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The problem with authoritarian governments, even ones you like, is that they don’t restrict their exercise of power to ends of which you approve. A government that forces you to stay inside your home, deprives you of your living, and forbids you to visit your loved ones—all in the name of “saving lives”—can make use of the same rationale to restrict a woman’s right to choose.
Imagine the following scenario in a post-COVID world. One of the red states brings a challenge to Roe v. Wade before the Supreme Court and argues as follows: The ruling in that case unlawfully restricts the exercise of the state’s legitimate power to infringe upon civil liberties to save lives—a power we have now ceded without objection. The defendant brings experts to “prove” that a fetus is not truly alive; experts for plaintiffs bring “evidence” to support the opposite point of view. If the preponderance of the evidence shows the fetus to be alive and viable, how likely would the Court be to uphold a woman’s right to choose, given the state’s newfound right to abrogate it?
We justify our deference to the current lockdown in the name of listening to experts, but that does not relieve us of the obligation to think for ourselves. Anthony Fauci is an undoubted expert on how a virus may spread exponentially through a population but is unqualified to gauge the costs of an economic shutdown upon our country or to judge the risks involved in granting the government the power to curtail civil liberties in order to save lives.
Even within their own areas of expertise, experts are often mistaken. Neil Fergusen of Imperial College London famously terrified Boris Johnson into closing down his country; a leading expert from Oxford University recently argued that the number of infections actually peaked in that country prior to instituting the lockdown. A recent analysis reported in the Wall Street Journal found no statistical correlation between lockdowns and loss of life per capita in states that sheltered quickly; population density and public transport usage were far more significant factors. For months now, expert epidemiologists, such as Paul Offit and Anders Tegnell, have argued against widespread economic shutdowns in favor of more moderate responses.
In the face of such vast uncertainty, we should maintain a healthy skepticism about what all these experts assert as truth. We must cling to our defense of civil liberties and not defer to a vast expansion of government authority in the name of “saving lives.” We may very well come to regret our enthusiastic support for a widespread economic shutdown when we discover, too late, that we’ve undermined the very civil liberties we have long battled to protect.
