On his Facebook page, Robert Higgs writes:
Virology is a branch of biological science. Epidemiology is a branch of medicine and demography. Libertarianism (including its subset, individualist anarchy) is an ideology. Do not let your commitment to libertarianism convince you that you do not need to know anything about virology and epidemiology in order to make intelligent appraisals of a viral-disease epidemic. And do not assume that virology and epidemiology are nothing but tools that the rulers use to bamboozle the public into greater submission to their power grabs. It’s not so simple.
This is a point similar to the one made by Michael Huemer, and which I have quoted in a previous post. Commitment to a certain set of political ideas is a poor guide in assessing risks due to a new situation, which results out of the spread of Covid19.
Ideologies are like eyeglasses: they allow you to focus on pictures of a world of which you have limited knowledge, where assuming and processing information is costly and simply can’t be done in an adequate way in most of instances. But wearing glasses does not mean you are no longer myopic. In some situations, your eyesight may get worse, regardless of the fact you keep your glasses on your nose. Largely unpredicted and unexpected shocks are one of those instances.
Yet here comes a question: what is your libertarian ideology worth, in these days of pandemic? Some of us are libertarian because we naturally resent any infringement upon our own liberties, or because we feel a free society best guarantees each’s own interests. This is, to my purely anecdotal but still suitable large experience of meeting real world libertarians (not their caricatures, so easily encountered in other folks’ political statements), a quite rare occurrence. Most of the time you are a libertarian because you think government is more likely to screw things up than are other social actors. In that sense, you decided to wear libertarian glasses because of your reading of a certain amount of historical evidence. Because of that, you think the burden of proof lies on the interventionists.
So, what shall your ideology teach you these days? How it can be of use? Here’s seven instances, in which I think your libertarianism may serve you well.
1. It makes you appreciate fiscal prudence. If exceptional moments may come, being fiscally prudent in normal times makes governments more resilient and more credible when they are under pressure. Germany’s fiscal probity does not necessarily make individual Germans healthier than Italy’s fiscal lassitude. But it makes Angela Merkel a more credible leader when facing markets and bond holders, which is not a trivial thing.
2. It makes you think of the next generation. Whatever the tricks deployed by central banks, we are going to end up far more indebted than we used to be. Hard times are coming and will especially impact younger people who are just entering the labour market, particularly if they have little or no family support and capital behind their shoulders. To not jeopardize their economic future is an important argument to check unnecessary and wasteful public spending, particularly as we have more genuinely needed, emergency expenditure.
3. It makes you beware voters, not just politicians. In Italy we have found some new “untori”. It is runners. You got it right: runners, those people who dress funny and take a jog in the street. As our hospitals are overloaded with Coronavirus patients, clearly runners should be careful and try to avoid accidents, as they are probably unlikely to be treated with the accostumed. Yet it is well known that the highest number of accidents happen when you stay home, between your house’s walls, and the whole country is forced to stay home. But of course in terrible moments such as these people feel a natural need for somebody to blame: visible hands which can be considered responsible for bad things happening. The more this happens, the uglier society may become.
4. It brings you to advocate deregulation even more. These days regulatory bodies such as the FDA are granting “emergency use authorization” to new coronavirus tests and will possibly use fast track for new drug treatments and, eventually, a vaccine. When the going gets rough, deregulation is no longer a libertarian fantasy: it is a need, to speed up processes that otherwise will take years, because of the regulatory burden, leaving people to die meanwhile.
5. It makes you to celebrate the profit motive. It is the profit motive that brings together capital and brains, in those companies that are trying to develop a vaccine as fast as possible. It is the profit motive that will make companies to switch to produce medical equipment (such as masks), in order to adapt to changes in demand.
6. It makes you skeptical of the ability of planners to twist things, and thoughtful about unintended consequences. Some of these unintended consequences are pretty predictable. For example, in Milan the local government has made underground trains run less often, in order to achieve social distancing. It ended up with the opposite result: people are now way too close to each other on the morning trains at rush hour. Happily, local government is relatively flexible and they reversed their decision. Something similar may happen in the near future, as the government is thinking of further limiting opening hours in supermarkets. None of this is astrophysics but to think about measures critically you need to know that reality can’t be changed at the stroke of the pen, and individual behavior adapts to, but does not necessarily obey, new laws. All the time you spent reading Hayek now come to use.
