SOURCE: Wesley J. Smith, The Epoch Times <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Commentary<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The COVID-19 pandemic offered an unprecedented excuse for wannabe authoritarians to stifle liberty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To fight the virus, once unthinkable government controls abound. Entire economies have been shut down, businesses closed involuntarily, and people thrown out of work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Vaccine mandates enforced through phone-app-facilitated \u201cpassports\u201d are now proliferating. Soon, continued employment or the ability to participate in society freely may depend on proving that one has received a vaccine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n OK, Wesley. That\u2019s 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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not if the technocrats get their way. COVID-19 whetted their appetite for power, and now they want their existing \u201ctemporary\u201d sway over how we live to become a permanent fixture of society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Such an approach was laid out in 2020 by Dr. Anthony Fauci in a co-authored piece in a science journal advocating that the U.N. and the WHO be empowered to enact measures that would \u201crebuild the infrastructure of human existence<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fighting global warming<\/a> 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\u2019re being peddled as a means of protecting human health and wellness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And the \u201cgood news\u201d\u2014from the autocratic perspective\u2014is that, unlike COVID-19, the goal of \u201cnet-zero\u201d carbon emissions, which we\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A recent editorial in the Journal of Medical Ethics lays out the mindset.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMany governments met the threat of the COVID-19 pandemic with unprecedented funding,\u201d the editorial reads. \u201cThe environmental crisis demands a similar emergency response.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n See what I mean?<\/p>\n\n\n\n But it wouldn\u2019t just be about spending more money. Only the most radical refashioning of society will do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cGovernments<\/a> must make fundamental changes to how our societies and economies are organized and how we live,\u201d the editorial states. \u201cGovernments must intervene to support the redesign of transport systems, cities, production and distribution of food, markets for financial investments, health systems, and much more.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n If that reads suspiciously like Dr. Fauci, that\u2019s because technocrats all think alike.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The plans being laid by \u201cthe experts\u201d would also constrain our freedom by subjecting us all to a system of high-tech surveillance\u2014one disturbingly similar to the tyrannical Chinese social credit system. An advocacy article<\/a> in the prestigious science journal Nature by four environmental \u201cexperts,\u201d lays out one such very disturbing proposal\u2014a means of restricting individual behavior known as \u201cpersonal carbon allowances,\u201d or PCAs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cA PCA scheme would be \u2018a national mandatory policy\u2019 that would entail all adults receiving an equal tradable carbon allowance that reduces over time in line with national [carbon] targets,\u201d the article reads.<\/p>\n\n\n\n