Laissez-Faire Institute - Freedom Without Compromise

Libertarian lessons from the pandemic

1. We still live in the Dark Ages

Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

We’ve quoted this already in Laissez-faire: the political philosophy of civilization, where we’ve shown how on a political level we still live in the Dark Ages. More and more, indeed, there is a caste system, a class of privileged exploiters living in castles at the expense of exploited producers. Latest example to date is how masks and gloves (like guns) are supposedly great and needed not just for the medical class, but also for the warrior class, yet useless for the serf class. And of course, the members of the ruling class have access to tests denied to us mere commoners – all equal, except those more equal than others.

Now besides all the political signs of Europe being in the Dark Ages, there is another glaring one: hygiene. Wearing slippers at home instead of street shoes – an “advanced” technology known here at least since 1478 is still far from obvious (or is there another reason for disinfecting the streets?). Soap – invented 2800 BC, yet washing hands still seems as something Westerners need to be told to do. Even before this crisis, there already was a high rate of infection in hospitals and even doctors had to be told to wash their hands. And of course, now it’s not anymore a rational advice to wash your hands when dirty, but a sort of religious ritual unrelated to actual cleanliness, to be performed even on a desert island:

“If you’re wearing gloves you’re not washing your hands.”

French Health Minister

Likewise for social organization and ways of working – remote work: technologically straighforward for decades, the obvious solution for traffic jams, commuting, pollution, etc. – yet far from spread as much as it should be by now. Avoiding rush hours and congested subways, for that matter – really something so out of our grasp of technological or organizational solutions?

In New York and Spain health workers are wearing garbage bags as protection. In 2020. In 2020 our so-called civilization can’t afford or can’t organize basic safety equipment. And the UK, of course, is still a rat-infested medieval shithole, not to mention a preposterous monarchy, and the best its leaders and medical “experts” could come up with is pretty much to not do anything about the pandemic, indeed, wish for more people to catch the virus – until, oh the irony, they caught the virus themselves.

So we have pretty much, by and large, the same political, social, religious and sanitary conditions as at the time of the Plague – except, yeah, we’ve got “influencers” around meanwhile, to bless us with their advice. We have pandemics wreaking havoc through populations maintained in artifical poverty, ignorance and technological backwardness by primitive forms of government — monarchies such as UK and Spain, and barely more modern “democracies” like France or Italy (the former being indeed a blatant case of just having copied the same king-centered structure, with the minor change of voting for him every few years – and indeed, this “President” as they call it, currently N’djekouale the 1st, successor on the throne of Flamby the 1st, also happens to be the co-prince of Andorra – QED). Whereas there’s always enough money around for the cleric, noblemen and warrior classes, healthcare is deliberately starved, criminally mismanaged and socialized, whereas technological or organizational progress is opposed.

In a thousand years, after anarchy and real civilization will have been achieved for a while already, historiography will no doubt amend the definition of the European Dark Ages thus: “Time period of the West from around 500 AD to 2500 AD, characterized by monarchies, feudalism, and coronavirus/flu/plague pandemics with thousands of avoidable victims due to lack of basic hygiene, mismanaged/socialized healthcare, and general idiocracy”.

2. Because of states, we are way poorer than we ought to be

If the State had been abolished a century ago, we’d all have robots and summer homes in the Asteroid belt.

Samuel Edward Konkin III

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Clarke’s Third Law

Try explaining the lightbulb to someone who’s only ever heard of candles. Try explaining the smartphone to someone who’s never even heard of a printed book.

The impediments on progress and wealth that government institutes are beyond dispute. The more government, the more stagnation and regression – closed and totalitarian regimes like North Korea pretty much revert a country to a Stone Age stagnation, whereas Soviet-style “socialisms in one country” just halt progress, but steal it from outside – while they can, of course, since, were they to win, they would have no one to steal technology from (and after a while, they finish burning up the capital accumulated before they started their rule, and thus collapse anyhow).

In “mixed economies”, progress is usually not halted nor reversed, merely slowed down – a lot. Compounded over hundreds of years, the difference between what we have and what we should have becomes utterly unfathomable.

