In a recent interview with Sean Hannity, “Dirty Jobs” host and workforce activist Mike Rowe lamented the relegation of millions of Americans to “non-essential” status amid widespread lockdowns and business closures to limit the spread of coronavirus.
“It’s crazy” that state and local governments have deemed millions of Americans to be “non-essential” workers due to coronavirus restrictions, Rowe told Hannity. “There’s a new word for 40 million people in this country: Non-essential, and it’s crazy. We have deemed a giant hunk of our people essentially one click away from [being] unimportant or worthless.”
Rowe’s comments come as several states begin reinstating lockdowns and enforced business closures as COVID-19 cases show little sign of disappearing. The closures, Rowe declares, are “just another example, in my opinion, of a big cookie-cutter approach in the name of public safety, where we treat everybody basically the same except for the essential folks.”
“During this pandemic,” Rowe went on, “I’ve seen firsthand that everybody is essential to somebody, even if you’re just working to pay your own bills. So something is going on here that is that is fundamentally upside-down. And the fact that these policies are now being instituted by leaders who have shown themselves to be the very definition of rank hypocrisy is, I’m afraid, going to lead us into a place where it’s going to be very difficult to get the poop back in the goose.”
The “rank hypocrisy” Rowe spoke of could perhaps refer to the series of Democrat politicians, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, California Governor Gavin Newsom (and his state’s top health officials), Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo, and San Francisco Mayor London Breed contradicting their own guidance to ordinary citizens to stay home whenever possible.
Hannity proceeded to ask Rowe what would have happened in the early days of the pandemic if “farmers didn’t farm, packers didn’t pack and truckers didn’t truck.”
“Frank Capra asked the same question even more broadly in ‘It’s A Wonderful Life.’ He said, regarding George Bailey [played by Jimmy Stewart], ‘What would happen if this one man had never been born, had he never walked the earth?'” Rowe answered.
“And the answer is everybody’s favorite movie, because it shows us in clear terms how we’re all connected,” Rowe continued. “Never mind essential versus non-essential, fishermen versus farmers, steel workers versus pipefitters versus teachers versus accountants. We’re all part of a mosaic.”
“It’s a quilt,” he declared. “And if you start to arbitrage certain people out of the mosaic based on some harebrained definition of essentiality, then you’re going to get the really depressing parts of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ and it’s going to keep going on and on and on.”
The deep interconnectedness of every facet of the economy is Economics 101. No wonder Dems don’t get it!
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