{"id":4898,"date":"2011-10-03T09:48:44","date_gmt":"2011-10-03T13:48:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/?p=4898"},"modified":"2011-10-04T09:13:06","modified_gmt":"2011-10-04T13:13:06","slug":"do-libertarians-have-an-answer-for-epidemics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2011\/10\/03\/do-libertarians-have-an-answer-for-epidemics\/","title":{"rendered":"Do libertarians have an answer for epidemics?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I’ve been thinking a lot this weekend about Texas Governor Ricky Perry’s promise that he wants to \u201cmake government as inconsequential to your lives as possible” if elected president next year.<\/p>\n

It is, in a lot of ways, an appealing idea.\u00a0 Americans, myself included, like the idea of independence, of self-reliance — and the simple appeal of not being messed with is hard to deny.<\/p>\n

Many of us are instinctive, knee-jerk libertarians.\u00a0 But a couple of experiences this weekend sent me back to the drawing board, to ponder the underlying romanticism of my thinking.<\/p>\n

The first was watching “Contagion” the brilliant Steven Soderbergh film about an outbreak of virulent H1N1-type virus that proceeds to kill 18 million people.<\/p>\n

It’s not a sci-fi movie.\u00a0 It is, rather, a fictional-but-mostly-accurate exploration of how epidemics work and how governments respond.<\/p>\n

That is to say, clumsily, inadequately…and essentially.<\/p>\n

Arguably, government-directed public health and sanitation efforts have done more to reduce human death and misery on earth — and here in the US — than any other single societal innovation.<\/p>\n

Whether it’s preventing chronic cholera outbreaks by requiring proper sewage systems, requiring that food be properly handled so we don’t die of botulism, or intervening when viruses like H1N1 threaten to go hot-zone, there simply is no other human institution waiting in the wings to do this work.<\/p>\n

The second big nudge to my mental conversation has been reading excerpts of Steven Pinker’s new book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature.”<\/a><\/p>\n

Pinker, one of the country’s most interesting writers and intellectuals, chronicles the fact that world has been growing more and more peaceful over the centuries, so that “we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species\u2019 existence.”<\/p>\n

Whether talking about war, crime, or government-sanctioned violence (such as capital punishment), we live in a mostly unheralded golden age where far fewer people are viticimized than ever before.<\/p>\n

This from Slate’s<\/a> review of Pinker’s book:<\/p>\n

Pinker calls this two-decade period the New Peace. Annual war deaths have fallen over the past 60 years by more than an order of magnitude, from about 500,000 to 30,000 per year, according to one estimate. As for terrorism, you are more likely to be killed by lightning than by a terrorist.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I mention Pinker’s book in this context because he ascribes much of the improvement in this post-violence era to — you guessed it — big government.\u00a0 Again from Slate:<\/p>\n

At the top of the list is the rise of the modern state, which suppresses the violence of citizens and adjudicates disputes by means of police and courts. What is more, democracies rarely if ever fight against each other; over the past century the percentage of humanity living under democratic regimes has surged from 12 to over 60 percent.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So what do you think?\u00a0 Is libertarianism the last gasp of a romantic ideal, one we can indulge in because governments more or less keep our world safe while we gripe about it?<\/p>\n

Or would you really rather go it alone?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been thinking a lot this weekend about Texas Governor Ricky Perry’s promise that he […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[4803,6562],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4898"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4898"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4898\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4900,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4898\/revisions\/4900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}