In a free society the steps taken to mitigate the risk of contracting an infectious disease like the seasonal flu are properly regarded as individual, private decisions, not governmental ones. If we run a business, we can choose to perform temperature checks during flu season and send home employees running a fever unless of course government controls prevent us from doing so.
If we are an employee, we can seek a job that lets us work from home, at least in the winter months. But as individuals we can also choose to do none of these things, and the number of deaths from the flu will be higher than it otherwise could have been.
A novel coronavirus does not suddenly bestow upon government the coercive power to lock all of us down in our homes indefinitely, for our own supposed good. Each of us can of course choose to self-isolate. But none of us has the right to coercively lock down other people in their homes, unless the government has determined that they are carriers of the infectious disease.
In an uncontained pandemic, when this is precisely what government cannot determine, it must leave each of us free to pursue our health as we judge best. If we widen our perspective from infectious diseases to non-infectious diseases and to health more generally, the issue is even more clear. Government has no goal of minimizing deaths from cancer or heart disease or maximizing average life expectancy or ensuring that everyone is physically fit.
Only you and I can figure out what is best for our health and happiness, and we should each have the freedom to do so. America is the land of self-responsibility.
We regard freedom as the highest political goal because freedom enables us each to live our lives. In the case of the value of health and the threat of disease, we each must think how health is best achieved and disease best avoided in our individual circumstances, and we must decide how important in our lives this issue is to us.
What, for instance, do you think are the components of health, mental and physical? What roles do diet and exercise play and what evidence is there for this? What about the role of friendships or a fulfilling career? Should you become a vegetarian or take up meditation?
And how does physical health, in particular, fit with your other goals? Might it make sense to deprioritize it for a few years as you launch your new business? How should you assess the issues of quality of life and quantity?
Even if evidence points to a calorie-restricted diet extending your lifespan, do you want to live that way? Such decisions are but a sampling of what the pursuit of happiness looks like with respect to health. Unless incapacitated, no one who values his life will cede authority for these decisions to another person.
No one has the right to delegate to government the power to enforce on everyone a vegetarian diet or a two-hour-a-day exercise regime. Its goal is to secure the right of each of us to the pursuit of health, as an aspect of our right to the pursuit of happiness. As we have seen, when an infectious disease rises to a certain level of severity, the government is charged with the task of isolating the carriers of the disease from those whom they are endangering.
That is its basic goal and responsibility. If it is unable to achieve this goal, if an infectious disease becomes widespread and reaches pandemic levels, the government does not acquire the goal of minimizing at all costs the number of deaths from the disease. Rather, it must continue to test and isolate as best it can. And we as individuals must voluntarily assume the responsibility to implement the countermeasures we think appropriate, given the new conditions and level of danger.
This strikes many of us as a more valid public health goal. Rather, they were trying to reduce the number of new cases to lighten the load on hospitals.
Hence their initial imposition of coercive, statewide lockdowns, despite the economic devastation they knew these would cause.
There is of course a compelling objection to the idea that this was the initial goal of most governors. They could have coercively locked down the vulnerable. But even if we accept the idea that balancing lives and livelihoods has now become for most governors the goal, and always was for some, the crucial question is: Is this a legitimate public health goal?
There is a fundamental difference between individuals voluntarily choosing to implement NPIs in the presence of a novel coronavirus, and government coercively imposing on everyone the countermeasures it deems appropriate for our health. All such calculations entail that government is charged with the task of picking winners and losers, of deciding who counts as the saved and who the damned. All of this is profoundly un-American.
This principle strips government of any power to decide which innocent life takes priority — and which innocent life, therefore, takes a backseat. For in all such cases, the question is: Better for whom? The coercive government decrees issued during this pandemic were not better for the woman whose breast cancer went undiagnosed or who can no longer afford to send her daughter to university. Each of us possesses the same rights and freedoms and each of us must learn to pursue our lives, health and happiness as best we can.
This is why, as we have seen, the CDC guidelines for an influenza pandemic are correct in recommending essentially voluntary NPIs like disinfecting and social distancing. Each of us must decide, in our own circumstances, which countermeasures are worth implementing and to what extent.
