The proper purpose of government is the protection of individual rights, including property rights. The proper purpose of government is to protect the freedom of individuals to act on their own judgment, so long as they respect the freedom of others to do the same. Government’s purpose does not change in a pandemic. The role it plays in protecting rights does change.
Individual rights can only be violated through the initiation of force, or the threat thereof. If someone ties you up, waves a gun at you, or steals your property, he has used force (or the threat of force) to make you act differently than you would voluntarily choose.
Context is crucial in deciding what constitutes the threat of force. Consider an individual who enters a bank with a gun. If he was wearing a mask, most would consider his actions a threat of force. If he was wearing a police uniform, they wouldn’t.
Similarly, if an individual entered a crowded mall with a machine gun, most would consider him a threat. But if he had a concealed pistol, few would even notice. The police should arrest the individual brandishing a machine gun because he poses an objective threat to others. A machine gun is not an appropriate weapon for self-defense; a pistol is.
Threats to others can take a variety of forms, including going into public while infected with an contagious disease. The severity of that threat can vary significantly, from the seasonal flu to ebola.
Thousands die in the United States every year from the flu. But the mortality rate is low–generally about .1 percent. We accept the flu as one of the diseases that we must deal with. Vaccines help those most at risk avoid contracting the disease.
Ebola, however, has a mortality rate as high as 80 percent. Which means, venturing into public while infected with ebola is an objective and deadly threat to others. An infected individual should be apprehended and isolated from others.
The point is that government action to isolate infected individuals during a pandemic is not necessarily unwarranted. To make that determination, a host of factors must be considered: the virulence of the disease, the ease with with it can be spread, the time between infection and the presentation of symptoms, the availability of vaccines and treatments, and much more.
It is clear that the coronavirus falls somewhere between the seasonal flu and ebola. What is much less clear is the extent to which government should be involved in slowing the spread of the virus. Data has been lacking, and much is unknown.
As we have pointed out in previous posts, the government response to the pandemic has been horrible and threatens to destroy countless businesses and lives. But the fact that government has done many things wrong does not mean that government shouldn’t do anything.