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Comment by minikites | Hacker News Reader

>an infringement upon liberties

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

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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