Freedom, lockdown, and COVID-19

”Instead I invite you to consider what will happen if and when lockdown is lifted”.

Thank you – and I have a few questions about that.
1. When I was very young I spend a lot of time in Disneyland –
(mainly because my dad had something to do with Disney) and as a friend of mine -(who works for Disney) – told me that ”Disney is dead” – and he had told me before that Disney = USA – in a kind of metaphorical economical way of a business model – which only works without ”ANY social distancing” AND only at absolute ”full capacity” as for example Disneyland Paris didn’t work for years because it needed in the first place 9 -(in words ”nine” Mill visitors to –
even –
break even –
AND now – as the Brexit was completely useless – as every country is ”social distancing” too and some planes -(or ships or automobiles) and most people will make vacations in their own countries -(at least for a certain while) – and will NOT go for years to any conventions – or concerts – or other places where there isn’t any ”social distancing” – and as the people have found out that such a new life – and such a true REVOLUTION isn’t ALL that bad – as working from home isn’t – all that bad – and that we don’t need that many office buildings anymore – or having to drive and fly around like crazy – and as the German ”Gaststättenverband” -(I love that word) – predicts that every third restaurant and hotel will die – and the favourite waiter of of favourite (Italian) restaurant asked US:
How are we going to live with at least 25 to 30 percent less wealth?
and we said:
WE will make it – WITH ”social distancing”
but we also don’t want him to get sick –
so – no more hugs for ”Salve” and ”Ciao” – and that’s the sadest part of it –
AND what are we going to do?

And that’s my question – somebody please should answer – while we are:

https://youtu.be/TEjtu-KNcV0

For example, those unpicked crops won’t pick themselves and there will be plenty of unemployed (soon to be once-more relabelled “scroungers”) who can be made to replace the migrants who have stopped coming.

The farmers of Georgia (the US one)learned that lesson the hard way some years back, when the Legislature passed it’s version of the AZ SB1070 draconian anti-immigrant law. They had almost no one show up to pick their crops, certainly not at the wages they were offering, and slave prison labor turned out to be no better; after a day in the fields the prisoners refused to work any more, and even where they DID find a workforce willing to pick, they discovered that picking crops is not actually a conpletely unskilled task.

Crops demanding hand-harvesting require care and practice to efficiently pick without ruining the crop.

As for the “tyrannical assault on freedom” I was unaware that tryanny came with the comfort of your own home, internet, television, and takeout, although one particularly odious Wisconsin Supreme Court justice did equate < a href=”https://americanindependent.com/wisconsin-supreme-court-justice-coronavirus-internment-world-war-ii-rebecca-bradley-covid-19/”> the stay at home order to Korematsu and the internment of Japanese Americans .

“Libertarians who are extraordinarily sensitive to the least legal limitation on negative freedom are usually completely immune to the idea that structural features of capitalist society are coercive and freedom-limiting. ”

I think you will discover that those who coined the term libertarian (libertarie) which the propertarians knowning stole in the 1950s are well aware of those structural features — as Proudhon argued, property is both theft and despotism.:

http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/160-years-libertarian

Please don’t let these defenders of private tyranny continue their abuse of the good left-wing word libertarian.

I’ve never understood what “positive liberty” is supposed to mean. Among modern socialists, it seems to mean something like “capability.” But not so long ago it apparently had a mysterious significance that was never explained in specifics or examples. As far as I’ve worked it out for myself, it means something like “privilege justified by membership, where membership, being a subset of humanity, is redefined as ‘properly’ signifying the universal set, and ‘privilege’ thus denied as such.” Or rather, a shibboleth meant to signify one’s acceptance of such slippery logic. I think we can do without the term.

On the main topic of the OP, I do think it runs the risk of exaggerating the extent to which people find libertarian arguments – saying the government literally has no right to impose public health measures – measures every government in history has claimed the right to take – convincing.