Some of us, for instance, might choose to socially distance to such a degree as to work from home and not go out unless truly necessary, while others may decide that they need to go to and from work but will otherwise mostly stay home. Americans during the pandemic had already voluntarily started to implement such measures, even with the contradictory messages emanating from Washington about whether SARS-CoV-2 posed a threat.
Imagine what voluntary actions would have taken place had a consistent message been emanating from Washington. Moreover, most of us will not welcome the sight of nurses, doctors and other medical staff exhausted and ill. We have ample reason to voluntarily help prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed. When Americans learned of the shortages of equipment at their local hospitals, for instance, donations predictably started to pour in. Not only should the law restrict government to the continuing task of testing, isolating and tracking individual carriers of an infectious disease during an uncontained pandemic, it should require that our public health departments and our governments more generally operate with full transparency.
Another aspect of the lawlessness of our failed response to SARS-CoV-2 was the lack of information and evidence offered when the statewide lockdowns were ordered. The data and models supposedly justifying such extreme coercive actions were often not provided, even to researchers and other experts. What the lockdowns were meant to accomplish was unclear, and therefore how long they would actually last was unknown, as were the criteria by which they would be lifted.
How testing would be ramped up and strategically deployed was not specified, beyond a few broad and false general statements. What the evidence was that hospitals across an entire state or the entire country would be overwhelmed was not presented. Yet if we leave aside biosecurity issues, there are no grounds for such governmental secrecy.
A novel coronavirus is not consciously plotting against us. And as free individuals, we need this information to make voluntary, rational decisions. If people with existing respiratory conditions have special reason to be concerned with the novel virus, they need to know this as soon as possible.
If there is worry that hospitals in a particular region, say parts of New York City, will be overwhelmed because the hospitals lack equipment or are at the center of a suspected outbreak and in an area where it is difficult for residents to socially distance, residents need to know this as soon as possible. Most people will take voluntary countermeasures if they are given reason to do so.
All this information, including all the raw data, should be public and easily accessible. Our governments should invite experts to offer competing analyses and data-based counterarguments.
If, for example, our governments are relying on models to predict localized outbreaks, the models, including all their formulas and assumptions as well as the data being fed into them, should be publicly available. Critiques of the models from outside experts should be welcome. If, for instance, some outside experts argue that the data show that the infectious disease is not as contagious or as deadly as first thought, our governments and public health officials should want to know this.
It is also not a time for politics. Part of full transparency is requiring that our public health departments be, insofar as possible, independent and apolitical, on the model of the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the Federal Reserve.
Decisions about criminal prosecutions, the relative soundness of our fiat monetary system or the threat posed by an infectious disease should not depend on hidden political calculations, on whether, say, it is considered politically wise so close to a presidential election to investigate a senator, to raise an interest rate — or to admit the existence of a novel coronavirus spreading from human to human, because admitting this might drive the stock market lower.
There is one final, crucial aspect of governmental transparency. To appreciate how distorted operation of the profit motive is in the U. This means that despite the obvious increase in demand a pandemic represents, the supply of healthcare is projected to remain stagnant. If nurses, doctors, hospitals, manufacturers of personal protective gear, and emergency responders could profit from being able to meet the increase in demand, no one would think of healthcare capacity as a flat line.
Instead, we would expect what we saw in the world of video conferencing, where the supply surged to meet the increase in demand. Zoom and Microsoft rapidly scaled up their capacity. Facebook and Google tried to become bigger players in the market, with both companies rolling out new or upgraded services.
No governmental orders were necessary. Leave people free to produce and profit, and the results are amazing. By contrast, during this pandemic we worry that doctors and hospitals will go bankrupt, since preventive tests and elective procedures were forbidden at many hospitals that were not experiencing an overwhelming number of COVID patients. This is not what a normal market looks like. The fact that healthcare is so heavily controlled by government and that consequently the profit motive is so distorted, does not, as we have already seen, justify government locking us down indefinitely in our homes because the healthcare system might get overwhelmed.
