COVID-19: A Dangerously Half-Wrong Lesson

The flu-like cold that is closing in on pandemic status has, naturally caused speculation here in America about how bad the impact will be here, and whether differences between America and China might cause the impact of the virus to be different here.

Some conservatives, inspired by a blog post I keep hearing them call "masterful," are learning a dangerously half-wrong lesson, despite said post laying out lots of relevant facts. In a nutshell, the post argues that American cultural norms regarding sanitation and personal hygiene are superior to those in China regarding the spread of respiratory diseases and those that have a fecal-oral transmission route. (The novel coronavirus fits both descriptions.) So far, so good. If the examples from that post are accurate and representative of Chinese practices, it's absolutely correct on that score.

Where the article falls down, badly, is its attempt to explain how our different political systems also come into play:

Image by Thomas Vogel, via Unsplash, license.

... I watched a man hock up something from his chest and spit it on the floor, right next to us, in a restaurant. No oysters for me, thanks. I've suddenly lost my appetite.

We visited a Hutong (inner city -- where the locals live) and saw raw chickens, skinned and bleeding, just laying on the floor, waiting to be thrown on a restaurant grill ... for public consumption. No FDA or USDA or food inspectors or "codes" to comply with, here. But why? This is the last purely communist country on earth. You'd think there would be red tape everywhere. What was happening here?

...

I was witnessing the kind of maximum, almost brutal efficiency a society must develop when the state is the master and the individual is merely a subject. Why would a Communist country not have an effective FDA? Because who are you going to complain to if you get tainted food? The government? They don't answer to you. The press? They are owned by the government. And again, they don't answer to you.

So what if you don't like the conditions in the hospital? Where else are you going to go? This hospital is the last (and only) stop. You can't opt for another place and then just pay out of your own pocket. The government has capped financial upward mobility. There is now "income equality." And that means nobody has the means to buy their way into a different (or better) situation. And even if you could, one doesn't exist. The state provides it all...

Regie Hamm is generally right about the fact that freer societies afford individuals more opportunities to pursue value and improve their lives, but his is mistaken to credit the government agencies like the FDA past a very limited and very narrow point.

We can give one faint cheer to the existence of the FDA -- an improper intrusion of central planning into our lives -- because it (1) is at least supposed to be/was sold to Americans as an agency to protect individual Americans from bad actors in the food and drug sectors; and (2) performs some legitimate functions that would be performed anyway (but better and differently) in a truly capitalist society. The one cheer is because our mistaken foray into central planning is arguably motivated by a concern for individuals lacking in collectivist societies. And even that is highly qualified: I'd say that Hamm's heart is in the right place, but that it would be more accurate to say that we will do better than China more in spite of the fact that we have the FDA than because of it.

What's worse is that, because Hamm is unclear about the proper role of government, his mistaken praise for government regulation plays right into leftist "anything goes" tropes about capitalism, even when he attributes the problems to communism. Do his descriptions of restaurants and butcher shops not bring Upton Sinclair's The Jungle to mind? And it is wrong, on top of that to call China "purely communist." It has permitted a modicum of economic freedom for quite some time, but remained repressive. An Upton Sinclair would never have a chance there. (That is still not to say that a government agency, like the one we established, is the right answer.)

But leftists will be happy to dismiss Hamm's whole argument because China is not really communist -- and equally happy to both blame its "capitalism" for the unsanitary conditions while seconding Hamm's praise for the FDA and demanding we further nationalize best practices and industry standards.

Within Hamm's article are the seeds of a better lesson, namely that we need even more freedom. We can start by asking a simple question: How long would a restaurant that tolerated people spitting on the floor -- as we see in the first sentence of the excerpt -- last over here? Are there not incentives, heightened by the government not monopolizing everything for restaurant owners to not only not lose repeat business by killing off customers, but to vie for good reputations as clean and healthy places to eat? Carried further, I once argued:

[M]any government regulations exist that are similar to standards or conventions that would evolve in a free society. (Consider independent standards-setting bodies, free market incentives that might prove fertile for same, and evolving case law. For example, nobody wants to run a restaurant that is reputed to sicken customers with undercooked food: It's easy to imagine industry standards that aren't dictated top-down, and yet are enforced by something like a UL or a Consumer's Union.) To the degree that the government regulations are like what might have arisen anyway and are effective at achieving legitimate purposes, they will look like "good regulations" and will confound attempts to argue that central planning harms the economy.

Not only might watchdog groups and standards bodies spontaneously arise under capitalism, they already have and they are quite effective. China is not "fully communist" any more than we are "fully capitalist." Taking our greater ability to prevent or mitigate COVID-19 as an argument in favor of central planning (in the form of the government taking over regulation of business activity) is exactly the opposite of the lesson we should be taking away. In fact, we will doubtless discover aspects of our overall response that could be improved. Blindly praising the FDA risks taking the whole question of whether we should have one at all off the table.

As we proceed and in the aftermath of this outbreak, we should not leave any aspect of our response off-limits to questioning, and this emphatically includes whether we should have the government in charge of setting the standards and best practices of two of our most important industries.

-- CAV

PS: Let me also point out that the outbreak has barely started. What if there is something we're not aware of that makes the outbreak worse in America? (I personally fear government being "pro-active" and making things worse in any number of ways.) That would no more indict "capitalism" than our presumed better outcome blesses the FDA. To draw valid and actionable conclusions about the role of government in a pandemic requires being very clear about terms and about the proper purpose of government.

Updates

Today: Changed wording in first sentence.