Big government can’t save us from coronavirus
2020-02-13 · Guest: Jeffrey Tucker (Editorial Director of AIER) · 51:52
Government response to coronavirus and civil liberties
Bob Zadek and Jeffrey Tucker discuss the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, drawing parallels to the expansion of state power following 9/11. They explore the historical use of public health crises to justify infringements on civil liberties, the unreliability of early data, and the importance of maintaining free-market principles and constitutional protections during times of panic.
Topics: Coronavirus, Civil Liberties, Government Overreach, Free Markets, 9/11, Patriot Act, Public Health, Quarantine Law, History of Eugenics, American Institute for Economic Research (AIER)
Speakers: Bob Zadek, Jeffrey Tucker
Crisis as a Catalyst for Government Overreach [00:18]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome to The Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show on all of radio. Every Sunday, 8:00 AM Pacific Time, live. We are now and always the show of ideas, never ever once the show of attitude. Thank you so much for listening this Sunday morning.
Well, we have the coronavirus now to be concerned about. Now, this is not a show on public health per se; we are a show which examines and tries to preserve liberty against government encroachment. So what in the world does the coronavirus—what is it doing on a liberty-oriented radio program? Well, the answer is obvious. Because the coronavirus, like 9/11, like many other sudden, unexpected, existential or apparently existential threats to our well-being as Americans—whenever one of these threats pop up, and they have as a characteristic they were unprepared for, and they are somewhat scary, and the press is all over it to encourage that fear and to exacerbate it perhaps—whenever one of these threats pop up, government is quick to act.
Now, one would expect, I guess, government to act, but the action they follow is an immediate exertion of new powers over us citizens. Every one of these events—9/11, any event you want—it immediately results in new-found or dusted-off but existing governmental powers over us. And now we have the quarantine, the limitation on movement of both Americans and citizens from the rest of the world, the quarantine and the like. And is this assertion of governmental power appropriate? Is it constitutional? And does it represent proof positive of how quick government is to act to accept and to assert more power over us?
I am delighted to welcome to the show this morning Jeffrey Tucker. Jeffrey is the editorial director of the American Institute for Economic Research, a must-read, an organization you must follow. He’s the author of thousands of articles in scholarly press, in the public press, eight books in five languages, and most recently—and we will discuss it this morning—The Market Loves You: Why You Should Love It Back, his 2019 book which has been widely received with very, very strong positive reviews. He’s also the editor of the Best of Bastiat. And most recently, he has written an article which will be the subject of this morning’s conversation: “Must Government Save Us from the Coronavirus?” Jeffrey, welcome to the show this morning.
Jeffrey Tucker: My pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.
The Market as a Venue for Human Affection [01:15]
Bob Zadek: Now, Jeffrey, we’ll start with, because it is recently finished and published, your book, The Market Loves You: Why You Should Love It Back. Does the market—how can a market love anybody? And what is there that participants in the market—and of course market means free market—what is it that they should love back to that market, that environment?
Jeffrey Tucker: Well, okay, well, it goes like this. I started the book organized around C.S. Lewis’s The Four Loves. So there are many different levels of love. In English, we just have one word, but in Greek, there are four, including friendship and affection, a desire for self-sacrifice, eros, and also the kind of high level of love that God has for us and vice versa. So there are many different aspects to love. But it all comes down to kind of a feeling of an affection that one has for others and appreciation.
And you know, the market is—we use this word “market” and sometimes we think of it as being like the financial market or always involved with money, maybe it’s a morally barren place or something. That’s not even true. The market just consists of free individuals trading with each other, innovating, persuading each other, working together, benefiting from each other’s existence and life, finding value in each other’s work.
And I—to my mind, the market is a primary way by which we experience our own value and come to value other people in a way which we otherwise wouldn’t. So that’s one way in which the market is a venue for the expression of love and human affection. A lot of our friendships are built in the market setting; people have professional relationships you have that are oftentimes tighter than any other relationships you have in life.
