{"id":1046,"date":"2021-01-31T20:07:07","date_gmt":"2021-02-01T04:07:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/?page_id=1046"},"modified":"2021-01-31T20:16:26","modified_gmt":"2021-02-01T04:16:26","slug":"and-clowns-to-the-left","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/and-clowns-to-the-left\/","title":{"rendered":"And Clowns to the Left (2020)"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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This is my companion piece to “Jokers to the Right of Me.” The Liberty web page posted it on April 5, 2020.<\/em><\/p>

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So many people on the Left want to embrace the COVID-19 pandemic as the validation of their world view. I don\u2019t buy it.<\/p>

In \u201cJokers to the Right,\u201d posted here on March 31, I wrote that many people on my side of the political divide have been brushing off the pandemic as a minor thing. They\u2019re doing it, I think, in order to save libertarian ideology, which doesn\u2019t provide the best answers for fighting the spread of an infectious disease. People on the Left are having fun reminding us of that \u2014 for example, \u201cThere Are No Libertarians in an Epidemic,\u201d posted on The\u00a0Atlantic<\/i>\u00a0webpage, March 10.<\/p>

The Left loves it when the public health authorities proclaim that \u201cWe are all in this together.\u201d That\u2019s the Left\u2019s principle for the whole society. For the Left, to wave this around is to make a we-were-right argument.<\/p>

In political discourse, people make we-were-right arguments all the time. I have made them myself. In the current epidemic\u00a0Liberty\u00a0<\/i>contributing editor Randal O\u2019Toole, a critic of the public transit complex, argues in \u201cWe Were Warned Not to Bunch Up,\u201d (The Antiplanner<\/i>, March 18) that the virus shows the folly of public transit that requires people to bunch up. That\u2019s a we-were-right argument.<\/p>

The Left is now making a we-were-right argument at our expense. Here is one such:<\/p>

\u201cA pandemic . . . makes clear that we need the state if we are going to survive,\u201d writes Jedediah Britton-Purdy in \u201cThe Only Treatment for Coronavirus Is Solidarity,\u201d in\u00a0Jacobin<\/i>, March 13, 2020. \u201cOur alone-together world of individualist ethics and material interdependence didn\u2019t just happen. It takes a vast and intricate infrastructure to keep us all running in one another\u2019s service, and in the ultimate service of return to capital: from highways to credit markets to the global trade regime. The fact that these interwoven systems are tanking financial markets around the world at the prospect that people might need to spend a few months sitting at home rather than hurrying around exchanging money shows how finely calibrated they are to profit, and how totally lacking in resilience to shifts in human need.\u201d<\/p>

Here is another:<\/p>

The COVID-19 pandemic \u201cand the inadequate U.S. response have laid bare the brokenness of neoliberalism,\u201d write Jonathan Heller and Judith Barish in \u201cHow to Prepare for the Next Pandemic,\u201d in\u00a0The Nation<\/i>, posted April 2. \u201cThe neoliberal worldview, which has dominated public policy-making across the world for the last 40 years, celebrates the liberation of a nimble market free from the oppressive constraints of the lumbering government,\u201d they write. \u201cNeoliberalism\u2019s prescriptions are rooted in a radical individualism. In the words of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, \u2018There\u2019s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families\u2019.\u201d<\/p>

(The Left loves to quote that statement of Thatcher\u2019s. They have made it the most famous thing she ever said.)<\/p>

The libertarian counterargument has been that the Left is attacking a straw man \u2014 that Clinton\u2019s America, Dubya\u2019s America, Obama\u2019s America, and Trump\u2019s America are not libertarian. In responding in this way, libertarians are comparing reality, as they perceive it, to the image of an ideal society in their heads. That\u2019s exactly what the socialists at\u00a0Jacobin<\/i>and\u00a0The Nation<\/i>\u00a0are doing. Focus for a minute on reality alone. What\u2019s really going on here is that the Left is denouncing the classical liberal component of current society \u2014 and there is a large component \u2014 and demanding to replace it with socialism. These writers are attacking the idea of individualism:\u00a0our<\/i>\u00a0idea.<\/p>

In\u00a0The Nation<\/i>, Heller and Barish argue that our individualist society has ignored the alleged fact that wealth is \u201csocially produced\u201d \u2014 the Barack Obama and Elizabeth Warren line that \u201cyou didn\u2019t build that.\u201d In Heller and Barish\u2019s view, the rules of American commerce are set up to foster the production of wealth and not its fair distribution. The result, they argue, is \u201ca competitive individualism that undermines community and destabilizes the social order.\u201d And to them, this pandemic nicely shows they are right.<\/p>

