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Comment by mmm_grayons | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure strong containment would help, but that degree strikes me as an infringement upon liberties. It is extreme, and the fact that it was effective doesn't change the legality/morality of that sort of infringement on personal sovereignty.

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It's this kind of thinking that has made US to be at the level they are now. The freedom of an individual has been engrained in to the heads of people so well that a huge portion does not even consider social distancing / wearing masks, because it infringes upon their liberties. Of course, it is not as extreme as locking down villages/buildings but the point stands.

Sometimes people need to understand (I know this is not a popular opinion) that for the general good they need to give up their liberties for a while.

I only wish they could see how they look from the outside. The US and the UK are laughing (crying?) stock for those of us in places where we, for the most part, take this seriously, and have it under control.

The freedom of the individual is, in most cases, more important than the greater good. If you disagree, you'll have to make a better case than just saying that it's not true. There's a very easy solution that doesn't infringe upon liberties: everyone makes his own choice according to the level of risk with which he's comfortable. A healthy twenty-something can probably go about his business and be fine; an at-risk person should stay home as long as necessary until it's safe.

Is a law against drunk driving an inappropriate restriction of my liberty?

Following your logic, we should say that people must have sufficiently armored vehicles to go out, so that it's safe in case they're hit by a drunk.

> There's a very easy solution that doesn't infringe upon liberties: everyone makes his own choice according to the level of risk with which he's comfortable.

This plainly doesn't work. Social problems can't be fixed by individualist solutions. The vast number of people who are in the huge risk class (probably a quarter of Americans) can't be forced to stay in house arrest to avoid death, when much easier solutions could prevent the disease from even existing, as seen in Vietnam.

A few weeks of highly localized, tight quanatine are nothing compared to what is going to happen and be required to prevent millions from dying in the US alone. Unfortunately that ship has long sailed away..

It is an infringement upon liberties. It's more a question of "when are such infringements, as bad as they are, warranted?" - presumably there's enough people in this case who think it's worthwhile that people cooperated.

>an infringement upon liberties

Which is more of an infringement on liberty, a temporary quarantine or permanent death?

The American philosophy on this is "temporary quarantine," in general. Feels wrong, but when you look at American behavior through that lens, a lot of things make sense (gun policy immediately comes to mind).

America has a deeply-ingrained "rugged individualism" cultural myth that includes the notion that sometimes the pioneer in the wildneress starves to death or gets set upon by wild beasts, and that's "just a thing that happens," "just God's will," "the price of freedom," etc.

It is a slippery slope. Many diseases kill. Do we start forcing people to quarantine for those? At what threshold? Do we start controlling other aspects of people’s lifes to reduce morbidity? Unhealthy behaviors? I’m reminded of the sci-fi plot of the AI tasked with not harming humanity deciding to keep each person as safe as possible by effectively putting everyone under house arrest.

This is a false dichotomy. At-risk people can stay at home as long as they need to until it's safe. Those who aren't at risk can go about their business as normal. I'd say taking away the liberties of everyone is worse than a single-digit percentage death rate.

“Give me liberty or give me death” were founding words of our country. If you don’t believe our commitment to liberty and freedom was important, then what else made America the #1 most successful country for the last century?

Slavery, abundant natural resources, a commitment to not listening to 'sound economic policy' of its times (which would have had the colonies be strictly agrarian, shipping raw cotton to the English industry - look at Egypt and India for how well that worked out), genocide of the indigenous population, many years of exerting soft and hard power to control the continent, etc.

'Liberty or death' is a nice slogan, but it is in no way a core part of what made the US the most powerful empire in history.

Where was our commitment to liberty and freedom for the Black people we made slaves? The Irish we discriminated against? The Japanese we locked up in concentration camps? The natives we killed and stole their land from?

'Liberty' has always applied to a very small culturally white subset of the population. 'Death' came to the rest.

I'm curious by what metric you perceive we've been #1. The fact that we have the largest prison population and per-capita incarceration rate comes to my mind most readily.

>If you don’t believe our commitment to liberty and freedom was important, then what else made America the #1 most successful country for the last century?

The US got through World War 2 relatively unscathed compared to the rest of the world with its manufacturing infrastructure and vast natural resources intact, profited from loans made to aid Europe's recovery, entrenched its military hegemony leveraged by being the sole nuclear power, and made the US dollar the world's reserve currency.

Liberty ends when it substantially endangers non consenting people.

Even hard core libertarians accept government force to contain epidemics.

Government force in what way? There's a big difference between telling typhoid mary that she can't work as a cook any more and telling everyone he must risk his job and livelihood for a small number of at-risk people.

The concrete policies can and will be argued forever.

I'm saying the principle is clear.

How small is the number of at-risk people?

A quick Googling suggests about 60 million people over 65 in the US. Then we should add some millions for problems like diabetes. So, 1 in 5? 1 in 4?

Further, some young people seem to have permanent lung damage from the disease.

Why do you think you can speak for “hard-core” libertarians? I am a thoroughly moderate one and don’t believe this at all

There are of course also libertarians who oppose it.

As David Friedman put it:

> "There may be two libertarians somewhere who agree with each other about everything, but I am not one of them."

AFAIK, the classic "minarchist" position is that the reason to even have a government is to provide certain important Public Goods that can't be provided otherwise.

Those are (1) National defense, (2) A legal system with courts, jail, police etc, (3) Fighting epidemics. (3) is far less discussed (until 2020), but it's agreed on when mentioned.

Though in reality many such libertarians consider #3 as a sub-element of #1. For good or for bad, this has led to the debate on why if public health is to be funded, isn't it a part of the military.

In Germany there are States that are basically virus free. Still the Federal Government after asked by the States to OK lifting of the Mask duty, insist openly that lifting the duty to wear a Mask would let people loose the fear for the virus!

Is it still OK to restrict freedom to just keep people in fear?

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