Happy Friday Jr. everyone, this is Garrison Hardie stepping in for ya boy, the Chocolate Knox, for Thursday, July 14th, 2022. Before we take a dive into the news, lets talk about our conference!
 
FLF Conference Plug:
Folks, our upcoming Fight Laugh Feast Conference is just about 3-months away from happening in Knoxville TN, October 6-8! Don't miss beer & psalms, our amazing lineup of speakers which includes George Gilder, Jared Longshore, Pastor Wilson, Dr. Ben Merkle, Pastor Toby, and we can’t say yet…also dont miss our awesome vendors, meeting new friends, and stuff for the kids too…like jumpy castles and accidental infant baptisms! Also, did you know, you can save money, by signing up for a Club Membership. So, go to FightLaughFeast.com and sign up for a club membership and then register for the conference with that club discount. We can’t wait to fellowship, sing Psalms, and celebrate God’s goodness in Knoxville October 6-8. 
 
Now as we talk about heading into our conference in October, that’s heading into the winter time right? Reformation Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas… to me, that’s just really the best time of year. Getting to spend time with your family, the weather is getting colder, (as a ginger that’s great), and we get to celebrate the birth of our savior, Jesus Christ. Well, not if our government has any say over it!!! 
 
https://unherd.com/thepost/brace-for-winter-lockdowns/
 
Brace for winter lockdowns
 
This is from Unherd.com. Many of those who opposed lockdowns for the pandemic, predicted that the policy — if normalised — could one day be taken advantage of by opportunistic political forces to deal with almost any crisis. It was, as Lord Sumption once suggested, a potential pathway to authoritarianism. “If we confer despotic powers on government to deal with perils, which are an ordinary feature of human existence, we will end up doing it most or all of the time,” he wrote in November 2021.
 
Well, we are now facing just such a crisis. And there is a not insignificant chance that lockdowns might be revived, not just as a knee-jerk reaction to cope with a prevailing health crisis, but also, troublingly, an economic one.
 
The monkeypox health scare may have failed to get traction, but as Covid cases begin to rise again, the slow beat of pro-lockdown messaging is beginning to circle again in the mainstream media. 
 
For now, the public remains far from receptive. But this could change as soon as energy shortages and supply chain issues begin to bite this winter, which they surely will. The public has already been primed to believe that lockdowns were great for generating energy savings. We saw the evidence of that with our own eyes. Traffic jams disappeared. Oil prices went negative. Air pollution reversed.
 
In the face of late Soviet-style chaos on the streets, unconstrained inflation, not enough electricity to heat the homes of the vulnerable, the prospect of order emanating from the “temporary” suspension of a market economy might seem appealing.
 
It’s even easy to predict the messaging that might feel compelling: ‘Stay Home. Don’t queue. Save Energy.’ Or, ‘Bread and energy is cheap if you stay home!’
 
But here is why we must not fall for this line of logic. Planned economies are what got us into this mess to begin with. Covid, the war in Ukraine and sanctions against Russia may have all added accelerants to the fire, but the smoulders were burning ever since the 2008 global financial crisis nearly brought down the system. It’s just that the consequences of papering over the flaws in the system rather than properly addressing them only became visible in late 2021. 
 
It took 70 years for the communist system to fall apart under the weight of its own capital misallocation. We’ve managed to achieve it in about 14 years. At the heart of the problem is the poorly thought-out subsidisation of negative-sum business models propelled by excessive cheap money in the system.
 
In the communist period, this sort of