Well said. Novel crises end up with suboptimal responses because while custom is usually better than government, "Unfamiliar problem with large spillover effects" is one of the few areas where government will, on average, be more flexible than the average citizen's intuitions.
https://twitter.com/asplint/status/1327248035689230336
Like I'm super sympathetic to the folks arguing we shouldn't give government new powers just because there is a temporary crisis only 99.9999% of those folks also get really mad when you suggest using peer pressure to induce desirable reductions in spread.
In fact, what a large number of them seem to want--I'm tempted to say a majority--is that we use peer pressure to coerce everyone into ignoring the virus unless they're, like, 80. I mean, these people seem genuinely mad that I am not fulfilling my moral obligation to dine out.
Moreover the statistics they quote me on mortality are off by at least a factor of 10, and many allegedly libertarian arguments are in fact just an intuitive sense that anything they do is *a thing that decent people do* and therefore the government has no right to interfere.
And this is why I've thrown my lot in with public health experts rather than internet libertarians, even though in general, I do not trust their profession any farther than I can spit a rat. The things they say hold together; the ad hoc rationalizations on the other side don't.
Republicans could have modeled how individual initiative and robust communities do a better job than officialdom. They chose virus denialism instead.
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