Some people today are inclined to pose an opposition between the “common good” and individual liberty. There may sometimes be tension between attending to the good of the whole and allowing a range of individual choices, but personal liberty can itself contribute to the common good, as the response to COVID-19 pandemic exemplifies.
The American response to this pandemic has involved a massive exertion of state power at all levels — from state and local closures of businesses to travel bans to the invocation of the Defense Production Act. However, as Michael Brendan Dougherty has noted, this response has also slashed regulations. Government agencies helped cause a logjam for testing. The CDC had created a flawed version of coronavirus testing and issued very strict limits on who could even be tested; cumbersome regulatory burdens made it harder for private companies to roll out their own tests. Now, many of those restrictions have been relaxed, and non-state actors are churning out tests. Authorities at various levels have at least temporarily reformed some licensing laws (by allowing medical professionals to work across state lines, for instance). The federal government has eased restrictions on the production of various medical supplies.
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