In the first scenario, the government is doing exactly what it says and taking the public health measures it feels are necessary to save lives and end a pandemic.
In scenario two, the government is deliberately overreaching and applying unnecessary measures, purely designed to deceive the public and curtail freedoms (or to condition people to accept such limitations in the future) in order to set us on the path to authoritarianism.
This raises a number of earnest questions:
>they won't hesitate to do it again in the future in response to something far less serious
The concern about it being done for some "future far less serious thing" seems to be a tacit acknowledgment that the current thing warrants these measures to some degree:
1. Given that these things aren't very frequent (i.e. the last pandemic of this scale was ~100 years ago and we've already rivaled that death toll), would it be more prudent to worry about hypothetical future abuses if/when they come to pass, versus resisting the current measures?
2. If we were currently dealing with, say, an equally virulent airborne strain of Ebola, would current measures seem more justified, thus significantly allaying your current concerns?
>we all really hope we're wrong
Me too!
1. What do you think the odds are that you're right (roughly speaking)?
2. What if the people actively resisting and interfering with government efforts to contain the pandemic are wrong? What is the cost?
3. How (or perhaps more accurately, when) will you know whether you are wrong?
The difference between the slippery slope concern you're referencing and a willful conspiracy is significant to say the least.
This is why I first explicitly sought to clarify my GP's belief, which they emphatically confirmed as of the purposeful, malicious intent variety. In their view, COVID measures are merely a conspiracy, intended to transform the U.S. into an authoritarian state.
So, that's what my reply was addressing.
Trust me, we all really hope we're wrong. But that's what we think.