There’s a funny way, too, in which the market shows us love from people we don’t know. So we buy products every day, we take it for granted, we go to Amazon, we go to eBay, we shop everywhere, and there are millions of people working to bring us something that we want and inviting us to buy it. We won’t meet them, we don’t know them, but it is an expression of love on part of those people for us and our choices. And that’s sometimes in an awe of it. I mean, I go into Walmart and sit there in shock, you know, that this gigantic building was erected for me to give me infinite choice in anything that I want and invites me to accept or reject the option. You know, that’s to me, that’s a very beautiful, benevolent kind of institution. And it’s what we should be going for. I mean, Lord knows government does not treat us that same way. Mostly government treats us as the enemy, somebody to be pulled over and hectored and harassed and taxed and bullied and drafted or quarantined, for that matter. So the point of the book is to develop within my readers a deeper affection and appreciation for the market order and what it does for our lives.
The Dating Market Parallel [03:50]
Bob Zadek: What the thesis of your book got me thinking about is—and I think about how there is this resistance, this fear, and most importantly, a misunderstanding of the operation of the free market, especially by the millennial, by the youngest cohort of voters, where they sort of favor less free market. And I thought of a parallel, which I don’t recall ever being used to help that generation explain the markets. And the parallel is, believe it or not—and this was my thought process was invited by your book—was dating.
Dating is a very free market. People enter into the dating, seeking a mate environment, and they exercise judgment, they have very little compulsion, very little protection from the government in making the right choice of a mate. They are out there, in a matter of speaking, all alone, trying to make the right decision, often making the wrong decision, suffering from the wrong decision, but not being resentful. Nobody in that marketplace seems to cry out, “Why isn’t there governmental protection? Why isn’t government screening who is allowed to meet up with me?” But nobody does that. So we have a generation which—and I thought of this, Jeffrey, by the explanation you just gave in your book—why is that free market cherished, and the free market in something equally important, which is selling an hour of your time in exchanging your property for somebody else’s property—why does the free market appear to them not to work, when the free market in dating, in finding a mate, while it doesn’t always work, that is sometimes you make a bad choice, but nobody complains that the bad choice was caused by not enough governmental protection? You invite in your book a very interesting parallel.
Jeffrey Tucker: Well, this is an excellent way of thinking, actually. What’s fascinating about that is, you know, we would not tolerate government intervention in our daily lives and in who we mix it up with, you know, who we fall in love with, who we marry. We would never tolerate something like that. In fact, I was just looking at some statistics that turn out 40% of couples nowadays meet through technology, through online dating apps and that sort of thing. There’s a gigantic free market, and it’s getting ever freer. We’ve never had the opportunities that the market have given us today to meet the right person for in our lives. And we would never tolerate that.
But what’s fascinating about this topic is that if you want to set up for government to plan society, and that’s your goal—you’re like a socialist or a central planner or something like that—forget about sausages and wind power and everything else that they want to regulate, just social security and everything else. You need to start with managing the dating market, because that gets to the heart of demographics. That’s something that government has to control first before it can control physical resources.
And what’s interesting, if you look back in history, socialist ideology has always begun with this proposition: we cannot just let people run around procreating, meeting who they want, falling in love with who they want, procreating how they want. We have to control that first. And we’ve seen experiments in this direction. I mean, China’s one child per family law was exactly that. And it’s why Orwell wrote about this kind of controls over demographics and birth and coupling, and it appears too in Brave New World by Huxley.
So yeah, I really agree. This should be the first thing that governments should seek to control if they were really consistent about wanting to manage society. They don’t, because they know that’s supremely offensive to people and they’ll never put up with it. But as you say, if that’s offensive and you shouldn’t put up with that, nor should you put up with government regulating things like your wages, your healthcare, your travel, or what substances you want to consume. So a consistent defense of the free market would, yes, advocate for a free market in dating but a free market in everything else too.
