If you had told me a year ago that there would be a global pandemic, I would have predicted that it would have the effect of somewhat discrediting libertarianism. Even a month ago, that seemed possible. This is from the FT on March 11:
One need not be of the left to interpret the century so far as a vindication of the state. After free enterprise clinched the cold war, government all but apologised for itself during the 1990s, even with a Democrat such as Bill Clinton as US president.
Since then, we have seen, in order, the heroism of first-responders on September 11, 2001, the slump-averting recapitalisation of banks in 2008, and now, as coronavirus goes about its dire work, the necessity of public expertise, public infrastructure, brute public coercion. Only a churl or an ideologue, their Ayn Rand novels frayed through overuse, could pretend any one of these shocks was amenable to a market solution.
I’m not a reader of Ayn Rand novels, and I’m a utilitarian. But even to me it seems as if the complete opposite has happened. Libertarianism looks better than ever. Why?
Over the past month, we have seen a torrent of governmental incompetence that is breathtaking in scale. There are regulations so bizarre that if put in a novel no one would believe them. In contrast, the private sector has reacted fairly well, and has been far ahead of the government in most areas.
In retrospect, this should not be surprising, as despite the claims above the US government largely botched the response to both 9/11 and the 2008 banking crisis. After 9/11, they created counterproductive agencies such as the TSA and the department of Homeland Security, and of course they also invaded Iraq. These actions did far more harm than 9/11 itself. They responded to the banking crisis of 2008 with an ultra-tight monetary policy that caused NGDP to fall at the sharpest rate in 60 years, which caused far more harm than the banking crisis itself. These are not the examples to cite if you are trying to discredit libertarianism.
This time around the failures have largely revolved around regulations and trade policies that have greatly slowed the rollout of much needed testing, and also reduced the availability of personal protective equipment (PPE). Adequate testing and PPE are viewed by experts as the two key factors in controlling the epidemic (beyond social distancing.) Governments can play a useful role in pandemics, but in this case our government failed to do so. They did not encourage social distancing until it was too late. They disbanded the federal department aimed at addressing pandemics. They failed to stockpile needed equipment such as surgical masks. Then they banned the importation of such masks (until just a few days ago), and put tariffs on needed parts for ventilators. They inhibited the domestic manufacture of needed equipment. They fought against price gouging, which actually helps during a crisis. They prevented private sector actors from doing much needed testing for coronavirus. They had numerous burdensome regulations than deprived the health care industry of needed labor, or prevented it from shifting to needed locations. They spread misinformation and outright lies, even as they (correctly) criticized China’s government for doing the same.
Some of this is the predictable chaos of a dysfunctional Trump administration, but keep in mind that the situation in Europe is even worse. And many of the worst decisions came out of the government bureaucracy.
Most importantly, governments failed to show any creative problem solving or leadership, leaving everything to the private sector. Here’s Tyler Cowen Alex Tabarrok:
Bill Gates, who warned us–The Next Outbreak, We’re not ready–is getting ready for a vaccine, in fact for seven of them.
Business Insider: Gates said he was picking the top seven vaccine candidates and building manufacturing capacity for them. “Even though we’ll end up picking at most two of them, we’re going to fund factories for all seven, just so that we don’t waste time in serially saying, ‘OK, which vaccine works?’ and then building the factory,” he said.
Gates said that simultaneously testing and building manufacturing capacity is essential to the quick development of a vaccine, which Gates thinks could take about 18 months.
…”It’ll be a few billion dollars we’ll waste on manufacturing for the constructs that don’t get picked because something else is better,” Gates said in the clip. “But a few billion in this, the situation we’re in, where there’s trillions of dollars … being lost economically, it is worth it.”
This is exactly the type of planning and spending on attacking the virus that governments should be doing.