Best we can do, as economists, is put some numbers on it.

It is therefore preposterous to think that a civilization technologically ahead by centuries – as any stateless country would demonstrably be if it had renounced statism a few centuries ago – would not have a cure for puny viruses, not to mention unimaginable wealths that could finance the best healthcare for everyone, and more likely than not would already have achieved widespread immortality, for that matter.

3. Governments’ degree of incompetence, irresponsiblity, criminal negligence and murderous nature is undisputable

Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

Grey’s Law

Dios proveerá

[God will provide]

Nicolás Maduro1

They told us it would be fine.

What we didn’t realize was [that] their definition of fine included a million dead.

@FearIsNotPanic, replying to @nntaleb

Where to start? How about...

Nicaragua?

Unas diez mil personas marcharon en Nicaragua en una concentración convocada por el Gobierno y el Partido Sandinista en solidaridad con los países afectados por el coronavirus Covid-19.

“México y Nicaragua: un festival de música y una manifestación en medio del brote de Covid-19”

Italy?

Spain?

“Si no saliera su vuelo, tienen opción de sacar un billete con escala en otro país, ya que solo se han suspendido conexiones directas”

Consulate of Spain in Naples, Italy, after the Spanish government suspended flights from Italy to Spain

France?

Belgium?

“La Belgique détruit son stock de masques FFP2 sans le remplacer, Maggie De Block se défend” (as a bonus, you get a photo of what a government Minister of Health looks like).

Ah, Belgium! Not unlike the usual stories we get from Belgium, but at this level it’s really not that funny. (Update 2020-05-24: San Marino micro-state excluded, Belgium is now leading the world list of countries by mortality percentage. Great job guys!)

Switzerland?

Good question!

Well... Swiss health care is managed in a strange way. For instance, training of new medical doctors is deliberately curtailed, which leads to, big surprise, lack of medics. It seems pretty much everything is done to make the life of medical personnel as difficult as possible – punishing people who follow their natural instinct to help their fellow humans has always been a primary task of government.

And do we need to mention the “moratorium” on opening new medical offices? An economic lunacy based pretty much on the insane theory, reversing the causality, that it’s not the doctors who cure diseases, but instead the establishment of new medical practices who renders people around it sick (and thus entails costs for the healthcare system, duh). With this sort of logic, it’s surprising they haven’t suggested yet to just close all hospitals and stop testing anyone, to get the number of new cases to zero.

Should anybody be surprised, then, that a system pretty much begging for shortages of everyone and everything, ends up with, well, shortages? And these are the rulers we should trust to fight a pandemic?

And of course, let us not forget our ridiculous slave army, endangering citizens’ lives, like always.

USA

Big surprise, governments’ economic ignorance – glaring at least since Bastiat’s writings in 1845 – doesn’t help, either: “Trump’s trade war exacerbated shortage of medical equipment”. In other news (or am I just reading Atlas Shrugged?):

The governor Friday signed an executive order giving him the power to take ventilators2 from private health institutions to redistribute to those in the worst need via the National Guard.

Must be hard to sign executive orders giving more power to yourself. And another Atlas Srugged worthy quote:

“It can’t be that companies in this country or this state cannot make these simple products,” he said.

Hey, why don’t you make them? You, personally, start a private business, invest your own money, and do it? Indeed, why didn’t you make them in advance? Because, maybe, actually producing something, not with the government’s help, but against government hindrance (the myriad of idiotic regulations and petty thefts involved), is a tad harder than just looting whatever you need?

And of course, the usual bureaucracy, inefficiency, and general farce of any government involvement applies.

UK?

Incidentally: “People can get the coronavirus more than once, experts warn — recovering does not necessarily make you immune”.

Even Taleb (we don’t like Taleb, precisely because he’s not an individualist and could therefore support this kind of policies, hence the “even”) was shocked:

Lunacy in the UK

Just a reminder that for the government, you are expendable. Especially if it helps them hide their own utter incompetence – why admit failure at controlling the disease, when you can just claim that it’s impossible to control anyhow? And of course, you’re not supposed, as a good land-attached medieval serf, to check and compare what other countries are saying and doing.

