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.

Understanding Risk in the Time of Covid-19

I am something of a risk management expert. A significant part of my professional career has been advising organisations on how to effectively manage risk, so I can justly claim to know a thing or two about the subject. The responses of governments all around the world to the Covid-19 outbreak have demonstrated how poorly understood the science of risk management is amongst our leaders.

Risk is quantitatively assessed as likelihood times impact. In other words, the chances of the risk eventuating (if we don't do anything to avoid it) multiplied by what happens if it does. One of the problems with Covid-19 is that governments, at least initially, under assessed the likelihood. They have also overestimated the impact with their projections of huge numbers of deaths. Having assessed the risk, you then have to assess the possible mitigations and their costs. Governments have compounded their errors by going straight to the most extreme form of mitigation and not quantifying the costs.

Time can be a significant factor in risk mitigation. I was listening to a podcast this morning in which an academic in America was discussing the poor state of infrastructure in many US states. He gave an example where a state government had decided to defer repairs on a short stretch of highway that would cost $6m if done today. Leaving the maintenance unaddressed for just two more years would result in a six-fold increase in the cost of repair. Under those circumstances, it seems crazy not to carry out the mitigation today.

One of the worst effects of a lack of understanding of risk management is the precautionary principle. This is the belief that unless you have complete knowledge about the likelihood and impact of the risk, either you shouldn't take any action at all (e.g. not allowing the trial of a new drug) or you should go all-out to prevent the risk eventuating (e.g. locking down the population in a pandemic).

Imagine you have a sore leg and you go to the doctor, who takes one look at it and says it might be cancer and therefore he should amputate. This is the precautionary principle. At the very least, you would want to understand the likelihood of it actually being cancer and the prognosis for that particular form of cancer before you agreed to the surgery. Some cancers are benign and don't need to be treated at all. Others are minor and localised and a simple excision of the tumour might be sufficient. You would weigh up the likelihood and consequence of the diagnosis against the cost (in loss of mobility, ability to work, etc.) of the mitigation. You may decide that the cost of any mitigation is more than the benefit gained from the treatment (a not-uncommon decision particularly amongst elderly cancer patients).

The most obvious real-world example of reliance on the precautionary principle today is the various zero-carbon initiatives legislated by governments around the world. Stopping all or most of the use of fossil fuels, which we literally rely on to keep us alive, in the belief that it will prevent global warming is, from a risk management perspective, extreme folly. The claims of "settled science" notwithstanding, we have little certainty about the direct impact of manmade carbon dioxide emissions on the climate, so banning the most common, economic and safe forms of energy before we have the chance to develop reliable alternatives, is unjustified.

Some experts were calling for the New Zealand Government to quarantine everyone entering New Zealand back in February, when we had no Covid-19 cases. That mitigation, as disruptive as it would have been on our tourism and international education sectors, would have cost a fraction of the complete lockdown of our economy that was adopted once we had multiple cases of the disease within our borders. Philip Thomas, a professor of risk management at Bristol University, has estimated that if GDP falls by over 6.4 per cent over the next two years as a result of prolonged economic inactivity, more lives will be lost than saved thanks to rises in poverty, violent crime and suicide. So, even if you ignore the actual dollar costs, the lockdown may end up costing more in lives than the unmitigated impact of Covid-19 itself.

Effective risk management is almost always about choosing the lesser evil. There is seldom a costless mitigation option. Economists and actuaries understand this, which is why they quantify the value of human life in their models. For example, the economic cost of a death from a motor vehicle accident in New Zealand is valued at $4.34 million. Personally, I consider my life worth a lot more than that, but the transport authorities have to use an average value of life that represents the trade-off they are prepared to make in mitigating the risk of death on the roads. Make it too high, and the models would indicate we should ban all travel by motor vehicles, which would cost a lot more than the value of the lives lost. The problem with government responses to Covid-19 all around the world is that they haven't done these calculations, so it is not surprising they all jumped on the precautionary principle bandwagon and locked us all down.

A further problem with risk management is reliance on specialist expertise. This may seem a strange criticism for a risk management expert to make, but experts are, by definition, narrowly focused on their area of expertise. It would be surprising to find an epidemiologist, for example, who knows a lot about economics. So when governments take their advice exclusively from a epidemiologist, it isn't surprising that their response doesn't give sufficient weighting to the economic costs. Part of the challenge in defining and quantifying a risk is in finding the right range of expertise to do a balanced assessment of likelihood and impact. An engineer who specialises in fluid dynamics, for example, may be as qualified to advise about the spread of a disease as a doctor.

I feel like we're in the early stages of a nuclear war and there is still time to stop the missiles with only moderate damage to each side, but no one has the courage to agree a ceasefire. At some point rational thinking has to enter the higher realms of decision making about Covid-19. Our governments have largely ignored the costs of mitigation, but once these become apparent - like the smouldering remains of nuclear strikes - we're all going to wonder why we didn't come to our senses earlier.