Coronavirus: a free marketer's perspective
As new coronavirus cases increase in Santa Clara county, noted classical liberal Richard Epstein of the Hoover Institute explains that serious health crises need powerful, strong, targeted government leadership. From the Libertarian podcast, March 9, 2020.
Troy Senik (moderator): “It can be easy in the abstract to say, in situations like this, 'Well the government just needs to act out of an excess of caution.' But when you get to the specifics, the cost-benefit calculation can be pretty complicated. So for instance, there’s obviously a theoretical point at which you’d want to shut down travel at least to certain hotspots for the disease. But if you’re too quick to do that, you could be seriously impeding commerce, you could needlessly be creating more panic. How should policy makers be thinking about navigating those risks in a high stakes circumstance like this?"
Richard Epstein: “Oh my God, why do you ask such hard questions? Essentially there’s no market mechanism that will solve this particular problem by way of buying and trading. And so the only way in which you’re going to get legitimacy out of this particular process is for people to be confident that the people in government who are doing this meet a couple standards.
"One, they have to be people versed and knowledgeable in respect to the kinds of problems that are going on. There are epidemiologists who know more about this than other people and you’d want them to be consulted. The government will need to bring people who have real expertise dealing with health issues.
"Second, once you get the right people, there cannot be anything other than complete transparency about the way in which this particular debate is going to be covered.
"You’d certainly not want panic to take place, but you have to get an enormous amount of public buy-in for these things because the legitimacy of these restrictions is going to be tested immediately because the gravity of the restrictions is such that people generally want to know answers. So what you need to have is a deliberative process informed by strong scientific information. And then what you have to get political leaders from all parts of the spectrum to come forward and back this effort on the grounds that epidemics don’t play favorites with anybody from one particular party, one particular race, one particular region, or anything else of the sort.
"With an airborne virus, the need for separation becomes much more powerful. The people in charge of the effort need to explain why this epidemic is so dangerous, how the thing spreads, why it is that lesser restrictions don’t work. This will help legitimize the sort of intensive government controls that are going to be put into place. This is the real stuff when it comes to epidemics. All too often you hear, ‘oh there’s a terrible epidemic, too many obese people in the United States’ and so forth. You don’t shut down airports for those kinds of reasons. What you really have to remember is in this particular case is when we use the word 'epidemic,' we’re thinking of something which is communicable and spreads very rapidly and is deadly in its consequences with respect to innocent people. And those are very narrow definitions and they’re very exacting requirements, and unfortunately they’re all satisfied in this particular case."
These comments were edited for brevity and clarity. The full podcast can be found here.
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