7. It will make you ponder the importance of the individual. In a 60 million person democracy, such as Italy, you cannot lock everybody in their flat, not even in great cities. To fight the virus we may need government, but we need people behaving responsibly and enduring the hardship of social distancing. After this is over, whatever the magic governments and central banks deployed in the meanwhile, it is people’s propensity to truck, barter, and exchange that will bring us back to a functioning economy, it is their creativity that will sparkle entrepreneurship. We are all in this together, but this “we” is millions of individuals, whose plans and hopes have been disrupted and whose discipline and intelligence are of paramount importance, in the dark days ahead.
READER COMMENTS
Matthias Görgens
Mar 21 2020 at 12:15pm
I mostly just want there to be lots of different countries with different systems to pick from. So you can vote with your feet. (The only vote that really changed anything for the individual.)
Obviously, we can fit more countries on the planet, if they are smaller countries.
The American states were supposed to be a bit like that. Laboratories of democracy or so.
My adopted home of Singapore is mostly run along sensible, neoliberal lines, and so far has displayed a competent and pragmatic response to the virus crisis.
It’s fun to think of all the political principles, and how an ideology might colour your thinking, of course.
Thaomas
Mar 21 2020 at 1:10pm
It may do all those things, but not necessarily to the optimal amount or the best way.
1. Germany’s fiscal policy may or may not have been optimal but its influence on the ECB was disastrous, even more deflationary than the Fed.
2. Public spending guided by the principle of NPV>0 means that future generations will be better, not worse off. Insights about what is “wasteful” NPV<0 are welcome from any ideological point of view.
3. ??? Voters more or less than politicians and on what issues?
4. Deregulation or regulation according to cost benefit analysis? If regulators are biased toward avoiding known risks or do not do proper cost benefit analysis (value healthy years preserved too highly?) is the best strategy to advocate for better cost benefit analysis or just denounce "regulation?"
5. Celebrate the profit motive relative to what? What are the margins, what are the issues, on which issues does inadequate "celebration" of the profit motive lead to bad decisions?
6. Trying to avoid unintended consequences when making policy is not as far as I can see a uniquely Libertarian insight. Using data and the results of policy to feed back onto constant revision of policy (as with the Milan underground) seems like the best decisions seems best. Or is the alternative never to change policy at all?
7. A "communitarian" could not have said t better. 🙂
I think the implication of this crisis of those pf Libertarian leanings is get their hands dirty in proposing alternatives to existing and proposed policies instead of identifying the conceptual errors that lead to bad policy. As the expression goes, "Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness."
Greg G
Mar 23 2020 at 11:04am
3. ??? Voters more or less than politicians and on what issues?
Umm…how about the extent to which being a reality TV star and promising to be a “disrupter” qualifies you to be President for one.
SaveyourSelf
Mar 21 2020 at 3:23pm
General rules (Libertarian Principles) are the foundation on which the complex system of civilization is built upon. We ascribe to the general rules whenever possible because they are known to produce, on average, reliably good outcomes when followed historically and in experimental circumstances compared to alternative rules. The rules have a momentum, if you will, in the direction we want to travel. Thus the justification for deviation from the general rules must necessarily fall upon anyone proposing ignoring them rather than from those promoting adherence. Commitment to Libertarian political ideas is a good guide to approaching risks in a new situation! Including the spread of Covid19. Leaving people free to make decisions for themselves and their resources allows those free individuals to respond quickly to the changing circumstances Covid19 produces.
Greg G
Mar 23 2020 at 9:58am
Yes, general rules are very important. But we call them “general” precisely because they don’t necessarily make sense in every SPECIFIC situation. This is because we do have, and should have, many things we value and many general rules that result from these values. These general rules can conflict with each other. Note that, in his excellent post here, Alberto does NOT conclude that quarantines necessarily violate libertarian principles.
Yes, the burden of proof should be on those who advocate specific exceptions to general rules due to these conflicts. In this case, that burden of proof is met.
This virus is spreading exponentially and is already overwhelming the capacity of the healthcare system where it is hitting first and hardest. Our healthcare system is optimized for profitability , not pandemic. That works pretty well during normal times but can’t be expected to work well in a 100 year flood like this.
