As Robert Higgs trenchantly observed in his book Crisis and Leviathan, central planning is a one-way ratchet. Governments take advantage of a crisis to introduce previously unimaginable restrictions on freedom in the name of public safety. We allow permanent erosions to the bedrock of liberty under the guise of temporary expediency.
In responding to the Coronavirus outbreak, China has ratcheted up its totalitarianism — forcibly taking people from their homes and committing them to “hospital cities,” built overnight using eminent-domain-on-steroids.
Marxist philosopher-clown Slavoj Žižek sees in Wuhan’s state of emergency a silver lining. He writes of “an unexpected emancipatory prospect hidden in this nightmarish vision.”
Brace yourself.
Not only does the crisis provide a pretext for “a new kind of communism,” Žižek suggests that the “half-abandoned streets,” and “stores with open doors and no customers,” actually “provide the image of non-consumerist world at ease with itself.”
If that’s the shot, then the chaser is Jeffrey Tucker’s recent article for the American Institute for Economic Research on the virus. Tucker, AIER’s editorial director asks, Must Government Save Us from the Coronavirus? In short, the answer is no.
While it’s easy to think of Chinese quarantines as something distinctly un-American, he points out that “the US government already has the power to create sick camps, kidnap and intern people upon suspicion that they are diseased, and keep people in camps for an undetermined amount of time.”
Tucker points out that the abuse of these powers is far more common than their discerning use.
What then is to be done?
Tucker has made a career of writing boldly and beautifully in defense of free market institutions and the power of individuals to provide superior solutions to the government. He joins me this Sunday to discuss the tragic history of forced quarantines and surprisingly effective voluntary alternatives.
We also relate the expectation that government will save us from pandemic as a symptom of a much greater problem — America’s acceptance of bigger government when it suits their political fancies or addresses a perceived threat.
Listen now to hear Jeffrey explain how markets — i.e., individuals — can improvise a more orderly solution to disease outbreaks than the chaotic spasms of a failing authoritarian state.
TRANSCRIPT
Bob Zadek: This is not a show on public health. We are a show which tries to preserve liberty against government encroachments. So what in the world does the coronavirus have to do with a liberty-oriented radio program? Well, the answer is obvious. The Coronavirus, like 9/11 and like many other sudden unexpected, existential threats or apparent threats to wellbeing as Americans, whenever one of these threats pop up which we are unprepared for and which are scary,
The press encourages us to fear it. Government is quick to act in these circumstances, which one would expect, but the action is followed by an immediate exertion of new powers over us citizens. Every one of these events immediately results in newfound governmental powers. Now we have the quarantine and the limitation on movement of both Americans and citizens from the rest of the world. Is this assertion of governmental power appropriate? Is it constitutional and does it represent proof positive of how quickly the government is to assert more power over us?
I am delighted to welcome the show this morning Jeffrey Tucker. Jeffrey is the editorial director of the American Institute for Economic Research. He is the author of thousands of articles in the scholarly press and in the public press. He has written eight books in five languages and most recently, his 2019 book The Market Loves You, has been widely received with very strong positive reviews. He is also the editor of the Best of Mises, and most recently he has written an article which will be the subject of this morning’s conversation, “Must Government Save Us From the Coronavirus?”
Jeffrey, welcome to the show this morning.
Jeffrey Tucker: My pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.
Socialism: Arranged Marriage on Steroids
Bob Zadek: Now Jeffrey, we’ll start with your book The Market Loves You: Why You Should Love it Back. How can a market love anybody and what is there that participants in the market should love back, to that market, that environment?
Jeffrey Tucker: I started with a book organized around CS Lewis’s “Four Loves.” There are many different levels of love. In English we have one word but in Greek there are four — one includes friendship and affection and desire, to self-sacrifice, and the high level of a love that God has for us and vice versa. So there’s many different aspects of love, but it all comes down to kind of love and affection. We use this word “market,” and sometimes we think of the financial market which is involved in money and is morally barren, but that’s not really true, the market just consists of individuals trading with each other, innovating, persuading each other, working together, benefiting from each other’s existence and life and finding value in each other’s work.
The market is as a primary way by which we experience our own value and come to value other people in a way in which we otherwise wouldn’t. So that’s one way in which the market is a venue for the expression of love or affection. A lot of friendships are built in the market, to involve professional relationships which are many times tighter than any relationships you have in mind. There’s a funny way too in which the market shows us love from people we don’t know. So we buy products every day. We take it for granted. We go to Amazon and eBay, and there are millions of people working to bring us something that we want and inviting us to buy it. We won’t meet them, we don’t know them, but it is an expression of love on the part of those people for us and our choices.