Slightly but not completely tangential to the topic, I’ve found the present crisis has reduced quite a bit my tolerance for writers opining broadly out of their zone of expertise, whether to claim expertise they don’t really have or to claim* the crisis proves they’re right about everything and always have been. I suspect that will continue after the crisis ends. For now I’m happy to ignore the shouting on the one side about “health is the only thing that matters” and “the economy is the only thing that matters”, do what I can and need to, and hope there are enough responsible people in power to work out reasonable plans that ignore shouting in favor of reality.

in the modern, no argument but “if you were smarter than you are, you’d understand why what I say is true” manner

@8

The distinction between ‘with’ and ‘of’ is self-evident bullshit, if you just think about HIV and how it acts and what it does.

You just need to think it through: how could you possibly tell the difference?

Lots of semi-educated, semi-smart people are drawing this tenuous distinction vis a vis Covid-19 that they would not dare to do with any other disease (‘Oh no the real cause of his illness was Kaposi sarcoma. It just happened to be an unfortunate coincidence that the patient was HIV positive as well’.)

In any case, there was an actuary in a twitter thread I have now lost the addy for, who pointed out that actuaries make decisions about this ‘distinction’ all the time, it is literally their job. And the reality is that even for very old Covid-19 sufferers who die, they are still losing a non-trivial number of years in terms of their lifespan, maybe up to 8 or 9 years.

@4 — or more directly, https://existentialcomics.com/comic/259

@Quentin The “dying with, not of” is pretty much moot given that all-cause mortality in England and Wales is twice normal. The Financial Times has a write up, but there’s no way to explain that away as mislabeling existing deaths. There’s a lot of people who live 50 years or more with high blood pressure or diabetes. They didn’t just all die this month for no reason.

Here is a great example of the freedom to work. https://www.10tv.com/article/reopened-restaurant-told-workers-dont-wear-face-masks-or-dont-work-2020-may

Regarding over/undercounting in general. There are just no standardiced rules for counting. Every nation, sometimes every region does it´s own thing, with a wild mix of aspects that under and overcount, or just delay reporting of some death. Overall overcounting (compared to excess death rates, there is no objective rule whom to count anyway) seems to be very rare, maybe Belgium?
Here is a nice graphic tool with weekly excess mortality data, they sure look particular ugly in the UK:
https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps#excess-mortality

If the infection rate in big cities and institutions is as high as some studies have suggested (1/3 by some reports), counting “deaths by Covid-19” as “presumed deaths” + “positive tests at death” will obviously be inaccurate

… I am forced to admit that I was approaching this problem with the perspective of the situation we have in australia, where the disease is still very rare.

[which is to say much of what I said and implied is wrong, for which I apologise.]

If there is a concept of freedom/liberty which includes the freedom/liberty to bring lawsuits, then any law which limits legal liability restricts that freedom/liberty; conversely, any law which widens the scope of legal liability enhances that freedom/liberty.

People, please ignore Quentin. There is zero chance that any country is over-counting COVID deaths and a large chance that every country is under counting. We won’t know fully how bad this was for months, until all the data cleaning is done. There are jurisdictions in America where care homes aren’t required to report deaths in any kind of timely fashion and in large parts of America this disease hasn’t even begun to take off yet.

Furthermore, that link Quentin provides says nothing about dying “with” vs. “of”. It is about how some deaths “of” covid haven’t been recorded in daily stats and the ONS is now incorporating them. Here is some background I wrote on mortality figures for people who care about the actual deaths of actual people, rather than minimizing them for political gain, as Quentin does.

If and when lockdown is lifted then expect the same voices who call it a tyrannical invasion of freedom also to call for the deployment of force and coercion against those reluctant to expose themselves to the risk of death.

This still strikes me as bizarre. Consider the folks who made their livings operating a mom-and-pop food truck or selling goods at farm markets or craft fairs. Both involve interaction with a stream of customers, so not particularly safe. But they have no employer and are not ‘coerced’ into reopening their own small businesses by anything other than the need to keep a roof over their heads and food in fridge. Are they unfree in any way other than humans (and all living beings) have been forever — ‘coerced’ into providing for themselves?

