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.