Deaths from this virus are going up by orders of magnitude in places where the healthcare system is overwhelmed. First responders, doctors and nurses are at much higher risk due to shortages of protective gear and the fact that they are exposed to higher initial viral loads than most people infected out in the community. We owe it to them to quarantine for now.
Their right to life, and the right to life of all the people infected downstream by those refusing to quarantine are more important than your right to make your own decision on this right now.
Mark Brady
Mar 21 2020 at 3:42pm
Regarding German fiscal probity, you may care to read this new article on the Financial Times website.
Germany tears up fiscal rule book to counter corona pandemic:
Berlin to raise €150bn in new debt to bolster ailing economy
https://www.ft.com/content/dacd2ac6-6b5f-11ea-89df-41bea055720b
Phil H
Mar 22 2020 at 5:02am
“In a 60 million person democracy, such as Italy, you cannot lock everybody in their flat, not even in great cities.”
I’m getting a bit tired of this. Why not? China did.
It’s the American gun enthusiasts all over again. People are going to die? We don’t care! Our “freedom” is more important than your life.
Here is a 100% incontrovertible fact. You can lock down cities. The largest country in the world just did it. If you don’t want to, then make that argument. Explain why you are willing to accept more deaths. Don’t hide behind the lie “it can’t be done”.
Fred_in_PA
Mar 22 2020 at 1:56pm
You say, “Here is a 100% incontrovertible fact. You can lock down cities. The largest country in the world just did it. If you don’t want to, then make that argument.”
Seems like a challenge, so here’s a layman’s response;
Locking down a social unit — here, a city — stops most or all of their production. Even those who can produce in solitude can’t produce everything they need, and so must trade — a social interaction — for the rest. But such social interaction is forbidden.
You cannot consume that which has not been produced. You can consume that which you did not produce yourself, but getting it will require (the now forbidden) social interaction — either trade, gifts-freely-given, or coercive theft. (You could also draw upon personal stockpiles accumulated before the lockdown — a hoarder / survivalist approach.)
(Most real humans aren’t this ideologically devoted, however, and will resort to black markets. Real joint production and trade will continue but now surreptitiously — carefully hidden from the watchful eyes of the police charged with stopping it. I believe an economist would refer to the costs of hiding as a “dead-weight loss”.)
Wuhan, China has a population of 11 million. She had 48,557 diagnosed cases of CoViD-19, and 2,169 deaths. Allowing for many cases that were either asymptomatic or never reported, let’s guesstimate 110,000 actual cases and 2,200 deaths. So maybe 10% got infected, and of those 2% died. The Diamond Princess offers another baseline, with 20% of those passengers getting infected and 1% of the infected dying. Wuhan was probably more able to enforce social isolation: The Diamond Princess probably more able to provide good care to the afflicted. (Given China’s now abandoned “one child” policy and their low current fertility, the average age of the two populations may not be that different. I don’t know.)
Being under time pressure, I’ll wrap this up. I suspect your cure is worse than the disease: That collapsing the economy does more damage than simply letting the disease run its course. I feel certain that you don’t propose the former and that I’m not proposing the latter. But that is your tendency (and my tendency). Wisdom is probably somewhere between us.
Fred_in_PA
Mar 22 2020 at 5:58pm
Oops! 10% of Wuhan’s 11 million people would be 1.1 million.
110,000 postulated cases implies a 1% infection rate.
Is this disease less of a threat than we’ve been led to believe? Or does Phil H’s draconian shutdown yield a 95% reduction from the Diamond Princess numbers? (Or — more probably — somewhere in between?)
Mark Z
Mar 22 2020 at 5:42pm
Enforcing a full quarantine of an entire city is not a trivial task, and in non-authoritarian countries where people are accustomed to freedom of movement, compliance with lockdown orders is going to be an issue.
And as Fred noted above, you can’t shut down production and transportation of almost all goods – especially food, medicine, etc. – for very long. Even China has been gradually easing restrictions after a mere several weeks of intense lockdown. Shutting down cities just isn’t a viable long term strategy (by which I mean, longer than a few weeks). More limited, periodic lockdowns of hostpots are more viable.