4. Governments will lie to you, blatantly

Despite’s China managing the outbreak now, shouldn’t we mention that government censorship prevented early warnings in the first place?

China, Italy, and who knows who else are suspected of underreporting the death toll.

In countries where there is enough masks, they become recommended and even mandatory in some places:

For weeks, when healthy Americans asked whether they should be wearing face masks in public to help stem the spread of the coronavirus, health authorities in the U.S. have answered with a definitive no. Now, with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reviewing its policy, those recommendations may soon change — but in Central Europe, a handful of countries have already made that decision.

Austria, the Czech Republic and Slovakia have recently made it compulsory to wear some form of covering over their mouths and noses when entering certain public spaces. In this respect, they have more closely followed the lead of health authorities in Asian countries — such as China and South Korea, where masks have been strongly encouraged and even widely distributed — than their own neighbors in Europe so far.

In countries where there’s not enough of them, government will explain to you that “they’re useless, duh”. If there is a drought and we run out of water through government mismanagement, expect the government to start explaining to us that drinking water is useless – except for politicians, of course. Enjoy this warning from the U.S. “surgeon general”, issued at a time when in countries hit earlier such as China, South Korea, and Japan pretty much everyone was wearing a mask already:

Seriously people- STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!

Which raises the obvious question: shouldn’t hospitals, or indeed the government (that is, he) have organized enough supplies before the epidemic? People don’t hoard protective suits, yet they’re running out of them as well. Don’t blame your utter incompetence on the “general public”.

Q: What mistakes are other countries making?

A: The big mistake in the U.S. and Europe, in my opinion, is that people aren’t wearing masks

George Gao, director-general of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, March 27, 2020

5. Some governments will take smarter measures than others – but it won’t be “yours”

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.

P. J. O’Rourke.

Have we hand-picked only the most mismanaged governments for the list above?

Well, yes and no. The issues are pretty much the same across governments as different as Swiss, French, Spanish, British, US, etc. It cannot be a mere coincidence. The issue, then, is deeply structural, and not just accidental: institutional irresponsibility, short-term concerns only due to the very nature of the democratic system, etc. It is not a mere coincidence that those supposedly “end of history” systems of government would just happen to have incompetent managers, all at the same time, during the past twenty years. It is the very system that all of them share which is flawed.

The idiot John Oliver had likewise claimed that the issue with socialist Venezuela was not socialism but some sort of accidental mismanagement. But that’s missing the point entirely.

Political philosophy is not about designing a system which ensures that a limited group of people get as much power as possible, indeed ensuring that the worst get on top (Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, ch. 10.) – and then just praying (à la Maduro supra) that somehow we’ll all be very, very lucky and that through some magical miracle they’ll just happen to be literally omniscient angels, and that the calculation problem won’t apply to them. Quite the opposite: it should be about ensuring a polycentric, stable system of mutual control and oversight. The point of socialism is precisely to concentrate power in the hands of the few so that they can mismanage for their own gain. Laissez-faire, its utter opposite, is about making sure that politicians not just don’t mismanage, but can’t mismanage, because they don’t control anything to mismanage to begin with.

But sure, let's admit the possibility we missed some good ones, who did the right things despite structural incentives to do the wrong ones. Teenage boys with whiskey and car keys might behave responsibly.

What is your guarantee you won’t have a government that makes bad decisions, with your money? How do you control it? Why take that risk? Sure, you can decide where to live – but you might not be able to anticipate which government will handle better unforeseen cases. And government doesn’t own the country you live in – why should you leave, they’re the ones who suck.

And remember:

Whatever we libertarians decide, it’s certainly not going to affect national policy. It would be one thing if Cox, or you dear reader, for some reason had the power to decide whether the nation would have federal border patrols or not — and at the same time lacked the authority to alter any other federal policies.

Wishing for a limited government that would do what you want it to is not any more “pragmatical” or “realistic” than wishing for outright abolition of government and subsequent market solutions to disease prevention – in fact, much less so.

