Two years of unprecedented erosion of our freedom by the government during the pandemic – economic lockdowns, stay-at-home orders, travel bans, long forced quarantines, incarcerations – has brought the issue into a clearer focus than in the previous decades of gradual decline of freedom.
From studies and media reporting throughout the pandemic, we know the consequences of government restrictions on freedom. Shutting down businesses led to plummeting revenues, job losses, bankruptcies, and to supply chain disruptions, empty shelves, and lack of services. Unemployment, financial distress, and stay-at-home orders contributed to escalating drug abuse, domestic violence, depression, and suicides. Government regulation of health care has led to shortages of tests, treatments, hospital beds, and healthcare workers – and caused unnecessary deaths from Covid and from other diseases that have gone untreated as Covid patients have crowded the hospitals.
Early on, government restrictions, such as short-term economic lockdowns and stay-at-home orders could be justified when very little was known about the virus and vaccines and treatments didn’t exist. However, two years into the pandemic, despite all that misery and the vaccines and treatments now available, polls suggest that over a half of Canadians are still in favor of economic lockdowns and two thirds approve of mandatory vaccinations. Why?
A majority of Canadians welcome government control of their lives because they have never accepted the principle of freedom: that the government must not coerce them to do anything (except in retaliation for initiating force against others). They are comfortable being granted a little bit of freedom and letting the government decide when and to what extent that freedom must be compromised for the ”common good,” such as socialized health care. (No wonder the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms gives legal sanction to the government’s restricting individual freedom when it deems it ”reasonable”).
Such a rejection of the principle of freedom has morally sanctioned the government’s increasing violation of that principle. Yet, the government’s coercive intrusion in our lives during the pandemic never achieved what it claimed: prevent deaths and protect us from the virus. The Covid outcomes are no better here than in countries (such as Sweden) that never imposed harsh restricions. Instead, the restrictions have been the cause of most of the pandemic misery (see an article that reports a study here). That is because we need freedom to live.
While it is true that we can survive physically (if spared serious disease) even when locked up in our homes and barred from working, such incarceration is not living a life. Living a life consists of pursuing and achieving values: productive work; health; meaningful relationships; wealth and all the material values it affords, from food and shelter to tools and technologies that make life more enjoyable; and art and recreation.
Our achievement of these and other values was hindered or prevented by government restrictions, because to pursue and achieve values, we must be free. First, we must be free to think to identify the values we want and to plan how to obtain them. This we can do, of course, even when locked up or otherwise restricted, but we cannot act to get the values unless we are free, either to create them ourselves, or to trade with others. Ask any owner, employee, or a customer of a restaurant, gym, a hair salon, or a retail store that the government ordered to shut down.
Thinking, producing, and trading freely are the source of the material values we need to live, but such freedom also allows the achievement of an important spiritual value: a sense of purpose that gives life meaning and helps in obtaining other values. Such a purpose comes from productive work. As studies now show, harsh government restrictions that prevent people from working have led not only to economic misery but to depression, drug abuse, and suicides when people lose their work – and their purpose.
Freedom matters because it creates the conditions for a flourishing life. The role of the government is to protect our freedom against coercion, not to violate it.
Those who never recognized the principle of freedom and the government’s role in protecting it, as well as the rest of us, are now facing the consequences, such as shortages of goods and services (including health care), escalating excess deaths from mental problems and untreated health conditions unrelated to COVID, and the upcoming economic misery from the ballooning public debt that will perpetuate the government-created economic devastation.
If we want to live again with purpose and flourishing, not just barely to survive in misery, we must protest government coercion and advocate for freedom.
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash.
Jaana Woiceshyn teaches business ethics and competitive strategy at the 
3 Responses
Thankyou, very good.
Root causes of government behaviour include failure to integrate and pandering to Chicken Littles. Those and the Alfred E. Neumans do not have a sound method of learning, they use emotions without validating them.
They fail to understand the goodness of life and that there are risks which can be handled rationally. Life is about more than disease avoidance.
Government medical people are focussed on preventing disease, evading the collateral damage of their policies. They refuse to communicate risk and prevention clearly, thus many persons at high risk because of health conditions died. (Some individuals did think, statistics show a drop in case rates in BC in the spring of 2020 before ‘lockdown’ policies could have taken effect. I know several people with a variety of serious conditions including organ transplant who did self isolate.)
A key cause is emotionalism, which comes from two teachings in societies, one is overt mysticism, the other a subtle fantasizing which fails to even feed people – both very negative about human life, they are usually control minded as collectivists are. In contrast, rational people have good methods of obtaining knowledge, so can decide on risk and reward of vaccination for themselves. Whereas students are dying from measles and meningitis because some sires shun vaccination. Emotionalism feeds faddish behavior, which is part of the problem in health and in riots (a sense of belonging to something is part of that), it’s a form of collectivism as knowledge for values. Politicians pander – for example jumping up when a trend is becoming clear to claim they are leading it.
Rational people can manage risk – for example, over 200 care residences in Canada knew from past experience that a virus erupting in mainland China would be here before long, so acted assertively to protect their customers who are by definition very vulnerable, and their staff. In contrast, the publicized facility in Kirkland Washington didn’t know what hit it until days after people became seriously ill. BC was slow to stop care aids working in more than one facility. Quebec was worse.
Politicians stumbled around, some minimizing risk then flipping into panicking – not rational people. Their behaviour is not new, internment of persons of Japanese ancestry during World War II and flip-flopping on artificial sweeteners are examples.
Persons objecting to wearing masks are endangering others and enabling safety problems by not following airline crew direction, which would be crucial in an emergency. Some are just rebels without a real cause, like rioters in Vancouver BC in 2011. Some objectors to vaccines cannot parse benefit from government coercion – as most governments cannot parse to examine each major factor then integrate to make a rational decision.
The primary question about failure to grasp the benefits of individual freedom supported by defence and justice systems is why voters do not. They sit in the luxury of the benefits you point to, while voting for emotionalists.
How can rational people reach them ‘where they live mentally’? Teaching is available at a fundamental level, such as Harry Binswanger’s book ‘How We Know’, but that needs to be extrapolated to a majority of voters in shorter points.
Action is necessary, as pointed out by Ayn Rand at the beginning of ‘Philosophy: Who Needs It?’ and via the character of Dagny in ‘Atlas Shrugged’. But to live it has to be rational, no matter how difficult the situation.