“If we give these tin-pot dictators, these governors, more money, they’re less likely to open the economy. The answer’s not printing up and distributing free money. It’s opening the economy.” —Senator Rand Paul (R-KY)

Rand Paul has let the proverbial cat out of the bag and — tragically — precious few Americans want to hear what he has to say. That’s because those tin-pot governors and the rest of the Ruling Class have discovered there’s nothing quite like fostering desperation when it comes to making Americans as “pliable” as possible.

Following the passage of a $900 billion stimulus package two weeks ago — best described as a “bipartisan” 5,593-page middle finger to Middle America — a hard-pressed public will be receiving a whopping $600 apiece to weather their ongoing battle with a health-related virus, along with weathering the far more severe virus of megalomania that afflicts those aforementioned tin-pot dictators.

There is no question that millions of Americans are desperate, driven to the depths of economic despair by a virus and arguably the most contemptuous media-driven fear campaign this nation has ever endured, even as the definition of “quarantine” — detention or isolation imposed upon those suspected of being infected or contagious — was bastardized beyond recognition. Everyone, including the healthy, were “locked down” to “flatten the curve.”

Of course, not quite everyone. The term “essential workers” was also bastardized beyond recognition, as little distinction was made between the genuine heroes that included front-line healthcare workers, food producers, delivery people, etc. and the feckless hacks with political connections such as Hollywood movie producers, selective groups of protesters whose protests occasionally “intensified” into looting, arson, and murder, and an inner-circle of hairdressers and high-end restauranteurs needed to accommodate the “lockdowns for thee, but not for me” hypocrites who have made it clear the concept of a government of, by, and for the people has, for all practical purposes, been tossed on the ash heap of history.

In short, take your $600, stay inside — and shut up.

Perhaps the most maddening aspect of this debacle is the typical bureaucratic incompetence that accompanies it. No distinction was made between those who really needed support and those who needed no support at all. Perhaps this explains that while millions of Americans remain in dire straits, personal savings rates have quadrupled from 8% to 32%. In short, those Americans with jobs or other wherewithal simply put those checks in a savings account, while their less fortunate and “nonessential” fellow citizens struggled to make ends meet.

This economic bifurcation — arguably the largest separation between the rich and the rest of the citizenry in the history of mankind — is completely inimical to a nation conceived as one in which one’s class was largely determined by one’s talent and ambition, rather than one’s connections.

Yet even as this increasing separation is being further realized, the weak thinkers, long marinated in a stew of grievance politics, wish to exacerbate it. The progressive dogma of “intersectionality” aims to increase the number of oppressed minority-within-minority victims as a means of equalizing outcome instead of opportunity. When one supplants meritocracy with the color of one’s skin or one’s gender under the auspices of increasing “fairness,” however, the very same capriciousness by which our tin-pot dictators determine which parts of the economy are more or less “worthy” of being opened or closed is exponentially increased.

Another thing Americans don’t wish to hear about is the national debt, which has reached a staggering $27.5 trillion. For most people it is a meaningless number, and all the warnings about mortgaging the future to pay for the present were largely ignored, even when the economy was booming. Due to the pandemic, massive levels of deficit spending, no matter how irresponsible, is viewed as a necessary and legitimate response to the ongoing emergency.

All well and good — for now. But as columnist Kevin Williamson warns, “We are training a generation of Americans to wait by the mailbox for their check from the government.”

No doubt. But that training is likely a prelude to the much more deleterious — and power-consolidating — level of training that will convince Americans to embrace Universal Basic Income (UBI). UBI has long been championed by progressives as a means of providing incomes for Americans whose jobs will supposedly be permanently eliminated by technology.

Add to the mix a Data for Progress survey released last April. It reveals that 66% of Americans supported a $1,000 monthly payment — for the duration of the pandemic.

That “duration” is an extremely flexible term? It remains to be seen how long millions of American will tolerate (or is that enjoy?) life without being “bogged down” by work, especially when it becomes apparent they will instead be bogged down by an unprecedented level of oppression that inevitably occurs when one relinquishes Liberty — and dignity — for security.

Moreover, Senator Paul’s warning about “less likely” in terms of opening certain sectors of the economy may become “never again,” especially for many small business owners who remain the most “problematic” group of Americans for a corporate oligarchy intent on eliminating competition and consolidating its power as a result.

In the meantime, Americans will be forced to endure the pitiful machinations of a ruling class that has somehow convinced itself that debating the difference between $600 and $2,000 is a noble pursuit — as if either amount will even remotely compensate the tens of millions of “nonessential” Americans forced to remain out of the workforce for nearly a year — even as our “representatives” themselves haven’t missed a single paycheck since the communist Chinese-precipitated crime against humanity began.

Moreover, because of Congress’s willful contempt for the public, the state-level tin-pot dictators will continue to dictate, because they have no incentive whatsoever to stop.

Just one question remains: How long will it be before “stimulus” and “serfdom” become interchangeable terms?