Much of this is a matter of political culture. It’s easier for the Chinese government to severely restrict freedom of movement, both in the sense that such restrictions are more socially acceptable and politically possible, and in the sense that the state has more experience doing this sort of thing. They are better equipped to do this than the US. And I think that elucidates the tradeoff. Maybe right now many wish their relatively liberal governments had more experience being authoritarians governments and had fewer liberal norms holding them back in a time of crisis, but I think that would come at the cost of having a more authoritarian government (and set of norms) during normal times as well. You can’t easily switch from a free society to one where people can be locked in their houses at gunpoint without due process on a dime. Societies that can do the latter during an outbreak like this are probable going to be less free societies when there isn’t an outbreak.
Phil H
Mar 22 2020 at 8:50pm
Thanks, guys.
I’m not really sure what you added to the argument, though. You both seem to have given me a string of reasons why locking down a city is hard. Fine. Not disputed. But China – a poorer country than Italy – managed to do it. Why can’t Italy/the US/the UK?
The best I’m getting is vague allusions to how it’s easier in China because of its “authoritarian culture”. That’s… not really an argument.
Here’s a bit of background on how it actually works. The heroes of the Chinese lockdown are the delivery guys. China has relatively advanced ecommerce, with a large proportion of restaurants offering online delivery, and supermarket deliveries available from JD and Taobao, the two equivalents of Amazon. The so-called lockdown was actually carefully modulated to allow those things to carry on. Travel between provinces (bringing cheaper rural labour into the cities to do the deliveries) was never completely stopped, just radically slowed, enabling a trickle of people to keep coming and keep it working. With factories and office buildings shut down, most people didn’t have an incentive to go out.
All children across China are now attending school remotely, and what heroics went on behind the scenes to make our internet powerful enough to support that, I do not know. It hasn’t been entirely smooth. But it has basically worked.
It’s all possible, it just requires a set of smart policies and incentives. Claims that it can’t be done, or that thousands will die, just seem… misplaced.
Fred_in_PA
Mar 22 2020 at 11:05pm
Phil H;
Does the explanation of why China can do it but the West can’t lie in how people get paid?
I don’t know the percentage of private-sector employment in China. I had (without thinking about or investigating it) assumed that it was zero: That the State owned all industry and was the sole employer. If so, the State could decide to continue paying everyone, even though they are not working. Which then gives the people the money to trade for their daily needs.
Here (Pennsylvania) almost everyone works for a private employer. (Even much of the State’s activity takes place through private contractors.) Hence, when they aren’t working — albeit by State diktat — they don’t get paid. So such a lockdown here results in a lot of people who can’t buy bread or pay the rent.
I don’t think you can fix the problem by requiring the employers to pay them even though they’re not working: Most employers don’t have those kind of reserves. Especially, the (roughly) half of our employers who are small businesses would be destroyed by such a mandate. (Which means no recovery once the crisis has passed.)
The only solution I can see would be to have the State pay the workers for the duration of the crisis. But then — as with China — you’ll have the problem of all that fiat money never backed up by any real product. I’m not competent to analyze that, but my highschool training leads me to expect sufficient inflation to downward adjust the value of the (aggregate?) currency to match the downward adjusted physical output. (So maybe us oldsters pay for this anyway — but now by seeing our savings wiped out! Sigh.)
It does point to the foolishness of our dear Governor shutting down everything — both high risk occupations & low and in both high density settings & low. I understand not wanting insurance workers congregating in office bullpens in dense downtown Philadelphia, but I don’t understand the ban on outdoor lawn maintenance in rural Potter county. That would seem to unnecessarily increase the number of unemployed (and hence the burden on the State to support them) while decreasing whatever meager revenues the State could have collected from those businesses still allowed to operate.
Mark Z
Mar 23 2020 at 2:30am
It’s not just that it’d be hard, it may be politically impossible. Imagine a governor ordering police to start arresting people for breaking quarantine. Do you think he’d get re-elected? And suppose some judge issues an injunction against the policy, what happens if he ignores it? I’m arguing that severe enforcement measures would be very unpopular, many people would not comply, and therefore punishment would be widespread, which would exacerbate the unpopularity and any politician offering a softer touch would have a field day.
