I don’t see a whole lot of discussion about personal liberty from the limited amount of news consumption I do. There’s no shortage of education and information out there regarding the risks and preventative measures, so I believe people should have the right to make their own decisions as to how and when they want to interact socially and economically.
Now all you government loving nanny state aficionados will argue that Americans are simply too stupid to handle this without the government forcing them to adhere to these completely contradicting guidelines from state to state. And maybe you’re right.
But the way I see it people have been armed with knowledge to make good decisions and take proper precautions. Let people who want to go back to work go back to work. Let them and their families decide how to take precautions and protect their loved ones in their own household.
At the end of the day it’s not really much different than trusting people with gun ownership, driving a car, walking around with untreated drug addiction or mental illness, AIDS, etc. At any given time any given person can cause untold numbers of deaths and destruction, but in general people aren’t as bad and stupid as they’re made out to be.
It’s actually more akin to vaccination. Just like with people who refuse to vaccinate or child, the victim of their selfish actions is not likely to be themselves or their child. Instead, it will be someone who is older, more fragile, immune-compromised, etc. I’m OK with people not being legally allowed to be that selfish.
I mean I get your stance, yet each and every year millions of people knowingly and unknowingly go to work with influenza A or B or other serious infectious diseases. They go to other functions and sporting events and church. They unwittingly, perhaps selfishly in certain instances, get other people sick or dead. My viewpoint is that caution is obviously prudent, yet we are on a slippery slope here.
I think it’s hard to draw a hard line between shutting down the entire country indefinitely and what the acceptable collateral damage from the actual threat is. Which is essentially the battle that’s being fought right now at every level of government and public policy.
Now in a different and better world, we could shut down the country and everyone would have full access to supplies and healthcare and money and some sense of security. However our society isn’t constructed that way and therefore the shutdown has caused literally incalculable financial damage to businesses and individuals that will take a long time from which to recover. If the goal is to save every life possible from COVID-19 that’s a noble gesture but we have to look at the bigger picture to see what trickle down effects that this single minded policy has.
If this causes a 5 or 10 year economic depression that ends up costing hundreds of thousands or millions of lives to poverty, disease, suicide, increased substance abuse, families’ savings and property values destroyed, financial inability to properly care for children, etc, of people in the prime of their lives, was it worth it to save tens of thousands of lives of the *mostly* elderly and generally unhealthy in 2020?
These are the kinds of conversations that are taking place and also the kind of arguments that get used to make decisions in wars, such as the decision to drop the bombs on Japan in WWII. It’s a no win situation. Someone has to draw the line in the sand, Dude, and across this you DO NOT...Also, Dude, the Chinaman may be the issue here. We are basically in an economic hot war with China ATM and the COVID situation is really just window dressing.
It’s about forcing re-nationalizing manufacturing and lessening our economic dependency on China in the same way we used to talk about lessening our dependence on foreign oil. This is something Trump has been talking about for ages. So while everyone is arguing over reopening the country and using this as a political football for business owners and the newly unemployed to clash with the people seeking the moral high ground of safety at all costs, a lot of chess is being played on the global level.
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