Posted on 04/01/2020 4:11:10 AM PDT by Kaslin
"There are no libertarians in a global pandemic." So goes the smug punchline of large-government advocates who point to the necessity of collective action in the face of an unprecedented global crisis. Without government, they say, we'd all be dead.
Few libertarians would disagree. The hardcore libertarians at Reason magazine aren't spending their days fulminating over the evils of government-required lockdown orders in the face of a fast-spreading, deadly disease. That's because they, like all other sentient human beings, recognize that collective action is sometimes necessary.
But here's the dirty little secret: Institutional failures during this pandemic are more indicative of what our politics should be during nonpandemic situations, not the blunt-force ability of the government to shut down the global economy and force us all to stay home. The question isn't whether government has power. Government is power. The question is how and when to apply that power. And what we've seen is that government sucks at everything, even the most basic things it is supposed to do well.
Democrats and the media like to pretend that government's failures in this process aren't endemic to government control. They like to blame such failures on Republicans, and on President Donald Trump specifically. But that's just not the case. Human beings are fallible, stupid, gullible and self-interested. Human beings who have the power of government to back them are not less human for having that power. Their humanity just has direr consequences, which is why in nonemergency circumstances, checks and balances are absolutely necessary.
Take, for example, the early days of the pandemic. Democrats say Trump was slow to respond to the incipient threat. But so were Democrats. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently declared, "As Trump fiddles, people are dying," but in late February, she was walking the streets of Chinatown, encouraging citizens to join her. New York Mayor Bill De Blasio has ripped Trump for his supposed downplaying of the virus, but De Blasio spent a month poo-pooing its threat. When confronted about that simple fact by CNN's Jake Tapper, De Blasio conveniently suggested that stop looking backward.
Why should we trust these people, exactly?
Or take the roots of America's inability to provide the health care resources necessary to hospitals across the country. While state and local governments were frittering away billions of dollars on useless government spending, they did precisely nothing to prepare for exactly the sort of black swan events for which governments were presumably invented. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spent a month failing to produce useful tests and prevented physicians in Seattle from performing proper testing, even after President Trump issued a travel ban on China. For years in advance, members of the federal government of both parties had been warned about the need for ventilators and masks. No one produced or stockpiled them. The Food and Drug Administration's red tape prevented the quick development of new measures to deal with the novel coronavirus.
Why should these people control our lives, when the threat of the red death isn't hovering on our doorstep?
The government is a giant, lumbering idiot. Sometimes we need a giant, lumbering idiot. Almost always, we do not. And those who have used this pandemic response -- one of the rare times we need a giant, lumbering idiot to intimidate people into preventing mass infection of one another, and to borrow the money necessary to redress the injuries thus incurred -- as a rationale for a government-run "new politics" should have their heads examined.
The problem as I see it, was the panic got way out in front
on this one. By the time this was headed to our shores, it
was big news and the hype was gigantic.
People anticipated landfall, and were flat ass panicked over
the prospects.
In that atmosphere, governments have very little choice
except to “do something, anything” to make it clear they care
and have done everything they can to mitigate the worst
possible outcome.
I don’t think a Conservative could have ignored this like
Obama ignored H1N1. If they had, they would lose the next
election by a landslide.
Trump was essentially over a barrel. He had no choice but
to address COVID-19, and do everything in his power to
confront it.
H1N1 came in without a big buildup. The media wanted to
support Obamacare. They avoided mentioning H1N1 much at
all.
Something like 1,000 people had already died before Onama
declared it an emergency, but I don’t think he did much
on the order of what we’re doing today.
We clearly didn’t stay home, shut down businesses, or
disrupt the economy like we are now.
And somehow we survived.
We need to develop a better plan for the next time, and
education the public so that they understand we can’t
simply shut the nation down every time this sort of thing
takes place.
Was the heavy handed, economy wrecking response we’ve seen due to early intelligence assessments that this was indeed a bioweapon? The spooks badly overestimated Iraq’s WMD capabilities after Sept. 11. Even if the intelligence agencies were only telling Trump that they could not rule out the possibility that this was an engineered bioweapon, Trump would have been forced to accept worst case thinking and act accordingly.
This COVID-19 Wuhan virus thing is a one-shot wonder. Short of an approaching asteroid aimed at the Pacific Basin, not much will exceed it in importance. But it had to hit at just the right juncture in history to have the impact be as great as it is turning out to be.
There is a state of equilibrium called homeostasis, in which even extreme events can upset things for only for a short while, then the “normal” quickly recovers. The “new normal” is only slightly displaced from the “old normal”, if at all, and the extreme condition is absorbed into the existing balance. That is how life has managed to exist on this turbulent planet for billions of years, and why it shall again resume, rather more quickly than slowly.
