I think it's worth expanding on the statement "my anarchism stops at infectious disease control", so I will. Infectious disease is fundamentally different from most other social-political problems in several important ways. First, and most importantly, it's *tractable*.https://twitter.com/St_Rev/status/1231160076079173632 …
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That is, we have a lot of reasonably well-understood tools for managing infectious disease that we know work. Beyond that, we have a fairly well-developed understanding of infectious disease dynamics, how diseases spread through populations over time.
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We understand epidemiology *much better* than we understand somewhat similar processes like the weather or the economy. We can say in many circumstances, with reasonable confidence, that applying interventions XYZ will get an epidemic under control.
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This is crucial. Most other purported government policy programs are bullshit, in the technical sense. There's no good reason to expect most policies to accomplish their putative goals, or anything at all (aside from lining some hidden party's pockets).
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(For more on that, read Huemer's "In Praise of Passivity": http://studiahumana.com/pliki/wydania/In%20Praise%20of%20Passivity.pdf …) Now, it's true that a lot of tools in the disease control toolkit are fairly coercive. But what's rarely appreciated is the ethical dimension of disease transmission.
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Someone carrying a deadly, contagious disease is someone who is generating potentially lethal externalities everywhere they go. Because we don't have a way to directly detect it, we don't think about it. But they might as well be firing randomly into a crowd.
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Putting someone in a quarantine is a coercive restriction of their liberty. Call me a statist, but I'm OK with coercively restricting the liberty of someone firing into a crowd, so I'm OK with quarantine as a tool to manage deadly communicable diseases.
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So to sum up: From a utilitarian perspective, infectious disease management justifies authoritarian interventions that other functions of the state do not, because the threat is very large and the interventions are demonstrably reliable in a way that other policies are not.
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As a postscript, I have a half-baked hypothesis that the rise of the progressive state is at least in part a reaction to the unreasonable effectiveness of public health interventions from say 1850 through 1910 -- a (failed) attempt to generalize the model to other problems.
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Strong agree w this hypothesis
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