Foxholes and Pandemics

There is a variation on the old  and false saying that there are no atheists in foxholes going around among leftists that there are no libertarians in pandemics. It is of course nonsense. Most libertarians are not anarchists. They realize that there are enough irrational and unethical people and behavior in the world to make a government desirable.  However they also know that history’s worst  crimes and atrocities have been committed  by governments, that governments are usually inept and grossly inefficient and often harmful and repulsively corrupt, that officials and bureaucrats have perverse incentives and tend to be avaricious and power hungry, that governments fund themselves by extortion, and that no government can be fully trusted to respect people’s rights, and many cannot be trusted at all. While accepting a need for government, libertarians favor having the smallest and least powerful governments and the largest amount of individual freedom possible within a given context.

In normal times officials have no right and should have no power to tell people where they can go, with what sort and number of people they can meet, or when or whether to keep their businesses open. However none of us has a right to be a Typhoid Mary in a restaurant kitchen.  In a major epidemic of a dangerous, very contagious disease, particularly a new dangerous disease  the severity and course of which are unknown, it is not inconsistent with libertarian principles for governments to impose temporary restrictions on people’s behavior to fight it while being as respectful of people’s rights as the situation allows.

Of course governments can and do go overboard and fail to hit the right balance.  Once this epidemic is over, people should look at the facts and decide if what was done was excessive. If it was, laws and policies should be changed to make it harder for the government to do it next time.  For now it makes sense to go along.