Great video and article that Glenn Greenwald put up on his substack yesterday. In them, he points out that society has heretofore been well-adapted at performing cost-benefit analyses when considering public policy. A very good analogy he uses is that of speed limits.
Auto accidents are a leading cause of death in the US, particularly among the young and middle aged. Why do we allow high speed limits? Or teenagers to drive? Why not set the limit at 25 mph? Or apply a limit of one vehicle per family? Of course, we do not because there are extensive trade-offs and benefits of efficient and abundant transportation – economic, social, personal,…. Why, in the current multi-year Viral Crisis is it unacceptable to have an open discourse about the negative externalities of lockdowns, or the potential limitations and risks of increasingly-mandated medical therapies? We’ve heard from the beginning, “if it saves one life…!” Stop driving, and you could save many, many lives.
“In virtually every realm of public policy, Americans embrace policies which they know will kill people, sometimes large numbers of people. They do so not because they are psychopaths but because they are rational: they assess that those deaths that will inevitably result from the policies they support are worth it in exchange for the benefits those policies provide. This rational cost-benefit analysis, even when not expressed in such explicit or crude terms, is foundational to public policy debates — except when it comes to COVID, where it has been bizarrely declared off-limits.”
Worth a read and/or watch!