You know, as for millennial attitudes towards economics and the free market, I really think what we have here is just a tremendous confusion born of economic ignorance. Most people don’t take economics in college. All they know is that they’re financially strapped as a result of college debts they should have never undertaken, and they’re frustrated with the job market because it’s not paying them what they want given their credentials that they spent four years earning. So then they turn against the market and pretend that they’re socialists. I run into this absolutely all the time, and it’s mind-blowing. And I get impatient with it. You know, I know for sure that if I could spend an hour with any socialist under the age of 30, I could get that person to profoundly question their beliefs. And I’ve done this in the past, and they’re shaken and they come back to me later and say, “Okay, I’m no longer a socialist, that was dumb.” You know, the problem is how do you get to them? You know, that’s the big issue.
Socialism as an Arranged Marriage [13:31]
Bob Zadek: Well, Jeffrey, your book—in reading your book, I think the phrase that will “get to them,” the phrase you just used, is the way to explain socialism is: socialism is an arranged marriage in economics. It’s an economic arranged marriage where somebody external decides how you make these important decisions, whether it’s how you hire a doctor or a lawyer, licensing laws, what products you’re allowed to buy, what products you’re allowed to consume. If you abhor arranged marriages, then socialism is an arranged marriage on steroids. There’s your next book, Jeffrey.
Jeffrey Tucker: Yeah, it’s good. I’ll probably just take all these ideas and put them in an article, so thank you. But you know, the question of procreation and freedom of association in partnering, particularly sexual partnering, is a huge topic. And it was the topic of my previous book called Right-Wing Collectivism, where I actually did spend an entire book talking about the history of demographic panic and government planning. I mean, it was the progressives of the turn of the century, turn of the 20th century, that wanted to use eugenics and marriage licensing laws. People don’t know this, really, but the reason we have to get a license to get married is because of a panic on part of government that the wrong people were hooking up and it was leading to a diminution in the quality of the population. It’s true.
Bob Zadek: The first marriage licensing statutes were in New England in the 1820s. And the reason behind them, if you read what was in the media at the time, was there was a fear that white women were marrying Asians, mulattos, and imbeciles. And in order to prevent that, we had to license them, so that’s the way you can preserve the species. So you’re quite right, that little story about American history has a very ugly past.
Jeffrey Tucker: And can you believe that we still have all these marriage licenses today? We do. There’s no move even to get rid of them. I mean, it’s kind of an incredible thing. I mean, the Supreme Court had a judgment a few years ago that mandated that marriage be available to same-sex partners. I favor the idea of freedom in that respect, but the idea that there should have ever been a government mandate in the first place is ridiculous. And the government mandate comes about because of the previous laws putting government in charge of distributing marriage licenses. If the government were never involved in the marriage industry in the first place, there would have been no reason for a Supreme Court decision or all this crazy debate that we’re having today. So we need to get government out of the marriage marketplace entirely. No marriage licenses, that’s utterly absurd. And you’re right, it was a racial fear, but it was also just a general fear that you were marrying somebody that was stupider than you and so you would reduce the quality of the population. And it really had a eugenic orientation to it. The idea was to prevent some people from procreating. Back in those days, there was a widespread belief—and this was true all the way into the 1910s and 1920s—that if they could stop people from getting married or stop them from working, which is one of the reasons for minimum wage laws, then they could stop them from procreating, which is utterly ridiculous we now know, but that’s what they believed.
Coronavirus and the 9/11 Parallel [17:30]
Bob Zadek: Now, when you say “get the government out of,” that sentence has a myriad, an infinite number of very appropriate endings, which is a wonderful segue into your recent article, which was a wonderful piece, Jeffrey, and I thank you for that. To set a little groundwork, and in my introduction, I equated what’s going on with the government reaction and the media reaction and therefore the public’s reaction—because the public reacts based upon what they are told or what they learn from the media for better or for worse—but I’d like to flash back, because it’s in recent memory, to 9/11.
9/11 was sudden, all of a sudden it was there, people were frightened, people felt a huge threat which they could not get their brains around, how serious was it, were we about to be invaded, was this the end of everything? And within minutes, literally within minutes, we had draconian federal statutes passed without any examination. In fact, they had to have been written before, just waiting for the appropriate crisis. Now, that’s me being a conspiracy theorist, and maybe that’s inappropriate.
