Victor Davis Hanson of National Review Online sees disturbing developments in American society.
These are crazy times. A pandemic led to national quarantine; to self-induced recession; to riot, arson, and looting; to a contested election; and to a riot at the U.S. Capitol.
In response, are we focusing solely on upping the daily vaccination rate? Getting the country back to work? Opening the schools as the virus attenuates? Ensuring safety in the streets?
Or are we descending into a sort of madness?
It might have been understandable that trillions of dollars had to be borrowed to keep a suffocating economy breathing. But it makes little sense to keep borrowing $2 trillion a year to prime an economy now set to roar back with herd-like immunity on the horizon. Trillions of dollars in stimulus are already priming the economy. …
… Meanwhile, the United States will have to start paying down nearly $30 trillion in debt. But we seem more fixated on raising rather than reducing that astronomical obligation.
We are told that man-made, worldwide climate change — as in the now discarded term “global warming” — can best be addressed by massive dislocations in the U.S. economy.
The Biden administration plans to shut down coal plants. It will halt even nearly completed new gas and oil pipelines. It will cut back on fracking to embrace the multi-trillion-dollar “Green New Deal.”
Americans should pause and examine the utter disaster that unfolded recently in Texas and its environs. Parts of the American Southwest were covered in ice and snow for days. Nighttime temperatures crashed to near zero in some places. The state, under pressure, had been transitioning from its near-limitless and cheap reservoirs of natural gas and other fossil fuels to generating power through wind and solar.
But what happens to millions of Texans when wind turbines freeze up while storm clouds extinguish solar power?
