Ron Paul writes about the lockdowns.....
"From California to New Jersey, Americans are protesting in the streets. They are demanding an end to house arrest orders given by government officials over a virus outbreak that even according to the latest US government numbers will claim fewer lives than the seasonal flu outbreak of 2017-2018.
Across the US, millions of businesses have been shut down by “executive order” and the unemployment rate has skyrocketed to levels not seen since the Great Depression. Americans, who have seen their real wages decline thanks to Federal Reserve monetary malpractice, are finding themselves thrust into poverty and standing in breadlines. It is like a horror movie, but it’s real.
Last week the UN Secretary General warned that a global recession resulting from the worldwide coronavirus lockdown could cause “hundreds of thousands of additional child deaths per year.” As of this writing, less than 170,000 have been reported to have died from the coronavirus worldwide.
Many Americans have also died this past month because they were not able to get the medical care they needed. Cancer treatments have been indefinitely postponed. Life-saving surgeries have been put off to make room for coronavirus cases. Meanwhile hospitals are laying off thousands because the expected coronavirus cases have not come and the hospitals are partially empty.
Countries like Sweden that did not lock down their economy and place the population under house arrest are faring no worse than countries that did. Sweden’s deaths-per-million from coronavirus is lower than in many lockdown countries.
Likewise, US states that did not arrest citizens for merely walking on the beach are not doing worse than those that did. South Dakota governor Kristi Noem said last week, “we've been able to keep our businesses open and allow people to take on some personal responsibility." South Dakota has recorded a total of seven coronavirus deaths.
Kentucky, a strict lockdown state, is five times more populated than South Dakota, yet it has some 20 times more coronavirus deaths. If lockdown and house arrest are the answer, shouldn’t those numbers be reversed, with South Dakota seeing mass death while Kentucky dodges the coronavirus bullet?
When Anthony Fauci first warned that two million would die, there was a race among federal, state, and local officials to see who could rip up the Constitution fastest. Then Fauci told us if we do what he says only a quarter of a million would die. They locked America down even harder. Then, with little more than a shrug of the shoulders, they announced that a maximum of 60,000 would die, but maybe less. That is certainly terrible, but it’s just a high-average flu season.
Imagine if we had used even a fraction of the resources spent to lock down the entire population and focused on providing assistance and protection to the most vulnerable – the elderly and those with serious medical conditions. We could have protected these people and still had an economy to go back to when the virus had run its course. And it wouldn’t have cost us six trillion dollars either.
Governments have no right or authority to tell us what business or other activity is “essential.” Only in totalitarian states does the government claim this authority. We should encourage all those who are standing up peacefully and demanding an accounting from their elected leaders. They should not be able to get away with this. "
GK: Here in Los Angeles County, approx half of the work force is now unemployed.. If they continue these draconian (and totalitarian) measures, there will be millions of people who will be homeless, because they can no longer pay their rent, or have their homes foreclosed, because they could not make their mortgage payments. People will be looting grocery stores, and there will be violence.
It seems to me, this is what "they" want... the near-term goal being to make things look as ugly as possible, before the 2020 election.
This is uncharted territory.
I was 100% on board with the shut downs initially, until we had more data.
We have the data and science. Time to use it to start opening most of the country back up..............not everything but businesses for sure and other things that make common sense.
We know where its bad and really bad and where its not bad to almost nonexistent. We know where its increasing(very few spots) and where its been decreasing for some time (many places)
The cure is doing 100 times more damage than the disease. Every day, the damage from the cure exceeds the damage from the disease by a wider and wider margin.
The main reason to shut down was to avoid an apocalypse. Nobody could have known 5 weeks ago, when we were first realizing this was getting bad, if 10,000 people or 10,000,000 were going to die from this.
Even a 1% chance of 10 million or even 1 million can never be taken. It would have overwhelmed the medical system and would have taken out so many key people that we would have shut down just as bad and with 10 times the casualties.
But we're past that now.
It can get worse again in some spots when we re open..........but we close ONLY THOSE spots down.
We now have the data that we did not have a month ago. We know where its NOT bad and thats in most of the country. It's dumb to penalize counties with no cases to a low number of cases. They should remain open............until an outbreak happens. And we have the testing in place now that was not there before to do that promptly.
The way that Michigan is managing their crisis is a perfect example of how .........NOT to do it.
Michigan protests stay at home order
Started by metmike - April 15, 2020, 9:19 p.m.
