In pandemics, lives are saved by doing the best at creating and using resources, which include both products and information [4].

The creation and use of resources is done best when people are free. When people are free, they naturally choose to voluntarily cooperate. As they cooperate, each person adds value using all the information he has.

No central planner will ever know all the information that people themselves know.

No central planner is infallible. Every central planner is human, with human limitations. Further, no central planner has strong incentives to correct his errors (or even to learn of his errors).

No central planner is selected by a process that selects for planners who make the best choices for people. Unlike customers, who choose the products that are optimum for the customers themselves, taxpayers don’t get to choose the bureaucrats who are optimum for the taxpayers themselves. Instead, politicians choose the bureaucrats who are optimum for the politicians themselves.

No central planner has any right to substitute for people’s own choices the planner’s own choices that might alienate people’s unalienable rights to life, liberty, and secure property [5]. Each person has every right to make his own choices.

This, then, is the criterion for identifying the pandemic policy responses that government people should make, both because these responses are right and because these responses will save people’s lives: government people should make the choices that leave people free.

People are left freer when each government person limits his own coercion.

People are left freest when each government person also uses his constitutional powers to limit coercion by other government people and cronies [6].

In each matter of health policy in which government people have applied coercion or have allowed others to coerce people, the health policy that would have been right and would have saved lives would have been to limit that coercion as fully as was within each government person’s constitutional powers.

So then, lives will be saved when government officials limit themselves in every possible way: No restrictions on prescribing and dispensing existing medications for off-label indications. No restrictions on selling supplements. No requirements to lock down. No stimulus spending and debt. No requirements to distance. No requirements to disinfect. No requirements to quarantine. No requirements to mask. No restrictions on fast in-home tests. No patent monopolies for drugs unless all data needed to develop and sell the drugs are shared openly. No limits on liability for drug effects that result from continuing to sell drugs after these effects are first reasonably suspected. No requirements to use drugs. No other coercion.

And more lives will be saved when government officials also limit others, by creating and enforcing laws punishing others who apply the coercions listed above [7].

Neither nearly-all Republicans nor Democrats nor nearly-all businesses have offered reduced coercion [8]. The result has been a predictably-long pandemic [9] with predictable deprivations of life, liberty, and property [10].

Similar large payoffs from limiting coercion, and similar limited choices of representatives who would limit coercion, are seen in most major areas involving either policies or processes.