The rule of law is important and limiting the power of “rulers” to make large sweeping regulations by themselves is important. Agreeing with what they’re trying to do doesn’t make it right. People have been cheering for authoritarianism more and more and it’s disturbing.
When the government wants to fuck us over, think what the NSA has been doing, they won't look for precedents so there's no point in treating every decision they make as a potential sliperry slope.
Covid was/is killing people, vaccines prevent that, so vaccines must be required. Very simple.
Rights aren’t just for your side.
If you're a libertarian, you vouch for liberties across the board. Not seesawing utter power against the other side every election cycle.
This last sentence is such a massive slippery slope that an answer isn’t even necessary.
There's a pretty significant difference between "you may not sell dangerous products" and "you must use X medicine".
Next up, government mandated pedometers with minimum step counts, broccoli consumption, teeth brushing (prevents heart disease that kills people!), flossing, and minimum hours of sleep per night.
Once we've kept the fat, foul-breathed insomniacs out of society, government bans you from going into the wilderness (bears! bee allergies!), driving a car, riding a bike, running with scissors, and using a computer for more than a few hours a day.
Some of these things obviously kill more than others, but heart disease, cancer and "accident" are all leading causes of death in the US, with heart disease and cancer beating out COVID in 2020 and probably 2022.
More like I want to solve an increasingly unsusatinable cost to society:
>People with obesity experienced a statistically significant twofold increase in average direct healthcare costs per year (EUR 5,934), compared with controls (EUR 2,788) and had statistically significantly higher indirect costs compared to controls. Total healthcare costs for people with obesity and one or more of the 11 comorbidities were 91.7%–342.8% higher than total healthcare costs of the population with obesity but none of the 11 comorbidities.
>Obesity was associated with an increase in both direct and indirect costs. The presence of comorbidities was associated with additional healthcare costs.[0]
A comparable analogy would be mandating, under penalty of legally enforced isolation, that you eat a certain amount of vegetables per unit of body weight.
They don't though.
None of the vaccines prevent transmission - they were never even tested for that.
And only the extremely elderly or obese are in any significant danger of dieing of COVID. If you're not in either of those camps, or have natural immunity the risk is negligible.
We should not make policy decisions as long as only the elderly and otherwise vulnerable are at risk?
[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...
Many person years were lost: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
I sat in the ICU as my father died and listened to the many ventilators as a result of policy failures. I had lots of time to contemplate possible policy decisions. Pretending that the only possible choices were "do nothing" and "do something stupid" is not useful to the discussion or any future policy decision.
There is really no example of a country that successfully "did something well" as a matter of policy; the countries that fared better in terms of death rates did so on the basis of their demographics or their cultural habits. Countries with younger or fitter (less obese) populations did much better. Countries with more group-minded cultures, like the East Asian countries, did better, but those countries are also much less obese so it's unclear how much the habitual masking in those places helped. If you have counterexamples, I would love to hear about them.
In the end, there's not much policy-wise you can do in the face of a highly transmissible airborne disease that's not actually deadly enough to scare people into staying away from each other. Governments can issue as many policy decisions as they would like in the moment, but in the end everyone is going to get it, and some will die.
Long-term policies that encourage people to actually be healthy would help a lot more; but instead many countries, and especially the developed Western ones, did the opposite and encouraged or forced people to stay home, next to their refrigerators, in fear, away from laughter and joy from their social groups, all the while demonizing those who broke the arbitrary and capricious rules at the same time that political leaders were visibly flouting their own rules. I suppose we can agree that we learned a lot about what not to do for the next pandemic.
e.g., Those countries that paid only the sick to stay home were smarter than those who locked down everyone.
We should have invested in the infrastructure that will be of use in the next pandemic.
There are many obvious good policy decisions other than "do nothing".
I do realize that in the country run by Democrats, Republicans, and Trumpers that nothing useful will happen.
Is "training more doctors and nurses" an obviously good policy decision? The same resources that go into training medical professionals can be used to accomplish other things that might be more beneficial for society. Building more hospitals? The same. None of those things come for free, so I don't share your certainty that anything is obviously good.
And considering how stupid some of the decisions we made were (with the benefit of hindsight, to be fair), "do nothing" is actually one of the better policy decisions that we could take with us for the next pandemic. I would sincerely hope that we don't normalize some of the behavior we experienced from the part of the policymakers.
