... a message from county chair Joe Dehn ...

It's now been more than six weeks since the "lockdown" began for us here in Santa Clara County. It was certainly a big shock both to our economy and to our liberty. I'm sure the politicans who did this thought it was a hard decision.

But the harder part is yet to come. Whether the kind of lockdown we now have was actually the best approach is something people will be debating for a long time. But most of the popution was willing to accept it in the spirit of an "emergency measure", seeing it as similar to ones enacted in response to events like hurricanes and earthquakes.

But the key feature of an "emergency" is that it comes up suddenly. And it doesn't last forever. When a government declares a "state of emergency" with no defined end, we become justifiably skeptical. So it is important to understand exactly what emergency it was that was used to justify the lockdown.

The emergency was not that many people were likely to get sick. The emergency was not even that many people were likely to die. The emergency was very specifically that the number of cases might increase exponentially, resulting in the medical system being overwhelmed, in turn resulting in an unacceptable breakdown in dealing with both victims of this disease and everybody else who might need medical services for any other reason.

Fortunately, that's not where we are today. The accompanying graph shows the number of deaths from COVID-19 in Santa Clara County, based on official California public health reports. The blue bars show total deaths to date. Obviously as long as any more people die that curve will continue upward, but the increase is not anything like exponential -- it looks pretty close to linear. To put the same thing another way, the number of people dying per day (the red bars) is pretty much constant (averaging a bit less than 3/day).

Presumably the rate would be higher now if none of the actions to keep it down had been taken. It will almost certainly increase somewhat if some of these actions are reversed. But the actions themselves are now creating continuing -- and cumulative -- very serious harm. There are trade-offs that need to be made. (See the Commentary section below for discussion of many of these issues.)

Everybody seems to agree that we now need to look at reversing some of the restrictions, but there is very little agreement about which ones or how fast. And resolving those disagreements is going to be a lot harder than just giving that order for everything to stop.

The more we learn about this virus, the more likely it seems that it's going to be with us for a long time. That means we cannot continue to treat the situation as an "emergency", with politicians and bureaucrats shouting orders in all directions. We can survive that kind of government-directed approach without too much collateral damage in the case of an emergency like a hurricane or an earthquake because the immediate danger is over in a few days. That's not the kind of situation we are facing here. So it is essential that we get back, as soon as possible, to dealing with life in the ways that history has shown to be most effective in promoting both human happiness and prosperity -- by respecting individual rights and letting the market work.

This doesn't mean we should ignore the virus or go back to doing everything the way it was done before. Many of the specific techniques that have been applied to reduce transmission of this disease can and should continue to be applied. But they should be applied as part of a system of individual choice and responsibility. And the absurd notion that government should or even can properly divide our complex economy into "essential" and "non-essential" parts needs to be dropped immediately.

The free market must be allowed to operate, to enable individuals and businesses to make the trade-offs involved in getting things moving again. Letting the market function is essential to all of our hopes for the future -- including our future ability to respond effectively to this disease and ones that may come along after it.

And why is this part going to be so hard? Because the average politician today has little understanding of either individual liberty or economics. And worse than that, this is true also of a significant portion of the general population. Too many people have been trained to believe that giving government control of the economy is actually a good thing. They don't understand what's wrong with it, so they are not inclined to resist it, or be in any hurry to reverse it.

And this is, for us as Libertarians, the hardest challenge of all -- how to undo the damage of a century or more of mis-education that has left the population not even able to understand the damage that politics is doing to their livelihoods and their lives.