As others have said, this too shall pass.
“We need to develop a better plan for the next time, and
education the public so that they understand we can’t
simply shut the nation down every time this sort of thing
takes place.”
My only problem with your statement is that it presumes we had a plan in the first place. There was no plan as far i as can see.
Besides, the gerrymandered-elected political hack office holders and their limitless, largely incompetent bureaucracy in place and ability to print money with their lock on the mass media and universities - they will not be willing to develop an actual plan that doesn’t run over the citizens’ rights. Look at how in the middle of this they are using it to blame POTUS and ram through spending pork.
If you had paid close attention here, you would have noticed that there was a “Merry Band” of Freepers who were writing about this long _before_ the mass media had a clue.
_We_ went out and prepped before other folks knew what was happening.
Knowledge was power.
The mass media was _late_ to this news, not early.
Read this old FR thread and you will get the idea:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3820145/posts
You are so right.
I think the general fallacy is that people in high places
have all the answers. They really don’t.
You get some agencies trying to provide as clear a projection
as they can, but that can be a very hard thing to pin down.
Some of us tend to think there’s a big bad plan behind
some of these things, but I think we can see how poor
some government wonks are at thinking their way out of a
paper bag.
Yes, there is some subterfuge. I’m not convinced it’s as
big as we think. We do know that people gamed Trump. I’m
not denying that. I’m just not sure that people are as
intelligent as we think, and I think there’s a lot of
mistakes made through ignorance.
Some of the people may have thought there was a bio-weapon
aspect to this. Others may not have thought so.
It’s hard to determine the truth or magnitude of those things.
I more or less listen, but file things away rather than
think I’ve got enough handle on it to take some sort
of action, or urge other to join with me to form
some type of response or reaction.
Thanks for taking the time to post your non-armageddon thoughts.
It made my morning.
I think Sweden has a pretty good plan.
They are allowing the public to make their own choice what
they want to do. They can stay home, or they can work.
If they work they keep their distance, wash hand often, and do other things to minimize the threat.
Older people stay home.
Anyone else that can, is free to.
I’m pretty sure they encourage folks to work remotely too.
They are seeking to keep their economy going.
IMO < this is a good core, to develop a plan around.
We need to do that.
As for government types, they are geared to fix things.
Sometimes you can’t, and you just need to keep your mitts
off the problem. Let it self-heal.
H1N1 seems to have turned out pretty good.
We could learn from that too.
Thank you.
I’m not suggesting subterfuge, though that’s possible. I’m suggesting incompetence. Are we saying the same thing?
This will be the norm as every hypochondriac runs to the hospital with a hang nail. We should just hybernate between Dec and March. This is the facists dream come true. Control everyone with the threat of the flu. What a weak and pathetic society.
Few libertarians would disagree.
Why wouldn’t they disagree? The real heroes have been in private industry, not government. Private industry is feeding people, making masks and PPE, developing tests, developing vaccines, and, by and large, treating the sick.
If you aren’t sick of government by now, you are crazy.
Few libertarians would disagree.
Why wouldn’t they disagree? The real heroes have been in private industry, not government. Private industry is feeding people, making masks and PPE, developing tests, developing vaccines, and, by and large, treating the sick.
Governments, on the other hand, have generally made things worse through their futile, destructive “lock down” orders and by spreading panic. Even where government action could have helped in the early stages, the government dropped the ball.
If you aren’t sick of government by now, you are crazy.
I think you are partly right.
The media may not have been deep into this on 02/27, but it
wasn’t completely turned out.
If you’ll remember back to that time, the Diamond Princess was very big in the middle of February.
The media made that a sensational story.
While it may not have been on top of things at the turn of the months into February, I think that by the 15th, the MSM was pretty much all in.
There as big talk of closing off Wuhan too.
I’m not sure I’m with you on that line of thought.
I think we may be.
Some of the biggest moves by Trump have been during the last couple of weeks, and the public has indirectly been driving it.
People have been freaked out, and I think government officials have been motivated to “do something, almost anything”.
Incompetence is a factor I’m sure.
I heard one local government employee say to another “they should just let us run things all the time”.
Few libertarians would disagree.
“Socialists” are cynical about society, and - concomitantly - naive about society’s opposite, which is government. “Socialists” should therefore more properly be called “governmentists.”The opposite of cynicism about society and naiveté about government - naiveté about society and cynicism about government - is basically what Karl Marx called “capitalism.” Which, of course, was the straw man he excoriated.
Conservatives, and even libertarians, are not so naive about society as to reject the necessity of (at least some) government. They are therefore skeptical of both society and government.
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