We want to trust our leaders, but, how can we? In the “best of times,” they tax and spend, abuse power, ever expand government control, will not honestly balance the budget (their constitutional duty), and are contemptuous of the people.

In these “worst of times,” they disregard their constitutional limits (The governor of New Jersey said the Bill of Rights was “above my pay grade”), and use bad science and worse reasoning to impose dictatorial controls. In order to save the village, they are destroying it. In the name of protecting us from the CoronaVirus, they are destroying the economy.

Many jobs and businesses will never recover. Without income, we cannot buy food or pay bills … and the economy “contracts.” The “cure” cannot be allowed to be worse than the disease.

Dickens’ “Tale of Two Cities” contrasted London and Paris. The English had their Glorious Revolution in 1688, peaceful, giving us the Bill of Rights and parliamentary rule, This was the First American Revolution, to preserve the rights of which we had the Second. The English did not lose the Revolutionary War (that is an American myth), but recognized that a self-ruling America was better than a controlled colony.

The French, however, in the name of Liberty, imposed controls and took away all liberty, first from themselves and then from the rest of Europe.

The coronavirus is real, but the response to it is not. The original models, from the Washington and Oxford experts, proved outrageously wrong. They used fear, instead of science, disregarding worse causes of death, exaggerating the numbers (the number of dead is way less, and overcalculated), and using the opportunity to order rather than persuade.

The national government has respected our federal system of divided powers (by recommendations and persuasion), but many of the states, including Oregon, have not. Our Constitution and Bill of Rights were written in time of war, of emergency, not to be suspended at whim.

The Capital Press chronicles, issue after Issue, government abuse and excess, all based on ever-expanding government power. The government has long since become the enemy of the businessman, the farmer, the miner, the rancher. Even when “friendly,” it is a smile of control. The courts have allowed governments to criminalize not growing crops or having land which might (but does not) harbor a “threatened” intrastate subspecies.

If this government had been in control, we would still be living in poverty, without dams, coal plants, oil and gas, pipelines and transmission lines, factories, timber, roads.

The Founders would be appalled at the level of regulatory control, yet every legislature aspires to more and more control. We are bound, like Gulliver, by thousands of threads of control by local, state and national agencies. We are made criminals if we gather rainwater, manage a pond, pick up a stray feather, or hire an “independent contractor.”

The state is a police state. We must pay a fortune to move our business across the street, remodel our garage and may be jailed if we use the wrong pronoun, or express out loud yesterday’s law or truism (e.g. that the family is good, or marriage is between man and woman).

Robert Frost’s “countless silken ties of love and thought” (The Silken Tent) are replaced by endless laws and rules, by threats and fear, by fines and police and prisons. We empty our prisons of recidivists (who promptly commit new felonies), to put in them citizens who reopen businesses or walk on beaches.

We are living in Orwell’s “1984” and Huxley’s “Brave New World,” and not in the Founders’ America. Now we can be arrested and jailed just for opening our business, or walking on the “forever free to the public” beaches of Oregon.

Our current leaders cannot be trusted to balance a budget, fix a computer, or run an agency. They are neither wise nor expert. They seem guided only by power, which requires more money and more rules: “We can, therefore we may.” Where is the Oregon of Oswald West, of Tom McCall, of Mark Hatfield? Does anyone seriously have confidence in the government in Portland or Salem? Today is Election Day, but how could we not be appalled at our choices?