6. Local governments are in conflict with central governments

Das Selbstbestimmungsrecht, von dem wir sprechen, ist jedoch nicht Selbstbestimmungsrecht der Nationen, sondern Selbstbestimmungsrecht der Bewohner eines jeden Gebietes, das gross genug ist, einen selbständigen Verwaltungsbezirk zu bilden. Wenn es irgend möglich wäre, jedem einzelnen Menschen dieses Selbstbestimmungsrecht einzuräumen, so müsste es geschehen.

[However, the right of self-determination of which we speak is not the right of self-determination of nations, but rather the right of self-determination of the inhabitants of every territory large enough to form an independent administrative unit. If it were in any way possible to grant this right of self-determination to every individual person, it would have to be done.]

Ludwig von Mises, Liberalismus [Liberalism: In the Classical Tradition]

Business as usual – federalism is yet another example of how government is chaos.

Brazil

Switzerland

Alors que les cantons durcissent peu à peu les mesures prises vendredi dernier par le gouvernement suisse, celui-ci tergiverse, malgré une séance de crise tenue dimanche soir.

Le Conseil fédéral ne va toutefois pas jusqu’à un confinement obligatoire. La décision du canton d’Uri de confiner les personnes de plus de 65 ans est problématique et n’est pas conforme à l’ordonnance édictée vendredi, a indiqué Martin Dumermuth, directeur de l’Office fédéral de la justice. Le Conseil fédéral n’a pas voulu de confinement généralisé et les cantons doivent l’accepter.

La réaction n’a pas tardé: peu après, le Conseil d’Etat uranais annonçait qu’il acceptait la décision du Conseil fédéral et levait l’interdiction de sortie des seniors.

La mesure avait été introduite à Uri jeudi à 18h00. L’état-major de crise cantonal avait pris cette décision parce que les seniors ne respectent pas les règles en vigueur. Les autorités espéraient les tenir à l’écart des commerces et d’autres institutions.

Uri fait marche arrière

Spain

EU

Worth mentioning is also the EU, whose only preoccupation since the start has been that Schengen area member states don’t close their borders to limit virus entry, and acting hurt that Trump closed his borders to them.

And of course, its member states, fighting against each other like the gangsters that they are3 for scraps of masks.

Not our words – those of the former Vice-President of the European Commission:

si des États membres de l’UE se mettent à se comporter comme des gangsters, comme la mafia organisée, c’est intolérable.

We couldn’t agree more: the masks come off. Altough the comparison with gangsters might not be entirely fair – for the gangsters.

Also: yes, the EU is completely useless at best and should be abandoned – since States are nothing but groups of gangsters, setting up a cartel of gangsters does not make things any better.

7. People needing government to tell them to wash their hands is the problem, not the solution

The government is good at one thing. It knows how to break your legs, and then hand you a crutch and say: “See, if it weren’t for the government, you wouldn’t be able to walk”.

Harry Browne

Do we need the state now to help us out of this? Yes of course – after stealing half our incomes (and that’s just counting statically), preventing us from researching advanced medical technology, disarming us, and making most people dependent on it for advice and information, yes we do have to rely on the state to protect us, pay out unemployment benefits, take measures to stop the propagation of the virus, etc.

But that’s precisely the problem, not the solution. People are so used to relying on the government that they don’t ensure their own reserves (food, financial, medical) anymore – or indeed, can’t, after being impoverished by government. Saving, or any sort of financial responsibility, has been actively discouraged by governments for decades:

This supply side trigger has come at a time when interest rates had already been artificially pushed close to zero for a decade or more in many countries. In such an environment, only crazy people wanted to be savers, and everybody—households, businesses and governments—borrowed to the hilt while credit was cheap and plentiful. So the world entered this coronavirus shut-down with virtually no savings buffer, with firms and employees living paycheck-to-paycheck in a mountain of debt.

In addition, people are now so used to relying on government for everything that they don’t have the reflex to seek market, community-based solutions (think of how most people are happy about the smoking ban in “public places”, yet used their effort and energy to achieve it through government legislation, instead of simple market actions to the same effect).

