Pandemics

What’s the best way to deal with a highly-infectious, extremely-deadly pandemic? Should society coercively quarantine the infectious and the possibly-infectious? Should society coercively close businesses and ban social gatherings? Should society provide government financial aid to the businesses closed and government medical aid to the people infected?

None of these. No matter how bad the pandemic, emergency, or natural catastrophe, government never has the right to initiate coercion. And no such criminality or tyranny is ever necessary or beneficial to society.

The correct answer to the problem of disease pandemics is: individual liberty. This is the correct answer to every social, economic, political, and public health problem – no matter how sudden or disastrous.

The free individual and society tend to be highly rational, responsible, competent, and even expert in unexpected, difficult situations. No matter what is thrown at them, free persons and voluntary social groups tend to be quite dexterous and clever.

Of course, when confronted by a formidable medical menace, like a dangerous pandemic, free individuals and societies do need to react effectively – to be reasonably prudent, wise, insightful, and slick. They also need to have fostered high-quality medical experts and institutions in advance. Then they need to assiduously follow their advice.

There’s no substitute for ingenuity. There’s rarely any unthinking, automatic, one-size-fits-all answer to a terrible pandemic. Both the individual, and society collectively, need to be intelligent and virtuous. They need to be flexible and deft about all of this. They need to take effective counter-measures to minimize sickness and consequent impoverishment.

Every free individual should call upon her hopefully-powerful education and moral code in deciding whether she wants to work or go out socializing -- or not. In the midst of a horrible pandemic, she must determine the proper conditions to meet and precautions to take before working or socializing.

Often the health situation changes quickly and radically This is one reason why the free individual – with all of her rights and choices protected – is by far the most likely to make the right decisions under difficult circumstances. The least likely is some mindless, soulless, fascist government bureaucrat. Do-gooding, welfare-statist, dictatorial, government agents -- if they get to decide – are almost guaranteed to wreck the health and wealth of all.

It also needs to be understood that in a pandemic, as otherwise, when a person knowingly or unknowingly infects another with a harmful or deadly disease, then she has committed a crime. If the disease-vector person can be accurately determined, she needs to be punished. The law should provide for justice in all such deliberate or negligent attacks which do serious damage.

It further needs to be understood that unlike in failed welfare-statist societies, government public places shouldn’t exist, except for tiny, isolated ones, for narrow, governmental purposes, such as the police, military, courts, and jails. Disease-causing government schools, roads, parks, etc. should not exist. They should all be private and capitalist. The natural responsibility and cleverness of the capitalist owners – who can readily be sued or jailed for getting people infected – will tend to slow the epidemic drastically.

Thus the best way to deal with a highly-infectious and extremely-deadly pandemic is thru social and economic liberty. Also thru the full exercise of individual freedom, responsibility, intelligence, and virtue.