The “lockdowns” are not how a free society would handle a contagion.
Free people might advisedly wear masks and physically distance themselves from others when they are especially vulnerable to an airborne disease, or they themselves show some symptoms.*
But free people take risks, too, and accept responsibility for risks taken. And they go about trying to improve their lives generally, in society.
In society, via commerce.
Furthermore, free people would also change their behavior based on good information freely discussed.
What they would not do is engage in bullying to suppress information, cheer on institutional debate suppression, or mandate abridgments to other’s liberties on the basis of personal or sectarian opinion.
That is, they would not do what we do now.
And, perhaps most importantly, free people would utterly condemn leaders who lied to them, or who took special privileges by flouting their own mandates, enforced on the rest of us.
We’ve sure seen a lot of this latter.
The latest case is that of Austin, Texas, Mayor Steve Adler, who has been caught in one of those grand hypocrisies that show the panic to be mostly political opportunism: he had recorded his early November message to “stay home if you can” after attending his daughter’s wedding with 20 guests and then taking a getaway trip with a party of eight.
“This is not the time to relax,” he warned, however. “We may have to close things down if we’re not careful.”
Recorded in Mexico, I guess that “social distance” allowed him the gumption to deliver a threat: if you don’t self-quarantine, I will quarantine everybody!
Except, of course, himself.
Freedom is not just something for our rulers. Liberty with an exception clause is spelled “L‑I-C-E-N-S‑E.”
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* By wearing masks and gloves these two groups would signal to others to give them some distance. Not virtue-signaling, but well-mannered responsibility signals. The healthy people, though, would take the risks of the disease because, after all, we face a million risks every day, from automobile injury to cancer.
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1 reply on “A Tyrant’s License”
Great job. Great photo.