Libertarians in Pandemics

B: Will the pandemic kill off libertarianism? - UnHerd

A: Why would it? Multiple governments and super-government agencies have absolutely dropped the ball, meanwhile private entities were the first to start implementing quarantine tactics weeks in advance of the government.

I think my case is stronger than ever.

Me: Doomsday cults see their predictions fail but cultists double down

Why would cognitive dissonance differ here?

A: The only thing I predicted incorrectly was the severity of the virus. I never doubted it would be mishandled at every level.

Me: Libertarians are powerless against irresponsible spring breakers

US students party on spring break despite coronavirus - BBC News

A: I seem to believe that they went on spring break despite the government issuing quarantine orders. What would you prefer? We start lining up college kids and executing them with a shot to the back of the head?

Me: "defying recommendations from the federal government and Center for Disease Control (CDC) over the coronavirus outbreak"

Recommendations aren't orders

Besides which you seem to be unaware that governments have many ways of enforcing rules besides execution by shooting squad

You don't seriously believe that if you exceed the speed limit by 10kmph, you're going to get shot?

A: If get a ticket and I refuse to pay it, men with guns come to my house and try to take me away and if I refuse to go with them, they almost certainly will shoot me. So yes, they are willing to shoot me over a speeding ticket aren't they?

And you seem to have missed my point. This isn't exactly a libertarian wonderland. They went on government's watch. I don't know how you can say that's a failure of the small government crowd.

C: I think this thread makes you the one who is right. Well spotted.

D: God, I hope so. Quicker than Ayn Rand rushing to her mailbox to get her Social Security check.


The original article is pretty good (which is why libertarians ignore its points):

Will the pandemic kill off libertarianism?

"What does it say about human nature that despite repeated urging and warning, despite a bombardment of information, people continued to congregate and mix in ways that put them and others at non-trivial risk of a potentially fatal disease?

And what, in turn, will the necessity to ban such congregations mean for our future understanding of the way the state should view and treat people as they go about their economic lives?...

Free marketeers, explicitly or otherwise, tend to rest their argument for unfettered market interactions on the idea that these are dealings between rational actors. In markets, as in life, people left to make their own decisions will, in aggregate, make spending choices that benefit themselves, thus allowing markets to price and allocate resources in the most efficient way.

This is the ‘rational agent’ theory of economic behaviour and it’s one of the most fundamental ideas of our age. It’s the basis for most economics teaching and the foundation of most ideas of market operation, regulation and consumer law (even if there are quite a few people who argue, quite persuasively, that it’s wrong).

Now let’s go back to the people, in London and elsewhere, who last week continued to crowd into pubs and gyms.

Why did they do it? Why was it necessary for Boris Johnson, instinctively liberal, to order the pubs to close? You only need to take such measures if people are either not nice or not rational. Neither explanation bodes well for libertarianism or free markets.

How rational were the choices made by those pub-goers or the folk crowded into parks and markets? Were they coolly assessing the pleasure they would derive from a few drinks or a stroll with friends, and assigning it a value that outweighed the risk they and others would face resulting from their choice?

If so, I think that raises a significant problem for libertarian views of human nature as benign. People who think their enjoyment of a pint of lager justifies risking the lives of others do not measure up to that nice idea that, left to our own devices, we generally do the right thing.

Or here’s another explanation for pub-going in a time of coronavirus. Maybe the people who continued to mingle were being neither good nor bad but merely inaccurately estimating the consequences and costs of their actions. Here we get to those other economists, the behavioural ones, who argue that we make our allocative choices not on the basis of neat, orderly mental spreadsheets weighing cost and benefit, but because of messy, complicated human frailty.

The decision to keep going to the pub during a pandemic looks a lot like an illustration of what Daniel Kahneman called the availability heuristic, the tendency of people to over-state the probability of familiar things they can easily imagine, and underestimate the chance of hard-to-concieve things happening.

How many of us can easily conjure up a simple mental picture of an invisible virus spreading exponentially through a population of tens of millions, and be clear in our minds about who we might be harming by popping down the local for one last pint or a walk in the park? I don’t think the Londoners who continued to go out drinking or strolling were callous. I think they just couldn’t easily conceive the potential consequences or the probability of those consequences.

The choice to go on going out was, in other words, hard to describe as rational, even in the narrow terms of rational choice theory. And if people aren’t rational about a situation that risks tens of thousands of lives and deep damage to our society and economy, how much weight should we put on the idea of rational actors in future?

Arguably, this shouldn’t even be a debatable point. There’s a good case to be made that the 2007/8 financial crisis should have put more of a dent in the idea of rational economic actors.

When no less a figure than Alan Greenspan admitted that markets did not work the way he had believed they did and that he had “made a mistake in presuming that the self-interest of organizations, specifically banks and others, was such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders” then policymakers the world over should have shown more scepticism about ‘rationality’."


While obsessed with simplistic economic claims, libertarians don't just want government non-interference in markets

This can be applied to other contexts too, e.g. mandating seatbelts

Has Alan Greenspan been disowned by libertarians yet for not blaming the 2008 financial crisis on government regulation?