Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…You’ve obviously written about pandemic in preparation before, years ago, but when you wrote this state capacity libertarianism column or post on Marginal Revolution, you weren’t really thinking at all about the fact that there was something brewing in Wuhan. Correct. I had read the Wuhan reports, and I was concerned, but events of concern come out of China fairly often with flu viruses and the like, and I didn’t then think this one was it. I did mention it to some people on WhatsApp, so I was following it. I think, right now, libertarians are at a war with each other. I’m not sure a state capacity libertarianism is the future of libertarianism, but it’s the future or present of my libertarianism. Milton Friedman said this, too. He said, “One of the public goods you need government for is to control contagious diseases.” This is that. When it happens, you will best secure liberty by beating back the virus. That does mean, say, subsidies for vaccines and government taking an active role in trying to support testing. We did a better job with vaccines than testing. That’s the case when you really want your government to have its act together. You can see a big difference between countries where the government did a good job and countries where government did a bad job, and it has long-run implications for their liberty. What surprised me is how many libertarians moved into a kind of denialism, like, “Oh, this isn’t so bad. It’s only the old people. It only kills whatever percent.” Older, more macho libertarians would have said, “Oh, this virus is terrible. We need to let the market rip to crush it. If we would let the market do whatever, that would be so great. The market would crush the virus better than the government.” I don’t think that’s quite true as stated, but it would have been a very libertarian response. Instead, I think there’s been a lot of people who’ve gone down different rabbit holes that haven’t really been that fruitful or have involved very off predictions like, “Oh, this thing will be over with by the fall,” or something. When I read that post now, it seems to be a pretty clear distinction. You’re talking about the old emphasis on, as you say, “We just need to let the market go.” The argument is not, this isn’t a risk. It’s that the best way to solve it is to have the strong market response. Do you see that as being a clean line here of, when you were writing that post and you were thinking of the kinds of people who were emphasizing state capacity more and what it can do to empower individual action are exactly the people who are now arguing with each other in a libertarian community about response?…

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