On Sat, Mar 14, 2020 at 8:55 PM Peter Fairbrother <peter@tsto.co.uk> wrote:
On 15/03/2020 02:46, Kurt Buff - GSEC, GCIH wrote:
The point of government is to prevent crime,
not tragedy.
There I must disagree. The point of government is precisely to prevent tragedy.
As in protection against invasion by foreign hordes, or for that matter viruses.
I slightly misspoke - the mission of government is to prosecute crime, not prevent it, because ultimately prevention is impossible. But here we see the problem with your scope of government - everything unfortunate becomes defined as a tragedy, and therefore legitimizes all government intrusion into the private sphere. War, that is, invasion by a foreign power, is a species of crime. Illness is not. Kurt