The lockdowns of the past month have not been conducive to the common good. While they have saved the lives of many people, they have also endangered—and are still endangering—the lives and livelihoods of many others. They have created a new and dangerous political precedent.
We need to move beyond the stale platitudes of trying to fix politics in DC. The chattering class’s lamentation about the divisiveness of politics is frankly silly. In some ways, polarization is our friend.
So far, when it comes to disarming the population, governments haven't been quite as terrible as one might have predicted during the COVID-19 panic.
The fact that people break curfew just proves that smaller, decentralized communities are better at organizing than a few top-down planners. Barbadian neighborhoods do a much better job of self-regulating.
The lasting and far-reaching harms caused by this authoritarian precedent far outweigh those caused by the COVID-19 virus. The American people must decide for themselves how and when to reopen society and return to their daily lives.
Federal regulation of medical tests and testing needs to be ended and left to the states. And then state authority must be broken up and decentralized even further.
So far, when it comes to disarming the population, governments haven't been quite as terrible as one might have predicted during the COVID-19 panic.
“Whenever a single definite object is made the supreme end of the State…the State becomes for the time inevitably absolute.” We cannot allow combating a virus to overwhelm all other values in society.
The coronavirus demonstrates how crises become local.
