Tuesday, March 31, 2020

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.