Looking at excess deaths per capita: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-..., I don't know that there is a clear conclusion to be drawn that some countries really did better than others in Covid-related policy-making. Sweden of the famous "do nothing" approach to Covid had roughly the same excess deaths per capita as did France or Israel, both with much greater restrictions in life.
Same with the differences between US states: I see no discernible differences, and the degree to which I do see differences, it seems random. Why does Vermont have a slightly higher rate than Massachusetts? They share a border and are culturally similar. Why are the rates comparable between California and Florida? They have had radically different policy responses.
But I fear that all this nitpicking is bogging me down from making the real point, which is that reducing excess deaths or increasing the average life expectancy is not the purpose of government. Otherwise, just plug us all into cocoons a la The Matrix and keep us safe and alive for a long, long time.
I stated the biggest example in my previous reply: Paying the sick to stay home would have been smarter than the lockdowns.
Spending on infrastructure for health testing at airports and air monitoring in public spaces would have been smart and we will need this for future pandemics.
The country with the most nuclear aircraft carriers could have invested in getting PCR machines installed everywhere. Instead, it propped up the cruise ship industry.
> Every policy decision is a decision to allocate the scarce resources of the public in one the pursuit of one goal or another.
Yes, all government policy decisions are about allocation of capital. I never wrote otherwise.
> Is "training more doctors and nurses" an obviously good policy decision? The same resources that go into training medical professionals can be used to accomplish other things that might be more beneficial for society. Building more hospitals? The same. None of those things come for free, so I don't share your certainty that anything is obviously good.
Yes, spending money training doctors and nurses would have been smarter than corporate welfare in the form of PPP and Fed bond purchases. Our demographic collapse will have us needing more doctors and nurses even without accounting for future pandemics. Imagine if elected representatives were able to make decisions that made sense in the long term.
> And considering how stupid some of the decisions we made were (with the benefit of hindsight, to be fair), "do nothing" is actually one of the better policy decisions that we could take with us for the next pandemic. I would sincerely hope that we don't normalize some of the behavior we experienced from the part of the policymakers. Looking at excess deaths per capita: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-..., I don't know that there is a clear conclusion to be drawn that some countries really did better than others in Covid-related policy-making.
According to that table, there is a difference of over 1,000 excess deaths per 100K people. Clearly, some cultures will survive pandemics better than others.
> Sweden of the famous "do nothing" approach to Covid had roughly the same excess deaths per capita as did France or Israel, both with much greater restrictions in life.
Sweden did not “do nothing” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_government_response_to...).
> Same with the differences between US states: I see no discernible differences, and the degree to which I do see differences, it seems random. Why does Vermont have a slightly higher rate than Massachusetts? They share a border and are culturally similar.
I see no mystery here. There are no ways for states to protect themselves from the citizens of other states. The Commerce Clause of the Constitution enables effective virus distribution. Where there are differences, the simplest explanation I see is difference in elderly population versus seasonal cold, dry air.
> Why are the rates comparable between California and Florida? They have had radically different policy responses.
The excess death curves for California and Florida are very different. I live in Florida. I have been tracking the CDC data since early 2020 and built tooling around it to better understand the failures: https://mcculley.github.io/VisualizingObservedDeaths/
> But I fear that all this nitpicking is bogging me down from making the real point, which is that reducing excess deaths or increasing the average life expectancy is not the purpose of government. Otherwise, just plug us all into cocoons a la The Matrix and keep us safe and alive for a long, long time.
This is a false dilemma. Of course we expect government to do smart things which result in fewer excess deaths, especially when we can see other governments doing smarter things.
The decision of St. James's parish to remove a handle from a well pump is the canonical example. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outb...) Should they have done nothing instead?
I enjoy civilization. I choose to live in a city. This requires compromises due to density. Should we have no regulation for how sewage is treated?
The popular narrative being told to people from all sources was that vaccines were to prevent transmission which was quietly toned down when it turned out not to be true and then people now say things like "we never said that" when nobody mentioned it at all in the beginning that vaccines quite possibly weren't going to prevent disease or transmission.
People just move goal posts, fail to outline risks that don't align with their advice before those risks are undeniable, and generally always pretend they were right all along.