This lockdown is driving some people potty and they are starting to see conspiracy theories around every corner.
There’s even a dangerous emergence of influential people calling for governments to end the lockdown and allow people to return to work.
It’s a movement that seems to be led by Donald Trump and it’s gaining momentum.
The argument seems to be that getting people back to work is more important than saving their lives and the lives of others.
I can’t think of anything more blindly capitalistic than that.
It’s a modern equivalent of a brutal construction site foreman shooting dead a sickly worker as a warning to the others to keep going and get the job done.
Not even the possibility of a virus wiping out all of humanity will stop these people from worrying about the money they’re losing.
I also notice more and more social media posts about how this lockdown is apparently government’s way of controlling us and how it’s all about money.
Well, these things can’t all be true.
Firstly, it can’t be about money if government is deliberately shutting down its cash-flow pipelines.
The state is now making millions and millions of rands less daily than it did two months ago in taxes and levies.
Most of the income it made from individual taxes, PAYE, corporate taxes, cigarette sales, alcohol have all been wiped out.
And it’s going to take years for it to return to where it was.
As for wanting to control the population, why would a modern, democratic government want to exercise such blatant control over its citizens, without the communist-like resources to do it effectively?
And to what aim?
We are not a nation that will tolerate something like that again.
And neither will the world that we are now a part of.
So, I don’t believe that anyone seriously believes such nonsense.
People are either just desperately bored out of their skulls, or they’re not thinking.