Yet More Inaptness of a Mad Gunman Analogy to Covid-19

(Don Boudreaux)

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In response to my letter to Richard Fulmer, Jeffrey Tucker sent to me the following e-mail, which I share here with his kind permission:

Also getting the virus yields two forms of positive externalities: you thereby gain some degree of personal immunity and you contribute to herd immunity in a way that protects others who might be more vulnerable. This is why in the entire history of liberal philosophy, there is absolutely no record of anyone imagining that risking the spread of a respiratory infection, especially by someone asymptomatic, has been considered some kind of aggression. If it were otherwise, liberty and progress would never have emerged from within the pathogen-soaked world of the Enlightenment and after.