Situated between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara counties on the California coast, Ventura County boasts a population of about 850,000, living amidst pristine beaches, occasionally snowcapped mountains, and plentiful farmland. Since April, Ventura County’s 7-day rolling average for deaths attributed to Covid-19 (SARS-CoV-2) has only barely exceeded 2 a handful of times, and for the past 14 days our County has had one death due to the Coronavirus. Only 0.02% of the population has succumbed to Covid-19 and to the best of my ability to determine, all of these poor souls were elderly and/or had comorbidities.
The number of cases per 100,000 has now increased to over 15, but (thank God) while some are being hospitalized, and some even have been placed in Intensive Care Units (ICU), there are still plenty of hospital beds and ventilators in the County. Yet, Ventura County was relegated to the most restrictive of California’s four-tier system along with much of the State before Thanksgiving even though not many people are dying and the hospitals are not being overrun. When reflecting on the data and what governments have done in an attempt to “flatten the curve” or “stop the spread,” why is there such a great disconnect between the lethality of the Coronavirus and governmental response to it?
In The Price of Panic, Douglas Axe, William M. Briggs, and Jay W. Richards offer a contemporaneous answer to this question while at the same time exploring alternative ways to deal with the pandemic that are not violations of mere social norms, let alone the inalienable rights that are enshrined in the Bill of Rights. There have been violations of the free exercise of religion and the right to peacefully assemble, both enshrined in the First Amendment. The Second Amendment’s guarantee of right to keep and bear arms, which is fundamental to allowing a free people to defend themselves against both criminals and the government has also been restricted; this is particularly important when the government does not protect its people from criminals. The sanctity of private households, the Fourth Amendment, has been disregarded. Presently in most of California, you are not supposed to have any friends or family over to your house. Many governments have disregarded the right of due process and property, which as part of the Fifth Amendment are not to be ignored. The Twenty-First Amendment’s guarantee to drink liquids of one’s choice is in many places functionally returning to the Eighteenth Amendment. While some may quibble at “intoxicating liquors” as an inalienable right, the ability to drink such liquids is certainly part of the natural law tradition.
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