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The joke going around in virus land is that there are no libertarians in a pandemic, just as there are no atheists in foxholes. For some people this is, no doubt, a joke with a double meaning. Even if atheists may be less willing to climb into foxholes than Presbyterians or Yazidis in the first place, the study of soldier experiences and war literature suggests that combat is pretty darn good at sowing materialism and encouraging questioning of revealed wisdom.

Yes, there are atheists in foxholes, dummy, even if they didn’t bring atheism with them; and even if a pandemic teaches lessons in the usefulness of capable, powerful government, it perhaps has just as many about the harmfulness and stupidity of government as it generally exists in the real world.

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The United States, to take one infuriating example, is about to have an awful lot of unnecessary deaths because, through ill-considered “peacetime” regulation, it allowed its national disease-surveillance agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to acquire what was tantamount to a manufacturing monopoly on DNA testing of virus samples. It wasn’t a competent monopoly, either, as things turned out. We are still seeing American news items about academic and private laboratories — the kinds of places that developed DNA sequencing in the first place, and which were its exclusive domain until recently — that hope to help increase testing capacity, but must wait for permission from the federal paterfamilias.