I am sometimes in awe of it. I go into Walmart and sit there in shock, I see this gigantic building erected for me and invites me to accept or reject the option. Now that is to me a very beautiful, benevolent kind of institution and it is what we should be going for. I mean, Lord knows governance is not true in the same way. Government can pull us over and harass us and tax and bully us and draft or quarantine us for that matter. So, the point of the book was to develop within my readers a deeper affection and appreciation for the market what it does for our lives.
Bob Zadek: I think about how there is this resistance and misunderstanding of the operation of the free market especially by the millennial cohort of voters who favor a less free market. And I thought of a parallel which I don’t recall ever being used to help that generation explain the markets. And the parallel is, believe it or not, dating.
Dating is a very free market. People enter into dating seeking a mate environment and they exercise judgment. They have very little compulsion and very little protection from the government in making the right choice of mate. They are out there all alone, trying to make the right decision, often making the wrong decision, suffering from the wrong decision, but not being resentful.
Nobody in that marketplace seems to cry out, “Why isn’t there governmental protection? Why isn’t the government screening who is allowed to meet up with me?” Nobody says that. Why is that free market cherished and the free market in something equally important — selling an hour of your time and exchanging your property for somebody else’s property — appear to them not to work?
Nobody in that marketplace seems to cry out, “Why isn’t there governmental protection? Why isn’t the government screening who is allowed to meet up with me?”
Nobody says that.
Jeffrey Tucker: This is an excellent way of thinking. We would not tolerate government intervention in our dating lives and who we mix it up with. It turns out 40% of couples nowadays meet through technology through online dating apps. There is a gigantic free market and it is getting ever freer. What’s fascinating about this topic is that if you want to set up a government compliance society, and that’s your goal, you’re like a socialist or a central planner, forget about about prostitutes and wind power and everything else that they want to regulate, you need to start with managing the dating market because that gets to the heart of demographics. That’s something that the government has to control first before it can control physical resources.
If you look back in history, socialist ideology has always begun with this proposition. They think that we cannot just let people run around procreating and meeting who they want and procreating who they want. We have to control that first. We’ve seen experiments in this direction. I mean, China’s one child policy is exactly that. Orwell talks about these controls over demographics and birth and coupling and it appears too in the Brave New World, so I agree with you. This should be the first thing that governments should control if they were really consistent about wanting to manage society. They don’t because they know that it is really offensive and they would never put up with it.
But as you say, if that is offensive and you shouldn’t put up with that, nor should you put up with government regulating things like your wages, house care, travel, or what substances you want to consume, and that sort of thing. A consistent defense of the free market would advocate for free market and dating but everything else too.
As for millennial attitudes towards economics and the free market, I really think what we have here is just a tremendous confusion born of economic ignorance. Those people don’t take economics in college. They’re financially strapped as a result of college debt they should have never undertaken and they’re frustrated with the job market because it is not paying them what they want given their credentials that they’ve spent four years earning so they turn against the market and pretend to be socialist.
I get impatient with it. I know for sure that if I could spend an hour with any socialist under the age of 30, I can get that person to profoundly question their beliefs. I have done this in the past and they seem shaken and they come back to me later and say I am no longer socialist. The problem is how do you get to them? That is the big issue.
Bob Zadek: I think the phrase that will “get to them” is that socialism is an arranged marriage in economics. It’s an economic arranged marriage where somebody external decides how you make these important decisions, whether it is how you hire a doctor or a lawyer, licensing laws, what products you’re allowed to buy, what product you’re allowed to consume. If you abhor arranged marriages, then socialism is an arranged marriage on steroids.
Jeffrey Tucker: I’ll probably just take all these ideas and put them in an article. Freedom of association and partnering in sexual partnerships is a huge topic. And it was the topic of my previous book called, “Right Wing Collectivism,” where I actually did spend an entire book talking about the history of demographic panic and government planning.The progressives at the turn of the early 20th century wanted to use eugenics and marriage licensing laws. We really only have to get a license to get married because of a panic on the part of the government that the wrong people were hooking up and it was leading to a diminution in the quality of the population.