You might think that this sort of crisis would lead to lots more regulations. And obviously there have been mandates to close down certain businesses. But again and again we find governments removing regulations that were inhibiting the response. We were told that this crisis discredits globalization. In fact, governments have often been removing trade barriers in response to the crisis. And those barriers that have been added are widely viewed as counterproductive.
So what are the arguments on the other side:
1. Assume a can opener. “Yes, the federal government screwed up. But a better government would have done better.” Actually, local governments (of both political parties) also screwed up. I recall people saying that the 2008 banking crisis showed that we needed more regulation, even though the regulations we did have encouraged reckless lending. People seemed to think regulation would work if the government could have foreseen the banking crisis. But if the crisis were foreseeable, banks would not have made decisions that led to them losing hundreds of billions of dollars in market capitalization.
2. The “but China” argument. Yes, China has controlled the epidemic with some pretty draconian policies, but Taiwan has controlled the epidemic much more effectively with far less draconian policies. China’s not the country to cite if you oppose libertarianism—Taiwan should be your model.
3. The externality argument. Socializing has external costs during an epidemic, thus (it is claimed) governments need to regulate socializing. I certainly agree that social distancing is appropriate during an epidemic, but it’s not obvious that government is the optimal tool to enforce that policy. Don’t forget that excessive fear of health risks among the general public is another market failure. If experts warned people to stay home, they would probably obey for the most part. And it may be optimal to have a few restaurants open during an epidemic, for those with a strong preference to eat out. Some restaurants are open in East Asian countries.
Some point to government closures of schools. But private schools also closed, and often before public schools. Private employers voluntarily decided to have employees work from home where possible. The NBA closed down even before the federal government was focusing on the issue. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of a “market failure” that calls for some government mandates, but it’s not obvious to me that these mandates make the social distancing more optimal than what you’d get from private actions.
4. The Defense Production Act. I’ve never seen a good argument for using this during an epidemic. Is there one?
5. Medical research. This is the strongest argument for government involvement. But it’s not so much about what to do during an epidemic; rather it’s about what to do prior to an epidemic. And of course the private sector also does lots of medical research. To be sure, there are “public good” arguments for subsidies. But again, the private sector also provides lots of subsidies. My wife used to work for a company working of drugs to address a future flu pandemic, and they received lots of funding from Bill Gates.
That’s not to say the government cannot play a useful role in encouraging medical research, but if that’s the main argument against libertarianism coming out of the coronavirus crisis, it’s pretty weak tea—especially when set again all the examples of government incompetence that have made the crisis much worse than it needed to be.
I’m not a doctrinaire libertarian who opposes all government policies. I support policies to combat global warming and provide income subsidies to low wage workers. I could undoubtedly be convinced to support a few policies here and there to address this crisis. But the evidence coming out of this epidemic certainly does not provide a strong argument for a large and intrusive government.
Update: In a libertarian world we’d definitely have “human challenge studies” of vaccines for Covid-19 (i.e. studies with people intentionally infected, as in flu vaccine studies.) This sort of study would greatly speed up the process and could save an enormous number of lives. Will it occur?
HT: Tyler Cowen, my wife.
READER COMMENTS
Mark Z
Apr 4 2020 at 5:26pm
I think economic libertarianism will come out looking pretty good (or should at least) for the reasons you mention. But I think civil libertarianism is going to take a big hit. Some early research thus far seems to show lockdown-type policies significantly reducing disease spread in China, so, unlike with 9/11 and the now despised TSA, there will be successes to point to in the reaction against civil libertarianism.
Even on the economic front, one has to ask, if even the Financial Times – one of the most ‘neoliberal’ mainstream outlets – sees the response to the financial crisis and 9/11 as vindicating state intervention, what hope is there for general public opinion? A timely example: when I look at the government’s conflict with 3M, I think, what a nice Smithian example of a private company furthering the interests of humanity while pursuing its own interests, while also publicly articulating the argument against restricting trade while the government foolishly intervenes. But I suspect even many educated and informed Americans will see this and think, “for once, Trump is doing the right thing by keeping those masks in America.” Hopefully I’m too pessimistic.