Jeffrey Tucker: No, it’s not a conspiracy theory. That’s absolutely documented. I mean, all the plans for everything that happened after 9/11 were laid out five, ten years earlier. So you’re exactly right about that. 9/11 was just the catalyst.
Bob Zadek: So, and the government—there was no debate. Nobody discussed, nobody said, “Hold on a second, let’s take a deep breath and think this through.” It just happened. And the public was all for it. There was no opposition in Congress, no opposition in the press, no opposition in the public. It just was, maybe the single most immediate mass surrender of freedom in favor of the government that ever existed in American history. It was sudden and it was massive. And we still have it. Remember, we still have it. Those laws have not been diminished or repealed.
So now we have the coronavirus. Again, a sudden threat. One day it wasn’t here, one day it was. And nobody knew anything about it. And here we—and so we have the threat, and nobody is examining how serious it is, that is nobody until you, Jeffrey, and we’ll go into your piece because it’s wonderful. Jeffrey, we have about four minutes before we go to break now, but just start us off on the coronavirus and give us an introduction to: is there a possibility, I dare say a real possibility, that the virus itself, the threat of the virus, is massively overstated with misunderstood data?
Jeffrey Tucker: I mean, that’s been true in every time in modern history where one of these diseases has come along and caused massive panic. When I was a kid, there was a fear about the swine flu, and it turned out the only people who really had fatal swine flu were the people that got the vaccination for it. I mean, that was back in the late 1970s. So that was my introduction to disease panics. But it’s been true ever since then, every time there’s a panic, I think under every president has one of these things, and everybody freaks out about the coming pandemic.
And when you think about this, you have to consider the fact that the flu kills 50,000 people in the United States every single year, the flu. So, you know, if you want the numbers, a person coming from China to the US has a 10,000% greater chance of contracting the flu, even fatally, than an American traveling in China has to contract the coronavirus. So that’s just what the data shows right now. And you know, we’ve seen over the last week China now reporting a diminution in the number of—the rate of death and the number of people infected. Now, you can trust those numbers or not. I’m inclined to think that from every case we’ve ever seen, that there’s wildly exaggerated fears because people have in their minds visions of the Black Death and that sort of thing. And then they, as you say, they just panic and they say, “Oh government, do something, quarantine people, get the infected away from me.”
But you know, the problem is that these powers are easy to abuse, they certainly will be abused. We’ve seen this on the cruise ship that was—the Diamond Princess, where 400 Americans were quarantined on a ship with sick people for two weeks they couldn’t leave. And people complained about it, said “This is crazy, I feel like I’m in prison, what is going on here?” And then they botched the release, so now finally they’re off the boat, but they’re going to be sent to Tokyo for two weeks and quarantined again. So, and these people, they talk about just the sheer irrationality of the entire thing. As if government knows who’s sick, who’s not sick, which they do not know this. These tests are—everybody recognizes these tests are ridiculous. And the idea that government’s going to make a decision for you on what you’re going to do with the threat of disease better than you can make yourself is utterly prosperous, but it’s a serious, serious danger. I wrote my article January 27th. Here we are, you know, more than two weeks later, and I would say the threat of quarantine power being used in the United States is much greater now than when I wrote the article.
Bob Zadek: And in your article, which we’ll cover as soon as we get back from our 30-second break, but in your article, you indicate how, because most of the data is coming from China, how unreliable that data is, and especially in the ratio which you explain in your article between the number of people who contracted the disease and the fatalities. And that explanation of the calculation and how off it could be caught my attention, as it will catch the attention of our listeners, because if the data is exaggerated, that means the reaction is exaggerated, that means the loss of liberty is for no good reason. So there is a chain effect. We’ll learn about that in about 30 short seconds when we come back. I’m speaking with Jeffrey Tucker. Jeffrey has just written an article, an important article, “Must Government Save Us from the Coronavirus?” We’ll be back in 30 short seconds. Please stay tuned.