Bob Zadek: The first marriage licensing statutes were in New England in the 1820s. The reason behind them was a fear that white women were marrying “Asians, mulattoes, and imbeciles.” In order to prevent that, we had to license them. That’s the way you can preserve the species. So you’re quite right. That little story about American history has a very ugly past.
Jeffrey Tucker: Can you believe that we still have all these marriage licenses today? There was an adjustment two years ago that mandated that marriage be available to same sex partners. The idea that there should ever have been a government mandate is ridiculous. If the government wasn’t ever involved in the marriage industry in the first place there would have been no reason for a Supreme Court decision or all this crazy debate we are having today. We need to get the government out of the marriage market place entirely. No marriage licenses. That’s just utterly absurd.
The fear that you would marry somebody that was stupider than you so you would reduce the quality of the population had a eugenic orientation to it. The idea was to prevent people from procreating. Back in those days there was a widespread belief that if you could stop people from getting married you could prevent them from procreating.
The Coronavirus: A Means for Government Control
Bob Zadek: When you say “get the government out of,” that sentence has an infinite number of very appropriate endings, which is a wonderful segue into your recent article. To set a little groundwork and in my introduction I equated what is going on with the government reaction and media reaction, and therefore the public reaction, to the coronavirus, with 9/11. 9/11 was sudden and people were frightened. People felt there was a huge threat which they could not get their brains around. How serious was it?
Were we about to be invaded? Was this the end of everything? Literally within minutes we had draconian federal statutes passed without any examination. In fact, they had to have been written beforehand and were just waiting for the appropriate crisis. Maybe that is a conspiracy theory.
Jeffrey Tucker: That is not a conspiracy theory. That is absolutely documented. I mean all the plans for everything that happened after 9/11 were laid out five to ten years earlier.
Bob Zadek: There was no debate. It just happened, and the public was all for it. There was no opposition in Congress, no opposition in the press, no opposition in the public. It was the single most immediate mass surrender of freedom in favor of the government that ever existed in American history. It was sudden and it was massive. Remember, we still have it. Those laws have not been diminished or repealed. So now we have this coronavirus, a new sudden threat. One day it wasn’t here and the next day it was and nobody knew anything about it.
The government has once again assumed in a small degree something like martial law in some respects. I don’t want to get alarmist about this. Start us off on the coronavirus and give us an introduction to the possibility that the virus itself is massively overstated with misunderstood data.
Jeffrey Tucker: That has been true in every time in modern history. When I was a kid there was a fear about the swine flu and it turned out that the only people who had fatal swine flu were those that got the vaccination for it. It has been true ever since. The flu kills 60,000 people in the United States every single year. A person coming from China to the US has a 10000% greater chance of contracting the flu than an American has of getting the coronavirus after contacting China.
That is what the data shows right now. China is now reporting a diminution in the rate of death. Whether you can trust the numbers or not, I’m inclined to think that, from every case we’ve ever seen, that there’s wildly exaggerated fears. People have in their minds visions of the black death and that sort of thing. And then they panic and demand the government to do something, to quarantine people. The problem is that these powers are easy to abuse and they certainly will be abused. We’ve seen this on the cruise ship the Diamond Princess where 400 Americans were quarantined on ship with sick people for two weeks.
People complained about it and likened it to a prison. They’re going to be sent to Tokyo for two weeks and quarantined again. The people talk about just the sheer irrationality of the entire thing, because this government knows who’s sick and who is not sick, etc. They do not know this. Everybody recognizes the tests are ridiculous.
I wrote my article on January 27th. Here we are two weeks later and I would say the threat of the quarantine power being used in the United States is much greater now than when I wrote the article.
Pseudoscience and “Health Theater”
Bob Zadek: In your article you indicate how because most of the data is coming from China and how unreliable that data is, especially in the ratio. Would you explain in your article the people who contracted the disease and the fatalities and that explanation of the calculation? If the data is exaggerated, that means the reaction is exaggerated and that means the loss of liberty is for no good reason, so there was a chain effect.
Think about Japanese internment and incidents about the internment of Chinese nationals for various fears of disease. So this has unpleasant components to it.
Jeffrey Tucker: That’s true. There would have been no forcing of Jews from the ghetto in World War Two by the Nazis rounded them up in cattle cars and then that lead to panic and extermination eventually in gas chambers. All that began with the quarantine based on demographics: government power. There should never have been any government quarantine since. There is very little we can actually trust the government with at all but the idea that they are going to be able to determine whether you are sick and how big the risk is of infection to others, and the conditions in which you are going to keep yourself and others safe around you.