And who, precisely, have you seen favoring force to compel anyone to remain in or return to unsafe work (whether as employee or sole proprietor)? The only thing close that I’ve seen was the leftist mayor of New York’s hare-brained suggestion to draft medical personnel. That would be an instance of coercing people to work in unsafe jobs. But absent a draft, aren’t people free to judge their own circumstances (their age, their health, their overall vulnerability) and decide to switch to a safer job? And haven’t you provided one example of how that might be done? After all, harvesting crops is outdoor work where social distancing is relatively easy to achieve. Also isn’t it clear that many people are going to have to make such switches simply because a lot of the less safe jobs (flight attendant, manicurist, waiter, personal trainer, etc) are not going to be on offer in anything like their former numbers for quite some time?

And, by the way, this is not idle musing — I do have skin in the game. My wife works in a medical field and must see patients and their families at quite close quarters and in confined spaces to do her work. She has been seeing only a few emergency patients, but now the clinic is planning to spin back up and schedule a full load of regular patients starting in a week or two. We are both relatively close to an age of vulnerability (and if she becomes infected, I surely will be too). She did consider early retirement or accepting a voluntary furlough (that might become permanent), but ultimately decided to return (out of a sense of purpose, of solidarity with her co-workers, and because her patients depend on her). But it was a considered choice, not coercion.

But absent a draft, aren’t people free to judge their own circumstances (their age, their health, their overall vulnerability) and decide to switch to a safer job? And haven’t you provided one example of how that might be done? After all, harvesting crops is outdoor work where social distancing is relatively easy to achieve.

In theory, anybody can decide ‘I want to switch from the job I have now to a different job’, but in practice deciding you want to do it is not automatically sufficient to make it happen: just because I want a job doesn’t mean I can get it. I don’t know that it would be easy for me to get a job harvesting crops, and I don’t know that even if I got one my performance would be good enough to keep it. (I also don’t know how much physical distance between people harvesting crops is typical.)

Here is a link to an article Ina an Italian newspaper from April 28 about undercounting of death in various EU countries, based on checking declared coronavirus deaths VS excess deaths:

https://www.corriere.it/dataroom-milena-gabanelli/morti-covid-tutte-bugie-dell-europa-ecco-dati-reali/1c28ca00-88b3-11ea-96e3-c7b28bb4a705-va.shtml

Use Google translate if you are interested, however it has some nice graphs.

The third graph (Sottostima dei morti per l’epidemia) gives an idea of how many more people are dead by covid relative to what is officially declared.

For Italy it is +36% (meaning that if the Italian government says 100 covid deaths, reality is 136).

For UK is a whopping +93% (meaning that when the UK government says 100 deaths, reality is 193).

So undercounting my ass.

This said, there is a worse problem: in Italy, for example, we had a big outburst, but most in the north, in the region of Lombardy where I live. Even in Lombardy there are some cities that were literally ravaged (like Bergamo and the small towns around it) and other, like in the province of Varese where I live, with relative few cases.

The reason is that the lockdown really slowed down covid, even though it took some time.
If we want to think about what happens without lockdown, it makes sense to think to the cities where covid apparently ran its full course, like Bergamo and nearby towns, not to the cities like Varese where covid was apparently stopped by the lockdown.

In these cities the death count is whopping, according to the same article the year on year death increase reached a +900% in some of those towns.

So I think that lockdown is somehow working, the number of deaths is still high but not as high as it could be, but a lot of people for some reason don’t want to believe it and make up dubious stats to justify their hopes, it’s a sort of wishful thinking.

Early estimates of coronavirus were around 1%-2%, in a country like Italy with 60 millions inhabitants it means, assuming 80% of the population catches it, between 500 000 and 1 000 000 deaths. Make this projection for your own country.

“La majestueuse égalité des lois, qui interdit au riche comme au pauvre de coucher sous les ponts, de mendier dans les rues et de voler du pain.” le lys rouge, Anatole France.

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.”, CT, notGoodenough.

[A choice is only a choice to the extent of the agency available – the less practical the alternative option, the less of a choice it is. The lack of appreciation of this point amongst many of the political and business sectors is….disapointing, to put it mildly]

MarkW@25 pleads for a true understanding of how it is the “left” that fights freedom. The threat to deny unemployment compensation to people who refuse to return to work strikes me as “force and coercion.” I do not see that as “left” in any fashion.

