Does trying to keep us safe mean eroding our freedoms?
For all but a sliver of human history, humans lived in roving bands on what became the continent of Africa, eating bugs and berries, until they learned how to sharpen a stick and build a fire. Back then, a human being was just another creature subject to the whims of Nature, and on the menu. How we survived among lions is a miracle.
Ted Kaczynski, the full-time mathematician and part-time serial killer, had a simple insight: we evolved for millions of years into creatures who were simply not adapted to survive the technology we had created. The physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer had a similar thought when he witnessed the first atomic bomb explosion, recalling words from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
In the ancient world, the Athenians traded with North Africa, and managed to import a disastrous plague. These days, an exporter can be at home enjoying a bowl of his mother’s best bat soup, then hop on an airplane for New York. Nature continues to have her way with us. Our current dilemma as a species has been long predicted, and long ignored. We humans may soon again be self-sufficient bands of people once called nations, with quaint notions like borders.
It is neither racist nor xenophobic to point out that trading with a country populated by people who eat wildlife and governed by people who will say and do anything to advance their own interests is inherently risky. We are now paying the difference for all that cheap stuff we bought. It is also not incorrect to point out that an autocratic oligarchy that builds a huge export economy needs to rethink its proclivity for dishonesty. It could start by divulging the circumstances of Patient Zero.
There are only three ways to defeat the Coronavirus: treatments, a vaccine, and herd immunity. “Flattening the curve” buys time for the first two options, but it delays the third. As the economist Thomas Sowell once said: “There are no solutions, only tradeoffs.” Absent an antibody test, we can only guess how far along the herd has come. The Spring Breakers who defied quarantine may yet be vindicated.
Flattening the curve is costly. It is said that bankers jumped off buildings on Wall Street during the Great Depression. Eleven years ago, we endured a mere banking crisis, and there was another bump in suicides. We now suffer a supply and demand crisis, and it will be some time before we understand the scale of the psychological damage, and the number of non-viral deaths, that it will cause.
The Federal Reserve figured out the way to prevent banker suicides was to print money, but that risks the impoverishing tradeoff of inflation - more dollars chasing fewer goods and services being produced. Why anyone thought that empowering a private bank to print money would end well is a mystery. The Fed may eventually own everything and reduce the people to debt slaves, yet businesses and individuals eagerly await their checks. It is said that Venezuelans now use their currency for toilet paper. We may be next.
We cannot wish away the risks we face as human beings, any more than early humans could wish away the lions among whom they lived. Every attempt by politicians to mitigate the financial and physical risks we face as Americans erodes our freedoms, grows government, and centralizes power. Washington is now Santa Claus, and we get groped at the airport, but are we richer, safer, and freer? Will every new pandemic entail photographing our license plates, monitoring the cell towers we ping, passing out immunity cards, and implanting chips in our arms?
Our rights as citizens have served us well to the extent that we still have them. Foremost among these are the rights to peaceably assemble, to comfort one another, and to defend ourselves. We need leadership that understands that we know living entails risk, and that the herd cannot long cower in a cave and wait for the dispassionate lion to wander off.
Cameron S. Schaeffer is a pediatric urologist with offices in Lexington and Louisville.