Might I ask what level of economic depreciation is worth one life?
Kind of an unanswerable question, because it will differ from individual to individual and from circumstance to circumstance. But I think that history shows that economic misery drives people to do a lot of things they would prefer not to do, even at the risk of their life.
For, even where just one American perceives the health threat to be greater than the economic one, if the country goes the way of the majority, and that one dies of Covid-19, the majority has blood on its hands, does it not?
Hmmmm. I wouldn’t agree with your semantics, but I do understand your point.
Fortunately, I don’t think we we will come to such a dystopic situation. We continue to collect data on COVID, and as we do, the data seems to indicate that the right path *may* be a more targeted lockdown than a general one.
Remember, this is a public health matter. Public health is long accustomed to making recommendations which include a “tolerable” number of deaths for the greater good. Every time we approve a new drug, we know that it will cause death for a (hopefully) few.
Eventually, we will have what we need, which is a huge dataset which lists every fracking COVID death and all of the demographic, physical, and health conditions of the victim. Age. Race. Weight. Height. Diabetic? Boom boom boom. An Excel spreadsheet with 100 columns or more.
Then, people like me take that spreadsheet and we find correlations in it. And if we find that (as NYC did) 94% of all deaths were either (a) diabetic OR (b) immunocompromised OR (c ) over the age of 80, then that tells you that you don’t need a general shutdown; you need an open economy where anyone in a designated at risk group is being accomodated in their homes.
Human and economic welfare are incommensurable values. It’s a delicate situation that cannot be solved with pitchforks.
Well, I’m not sure the pitchforks are intended to solve anything. :-)
In any case, the right to assembly is similarly not absolute… your angry mob might be dispelled rather quickly given the circumstances.
No right is absolute, but no court is going to approve a five year ban on right to assembly, either. When a right is abrogated, it must be for a narrow purpose and for a narrow time.
