What’s the better for dealing with pandemic disease: martial-law quarantines imposed by the state according to geography, or keeping society open while trusting medical professionals, individuals, families, and communities to make intelligent decisions?
A month ago, such a question would have been purely hypothetical but the answer in the United States would have been settled. After all, this is a country of law, with a Bill of Rights, limits on state power, and an essential trust in freedom. Right?
How times change in a crisis. Mayors and governors around the country are imposing quarantines, not because they work but because they don’t want to be blamed for failing to act. So let’s consider that essential question: what works?
South Korea has seen a steady decrease in new coronavirus cases for the latter half of the last week. The country had the fourth most cases of coronavirus in the world. There were no geographic quarantines enforced by armed guards. Instead, the sole focus was on widespread testing and isolating the sick.
After averaging over 500 new cases per day back to the last week of February, between Friday and Sunday the daily totals numbered 438, 367, and 248 according to the Korea Center for Disease Control.
How is it that without deploying the military or imposing widespread, enforced quarantine, the spread of coronavirus in South Korea is apparently slowing?
Actually, there’s a better question: why should the U.S. copy China rather than South Korea?
While the global spread of the virus is still unfolding and the appearance of new strains may throw the proverbial wrench into Seoul’s policy mechanism, at present the results speak for themselves.
Every government action which reduces liberty from any starting point generates net costs, whether put forth under calamitous or idyllic circumstances. Freedom is not a fair-weather proposition. We love it and defend it because it works, in normal times or crisis times.
The quick decision among most countries to deploy their military, force the lockdown of communities, pressure firms to withhold their services, and paralyze individual movement reveals precisely what we suspected but did not fully know about our ruling classes. Our liberties are expendable when they say they are.
One More example that the ‘Virus’ is being used as a “Manufactured Crisis” for Political Reasons.
Want to know “Why?”
Ask, “Who Benefits?”
Follow the )))money(((
And remember, “to find out who Rules over You, look for who you are Not Allowed to Criticize.