Why Lockdown Libertarians are Wrong

Libertarians have been divided over whether governments should have locked down entire populations to stop the spread of Covid-19. Perhaps that split is not surprising - the libertarian movement has always been a broad church with a range of views from a religious-conservative right to an anarchist left. Most libertarians agree that some government is desirable but that its role should be limited to protecting the genuine rights of individual citizens. They also agree that rights don't exist at the discretion of governments, but rather the opposite - that governments exist at the behest of individuals, each of whom has their own inherent rights that can't be taken away. As Thomas Jefferson wrote so eloquently in the US Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...

The last sentence is perhaps the most important - the only legitimate function of governments is to protect individual rights and governments should be limited to this function. In other words, we delegate to governments the powers to protect our rights and nothing more. This begs the question, what are the legitimate actions of government in protecting our rights? Almost everyone agrees that stopping the initiation of violence against us is a legitimate action of government, even if that requires the government to use violence in our defence. If someone is intent on murdering us, we accept that the government can use force to detain or, if necessary, even kill that person. But what about someone intent on infecting us with a deadly disease?

The case of Typhoid Mary in the United States was a classic legal case in the early 20th Century. Mary Mallon was an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid, then a very deadly disease. Public health authorities asked her to self-isolate and she refused, continuing her work as a cook, infecting hundreds and causing the deaths of at least five people. Ultimately, she was forcibly detained for the remainder of her life. Few people today would dispute that the authorities were right to detain her - she was a real danger to the lives of people she came in contact with and she refused to voluntarily remove the deadly threat she presented to others.

Covid-19, like typhoid, can be spread by asymptomatic carriers of the disease. However, Covid-19 is far less deadly than typhoid, with a global case fatality rate (CFR) of 1-2% (which drops exponentially with age and is decreasing rapidly across all ages as vaccination rates increase). This compares with an untreated typhoid CFR of 10-20% (and even when treated with modern antibiotics, typhoid still has a similar CFR to Covid-19). Typhoid Mary's case was exceptional precisely because they locked her up, and even in her case that was a controversial decision at the time. With Covid-19, governments are locking up entire populations (at least to the equivalent level of house arrest).

I agree that extraordinary times require extraordinary measures and that threats to life not only justify but require governments to act to safeguard us. The alternative is anarchy and I am not an anarchist. I agree that someone who is infected with a deadly disease should be detained if necessary to protect everyone else. However, I do not accept that governments have the right to lockdown entire populations in response to Covid-19 for the following reasons:

1. Covid-19 is not a sufficient threat to justify such an indiscriminate response
2. Lockdowns are an ineffective public health response and there are alternatives
3. Lockdowns are a slippery slope that will be very hard to reverse.

I will address each of these reasons below.

We live in a time when the precautionary principle seems to apply to many public policy questions, whether it is climate change, natural disasters or public health. The problem with this principle of almost complete avoidance of risk is that the costs of mitigation are never considered and the alternatives often dismissed. Thus in New Zealand we have spent billions of dollars earthquake proofing buildings since the Christchurch quakes, when that money would almost certainly save more lives if it was spent on improving cancer treatment or building safe roads. The optimal risk management involves weighing the threat against the cost of mitigation and the alternatives. There are a number of considerations that have not been adequately considered in decisions on Covid-19 policy, including:

• the vast majority of people being locked down are not infectious
• Covid-19 does not represent a deadly risk to all but the most vulnerable in the population
• the economic, social and health impacts of lockdowns are huge
• there are alternatives to the wholesale abrogation of individual rights.

A more reasonable response would be to protect by isolation only those most vulnerable - the elderly and those with co-morbidities - and let the rest of the population go about its business. This is the approach taken in Sweden, Israel and a few other countries, which, although they have experienced far more deaths than New Zealand, have a lower Covid mortality than many countries with the most draconian lockdowns. It is also the approach recommended in the Great Barrington Declaration, which has been signed by thousands of epidemiologists and public health experts worldwide. The authors of the Declaration have pointed out that the costs of the lockdowns, even on people's health, almost certainly exceed the benefits in saving lives.

Finally, there is the slippery slope issue. Already public health authorities concerned about influenza and climate change policy advocates are pushing for lockdowns to be adopted to mitigate those risks. You may think it is unlikely that the public would accept such responses to those issues, but eighteen months ago no one thought the citizens of Western countries would accept the Covid-19 lockdowns. It has always been much easier to give up freedoms than to reestablish them and we forget that the liberal, rights-based order is a rare phenomenon in human history that sits on a fragile foundations. We can and do regress, as the people of China and Russia are discovering to their cost today, and dictatorial governments always have sound reasons to justify their policies.

