Government can and will abuse any power it has, so don’t give it any more than it needs.

I recently engaged in a debate with a gentleman over the governor’s plan to reopen the Mountain State. My perspective was that a 6 week process to undo something that should not have been done was far too long, the other gentleman contested that to reopen the state too quickly would risk the earlier dire predictions coming true. I argued in favor of liberty and independent thought and he talked about contagion spread ratios. I argued that Jim Justice has no otherworldly wisdom that gives him the ability to direct the lives of 1,792,000 individuals with 1,792,000 individual circumstances, he replied “vote for someone else” and suddenly I got it, we were arguing two different points.

I am taken back in my memory several years to the first time one of those videos and stories emerged from Afghanistan of a women being flogged for wearing pants. As a red blooded American man I was moved to a combination of anger and pity that literally turned my stomach. My liberal friends were of a similar reaction, pity for the woman anger toward the cruelty of the sentence, in fact we seemed to be in perfect agreement, but we weren’t.

The liberal saw the problem as an abuse of power, government using its regulatory authority in a manner that was inappropriate. They disagreed with the regulation against pants, because they liked wearing pants and thought Muslim women might also like pants, etc.

The conservative like me sees the problem differently; the flaw is that government has this power in the first place. The constitution was written to limit the power of government to very specific enumerated powers, each time the government exceeds those enumerated powers we draw closer to tyranny.

Initially the states were left to their own to make and maintain their own bill of rights with the plenary powers of the state limited by the people of the state by means of their own constitution. After the War Between the  States it was added to further defend individual liberty by the 14^th amendment: Section 1

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

As west Virginians we also have the state constitution that says: 3-1.  Bill of rights.

     All men are, by nature, equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity, namely:  The enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and of pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.

Can anyone argue that the current policies of the governor respect article one of the state bill of rights?

As more data comes in the damage done at every level of our society, even healthcare, to flatten the Covid-19 curve looks like a doctor amputating a patients leg over an ingrown toenail because it might have gotten infected. But if the government had stayed true to the constitutional restraints and maintained those responses that did not violate the bill of rights than we would have achieved the same positive results without the horrendous damage and threats to the freedom of future generations, but the point is that government only does harm when it exceeds its constitutional restraints, even if there is a virus out there.