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… is from page 2 of Christopher Snowdon’s excellent 2017 book, Killjoys: A Critique of Paternalism [2] (original emphasis):
A demand for something to be done can morph into a demand for anything to be done. Faced with a series of supposed crises and epidemics – the binge-drinking crisis, the obesity epidemic, etc. – the government is told to take action at all costs. But taking action at all costs is a terrible way to make policy.
DBx: Of course. And never in my lifetime was the move of ‘taking action at all costs’ as insanely costly and poisonous to liberal civilization as it was in the insistence of so very many people that government focus single-mindedly and obsessively – in effect, blindly – on reducing the spread of one pathogen.