COVID-19: What Would the Founders Have Done?

Epidemics are not a 21st-century thing. The men and women of early America dealt many times with extensive and deadly diseases-including smallpox, cholera, measles, and yellow fever. They were well aware of the bubonic plague that came before and would visit again.

While I wouldn't pretend to know what the men and women of Washington's day might prescribe for a coronavirus response in ours, it's fair to say they believed statism to be no cure for anything-and in fact, to be a mortal danger itself and deadlier than any pathogen.