But it does impose two different responsibilities on government. Just as it must quickly reprioritize budgets to spend more on testing, isolating and tracking, so it must quickly reprioritize budgets to spend more on hospital capacity. That this only started to happen late into the pandemic contributed to the atmosphere of panic. Because government controls so much of healthcare, in a potential pandemic it should immediately begin directing money and resources to increase the needed hospital capacity.
Second, government must acknowledge that government-controlled healthcare means rationed healthcare. Nothing is free in this world. For instance, when government forbids the manufacture and sale of tests as it did at the beginning of this pandemic, instead of government saying that whoever wants a test can get a test, it must explain clearly how the severely limited number of tests will be administered.
First responders will have highest priority, for example, with more general healthcare workers next, and young people at the very back of the line. Or, instead of saying that we have more ventilators in federal stockpiles than we need, it must explain clearly how ventilators and ICU beds will be rationed. It would state, for example, that the elderly and vulnerable will have highest priority — or that they will have lowest priority because they are the least likely to survive COVID In Italy, an even worse government-controlled healthcare system, there were whispers about how doctors were rationing ventilators.
Stop the whispering and make the rationing public and explicit. Only this will allow truly informed, individual decision-making. Also vital in a government-controlled healthcare system is to allow medical staff — doctors, nurses, emergency responders and so on — to opt out.
When we declare that healthcare is a right and thereby covertly make medical personnel our servants, obligated to provide us with what is ours by right, we are doing them wrong. It is perverse to expect them to continue to work without gowns, masks, tests and adequate hospital equipment, thereby risking their own lives and the lives of their loved ones — all because we have declared healthcare our right. Instead, we should allow them to say that enough is enough.
Allow them to decide that their hospital is not accepting more patients, that one nurse will not somehow try to work five different ICU beds, that their own lives also matter.
Admitting this is one more aspect of admitting the fact that government-controlled healthcare is rationed healthcare. And the more we as individuals understand that government healthcare is rationed healthcare and that medical staff have a right to refuse us care when hospitals are overwhelmed, the more reason we have to voluntarily take countermeasures like social distancing. By contrast, the more we are taught that healthcare is free and ours by right, the more we are taught that, magically, there will always be a nurse and an ICU bed when we get COVID, the less seriously we will take the need for voluntary countermeasures — and the more it will seem that the coercive hammer of government is necessary.
In sum, government should not have the power to lock us down in our homes even during a widespread, uncontained outbreak of an infectious disease, even in order to reduce the load on the healthcare system.
But there are valid steps our government should take to increase the capacity of our government-controlled healthcare system and to transparently provide information that will encourage voluntary NPIs during a pandemic, both of which will help reduce the load on hospitals. This, in effect, is the approach Sweden has codified into law by establishing a relatively independent and transparent public health department and by prohibiting to government the power to order statewide, indefinite lockdowns during a pandemic.
As we have said, it is a dangerous myth that the only effective action in slowing the spread of an infectious disease is coercive action. Life is not normal in Sweden: people are socially distancing, restaurants and other businesses have fewer customers, and people are more often working from home.
But in another sense life is normal in Sweden, because without coercive lockdowns individuals there remain free to think and act. Unlike Taiwan and South Korea but like the U. But unlike the U. Swedish law limits the scope of lockdowns to, at most, a neighborhood of a city and only for a short period of time. The goal of such lockdowns is to assess the situation, separate the carriers of the infectious disease from everyone else in the neighborhood, and then to allow life in a free society to go on.
If government is unable to detect and isolate the carriers from the non-carriers in the neighborhood, it should not lock it down in the first place.
Because the Public Health Agency of Sweden has classified SARS-CoV-2 as the highest level of threat from infectious disease, the law grants the Swedish government the power not only to isolate carriers of the virus but also to quarantine in their homes healthy individuals who may have been exposed. By law it cannot lock down even a city. According to the Swedish Communicable Diseases Act , individuals can be put in quarantine but not towns or cities.
It then goes on to explain the power it does possess to lock down smaller geographical areas, a power focused on testing, isolating and quarantining. Under the Swedish Communicable Diseases Act , an area corresponding to a few blocks may be put in lockdown. This means, among other things, that it becomes prohibited to access or leave the area. A lockdown can be used when one or more people have fallen ill with a life-threatening disease within a particular geographical area.
