Naomi Wolf: The Constitution Isn't Suspended Because of a Pandemic

and government power, which is really characteristic of Italian fascism in the 20s, and they're using that to engage in kind of emergency orders that simply strip us of our rights, rights to property, rights to assembly, rights to worship, and all of the rights that our Constitution guarantees. So people are definitely horrified and noticing. I think people are shocked and divided, as I mentioned before. And the other thing that happened is you said this has all been very sudden. And when you look back, you know, March of 2020, a lot of things started to move that kind of locked into place a set of policies that are kind of 360-degree, full-on totalitarian policies. So I think a lot of us are kind of in culture shock. Luckily or unluckily, I've been studying closing democracies for 12 years, so I recognized early on, you know, once I realized New York State had emergency powers, I know from history that no one gives up emergency powers willingly. Nowhere in the Constitution does it say all this can be suspended if there's a bad disease. We have lived through typhus, cholera, smallpox, HIV, tuberculosis, polio, the Spanish flu. You know, we've lived through an attack on our soil. Never have there been months and months and months of emergency powers when we weren't actually fighting a war. So this is completely unprecedented. Lockdowns have never been done before in free societies. And really, we're turning into a version of a totalitarian state sort of before everyone's eyes. And I really hope, you know, we wake up quickly because history also shows that it's a small window in which people can fight back before it's too dangerous to fight back. Man, I'm starting to think that we're being divided as a country precisely so we don't have conversations like this. The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen. This is one of the most important realizations about society you will ever have. In fact, this understanding is the primary reason for America's unique success as both a free and affluent society. Everything gets smaller as the government gets bigger. Liberty gets smaller, individuality gets smaller, goodness gets smaller, and human character gets smaller. This is not a political point on behalf of a political party. It is simply an observable fact. And it's just common sense. Now, no one denies that government can and must do certain things. There's plenty for government to do. It's the government that must protect us from foreign attacks. That's why we have armed forces. It's the government that must protect us from criminals within our country. That's why we have police. Likewise, fire departments and courts are obviously necessary government institutions. And yes, when all else fails, private and religious-based charities, families, friends, then too the government must be there to provide a safety net of last resort. But it must always be of last resort. When government is the first resort, the first place citizens look when they have a problem, bad things happen. As government grows, almost everything else begins to disappear. The first thing that goes when government gets bigger than it needs to be is goodness. Yes, goodness. As the state gets bigger, people simply do less good for their fellow citizens. After all, why help others when the government will do it for you? This is the reason that as noted by the international non-profit organization Charities Aid Foundation and shown in study after study, Americans give more charity and volunteer more time to help others than do Europeans, not to mention just about everybody else in the world. From the beginning, Americans understood that government must be small and therefore individuals must devote time and money to helping others as well as non-governmental institutions of goodness. They have to be large and plentiful. Europeans, on the other hand, with their philosophy of big government, came to rely on the state to help their fellow citizens and even their own family members. The second thing that diminishes as the government grows is the character of many of its citizens. Just as taking care of others is a sign of moral character, so is taking care of oneself. Relying on others to take care of you when you are capable of taking care of yourself is just plain selfish and the very definition of irresponsible. And it gets worse. The more people come to rely on the state to take care of them, the more they begin to develop a sense of entitlement. A sense of entitlement is the belief that you do not owe others but that others, in this case the state and your fellow citizens whose money supports the state, owe you. A sense of entitlement creates two other bad character traits, ingratitude and resentment. The more people expect to be given, the less grateful they will be for what they are given. And they get resentful when any of those entitlements are taken away. The third thing that bigger government diminishes is liberty. This should be obvious. The more government, the more rules. The more rules, the less liberty. In much of Europe, for example, governments tell store owners how many hours they can keep their own stores open. That's right. In France and Germany, for example, you can't keep your own store open past a certain hour. And you can't open your store before a certain hour. And in the United States, the Federal Register was 2,620 pages long in 1936. By 2012, it contained 78,961 pages of rules and regulations. There are, however, some things big government always does increase. Corruption, fraud, and theft. How could it not? Unless you think people are angels and that political power attracts angels, you know that a lot of people with almost unlimited power and with access to almost unlimited sums of money will abuse those powers. So for all these reasons, small government was the vision of the people who founded the United States of America. It is the major reason America has given more people more freedom and more opportunity to live a better life than any other country has. I'm Dennis Prager.