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IPFS News Link • Government

Is The Coronavirus Panic Just a Version of the Washington Monument Syndrome on Steroids?

• https://www.targetliberty.com, Thomas DiLorenzo

In the 1960s when Congress refused to give the National Park Service all the budget dollars it was requesting the head of the "Service" responded by shutting down the Washington Monument, the most popular tourist attraction in D.C., along with other national parks.  It was not financially necessary to do so; the purpose was to inflict inconvenience on voters from every state in order to "bring Congress to its senses" and restore the agency's bloated budget.  It worked.

All other government bureaucracies at all levels of government quickly caught on.  Local governments would curtail police, ambulance, and garbage collection services if "stingy" taxpayers balked at tax increases; school districts cut school bus services to punish taxpayers for refusing to impose higher taxes on themselves; and on and on.  The Washington Monument Syndrome was born.

So you can imagine what popped into the head of Yours Truly upon reading that the Trump administration cut the budget of the CDC from $11.5 billion in 2018 to $7.7 billion in the 2020 budget.  The CDC bureaucracy responded by very successfully organizing mass hysteria over a cold virus that is inconsequential when compared to the flu or the incidence of tuberculosis in the U.S., among many other far more deadly diseases.


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