A Libertarian approach to COVID-19 policy.

in covid •  3 years ago 

image.png

The number of libertarians I know who have used a genuinely libertarian framework to consider appropriate responses to COVID-19 is in the single digits.

The appropriate way to frame the issue is that a pandemic is an emergency/abnormal situation which places individual rights in conflict with each other. The right to do what one wants is in direct conflict with the rights of others to not be infected and thus harmed by a novel pathogen.

My conclusion is that the majority of libertarian intellectuals have a paper thin grasp of the philosophy, and base the majority of their worldview on knee jerk contrarianism and a few simple rules of thumb.

I remember when I was 15 and was promoting Harry Browne's candidacy for president. A voter asked me about some policy that was rather obscure, and without a second thought I could tell them what Harry Browne would have thought of it. They then asked me how I could so easily know what he would think, and I told them that all of libertarianism is easily deduced from a few basic principles.

Well, that's easy when you're a 15 year old who thinks he knows everything. The real world involves rights that conflict in a myriad of ways.

If you want to know what I think the ideal COVID-19 policy is going forward, it is this:

  1. Vaccination should remain voluntary

  2. Those who choose not to get vaccinated should still receive medical care as before, but they or their estates should be billed for it and those debts should be aggressively enforced

  3. If an unvaccinated person infects a vaccinated person (which is, as far as I can tell, the case in the vast, vast majority of breakthrough cases), courts should consider failure to have been vaccinated as an act of negligence and the victim should be able to pursue compensation.

I think I am quite literally the only libertarian up till now who has pointed out that at just about every stage of the pandemic we have been seeing people acting under conditions where they are only partially responsible for the consequences of their actions, and then we have seen the government step in and attempt (quite badly) to correct the situation. Most libertarians have focused exclusively on the ways the state has gone wrong, and paid no attention to the ways the state has acted as an enabler.

The correct libertarian position would involve freedom under conditions of full liability.

If you don't want to get the vaccine, you should be on the hook for the consequences of that decision. Far fewer people would make the decision they are making if they bore the full scope of consequences for bad outcomes.

Authors get paid when people like you upvote their post.
If you enjoyed what you read here, create your account today and start earning FREE STEEM!