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Let Us Do It
What should government do about the current epidemic caused by the Wuhan virus? I say, as the French used to say back in the nineteenth century, “laissez-nous faire“: “Let us do it.”
This was abbreviated to “laissez faire,” meaning, roughly translated, don’t you, the politicians, bureaucrats, academics, and media types-–you supercilious, really somewhat stupid, ignorant, arrogant, power-crazed, meddlesome, self-righteous, interfering bastards–do anything. Just let us do it. Just laissez-nous faire.
Now, I understand that government today doesn’t ask us “what should we, the government (not we the people) do?” about the economic problem. About the permanent, all-encompassing problem of scarcity, including the incremental problem of scarcity created, it turns out, by the Communist Party of China (ChiCom delenda est!): Wuhan virus.
They don’t ask us, they just do it.
In today’s case, they forbid any human physical social interactions that have not been specifically pre-approved by them, the politicians and bureaucrats. (The most prominent of the latter group are the justly name “educated ignoramuses,” epitomized by Dr. Fauci, who, as Ludwig von Mises pointed out, are deeply educated in their specialties, like epidemiology, medicine, or economics, but profoundly ignorant of every other area of human knowledge.)
If I want to paddle a kayak, I can learn by reading the papers that the government has given me permission to do so. This way of spending these irreplaceable hours of my life is one of those that is pre–approved, therefore I may consider spending these hours doing it.
But if I am an anesthesiologist in Michigan and want to provide a needed surgery to a patient–like a lung transplant, or heart surgery, which requires putting him on a ventilator, which in case you don’t know it is a very tricky business that most aspiring anesthesiologists aren’t very good at, except in easy cases–I may not. I must stay home and try to stave off boredom doing social media. If I am exceptionally good at this rare, much-valued skill, and have been offered a job doing it after my residency, I find that my job offer has now been suspended. I will need to sit at home, unpaid, while people whom I could have helped with my hard-earned, half-million-dollar, rare skill, suffer needlessly. While ICU beds and ventilators, which government claims it is making available, are unavailable for no other reason than that they have unconstitutionally and dishonestly dictated that they not be provided to those who need them.
If I wish to spend some of the hours of my life today going out in a motorboat, rather than a kayak, I discover that this is not on the list of ruler-approved actions.
It’s immoral and it’s also stupid, which is why I say this:
“Laissez-nous faire.” Or, in short form, “laissez faire.“
Or in plain English: Let us do it.
Published in General
That’s probably how it will work.. Ordinary people will have to use common sense and signal it’s over.
The rules were slap dashed together and mostly stupid and not thought out, motions, or show rules.
Example: My son and husband use the same office, one is a mechanic, the other sells used cars. The mechanic is essential, people can bring vehicles in to be fixed, the don’t have to mask, clean their car (which mechanics get in to check out, test drive). My husband was shut down for two weeks, but now he can open if he puts up a tent, uses masks, keeps the 6′ rule, and sanitizes the vehicles after every test drive. Husband said not worth the hassle.
A friend who owns a tow truck service said Easter on the scanner was people calling to tell on neighbors with multiple cars in their driveway.
Of course, this is Michigan.
I think you are misunderstanding. When ordinary people use common sense and signal that doing or not doing something is stupid and immoral, and the state uses its monopoly on violence to say that that thing will be done or not done, regardless, the state wins.
Civil disobedience is starting. The people will lead.
Pedantry alert, don’t you mean laissons-nous? I know, but I studied the language for 12 years to achieve utter mediocrity.
But what’s French for Leave me alone!
@markcamp doesn’t every 2 or 3 year old know how to say I can do it! I don’t understand why so many people seem to have forgotten how. @rodin I’m amazed that civil disobedience is even needed in NH but there’s an astonishing amount of fear. And there are a lot people still working at “essential” jobs. People driving in their cars by themselves wearing masks! Not going to friends’ homes for dinner…. I’m looking for signs of. I plan a drive to the Maine beach area today so maybe I’ll have a report. It might hit 60 and be a trigger.
Added: I just read of a protest in Concord yesterday afternoon. Maybe that’s a sign. It was cold and dreary and the story said “a couple of hundred” people were there.
If it was a pro-abortion rally, it would have been “thousands” . . .
Thats fine. I completely agree.
We should not be forced into any behavior.
That said, idiots who refuse to recognize it”s a new world for the foreseeable future are going to have to be dealt with somehow.
Spring Break 2020
Civil and then uncivil. Too many people (those in government and those that are still working and earning a living) are very content to make sure millions of people are not able to work and feed their families. Tell us again how we are all in this together.
Is your objection a matter of general principle regarding government response to pandemics or is it that this outbreak does not rise to the level needed to legitimize government action?
My private French tutor is visiting today. I will check it out as soon as she returns from the Kroger, and get back to you. Thanks for the heads-up. Grammatical perfection is meets minimum requirements for my wordshop.
I read your note and thought, gosh, I think Sisyphus is right! Then I thought some more, and murmured, Wait! the text may have been right, for reason X. I will tell my daughter my guess before she gives me the correct answer, and if I am right, she will exclaim, “Good!”, which makes her students beam, even me.
UPDATE:
Thanks for what turned out to be an educational criticism.
In my view,
We can only hope that the people who are imposing these draconian restrictions are completely unaware of the massive, needless suffering they are causing.
