How to Stay Sane as a Libertarian on Lockdown — BZS

23 min readMar 27, 2020

While the COVID-19 scare has forced many businesses to close, politicians around the world are having a field day. The people are scared, and once again seem more than willing to hand over their economic freedom in the name of safety. Ostensibly, the rationale of “lives not livelihoods” is beneath this stripping away of our liberties. It is only “temporary,” we are told — just as the income tax and PATRIOT Act — were merely temporary measures to address extraordinary circumstances of WWII and 9/11 respectively.

In a recent piece, “An Epidemic Big Enough to Accommodate Everyone’s Wish List,” (3/18/20) Reason.com Senior Editor Jacob Sullum notes how politicians from both parties are using the crisis to advance their agenda. Bernie Sanders is pushing Medicare-for-All, while Trump doubles down on his border wall.

In doing so, government is complicit with the mainstream media, which happily spits out the most dire scenarios — reporting on every new case as proof the sky is falling while ignoring new data suggesting that we are overreacting.

In response, I have limited my information intake to a select trusted group and am calm, relaxed, optimistic, and comfortable in the conclusions and observations I have made. Being selective has made a profound difference in how I feel about the world and the confidence I have in my own decision making.

I invite you to try it. A few important reminders:

Newly discovered cases ≠ new cases
Mainstream media hijacks our emotions to sell us advertisements
“Temporary” restrictions on freedom are never temporary
Government always thinks about how to expand its power at the expense of the people during times of crisis.

So, who should you follow? For starters, try Reason Magazine, Cafe Hayek, American Institute for Economic Research, and The Cato Institute.

Jacob Sullum has been particularly prolific — covering all angles of the virus, from the unrealistic worst-case scenarios to the constitutional considerations of banning non-essential business.

Jacob joined me for the full hour to discuss whether the aggressive control measure against COVID-19 are worth it. He’ll also help explain why politicians — in the words of Rahm Emanuel — “never let a good crisis go to waste.”

Jacob’s writings over the past few weeks also reveal Governor Andrew Cuomo as the political opportunist par excellence, but he has plenty of competition.

To get the complete picture (without the hysteria), join my conversation with Jacob Sullum, and learn my secret to staying sane as a libertarian on lockdown — this Sunday, 8–9am PACIFIC — on the show of ideas, not attitude.

Related Shows:

Government, Stay out of My Gullet with Jacob Sullum
Hate Crimes Legislation with Jacob Sullum
Zimmerman Trial — It Is Not About Race with Jacob Sullum
Big government can’t save us from coronavirus with Jeffrey Tucker
Lawson Bader on *I, Whiskey* & Curtailing the Regulatory State

Reason Articles by Jacob Sullum

Epidemiology and Overreaction

In the coronavirus pandemic, we’re making decisions without reliable data By JOHN P.A. IOANNIDIS | MARCH 17, 2020
How Mass Hysteria Is Making Coronavirus Worse Than It Actually Is — Worth By Joon Yun, March 2, 2020

Economic Concerns

We Will Regret Not Taking the Economic Effects of Mass Quarantine More Seriously — Reason.com by Nick Gillespie
Donald Boudreaux: Globalization, wealth & health | TribLIVE.com
Coronavirus and Politicians vs. the Economy | Cato @ Liberty by Chris Edwards
Beware of Panic Policymaking — AIER by Veronique de Rugy

Constitutional Considerations:

Transcript

Bob Zadek: Welcome to the Bob Zadek Show. The coronavirus is in the news all of the time and there is so much information out there that for the population and for all of us who are concerned about our economic well being, our physical well being, and the wellbeing of those we care about the most on the planet. The future seems so murky right now. There is so much uncertainty, so much bad information — an absence of quality information. I thought I would do my best this Sunday morning to help us sort through some of the noise and help us all better understand how we got here, what the future holds and what we should be doing right now.

This morning’s guest is Jacob Sullum. Jacob has been on my show many times before. He has written extensively on the coronavirus and on public health in general. He’s the senior editor at Reason magazine and he’s also a nationally syndicated columnist. He has written two critically acclaimed books. In 1998 with incredible prescience, he wrote a book entitled, For Your Own Good: The Anti-Smoking Crusade and the Tyranny of Public Health. In 2004, Jacob wrote Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use. Jacob, you are my go-to person for this topic. You are so informed and you can help all of us sort through what’s going on. So Jacob, welcome to the show this morning.