Scott Sumner
Apr 4 2020 at 5:56pm
You may well be right. I was thinking about opinion among informed people, which is admittedly a small sample.
Dylan
Apr 4 2020 at 6:06pm
I think this is right on both fronts. Civil liberties are looking to take a big hit in this crisis, and like 9/11 I’m not sure they’ll bounce back. Did you see the piece in the Atlantic on how willing the public is to violate national constitutional protections even at the merest possibility that they might help fight the pandemic?
And Mark is right, the battle isn’t about what this should teach us, but how public opinion will be shaped by what happened. And here, I’m not seeing much evidence of people coming around to the idea that markets would have handled this better. There’s been a pretty noticeable movement away on both the right and the left from free-market ideology over the last few years. I’ve been amazed at how any comment, no matter how mild, that is perceived as being positive towards capitalism , even while acknowledging big flaws, gets shouted down in places with educated readers that lean left. The right doesn’t do as much as even pay lip service to these ideas anymore, and instead applaud people like Orban.
Because people view a crisis through the lens of their own ideology, instead of this showing people that they were wrong about something, it instead pushes people into doubling down. As Mark says, even stalwarts like the FT and the Economist have been a lot less full-throated in defense of open markets than they normally are. I’m only moderately libertarian, but am pretty concerned for the future direction of governments worldwide.
Scott Novak
Apr 5 2020 at 3:34am
If strictly libertarian policies had been followed by America so far – I am sure we wouldn’t have as bad of a mask shortage. But we can’t go back in time. Now that we already screwed up and are at the precipice of the peak 6-8 weeks of deaths, with 25% of world COVID cases and 3rd world levels of masks/PPE, something drastic has to be done immediately. Reforming incentives and eliminating stupid laws against price gouging and other regulatory barriers against mask production will probably increase US production too late for the bulk most of the Doctors and Nurses that are going to get infected in the peak of the next 2 months. Sure, let’s take internal libertarian actions, but we also don’t have much choice but grab all the masks we can right now – export bans might be the only way. Germany, France, South Korea and Taiwan all banned exports of masks months ago.
Canada should be treated better and humanitarian exceptions should be made – but the point is the burden should be flipped from presumptive free trade to case by case allowance of medical/PPE exports to needy &/or allied countries. An important point is they have 1/25th of our cases with 1/10th of our population – they are doing much better than us.
Scott Sumner
Apr 5 2020 at 4:58pm
Scott, Why not just make it legal to import the masks we need?
Mark Z
Apr 6 2020 at 12:45am
The problem is that Canada is also a major supplier of medical imports to the US, including materials used to produce PPE. If we cut them off, it invites retaliation that deprives us of other necessary things.
If we need them so much more, then the government should be willing to pay more for them and outbid foreign buyers. Some bureaucracies in the US are frustratingly fixated on trying to negotiate down prices in the middle of a crisis, or their hands are tied by internal rules or price gouging laws. If the US government can afford to fritter away 2.2 trillion dollars, I think it can afford to pay a premium for masks and gloves.
Mark
Apr 5 2020 at 8:46am
I think this pandemic illustrates that the line between economic and civil libertarianism is very blurry. Is a shutdown order that requires businesses to shut down economic or civil? What about one that orders people to stay home, thus preventing economic activity like tourism?
The one traditional civil libertarian issue that I think will go out the window is surveillance. People will become much more accepting of surveillance, particularly if that surveillance helps restore people’s other freedoms (such as in some East Asian countries where phone apps record people’s health status and where sick people have been so that people with a good health status can resume normal activity and people know to avoid where sick people have been).
