[1] https://www.ft.com/content/19d90308-6858-11ea-a3c9-1fe6fedcc...
People here are mostly calm, cautious and despite a few outliers have largely high compliance rates from everything I see on the streets.
More authoritarian governments have the clear upper hand in fighting COVID-19, but I'm very curious how this will play out and if we can weather this situation just as well as a free and privacy-sensitive liberal democracy.
It works well here partly I suppose because the local culture doesn't expect you to get very close even at the best of times. One metre of separation is pretty normal so now we cross the road to get out of each other's way.
Not everyone gets it of course and bars are now closed by edict in Oslo because they would not enforce the one metre separation rule.
Shops are open and have signs saying keep a metre apart and places where you queue have marks on the floor to show how much distance this is. Most also have alcohol gels and single use gloves available for those who want to use them.
There are also signs saying please pay by contactless card or mobile app if you can.
I go out for a walk for about an hour every day as usual and now it feels like Sunday every day.
It would be very heartening if the German strategy works.
And I really like the way Germany remains consistently conscious of personal values, things like rejecting mass surveillance and looking for another way. It's one of the things I like best about Germany.
But it really depends how people behave next.
In the UK, the government has announcement a bigger lockdown with strong rules and enforcement, because at the weekend masses of people were simply ignoring requests to socially distance. Too many people were using the "time off" to go on holidays and cluster in high density situations, completely ignoring all health advice for the protection of themselves and others.
The German approach of "you're free to go around, but don't meet with more than one person" will only work if people actually comply.
this is pretty easy to enforce:
see N>2 people, fine/ticket/arrest/whatever.
The UK barely has enough to deal with crime at the best of times.
Shouldn't the virus spread little by little so people gain immunity and the hospitals can manage the number of patients? I doubt we can continue this shutdown for 12-18 months (vaccine) and who knows if meds cure it.
So the better strategy might be to not drive the health system to its brink (also not clear how well it could sustain that strain for long anyways) and instead keep infection numbers very low until we have a vaccine (while opening society and the economy as much as possible).
In each case, we need to keep R0 more or less exactly at 1.0 . If it is any bigger, we have exponential spread which will quickly overwhelm the health care system. If it is much smaller, we have gone overboard with containment measures and should relax them to ease the burden for society. The only difference is how much strain is put on the health care system (which is usually already operating close enough to capacity without a pandemic).
This here is really the problem, none of these emergency changes should necessarily become permanent. Income tax started out as a war fund some one or two hundred years ago...
But I sense we are fighting human nature.
Prior to industrialization almost all profit surpluses accrued to the elite, who always were taxed quite heavily. Industrialization meant the rise of the wage-earning middle-class and a shift in wealth (not to mention expenditures), thus the income tax.
That's not at all what they hoped to create. The colonists didn't write no taxation or minimize taxation but no taxation without representation. Don't take my word for it, though, they wrote up a whole list of grievances (most of which have to do with the representation bit): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievances_of_the_United_State...
They were happy to tax themselves -- they just didn't want to get taxed by England.
Why do you think so? My reading of history is that the term 'loyalist' wasn't coined until well after the Boston tea party and several people who were later considered loyalists were participants in that event. It wasn't until it was clear that King George wouldn't respect their rights as Englishmen (three years later) that the patriots drafted the declaration of independence and the revolution began.
The actual list of grievances in the declaration of independence were focused mostly on self determination and representation, not taxes:
1. He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most necessary for the public good
2. He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
3. He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only
4. He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
and so on.
Personally, I'd rather take my risks and live free.
The German approach mentioned above is better in my view. I believe we can find ways to be effective and protect people's civil rights.
https://www.alcoholproblemsandsolutions.org/taxes-and-prohib...