>My point was that equating quarantines with totalitarianism is the kind of superficial and querulous comparison that a child might make about timeouts.
My point is that it's generally accepted that children have less rights than adults. E.g. it's accepted for parents to lock their kid in a room for hours for swearing, but it's not accepted for the government to do the same thing. The fact that it's socially accepted to treat a child a certain way doesn't mean it's socially accepted for the government to treat adults the same way.
So you simply disagree with the concept of quarantines in general? Based on what, exactly? Like, specifically cite some case law that demonstrates that quarantines are unconstitutional.
I'm not American, so I'm not sure the relevance of case law here, but legality is not the same thing as morality. The idea of natural rights upon which the US constitution was built is that these are not granted by the state or some document, they are inherent to being human; "inalienable rights". Now if you're an at risk category you could argue that somebody coming near you and potentially infecting you is a violation of your rights similarly to how somebody punching you is, and that seems reasonable to me. But I think it'd be too much of a stretch to argue "those people spending time together at a bar might increase my chance of being infected, so they shouldn't be allowed to congregate", especially when this very directly violates their rights of movement and association.
Similarly for the argument about not having enough hospital beds due to other people getting infected: the classical idea of rights was as "negative rights", not "positive rights". A negative right means you have the right that somebody else will not do something to you, whereas a positive right means that you have the right for somebody else to do something to you (or, somebody else has the obligation to do something for you). Positive rights necessarily impinge on negative rights. Since requiring hospital care is a positive right, not a negative right, approaching it from a system of negative rights one wouldn't have any right to restrict other peoples behaviour under the justification that it would improve your access to hospital care.
Inalienable rights are not without limits, at least within the American system of governance. You have the right to free speech, but you don't have the right to yell "fire" in a crowded theater and endanger others' lives.
Similarly, you have the right of free assembly, but not when it puts others' lives at risk.
And regardless of the legal/moral distinction, I would suggest that these limitations are both legal as well as moral.
>Inalienable rights are not without limits, at least within the American system of governance. You have the right to free speech, but you don't have the right to yell "fire" in a crowded theater and endanger others' lives.
Personally I don't support quarantine because I believe a negative-rights-based system produces the best outcomes in the long term. Yes it might do worse in a pandemic like this, but it also severly limits the possibility of other worst-case outcomes like the hundred million people killed by Mao and Stalin, the Cambodian genocide, Hitler's atrocities. If the countries involved (and by extension their governments) had been absolutely committed to the protection of such negative rights (and had institutions that made it extremely hard to violate these rights, a strong court system and constitution), they could never have justified the atrocities they committed.
My point is that it's generally accepted that children have less rights than adults. E.g. it's accepted for parents to lock their kid in a room for hours for swearing, but it's not accepted for the government to do the same thing. The fact that it's socially accepted to treat a child a certain way doesn't mean it's socially accepted for the government to treat adults the same way.