Current Events > This pandemic proves the need for stress tested government ideas

(+) Yeah! (+)

There are some political philosophies out there that seem to attract younger individuals because they're novel and different, but the problem is they had never been stress tested.

Libertarianism wanted a very small state government. In Grover Norquist's words, he wanted "a government so small it can be flushed down the toilet". The alt-right, especially Steve Bannon preached "the deconstruction of the admin state". Small government advocates everywhere pushed for "small government" and they wanted to defund it.

This sort of ideas have been implemented in the last 4 years and.... then COVID happened. The result was that we were woefully unprepared.

The pandemic task force? It was dismantled. Many CDC positions were cut. There was no funding to appropriately scan people at airports. We have no test kits every though other countries have. There is a N95 respirator shortage.

All of this could have been avoided. I feel the lesson here is, next time a candidate comes up with a radical idea of government, ask yourself, has it been stress tested? Because everything seems to work, until the next pandemic, or economic recession, or armed conflict, or other sort of crisis happens, and then we find out how woefully unprepared we were.