Victims and Victims

Whatever one thinks about the appropriateness of the lock downs over  the epidemic, it is indisputable that they produced real victims – people whose businesses or livelihoods  were damaged or ruined,  dying people in nursing homes who spent their last days alone because they were locked away from their family and friends, sick people left to suffer because the surgery they needed was banned as elective, children  who coped  poorly with the disruption of their lives’ routines, and many others.

There are also phony victims – officials responsible for shutdowns with sad tales of being triggered by “hateful” criticism from unruly subjects rude enough not to like being pushed around.  As one example a transsexual official in Pennsylvania has made national news and gained sympathetic attention in the traditional media by whining that some people who don’t like the way the lock down has gone in that state have been mean by failing to respect that fact that he prefers to be seen as a woman, even going so far as to ridicule his pretense and call him “sir”.  That may have been bad manners.  It may have been rude, counterproductive, and beside the point of opposing  the lock down.  But that is all it was.  It did not make him a victim, any more than being called a fat lunatic makes Trump a victim.

I will save my sympathy for the real victims, and let the thin skinned politicians and bureaucrats suffer as they may.  It is healthy for the country for people to treat politicians and bureaucrats  as a class as objects of ridicule.  Besides Truman was right about heat and kitchens.

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.