Coronavirus: What do we Know?

Bob Zadek: I should mention Jacob is on his cell phone speaking to us from Texas, but you’ll certainly be able to hear and understand him. Coronavirus has been in the news all of the time, as it should be. And there is a lot which is known, but most importantly, there is some crucial information which is not known. Without nailing down this massive unknown, the rest of the conversation in the media and in public has a speculative aspect to it.

So what is the great unknown and why is it unknown?

Jacob Sullum: The most important thing that we still know is exactly how deadly this virus is. Meaning what percentage of people who are infected can be expected to die. It seems pretty clear that it is more deadly than the seasonal flu. For example, the seasonal flu has what they call a case fatality rate of about 0.1%. The public health officials in the United States are saying that the test estimate indicates that the case fatality rate for COVID-19 is somewhere between 0.1% up to 1%.

That’s a huge range and the fact that we have not been able to nail that down better suggests how poor our data collection has been so far. There are some epidemiologists by the way, who think the lower end of that range is actually less than .1%.

It might be as low as 0.05%, which would make COVID-19 actually less than the seasonal flu. But it is likely somewhere in between. Depending upon which fatality rate you use to make projections, the number of deaths you predict varies very widely. People have seen estimates of the worst case scenario according to the CDC as being 1.7 million deaths in the U.S.

Neil Ferguson projected 2.2 million deaths. Now, I think those scenarios are implausible for two reasons. First of all, they are assuming a relatively high case fatality rate. The CDC assumed 0.8%. The Imperial college assumes 0.9%.

Maybe that’s right, but it is also possible that it is half that. The other major thing that figures into these projections is what percentage of the population do you think will ultimately be infected? The CDC assumed 65% in their worst case scenario, but that’s based on the assumption that basically nothing was done. It does not adequately take into account voluntary changes in behavior that have already happened and will continue. So if people are reducing social contact, if they are limiting their errands, if they are washing their hands frequently, if they’re doing everything they’ve been told they’re supposed to do, even if not everyone is doing that, even if not everyone is the best at washing their hands back, those sorts of changes are bound to have an effect on the transmission rate and how many people ultimately will be infected.

These are all big unknowns, which is why you see such a big range and estimates of how many people might die from a few thousand in the United States to 20,000 to 1.7 million. So you look at that and you think, how can you possibly rationally make policy when you don’t know how big the problem is you are approaching. Really, you can’t. That’s one of the things I should try to emphasize is that way there’s such a high level of uncertainty you’re really operating in the dark. You don’t know how many Americans are infected, you don’t know what percentage of those people will ultimately die. So you can’t know whether what you’re doing is actually worth the cost.

There are enormous costs to these aggressive interventions like shutdowns or lockdowns or whatever you want to call them. Shutting down the economy for weeks or months has a really severe impact on millions of people, right? People are out of work. Their businesses are no longer operating. That may be driven as to bankruptcy. We are looking at a severe recession as bad as 2008–2009 or possibly worse. That recession cost an estimated $22 trillion. We’re doing sort of doing that to ourselves. Some of this in fact is just a response that would have happened anyway to the virus. But a lot of this is government mandated, right?

So if you’re trying to figure out whether it is worth doing this given the huge cost, you don’t know what the problem is that you’re avoiding, what the magnitude of that problem is, it is really hard to make rational policy decisions.

I think it’s a mistake to say, like Andrew Cuomo does, that we’re going to do whatever it takes for how long it takes, no matter the cost. That cannot possibly be right. Because if the cost is huge and the benefit is small, we shouldn’t be doing those things.

So we have to talk about this in a more balanced way, taking into account not only what lives could possibly be saved by these measures, but also what is the cost of doing them.

Bob Zadek: The math is 10th-grade algebra. It’s a numerator and denominator. You divide the numerator by the denominator and that’s the percentage.

The numerator is the number of deaths. That we kind of know. We know how many people have died and we know if they have died from the disease or at least have the disease be a major contributing factor. There often are many factors.

