The governor of NH, Chris Sununu, has joined other governors of nearby states by closing restaurants and bars in the entire state of NH for an indeterminate time (currently until April 7 - but that could change). Restaurants and bars may only provide take-out and/or delivery service.
Yes, COVID-19 is scary. I'm not denying it, nor am I minimizing the danger we face from it.
BUT I have not yet been able to identify the law or statute that empowers the governor to order private businesses to change their business model or to close if they cannot adhere to his order. Some restaurants "on the edge" will go out of business. There doesn't appear to be a remedy to permit any of these businesses to recover their losses due to the governor's order. Those that survive will be operating on shoestring budgets for a long time and may have to lay off employees merely to survive.
If the goal of this order is "social distancing", then I ask "what are the next businesses to be shut down?" Will personal services - barbers, hair salons, acupuncture, chiropractic, etc - be next? If the goal is to prevent people from "touching" each other or being in close proximity to each other, are supermarkets and movie theaters the next targets?
This isn't sarcasm. This is deadly serious.
This is how tyranny begins.
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." Those words were spoken by Benjamin Franklin. Granted, the context was a different, but the question still stands: how many freedoms are we willing to surrender to attain the illusion of immunity from a disease?
And when the next crisis comes - whether real or something invented by the government - will we allow our governors to use authoritarian means to shut down all commerce "for the sake of safety"?
COVID-19 is a novel vaccine, meaning that we don't have an effective way to defer (immunize) or cure it. The death rate is high, but it isn't the Black Plague or the Spanish Flu. Unlike some "experts" in the media and doctors who are not experts in virology or communicable deases, I don't believe that "millions will die". We may well see the death of thousands, but thousands die every year from influenza.
So, I ask the question again: what law or statute grants the governor of NH the power to arbitrarily order the closure of some businesses in NH, and what are the limits to that power?