The idea that we are going to put the government in charge of all that is really crazy. You see this in China right now. There’s a little tool that they use called a distance thermometer that you place next to the person’s head and squeeze the trigger and it tells you their temperature. It depends on what the temperature is. That’s what they consider a person to be infected or not. It’s like pseudoscience. If you don’t hold it directly against the person you have for a long period of time you’re not going to get a good registration. Or if the person just ran to catch a bus they will have higher temperatures and it will be a false diagnosis.
Jeffrey Tucker: This is the basis of judging how many people have it. You should shoot this quick little wave of a magic wand across the person’s head, and the next thing you know you are being quarantined with others who most likely do have this, so now you are going to get sick. So it is not protecting anyone.
Bob Zadek: I must confess that when you were explaining this tool that was being used in China, I started to smile. I flashed to TSA. The tool you described is health theater. It’s doing something with some machinery that will have the effect of making us feel safer. The parallel is undeniable between the 95% failure rate at TSA and the 95% probably failure rate with this silly tool that’s being used both under the guise of protecting the public. Both have the effect of denying citizens freedom and both based upon these mysterious mysterious tools, but the government has the appearance of doing something, of being on top of it. And yet the parallel Jeffrey is inescapable between the two events.
Just Another Flu?
Bob Zadek: I was just smiling now when in your article you made reference to this calculation that I want to just make our friends out there aware of how off the fatality rate could possibly be based upon data and data should not be assumed to be trustworthy coming from China. It’s not been verified. So help us understand how governments determine by apparently objective calculations how serious the virus is.
Jeffrey Tucker: A lot of my information comes from a health economist and a medical history economist at the University of Michigan. He points out that the coronavirus may not be very contagious and it may not be all that deadly. We don’t know yet how many people have mild coronavirus infections but have not come to medical attention. Based on data from other chronic viruses, experts think the incubation period is about five days. We do not know how efficiently the current virus spreads. He says the fatality rate is a very important statistic and is calculated by dividing the number of known deaths by the number of known cases.
Right now it appears to have a fatality rate of about 3% which is roughly like the flu in 1918. But here’s the problem, what if there are 100,000 Chinese citizens with mild infections that we don’t know about that would lower the cases fatality. It would lower the fatality rates to about 0.02%, which is identical to the seasonal flu deaths. It’s just an extreme reaction to start quarantining whole towns and have a nationwide panic and have the world health organization freak out about it when it is just basically the flu. But let’s say it really is a deadly pandemic. Even then it would not be good to quarantine. It would likely have the reverse effect, as the people on the cruise ship will tell you. We can’t leave these decisions up to government because it will only cause the spreading of disease and delay the ability to find a cure.
Honestly, I can guarantee you within 12 months nobody will be talking about the coronavirus.
Legal Recourse for Quarantine
Jeffrey Tucker: If we give the government massive power you might find people in suits coming to your front door and dragging you to the quarantine center. This happened on the cruise ship two weeks ago and it could happen in your neighborhood tomorrow. The Center for Disease Control has very specific plans for quarantining any elements of the U.S. Population that the President wants to.
It all comes from the executive department. If they want to quarantine people, they can do it. They can grab you out of your home and put you in a camp where you have no rights, no lawyers, no recourse. There’s nothing you can do. If you resist you can be shot on site. Now, what’s weird to me about the Center for Disease Control is if you resist this successfully and get away, then you will be fined $1,000 dollars. Look, I’m glad to pay $1,000 to not have me and my family and my friends taken to a government camp for coronavirus. That’s not a very high price to pay so if somebody comes to my door, I’m going to have cash in an envelope and say, here is my fine, let me go.
Bob Zadek: There is almost nothing in the Constitution dealing with the power of quarantine, which means, which means you have to look elsewhere for the rules.
You have to look at the Fourth amendment, such as being locked up without due process. Does that even apply? You end up going back to colonial America when there were quarantines. There was a very old phrase, cordon sanitaire, where the government would tie a rope around the perimeter of certain areas to quarantine them. In colonial times there was the exercise of quarantine, frequently on ships, but believe it or not there is no Supreme Court precedent on what due process rights you have if you are determined by public health officials to be subject to quarantine. I was astonished when I learned that.
Jeffrey Tucker: These laws have existed for decades on the books regarding quarantine powers. Government can say, “Oh, sorry about that,” but we’ll use it again and it is right there on the Center for Disease Control website. You have no rights in the event of a pandemic disease. The CDC can come to where I am right now in Massachusetts and quarantine me today with no legal recourse whatsoever.
