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Notes -
I’m not against people making their own choices. To be clear, I think the best model in the entire affair was Sweden who didn’t enforce laws forcing people indoors and forcing businesses to close. Such things are possible— give people proper information and the tools they need and they will find their own balance. If you live with someone at risk, the strongest measures make sense. If you’re a 21 year old co-Ed living in a college dorm, you can do anything you want without too much worry. And you can easily set yourself up to prioritize one thing (like your business) or another (your personal safety). We do this all the time, in pretty much every other context.
But the idea of the state enforcing the choice, the state deciding what I can do with my time, where I may shop, work and play is not freedom and in fact pretty tyrannical. Free people do not need permission from the state to move about, to work, play, socialize, or shop. The state, in a free society must get permission from the people to place restrictions on the people. The state doesn’t get to just decide by fiat that something is so dangerous that they get to decide what the people get to do until the state decides the danger is past.
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