[Commercial Break]
Health Theater and the TSA Parallel [33:00]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome back to The Bob Zadek Show, longest-running live libertarian talk radio show on all of radio, the show always of ideas, never once the show of attitude. This morning we are speaking with Jeffrey Tucker. Jeffrey has written an important article on the coronavirus, not with a prescription that is not a medical prescription, but Jeffrey points out to us how the coronavirus, based upon probably incorrect data, maybe grossly incorrect data, has given the government an opportunity to hopefully temporarily, we will see, seize somewhat extraordinary, probably lawful, but extraordinary powers over its citizens’ right of movement and of personal freedom.
And also right before the break, Jeffrey pointed out that a lot of the attention is directed on people, Chinese and Asians in general, and great attention is played—is paid to their movement into the United States. So it’s starting to have—and if you—there is right now incidents, individual anecdotes in the press about Uber and Lyft drivers being circumspect about picking up Asians, being concerned, there’s all this bordering on hysteria. And Jeffrey, when I started to read that, I got really frightened because we have to flash back to the Japanese internment during World War II. Before that, there were incidents in the end of the 19th century about the internment of Chinese nationals for various fears of disease. So this has unpleasant, if not ugly components to it, which have a history. So if I am and others are concerned, it’s not without good cause. There has been a history of using or these experiences such as the coronavirus fear to give people an outlet for really unpleasant and wrong-headed racial biases. So this has in the mix, this has a lot which is very similar to other events in our history.
Jeffrey Tucker: That’s right. And I hate to be the one to bring this up, but there would have been no forcing of the Jews into the ghetto in World War II if quarantine powers—the Nazi powers were entirely based on this idea of quarantine. And then that led to a greater degree of sickness and then rounding up in cattle cars and eventually, you know, a panic and extermination, you know, through many means including gas chambers. It all began with the quarantine of people based on demographics, a government power.
And so, you know, there should have never been any government quarantine since the first, as you say, in that exact same period in the US, too, for the Japanese, all based on demographics. And so, can you imagine, you know, there’s very little you can actually trust a government with at all, if nothing at all. But the idea that they’re going to be able to determine whether you’re sick, to what extent you’re sick, how big the risk is of infection, whether you’re likely to die, and the conditions under which you’re going to keep yourself safe and keep others safe from you, and we’re going to put government in charge of all that, is utterly crazy.
And we see this in China right now. They have a little tool that they use—this is how I don’t trust any of the data—there’s a little tool they use that’s a kind of a distance thermometer. And the idea is you put it up next to the person’s head and squeeze the trigger and it tells you their temperature. And depending on what the temperature is, that’s what they consider a person to be infected or not. So everybody who registers positive is considered infected, and everybody who registers negative is considered not infected. But these tools are unbelievably almost useless. I mean, it’s like pseudo-science. If you don’t hold it directly against a person’s head for a long period of time, you’re not going to get a good registration. If a person just, you know, ran from the bus to catch a bus, their forehead’s going to be hot, and that’s going to show up in the tool. And the false diagnoses are infamous with these things. So they have these tools, they’re selling like crazy, the companies making them is making a mint, but this is the basis of how they’re detecting how many people have it. It’s just this quick little wave of a magic wand across the person’s head. It’s just ridiculous. And then next thing you know, you’re being quarantined with the people who most likely do in fact have this, and then the disease—you’re going to get sicker, or you’re going to get sick for the first time. So far from protecting anybody, it’s actually extremely dangerous and people are getting it themselves.
Bob Zadek: Jeffrey, I must confess that when you were explaining this “tool” that was being used in China, I started to smile. Now why did I smile when you were explaining that? Because you know what I flashed to, Jeffrey? I flashed to TSA. And TSA is the same—the tool you described is health theater. It’s doing something with some machinery that will have the effect of making us safer. The parallel is undeniable between the 95% failure rate at TSA and the 95% probably failure rate with this silly tool that’s being used, both under the guise of protecting the public, both have the effect of denying citizens freedom, and both based upon these mysterious tools. But the government has the appearance of doing something, of being on top of it. And yet the parallel, Jeffrey, is inescapable between the two events. I was just smiling.
