There are competing visions of how to address problems such as pandemics. One vision is of a culture of consent and trust with a freed market, where medical institutions, businesses, and other organizations respond to pandemics and help people maintain their safety and means to continue living their lives. Another vision is of a culture of control and obedience, where political institutions declare large-scale solutions imposed by force.

My view is that the present covid problem is more complicated than many people make it out to be, and that looking at one simple metric, such as the short-term death counts from a single cause, is myopic and not solving the real problem, which is to secure people’s lives and freedom over the long-run. Authoritarian responses can and probably will lead to more deaths and loss of life-years than are caused by the virus itself. Even if authoritarian measures succeed in the short-run, there is an extreme price to be paid systemically for allowing such an authoritarian precedent to be established or authoritarian culture to grow. It’s yet another example of what Bastiat wrote about: the seen and the unseen.

In my view, the solutions to this problem are more properly found by medical institutions and individuals rather than political institutions. The best solutions will not be the same for every person or every geographical region.