I also think the verdict is still out on how well less draconian measures work; some states have been more ‘on the ball’ than others in terms of closing schools, bars, restaurants, implementing work from home, etc. as soon as the virus hit. These states (Ohio perhaps?) may fare much much better than, say, New York, which dragged its feet in some key areas like closing schools. Of course, another advantage has: closing borders between states is also politically impossible under the circumstances.
Bottom line: if western politicians knew they would be rewarded (or at least not punished) for being much stricter in enforcing public health measures, I don’t think they would be as hesitant as they are about doing so.
Phil H
Mar 23 2020 at 3:07am
Fred: private sector employment is much larger than you think. There are a few towns, particularly in the northern rustbelt, where state owned companies do employ the majority of the population (SOEs not exactly the state, but close enough). But for most cities, particularly in the south, where I live, the private sector has the lion’s share.
I’ve been wondering about the poor, and I think part of the issue is this: in the (poor) countryside, home ownership is very high; there are very few renters. In the richer cities, the very poor who rent accommodation have been kept out of the cities, because the factories were closed. They returned to their rural hometowns for Chinese New Year, and stayed there, because there was nothing to come back to. For the rest of us, rents in Chinese cities are still fairly cheap. Small businesses are in trouble, but I haven’t heard of anyone in serious trouble like not being able to pay for food or power. It must be happening, but it’s not large numbers. Chinese people keep savings!
Mark – If that’s the case, then that’s bad incentives. It’s different to what you were suggesting earlier, that it’s too *difficult* to shut down the cities. That distinction seems very important to me! Because one points to a solution – change the incentives – and the other just points to despair.
Robert EV
Mar 22 2020 at 2:55pm
Limits on perishable goods (e.g. dairy products) means more trips to the store, or trips to other stores, which means more exposure and greater network effects. While effective in times of war, rationing has pernicious effects in times of pandemic.
Hopefully the hoarders reach their limit, and the food distribution system adapts from restaurants to grocery stores sufficiently fast that these limits can be removed.
Dylan
Mar 23 2020 at 7:56am
Are people really hoarding perishable goods? Regular milk only seems to last about 3 days. My local stores haven’t had any limits on how much you can buy, and there’s still plenty of milk on the shelves. Instead, we’ve been out of things like tortillas, flour, dried beans, rice. Tofu and tempeh have been gone for more than a week, but surprisingly there is plenty of meat.
Patrick
Mar 22 2020 at 7:15pm
Whoa! Where to start?
“But wearing glasses does not mean you are no longer myopic.”
I am afraid sir that you should put yours back on and begin reading a new.
“…fiscal prudence… Germany’s fiscal probity…”
This “German fiscal probity” of which you speak was the impetus for the concept of lebensraum as well as the Euro almost collapsing. German banks were happy to lend to their poor southern neighbors, as well to sell them the luxury goods, only because the money all came back to the Vaterland. So, probity it was not…
2. “It makes you think of the next generation…an important argument to check unnecessary and wasteful public spending…”
Let us again revisit your beloved Germany as an example. During the past decade the German Government had the potential to borrow money at rates second only, and in some cases better than, the government of the United States of America. They could have used those monies to invest in their crumbling infrastructure, they did not.
3. “It makes you beware voters, not just politicians.”
Perhaps it is my Anglo-American roots showing, but I do not fear an educated voter, nor do I fear an educated politician. I do however fear a political system that will succumb and fall to the will of an uneducated populous. The political system must temper the anger of the mob, if it does not it really is not serving democracy. While I will be the first to admit that Donald Trump and Brexit are not our finest moments, the British parliamentary system and US Government are two of the most stable democratic systems in the world. Change is slow. It might seem painful. However, “Off with their heads!”, is not the answer either. Thomas Jefferson should have been a Jacobite, thankfully we have never watered that “…tree of liberty”.
4. “It brings you to advocate deregulation even more… such as the FDA…”
Perhaps you have forgotten about the other agencies being deregulated like EPA…
5. “It makes you to celebrate the profit motive.”
Do you know that US companies have actuarial tables that they use to determine if they are going to recall a known faulty product? Even if this product causes the deaths of humans, is this the profit motive of which you speak?
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