Everyone has their breaking point, but apparently many people have yet to hit theirs, even with the lockdowns of 2020 and beyond.  In less than a year, many people, perhaps a majority, have basically accepted totalitarianism in the United States.

There isn’t a breaking point for some, especially those well off and those who work for the government and get a guaranteed paycheck.  The breaking point for many government workers is the funding of their agency and their job.

If some of these governors keep on destroying their states, they will find an increasingly shrinking tax base.  You can’t keep sucking money out of people when they either move out of state or are not working. If the federal government stops bailing out state and local governments, then maybe the politicians in the lockdown states will finally open things up when they are looking at steep budget cuts.

I feel more insecure going forward, knowing that the American people will just submit to authoritarianism because they are told lies by the authoritarians.

I was accustomed to this when it comes to war.  The politicians, the media, and the “intelligence” agencies can just make up any story to justify a war.  Saddam has weapons of mass destruction.  Assad gassed his own people.  Libya is supporting terrorism.  The excuse hasn’t mattered much.  The people willingly go along and give the military a green light.

When it comes to war though, it happens overseas.  The American people suffer no direct consequences for being wrong and for submitting to authoritarianism.  They don’t even have their taxes hiked.  They pay for it through monetary inflation (dollar depreciation), but most people don’t understand this or think it through.  So the politicians get away with lying about war.

I didn’t think they could get away with implementing authoritarianism at home.  It isn’t on the same scale as a war, as governments are generally not directly killing people.  But the lockdowns and stay-at-home orders have been devastating nonetheless, and they have shattered many millions of lives.

It is easy for a Hollywood celebrity to take a video telling everyone that “we’re all in this together”.  They say this in their giant house with the big pool in the background.

Where are the advocates for the hundreds of thousands of small business owners who were forced to shut their businesses?  Many of these are permanent.  Where is the political left?  These are the people who decry inequality and big corporations. The lockdowns that most of the left have supported have created greater inequality, as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.  They have also destroyed small businesses to the benefit of large corporations.

Dying With a Vaccine, Dying of COVID

Now that vaccines are being pushed, it is inevitable that there will be side effects.  These will include reactions and likely even death.  But it isn’t always easy to identify cause and effect.  This is something that the COVID hysterics won’t admit to when it comes to the virus.

There are establishment outlets warning that just because someone dies after taking a vaccine, it doesn’t mean that they died of the vaccine.  When you have thousands of people getting vaccinated every single day, including many elderly people, you are going to have a few people who would have died anyway.

Yes.  This is what they are actually saying.  In other words, they’re saying the exact same thing that others of us have been trying to point out since March 2020 about COVID-19.  It’s mostly old people and really unhealthy people dying “of” COVID-19, according to the CDC. The people who are supposedly dying of COVID are people who generally die.

So this is the logic of the COVID hysterics.  If you get a COVID vaccine and die, it is a coincidence.  The person would have died anyway.  If you test positive for COVID and die, then you died because of COVID.  There is no way you would have died without it.

When people buy this kind of logic, perhaps they deserve to be enslaved.

We’re still waiting on the final mortality numbers for 2020, but they look to be somewhat in line with what would have been expected without any “pandemic”.  If anything, it looks like it was younger people who saw an increase of mortality due to things like depression, suicide, and drug overdoses.

Admittedly, it gets tricky because there are a lot of variables with people staying at home more.  There are probably fewer traffic fatalities, but more depression-related deaths.  There were probably some people who survived because they didn’t go to a hospital or doctor’s office (medical mistakes are frequent), while others died prematurely because they didn’t go.

But when you look at the more open states within the United States, and you look at relatively open countries, the overall mortality isn’t significantly higher than usual, and they are not higher than the lockdown places.  We’ll hopefully get better data for the year 2020 in the coming weeks, but the point is that this isn’t much of a pandemic at all.  It is only a pandemic in fear and hysteria.

The Breaking Point of Small Business Owners

The hardest hit people are those who have lost work and those who own businesses that were shut down.  For people who already worked at a low wage, they can probably find a replacement job in most cases.  Plus, the generous (generous by politicians using other people’s money) unemployment benefits are oftentimes paying a higher wage anyway.

I can imagine someone who was making $100,000 per year and supporting a family.  If that person loses their job, it would be quite difficult, as the unemployment payments won’t nearly cover the previous salary.

I believe the hardest hit are the small business owners.  Imagine owning a small clothing store.  You get shut down, while people go to Walmart or Target down the road, which are deemed “essential”.  But when you got to Walmart or Target, it is not as if the clothing departments were closed down and you could only buy groceries and household products.  Customers could still walk out of the big stores with clothing.

Restaurants have to be the hardest hit businesses.  This is especially true for restaurants that made most of their money from dine-in customers.  It’s easier for a fast food place to still make decent revenues from drive through services.

I have a lot of empathy for these business owners.  Thug politicians are putting them out of business.  But the people are enabling this.  They are consenting to the power acquired by these governors and mayors.  They aren’t all consenting, but there are enough of them that are.

These business owners are having their livelihood taken away from them.  It is very difficult to start and sustain a successful business. This is especially true for brick and mortar businesses.  They require a lot of startup capital too.

For many of these restaurant owners, they are seeing hundreds of thousands of dollars that they have saved and spent over the years vanishing with one unlawful executive order.

While I have a lot of empathy, they still have decisions to make.  For those in places like New York City or California, they probably should have seen the writing on the wall years earlier.  There is no way they could have predicted what would happen in 2020, but the creeping totalitarianism was evident.  The incredibly confiscatory taxation levels have long been a sign of trouble.

At what point do these people fold and move and never return?  If I lived in California, I would be doing everything in my power to get any money I can for what I have left.  I would move out of the state and never return.  It is hard to close down your business, especially if you have devoted years or decades of your life to it.  But at some point, you cannot deny reality.

I am not typically one who says we should just give up our fight for liberty and let everything go to hell.  At the same time though, you can’t keep fighting an uphill battle where you know you won’t win. The business owners in these non-business friendly states and cities are in a no-win situation other than just leaving.

If you lived in the Soviet Union in 1970, or if you lived in Nazi Germany in 1940, it probably wouldn’t have been wise to stay and fight for liberty.  At some point, the only option is to leave.

These business owners are Atlas.  They feel the weight of the world on their shoulders.  They just need to shrug.