The lockdown then serves to make it possible to find the source, and to identify any more cases of disease or transmission. The aim with this intervention is to create a zone where an investigation can take place without risk of people entering or leaving and risking further transmission of disease. When the investigation is finished and anyone exposed has received the appropriate care or waited through the incubation period, the lockdown should be lifted.
A lockdown is a temporary intervention in order to investigate cases of disease or disease transmission. Hence, it cannot be used in order to prevent people from travelling in or out of an area for a longer period of time. But Trump demands it upfront. The wider phenomenon this demand for loyalty represents is a profound tribalism, a world divided into the loyal and the disloyal, insiders and outsiders, us versus them.
To get a flavor, listen to any Trump rally. Rand argued that in a period of intellectual and cultural bankruptcy, if the anti-intellectual mentality is on the rise, tribalism will be ascending culturally and, politically, a country will drift toward authoritarianism and ultimately dictatorship. The Communists demonized the bourgeoisie, the Nazis demonized the Jews, and the Socialists demonized the owners of private property.
One of the most disturbing elements of the presidential campaign was the vitriol directed by the candidates not at their political opponents, which we expect, but at large segments of the public. Sanders and Trump, the two candidates with the most enthusiastic followings, excelled at this. Sanders demonized financiers, drug companies, bankers, Wall Street and the so-called one percent.
Trump demonized Hispanics, immigrants, journalists, free traders and elites. Sales should be soaring again — because the book is not primarily about economic collapse, but about cultural and intellectual bankruptcy. Part of the point of the story is that these pseudo-intellectuals will eventually be replaced by their progeny: people who more openly dispense with the intellect and who are more explicitly boorish, brutish and tribal, i.
This is best symbolized by the appearance on the political scene, late in the novel, of Cuffy Meigs. Although I suspect we are only at the beginnings of a similar political descent, the parallels, unfortunately, exist. President Trump carries the nuclear codes in one pocket and Infowars in the other. The only way to prevent this kind of political and cultural disintegration, Rand thought, was to challenge the irrationalism, tribalism, determinism and identity politics at the heart of our intellectual life, propagated by the so-called left and right and by too many others as well.
We are rational beings, who are capable of choosing a logical course in life and who should be pursing our own individual happiness. But she is trapped in a collectivist The Morality of Freedom 1 Lesson. Do all people desire freedom? If we look at the history of civilization and at popular political movements over the last hundred years, argues Onkar Ghate, the answer What Is Liberty?
Political figures from Jefferson to Lenin to FDR and philosophers from Locke to Marx to Rawls all claim to stand for liberty, but they have radically different understandings Religion and Politics 3 Lessons.
This leads Rand to reject any form of faith or Individualism in an Age of Tribalism 5 Lessons. Increasingly, our culture pushes us to view ourselves as passive members of one group or another.
Don't want progress tracking and user-only features? This is a pattern that goes back half a century, back to the original Objectivist crack-up in And you can make a case for or against any of these people.
But the problem is that the system has to be changed. We have to change our way of organizing the movement and our thinking about how it works. As it is, what we get often ends up sounding a lot like an endless battle between cliques—in this case, the Barney-Biddle faction versus the Brook-Ghate faction.
The problem, as I diagnosed it back then, is that the Objectivist movement has always been organized in too much of a top-down and centralized way. I mean that nobody should be doing that job. I do not receive any funding from him currently.
So why not just continue doing that—and encourage other donors to do the same? This is the program I laid out ten years ago, after the John McCaskey fiasco. This is a bad analogy, though its impact is mitigated to the extent that one takes it only as an analogy, and a very loose one at that. And to the extent that one remembers Ayn Rand was the same person who wrote the character of Howard Roark.
What everybody ought to be questioning is the whole idea of establishing a command structure for a philosophy. So what does that mean for what donors or supporters should do? But notice how different my solution is. I think the Objectivist movement will be more vibrant and effective if it is the product of the independent efforts of entrepreneurial intellectuals.
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