In his on-line series “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee,” Jerry Seinfeld interviewed Eddie Murphy. Murphy said that he thought he wanted to be a boxer, until he got in the ring with someone who did want to be a boxer. That’s about where I stand on libertarianism. I used to think I was one, and then I realized that my entire political philosophy boiled down to believing that the right amount of government is “as little as possible.” Everything else about the intellectual house of cards called “libertarianism” is an otiose defense of defection in life’s great Prisoners’ Dilemma.

I was struck, for example, by the quotation from Rothbard about people being coerced to help others. I had a college professor more than fifty years ago who liked to say “It is not a moral act of A to force B to help C.” That’s probably true, but something that looks like A forcing B to help C may actually be something else. In this algebraic version, the government is A. But what if government is actually “We, the B’s”? And what if we’re actually helping ourselves?

If we feed Jean Valjean, he will not steal our bread, perhaps violently. By that calculus, we are not “helping C,” we are defending ourselves, as in war. If we can be compelled to pay, or serve, a defense force, why not a welfare system that reduces crime against us? We like to feel good about ourselves, so our pols dress up welfare as assistance, but libertarians who don’t believe they should be made to help others can nevertheless support welfare as self-defense. Yet, somehow, they don’t, because their true need is to justify non-cooperation, in which effort a little bit of confirmation bias goes a long way. (I.e., if an argument purports to justify my view, it’s probably persuasive.)

At the end of the day, though, Libertarianism is substantively empty, one big de dicto rule that never requires any particular content. So, for example, I assume that driving under the influence is punishable in a libertarian society. But isn’t going near me under a certain set of pandemic circumstances interpersonally equivalent to driving drunk? Don’t you owe me as much care in not infecting me as in not driving into me? As a society, we take the risk of allowing people to drive, but we do not take the risk of allowing drunks to drive. The idea that this distinction conforms to some non-aggression principle with a deep philosophical foundation is silly. It’s just a matter of governing ourselves as little as possible.

Thus, the Brits tried the “herd immunity” trade-off, and it didn’t work. So they switched to the lock-down trade-off. The former required less governance, so, maybe it was worth a try. Or maybe the epidemiology was so evident that only a skepticism of expertise masquerading as libertarianism was at play. Generally, I am skeptical of self-styled experts. There are always Chicken Littles, and if we were not skeptical of their claims, they would multiply like the COVID virus. So we develop a healthy (or, in this case, literally unhealthy) skepticism of doomsday forecasts.

I am not a Trump fan, but I try to imagine any President saying “There are fifteen cases now, but, unless we lock the country down, there will be an intolerable number in a short time. So I’m asking governors to lock down their economies and proposing that Congress authorize trillions in subsidies to offset the economic damage.” Not in this country in this lifetime. I doubt even an otherwise credible President would be believed. We need the receipts, painful as they are. Again, some effort may be made to attribute that skepticism to something called Libertarianism, but it isn’t. It’s just human nature.

Either the response to COVID has entailed the least possible government, or it hasn’t. Further navel-gazing results from too many of us having too much time on our hands.