In a world in which not every human being lives an isolated existence – that is, in our world – each of us incessantly acts in ways that affect strangers without thereby justifying government-imposed restrictions on the great majority of these actions. Therefore, justification of government obstruction of the ordinary affairs of life requires far more than an identification of the prospect of some interpersonal impact.
Refusal to admit failure is costing us dearly right now, as they added layer upon layer of compulsion as a cover for honestly coming to terms with the appalling mess of the last 18 months.
The answer is not fear, not segregation, not lockdowns, not the imposition of medieval rules and castes. The answer is freedom and human rights. Somehow those institutions served us well over many hundreds of years, during which time the human population has mixed ever more, and has grown ever healthier with longer lives.
The ideal of the common good, inseparable from the ideal of freedom, has a noble heritage. It is worth recapturing before we find ourselves in endless cycles of tribal warfare, now even in the name of public health.
Whatever Happened to the Ideal of the Common Good? Read More
We need desperately to rethink the panicked ideology that consumed the nation last year and still consumes the world today. Liberty and health go together. These plans to eradicate the next germ to come along eradicate instead everything we love about life, namely its liberty and our rights to choose.
We don’t really need JAMA to tell us that plugging up a child’s ability to breathe freely is a bad idea. You only need good sense and a slight capacity for empathetic compassion, a trait in short supply among policy makers these days.
A system that would severely damage human psychological health and thus, morality would be one that dramatically uproots every freedom that people had previously taken for granted. The phrase “unleash hell” comes to mind; that is literally what lockdowns did to this country. We see it in surveys of mental health and it manifests itself in crime and the general collapse of public morals.
In England in the 14th century, when the marauding Flagellants came to town, good members of the community found these people amusing and rather ridiculous, and otherwise they went about their lives, having fun and building a better and more prosperous society.
If it is possible to mash together hard science, poetry, epidemiology, and sociology, it is this book. It is not a huge treatise but closer to an extended essay. Every sentence is pregnant with meaning. Reading it not only made my heart race but also caused my imagination to run wild. It’s both bracing and beautiful.
A Framework for Understanding Pathogens, Explained by Sunetra Gupta Read More
The Achilles heel of contemporary liberalism has always been its attitude toward free economies. 55% of liberals embrace a misrepresented definition of capitalism
