Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…A childhood friend of mine and listener to the show, Paul Matzko, suggested this framing, and I’ll just provide it to you: based on the events of 2020, what are the best cases you can make for or against state capacity libertarianism? Let’s do the pro case. What is the pandemic? How does the pandemic bolster the case for state capacity libertarianism? Well, our best program in the United States, Operation Warp Speed, will have ended up making an enormous difference, getting us vaccines sooner and a broader choice of vaccines. If some of those in the pipeline had failed, the fact that we invested in this portfolio of seven would have turned out to have been very important. As I’m speaking, we’re not completely sure how important that will be, but ex ante, that was a brilliant decision, and arguably, we should have done more. That’s the good side. I think the downside of state capacity libertarianism is simply realizing there are some very nice features to not being surveilled all the time, as they do in China. When I said a moment ago that the United States is not very good at trace, though it’s good at innovating — if you had stronger state capacity, presumably you should worry more about state surveillance, and I do. That, to me, is the best case against state capacity libertarianism as I envision it. Even though having a good trace regime would have been fine in this instance, I’m not sure it would have been a good precedent. Yes, one thinks about the fact that — I think it’s still the case — that Germany can’t do a census because there’s just such a cultural resistance to a census. It’s interesting how these cultural attitudes affect the ability of the government to respond and have these longer-term effects.…

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