It actually largely doesn't have that power.

I mean, it does until challenged, and it could impose restrictions on entering government buildings -- but the government really doesn't have an unlimited authority to declare arbitrary restrictions on the right of people to peaceably assemble.

Not legally, anyway.

At least at the state level, states' general police powers have usually been interpreted to give pretty broad authority to enforce measures like quarantines and mandatory isolation if necessary to protect public health. There's a bit of recent case law from the 2014 Ebola quarantines: a few nurses who had had contact with a suspected case (but had no symptoms) were put under mandatory quarantine, and sued for unlawful detention, but courts upheld the quarantine.

There's some limit to these powers, e.g. a quarantine in SF in the year 1900 was struck down as being racially discriminatory in a way not justified by public health (only ethnic Chinese were quarantined). But courts are reluctant to second-guess this kind of thing unless it seems like a pretext.

There is a distinction between quarantining someone who is sick for the duration of their illness and putting the entire population under indefinite detention and building a long-lasting deep surveillance operation with mandatory universal participation

I think we all know each right has its limits when the greater good is at stake. Largely, it's intent that matters.

The idea of inalienable rights is antithetical to this outlook. No matter how noble the authorities’ intentions may be, certain essential rights are allegedly sacrosanct.

> The idea of inalienable rights is antithetical to this outlook.

There's no such thing. The idea that a right is inalienable is aspirational. While we should respect it, we should also respect that nothing is absolute and the best laid plans of mice and men and whatnot. We cannot allow perfect to become antithetical to good.

The draft is still legal and constitutional. If society and the constitution thinks it's acceptable to send 18 year old boys against their will to get machine-gunned in a foreign jungle in the name of "national security", then by those standards none of the measures being proposed to combat the coronavirus are an unprecendented or unacceptable violation of any so-called inalienable rights.

The virus poses a larger threat to national security than the Viet Cong, after all.

> Largely, it's intent that matters

I'm sure Earl Warren said that to himself when he locked up the Japanese Americans during WWII.

Everything comes in shades of grey, and that's a particularly dark one. That doesn't mean small concessions aren't the right thing from time to time. In the same way while Americans are allowed to bear arms they aren't allowed to bear nuclear arms. I doubt you'll find a single person in favor of unrestricted domestic nuclear proliferation in the name of the second amendment.

Especially when the country isn't even sure about bump stocks.

How about we address such things on a case by case basis?

> It actually largely doesn't have that power.

Yes it does. This is war.

No war has been declared.

But in a way, you are right. We are in a war for our futures, and we are losing.

Now you're right in a way. We're in a war for our futures against an opponent that won't do any damage to the vast majority of the population and will disproportionately negatively affect a small slice. That small slice must be protected and the rest of us need to venture out of our burrows.