As one Twitter pundit put it last Spring, “There are no libertarians in a pandemic.” There is no possibility of quickly identifying a deadly virus and advising the public at large on its impact and how to deal with it in the absence of a massive, well-established, government-funded medical research agency. The Twitterverse lit up with glee at the cleverness of this observation. But punditry aside, most libertarians and advocates of small government would support large-scale government response to public emergencies. That line of thought doesn’t align with massive, intrusive government full-time, all the time.
On the other side of the argument, small-government Republicans have pointed to the necessity of waiving a dump truck full of regulations to permit doctors to work across state lines, facilitate telemedicine and accelerate the development of a vaccine. At a local level, restaurants have been allowed to sell alcohol to takeout customers, streets have been blocked to traffic to accommodate outdoor dining and distilleries have repurposed their operations to produce hand sanitizer. All with the blessing of local regulators.
None of these activities supports the extreme views of either liberals (massive government) or conservatives (drown the government in the bathtub). Yet, the pitched battle waged in Congress reflecting the culture war leaves us with only the two extremes as options.
Where to draw the line will never be an exact science, particularly when a crisis is upon us. The mixed signals and false starts that were abundant in March and April remind me of trying to fix an airplane while you’re flying it. State and local mandates were inconsistent from place to place as infection rates and local conditions varied. Wyoming would never need the same restrictions as metropolitan New York. And, Florida still has both a lower infection rate and lower unemployment rate than New York. That needn’t have devolved into a battle of left vs. right. But, as things go these days, that’s exactly what happened.
And, so, the pandemic has raised the prospect or, at least, a discussion about technocratic control a la Europe. But such control hasn’t saved Europe from the worst effects of the virus and it is never a guarantee that such bureaucratic rule-making would be effective or just. Is that an argument to turn everything over to the free market? No, it’s not.
We must recognize that, in the absence of a financial motivation, the private sector would never develop the required regime of testing, contact tracing and quarantine. Further, only government can mitigate the worst effects of the pandemic by providing funds to keep businesses and households in the black, all the while funding and guiding medical research to the best outcome, whatever that may be.
The modern libertarian ideal has been distorted by the far right of the Republican Party with their own catchphrases. I’m thinking of Grover Norquist’s vow to make government small enough to “drown it in a bathtub.” We have delegitimized government so much that the nation that beat the Nazis and put a man on the moon by exercising its industrial might now can’t produce enough masks for its doctors and nurses.
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As with so many other of our greatest challenges, the American right has rendered itself irrelevant to the task of creating legitimate state capacity to address our greatest needs. This is a genuine tragedy. There is legitimacy to the Libertarian ideal. Suspicion of centralized government power and respect of the power of market forces should form the basis of how we decide to move forward. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have effective government programs.
The left would like to restore the triumvirate of the 3 BIG’s -- government, business and labor – that drove the economy for two and a half decades following WWII. But that era was enabled by the destruction of the industrial capacity of Europe and Japan during the war. By the 1970’s, high taxes had undermined capital investment rendering the US uncompetitive and setting the stage for the Stagflation that characterized that decade. It also set the stage for Ronald Reagan’s supply-side economics that served us well for about two decades.
At the dawn of the 21st Century, that paradigm seemed to be getting too long in the tooth to drive economic progress. The Bush tax cuts yielded economic growth equal dollar for dollar with the growth in government debt. In other words, the multiplier effect seemed to be absent during a decade when capital flowed more easily into tax advantaged real estate investments eschewing innovating industries like manufacturing and high tech. The failure of the tax cuts to spur economic growth combined with a failed government response to Hurricane Katrina and the bursting of the housing bubble then set the stage for liberal Democrats to take both houses of Congress and the White House. Free trade agreements made in the 1990’s made the investor class richer while problems once isolated to the inner city spread to rural communities – family breakdown, drug abuse, education and healthcare gaps.
As we look forward to a decade of not only overcoming a pandemic but also confronting the strategic challenges presented by China and making economic growth more inclusive, we must fight the instincts of both the left (to put too much faith in government action) and the right (to leave too much to the market). The legitimate objective of government is to do what we cannot do for ourselves but must be done. The focus should be on making government effective rather on the dogmatic reflexes of the left and the right.
Free markets only perform at optimal levels when embedded in common goods provided by government: education, infrastructure and economic freedom. And, government can only be effective if its limitations are recognized. Regulation must be reasonable and consistent. Disincentives to private investment should be removed and corruption must be rooted out.
WHO WILL LEAD?
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