Last week, Biden made a push for even more COVID funding as part of his administration's new strategy of “living with the virus.” Curiously enough, small government conservatives have been saying that this would have to be the strategy from day one.
Looking back, perhaps one of Biden’s worst mistakes was when he promised the following on the campaign trail in late 2020: “I’m never going to raise the white flag and surrender. We’re going to beat this virus. We’re going to get it under control, I promise you.” Controlling the virus and learning to live with it are two very different things.
Two years later and Biden's message is now this: There will be no final and definitive defeat of COVID. The masks can come off and people should go back to work for good. We have to live with it.
Why has it taken the Biden White House so long to admit what so many Americans knew to be reality from the get-go? Why has the Left spent so much time killing jobs, strangling the economy, and devastating livelihoods all in the name of a goal that was never anything more than a fantasy?
One obvious answer is the age old adage that freedoms lost are never regained. Why would Democrats and their friends in our unelected bureaucracy want to yield back the power they have gained in the past two years?
To be fair, Biden has always been a bit behind the times. Throughout his long and cushy political career, he has flip-flopped on fracking, the filibuster, and crime, to name a few key policy issues that he just can’t seem to make up his mind on. It makes sense that he would do the same with COVID.
Any plans that the Biden administration has made to “beat” COVID have been resounding failures. The six-pronged plan from last Fall contained a horrendous anti-worker, anti-business vaccine mandate that was eventually struck down by the Supreme Court. The free tests boasted by the White House take so long to arrive that the patients in need of them are already recovered by the time they receive the tests. And despite the Biden administration's purported preparedness to handle COVID, it still wasn't able to handle the Omicron surge this past Christmas.
What makes the Biden Administration’s handling of COVID especially infuriating, though, is when we reflect upon how conservatives’ approach to the virus has remained consistent and principled throughout the pandemic. From the beginning, conservatives railed against economic shutdowns, correctly arguing that shuttering the economy for months on end would be disastrous. You only have to take one look at the current state of the economy to see how conservatives have been vindicated.
According to the latest jobs report, the U.S. has only just reached a 90 percent restoration of all the jobs lost during the pandemic–and by lost, I mean forcibly killed by politicians via lockdowns. But this fact hasn’t stopped Biden from taking credit for adding jobs to the economy during his tenure.
The bottom line is that conservatives fought against blanket mandates, government spending, and school and business closures even before polling began to indicate that people were tired of COVID restrictions. Conservatives stood up for freedom before it was politically convenient because they genuinely care about securing a prosperous future for this country and its people.
Thankfully, the US will never pursue a “zero-covid” strategy, similar to what the Chinese Communist Party has employed, as much as the Left would like to see that happen. This is because supporters of small government have been steadfast in their defense of freedom. We owe it to those who stood-up for businesses that were forced to close; for those who fought to keep children in school; and for those Americans who pushed back against anti-science vaccine mandates.
Supporters of small government have been right all along. We knew that the virus was here to stay, but those in power continued to subscribe to the ridiculous notion that we could shut Covid-19 down for good. They did not want to admit that certain things (like viruses) are simply outside the government's control. Of course, when confronted with this fact, the powers that be are happy to blame anyone but themselves. The people, afterall, must be ruled.