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I often have pretty libertarian instincts about things, but a lot of what I’m seeing in regard to the pandemic is just nonsense, a miserable version of libertarianism that doesn’t have any account of liability or responsibility.
There’s no credible version of libertarian theory/thought that doesn’t include liability for harming others. Just the opposite: the basis of the harm principle is that your actions are free until they impinge on others.
A strict libertarian account of the pandemic might allow you to do whatever you want, but hold you criminally or civilly liable if you infected someone who subsequently died from COVID. It’s not statist to punish irresponsibility that kills other people.
What I see a lot of people proposing is that we should reopen society and just live with the consequences, hoping people don’t behave recklessly, but not punishing the irresponsibility if they do. That’s a strategy—hey, maybe even the right one—but not, IMO, a libertarian one.
Lots of libs and cons (quite rightly)crap on libertarians who seem to have no belief in collective public goods but defense. But that’s a sliver of radicals. Most libertarians take untraceable externalities as a prime justification for state action. Pandemics easily qualify.
This is all, of course, about philosophy; there’s no practical question about whether the states of the US have the legal authority to take drastic action for the public health. Of course they do. All I’m thinking through here is the wisdom.
Like, no one doubts the state had the power to combat drunk driving; there are many ways to go about it, some more obnoxious to liberty than others. But no one asserts a libertarian right to drive drunk, and certainly not a right to do so without liability for killing someone.
This isn’t to say we *should* hold people liable for spreading a virus; point is state pandemic authority doesn’t violate libertarian theory. It’s an obv case of untraceable externalities.
(Authority, of course, doesn’t equal wisdom; states should still act w/ liberty in mind).
(Authority, of course, doesn’t equal wisdom; states should still act w/ liberty in mind).