My son-in-law manages a restaurant. He just brought out a meal yesterday to a furloughed employee (he and his management employees are making daily meals for them, which they pick up at the restaurant, to help them survive the government’s mindlessly brutal assault on their ability to earn a living.) The worker told him that he and his wife have five kids, of whom four are handicapped. They have no savings and now no income, and are facing homelessness. My son-in-law talked to my daughter and they decided to help them out, though they are not in great shape themselves. He has also decided, against the initial opposition of his corporate bosses, to hire one person who is facing personal disaster, in spite of the lack of a business case. The call ended this way: [Corporate]: If this were your business, would you do this? [Mark]: Yes, absolutely. [Corporate]: OK, then, do it.
The government, if it were honest, competent, and really motivated to help people, could provide useful services, like providing epidemiological information to help people to make the best decisions while still being in control of their own lives. For example, if the ruling class respected the ability of ordinary Americans to evaluate their circumstances (of which they have absolutely no knowledge or understanding, as they grinningly show off on national TV their side-by-side $24,000 refrigerators packed with luxury brand pints of ice cream, as Nancy Pelosi did recently) and make rational decisions for themselves, CDC experts could publish the statistical information that would allow them to evaluate the true increase in the risk of death to a healthy worker following best procedures.
They will never reveal this information, because it would remove the moral justification for their actions. If they told the truth about what matters, their victims would say, “Why don’t you stop helping me? Why don’t you just tell the truth and then leave me and my boss and my customers the hell alone?”
Instead, they fill our inbaskets with irrelevant data about “cases” and numbers of deaths with all relevant context removed, like age and prior serious conditions.
Appreciate the thoughtful response. I am interested in where you think the threshold lies for government action. I did an analysis of U.S. case and fatality numbers and absent the New York metro area the case and fatality rates for the rest of the country are similar to those of Germany, which has done noticeably better than any other large European country. However the NY metro area rates are about 9X the rest of the U.S. and the fatality rate about 15X. Do you think government action was justified in the NY metro area (not talking here about whether every specific action was justified, only conceptually)?
Government action? Yes.
What action? Depriving every citizen who is not a member of the political class of his right to any given action without prior state approval? No. A person who needs permission from some master to act is a slave, not a citizen of a republic.
I don’t understand what that means in substance. What types of action do you think justified? Under the accepted definition of police powers some actions in times of epidemics, including limited, in time and scope, restrictions on liberty, have been traditionally employed in the United States since the founding.
Here’s what I meant in substance.
I guess that is where we disagree. In my view the government can take steps, reasonably limited in scope and time, to interfere with an individual’s use of private and public property in a public health emergency. When I say that I am not defending every specific actions taken by state governments in the current emergency.
We don’t disagree on that. Don’t hear what I’m not saying. Every action of government interferes with human rights; please don’t forget that we Americans (we liberals, we conservatives…whatever word it is that you understand as applying to us, and does not apply in your mind to those who oppose us) deliberately set up a government.
Or they spend hours a day complaining about how everyone is mean to them in the press. While at the same time constantly giving out wrong information and tweeting out hashtags that undermine their own administration’s stated policies. But you complain about Nancy Pelosi’s fridge? Rather than the single biggest agent of confusion and indecision in the vast field of authorities trying to deal with this mess we find ourselves in.
Let us do it? Well we are. Who is clamoring to go to a restaurant now? Or any other crowded space. The context has been given the disease is highly infectious it spreads through droplets, but may also be aerosolized. As such physical distancing is the only way to prevent disease spread. It is a major risk to the elderly, or those with compromised immune systems and health, but in no way is it safe to the young. More importantly the young getting it especially if they are asymptomatic will risk spreading it to the vulnerable. The more and faster the disease spreads the more people are going to die. Not just from it but from lack of care from the overwhelmed medical system. We have no vaccine and no proven treatment. Either will take months to develop and or validate. The disease today has been confirmed to have infected seven hundred thousand people and very likely many more, but this still only represents a tiny percentage of the total population. Many more potential victims are out there. In slightly over one month this thing has killed 40,000 people making it the single deadliest disease in the country for the month of March and April. And really the single deadliest thing in the country at the moment. We are nowhere near having our hands around this thing, and by all indications only our extreme distancing and our relative lack of density has kept our casualty rate so low. Remember back on March 1st we only had one confirmed death from this disease by April 1st we had 5000 and just two and a half weeks later we have 40,000. Yah curve has been bent but we are at the zenith. It took 2 months starting with a hand full of people to get to this point. Today we have easily 10 times as many infected asymptomatic people as we did back on March 1st to serve as unwitting spreaders of the disease.
People are frustrated, they should be it is frustrating. But, you dont just start drinking the sea water because you are thirsty and you think the book worm telling you it is a bad idea is a prick. That would be stupid.
Further to Valiuth’s cogent observations, one can say what one likes about individuals’ recreational pursuits.
One can justly point to all those suffering and facing all manner of ruin as the economy continues its tailspin.
But whoever insists on the correctness of her conviction that tyrants in whatever area of government are the only thing standing between her as a sovereign individual and her untrammeled freedom to take the risk of resuming a status-quo-ante lifestyle… Well, such a person might want to have a conversation with her local Independent Insurance Agent (TM).
https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2020/04/20/565443.htm