Let a thousand flowers bloom, as it were. If states are the laboratories of ideas in good times, why limit the experimentation in bad times with one-size-fits-all lockdowns? It cannot be stressed enough that the political response to a virus, one that has broadly limited freedom with our “own good” in mind, has amounted to an obnoxious non sequitur. Death potentially looms due to an unknown, so restrain the very human capital that has felled all manner of past maladies with economic growth, creativity, and advances born of growth capital matched with the creative?

Some will say, and have said, that they can’t risk the possibility of others not abiding social norms that would result from freely arrived at responses, but just as there’s no such thing as a “do nothing” response to a virus, neither is there a society where everyone follows the rules. This is true in even the most brutal of police states. Applied to a free society, some would flout the rules given their desire to be around others. If so, the fearful would have an easy answer: self-quarantine.

But just as illegal heroin users produce crucial information for the law abiding through their usage of what politicians don’t allow, so would the Covid-careless provide crucial information now.