Here’s a profound truth: most people would do just fine without the bureaucracy and the nanny state. From Jeffrey Tucker at brownstone.org:
Early in the Covid period, the skeptics of government closures and universal quarantines were denounced as favoring a policy of “let it rip.” The phrase has been in use since the 19th century. It is apparently drawn from experience with steamships. When you released power to its maximum extent, it made a ripping sound.
The implication is that when you let it rip, you let go of all controls and just wait to see what happens.
Think about the application to infectious disease, at least in the context of the debate over lockdowns. The theory is that if you don’t force people to stay home, force businesses to close, and force schools and churches to shut down, people will mindlessly move about here and there and cause infection to spread wildly. No one will have a clue about what to do about it.
The implication is that people are unbearably stupid, lack all personal incentive to protect themselves, and somehow cannot but be as reckless as possible. There will be no strategies, no methods of mitigation, no therapeutics, no limits on the spread of incurable sickness.
We need geniuses like Anthony Fauci to give us police-enforced guidance in order to stay safe from the consequences of our own choices. We don’t have brains. We don’t have habits born of experience. We don’t have any social mechanisms embedded in our traditions. We don’t have anything.
We are worse than an anthill, which at least has a rules-based order born of instinct. In this view, human behavior is purely randomized and rote, moving about here and there, fully unable to process information about guidance, lacking completely in any capacity to be careful, wise, or otherwise govern ourselves.
Jeffrey Tucker and Brownstone are important voices!
This article reminds me that just as the “dropping of context” invalidates claimed knowledge, so too does the presenting of a false alternative destroy debate.
Dave Walden