My gym – like thousands of small businesses around the country – has been out of business for more than a month now. Not because customers aren’t coming – but because customers are not allowed to come.
What follows is an Open Letter to the owner of this business, urging her to resume doing business – on the theory that in a free country, people have that right and that government has no right to say otherwise.
Dear Patsy –
I and many others are more than willing to take the chance we might get sick in exchange for being able to live again.
This includes being able to work out at Crunch.
We believe in what used to be a given in America – free association. That you – as a business owner – have the right to open your business and that we, as free Americans, have a right to choose for ourselves whether to do business with you.
We fully support the right of those who are “at risk” of contracting the Corona virus or the ordinary flu or the common cold or whatever they’re “concerned” about to take whatever steps they consider appropriate to reduce their risk.
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But we dispute their right to use force to compel others to adopt these measures for the same reason that we would object to the use of force to “flatten the curve” of ordinary flu, which as you may already know routinely infects millions of people each year and – according to the CDC – causes or contributes to more than 30,000 deaths every year (generally, of older people – from pneumonia and so on).
No one is putting a gun to anyone’s head to work out. No one should be putting guns to anyone’s head for trying to work out.
This isn’t merely about working out, either. It is about freedom.
It is about living.
The “lockdown” – where did the government get the authority to “lock down” people who aren’t inside a prison? – is based on the idea that existence – its parameters defined by government bureaucrats – trumps our right to live.
That “safety” – as defined by government bureaucrats according to their own arbitrary criteria – endows these bureaucrats with open-ended power to turn us into prisoners and (inevitably) paupers.
That they have the rightful power to take away our lives – based on the assertion that we might otherwise lose them. In the manner of parents over children. And of guards inside a prison.
If this principle is accepted it will become normalized and then routine.
An enormously dangerous precedent is being established.
