"Does anyone seriously believe that the Greek Assembly and/or the Roman Senate chose
freedom of assembly as the greater good in the midst of any one of those plagues?"
That's a good question. But there are a number matters involved here.
One is the plague, another is a citizen's constitutional rights during a plague, and a third question is what is the economic impact of a total shutdown.
Let's start with the plague. Shouldn't the seriousness of the particular plague have a bearing on what transpires later as far as what a country does?
The plagues of 500 or so years ago and more often killed off the third of the population of Europe.
That isn't going to happen with this plague. Even if the virus in the worst scenario killed three million people in the U.S., that's still only one percent of Americans.
They're now predicting 60,000. But it looks like it will go past that maybe 100,000. That's still less than one tenth of one percent of Americans. And most of those people are the elderly and people already beset by serious illnesses.
Should we shut everything down because a fraction of one percent of the citizens will be killed by the virus? I think not.
One other question is the one about civil rights. How much can the state force you to do things even in an emergency? You don't think the state is going over the line when they force people from going outside their homes to gatherings even when those people are keeping safe distances?
And what about the economic impact of a total shutdown? Obviously, unless enough people are working, everything collapses. People are forced to live on subsistence supplies.
This disease is proving to be not like the plagues of the middle ages. Even during the Spanish Flu pandemic America did not shut down. And more than half a million Americans are estimated to have died from the flu.
Time to get things going.
