Lefty Rues Lack of 'Safety Net' From Bad Policy (!)

En route to other things, I ran across a remarkable column at CNN by Jill Filipovic. Its headline? "America Has a Problem. We, My Fellow Progressives, Must Admit It."

It's about the severe hardships caused by the prolonged and unnecessary school closures, particularly in "progressive" areas, during the early part of the Covid pandemic.

If you were hoping for a mea culpa or at least the beginnings of a serious bit of soul-searching, you will be disappointed, however.

Yes, Filipovic all but admits that progressives made a major policy blunder:

This should make the progressive-minded among us who supported school closures pause and ask ourselves if we got this one right -- and what we could learn from this whole debacle. [bold added]

And what follows seems promising enough, with its admission that the closures continued far longer -- and so had worse consequences here -- than elsewhere in the world.

But the post-mortem ends quickly if indeed it ever actually began. America lacks a "safety net," you see:

Politicians with nets scare me. (Image by Andrés Canchón, via Unsplash, license.)

The Trump and Biden administrations offered Americans much-needed financial relief, but, overwhelmingly, the backup plan when the nation fell apart was Mom: That's who was largely in charge of remote schooling and childcare, in addition to working for pay.

This middle-aged, male "Mom" is still too angry about being conscripted into an unpaid childcare workforce to be offended at the catch-all term, or to fall for the bait that -- yes -- women and minorities were affected most by this disaster.

No. I want you to get a load of the chutzpah of someone complaining that there isn't a government safety net against government-caused disasters! Wasn't the whole damned premise behind the failed policy of indefinite mass house arrest "safety?"

Of course, when your only tool is the government hammer, every problem -- including, we see now, those created by that hammer -- is a nail.

I leave as an exercise for the reader to tease out whether the remainder of the Filipovic piece is an example of someone (a) who believes her own propaganda, (b) is bereft of the ability to question the premise that absolutely everything is the government's job, or (c) is incredibly cynical about elections and the ability of her own readers to understand anything.

All I can see is a condescending and clueless political faction that has just caused lots of people lots of problems and, rather than question the propriety of central planning, confines its self-examination to thinking about how to "help" each of these groups/bribe them with goodies in the next election.

To borrow a phrase from the author Jason Riley, Please stop helping us!

No thanks.

The lesson for the rest of us is to quit voting for progressives, and to demand politicians who understand that the job of government is to create the necessary condition -- freedom -- for us to go out there, solve our own problems, and flourish.

"Safety nets" are worse than a myth for unimaginative losers: They are a trap and the sooner that the idea of government coercion being "safe" is consigned to the dustbin of history, the better.

-- CAV