I won’t deny the libertarian gloss non-cooperators put on their non-cooperation, but there is something to be said for the Chicken Little problem. CL did not have the receipts. We cannot afford to have a burden of proof on radical action such as has been taken against COVID-19 that can be carried by one doctor shouting that the sky is falling. We need proof, because, if we don’t demand proof, we will be forever dealing with spurious warnings.

Trust is a very big deal in this regard. Some leaders are more trustworthy than others, and some information sources are more trustworthy than others. No one with a working brain believes what Trump says, but too many with non-working brains disbelieve what the news media says. The arbiter of truth in the US as to COVID-19 is the number of hospital beds and deaths attributable to it. When enough grandmas and grandpas have succumbed, we believe there’s really something going on.

That’s not to say that this administration could not have made a case for a lock-down sooner, but it’s difficult to see under our political system how something like Peter Navarro’s memo to Trump in January could have supported a shut-down of the economy. As it is, morons who don’t understand dynamic analysis are arguing that this bug is killing fewer people than the seasonal flu, and we don’t shut down for the winter. It never occurs to them that the low death rate is the result of the lock-down, not proof that it was not or no longer is necesssary. (“Nobody goes there anymore; it’s always so crowded.”)

One goes to war with an epidemic with the electorate one has, not the electorate one wants. Ours is rightly skeptical generally, and especially skeptical now. We needed our nose rubbed in the facts, because that’s who we are. What small role Thoreau and Emerson played in that is fun to think about, but I’m more inclined to blame anti-alarmist skepticism than studied libertarianism for our resistance.