The COVID-19 pandemic offered an unprecedented excuse for wannabe authoritarians to stifle liberty.
To fight the virus, once unthinkable government controls abound. Entire economies have been shut down, businesses closed involuntarily, and people thrown out of work.
Contact-tracing apps were invented to alert the user when exposed to someone with the virus, but they also keep a clear record of individual movements.
Vaccine mandates enforced through phone-app-facilitated “passports” are now proliferating. Soon, continued employment or the ability to participate in society freely may depend on proving that one has received a vaccine.
OK, Wesley. That’s admittedly tough medicine, but it was necessitated as a public health measure to defeat a dangerous communicable disease. Once COVID-19 fades away or becomes endemic like the flu, everything returns to normal. Right?
Not if the technocrats get their way. COVID-19 whetted their appetite for power, and now they want their existing “temporary” sway over how we live to become a permanent fixture of society.
The question is how to get people to surrender more of their liberty. One potential plan would impose an international technocratic control in the name of preventing future pandemics.
Fighting global warming presents an even more ominous pretext for establishing the system of rule by experts. Restrictions on personal liberty have long been promoted as a necessary prophylactic to prevent environmental degradation. But now they’re being peddled as a means of protecting human health and wellness.
And the “good news”—from the autocratic perspective—is that, unlike COVID-19, the goal of “net-zero” carbon emissions, which we’re told must be imposed to keep us from boiling like a lobster in the pot, could never be achieved. Genius! That means the technocracy would never end.
A recent editorial in the Journal of Medical Ethics lays out the mindset.
“Many governments met the threat of the COVID-19 pandemic with unprecedented funding,” the editorial reads. “The environmental crisis demands a similar emergency response.”
See what I mean?
But it wouldn’t just be about spending more money. Only the most radical refashioning of society will do.
If that reads suspiciously like Dr. Fauci, that’s because technocrats all think alike.
“A PCA scheme would be ‘a national mandatory policy’ that would entail all adults receiving an equal tradable carbon allowance that reduces over time in line with national [carbon] targets,” the article reads.
Think World War II-style rationing coupons that limited individual purchases of gasoline and other commodities gone high tech, with lower allowances allowed with each passing year.
How would PCAs work? Individual allotments would be “deducted from the personal budget with every payment of transport fuel, home-heating fuels, and electricity bills,” according to the article.
But what if you exhausted your individual carbon allotment?
“People in shortage would be able to purchase additional units in the personal carbon market from those with excess to sell,” the authors assure us.
What that really means is that the rich could avoid giving up their private planes, since they could just buy up other people’s carbon allowances.
Apps would play a central role in enforcing PCAs.
“Recent studies show how COVID-19 contact tracing apps were successfully implemented with mandatory schemes in several East Asian countries such as China, Taiwan, and South Korea,” the article reads. “In these countries, the apps assessed the user’s travel history and health status, playing a key role in tracking infection.”
That technology would now be the means for imposing even more profoundly intrusive information-gathering about our personal conduct. The authors also said that “the many digital-tracing algorithms that were developed and tested provide initial valuable information for the design of future apps that—for example—estimate emissions on the basis of the tracking the user’s movement history.”
In other words, Big Expert would know where you’ve been, what you’ve bought, and who you’ve seen.
It wouldn’t just be apps, either.
“Advances in AI [artificial intelligence] ... promise to improve personalized feedback and advice,“ the article reads. ”Recent advances in smarter home and transport options make it possible to easily track and manage a large share of individuals’ emissions.” (And don’t forget about facial recognition technologies!)
“AI could be especially beneficial for PCA designs that also include food-and-consumption-related emissions.”
In other words, if you eat that hamburger, we'll know and deduct it from your PCA accordingly! Good grief.
All of this would have once been beyond belief, the authors admit. But because millions of people cooperated with COVID-19 restrictions, “people may be more prepared to accept the tracking and limitations related to PCAs to achieve a safer climate.” In other words, emboldened by our compliance with supposedly temporary public health measures, our would-be technocrat overlords see a chance to seize permanent autocratic control.
Let’s not let them. We still have the power to thwart rule-by-experts, through democratic means. But if we lack the courage, if we acquiesce (again) to significant liberty constraints in the name of protecting health, the soft totalitarianism we'll have facilitated won’t be their fault. It will be ours.