The Fatality Rate Calculation [33:15]
Bob Zadek: Now, when you—in your article, you made reference to this calculation that I wanted to just make our friends out there aware of, about how off the fatality rate could possibly be based upon data. And data should not be assumed to be trustworthy coming from China; it’s not been verified. So help us understand how governments determine by apparently objective calculations how serious the virus is.
Jeffrey Tucker: Well, this is—a lot of my information comes from a health economist, a medical history economist named George Dehner at the University of Michigan. And he points out, he says, “Look, it’s possible that the coronavirus may not be very contagious, it may not be all that deadly.” We don’t know yet how many people have mild coronavirus infections that have not come to medical attention, with small symptoms that look very much like a cold and they could just go away.
But based—he says based on data from other coronaviruses, experts believe the incubation period is about five days. We do not yet know how effectively this coronavirus spreads. And he says the fatality rate is a very important statistic in epidemiology. It’s calculated by dividing the number of known deaths by the number of known cases. And right now, it appears to have a fatality rate of about 3%, which is roughly like the flu pandemic in 1918. But here’s the problem: what if there are 100,000 Chinese citizens with mild infections that we don’t know about? That would lower the case fatality—in other words, a lot more mild infections, that would lower the fatality rate to about 0.02%, which is identical to the seasonal flu deaths. And it’s an extreme reaction to start quarantining whole towns and have a nationwide panic and have the World Health Organization freak out about it when it’s basically, as far as we know, no more or less serious than the flu.
But here’s the thing: let’s say it really is a deadly panic—which it’s not—a deadly disease, which it may not be that pandemicly spread all over the world, which it’s not. Even then, you know, to give government the power to quarantine people and think that’s going to do some good is just crazy. Likely it’s going to have the exact reverse effect, as these people on the cruise ship will tell you. They were trapped for two weeks on a cruise ship having to accept food into their rooms from people that may or may not be infected. You know, we can’t leave these decisions up to government because it will only cause the spreading of disease and delay the ability to find a cure, which we will find out more about coronavirus within about 12 months, honestly. I can guarantee within about 12 months nobody will be talking about the coronavirus. We’ll figure out that it’s just a version of the flu or the common cold or some virus that if gone untreated leads to death like anything else. And it’ll just be a flash in the pan.
But meanwhile, if we give government massive powers as we did after 9/11—I mean, it’s actually the case, you might find yourself, you know, people in suits coming to your front door, putting an X on your door and dragging you out and putting you in a quarantine camp. That sounds crazy and paranoid, but it’s in fact happening. It happened on the cruise ship two weeks ago, and it could happen in your neighborhood tomorrow. And you could say, “No, no, no, that could never happen, we have a Constitution.” Look, the Centers for Disease Control has an honest website right now, which I linked to and quoted at length, very specific plans for quarantining any element of the US population that the president wants to do. It all comes from the executive department. If they want to quarantine people, they can do it. They can grab you out of your home and put you in a camp, and you have no rights, no lawyers, no recourse, there’s nothing you can do. And if you resist, you can be shot on the spot.
Now what’s weird to me, or extremely weird about the Centers for Disease Control’s thing, is I’m always looking anytime government’s trying to enforce something, you want to know what the penalties are. What if a person who resists being taken, you can get shot, and that’ll never go to court. But according to the Centers for Disease Control, they say if you resist successfully and get away, then you’ll be fined. Right? What’s the fine? $1,000. $1,000! Look, I mean, I’m glad to pay $1,000 to not have me and my family and my friends all taken to a government camp for coronavirus. You know, that’s not a very high price to pay. So if it’s up to me and somebody comes to my front door, I’m going to have cash in an envelope and say, “Hey, here’s my fine, let me go,” and send them on their way.
Quarantine and the Constitution [38:40]
Bob Zadek: You know, it’s interesting because I got curious about the power of the government to in a way lock you up and whether the Constitution even addressed the issue. And there is almost nothing in the Constitution dealing with the power of quarantine. Which means, if there’s nothing in the Constitution, it would mean that you have to look elsewhere for the rules. And then you have to look at the Fourth Amendment—being locked up without due process, does that even apply?
