Donald Boudreaux agrees with me that this is the right time to dust off Crisis and Leviathan.
Typically, the quantum of additional powers granted to – or seized by – government during each crisis shrinks somewhat when the crisis passes. Normal times, after all, aren’t crisis times. But never do such additions to state power fully disappear. Government’s exercise of these powers is perceived as having been key to escaping the crisis – so such powers become more widely regarded as being beneficial. Fear of such powers is lessened.
The fact that this happy perception of the consequences of such powers is, at least to some degree, always an illusion conjured by the propaganda that government officials inevitably deploy to justify their exercise of their new powers is irrelevant. If people believe that this new grant of power and that new expansion of authority as used by government officials were both effective and necessary to the nation’s escape from Armageddon, people naturally lose some of the skepticism they had, pre-crisis, about such power and authority.
A sad possibility is that the process consists of government becoming stronger, people becoming more sheep-like, government becoming stronger, etc.
What if the crisis also leads to more society trust? Reviewing US history the only time of significantly large society trust was the post-WW2 years which coincided with higher government trust. (My take on US history is there was a fair amount of local neighbor in US history but out of immediate neighborhood there was little trust.) For libertarians I suspect government & society trust have correlations.
(I find the Coolidge alt-history here very unlikely here and believe Coolidge woud have struggled even more with the Depression.)
The most effective antidote to government power are property rights, so why aren’t there more calls in defense of property rights? See: https://priorprobability.com/2020/04/02/a-property-rights-approach-to-the-coronavirus-pandemic/
Well the philosophical positioning is all well and good but doesn’t really give people an idea of what to fight for. Repealing the CARE Act was a good but futile suggestion. Hopefully enough businesses had enough bad experience getting burned during the financial crisis bailouts that they know enough to steer clear of any involvement. They can moot the issue if they are wise and clever enough.
Libertarians and populists have similar goals with respect to the current mess, but rather than sitting around and hoping some autocrat will impose a dream wish (which seems to be the traditional libertarian modus operandi), independents and populists should identify pragmatic legislative agendas at both the national and state levels and publicize them.
Germany’s federalism has been a relative success in addressing the current situations provides a good example at the national level from which to craft a pragmatic legislative agenda to address the current situation that may appeal to many independents and populists. Looking to Germany’s example, at the national level, the following legislative actions should be endorsed and pursued:
(1) Transform the FDA into an advisory body by repealing its enforcement authority and authorizing states to enforce state regulatory regimes. The biggest cost to this change is that large corporations would have to negotiate with 50 states to do business on a national scale. This cost would be more than offset, however, by eliminating the complicated federal regulatory scheme which functions primarily as a barrier to entry. Business already have to deal with 50 different tort law schemes so the marginal increase would not be unreasonable. The FDA’s malfeasance and malpractice with respect to masks and medications have cost far more lives than saved. Alex Tabarrok has blogged about how Germany’s federalized system, operated by the German states with only a national advisory body, has efficaciously responded to the disease.
(2) Transfer pandemic planning, testing, and tracking responsibilities from the CDC to the states. The federal government may be good at putting on daily press conferences but skin-in-the-game, rubber meets the road action is only possible at the state level. States need to step up and take responsibility. Germnay has a national institute that advises but states have substantive and efficacious infrastructure in place.
(3) Medicare’s direct graduate medical education funding system is ineffective and does not produce the numbers of residencies needed yet diverts attention from alternative funding sources. Shut that program down incrementally over five years with gradually diminishing block grants to states. Allow states to step up and innovate in the field of medical education, and some may wish to follow the German example. German medical education begins after high school and takes 6 years to complete. Nurse education only takes thee years. Germany has 3 doctors per 1,000 population versus 2.3 for the US.
At the state level, independents and populists may wish to advocate for abolition of certificate of need requirements for new medical facilities. But more importantly perhaps, codifying a civil malpractice procedure along the lines of the German model in place of the anarchic common law trial courts would great decrease the cost of medical services as well as provide useful information and precedents. Independents and populists who concur should ask candidates for office what the current crisis has taught them, how they would respond, and, how the candidate would incorporate the principle of subsidiarity and democratic accountability into their plan of action.
Send all this stuff to the states? I have one word: California.
And California may be far from the worst state . Michigan, New York, Louisiana and Nevada are performing poorly too. Yet California has an outsized influence on the national government. Much better to permit pockets of excellence than reduce everyone to a lower common denominator. Moreover Schwarzenegger’s pandemic preparation would appear to be genius now if it had survived his successor.