Colby Cosh: As disgusting as it sounds, obedience is a virtue with coronavirus – National Post

The joke going around in virus land is that there are no libertarians in a pandemic, just as there are no atheists in foxholes. For some people this is, no doubt, a joke with a double meaning. Even if atheists may be less willing to climb into foxholes than Presbyterians or Yazidis in the first place, the study of soldier experiences and war literature suggests that combat is pretty darn good at sowing materialism and encouraging questioning of revealed wisdom.

Yes, there are atheists in foxholes, dummy, even if they didnt bring atheism with them; and even if a pandemic teaches lessons in the usefulness of capable, powerful government, it perhaps has just as many about the harmfulness and stupidity of government as it generally exists in the real world.

The United States, to take one infuriating example, is about to have an awful lot of unnecessary deaths because, through ill-considered peacetime regulation, it allowed its national disease-surveillance agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to acquire what was tantamount to a manufacturing monopoly on DNA testing of virus samples. It wasnt a competent monopoly, either, as things turned out. We are still seeing American news items about academic and private laboratories the kinds of places that developed DNA sequencing in the first place, and which were its exclusive domain until recently that hope to help increase testing capacity, but must wait for permission from the federal paterfamilias.

The United States is about to have an awful lot of unnecessary deaths

Meanwhile, the evidence from countries that have already had proper battles with novel coronavirus, as opposed to our preliminary skirmishes, mostly seems to carry the message For the love of God, test as much as you can. So good luck to the Americans, and also (gulp) to us: it is starting to appear as though one of the tightest bottlenecks in scaling up lab testing might be fraction-of-a-cent nasopharyngeal swabs, rather than sequencing appliances or virus samples.

Anyway, thats a digression, one that I cant resist because the narrative of central government failure suits my taste. But some of you will be asking why beautiful free markets havent provided us with more of those swabs. Still, its not quite just to say that every libertarian turns into a cringing supplicant of the state in a pandemic. Yes, right now a lot of Canadians are relieved that a state with the power to lock up businesses, arenas and churches in the name of public safety also has the power to send cheques from the future to the people who have lost their jobs.

I approve of all this too, since I am lucky enough to have a career that benefits a little from crisis and chaos. We need to help those people whose work is actual work, and who cannot do that work because an act of God requires exceptional remedies. But it is fairly easy to see how the crisis could be exploited to injure civil liberties permanently, as opposed to just re-habituating us to welfare, which some politicians are unabashedly keen on. Anyone who lived through 9/11 already knows this in his bones.

Medical privacy is already something we relax when it comes to the reporting of infectious disease. You will hear the argument that we make a fetish of it that clinical research would be so much easier without it, as it is when human research subjects voluntarily surrender it. There will also be pundits and experts along soon to say how convenient it would be if cellphone tracking data, which would be real handy for cops and working epidemiologists doing disease surveillance, were available a little more freely.

And as our time in social lockdown creeps along, you and I will I promise! grow less patient with those who defy it brazenly, or those who are otherwise irresponsible about social distancing. Isnt due process of law an awful lot of trouble? The police have batons and sidearms, dont they?

Medical privacy is already something we relax when it comes to the reporting of infectious disease

The realistic libertarian understands the distinction probably not invented by Murray Rothbard, but that is where I personally got it from between society and the state, between social action and government powers based on retaliatory violence. A mess like this demonstrates the difference to all of us. Why does liberal democracy function reasonably well, when enlightened despotism (bound by strong rules about individual rights, or not) is always an alternative?

One reason is that, in emergencies, the state can take extraordinary steps with some show of consent or pre-existing licence from society (which itself does most of the heavy lifting, and even most of the enforcement). When society is chronically at odds with the state, even for good historical reasons, you end up with Italy a wonderful place to be most of the time, but not right now.

I may not have voted for Jason Kenney or Justin Trudeau, but we did, and an epidemic is a situation in which the necessity for us to work in concert is overwhelming. We have an extraordinary selfish incentive to obey, however hateful and nauseous the word obedience may be to us. Democracy is a transparent fiction which rises unbidden to vivid realness at such a time, as it would if we were confronted with a visible invader.

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Colby Cosh: As disgusting as it sounds, obedience is a virtue with coronavirus - National Post