Abundance of Caution???

Received today:

Dear Applicant,

We understand the challenges your business is facing due to the massive disruption caused by the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. You are receiving this message as a notification that your Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL) application is currently being processed in the order it was received. You will receive an email notification when there is a change to your application status.

Without question, COVID-19 has caused an extraordinary impact on our nation's small businesses, and the demand for emergency working capital provided by the EIDL program is at historic levels. The SBA is processing applications from small businesses and private non-profit organizations across the country as quickly as possible. We thank you for your patience and understanding as we work to assist as many applicants as possible.

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This is in reply to an EIDL application filed electronically on 31 March 2020.  The 10k emergency grant offered at the beginning of the program, with which to pay rent and keep people working, quickly turned into 1k per employee, an amount that covers neither.  At least that amount was delivered on 21 April, a mere three weeks' processing time.  Now, over a month later, our application is "being processed".

This situation calls for three observations.

Firstly, COVID-19 did not *cause* any impact on our nation's small businesses.  What *caused* that was state governments' outrageous usurpations of power and wholesale negation of civil rights and liberties, including the forced closings of innumerable enterprises and the placing of the majority of the citizens of our country under unlalwful house arrest.  The direct result of those negations has been tens of millions of unemployed people, at least hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurial businesses dead or dying, and an unbelievable destruction of wealth that will screw most of us for the rest of our lives.  Supposedly this was done out of an "Abundance of Caution."  That is doublespeak if there ever was; it displayed instead an Abundance of Recklessness.  I would say stupidity, but the statist/leftist agenda in this entire situation is so transparently obvious that only an imbecile would fail to see it.

Secondly, we may expect to see more of the same next Fall, but having seen what they can get away with this time around, I expect far more outrageous fascist abuses the second time.

Thirdly, this glacial rate of progress by the SBA strongly argues that its entire staff should be fired, either for incompetence or for intentional obstruction of a mandate from Congress.  If this is actually an emergency ... and it is (while the medical "emergency" is contrived to justify the fascist actions taken during the past two months, the economic emergency resulting directly from those reckless actions is painfully obvious to us all), it is clearly *not* an emergency to the people who work for us in the SBA, with their guaranteed jobs, basic unfirability, and astoundingly generous retirements, all at our expense.

George Orwell and Ayn Rand would no doubt find all of this very interesting.  If he were alive, I wonder what they would be writing now.