Originally Posted by
Anti Federalist
And, like TSA, this will never go away.
When Biden's and Bernie's Bolsheviks come to power in the fall, this will be mandated forever...
Welcome to the new normal AmeriKunts.
Robert Higgs' "ratchet effect" redux ...
Coronacrisis and Leviathan
Peter G. Klein (13 March 2020)
https://mises.org/power-market/coron...-and-leviathan
In his magisterial Crisis and Leviathan, Robert Higgs shows that the growth of government in the twentieth century can largely be explained by patterns of crisis and response. These crises can be real (World Wars I and II, the Great Depression, stagflation) or imagined (inequality, the various isms). In either case new government programs, agencies, and policies are established, purportedly as temporary responses to the perceived emergency. But, as Higgs shows with rich historical detail, most of the temporary measures become permanent - either explicitly or in a revised form based on the original.
[...]
How will leviathan expand - temporarily and then permanently via the ratchet effect - in response to COVID-19? It’s too early to make any definite predictions, but we can make educated guesses based on experience and our knowledge of how governments work.
First, we can expect that government controls on travel and assembly will tighten. Whether via legislative approval, unilateral executive action, or judicial decree, the principle that governments must control movement and gatherings of people to prevent the spread of disease has been clearly established (or reestablished). As we know from Higgs’s work, the additional capabilities in this area acquired by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other agencies will likely be retained and put to use long after the crisis has abated. And further government intervention in the biomedical and healthcare sectors is virtually guaranteed.
The second likely long-term effect is ideological. Already we’re seeing the meme that the crisis has been caused (or at least exacerbated) by “neoliberalism”—that thanks to pervasive (?) libertarian ideology public health agencies were “hollowed out” and thus unable to respond in force:
https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/statu...28237285228544
Of course, we know that in the US the CDC initially prevented private labs from testing or developing new tests without FDA approval. More generally, public (and private) health in the US, as in most countries, operates within a tangled web of federal, state, and local regulations, subsidies, restrictions, and other controls.
It is impossible to know how a free market medical system would handle something like corona. But we will be told that there are no free market enthusiasts during a pandemic (and that, at best, those of us who favor property rights, markets, and prices should embrace “
state capacity libertarianism”). The case for markets will have to be made, as Mises would say, ever more boldly.
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