The example of agricultural workers comes up, as well might meat-packing workers. The difference between lockdowns and quarantines comes into play in such examples. If essential workers in a given large farm or meat-packing plant were checked for C19, then isolated from outside contact for two weeks, then they would have no need for rigorous measures in exposure to each other. Only new contacts, like truck drivers or errant management need be handled with safety protocols.

The problem of course is that the US doesn’t have the medical infrastructure to test even groups of essential workers on a wide scale. The US doesn’t have a political system that responds to the needs of the majority. Most of all the US doesn’t have the kind of economy that could provide housing and support for large numbers of people in quarantine. Sending people back to their families—and the multitude of indirect contacts from each family member—in particular is difficult because the truth is that the physical conditions for so many workers is deplorable, incompatible with good health, in so-called ordinary conditions.

The social decay is not obvious. Also, as even (especially?) cynics agree, there is a lot of ruin in a country. And of course, it can’t be admitted that the decay is the decay of the capitalist/imperialist system, so there must not be any such decay. But it’s all rotting, nonetheless.

@bianca steele

I’ve never understood what “positive liberty” is supposed to mean.

I’ve often found in practice talk of “negative” liberty is used to mean, signify, or broadly encompass collective or community-wide freedom from pre-existing harm and violence [individual, systemic]. A freedom that restores a standard of living and protection enjoyed by other communities, whose most outwardly protected rights are “positive” and involve the unregulated freedom to cause harm without consequence and to exploit the power conferred upon them, often to the detriment of others, but also to stake out an individualized freedom away from a common interest, an “identity,” if you will.

Lofty ideals, surely, but in practice defense of the positive stuff is a smoke and mirrors job, marketing ideals and “choices” that possess a thin veneer of rugged individualism while actually aping the manufactured lip service of their own party line. Unfettered agency meets bootstraps and little responsibility nor duty to one’s fellow man, where one’s impulses are purported to exist in a vacuum, are above both skepticism and criticism, and serve as proof of one’s intellectual superiority. Should a deep thought pop up in a nimble brain, it would be tyranny to deny anyone to act on that thought, all thoughts and ambitions being equally valid, but those by the elite and comfortable more valid than others, proof of superior intellect, superior station. Essentially, the house that Dunning Kruger + nepotism built.

Almost every economic right-wing value tries to find its validity within the “positive” framework, where bearing the cost of another person’s lofty aspirations is the duty of the little people. I believe it’s called meritocracy amongst the intellectuals, and not only does it defend unequal outcomes, it worships unequal access, working under the assumption that anyone oppressed must lack character, must be reaping what their limited capacities are capable of sowing.

@MarkW

If one wants to eat, one needs the cash to buy the meat. You don’t recognize any coercion in denying people access to unemployment insurance if their former employer’s offer to return to work is contingent upon a person’s willingness to work in less than safe conditions, in a country with an anti-scientific, anti-public health contrarian streak a mile long? This is the intersection between no reliable publicly-subsidized health care and that old chestnut about Knowing What You Signed Up For. Sure, the vulnerable and the ill know exactly the risks they are taking; there are no other options if they want to house, feed, and clothe themselves. Feel free to pretend that is freedom, but there’s no call for playing dumb here.

Congratulations on your wife’s ability to take retirement and her choice to forgo it. Would that the vast majority of the rest of the world, who will never enjoy the opportunity to “retire” without becoming homeless, have such cushy options at their feet.

From the opening of the Stanford Ency. of Philosophy entry on “positive and negative liberty”:

Negative liberty is the absence of obstacles, barriers or constraints. One has negative liberty to the extent that actions are available to one in this negative sense. Positive liberty is the possibility of acting — or the fact of acting — in such a way as to take control of one’s life and realize one’s fundamental purposes. While negative liberty is usually attributed to individual agents, positive liberty is sometimes attributed to collectivities, or to individuals considered primarily as members of given collectivities.

