Collectivists and the Coronavirus

Collectivists give the group priority over the individual. They are happy to violate individual preferences, liberties, and property in favour of the ‘needs’ of the collective. Socialists, nationalists, populists, and environmentalists are prime examples of collectivists. They have plenty of reasons to be happy with the advent of the coronavirus:

The socialists celebrate the return of Big Brother. Worldwide, governments have committed themselves to increased spending of trillions of dollars. Some for-profit businesses will be forced to close. Sensible austerity is out the window. State intervention, tax increases, price control, rationing, and nationalisations are beckoning or already underway.

The nationalists rejoice in the closed borders they have yearned for for so long. No more arrivals of brown people. Government officials and soldiers once again guard the internal European borders against individuals who have had the temerity of being born on the wrong side of them.

Populists applaud the strong leaders who offer simplistic solutions to complex problems. Lengthy states of emergency with dictatorial powers for the national leaders, and popularity-seeking strongman policies with few or no positive effects are the order of the day.

Finally, environmentalists cheer all the cancelled flights, the immobile cars, and the prospect of thousands of deaths that will result in a reduced world population, thus reducing mankind’s carbon footprint.

Many people belong to more than one of the above four categories of collectivists. They self-identify as part of the state, because ‘the state is all of us.’ They say ‘we’ did this whenever they speak of action taken by the national government. They think of themselves – and, by extension, the state of which they consider themselves a part – as saintly and infallible as long as action is taken ‘in the common interest’.

However, there is nothing about the coronavirus that suddenly makes states saintly or infallible, that suddenly invalidates the laws of supply and demand, or that suddenly discredits private businesses as the backbone of the global wealth that we currently enjoy. Thus, it is private pharmaceutical companies that will produce the medicine, ventilators, and other equipment needed to treat the coronavirus, private businesses that feed us during the crisis, and private research and enterprise that will eventually develop a vaccine against the virus. Governments are simply too incompetent to be trusted to save people’s lives.

The response of states to the pandemic has been somewhere in the range from panic-stricken knee-jerk reactions on one side, to cynical, calculated power grabs on the other. Exactly where we are in this range matters little, as the negative consequences of the governmental interventions are the same, regardless of intent.

An example of this is the recent lockdown in India. India currently has 1,251 recorded cases of the virus and 31 deaths. Now a country of 1.35 billion inhabitants is being closed down by the government because of a virus that has killed just 0.000002% of the population. So many Indians are barely surviving as it is. If those Indians are not allowed to leave their homes, millions of them will die. Of starvation, thirst, exposure, and preventable diseases, that is, not of the coronavirus. “The kind of devastation that is going to be faced by the bottom 50 percent of the workers in the informal sector is unimaginable,” says Jayati Ghosh, an economist and professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.

We are now entering a global recession because of such government interventions. People are not trusted to generally take the right decisions to protect themselves, their families, and their businesses. Notoriously incompetent and nefarious governments, on the other hand, are trusted unconditionally. Therefore, the greatest casualties of the coronavirus are reason, prosperity, and freedom. That is why collectivists love the virus.

The False Security Of Closed Borders

Today, Thursday 19th March, the media reports queues of lorries and cars stretching back some 60 km from the German-Polish border. Lorries face a 30-hour wait to cross the border. Families with children suffer a 20-hour wait during which they have no access to food or toilet facilities. The goods transported by the lorries are greatly needed at their destinations, where the lack of them causes disruption and deprivation.

Meanwhile, Australia and New Zealand are today closing their borders and thus follow in the footsteps of the US, Canada, Poland, Germany, Denmark, and many other European countries. In most cases, the corona virus is present on both sides of the closed borders in roughly equal measure. Germany and France is an example of this. In some cases such as Denmark, the virus is more prevalent in the country that has closed its borders (Denmark) than in the countries from which entry is denied (Sweden, Germany). The Danish health authorities (‘Sundhedsstyrelsen’) sensibly advised the Danish government that there is no evidence that closing the borders would have any positive effect. The government chose to ignore this advice and went ahead with the border closure regardless.

In an age of rampant nationalism, xenophobia, and authoritarianism, closing national borders is blatant virtue signalling as there is little or no real reason to do so on health grounds. However, the damage to the economy and the unnecessary hardship caused by the border closures are real enough.

Although few people realise it, damaging the global economy kills. This is an indirect effect that is hard to measure and it is therefore largely ignored as it cannot be explained to the public in the 5-second sound bites favoured by politicians. The French economist Frederic Bastiat wrote of “That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen”. In the current crisis, what you see is authoritarian governments taking action that they claim is in the best interests of the citizens. What is not seen are the negative effects of such actions, which are often indirect and all but impossible to measure. But less economic growth – or, worse, economic recession – means less money for medical treatment, health insurance, medicine, and medical research. This translates into deaths. Thus, I feel fairly convinced that the number of deaths caused by the damage to the global economy resulting from the virus and – especially – from ham-fisted and often ineffective government intervention, will far exceed the number of deaths that are caused by the virus itself.

It should be obvious to any but the most casual observer that the only thing that really works against the virus is self-isolation. That means isolating yourself in your private home. But a nation is not a private home, even though populist, nationalist, and socialist politicians would love for people to think of the motherly state in exactly such terms.

Unfortunately, it seems that the politicians are succeeding in making people think in collectivist terms. It is thus exceedingly difficult to find people who are not clamouring for the state to save them from the virus by way of various draconian interventions. Even people who have previously been sceptical about the state’s role in society jump on the bandwagon.

In many ways, this resembles a collective Stockholm-syndrome. The state, which almost always has a history of economic mismanagement, blatant discrimination, devastating wars, and often genocide, is the go-to solution for more than 99% of the world’s population whenever they want to be ‘saved’. They want a ‘strong leader’ and are then surprised whenever they subsequently face the destruction caused by the same strong leader.

Perhaps people act in this way not so much out of ignorance as out of fear. Fear of the unknown is a very powerful force. ‘Better the devil you know’ seems to be the attitude among people who cannot conceive of solutions that are not provided by the state. In the current crisis, safety and security are the concerns that governments are using to expand the scope of the state unopposed by way of ‘temporary’ curbs on individual and economic liberties. Unfortunately, such ‘temporary measures’ have a nasty habit of becoming permanent.

Let us hope and trust that individuals taking individual decisions to self-isolate is what will eventually destroy the virus. Clearly, people who do not self-isolate as much as possible may live to regret it since many of them will get sick and some of them will die. But trusting the government to save you by way of closing national borders not only imparts a false sense of security, it also endangers the essential liberties and economic progress that we – in spite of government actions to the contrary – have enjoyed in recent decades.