When Governor Newson locked down California, it was hard to believe that a single politician had the power to shut down the world's fifth largest economy and issue stay-at-home orders to forty million people.  Governor Newsom's mandate was followed by many state governors over the next week.  The mandates have placed millions out of work and shuttered, quite possibly forever, small and medium businesses where most owners have toiled long hours for years.

Gov. Newsom announces the lockdown 03/19/20 (YouTube screen grab, cropped).

The mandates have violated the essence of our nation's Constitution by depriving businesses due process and just compensation for their losses, also the freedom of assembly for every citizen and in some states the deprivation of Second Amendment rights.  These mandates have been followed by threats of force — jail time and fines for those who don't comply.  Citizens have been asked to spy on and report fellow citizens breaking the mandates.  Constitutional legal scholars argue that there are many other violations. 

The citizens have been told these unprecedented actions are required by the threat of COVID-19.  However, the threat has not been adequately defined by statistics or models, and in fact, statements from "experts" have contradicted their own prior statements and those of other "experts."  There has been no effort to measure the outcome of these unprecedented mandates.  How many business owners will lose years of life from stress over the loss of their businesses?  How many citizens will lose their health insurance and subsequently put off needed tests and preventative visits, leading to a loss of health and life?  How many citizens will commit suicide or become addicted to drugs, alcohol, or cigarettes leading to premature death?  How many citizens will not go to a hospital or doctor's office for fear of COVID-19 or because the facility has been mandated not to offer certain "elective" procedures?

Governors have failed to develop criteria to indicate when lockdowns will end.  Uncertainty, the most stressful of human conditions, abounds.  Citizens do not know when or where governors will exercise their newfound powers.  Will citizens have curfews, be forced to accept vaccines, suffer travel bans?  How will governors react when essential shortages result, such as food, medicine, and fuel?  Whom will governors blame?  

Governors who have locked down their states need their citizens to accept two unprecedented expectations: the power to lock down their citizens and direct industry.  Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Maduro, and many others throughout history are all examples of what happens when power is amassed on such a scale.  If governors have the ability to suspend the Constitution, then there is no law except those each governor decides upon.

Governors apparently want their citizens to believe that, unlike thousands of years of consistent history to the contrary, they have elected saints to office.  Let me repeat: governors want citizens to believe they will not use their new power for political or economic gain, as the citizens have been fortunate enough to elect saints — for the first time in the history of mankind.  If we accept that we have saints for governors, the next unprecedented expectation is that citizens have also elected geniuses who through the stroke of a pen and a one-size-fits-all solution know what is best for millions of citizens with millions of differing personal situations.  Could the citizens be so fortunate as to have elected both saints and geniuses?

In no circumstances are the citizens witnessing saints or geniuses at work.  Governors who are asking citizens to spy on other citizens as part of their mandate enforcement policy are already eerily similar to Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.  The media have been abuzz with politicians pointing the finger of blame to someone else.  What happened to "we're all in this together"?  What civil unrest are governors sowing when they apply universal restrictions to everyone, whether circumstances dictate such measures or not, or when governors apply different restrictions to certain geographic areas or groups?  Either way, we get the seeds of division and future civil unrest.  Governors have made their mandates based on faulty data and models.  Are we to believe governors will magically have the ability to look far enough down the road to see the cascading events they have unleashed and the further hardships they will mandate that their citizens endure?

It's time for governors to end their lockdowns.  Let the elderly, those with pre-existing conditions, and others concerned about COVID-19 isolate themselves if they so choose.