The government broke our legs (almost literally here – an impoverished, technologically backwards society that can’t 3D-print new legs or virus cures instantly, yet), and now is handing us the crutches (its crappy socialized healthcare system, its government mandated unemployment “social” insurance, etc.). Should we say no? Now there are libertarians who’ll say “no, no, government has no place in the crutches business”. And then there are those who’ll say, “see, we need a minimal government, because the market wouldn’t be able to provide nice wooden crutches like this”.

We say the complete opposite: governments are responsible for this mess in the first place. It’s not our role to beg the government not to clean it, nor tell the government how to clean it. Our role is to provide a glimpse of the completely different level of life we would enjoy without governments, not just with different solutions to the virus, but with the virus not being a newsworthy problem at all to begin with.

8. Collectivism is dangerous

Now of course, in a certain sense, collectivism doesn’t really exist, and individualism is apodictic. “Collectivists”, however – those who use the excuse of some form or other of collectivism to pursue their own selfish gains – do tend to push for collectivism in the general sense.

They rant against individual transportation – with ecology as a pretext (as usual with the Watermelons), yet you don’t see them praising electric cars, or encouraging remote work. No, the goal is to cram you into public transportation.

Same for housing – socialists do what they can to build buildings as ugly as possible, discourage ownership (because owners don’t vote for them). Instead of letting high-end housing be built, increase offer from the upper side, lower prices and move everyone one step above, they encourage the opposite – zoning laws, construction restrictions, higher prices through lack of competition and bureaucratic overcosts (so that people then have to beg them for subsidies), and ugly housing projects, with all they entail. Instead of encouraging everything as individual as possible, they strive for the opposite – common laundry room, common kitchen, common bathroom, etc. The pinnacle of that being the Soviet коммуналка.

Now which of these models of transportation and housing do you think favors the spread of contagious diseases?

9. Every death is avoidable

And there went another one who could have lived a thousand years.

Kim Stanley Robinson, The Mars Trilogy, quoted by Robert Vroman, “Help! The State Is Trying To Kill Me”, Anti-state.com, September 22, 2001.

Every death is avoidable. But don’t rely on the government – for them, it’s the complete opposite: every life is expendable. And the more socialist the government, the more this holds true.

When the British Prime Minister declares that it wouldn’t be so bad if a majority of his Queen’s subjects got the virus, you don’t really expect him to go tell it one by one to all those he’s expecting to die.

Israel, a somewhat more civilized nation4, seems to have a much better hold on the spread, and a relatively low death count, which means each individual victim still gets individually named. Most of them are around a 100 years old – yet, still, they could and should still have lived not a hundred but a thousand years, or more. And indeed, if every country’s inhabitants were contributing so much to technological progress as Israel, per capita, they probably would have.

Israel’s first virus fatality named as 88-year-old Holocaust survivor Aryeh Even

An avoidable victim, then, who had survived another tragic failure of governments, the Holocaust – a government-committed genocide not just criminal, but also quite avoidable, as part of the also utterly avoidable WWII, following the murderous and utterly avoidable WWI (which incidentally helped spread the deadliest pandemic of the last century, and so on).

Let us never forget, then: governments have murdered directly hundreds of millions of people, way more than any virus, while other governments just stood by, or indeed encouraged it. Whether directly or indirectly through incompetence and impoverishment and infantilization of their populations, governments are to blame in both cases.

Every death by war is avoidable, every death by virus is avoidable, every death by anything is avoidable – but not while governments are around.

10. Order is the solution, therefore anarchy is the solution

L’anarchie est le plus haut degré de liberté et d’ordre auquel l’humanité puisse parvenir.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

L’anarchie est la plus haute expression de l’ordre.

Élisée Reclus

 

We need order, therefore we need anarchy. We need the market to solve not just this particular crisis (and indeed, it should be taken as a wake-up call – there are much, much worse diseases than the one currently wreaking havoc, so it could have been much, much worse given the current level of irresponsible unpreparedness) but any crisis like this.

Not up to us to say exactly how, but here are some leads:

When people are free, they create things no one had previously imagined possible. This is the reason for human progress. It’s about the struggle to make life ever more wonderful, to improve health and diet, to lengthen lives, to overcome the state of nature, alleviate suffering and create a beautiful and flourishing world.

Jeffrey Tucker