Jeff Tucker’s “In a Disease Panic, the Free Market Is Your Friend” ought to be atop everyone’s reading list. As libertarians well know, people who are under the delusion that government is a creative element in society, rather than a predator, will never let a good crisis go to waste. (Barack Obama’s first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, put it just that way.) The historian and economist Robert Higgs has documented the history of exploitation of crises to expand power and consume liberty in America in his classic, Crisis and Leviathan. We can see this process on vivid display with the outbreak of the coronavirus, or COVID-19.
What propels the expansion-through-crisis process is the belief that only government can respond effectively to the crisis. Most people, busy with their lives, don’t know enough about economics and politics to see the flaw in the statist’s case. By and large, and through no real fault of their own, they operate at a primitive level intellectually. Plus they take for granted what they’ve enjoyed all their lives: the increasingly accessible abundance of necessities and luxuries, which even a couple of generations ago would have made people green with envy. That is all the result of the fact that, despite all the obstacles, government has not managed to abolish markets, the price system, and entrepreneurship.
Enter Jeff Tucker’s article:
The truth is that the market loves you right now, more in the midst of a disease panic than ever before. It would love you even more if companies were not being browbeat by government into curbing sales of essential items. Let the prices of sanitizer and masks rise and you draw more into production and distribution. Throttle the market and you reduce supply.
The market would have loved you more had the Centers for Disease Control not failed to authorize private companies to test for the virus. It was only after the aggressive protests of the governor of New York that the CDC gave in and let people do what they wanted to do….
In a disease panic, we are learning, people lose their minds and stop thinking clearly about things that matter. They also reach out to authority to save them. All of this is expected. And it’s very sad. Even sadder is how the unscrupulous power mongers among us use such times to enhance the power of the state over our lives and claim it is for our own good.
Libertarians need to speak up — now more than ever.
