Over Christmas, for the second time, a major wave of airline flight cancellations spread across the nation. This time, the entire network of Southwest flights — over 15,000 — was taken down just as Americans prepared to travel to see their families for the holiday. Millions of people were left stranded for days in the middle of winter with no information and no hope for a rapid solution. Southwest blamed the collapse on a software issue.

Last week the entire commercial air transportation system was shut down, as the FAA grounded all flights for the first time since the September 11, 2001 World Trade Center terrorist attacks. Once again, a software issue was reported to be the cause. Despite this being a once-in-a-generation event, the shutdown barely registered on the evening news. Have Americans simply grown accustomed to the new third-world status of their home country, or have news organizations decided not to report on major infrastructure failures to provide cover for the government program of destruction?

Tucker Carlson proposed that the increased frequency of transportation failures is due to cyberterrorism. Possibly. I think he’s giving the terrorists too much credit, though. The evidence that our own government is behind every one of our current national catastrophes is overwhelming. An advisory committee for the city of San Francisco just recommended paying every black resident there $5 million for “reparations.” Why not $100 million? And where will this lottery award funding come from? The advisory committee did not answer that question. The goal, as always, is not to solve a problem but rather to create a new one. Ronald Reagan had this realization decades ago, when he observed that “government is not a solution to our problem …government is the problem.”

Government is certainly the cause of the collapse of our national transportation systems. Here I highlight air travel, but this is also happening to local transport as well: trains, subways, buses. Simply driving a car has become more difficult — the cost of purchase, maintenance, and operation has skyrocketed. The roads are in disrepair. The car itself is under threat of a ban as the gasoline-powered engine is due to be outlawed in California and other states in less than 10 years. When I picked up my car from the body shop last month after a week of repairs, the manager told me I was lucky. “I have a brand-new Ford with only 100 miles on it that’s been sitting here for four months — we can’t get the parts for it.” No government that truly wants its citizens to thrive makes it harder to travel or transport goods. A government that wants its citizens to suffer does that.

Mark McDonald, M.D. is a psychiatrist and author of “United States of Fear: How America Fell Victim to a Mass Delusional Psychosis” and “Freedom From Fear: A 12 Step Guide to Personal and National Recovery”

Originally published at markmcdonaldmd.substack.com