Rights-based freedoms should not be given up cheaply and in my view preventing Covid-19 amongst the general population does not justify the cost, particularly as the CFR trends towards zero. What is done is done but we need to ensure we are not captured by the sunk cost fallacy and continue the lockdowns for fear of losing the benefits. We need to evaluate our Covid policies objectively from this point on. Australia has shown the way in determinedly coming out of lockdown and I hope the Ardern Government has the courage to do the same.

In the meantime, libertarians need to rediscover their principles.

Rights, morality and the size of government

The city of Wellington, where I live, is the capital of New Zealand and it is full of well-off public servants who think that bigger is better when it comes to government, and being of a libertarian persuasion myself, I find I am often called upon to explain my political views to friends and colleagues. In fairness, my views usually engender curiosity rather than outrage - they wonder how someone who is apparently rational and thoughtful could hold beliefs that are so obviously at odds with their own. They are even more surprised when I argue for minimalist government not from the familiar position of practicality (i.e. that the private sector could fulfil many of the current functions of government more effectively and efficiently than the government itself) but from a position of morality. They find this surprising because left-wing, big government supporters always think they have the moral high ground and it is disconcerting for them to find an opponent who undermines the very basis of their own beliefs.

The elemental moral argument against big government is that it requires the threat, and ultimately the use, of force against its own citizens. You could argue that it is not the size of government per se that requires the use of force, but it is hard to see how government could have grown to the size and broad role that is has today without resort to violence. The collection of taxes, for example, requires the threat and use of force and without taxes there can be no big state. If you believe as I do that the use of violence in human relations other than in self-defence is never moral, then you can't believe in big government.

My friends respond that the government needs the threat and use of force to prevent and stop violence. That is the moral contract of government, they argue - we give up the right to use violence to settle disputes ourselves and give the government a legal monopoly on its use in order to protect our rights. But the government doesn't need the unprovoked threat and use of violence to fulfil that moral contract. The moral role of government is the defence against, and prevention of, violence - not the initiation it.

Ah, my opponents say, if the government has a role in protecting rights then what about when those rights are in conflict? Doesn't the right to life mean someone has a right to food - and therefore government has a responsibility for ensuring everyone is fed?

True rights are never in conflict - if they are, then they are not rights. Rights are inherent to our humanity and they are universal. My rights cannot detract from your rights. Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.* The right to life simply means you have the right not to be killed by someone else - not that everyone has the responsibility to feed you. When the government takes on the responsibility of feeding those who can't feed themselves, it has to resort to violence to force others to pay for the feeding.

But, they cry, what about a baby? Yes, a parent who brings a baby into the world has a responsibility to care for that baby. The parent has made the choice to bring the baby into the world and the parental duty of care doesn't detract from the parent's rights any more so than a restaurant owner's right to run his business doesn't obviate his responsibility not to poison his customers. In other words, individual rights don't eliminate individual responsibilities.

Genuine rights sometimes appear to be in conflict and it is the role of the government, through the police, courts and armed forces, to mediate these conflicts by resorting to the objective facts and to moral rights. I have yet to find an example where it is demonstrable that genuine rights are in conflict when all the objective facts are revealed. Of course, sometimes the objective facts cannot be determined and the courts must decide between conflicting claims without full knowledge.

So, if the legitimate role of government is to mediate conflicts, how can it carry out even this limited role if it can't forcibly extract taxes? It has to convince sufficient numbers of people to contribute (through voluntary taxes or user charges) the money it needs to run government services. Such a system would almost certainly result in smaller, more efficient, more accountable and more moral government and that would be a very good thing.

* Variations of this saying have been attributed to different people but most commonly to Oliver Wendell Holmes.

UKIP challenges cosy centre-left-right political establishment

This week saw the UK Independence Party (UKIP) defy predictions and the serried ranks of its opponents to win the largest share of the UK vote for the European Parliament. In doing so, UKIP had to overcome an unholy alliance of all other political parties and every mainstream media outlet that rallied against it. During the election campaign UKIP candidates and supporters were repeatedly slandered but it was to little effect as more than four million voters cast votes for the party portrayed as comprising so many looneys and racists. UKIP support has been built on disaffection with Britain's membership of the European Community and admiration for the no-holds-barred style of its leader, Nigel Farage. Its policies, far from being lunatic fringe, are now being firmly embraced by the other political parties.

