Costs of government action on coronavirus

Some whiny statists are complaining that not everyone is embracing the measures being imposed by government to "deal with" the coronapocalypse. It is claimed that they are endangering lives by "downplaying" the risk.

No, they are not endangering society, nor will they be the cause of millions (or even dozens) of extra deaths. People who are "downplaying" coronavirus are serving an important purpose. Besides disarming the panic-bomb, I mean.

What they are doing is acting as a drag chute to slow down runaway government overreach.

This is essential.

Those who object to the "downplayers" aren't adequately (or even minimally) considering the costs of government intervention. You've seen this happen in other topics as well, such as with AGCC/"climate change".

Government-supremacists are pushing the narrative that not taking the actions government promotes will cause deaths, but are ignoring the deaths which will result from doing the wrong thing, or even too much of the "right thing". They are not considering the costs and benefits of both courses.

Maybe doing nothing about COVID 19 would kill more people. Of course, you have the option of doing everything you ought to do without government mandating anything. Doing something doesn't require anything being done by government. That is a bad assumption to make. But, I will concede that ignoring the problem would probably result in some unnecessary deaths.

However...

Damaging the economy-- as government is actively doing-- will also kill people. For certain. It may, in the long run, kill more people than the coronavirus would have even if no one had done anything about it-- but we don't know. We won't know. There is no way to know because you can't rewind history and change what was done.

Yes, some people caution against comparing how many deaths are resulting now and comparing that to the total deaths in previous plagues after they were over. That makes sense. However, you can compare death rates in the midst of the event-- which is something government-supremacists don't seem to like for anyone to do. It gets in the way of the narrative they prefer.

This is why we need brakes on the speeding car of statism. Those who "downplay" the danger are those brakes. They complete the costs vs. benefits big picture for the situation. Without them you only get one side, advocating only one path. Objecting to the balance they provide is not productive or smart.

(I added a "coronavirus" tag to the blog so you can follow what I've said about this from the beginning, if you care.)

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