Last year, there were 20,000 more cancer deaths in the UK, an increase of over 13%, due to government lockdown policies (and cancer charities estimate the ongoing death toll from undiagnosed cancers could reach 200,000). This is just one of the countless and awful consequences of people in government acting as if individual liberty doesn’t matter. It only took one year, just one, of them acting this way to result in this huge loss of human life – people of all ages, men, women and children. A loss that in terms of years of human life is truly staggering.

Individual liberty does matter. It matters more than anything. And it always matters more than anything, regardless of whether society is facing pandemics or wars. It’s the most important thing because it’s the system of spontaneous order, developed over centuries, that produces all social good and everything we value in life. What could be more important than that? It is the system that feeds the world. Again, what could be more important than that? If that system is prevented from functioning to some extent or other by legal decrees, then much of the social good it was producing stops happening too. Lives stop being saved. People stop being fed. On a global scale.

What does it say about the leaders and the managers of our society that it apparently did not occur to them that shutting down society would have truly terrible consequences for humanity? Either they’re incredibly stupid and ignorant in terms of grasping the value of liberty and understanding the basics of how the world works, or they’re astonishingly indifferent to human suffering and just didn’t care. Either way, our society and indeed the whole of humanity cannot afford to tolerate such terrible people in positions of government authority.

We understand natural ecosystems are crucial to the survival and flourishing of all earth’s creatures, but we still fail to grasp how important our own human ecosystem, the social order we call capitalism, is to us and the whole of humanity. It is what sustains us and enables us to flourish. If it’s rendered dysfunctional or is wrecked, our way of life is wrecked. If it dies, we die. In nature, no creature is powerful enough to destroy the very ecosytem that it owes its existence to, but in the human realm there is such a creature. The leviathan state.