MarkW
Apr 4 2020 at 6:00pm
Well put. It’s worth noting that not only did our central government screw up its own testing in the U.S. massively, it also actively obstructed potentially invaluable independent efforts in both developing tests and doing critical research. The Seattle Flu study (funded by the Gates Foundation BTW) was repeatedly refused permission to use already collected samples to test for the prevalence of Covid-19. And it wasn’t Trump appointees making these decisions, it was our ‘professional’ health bureaucrats.
Robert EV
Apr 5 2020 at 2:34pm
Due to rationing of tests? Such a decision is understandable.
Dylan
Apr 5 2020 at 3:32pm
This wasn’t due to rationing, it was in the very early stages of the outbreak in Seattle. The researchers at the University of Washington were trying to see if community spread was already happening. They had collected samples for flu and wanted to test for Covid-19, but IIRC they were denied because they didn’t have permission from the people that had volunteered for the flu study to test for anything else. After being repeatedly denied, the researchers ended up testing without permission, and that’s how we got the data we did, but we still lost some weeks from the process.
Robert EV
Apr 5 2020 at 8:37pm
Civil liberties.
Perhaps this will lead to broader release forms (that still protect privacy).
AT
Apr 6 2020 at 6:25am
So testing the samples for Covid-19 was an infringement of the donors’ property rights. Wouldn’t a Libertarian have to say the officials were right to refuse permission?
MarkW
Apr 6 2020 at 11:53am
There’s no law saying that you retain a property right in blood or saliva or tissue samples voluntarily provided for medical testing, so no, a libertarian would not ‘have to say’ that the decision to deny permission was correct. Nor have libertarians been leading the charge on the extreme bureaucratization of medicine and medical research. There is no conceivable reason that a person who volunteered to participate in a flu study would want to refuse to have their sample tested for a virus that was unknown at the time the consent form was signed. And there are no privacy issues — it would have been trivial for the researchers to test the samples for Covid without connecting them back to the original patients (though it would seem strange to agree to participate in the study without wanting to know if you actually tested positive for the flu — nor for Covid-19 if the study was so extended).
I urge you to read this Scott Alexander piece to get an idea of where we are with the bureaucratization medical research in this country. I once helped my wife try to navigate this unbelievably byzantine process for research she was doing (as a first-timer like Alexander), and I can testify that nothing about his nightmare is far-fetched.
Dylan
Apr 4 2020 at 6:21pm
One thing that is conspicuously absent from your list is government involvement in helping with the economic consequences of the pandemic. Even the Western countries that appear to be handling this better than others, like Germany, have had to shut down enormous amounts of the economy and enforce social distancing. From other posts I know that while you’re not in favor of the fiscal response in terms of stimulus, you have been in favor of government action to help with the humanitarian need that comes from suddenly making a large portion of the workforce unemployed. Among Western governments, the U.S. seems particularly unprepared to provide that kind of help. Without those institutions already in place, we end up with a crisis bill that spends more than we can afford, but doesn’t have the time to make sure that money is well targeted. I know other countries have also had to pass emergency economic support, but from the outside at least, it seems the support is more targeted and likely to be effective (again looking at Germany mostly).
Scott Sumner
Apr 5 2020 at 5:00pm
I favor help for the unemployed regardless of whether there is a pandemic or not.
Thomas Sewell
Apr 4 2020 at 8:04pm
I 98% agree with this post, but don’t believe that:
…is an accurate statement. Which federal department are you referring to?
Do you mean to refer to the three people on the NSC who when they reorganized the NSC two of them were folded into the doing largely the same job as before as part of the counterproliferation and biodefense directorate, while one resigned without being replaced?
See https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/03/16/no-white-house-didnt-dissolve-its-pandemic-response-office/,if that’s what you’re writing about.
My understanding would be that reducing the NSC back to it’s pre-Obama Administration size is (weakly) praiseworthy from a libertarian perspective, as opposed to being a bad idea.
