BLINKERED EXPERTS.

It's a lesson we have to learn every so often.  Governance by Wise Experts seemed to work to win the War, with an assist from the Axis powers getting too full of themselves.  After the War, though, it was the Wise Experts who got too full of themselves: interstate highways, limited wars throughout the Third World, urban renewal and a war on poverty.  The general problem with relying on experts is the very blinkering that makes them experts on the subjects they understand.  "I suspect, as well, that as anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and addiction are not infectious diseases in the sense of Fauci, the good doctor is less than competent to trade off those costs against the benefits of mask up, shut up, have no fun, and no holiday gatherings."  Thus, it's on whoever is making the decisions: a president, a governor, the general manager of a business, the head coach, to weigh and balance the advice of the various experts.  When that doesn't happen, it's on the people to say no.  That obligation is true whether the expert's area of concentration is national security (both Vietnam and Iraq looked like good ideas at first) or economics (rational expectations emerged as a modelling area in the wake of outcomes contrary to New Frontier hopes of fine-tuning the economy, and allocation czars never work) and Reason's Robby Soave now voices what is likely to be heresy to some people.  "Everyone has a right to dissent from the epidemiologists' contentment with the way things are now."

Citizens are not subjects, and they are not experimental animals.

Epidemiologists are free to take whatever precautions they deem necessary in their own lives, of course—as are the rest of us. But for too long, their pessimistic dictates have provided cover for politicians and government employees to make people's lives miserable. To take just the most obvious example, schools are still closed in many major cities, even as new scientific information has generally found that resuming in-person education would be perfectly fine. Teachers unions have echoed the choruses of the most alarmed public health experts, scrawling not until it's safe on their school reopening protest signs.

One of the blessings of liberty is that everybody shouldn't have to follow the same script. If a person has reasons to be extra cautious, or even just prefers the feeling of knowing that he is doing absolutely everything to reduce his own risk of catching the disease to as close to zero as possible, then he is free to live in accordance with that goal. Other people may decide their own circumstances don't require the same level of zealotry, or that their extremely low chance of having a negative health outcome justifies a greater degree of flexibility.

That sort of talk is defiant of the sort of wisdom that the people who seek to rule us just because keep appealing to.  Accordingly, it deserves the widest possible circulation.