The closest equivalent to UKIP in New Zealand is New Zealand First, which, like UKIP, is anti-immigration and built around an almost cultish devotion to its leader, Winston Peters. I think what makes UKIP and New Zealand First appealing to a small but significant segment of the population is that they both defy the traditional stereotyping of the left-right spectrum. Both parties derive their support as much from 'working class' and Labour Party supporters as from the well-heeled and Conservative/National Party supporters. What I enjoy about UKIP's success is that it sends a strong message to the political class that the traditional assumptions about what constitutes a Labour or Conservative voter are no longer valid.

Recently a friend of mine called me a 'libertarian conservative' and I pointed out to him that the term is an oxymoron. The current political system in most Western nations is heavily statist and crony-capitalist and no one would seriously describe it as libertarian. Conservatism, by definition, is about supporting the status quo. Really, I am a radical. I want to see radical change to our political and economic systems and I find that often I have more in common with radicals of the left than conservatives of the centre-right.  I believe there is a significant and growing segment of the population in most Western nations who believe as I do - people who want both social and economic freedom, who distrust state intrusion into their lives in both work and personal arenas.

I wouldn't describe UKIP as libertarian but it is certainly more radical than either Labour or the Conservatives and any party that seeks to overturn the cosy centre-left-right arrangement that passes for political pluralism in most Western nations has some appeal to me.

Liberal Means Anything But

One of the common characteristics of dictatorial regimes is that they recognise early on the need to control the language. This is because language is a proxy for thought. People may dissent in their minds but that is of little effect if they are incapable of expressing their dissent. George Orwell recognised this in his novel, 1984, with Newspeak, the approved language of his fictional dictatorship.   Newspeak was designed to ensure people could not communicate opposition to the regime and one of the means of doing this was to confuse synonyms and antonyms, thus eliminating words like 'bad' and replacing them with euphemistic alternatives such as 'ungood'.

Orwell's novel was prescience of the Western world today.  The political left-wing in our so-called liberal democracies has achieved what Hitler and Stalin could only have dreamed of - an almost complete stranglehold on the language. 

Take the terms 'left-wing' and 'right-wing' - what do they really mean?  Left-wing originally referred to those on the left side of the French revolutionary legislative assembly.  Those who sat on the left opposed the monarchy and supported the establishment of a republic.  Those on the right side of the chamber supported the institutions of the Old Regime, although not the monarchy itself.  In other words, the left-wing supported change, i.e. they were radicals, the right-wing didn't, i.e. they were conservatives.  In the Western world of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries these terms have lost their original meaning and distinction.  Left-wingers are often the most conservative in that they want to preserve the established order of a strong, central government and comprehensive welfare state.  Right-wingers are often the ones advocating change, seeking to reduce the role of government in the economy and to roll-back the welfare state.  Thus we had Maggie Thatcher, a Conservative who was more radical in her policies than any modern British prime minister.

Left-wingers have co-opted the term 'extreme right-wing' to imply Fascist or National Socialist beliefs.  This is ironic to say the least because, as the names suggest, both Fascism (deriving from the Italian word for 'group') and National Socialism (literally Socialism to achieve nationalistic goals) have more in common, at least in desired outcomes, with the democratic Socialism that most liberals espouse than with anything their modern opponents believe.

The word 'liberal' has similarly lost almost all of its original meaning.  Today it is interchangeable with the term left-wing.  Classical liberalism, as typified by the writings of 17th Century English philosopher John Locke, was all about individual freedom and rights and had little in common with the political beliefs of latter-day liberals who advocate for an all-powerful (albeit, they would say, benevolent) state.  In the Newspeak of today's Western democracies, 'liberal' means the exact opposite and those who think of themselves as classical liberals prefer to use the term 'libertarian' to distinguish themselves from the faux-liberals of the left-wing.

There are many examples of this topsy-turvy use of plain words for political ends.  Those who advocate equal treatment of different races before the law are labelled 'racist', those who would prefer to judge individuals on their merits rather than on their sex are 'sexist', and those who dare to question the political orthodoxy on climate change are 'deniers'.

The motivation for this misuse and misappropriate of language is always the same as that of Big Brother - to prohibit debate and control thinking.  This is reason enough to resist such hegemony at every turn.  Language defines the terms of any debate.  Concede the language and you concede the argument.