and do not travel no
matter what.

You know what’s amazing about this? Only about one third of workers
could comply with this dictate. In bigger cities, it was closer to 40%
but much lower in more rural areas. The newspapers and television
reporters, to say nothing of social media, were speaking to what’s
come to be known as the Zoom class, the people who work in digital
media, finance, insurance, banking, and other such high-end areas.

What about the rest? Who precisely is going to deliver these
groceries? Who is going to work in the hospitals? What precisely
happens to all the workers in the restaurants, hotels, airports,
theaters, and churches? Who will cut hair, trim lawns, build houses,
drive trucks? Who will be operating the lockdown economy and keep us
all from starving?

It was like no one really cared, certainly not most of those elites
who identify as left of center.

What emerged in the lockdown culture of 2020 was a new feudalism, or,
worse, a new totalitarianism. Society became almost immediately split
down the middle, essential and nonessential workers. Some of the
essentials could work on laptops and some could not, but in any case,
their paychecks kept arriving. The nonessentials were declared to be
dispensable. Hardly any of TV’s talking heads gave a flying fig.

And it’s true, the nonessentials are not the blue checkmark people on
Twitter. You never see them being interviewed by CNN or MSNBC. They do
not have Wikipedia pages. They do not write academic articles. They
aren’t judges or public-health bureaucrats. They don’t have the
resources to run for public office. They don’t read the New York
Times. They can’t even afford access to attorneys, so it’s not as easy
as somehow suing the system that exploited them.

We are talking about the silent two thirds, people who might be in the
majority but because of their economic and professional position were
not granted access to protest, much less change the system. They
became the fodder in other people’s plots and plans to enact a grand
new social/political experiment in disease mitigation.

Whatever happened to concern for the working class, the poor, the
marginalized, the minorities, such as women with children who left the
workforce in droves to care for children who were shut out of schools
for a year? In other words, what of the tropes about social concern
that have animated the left for the better part of a century?

And so much for the rights of women, especially women of color!

    “Four times as many women over the age of 20 dropped out of the
labor force in September (2020) compared to men,” reports the
Washington Examiner.

    “When school started up last fall, roughly 865,000 women had
dropped out of the labor force in September, compared to 216,000 men.”

What about the sick? Diagnosis for 6 cancers dropped 46%. For breast
cancer in particular, diagnosis collapsed by 50% due to lack of
screenings. Visits to the emergency room fell by half. There was a
collapse in diagnosis of appendicitis, heart attack, and stroke. As
many as 40% of Americans reported last year to be struggling with
substance abuse and mental health disorders. You would never believe
this one: health care spending during a pandemic actually fell by 6%,
mainly because people were locked out of their doctor's offices and
hospitals.

This is some serious collateral damage and it massively and
disproportionately affected the working poor, the vulnerable, and the
marginalized. Where was the concern? Where was the sympathy? The very
people who have paraded their social virtues for many decades fell
silent. It was especially egregious to observe the lack of concern for
schoolchildren, who lost their connection to their communities and got
lost. Reports of child abuse fell by 18% during lockdowns. It’s not as
if actual abuse and neglect fell by that much. It just became
invisible.

We could go on with this for an entire book but let’s look briefly at
small business. Nearly half of restaurants closed or are expected to
do so, with their workers unemployed. A quarter of small businesses
already closed, and nearly half had to lay off workers. Remember that
the next time some supporter of lockdowns preaches fealty to the cause
of helping small business. Forget subsidies; how about the basic right
to operate a business?

I’ve puzzled about this strange disconnect for the better part of a
year. My conclusion is that left-wing ideology has evolved to become a
highly selfish ruling class vision that only purports to love the poor
and so on in the abstract. In real life, the people who preach
socialist principles have very little if any connection to the real
stuff of life, exactly as we’ve seen over the last year, and in fact
care very little about those who win from freedom and lose from the
despotism they imagine to be better.

In 1949, F.A. Hayek worried that as we become ever more prosperous the
ranks of the “intellectual class” would grow and become injurious to
the common good. “The class does not consist of only journalists,
teachers, ministers, lecturers, publicists, radio commentators,
writers of fiction,” he wrote. “The class also includes many
professional men and technicians, such as scientists and doctors, who
through their habitual intercourse with the printed word become
carriers of new ideas outside their own fields and who, because of
their expert knowledge of their own subjects, are listened with
respect on most others.”

    “It is the intellectuals,” Hayek continued, “in this sense who
decide what views and opinions are to reach us, which facts are
important enough to be told to us, and in what form and from what
angle they are to be presented. Whether we shall ever learn of the
results of the work of the expert and the original thinker depends
mainly on their decision.”

If that was true in 1949, how much more so today, now the growth of
the intellectual class, real and imagined, has grown to become a
sizeable swath of the workforce? As for everyone else, they felt
browbeat, bullied, intimidated, and ultimately crushed in a year in
which the intellectual class experimented with the unthinkable, even
as the virus itself ignored all the political machinations and did its
damage anyway.

Hayek ended his essay with the hope that we won’t have to experience
the worst of totalitarian ideology before we come to appreciate the
glorious virtues of a free society. Reading it (and I encourage you to
do so) is a chilling experience. He provides a perfect picture of how
the scientific-industrial ruling class elite accomplished its goals in
the last 14 months: by taking over the commanding heights of opinion.

The question now is: what happens next? Will we imagine a new liberty
or acquiesce to the new serfdom under which we live today? Lockdowns
came to us like a meteor that few even knew existed. If that doesn’t
shake your worldview, and your sense of who will stand up for basic
rights and liberties, nothing will.