Lorenzo from Oz
Apr 5 2020 at 1:43am
In the same vein, see here:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/coronavirus-truth-national-security-council-pandemic-team/
Scott Sumner
Apr 5 2020 at 5:03pm
I completely reject that National Review article that blames our problems on the Chinese. What difference does it make if they withheld crucial information for a couple of weeks? Even after we got the information we twiddled our thumbs for many more weeks, doing almost nothing.
Scott Sumner
Apr 5 2020 at 5:05pm
Perhaps I erred, but my impression is that the office was made largely ineffective. We certainly see that in the results, as when the crisis broke the administration had no plan, and had to start from scratch.
Robert EV
Apr 5 2020 at 8:49pm
Mr. Tapeguy here claims that Bush 2 and Obama also disbanded and reassembled the pandemic response teams (Obama after Ebola), so Trump doing the same wasn’t a historically new practice.
Thomas Hutcheson
Apr 4 2020 at 10:28pm
But all these failures are sins against standard welfare economics. It that is ALL Libertarian is in practice (adorned with a few annoying sermons about Fredrick Bastiat and from Deirdre Mccloskey :)), welcome to the neo-liberal party.
Rajat
Apr 4 2020 at 10:29pm
I agree with a lot of what Mark Z and Dylan said. In Australia, the infection rate is flattening rapidly and it seems we will perform better than South Korea, so our government at least is regarded as having handled things okay. The main government intervention that people would view as necessary is the shutdowns. Here they’ve kept public schools open, but restaurants, bars, theatres, etc were all forced to close two weeks ago (excluding takeaways), and it’s unlikely this would have happened voluntarily. Some private schools that had positive cases did close earlier, but have continued teaching online, so there’s been no loss of fees as yet, and hence no real private detriment from ‘closing’. The government here is introducing a $A130bn wage subsidy package (about 5% of GDP), designed to help keep people notionally employed for 6 months. I’m cynical and think this is just about stopping the measured UnN rate from rising too far. After all, most workers without work have only been stood down rather than formally retrenched, and so would likely return to work if and when there is work for them to do. Hence for me this is redistribution masquerading as stabilisation policy. But it will likely become the template for future cyclical downturns now as well. I see both the size and scope of government here rising with cheers from much of the public and media class.
Thaomas
Apr 5 2020 at 2:24pm
Redistribution toward relatively low income people hid by adversity is an objective and should not need to be “disguised” as stabilization (that’s the Fed’s job).
Rajat
Apr 5 2020 at 9:35pm
Scott Sumner
Apr 5 2020 at 5:10pm
I mostly agree. I think it would have been better if Australia had closed the public schools and kept restaurants open, with tables far apart. Kids are not at much risk, but they pass on the virus. I notice you say the private schools were ahead of the government in that regard, another example of how this is certainly not a failure of libertarianism.
Yes, wars, plagues and other disasters lead to big government.
Lorenzo from Oz
Apr 5 2020 at 1:40am
The free trade/open borders side of libertarianism is going to take a bit of a hit though.
Joseph Hertzlinger
Apr 5 2020 at 2:16am
Why would free trade take a hit?
The problem with importing too much from China is that relying on a single source is a bad idea. Autarky is also a matter of relying on a single source.
Lorenzo from Oz
Apr 5 2020 at 2:52am
There is a difference between should take a hit and will take a hit. Although I agree free trade is a bit less vulnerable than cross border movement of people.
The difficulty of free trade is that it prioritises efficiency. The higher the level of risk, the more people value resilience. And resilience means redundancy. And redundancy is not efficient (at least, not in the time frames that people typically act within). Hence concern over non-resilient supply chains.
Scott Sumner
Apr 5 2020 at 5:11pm
Open borders play basically zero role in this problem. I’d say tourism is 100 times more important. We got our surge from tourists returning from Europe, not Mexican illegals.
Joseph Hertzlinger
Apr 5 2020 at 2:17am
A question for economists: Have there been any estimates of the social cost of grocery shopping similar to the estimates for the social cost of carbon?
