Officials are playing with a fire possibly more deadly than the virus outbreak

Nationally the discussion and point of view on the economy and the cure for this virus potentially being worse than the disease in real suffering and lives lost, has finally come forward across the media from thinking people and from the President. That was the discussion we did not cower from on Pratt on Texas over a week ago.

The academic experts in the epidemiological field wanted to prove their academic blackboard exercise of closing the country and to some degree they got it closed. The long term harm from such was easy to imagine and yet the ubiquitous Dr. Anthony Fauci clearly, similar to many academics, wrongly talked of the economy as if such were similar to a light switch that one can turn off and then on again with little trouble.

None took more draconian and early shut-it-down action than New York’s governor and yet CBS New York reports: “Cuomo Says Rate Of Virus Spread Has Increased, ‘We’re Not Slowing It’.”

In Texas the mass house-arrests and restrictions on travel, euphemistically called shelter-in-place orders, are prima facie absurd. When “essential businesses” include “big box” stores, “warehouse” stores, electronics stores, pool and lawn care service as well as liquor stores, as in Dallas County’s big house-arrest order*, anyone with an intellectual quotient slightly above the average of the prison population can see how ludicrous the orders are and rightly conclude that such are an example of symbolism over substance.

While state’s Health and Safety code, chapter 81 on communicable disease, allows for area quarantines there must be “reasonable cause” but such is reasonably undermined by exceptions so broad as to keep most large stores open and travel to such legal.

There is dangerous substance to the overreach of local officials and one wonders how far local despots will push until some decide their basic freedoms and rights being protected cannot wait for some future election or court date.

In Texas, officials are playing with a fire potentially more deadly than the virus.

* See the Dallas list here. And while “electronics stores” are not listed many of them certainly fall under this line: “Any business that supplies products needed for people to work remotely during the pandemic.”