Rebel TV E28 The End of the Pax Americana, Stability and Certainty and the Rise of Fascism

The End of the Pax Americana, Stability and Certainty and the Rise of Fascism
We have been privileged to live in a time and place of stability. For most of man's time on earth that has not been his fate. Thought history the next year or even the next day was not a certainty. Natural disasters, droughts, floods, or infestations could lead to starvation in no time. Death from disease was common. Any day a bunch of criminals or a criminal nation could take everything you own and sell you into slavery.
Since the end of World War Two most of the nations that made up the old British Empire have enjoyed a rare state of stability. No aggressor has invaded our shores. There is always food on the shelves of the grocery stores. Medical science has eradicated so many diseases that premature death from them is a tragedy instead of a normal part of life. People treat each other with civility and in most places violent crime is rare.
It is in these rare times that mankind is afforded the opportunity to advance. The great achievements of Greece and Rome were a result of the Pax Romana. So our own have been due to the Pax Americana and the Pax Britannia before it. If men and women can't think past the next day and need to work tirelessly for every meal there is little time left for musings on technology or philosophy. We have been very blessed. Until now.
2020 has shown us how fragile such a world really is. But this fairy tale world was not shattered by war and invasion. No meteor strike eradicated life on earth in a movie style Armageddon. It was not even the pandemic. Regardless of what the media or government tells us Covid is not the black death or the great plague, it is never going to kill even one thousandth of the population much less a third. No, this was no natural disaster. It was caused wholly and entirely by petty tyrants in governments around the world.
We are back to not knowing what is going to happen next year, next month or next week. We used to have the luxury of planning things years in advance. We could put money down on a cruise two years from now. We could make career decisions on the assumption that a well run business would be around for a while or plan to save up for additional schooling. We could book a venue for a wedding a year in advance, we could go back to a restaurant for an anniversary where a meeting took place ten or twenty years ago. We could make plans for the holidays. Now we can do none of that. We have no idea when some governor or a government is going to initiate another lockdown or stay at home order or decide certain businesses must close. Or if your holiday celebration can have no more than twenty five or ten or six people.
But it is not just the events in our personal lives that have been upended. These arbitrary decrees are destroying the prosperity that is the result of stability and certainty. Of course businesses have always had to deal with onerous and capricious government restrictions, regulations and taxes that changed all the time. But these changes happened slowly and incrementally. It gave businesses time to adapt. Now the changes happen overnight and the option to adapt does not exist. If the governor decrees that your bar or restaurant or gym or hair salon will close, that's it. Game over. You still have expenses; rent, electric, insurance but if you don't have much in savings, and a lot of small businesses don't, you won't last long. And what if the governor does allow you to open back up but at 25% capacity. Can you make it on that? And if you order inventory, particularly perishable inventory, and the decision is made to shut down again, then what? How can anyone run a business under those conditions?
Even more insidious is the government's decision to arbitrarily void private contracts, specifically rental and mortgage agreements. The owner of a rental still has to pay mortgages and taxes but the government has refused him the right to evict non paying tenants. How is that property owner supposed to survive especially when in one state they even decided to make him liable for the tenant's moving expenses! The word fascist is bandied about a lot but that is exactly what this is. We may own our property, we may own our business but the government decides exactly how we may use our property and how and when we run our business all the while taking a very large portion of the profits.
Not only do we have certain legal rights under the Constitution but that very Constitution states that the government was formed to “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” There is no justice when government arbitrarily picks winners and losers. There can be no tranquility when illegitimate power is exercised capriciously. The general welfare cannot be promoted when the government actively destroys certitude and there is no liberty under such despotism. The Declaration of Independence and our innate sense of justice tells us our duty when we find ourselves in a situation such as this.
When the government violates the people's rights, insurrection is, for the people and for each portion of the people, the most sacred of the rights and the most indispensible of duties. Marquis de Lafayette