Questioning the overreaction to the virus Dempanic

I haven't written much this week [Did you write at all? Ed.] because I've been waiting for the furore about the "Corona Crisis", aka the Dempanic, to die down. [You couldn't think of another verb phrase? Ed.] Only today have I started to hear a few small voices cautiously whispering that the pandemic (as the WHO calls it) isn't that bad, after all, and maybe it's time that our authoritarian governments start to take their feet off our necks.

I don't mean to downplay the seriousness of the problem, but I don't think it's the huge crisis that the liberal political and media elites want us to believe it is. Their real agenda is to increase the almighty state's control over every single thing that we do, not excluding the things we say and the things we think.

We the sheeple have been led into a huge trap, giving up our natural and constitutional freedoms to the ever-expanding, overweening nanny state. If those who lead us knew what they were doing, rather than making it up as they go along, it wouldn't be so bad. But they don't!

Not that this is anything knew. Here are a few wise words from The Peter Principle, by Dr Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull. For those who haven't read the book (published in 1969), the authors posit that things always go wrong, not because of Murphy's Law, but because, in a hierarchy, everyone tends to rise to his level of incompetence.

In the chapter headed Hierarchiology & Politics, Dr Peter quotes a student who said to him "I don't know whether the world is run by smart men who are...putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it." The good doctor says, in response, that his studies have shown that "capitalistic, socialistic, and communistic systems are characterized by the same accumulation of redundant and incompetent personnel."

Those who (allegedly) lead us say that they're merely following the advice of experts. The problem, as Dr Peter sees it, is that "in any economic or political crisis...many learned experts will prescribe many different remedies!" Why? Because
1) Many of the experts have actually reached their level of incompetence: their advice is nonsensical or irrelevant.
2) Some of them have sound teories, but are unable to put them into effect.
3) In any event, neither sound nor unsound proposals can be carried out efficiently, because the machinery of government is a vast series of interlocking hierarchies, riddled through and through with incompetence.

Agent 78 would agree. She is still waiting for some "emergency relief" promised weeks ago, to which she is clearly entitled. She has called two departments which might be tasked with doling out the elusive spondulix -- it's not clear which one actually has the responsibility -- but has been unable to get through on the phone. Indeed, she can't even get put on hold. Instead of saying "Hello", the computer at the other end just says "Try again tomorrow," or, believe it or not, "Try again next week."

The "cure" -- throwing money at the "crisis" -- is proving worse than the disease. No matter what they call their strategy, our governments are, in effect, printing money sufficient to ensure that everyone -- citizen or not, suffering or not -- will get some (eventually), and, at the next election, show their gratitude for being given their own money. The mind boggles.