It’s the denominator that’s the challenge because the denominator ought to be the number of people who have been infected and we don’t know, without testing, how many people have been infected. So we have a missing denominator and the equation cannot be calculated except with guesswork. The news media reports every day, new coronavirus cases, and that’s false. That statement is missing a key word. Please help us understand that the missing word is “newly discovered” cases. The cases have been there for some time. Perhaps we just didn’t know about them. It’s the discovery that’s missing from the conversation and that’s what makes the calculation impossible.

Jacob Sullum: Right. The cases that we know about are the cases that had been identified because they came to official attention. How does that happen? People get sick and they think “I might have this virus” and they go to be tested. Typically, this virus does not lead to severe symptoms. The last I looked at the worldwide data, they were saying 95% of known cases involve mild symptoms. There are lots of other people who never identified that never figure into the calculation who had mild symptoms or no symptoms at all. So if you have mild symptoms, either you think you have a cold or a flu. If you don’t go to the doctor or get tested you’ll never be identified unless they start doing widespread testing.

That’s the basic problem. They are not doing either testing of everybody or testing of a representative sample. So you can’t know how many infections there actually are. So this is all guesswork. It’s very scary to watch the number of deaths climbing and the case fatality rate which is going up to almost 2%. But it is very misleading because the vast majority of the cases have not been identified. And this is something that may remain up to two weeks, so the cases you are identifying now are these are people who are actually maybe infected as long as two weeks ago.

So you are sort of getting a picture of what happened two weeks ago, and you are not even getting an accurate picture of that because you don’t know what percentage of the population has been infected. So until they start doing wide testing, and ideally they should test everyone. They don’t have the capacity to do anything like that yet, but if they can’t do that, like right now, they should at least be trying to get a representative sample of Americans and test them. That means to test people who have no symptoms, who have mild symptoms, etc. If you test a representative sample then you have an idea of what percentage of Americans have been infected at this point. You’d have an idea among the people who are infected, how many develop symptoms, how many don’t at all. Of those who do develop symptoms, how many have to go to the hospital and how many can stay at home and recover. You really don’t have a clear idea unless you look at a representative sample.

Weighing the Costs and Benefits of Quarantine

Bob Zadek: Let us assume, and this is an opinion show, I have guests because their opinions count for more than many other peoples. I’m going to ask your opinion on something and you’re allowed to be wrong. You’re allowed to speculate, but your opinion is of great value to myself and to our listeners. It is of course possible that if we had a regime for extensive testing, we could know that the death rate is much lower than we feared because right now the death rate is a fake number.

It’s a number that should not even be reported because it’s based upon, as we said, flawed and imprecise data. So let us assume it is possible that the death rate of this virus will be shown to be in the lower range. Would that make what we are doing now regarding the economic disruption and the social disruption, would that make it wrong, wasteful and very destructive on our life as a nation or is it possible that the death rate will be shown to be low because we have taken these measures? Can we draw any conclusions on this?

Jacob Sullum: Well, I think if it turns out that the true mortality rate is in the vicinity of the seasonal flu, yes, it would be an enormous mistake to plunge the country to severe recession over this. We don’t do that with the flu. Even though a substantial and not insignificant number of people are dying every year for the seasonal flu. I think that COVID-19 will turn out to be more deadly. The question is “how much more.” The answer to that question really has a dramatic impact on which policies make sense or don’t. You’re facing a tremendous amount of uncertainty. Should the bias be towards intervening and intervening as aggressively as possible and doing that for as long as possible?

This is Cuomo’s inclination. I think that that is really irrational because when the government imposes regulations that are aimed at protecting public safety and health, they routinely take into account not just how many lives they think it will save but also how much it is going to cost. They will assign a dollar value, usually around $8 or $9 million for each life they think can be saved or each death they think can be prevented by this regulation. If it turns out that you’re spending billions of dollars but you’re only saving a handful of lives, they’re not supposed to impose that regulation.

Jacob Sullum: So this is what we’re talking about, but in a much larger context where the governments at different levels are imposing regulations that are aimed at protecting public health and aimed at preventing deaths. If we don’t know how many deaths they can reasonably be expected to prevent, it’s very difficult to weigh the cost and benefits. But we know that there are costs, we know that there are huge costs to these policies. The question is what’s the benefit?

