Small business owners should reject COVID closures and refuse to pay fines

The lockdowns that have swept across North America have taken countless small businesses along with them. Small businesses, the driver of our economy, employer of millions of Americans, have been closed down by the government for our own good.

Who really benefits from the crippling of our public marketplace? The only ones who benefit from these closures are government officials and big businesses.

Amazon is open. Costco, Walmart, BJ's, Starbucks, and Target, are all open. They have been open since the beginning. They never closed. They have the corporate infrastructure and deep pockets to continue making payroll, paying insurance and rent, for months into the future.

Just as these businesses entered the marketplace in many communities and pushed small businesses, Mom & Pops, 5 and 10's, local drug stores, out of business, and often with government tax breaks to fuel their assault, they are now doing it again. Only this time, it is much more insidious.

The government is facilitating a massive corporate takeover of our marketplace. They're doing it openly, brazenly, and with the totem that it's in our best interests.

60 percent of the business closures that were forcibly closed by the government under the guise of coronavirus concerns are now gone for good. These closures take with them not only the hard-working, entrepreneurial Americans who set up shop and created something positive in their communities, but the hard-working Americans who they employed.

The virus didn't do this. State and local governments did. And when Joe Biden steps back into the White House along with his cadre of swamp people leftover from the past administration, he will undertake this same mission of corroding the American marketplace on a federal level.

Local leaders who want their populations dependent on them and their largesse are empowered by the incoming Biden administration to impose greater and greater restrictions upon a people that feel it is their God-given right to earn a living, support their families, and grow their own communities.

Wrapped in cloaks of fear they tout their plans to force everyone to stay home, saying that it is better for people to not leave their homes than risk contracting and spreading a virus with a 99 percent survival rate. They claim to be horrified by the increasing death counts from the coronavirus, but their policies are nonsensical and benefit big businesses while forcing the little ones under.

Videos continue to emerge, shot by small business owners, showing the hypocrisy of local rules, and officials trooping into their places of work and distributing fines. Some small business owners have wracked up hundreds of thousands in fines, while others have been arrested multiple times for the crime of operating their business.

Americas' small business owners are the bread and butter of this nation. They are smart, steadfast, determined people who know how to operate their businesses safely and according to health guidelines. They do it already. Restaurants meet letter grades from the Department of Health, and are only forced to close when they are proved to be operating in an unsafe manner.

Why, now, are all restaurants in many cities forced to close without even being proven to be vectors of disease? Why is the government deciding, arbitrarily and hypocritically (I'm looking at you California, New York, Michigan, and Washington), what businesses are essential and what are not?

Americans do not need to be babied by a government that is so afraid of making a mistake that they are betraying the hard-working, industrious people that elected them to office. American business owners do not need the government to provide for them anything other than a fairly regulated marketplace that does not favour gargantuan businesses over small ones.

Instead, we are being treated to meaningless rhetoric, fear, and platitudes that are designed to shut everyone up, shut businesses down, and make everyone so dependent on both government and massive multi-national corporations that we cannot fathom living life without them.

It's unacceptable. No business owner should close unless it is of their own free will. No business owner should pay an unfairly levied fine.

No American, whatsoever, should let the government take their livelihood from them for the amorphous, false claim that it's for the greater good. Americans know what's in their best interests, and they don't need anyone to tell them otherwise.