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March
04
2020

Have we brewed a whirlwind?
Paul Craig Roberts

Dear friends, it is March and time for my quarterly call for your donations.  I am here for you as long as you want me. PCR

In the United States and throughout the Western World there is public distrust of public authorities and distrust among the public of one another.  Public authorities who do not like “conspiracy theories” do a lot to generate them.

We can see the public’s distrust of public authorities in the negligent response to the coronavirus.  The refusal of public authorities to stop incoming flights from infected countries has brought the dangerous virus into the Western World where inaction has so far prevailed.

Many virologists and other experts have criticized the inaction for seriously endangering the public.  I recently posted some of the expert statements made to public health authorities.  See:

Belgium:  https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/03/02/virologist-advises-belgium-health-minister-country-is-unprepared/ 

Germany:  https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/03/03/coronavirus-people-are-left-alone-in-the-face-of-a-rapidly-growing-virus-pandemic-some-thoughts-out-of-germany/ .

The refusals of public officials to take protective steps partly reside in ideological positions.  In Europe it is the European Union’s commitment to open borders and one Europe.  Closing the borders goes against the ideology that nationalism is the problem.

In other instances, Canada for example, the Prime Minister apparently considers it “racist” to protect Canadians from incoming flights from Iran.  See: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/03/02/we-cannot-protect-ourselves-because-travel-bans-are-racist/ .

The public sees inaction, disbelieves the feeble reasons given, and takes action to exhaust supplies of protective gear, storable foods, and everything else that disappears in a panic.  

As the inaction of public authorities is not understandable, all sorts of explanations arise.  For example: The Center for Disease Control (CDC) and the National Institute for Health (NIH) want the virus to spread, because the result will be bigger budgets;  the pharmaceutical companies (Big-Pharma) want the virus to spread, because it will bring them profits in mandatory vaccination whether it prevents or aids the spread of the virus;  governments want the virus to spread, because it allows them to impose martial law and abolish civil liberties;  elites are using the virus to reduce the world population;  governments are using the virus to reduce the strain of the elderly on health care systems and save money.  You can add to this list on your own.

One consequence of distrust of public authorities is lack of public cooperation in whatever response effort public authorities eventually mount.  Another consequence is that this lack of public cooperation justifies more coercion by government in order to deal with the threat.  Remember all of the violations of Constitutional protections made by the George W. Bush and Obama regimes in responst to 9/11 and the “terrorist threat.”  A big difference is that then there was no pandemic.

Distrust among the public of one another has been fomented by decades of feminist attacks on men and by decades of attacks on white people as “racists.”  These attacks have been institutionalized in the educational system.  They have been useful to feminist and “racial minorities” for advancement.  But they have atomized the population.  Where there was once community, no matter how unequal, there is the lack of community.  

The “sexist” and “racist” offences are more taught than felt and are reaching the point of absurdity.  Every day someone finds a slur in a word that has been part of the language for centuries before the presence in the population of racial minorities. These manufactured “offences” are used to excoriate men and to fire them from jobs and deny them professional careers.

Guillaume Durocher points out that community is also being destroyed by the decline in national community. The core entities that produced national communities or countries are being flooded out by incoming multitudes of immigrants from different cultures and value systems. Many on the left show open contempt for nationhood and national solidarity.  Durocher explains the collapse of national community here:  https://www.unz.com/gdurocher/towards-expat-nationalism/  

Now assaulting a fragmenting Western World comes a pandemic whose consequences cannot be known.  Is there enough leadership to overcome the long-inflicted damages and to pull the people together and to reestablish community?  With the Democrats politically weaponizing the coronavirus against President Trump, it does not seem so.

 

Hon. Paul Craig Roberts is the John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. A former editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal and columnist for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Service, he is a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles and a columnist for Investor's Business Daily. In 1992 he received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 1993 the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of the top seven journalists.

He was Distinguished Fellow at the Cato Institute from 1993 to 1996. From 1982 through 1993, he held the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. During 1981-82 he served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy. President Reagan and Treasury Secretary Regan credited him with a major role in the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, and he was awarded the Treasury Department's Meritorious Service Award for "his outstanding contributions to the formulation of United States economic policy." From 1975 to 1978, Dr. Roberts served on the congressional staff where he drafted the Kemp-Roth bill and played a leading role in developing bipartisan support for a supply-side economic policy.

In 1987 the French government recognized him as "the artisan of a renewal in economic science and policy after half a century of state interventionism" and inducted him into the Legion of Honor.

Dr. Roberts' latest books are The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with IPE Fellow Lawrence Stratton, and published by Prima Publishing in May 2000, and Chile: Two Visions - The Allende-Pinochet Era, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen Araujo, and published in Spanish by Universidad Nacional Andres Bello in Santiago, Chile, in November 2000. The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen LaFollette Araujo, was published by Oxford University Press in 1997. A Spanish language edition was published by Oxford in 1999. The New Colorline: How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, was published by Regnery in 1995. A paperback edition was published in 1997. Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, co-authored with Karen LaFollette, was published by the Cato Institute in 1990. Harvard University Press published his book, The Supply-Side Revolution, in 1984. Widely reviewed and favorably received, the book was praised by Forbes as "a timely masterpiece that will have real impact on economic thinking in the years ahead." Dr. Roberts is the author of Alienation and the Soviet Economy, published in 1971 and republished in 1990. He is the author of Marx's Theory of Exchange, Alienation and Crisis, published in 1973 and republished in 1983. A Spanish language edition was published in 1974.

Dr. Roberts has held numerous academic appointments. He has contributed chapters to numerous books and has published many articles in journals of scholarship, including the Journal of Political Economy, Oxford Economic Papers, Journal of Law and Economics, Studies in Banking and Finance, Journal of Monetary Economics, Public Finance Quarterly, Public Choice, Classica et Mediaevalia, Ethics, Slavic Review, Soviet Studies, Rivista de Political Economica, and Zeitschrift fur Wirtschafspolitik. He has entries in the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Economics and the New Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance. He has contributed to Commentary, The Public Interest, The National Interest, Harper's, the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Fortune, London Times, The Financial Times, TLS, The Spectator, Il Sole 24 Ore, Le Figaro, Liberation, and the Nihon Keizai Shimbun. He has testified before committees of Congress on 30 occasions.

Dr. Roberts was educated at the Georgia Institute of Technology (B.S.), the University of Virginia (Ph.D.), the University of California at Berkeley and Oxford University where he was a member of Merton College.

He is listed in Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World, The Dictionary of International Biography, Outstanding People of the Twentieth Century, and 1000 Leaders of World Influence. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: [email protected]

 

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