[allturtles]

That doesn't make any sense. There are so many government laws and regulations that affect our day-to-day lives, it would be impossible to list them all. You have to get a driver's license to drive a car and wear a seat belt while you're driving it, you can't drive if you've been drinking alcohol, you can't buy alcohol unless you're 21 and you can't do it between the hours of 12am and 8am or on Sundays, you must vaccinate your children before they reach school age, you must put your children in a car seat until age 7, you can't download that song you found for free on the internet, you can't run your own poker table at your house, you have to get a permit before you can make alterations to your house...

This is even ignoring the massive set of additional laws and regulations you have to comply with you if you own a business.

[TeMPOraL]

Yes, but these are all regulations already established. Most people were born into the world where they were already in place, and over their lifes to date, there were only altered in a minor way - a speed limit change here, a new mandatory vaccine there. Some classes of people, like business owners, may have experienced more pronounced regulatory churn - but it still feels mostly like tweaking stuff here and there.

COVID was the first in most people's experience when their government just went and upended their lives. Starting next week schools are closed. Two weeks from now, you can't go do anything other than work and shop. Stay away from other people or else. That includes babysitters. Oh, and your workplace is ordered to close indefinitely for now.

Whether justified or not, this is an entirely different category from the usual mucking around regulations at the edges, or playing cat and mouse game with white-collar fraudsters (which causes many, if not most, of the business-related law changes).

And sure, this is an emergency. But the point is, most people alive - at least in the West - never experienced a national-level emergency before.

[nonameiguess]

Are most people born since 2005 or something? All of the new government regulations I can think of that have impacted me personally that didn't exist when I was born (1980):

* Seat belt laws

* Can't smoke in bars and restaurants

* Can't smoke within 50 feet of a door

* Unaccompanied children at a park being considered neglect

* Illegal to use a mobile phone while driving

* Mandatory emissions checks to register a car

* Legal mandates for chicken pox vaccine

* Taking your shoes off and going through a body scanner to get on an airplane

* Time of day/time of week restrictions on alcohol sale (existed when I was born, but not where I lived, so new to me when I moved to Texas)

* Restrictions on how much sudafed you can buy

* Restrictions on filling out of state prescriptions forcing me to pick up and mail medication to my wife when she was traveling

* Real ID laws forcing me to make an appointment 9 months in advance and show up with what felt like 18 different types of proof I lived where I said I did in order to be able to vote

* The State of Texas apparently just passed a law saying my block of 6 townhomes now needs to keep minutes and retain paper records and send all communications to each other via registered mail even though we live 20 feet from each other

* I guess it's now illegal to get an abortion here?

Granted, none of these ever happened all at once in response to an emergency. I guess your friends are just lucky to have never lived in a place that experienced an emergency before this? Living through the LA riots wasn't all that pleasant, either. Anyone who has ever lived through a hurricane has not only been told they have to close their business, but they have to abandon their homes completely and leave the city without any guarantee they'll ever be able to return.

Sure, a national level emergency hasn't happened since the 1940s, and almost nobody alive today experienced that, but it is weird to see the divergence in response. As far as I know, shared sacrifice and repurposing of private goods to public purposes in the 1940s had the exact opposite effect. Especially since the measures were far more drastic. We didn't confiscate property and force Chinese Americans into internment camps this time around.

[tjfl]

Maybe it depends on age? For a lot of these activities it feels like it's always been that way (maybe not true if you're older?), so even if excessive you've had your whole life to get used to it. All of this covid stuff is new. I agree with mwint, don't have a home, not remodeling, no kids, and no business.

[techbio]

Public school has its influence. The asymmetrical power to focus large resources on ideological targets is a part of modern warfare that most high-school graduates are not going to grasp intuitively.

[techbio]

Oh sure, not relevant because government doesn't literally raise most of the children and there aren't really any government regulations in schools. /s