It’s a key quote, but it’s not necessarily true, to be perfectly honest. There’s a lot of bluster, false equivalences, and hyperbole going around at the moment,

It’s a key quote, but it’s not necessarily true, to be perfectly honest. There’s a lot of bluster, false equivalences, and hyperbole going around at the moment, and this seems to be a prime example of that. From where does the analogy flow? We’ve always had behaviours that are forbidden and places that we cannot trespass upon. This could equally be seen as a (hitherto unprecedented, in recent times) extension thereof. I’m not saying it necessarily is, mind you, just offering it as an equally plausible alternative to show how truly arbitrary the statement is. As for the notion of a “free man”, it seems to be a platonic idealisation on par with that of the spherical cow in a vacuum: a convenient theoretical construct suitable for facile speculation, but not one that encompasses the full gamut of the real world’s complexities. There’s many things “free men” are not free from and have never been free from even in jurisdictions that nominally subscribe to the notion (in the US, for example: taxes, the draft when it’s used, & cetera) and these emergency measures are simply a draft of that. The last one is particularly telling: during WWII the American public were told they were fighting for freedom, and were drafted in droves into the ranks of the military — an act that (obviously) was not voluntary. And yet freedom as a platonic ideal endured.