We are almost at the one-year anniversary from when the U.S. government and state and local governments announced the start of “two weeks to flatten the curve”.

This meant that most of society would be shut down in order to stop the spread of a supposedly very deadly virus that is easily spread.

While this happened largely worldwide, it is disappointing that it happened in America, the supposed land of the free.  The American people never should have tolerated this.

I saw the phoniness of this whole thing from the start when it was announced that there was something like a 3 to 4 percent mortality rate coming out of China.  These were obviously phony statistics, yet the establishment and its media seemed to ignore this.  Most people just accepted this as fact.

The statistics were phony because they were based on counting the sickest people.  Even if everything else they were saying was true, and even if the testing was reliable, it is still a lie.  They were calculating the mortality rate by taking the number of deaths divided by the number of people who tested positive. The biggest problem with this is that the people being tested early on were the sickest people.  They were typically people going into the hospital.

But when it became obvious that these original phony projections were completely wrong, the American people had already accepted the vast increase in tyranny, mostly in the form of lockdowns.  So even if the mortality rate is 1% or 0.1% or 0.01%, we can’t be too cautious. After all, if preventing everyone from going to restaurants and concerts and sporting events means we can save a great grandmother somewhere (i.e., extend her life by a couple of months or a couple of years), then we should do it.  Of course, I don’t even necessarily buy this premise, but it is still absurd even if it were true.

The original excuse for lockdowns was two weeks to flatten the curve.  This was repeated endlessly at the time.  I’m sure your really smart friends explained to you how we don’t want to overwhelm the hospital system and that these measures were necessary to spread things out so as not to fill up all of the hospital beds at one time.

Of course, most hospitals never were overwhelmed.  In fact, back in March and April of 2020, most hospitals outside of the New York City area were mostly empty.  There still isn’t a shortage of beds in most places.  If anything, there have been shortages of healthcare workers because they have to stay home for two weeks when they get the sniffles or because they have to stay home for two weeks when one of their kids gets the sniffles.

There are many absurd things that have happened, and it is all based on propaganda.  The CDC changed the way it counts deaths back in March 2020.  To sum it up, if you test positive for COVID-19 and then you die, then you died because of COVID-19. This was a complete change in how deaths were determined before that with, say, the flu.

As a side note, there are people dying after getting vaccinated for COVID-19, but these are not considered deaths due to the vaccination.  They are coincidental.

So if you are 85 years old and get vaccinated and then die, it was just your time to go.  If you test positive for COVID and die, then you died because of COVID.  Got that?

There are many problems with all of the propaganda that has been put forth over the past year. The virus was never properly isolated, so we don’t even really know what we are dealing with.  The PCR tests are a complete disaster, as they put out false positives, which just inflate the already phony data.  Fauci himself said that tests run above 35 cycle thresholds (CT) are not accurate.  The number of cycles run mean how much the labs are magnifying the material. Yet, the CDC recommends labs run CTs up to 40, making the tests meaningless in many cases.  At the very least, there are a lot of false positives.

Even if the statistics were real, which they aren’t, we are constantly fed fear through the corporate media.  When have you ever seen a daily ticker of deaths due to heart disease or something else? And I don’t buy the argument that it is because heart disease isn’t contagious.  It is easily proven that most people who die of COVID (or really, with a COVID positive test) were elderly or had severe health issues to begin with.

The people who supposedly die of COVID are typically people who die.  They are old people, and they are people with severe health issues.

Ceding the Moral High Ground

Regardless of the lies and propaganda, the tyranny of lockdowns and other mandates never should have been tolerated.

If you are against the lockdowns, you may or may not be a libertarian.  But if you favor the lockdowns in any way, then you are not a libertarian.

It is nice to show charts on how outdoor dining doesn’t really cause the virus to spread. It is nice to show that states without lockdowns are faring just as well as states with heavy lockdowns. But in the end, it wouldn’t matter to me if it showed that lockdowns really do save lives.  I would still oppose them on libertarian grounds, and so should everyone else who cares about liberty.

In fact, if you have libertarian principles, then you never should have gone astray in the first place.  Maybe you thought the virus was really dangerous and that it was important to stay home, but it is never acceptable to permit the state to force you to stay at home or to shut down your business.

Let’s say that the virus had been properly isolated and was proven to be highly fatal.  Let’s say that the PCR tests are reliable. Let’s say that lockdowns and mask mandates do help prevent spreading.  It still doesn’t justify lockdowns or any other government interference.

This should be the starting point of every argument against this government tyranny.  It is an argument for property rights and freedom of association.

If there is a really deadly and contagious virus out there, then most people will take the level of caution they think is necessary.  You don’t need to force people at the point of a gun.  Some people will measure that the risk is worth it to continue operating their business or to do any number of other things.

I cringe when I hear a shutdown restaurant owner argue that dining is safe or that the virus can’t be traced to their establishment.  This is ceding the moral high ground to the lockdowners.  It doesn’t matter whether they are taking extra safety precautions or whether the virus is spreading at their restaurant.  It matters that it is their property and they should be able to use it how they want as long as they aren’t initiating force against others.

This is the time that all libertarians – true libertarians – need to argue forcefully and without shame for property rights and freedom of association.  We should never cede the moral high ground, as it is the other side that is employing violence against others.