Bob Zadek: I was astonished to learn at how little legal protection citizens have if the government makes a mistake, for example if they quarantined your apartment building, whether or not there’s any recourse at all, whether or not the Supreme Court can even step into that decision. This is a scary governmental power that people are dusting off. There’s no suggestion that this is going to be out of control or that quarantine is going to be used indiscriminately. I don’t fear that even a little bit but I am concerned about the fact that this has so many of the earmarks of events in recent memory which did result in an expansion of governmental power and a loss of Liberty all under the same political cover of an existential crisis that people are just afraid of in a purely emotional way, not data-driven way. They have this reaction look to the government to protect us, which is a state of mind that is a blank check to the government. And if anything comes out of this show this morning, it is an invitation to citizens to be alert for governments seizing additional power under the political cover of the coronavirus.
Jeffrey Tucker: It depends upon how panicked the population is. Right now people would not put up with it, but if you had a couple of weeks of nonstop CNN broadcast and MSNBC and speeches going on about how it’s an existential threat, you get people scared enough that’d be turning on the neighbors. That could happen in two weeks. I remember 9/11, where the next day we had totalitarian controls over us. Right now we have internal passports where you cannot even board a domestic flight come the end of this year without a passport or driver’s license that gives you special permission to do so. So we are still experiencing the effects of 9/11.
We shouldn’t be sanguine about this. I think this power is real and it can come to us and it can be used. The government’s always looking for some big excuse to enact more totalitarian controls over. That’s what they do. Pandemic disease is a good excuse.
A Positive Side Effect: Free(r) trade
Bob Zadek: Another interesting aspect of the coronavirus event, which is good news if you accept that label — China ran short of necessary supplies like face masks. There’s a lot of other supplies that they ran out of. China has eliminated or dramatically reduced the tariffs on all this stuff. So this has had an economic positive result of reducing tariffs. Maybe when this is over the Chinese and the U.S. will realize it is better to have the goods than protect jobs.
Jeffrey Tucker: It’s funny you should say that. I didn’t even think about that until Bruce Yandle, an economist wrote an article for AEIR said that free trade could be one of the effects of the coronavirus in the long run. Certain historical precedents in the past point to disease panics that actually lead to greater flow of goods. I was really intrigued by that. The other thing is that it is also possible that there are some discriminatory attitudes towards Asian people as a result of coronavirus but it could also increase people’s sense of urgency and lead to a diminution of this Cold War-style environment that’s been cultivated by the Trump administration over the last three years. Maybe it will increase ties between us and underscore the need for international cooperation for disease control and medical research and various therapies and the trading of goods.
I think all that’s very possible. I think that would be the best outcome of this.
Bob Zadek: One can only hope that we learn the lessons of history from this experience. It wasn’t a long time ago in 1900 in San Francisco where there were fears of the bubonic plague. San Francisco quarantined 25,000 residents of San Francisco of Chinese descent and even forced them to be injected with an injection to cure the plague. It turned out that the whole exercise was totally pointless and there was damage from the injection. Now just imagine. We are talking about citizens of the United States being forced to accept an injection for no other reason than they were of Chinese descent. And this is not in the dark ages. This is in 1900 in San Francisco. So I just would remind our listeners that they are not sanguine.
It was easy for an American city and the population to succumb to these fears. The lesson of the coronavirus is of course that intelligent steps should be taken, but we must be super vigilant to not allow this to be an excuse for the ugly exercise of governmental power in a way that it compromises our core values. The core values must triumph overall. That’s the most important. And we certainly expect the government to take steps to protect us but we must guard our freedom because once it is surrendered, we don’t get it back. Now, Jeffrey, how can our friends out there follow your writings and the work of your organization?
Jeffrey Tucker: Well, my recommendation is that people go to AEIR.org and subscribe to our daily email. We’ve got 2 million subscribers right now and we welcome anybody to join us. I write there almost every day. We’re all about economic research. We try to put the best research out there.
Links
- AIER — American Institute for Economic Research
- Must Government Save Us from the Coronavirus?, By Jeffrey Tucker
- BOOK: The Market Loves You: Why You Should Love It Back by Jeffrey Tucker, 2019
- Twitter: @jeffreyatucker
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Originally published at http://www.bobzadek.com on February 13, 2020.