Thaomas
Apr 5 2020 at 2:28pm
The social costs of carbon combustion 0ver the private costs arise from the harm of CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere. I’m not aware of any similar externality generated by on-line grocery shopping. What did you have in mind?
Robert EV
Apr 5 2020 at 2:43pm
I don’t know that Joseph was asking about online grocery shopping versus the still standard in-person grocery shopping.
Even online grocery shopping is still in person. Moreso if sourced through gig economy shopping services (which have shoppers going to a variety of stores for a variety of objects) than if sourced through the grocer’s own delivery service (which at least minimizes store-to-store spread).
Joseph Hertzlinger
Apr 5 2020 at 7:10pm
I’m referring to shopping in person.
Matthias Görgens
Apr 5 2020 at 2:29am
That’s one of the joys of (living in) Singapore:
Instead of arguing for less government and being accused of being against all government, you can just argue for Singaporean levels of government (both size and competence).
They ain’t perfect, but better than what most of the rest of the world has to endure.
OH Anarcho-Capitalist
Apr 7 2020 at 10:28am
That’s why I also push for the extreme of an-cap society, but would indeed be happier with a US government that stayed within the written rules it is alleged to be bound by (US Constitution)…
Lorenzo from Oz
Apr 5 2020 at 2:54am
We have not yet seen the endgame, which means that there are lots of possibilities for the politics to play out in very different ways. If you want a really comprehensive and institutionally thorough critique of the performance of Western governments, try
https://medium.com/@curtis.yarvin/plan-a-for-the-coronavirus-7db3997490c1
Phil H
Apr 5 2020 at 8:06am
I’m… not quite sure about this. I do agree with it, and the catalogue of government failures is horrific. But there’s a bit of an unfair comparison going on. A few striking acts of goodwill and good management by private individuals, but there’s been a lot of mismanagement as well. Does none of that count?
Of course, the difference is that bad practice by private individuals usually affects mainly just the individuals concerned, but in the case of this epidemic, that’s emphatically not the case. Bad practice by a single company can create a big new outbreak.
One example is the way the virus has clustered along major flight routes. Most airlines are not state-owned any more. But obviously these private actors were playing a massive role in transmitting the covid virus.
So… I’m not sure. Obviously, there’s a massive need to do better. Particularly on the part of western governments. The point to notice isn’t that Taiwan did better than China. It’s that both seem to have fared much, much, much better than the US or Europe. What are the distinguishing features? Certainly in the case of China, it’s not that a more libertarian society did better. Is it not something like Tyler Cowen’s state capacity?
Scott Sumner
Apr 5 2020 at 5:14pm
I don’t agree. Taiwan did far better than China, and thus it’s the better model. AFAIK, Taiwan did not have more interventionist policies than the US. Just more sensible ones.
Phil H
Apr 6 2020 at 1:23am
Yes, I think Taiwan’s response has been pretty much perfect. I’m not so certain we can tell how interventionist it was/wasn’t, though. It involved a lot of tracking of individuals’ movements: not going Big Brother on the many, but I think there was a bit of Big Brother on the few.
I still think that China is the more interesting case, though. Assume that in general, states aren’t going to manage the perfect response. What’s the best imperfect response? I’m willing to state with some level of certainty that China’s response seems to have produced better outcomes than the US’s. And China’s imperfect-but-effective response came about as a result of high state capacity: When they wanted to stop transport links and impose social distancing, they did it; they were able to maintain supplies of food and masks with little difficulty.
I’m still not convinced that state capacity is anything more than a simple argument for capacity: if you’re going to do anything, doing it well is better than doing it badly. But this example does seem to make something of a case for state capacity.
Scott Sumner
Apr 6 2020 at 11:44am
One thing is clear; state capacity is not “big government.” Places like Singapore and Taiwan have some of the smallest governments in the entire developed world. But yes, if we must have government then competent is better than incompetent.
robc
Apr 5 2020 at 10:59am
Deontological libertarianism is bulletproof. At least to empirical results.
