[Mick]

Originally Posted by Nox

Until people realize that what is being done is to stop the spread of the virus, they will resort to increasingly draconian measures until compliance is all but guaranteed. They will keep changing the definition of “essential-businesses” until all that’s left open are grocery stores. As a final measure, they might even order that gas stations be closed. At some point, you can go wherever you want as long as you have gas, but nothing will be open.

Understood. So at a certain point, no one will be able to go get more food, because they don't have any gas, right? So now we have the entire society sitting in their homes slowly starving to death, and this is "for the good of society"?

This has been my point all along: this shit is totally not thought through. Your post is just another example of what I have been saying.

California first imposed a shelter in place with general directions to stay home. After that, they started directing more and more places to close. At this point, all our malls are closed, our restaurants, our golf courses, our beaches,our parks, etc. So yeah, you could go out and take a drive, but good luck finding anything open.

New Jersey is in the same place. All malls, restaurants, beaches, and parks are presently closed. I'm not sure about golf courses, but even though I do like to golf, I really don't care if they are closed. You can add nail salons, beauty parlors, gyms, movie theatres, concert venues, bars, and retailers that don't sell take-out food etc. to the list as well. Once you get to that point, why stop motorists at all to see where they are going? It's pointless, puts LEOs at risk, and adds NOTHING to the effort. How am I going to infect someone by driving down the road in my car? Why are we trying to "control" that behavior?

The state is losing BILLIONS of dollars doing this in tax revenue, in unemployment, and consumer spending.. they don’t want to do it any more than you want to follow their rules.. the sooner this pandemic passes, the better off we will all be.

I agree that the sooner the pandemic passes, the better. But what I have said all along is that there is a societal cost to all of this, that WILL result in people dying. This is what our so-called "leaders" are completely ignoring. If you push the population to the point where they are all starving in their homes with no power and no heat, how many people will die as a result? How long with this go on before there is an immense reaction of civil disobedience, that is also certain to result in the loss of citizens' lives?

At the end of the day, history has shown time and time again that endlessly ramping up "control" to try to ensure "compliance" by the citizenry as a whole is a loser's game.

But you know what they say: those who fail to learn from the past are destined to repeat it.