This morning, Harris County Judge Lina Hildago ordered all residents of the county to stay at home unless they have her permission to leave. Of course, Hildago didn’t have the intellectual honesty to put it that way. Instead, she justified her dictatorial mandate by claiming that it will save lives while ignoring the number of lives that it will harm and the businesses it will destroy.
Hildago called this a “Stay Home, Work Safe” strategy. It would be more honest to call it a “Stay Home, Work Safe, or Else” strategy. Because either you obey Hildago or else you face the possibility of a fine and 180 days in jail.
Hildago and her power-lusting colleagues believe that individuals are incapable of making rational choices about their own lives. So, she and her ilk will prohibit choices and tell us how to live. It’s for our own good, but we just aren’t wise enough to realize that.
According to Hildago, this is a temporary measure intended to slow the spread of the coronavirus and prevent the health care system from being overloaded. No rational person wants to see hospitals overwhelmed with patients, but placing the residents of the entire county under house arrest is not the only alternative.
Instead of issuing economy destroying restrictions and controls, the government should get out of the way of scientists and entrepreneurs. Instead of requiring the approval of the Federal Death Administration (FDA) for test kits and medicines, the government should set scientists and entrepreneurs free. Certainly, there will be some charlatans who make outrageous claims and peddle snake oil. And there will be some who fall for their quackery. But no act of government can stop fools from making foolish decisions.
But when government is controlling virtually every aspect of the response to the coronavirus, rational businessmen, doctors, and individuals are penalized in order to protect the foolish. If an individual, in consultation with his doctor, judges a particular medicine to show promise, there is no moral reason for the government to stop him from taking it.
Freed of the plodding bureaucracy that is the regulatory state, we could have thousands of individuals voluntarily engaging in clinical trials almost immediately. Within a few weeks, we would know what works and what doesn’t. Within a few weeks, we could put an end to the hysteria.
But that won’t happen, because it would require Hildago and her ilk to allow individuals to make choices about their own lives. So, for now, we must stay home, work safe, or else.
I’ve seen practically nothing mentioning private choice in recent media, mass or social or otherwise. The President appeared to consider the strategy of executive order to get around bureaucratic slowness in testing yesterday, but it’s not certain how far that got. We should at least point out that Ilhan Omar’s proposal to nationalize private hospitals would put everybody essentially into the VA. Since she’s now proposing trillions of dollars in free housing (claiming that housing is a right), she should provide a poor comparison to many market alternatives and individual choices – as long as we get the word out.
The reaction to COVID-19, like many public policy decisions, is occurring out of context and with little or no consideration of alternatives to martial law. Since some individuals will undoubtedly make poor choices, public officials want to eliminate everyone’s freedom of choice.