For their part, supporters of the market have been arguing that capitalism has allowed people to create the wealthiest society that ever was, including fabulous medical services and drugs; that in this emergency, companies and individuals are making supplies available, sometimes with no profit; and that a socialist society would be much less able to do this. (Where would you rather be sick?) Supporters of the market further argue that\u00a0<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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American wealth was not \u201csocially produced\u201d but produced under the guidance of innovators and entrepreneurs, which our system encourages. In addition, the relatively low death rate from COVID-19 in the United States makes a strong argument that \u201cindividualist\u201d America is not being outdone by countries with government-run medical systems.<\/p>

I like those arguments a lot. We should keep making them. But my argument is different. It\u2019s that if you\u2019re thinking of the principles under which to organize human life, you have to start with normal life. You don\u2019t start with a global virus panic, distill the principle of \u201cwe\u2019re all in this together,\u201d and apply it, rubber-stamp-like, to everything from college campuses to grocery stores. You start with normal life, and derive principles from that. And that is what classical liberalism does. It starts with rational individuals who need to work to sustain themselves and their dependents. It declares that people in normal life should have the liberty to choose their work and make their own decisions about the use of their time and their stuff, and that they should own the gains and losses from their decisions. Over time, this rule will allow people to make themselves wealthier and happier than having some ruling power, democratically selected or otherwise, making these decisions for them. Individual responsibility also tends to make the people stronger, whereas socialism tends to turn them into whiners.<\/p>

The classical liberal world will have different rules during emergencies. When the cruise ship is sinking, the captain does not auction off seats on the lifeboats. Likewise, in an epidemic of infectious disease, yeah, we\u2019re all in it together. But an epidemic is an outlier, a \u201cblack swan.\u201d The rules for an epidemic are special, and not relevant to the politics of normal life.<\/p>

But to some people, they are emblematic. I remember people who lived through World War II who said it was the best time of their lives. It gave them a collective purpose. Suddenly I hear the thought that we have a collective purpose again, and that our society should retain some of it after this is over.<\/p>

I do not hope for such a thing. Individual libertarians may want their lives to have a purpose, whether it be fighting disease, raising their children, building a company, or serving God, but we don\u2019t want to be\u00a0assigned<\/i>\u00a0a purpose. We want to choose our own. That insistence, that your life is your own, is our calling card.<\/p>

On a web page called unherd.com, James Kirkup offers a piece called \u201cWill the Panic Kill Off Libertarianism?\u201d He begins: \u201cI am not a libertarian, but I think libertarianism deserves some acknowledgement for its optimism about human nature. In short, this suggests that when people are left to their own devices, they will, in the end, do sensible, collaborative and even kind things.\u201d<\/p>

Well, that\u2019s nice. Then Kirkup goes on to observe that in the coronavirus epidemic, many people are doing stupid things. And they certainly are. Recently I\u2019ve seen stories of people going to weddings and church services in defiance of \u201csocial distancing.\u201d Kirkup argues that this shows that people need to be told what to do. And he concludes:<\/p>

If people cannot be trusted to make decisions that can make the difference between life and death . . . where else should restraint be imposed by the state, for the good of the individual and society? Put it another way: once you\u2019ve closed pubs and banned people from going outside, imposing, say, a tax to deter people from consuming sugary drinks is going to seem like a very small thing indeed.<\/i><\/p>

It may seem a small thing, but it does not follow. During an epidemic the society may have to protect itself by quarantining an individual against his will, just as in a war the state may ask its soldiers to shoot and kill human beings. But neither epidemic nor war is part of normal life. Sugary drinks are. Asserting that government control of soft-drink cup sizes is a response to an \u201cobesity crisis\u201d is an attempt to apply the rules of emergencies to ordinary life. It is ridiculous. It should be laughed out of the public square. It is also dishonest: I live in a city that has put a tax on sugary drinks supposedly for the public health, but the net effect has been to take more of the people\u2019s money for politicians to spend.<\/p>

Libertarians should be fine with a measure of \u201cwe\u2019re all in this together\u201d during an epidemic. In some ways, we need that idea in organizing a society, especially in recognizing that everyone has equal rights under the law. But it cannot be the organizing principle for everything.<\/p>

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\u00a0 \u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0 \u00a0<\/span>\u00a9 2020 Bruce Ramsey<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is my companion piece to “Jokers to the Right of Me.” The Liberty web page posted it on April 5, 2020. \u00a0 \u00a0 So many people on the Left want to embrace the COVID-19 pandemic as the validation of their world view. I don\u2019t buy it. In \u201cJokers to the Right,\u201d posted here on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1046","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1046"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1046\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1053,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1046\/revisions\/1053"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}