So I think over the shorter term, we succeeded in preventing hospitals from being overwhelmed by COVID-19 cases. This is the main concern I think over the shorter term because that not only means that you may not be able to treat everyone with COVID-19, but it means people with other serious health conditions may end up not getting the treatment they need.

That can lead to additional deaths itself. So you can have some idea of how many cases in a particular area. After we institute these measures we are seeing a decline in ICU cases. We can surmise that now that we reduce transmission, we think that this is working. Then the question becomes, how do you get from that situation where you impose sweeping restrictions on people to one where people are allowed to earn a living again, to have a functioning economy again.

It has to involve testing which we haven’t been capable of doing so far in this country. But you can start to do antibody tests. Now you are identifying infected and recovered people who now presumably have immunity. And that’s another completely unknown thing, because if you’re doing the standard tests and you have somebody who would have it and then recovered, it’s not going to show the virus. But it would show antibodies if you do the antibody test. They’re not going to get it, they are not going to transmit it to other people. What about the people who test negative? Meaning they don’t have it, they might still get it. Well maybe they can go back to work with certain precautions.

The other other way of approaching this is you can start to talk about the people who are most at risk and how we protect them instead of locking down the whole economy. Is there a way to protect the elderly people with serious conditions, because those are the people who really face significant risks of dying as a result of this disease. Are there more narrowly tailored approaches to helping them without shutting down everything?

Bob Zadek: That discussion is hard. And just to make really clear examples: We have been discussing for a long time in this country what should be our approach to healthcare. Everything from a total free market on one extreme, if that’s an extreme, to Medicare or Medicaid for all, another extreme. Both of those discussions have implicit in the conversation the concept of “rationing.” That is, some people will get suboptimal healthcare.

Some people will die. We can save them, but we cannot spend the money to save them. So we make decisions as a society all the time. Even in a more clear example, we have X deaths per year from driving, we could reduce that to zero.

Just prohibit driving. Now, why wouldn’t we? Well, that’s absurd. The effect of the economy would be devastating. It’s not worth the 55,000 lives. The 55,000 lives, we’ll try to make it lower, but 55,000 people will die as a conscious decision because the cause of their death is more valuable to society, that is driving, than the loss of their life. We make those decisions all the time. We don’t do it consciously because it’s too painful, but we make those decisions. So the decision that Jacob is talking about, which is putting people back to work, because the benefit to all of us is infinitely greater than the additional lives that may be lost as a result of that. That is a legitimate, indeed an essential, decision for us to discuss and to make. Instead, we seem to have assumed as governor Cuomo has, that we must take the most aggressive measures possible.

The governor of Pennsylvania has said, “First we save lives, then we save livelihoods.” That statement is false. That’s not the process. The process is that you decide what is for all of society the better of two unpleasant choices, but you make that analysis instead of just defaulting to saving one life is sufficient. So that is the hard decision that all of us through the political system have to make, but it has to be discussed instead of just assumed.

Looking Forward: How Do We Move on?

Bob Zadek: As you have pointed out earlier, the problem is we are desperately in need of quality, reliable information, specifically testing, to determine how many people are presently infected so we can determine the death rate, not based upon discovered cases, but actual cases that exist, and then we can determine what is the best cure. Now, since we have woefully few tests available now, how best should we use the testing that’s available as more and more testing comes online and available to the healthcare community?

Jacob Sullum: What you ultimately want to be doing, is testing a representative sample. But given that that can’t be done now, you want to test people with symptoms and ask who they have been in contact with and have those people be tested. So then you start to get a sense of how many cases there actually are and also how transmissible it is. You can try to avoid transmission by tracking contacts and determining who should stay in quarantine.

If you actually knew who was infected and who they had contact with, you could have a much more focused approach. So I would like to see that. One other issue we mentioned before is that the COVID-19 deaths are heavily concentrated among older people with serious pre-existing medical conditions. And I’m going to attribute this to Neil Ferguson, the British epidemiologist. I think it’s a very valid point and it needs to be considered. He testified before a parliamentary committee last week and one of the things he pointed out was that you can’t keep the country in lockdown for a year.