The idea of distinguishing between a negative and a positive sense of the term ‘liberty’ goes back at least to Kant, and was examined and defended in depth by Isaiah Berlin in the 1950s and ’60s.

p.s. Recently ran across some kind of interesting but, istm, somewhat opaque and debatable remarks about freedom and authority etc. in (of all places) Kissinger’s discussion of Metternich’s conservatism in A World Restored (pb, Houghton Mifflin Sentry Edition, pp.194ff.). Of course, given the author’s subsequent career it’s close to impossible to read this now simply as some passages in his doctoral diss. (which is what the book was).

LFC

Yes, though the ability for individuals to choose their life purposes is usually understood as included within “negative liberty.”

The Keats poem “Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent’s Narrow Cell” is an example of positive liberty, as he compares the constraints of a religious life to the constraints of traditional poetic form.

Hello Chris,

I certainly don’t think that people should be coerced back to work if they don’t want to, though I do think we need to end these lockdowns as soon as possible. What we need is more clear public messaging, from the government: making it clear to people that this disease isn’t actually that dangerous and that unless they are in an at risk group they really have very little to be concerned about. Cards should be sent out with green, red, amber marking where people can fill it out with their BMI, their underlying health conditions, chronic diseases etc. and this will give them a picture for whether or not they and their household is actually at risk.

People are talking about this disease like its the black death; as though it threatens everyone and kills indiscriminately. This way of talking has created a completely unfounded mass hysteria in the population. We are talking about a disease which has a case fatality rate of 0.3% (according to the most detailed serological studies, such as the one carried out in Gangelt) so it’s a little more deadly than the flu. Of course, it will be a significant killer for the next couple of years – but so is influenza, and nobody panics like this and announces crackers lockdowns during a bad flu season.

Part of the problem has been the medias failure to adequately contextualise the data they are presenting, so people just hear a large number of deaths and don’t know what to make of that number. Reporters need to be more clear about the fact that 800,000 people die every year in the UK and that deviations of 5% on either side of this are not uncommon. We need to be reminded that at 43,000 the number of excess deaths in the UK is about the same as the number of excess deaths during the 2014/15 flu season – and still falls short of the number of excess deaths during the 2017/18 flu season (excess deaths then were around 50,000). That context allows people to make sense of the data they read about without panicking – how scared were you of going to work during the 17/18 flu season? Most people probably didn’t even notice.

The other problem is that the government has completely failed to give a serious explanation for the lockdown to the public. They are spouting rubbish about “save lives” without actually explaining why the lockdown would “save lives”. As a result the public have been given the wrong impression that just extending the lockdown on and on will save lives. This is nonsense. Eventually the lockdown will be lifted and then the same people who would have died before would die a bit later – so no lives would be saved apart from for a few months. There are two explanations that could have been given for why we were implementing the lockdown. Firstly, it could be to ensure that hospitals don’t get overfilled as happened in Wuhan and Northern Italy. If that was the aim, then a short lockdown (or a local lockdown in London and some of the other cities with severe outbreaks) would have been sufficient. It has been clear for at least the last three weeks that the government has overestimated ICU needs, most hospitals around the country – including the Nightingale in London – are completely empty. There are no more concerns about shortages of ventilators as it is now clear they are not actually a good way to treat most cases. If there is another severe outbreak in another city in the UK we can always just announce a small local lockdown of that city. Secondly, it could be argued that lockdowns save lives because they give us time to build up a testing capactiy so we can trace down cases and stop really severe outbreaks from happening; but at 500,000 or so tests per week the UK is now testing a lot of people and has the capacity to test even more. Apart from that I can’t really think of any other reason why a lockdown would “save lives”.

So, no I don’t think we should coerce people to go back to work. But once people are given accurate information and this hysteria calms down, people will just go back to their lives as normal. No coercion will be needed.

@38, 39
As suggested in these comments, there are problems with the positive/negative liberty distinction.

For another set of distinctions, see Orlando Patterson, Freedom v.1: Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (1991), “Introduction: The Meaning of Freedom.” He criticizes Berlin, though briefly (p. 3 and references at n.7, p.407).