Phil H
Apr 5 2020 at 11:48am
Haha, so is pastafarianism and psychosis. Being unshakeable by real events is not a good quality in a political belief.
robc
Apr 5 2020 at 12:21pm
It is a moral system, not a political one.
nobody.really
Apr 6 2020 at 5:48pm
Hey! A little respect for pastafarian empiricists, please: They’re constantly throwing things against the wall to see what sticks….
Scott Sumner
Apr 5 2020 at 5:14pm
Yes, that’s why I’m a pragmatic libertarian.
robc
Apr 5 2020 at 7:12pm
Pragmatism seems weird. I mean the definition of it.
Why is it pragmatic if you measure results in dollars or happiness but not in freedom or soul damage?
A libertarianism that maximizes human freedom a outrance isnt considered pragmatic ( or utilitarian), although it is no different than a pragmatic/utilitarian libertarianism that maximizes human happiness.
And if instead you prefer to maximize the condition of your immortal soul, that is just completely outside the bounds.
Scott Sumner
Apr 6 2020 at 11:45am
Freedom makes me happy. How about you?
robc
Apr 6 2020 at 12:06pm
My freedom makes me happy. But apparently my freedom makes a lot of other people angry, so I am not sure if it is a net positive on happiness or not.
On the other hand, my freedom is guaranteed to be a net positive on freedom.
Tsergo Ri
Apr 5 2020 at 6:03pm
I think this epidemic also exposes one moral weakness of Libertarianism. It now seems that there is a moral obligation to test oneself for coronavirus (if the test is easily available), whereas within Libertarianism one should have the personal freedom to test oneself. One also has moral obligation to report the result. If the test is positive, one should also quarantine oneself.
I
OH Anarcho-Capitalist
Apr 7 2020 at 10:25am
Actually, it goes beyond a moral obligation. Under libertarianism proper, it would be an attack upon others to knowingly expose others to infections. If those others become infected, whether or not they develop COVID-19, they have grounds to sue for damages…
robc
Apr 7 2020 at 11:41am
Which means the person you responded to is wrong, it isn’t a moral weakness, but a moral strength!
robc
Apr 7 2020 at 12:40pm
An interesting piece on this topic:
https://glibertarians.com/2020/04/covid19-and-the-nap-a-legal-ethical-analysis-pt-2-of-2/
OH Anarcho-Capitalist
Apr 7 2020 at 10:22am
Editing?
cocheeese
Apr 7 2020 at 1:45pm
No problems with the Feds taking charge of a pandemic fight, and I think everybody’s doing a great job. The Constitutional system is working pretty well so far.
You can’t convince hysterical people that market actions like price gouging are natural and useful phenomenons. People have to arrive at those conclusions themselves.
Libertarianism (Classical Liberalism) undergirds our way of life… let life teach why, and use life lessons as reasoning for Libertarian ideals.
F. E. Guerra-Pujol
Apr 7 2020 at 9:28pm
Sumner makes many excellent points, but overall, this pandemic has been a disaster for classical liberalism and for property rights if you are a so-called “non-essential” firm. See:
https://priorprobability.com/2020/04/02/a-property-rights-approach-to-the-coronavirus-pandemic/
Jeff
Apr 23 2020 at 12:12pm
Of course this is true. A significant portion of the American public, likely a majority, supports having government officials shut businesses and order quarantines with zero legal authority, and actively scold resisters. And the widespread economic damage will create far more dependency on government, from unemployment payments to SBA loans to WIC/Snap food benefits. Support for UBI and single-payer healthcare will spike. Unless the economy “reopens” very, very soon and has a magic V-shaped recovery, Trump likely loses in November. The people around Biden will view this as an opportunity/mandate for a laundry list of progressive policies, and his VP choice will reflect this direction.
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