That’s not feasible and we need to start talking about how we get people back to work and how we allow them to earn their livelihoods again. But one of the points he made in terms of the impact of the epidemic is he said, we don’t know how many excess deaths there will be. Not that we don’t know how many people will die as a result of this virus, but we don’t know at the end of the year how many more deaths there would be than we would otherwise have expected because of the epidemic. What he said is that this is primarily affecting people who are near the end of their lives. He estimated it could be a half or two thirds of deaths from COVID-19 occurring in people who would have been dead by the end of the year in any case.

Now that’s a very touchy thing to bring up, but it is obviously relevant in trying to assess the harm that is caused by the epidemic and how much you’re willing to pay in terms of economic activity. What he was saying was in their initial analysis, and they did not consider economic or ethical issues at all, they just said, here are different scenarios, different policies we could adopt. And here’s a range of what they call “reproduction numbers,” which is how many people do you think the average carrier typically will infect?

They had a range of policies and they said, in these different scenarios, here’s how many tests we project. That’s all they did. So they didn’t talk about economic effects at all, or where the deaths were occurring, and whether they were excess deaths or whether they would have happened anyways by the end of the year. These are serious issues you have to consider. Imagine you had an epidemic that was affecting only young people. The cost of that would obviously be much greater than one affecting older people or the sick. I don’t think anyone would deny that.

So, given that is worse, in that situation you could be willing to bear a much greater cost. We ought to be talking about this even though it is uncomfortable. It does not mean that if you are sick or old your life is expendable. That is not what I’m saying. But we do have to try to get a handle on what kinds of costs are going to be imposed by this epidemic versus how much it would take to prevent that outcome.

Bob Zadek: And while it is painfully uncomfortable for us individually to put a price on human life, we really do it every single day, almost every single election. To give just one example as a hypothetical. I ask all of our listeners and friends out there, just think of this hypothetical. Assuming we are told we could cure some disease, we could therefore save lives. We could cure a strain of cancer. In order to do so we have to spend enormous amounts of money and we have to raise the tax rate 80%. Everybody in America will give 80% of their income into this fund which will cure cancer. And we have to do that for five years. Would you vote for or against that? If you vote against it you are saying saving a life does have a value and the cost of saving the life is to me individually and to us collectively, simply too expensive.

So we make that decision every day in our political life. What Jacob is suggesting or inviting us to think about is nothing new. It’s just very out there and very tangible. So the conversation about the economy or human lives is a decision we make frequently. Now, Jacob, it seems that we have by default at the national level and certainly at the state level in New York and California decided the needs of economic life, however severe they are, however much they’re compromised, have to be subordinated to saving lives in some amount. So haven’t we in effect made that decision right now? We have decided, as the governor of Pennsylvania has said, irrespective of cost, and that’s the most important phrase, saving even one life is more important than keeping the economic engine alive.

Jacob Sullum: Politicians are definitely making these decisions in the dark because they don’t have crucial information. And given that you have to at least get some way to the cost of the policy when you don’t know what the actual benefit of the policy is going to be. It is simply irrational to say we’ll pay whatever costs. Resources are finite. Money used for one thing cannot be used for another thing. People make decisions all the time that entail some risks to their own lives. Every time you get in the car. Every time you get on an airplane.

We can surmise from that that the people don’t put an infinite value on life. And one of the ways that they try to calculate the value per life that they use when they’re evaluating the cost effectiveness of regulations is by looking at how people actually behave. So for example, how much of a premium do people demand as a wage for a relatively hazardous job where you have a relatively high risk of dying versus a safer job? You look at how people actually behave and then you can see from that that even in terms of their own lives, they don’t attach an infinite value. So obviously when you’re making broader decisions that affect many people, you have to keep that in mind. There is not an infinite value to every life. If that were true, then you would never do anything cause everything has some level of risk.

So I think we understand that generally speaking in terms of our own lives. In terms of policy and ordinary time you don’t want to impose a regulation that costs billions of dollars and only saves a handful of lives. I think most people can see that. But the same principle off to the situation as well even though we’re operating on very limited data, and there’s a tremendous amount of uncertainty. Just because of the uncertainty, you can’t say we’re going to spend whatever it takes, we’re going to shut down the economy for however long is necessary. There’s tremendous uncertainty on both sides. You don’t know how big the death toll would otherwise be. You don’t know what the long term economic effects are going to be short term except for obviously millions of people through no fault of their own or out of work. When this is over they may not have jobs to go back to.

