By Richard Jack Rail
Why does the left stick with shutdowns when it's clear that they destroy small business? Simple. That's the signature of communists consolidating their power.
When the Bolsheviks took over in 1917 Russia, they went around killing off anyone who questioned them in the slightest way. The peasants rebelled, ushering in the period of War Communism. The Red Army took all the grain and foodstuffs from the peasantry so there wasn't even anything to plant for the following year. Famine ensued.
A few years on, Lenin, seeing that something had to be done, declared his NEP (New Economic Policy), which allowed limited capitalism. The economy roared back, led by the so-called kulaks, the ablest peasants who knew how to run farms successfully and who prospered when turned loose. Stalin would consider them traitors to the revolution for not giving it their literal all. His revenge would be savage.
In 1929, Stalin went after the kulaks in his first five-year plan. He instituted a policy of dekulakization to get rid of these people, who had provided not only food, but also jobs for millions. Stalin collectivized them out of existence. The kulaks themselves would be shot, either in the countryside where they lived or following show trials to make the point publicly that collectivization was not optional.
Private ownership disappeared. Equipment now belonged to the collective. Nobody took care of anything because, in the nature of commonly owned anything, it wasn't his. Shiny new tractors and combines and threshing machines broke down from lack of maintenance. Predictably, the economy stalled, and the country starved. Millions died.
Fast-forward to today. Small businesspeople are America's kulaks, the independent men and women with ideas of their own and the energy and determination to make something out of nothing — so long as the government, by force, doesn't stop them. That is precisely what the shutdowns are all about. It isn't that governors don't see what's happening; on the contrary, too many of them (think Whitmer; think Newsom) see exactly what's happening and are chuckling.
Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I believe we can expect everything that happened in Russia almost exactly a century ago to be repeated here with minor deviations to take into account the different conditions. Democrat governors are engaged in the dekulakization of American small business. The consequences haven't yet exploded onto the national consciousness, but everything that happened there will happen here.
Expect it, and prepare for it.
