"(1) Have we been too accepting of arguments that liberties must be suppressed to protect us from common dangers? Surely our ancestors faced earlier pandemics and worse problems, including wars, civil wars, and all the perils of the frontier. Yet they seem to have constructed a constitutional order and a legal system that did not require an indefinite global shutdown of so much ordinarily lawful and wholesome public activity.
"(2) Have we guided our actions too much by computer models and worst-case guesses by putative experts rather than by actual data and science? Have we responded more to panic than to reason, in a global stampede generated by irresponsible actors (certainly the Government of Communist China and the World Health Organization have behaved outrageously throughout these events) and by ever-sensationalist media?
"(3) While governments at all levels -- with the usual exceptions of local first-responders who, as ever, have been heroic -- have been displaying confusion, ineptitude, arrogance, and endless blame-shifting and fingerpointing, shouldn't we notice that the private sector and private markets have performed brilliantly? Despite strangleholds that governments have imposed on travel and commerce generally, and the massive uncertainties that governments have created, utilities continue to supply light and heat to our homes; we all have internet connectivity and access to television and radio; farmers and complex supply chains are getting plenty of food via countless well-stocked local groceries, large and small, to our tables; and brick-and-mortar stores and on-line shopping outlets, with their falling distribution networks, are bringing all the goods we want right to our doors. These examples only begin to illustrate the point. We are witnessing government failures on massive scales around the world and in our own nation, state, and city. Meanwhile, the rock-solid foundation of the free enterprise system, so taken for granted and so abused by politicians and the commentariat, is literally keeping us alive."
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