They may not have businesses to go back to. The government is trying to ameliorate that to some extent by handing out checks and making loans and all that sort of thing. We can’t pretend the short and long term costs don’t exist. I think it’s very clear that it is wrong for policymakers to be saying the cost doesn’t matter.

Bob Zadek: I have seen some interesting literature about dealing with the following or presenting the following. Assuming we posed a question to all Americans. Here is the alternative you have right now. I will make up a number. Let’s assume that the average chance of an American dying from the virus is 1%. So you have one chance in a hundred of dying from a virus more than you had before the virus. And the choice is, are you willing to assume that 1% risk and keep your job, keep your life basically the same with some modifications. How would you vote? What if there was one 10th of 1% chance of dying?

That’s kind of the decision that we are asked to make as a country. So it’s not about the people who might die, it’s about the country. The decision is not whether to put one person to death, it’s what to do for the country. And that crucial decision that affects 330 million Americans, is being made blind with no public debate, no discussion. Politicians who basically do their job are really easy. Once in a while you have to make the hard decision. And I would implore them, just make it rationally for the first time, do not calculate votes. Make a rational decision and show us your work papers. Show us the process by which you made the decision. That’s the record you run on. And wouldn’t you say Jacob, that we are denied that approach?

Jacob Sullum: I think people are faced with a severe problem, especially in a place like New York or Louisiana, and the main thing that I mentioned that you’re worried about right now is whether hospitals will be overwhelmed by these cases? It’s understandable that they want to act quickly. So maybe there’s no way they’re going to have a debate process. But now we should be talking about how to get out of these restrictions.

Can we get the same benefit or approximately the same benefit with fewer restrictions? We can ask, for how long does it make sense to have these restrictions? Are they doing what they’re supposed to be doing? Are there other ways of achieving similar results with the less severe economic impact? So I’m hoping we will start to see a conversation like that. And I’m hoping we will have more information on which to base those decisions.

I should mention that the risk to the average person is quite low. For the average person, if they didn’t care about all these other people at all, it would be clear when their decision would be. They would just take their rest and handle these, you know, go about their lives. So that is one way of looking at the issue. What kind of risk are you willing to expose yourself to? There is also a conflict between suppressing the epidemic and achieving herd immunity, which is something they also want to happen.

But if you have restrictions that are aimed at preventing transmission then you never get herd immunity. So you have to try to balance them in some way, especially as you talk about getting people back to work. So all these things need to be balanced against each other. It’s not simply a matter of saying we have to stop the epidemic and prevent these guys.

Bob Zadek: You just made two, in my opinion, crucially important points. Very important. And I’m going to repeat them. Point number one, anybody absorbing the media has a very low likelihood of dying from the disease. Number two, balance. That is what I am pleading for.

I am pleading for balance. Now, balance means reason. Balance means determining the effects and making a judgment, weighing two unpleasant chores or two unpleasant alternatives and taking the least unpleasant. Now we are in the extreme, now we start to leave that gradually one step at a time, but inexorably we leave the extreme that we have now, and we slowly, in baby steps, but clearly one after the other, we reduce the extreme quarantine we have now and we start to move slowly back to normal. As you pointed out, there are steps being taken. List for us examples of where we are coming to our senses and realizing that on balance the regulations we are getting rid of do more damage than good.

Jacob Sullum: The most important example is the FDA’s restrictions on testing. The CDC also had guidelines. So obviously there’s a huge role for the private sector developing these tests and getting these tests out there. We have blatantly reduced those regulations so that companies can do this more quickly to try to increase their testing capabilities. So that was crucially important. You’re seeing a bunch of states relaxing rules about who could practice medicine and who are healthcare workers. TSA waived its rule on fluids for flights on hand sanitizer.

Bob Zadek: Don’t forget telemedicine!

Jacob Sullum: For people stuck at home, relaxing rules about what can be delivered. So instead of people going to bars in many places, they can now get cocktails delivered to them from restaurants. That was in the midst of a ban on that. So I think when you’re in a crisis, you start to think which of these rules actually are necessary and make sense and which can be dispensed with in the interest of addressing the emergency.

Originally published at http://www.bobzadek.com on March 27, 2020.