Essays in Idleness

The Batflu virus isn’t much use to society, according to unspoken consensus. In pragmatic terms, it doesn’t do anything productive. Rather it prevents us from doing things; such as breathing, in extreme cases. But then I don’t think Pragmatism has much use, either. It isn’t good at accounting for paradox, whereas, the use of things is often paradoxical. A contagion might kill off what “needed killin’,” in that fine old Texas phrase. One thinks of the tourist industry, for example. Yet having only very partial views, we may not know what most needs killin’, and often we jump to unfortunate conclusions.

A parallel case may be found in the “civil” services, regulating authorities, non-profits, &c. Jobs in these areas, which command high salaries and pensions, and present delicious opportunities for graft, are outwardly the opposite of productive. They parasitically consume, on a colossal scale,  the resources of the productive.

Look into almost any kind of “charitable” activity, such as social work, and one will find that only a tiny proportion of the cash “trickles down” to the characteristically desperate “clients.” And when it does, they use it to buy not only drugs and licker, but truly useless things, such as lottery tickets.

“Education” systems, in the modern West, exist chiefly to enrich semi-literate, unionized schoolteachers. In many parts of Ontario, for instance, a teacher will make at least double what the average parents make, and therefore feel justified in sneering. The teachers naturally consider that the little ones belong to them, for they are the necessary source of their income. What rights should parents have to interfere in their upbringing?

My best argument for the parasite class (always granting that some may be sincere), is that they protect society from gathering excessive wealth, or living lives of too much ease. Without them, we might easily suffer from the vices associated with too much freedom.

How I preferred the deadbeat, layabout, very English London of the Labour Party, when I lived there in the ‘seventies — to the cosmopolitan, rich, over-swept London of the Thatcher years. There are some advantages to socialism.

And there are other arguments, too, for putting depraved Leftists in power, though on examination they reveal special pleading. For instance, teachers may claim to offer child-minding services, so that mothers, especially, can go to work. But it is because heavy taxation requires the dual income, or women to do horrible and demeaning paid work when their husbands run away, that these services were ever made necessary.

The government does, arguably, “create” employment. Among the most farcical examples are the tax lawyers and consultants. Taxpayers need these to navigate incredibly elaborate tax codes, for their own protection. Only a professional can find the loopholes. Whereas, a comprehensible, flat tax system would put all these “experts” out of business. It would shrink revenue departments spectacularly, and by extension, threaten to shrink taxes. To a professional politician, this would never do. It would shrink his power.

I have come to think of the Batflu lockdowns, and the race riots, as two heads upon a single revolutionary beast, the object of whom is to gain state power. The lockdowns were and are based on fraudulent, scientistic claims; they are by now too obviously a power trip by increasingly demented control freaks, not only at the governor level, but throughout the bureaucracies. Wild efforts must be made to sustain them. Somehow they must, with the help of the media trolls, keep the general public scared — lest they think for themselves, and become disobedient. But the panic of governments is overdone. So long as “the peeple” are still wearing masks, their message is working.

Meanwhile, the majority of those who populate the Black-Lives-Matter “peaceful demonstrations” (i.e. race riots with looting, arson, and gunplay), are young and lily white. They, and their political patrons, can hardly be demonstrating for the black people, whose economic and social interests are being intentionally hurt. The young, and radicalized in our universities, look forward to paying off their crippling student debts with careers in a much expanded nomenklatura, that will enforce the rioters’ demands. For the moment all they have to do is terrorize and demoralize an electorate that stands in their way — and hope that their riots don’t backfire.

Think of all the jobs to be created, simply for censoring the comments in rightwing blogs.