Will We Ever Get Accountability?

BY TYLER DURDEN
SUNDAY, APR 23, 2023 – 12:30 PM

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via DailyReckoning.com,

In all my thinking about the lockdown years, I’ve only had time now to think carefully about this strange distinction between essential and nonessential. What did it mean in practice and where did it come from?

The edict to divide the workforce came from a previously unknown agency called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency or CISA. The edict came down March 18, 2020, two days following the initial lockdown orders from Washington.

Management and workers all over the country had to dig through regulations that came out of the blue to find out if they could go to work. The terms “essential” and “nonessential” were not used in the way one might initially intuit. It sharply demarcated the whole of the commercial world in ways that are inorganic to all of human experience.

In the background was a very long history and cultural habit of using terms to identify professions and their interaction with difficult subjects like class. During the Middle Ages, we had lords, serfs, merchants, monks and thieves.

As capitalism dawned, these strict demarcations melted away and people got access to money despite accidents of birth.

Today we speak of “white collar” meaning dressed up for a professional setting, even if literal white collars are not common. We speak of the “working classes,” an odd term that implies others are not working because they are members of the leisure class; this is clearly a holdover from 19th-century habits of the aristocracy. In the 20th century, we invented the term “middle class” to refer to everyone who is not actually poor.

The Department of Labor has traditionally deferred to common usage, and speaks of “professional services,” “information services,” “retail” and “hospitality,” while the tax authorities offer hundreds of professions into which you are supposed to fit yourself.

The deployment of the terms “essential” and “nonessential,” however, has no precedent in our language. This is because of a view stemming from the democratic ethos and real-world commercial experience that everyone and everything are essential to everything else.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/will-we-ever-get-accountability