Some libertarians might think that epidemics and the panic associated with them might be some kind of government scam. Yes, government can and will exploit crises, maybe using them to accomplish its own ends more so than even solving the problem. However, an anarcho-capitalist world would certainly respond to severe epidemics.
In anarcho-capitalism, authority does in fact exist. Private authority. A mall owner can close the mall. A train company can close the train. A neighborhood organization can define the terms by which people use common property like roads. Rights Protection Agencies would have sufficient cause to track down and isolate infected persons who are bucking a quarantine since there is provable harm they might cause to others.
These organizations might rely on expert advice. It’s likely that health insurance companies would give big money to a diverse variety of epidemiologists so that disease outbreak can be prevented or mitigated. Imagine the costs savings of effective prevention and containment. The airline industry would have nothing on insurers. Insurers would not primarily be thinking of the, “stability of the fragile fiat financial system”.
The main difference between this system and a government system is that, in anarcho-capitalism, the conclusions of the New York Insurance Committee On Disease Outbreak – for example – would not necessarily lead to someone coming out to your house in small-town Kentucky to bar you from traveling. Or, you could have three or four opinions on disease response and different communities and regions can respond in kind.
Sure, leftists in particular would be aghast at this solution. “You want us to trust a for-profit board to make public health decisions, noooo!” they might say. Even so, in the theoretical solution, you still have someone with authority making decisions that affect public health concerning the containment of disease.
What should libertarians, therefore, think about government? For one, the government can be thought of as a private entity that owns property. Therefore, even a libertarian can reasonably support the idea of government closing its own property: public transit, access to public parks, closing schools, and so forth. Locking you in your home is another thing.
Government chooses to regulate health care and hospitals. As a consequence, government has an obligation to manage a disease outbreak responsibly. Bad policy is subject to scrutiny, both after a crisis, but also during the ramp up to the crisis. Even if you believe that the public ought to simply obey policy in the midst of a crisis, the former remains true. There is no major outbreak of novel coronavirus outside of China – yet – no major containment protocol either. While there is room for overreaction, there is no environment yet for major panic. Thus, the public absolutely has a right to have an adversarial relationship with public health authorities at the moment, and the media, regarding transparency and response.
Of particular harm is the government monopolizing information about an outbreak. Not only are they attempting to monopolize the response, they are also preventing others from responding rationally, by preventing useful information from releasing. This is troubling. Even if the “analysis” department gets everything right about a virus, the “execution” department could still screw up. If the “analysis” department is wary of pseudo-science, fine. However, they should not conceal their conclusions and data from the public.
We can reasonably conclude that WHO is compromised politically, at least a little bit. In spite of sufficient evidence to be skeptical of some of what WHO says, clowns in the media and online insist that only the WHO should be allowed to provide information about the new coronavirus. That’s the worst aspect of the new situation.
If we don’t trust a variety of for-profit insurance companies to protect their bottom lines from disease outbreaks, then how do we trust these jet-setting bureaucrats at WHO on the dime of the CCP and big Pharma? Ridiculous.
In conclusion, radical libertarians should be concerned about epidemics. Major coordinated public health efforts by authorities (private), would be part of an anarcho-capitalist world. Libertarianism would not be against containment protocol of a certain nature. As such, in my opinion, for the government to close access to public property as a containment measure seems reasonable to me as a libertarian. I also expect the government to competently fulfill the public health role it has accrued to itself by regulating healthcare. However, libertarians should reject narratives that insulate the government’s public health measures from scrutiny. Concealment of information is also an indefensible sin.
America, despite the New Deal and WWII, is not a Soviet style society. The public cannot and should not be coordinated via top-down fiat. In any event, this would fail. Public health officials should not rely on the National Guard and secrecy to contain a disease outbreak. Instead, getting accurate information out to competent middle class Americans in a timely manner would probably be the most effective way to mitigate a disease outbreak. Too bad these Americans have been systematically economically and culturally persecuted by Maoists in academy and politics since the 1970s.
