Coronavirus turning out to be socialism’s best recruiter
A pandemic makes all of us a little bit more socialist.
That’s because a virus does not respond to market incentives. It threatens absolutely everyone and is by definition a collective threat, as the term “community spread” reminds us. Containing it requires all of us to focus on the common good and respond to calls to altruism.
Those who can survive the coronavirus, especially the young, are thus asked to take genuinely inconvenient steps, less to protect themselves than to mitigate the damage it could do to others, especially the old.
Understanding and defeating an epidemic requires a government that can effectively organize easy testing for millions - which is exactly what we haven’t been able to do so far. But this means counting on competent, forward-looking agencies. Advocates of small government cheer “cutting bureaucracies” until we discover we need the bureaucracies that were “streamlined.”
Thus has President Trump come under criticism for eliminating two teams set up to plan for, and deal with, health crises. Trump ordered the
National Security Council’s “entire global health security unit shut down” in May 2018. It was set up by President Barack Obama after the Ebola crisis. This followed the dissolution of a center at the Department of Homeland Security charged with monitoring epidemics.
People who feel they might have coronavirus have a responsibility to get tested, right? But guess what? Those tests cost money.
Free testing was part of the “Families First” bill the House passed early Saturday morning that also includes initial other steps toward socially responsible policies, including family and medical leave coverage and enhanced unemployment insurance. If it’s in everyone’s interest for everyone to get tests, it’s also in everyone’s interest for the government to finance them.
Another way to contain the virus and the deaths it can cause is for sick people to get the care they need. Broad health insurance coverage and an excellent public health system are vital to this end.
No, I don’t expect this emergency to get members of the Business Roundtable to start singing “Solidarity Forever.” But you would like to hope it would encourage a bit of rethinking among those who regularly hate on government bureaucrats, denounce experts as useless elitists, claim the market can solve every problem, and lament what a terrible imposition it is when workers’ rights and benefits are imposed on our “job creators.”
Might they now acknowledge that some problems can only be dealt with collectively through public action? In their book “The Cost of Rights,” the scholars Stephen Holmes and Cass R. Sunstein spoke a truth we are too quick to deny: that “government is still the most effective instrument available by which a politically organized society can pursue its common objectives, including the shared aim of securing the protection of legal rights for all.”
Yes, and also the shared aim of securing protection against a silent and invisible killer.
Markets are great at determining who produces the best stuff most efficiently. But life is about a lot more than stuff. And efficiency is not the only value.
There’s fairness, compassion and our responsibilities for one another. There are dangers out there that none of us can deal with alone.