While I do agree that the economy has been shut down too long and too aggressively, I have some disagreements with Ron Paul's logic:
Countries like Sweden that did not lock down their economy and place the population under house arrest are faring no worse than countries that did. Sweden’s deaths-per-million from coronavirus is lower than in many lockdown countries.
cutworm: Why did he not compare the US to Italy?
Kentucky, a strict lockdown state, is five times more populated than South Dakota, yet it has some 20 times more coronavirus deaths. If lockdown and house arrest are the answer, shouldn’t those numbers be reversed, with South Dakota seeing mass death while Kentucky dodges the coronavirus bullet?
Cutworm: It seems clear to me that higher population density, higher work place density , higher gatherings of people, are to contributing factors to the spread of the CCP virus, in those areas. therefore the logic fails do to half facts.
Imagine if we had used even a fraction of the resources spent to lock down the entire population and focused on providing assistance and protection to the most vulnerable – the elderly and those with serious medical conditions. We could have protected these people and still had an economy to go back to when the virus had run its course. And it wouldn’t have cost us six trillion dollars either.
Cutworm This is hind sight (providing assistance and protection to the most vulnerable – the elderly and those with serious medical conditions.) but at this point it should be the direction we take, as it is know known to be factual.
Cutworm : I do agree that most governors went to far, and we have progressed far down the slippery slope to being Venezuela
look at this map,... east humid, west dry.
yes the east has more population density, but the west coast is densely populated just like the east coast.
i have not seen any valid data that shows that places with stricter shutdown orders have fewer cases or deaths than places with more lax methods.
I am in favor of these lockdown protests that are taking place right now, all over the country. Peaceful protest is part of life in the US.
However, I don't understand why so many of the protestors brought guns to their rallies. What's the point???? It presents a wrong image to the public. These protests are not about the 2nd Amendment...these protests are about the People asking their government to stop its draconian approach to dealing with this crisis. There has to be a more reasonable approach to keep the virus from spreading, without destroying peoples' lives.
We have a debate within our own family about lock down vs open up the economy.
We have one person who is in favour of continuing the lock down due to the danger of a wave of infections due to people not willing to observe safe practices. Also those who rely on mass transit would be in more danger. There are many reasons why a person would be afraid of the virus
But, that was some time ago, when our "experts in disease knowledge" had us scared to death with these extremely high possible infections
Well : It turns out as many or more will become sick or die from the flue, car accidents, you name it
Now that we have more information or data we find out the flue is as dangerous to the elderly, w e don't shut down every winter because I might get the flue, we don't stop driving due to a possible fatal car accident or any number of risks to personal safety every day we wake up and go about our normal routine
Unless it can be proven there is a larger than acceptable source of infection occurring, such as a nursing or rest home, then we have to start doing business
If not then some people will get lazy and want money for staying home while others want to save their business or go back to work because for some reason the cheque is not in the bank account
We also need seasonal off shore workers in Ag . Good luck finding local workers to do those jobs. It just doesn't work that way.
I know most of you are not into economics but the world has trillions of dollars of debt. The world needs to produce and trade or the cash flow is not there to pay the debt. Nobody set up a model that had a complete shut down and no, or educed cash flow. When the payments are not made it travels up the ladder, not down as to who has the greater pain. Yes, many individuals will be wiped out with no cash flow. Either by a lost job or personal BK. But when the country is wiped out due to a lack of currency, usually USD, to pay sovereign debt then the whole country is plunged into depression as the country has defaulted on the natn'l debt. Everybody suffers in a depression, not just some of the citizens. That is when you have nationalization, food riots looting and so on. That can get really bad
So: considering the pros and cons I have to say we need to open up the country and world. We need to avoid trading with china as much as possible to punish them for what they did to the world, We need to slow the flow of USD into china as much as possible. China needs USD to buy oil and other raw materials. If we can slow the flow of USD into china that will hurt them a lot more than any silly trade war. We can seize china's 1 trillion of US treasuries as reparations for the harm done by covering up the virus and letting the world know what to expect. Germany paid reparations after WW1, so why not china, We are at war with china, we just don't use tanks and battle ships
We will use what we can and declare war with china on an economic front
We can win that war, if we change our methods. One thing we need is to be open for business, the same as china.
I know most of you won't follow the logic of my thinking, but you need to try and educate yourself to the bigger world economy
We are in survival mode and the more we know the better prepared we will be.
Some day the flow of dollars will stop for millions of people, unless we get back to work. If we continue to try and prop up the system, with more free money, the system will surely fail