You end up going back to colonial America when there were quarantines. There was a very old phrase—it’s French, I believe, cordon sanitaire—which is where the government would basically tie a rope around the perimeter of certain areas that it felt had to be quarantined and separated from the population. So in colonial times, there was the exercise of quarantine, a lot on ships because ships travel, they brought disease. So, and believe it or not, there’s no Supreme Court precedent. There’s no binding authority on what due process rights you have if you are determined by public health officials to be subject to quarantine. I was astonished when I learned that.
Jeffrey Tucker: Yeah, it’s amazing. And these laws exist. I mean, they’ve existed for decades on the books, how exactly the quarantine powers pass. I guess they were used in World War II, but we haven’t really apologized for them, we’ve kind of forgotten about them. You know, government can say, “Oh sorry about that, sorry about that, that was a mistake,” but actually they’ll use it again. It’s right there on the Centers for Disease Control website, tells you exactly everything you need to know about quarantine power. And it’s not justified in any sense. Like you have literally no rights in the case of a pandemic disease. None whatsoever. Actually, you don’t even have to wait for the pandemic disease. I mean, the Centers for Disease Control can come to where I am right now and say, “Everybody in Western Massachusetts has to be rounded up, that’s it, for reasons of public safety,” and that’s it. You’re going to be on the cattle car headed for the camp. That can happen today with absolutely no legal recourse whatsoever.
Bob Zadek: I was astonished to learn at how little legal protection citizens have if the government made a mistake, if they quarantined you, quarantined your apartment building, quarantined your city, whether or not there’s any recourse at all, whether or not the Supreme Court can even step into that decision. And I was astonished to find there’s almost nothing. So I said to myself, “Oh my God, I don’t want to get out of control here, but this is a scary governmental power that people are dusting off.”
Now, there’s no suggestion—I don’t want to sound alarmist—that this is going to be out of control, quarantine is going to be used indiscriminately. I don’t fear that even a little bit. But I am concerned about the fact that this has so many of the earmarks of events in recent memory when we did result in an expansion of governmental power and a loss of liberty, all under the same political cover of an existential crisis that people are just afraid of in a purely emotional way, not data-driven. And they, as you said, Jeffrey, they have this reaction: look to the government to protect us. Which is a state of mind that is a blank check to the government. And if anything comes out of this show this morning, it is an invitation to citizens to be alert for government to seize additional power under the political cover of the coronavirus.
Jeffrey Tucker: As you say, a lot of it depends upon how panicked the population is. Like right now, I think today, people are not that panicked, I think there would be a lot of outrage. But if you had a couple of weeks of non-stop CNN broadcasts and MSNBC and presidential speeches and politicians going on about how it’s an existential threat and you get people scared enough, they’ll be turning in their neighbors. And that could happen in two weeks. I think maybe I’m a little more worried about this than you are, actually. I remember 9/11. Everything was normal, then the next day we had totalitarian controls over us, you know, the airport security was nationalized and we have internal controls.
And right now, we have already internal passports. You can’t even board a domestic flight come the end of this year. You won’t be able to board a domestic flight without a passport or a driver’s license that covers—that gives you special permission to do so. So that comes out of 9/11, and it’s all these years later we’re still experiencing the effects of that. And I don’t see any public protest about this. Internal passports? I mean, that happened while we were sleeping, and nobody’s—I don’t see anybody else writing about it. So we shouldn’t be sanguine about this. I think this power is real and it can come to us, it can be used. And let’s not forget that government’s always looking for some big excuse to enact more totalitarian controls over us. That’s what they do. And a disease, a pandemic disease, is as good an excuse as any excuse out there, even if you have to falsify the data.
Tariffs and the 1900 San Francisco Plague [48:00]
Bob Zadek: Another interesting aspect of the coronavirus event—and this is sort of good news, if you accept that label—and that is, and this didn’t get a lot of media attention, China, because they ran short of necessary supplies like face masks—and there’s a lot of other supplies that they ran out of because of the run on the purchases of them—China has eliminated or dramatically reduced the tariffs on all this stuff. So this has been, in a funny way, this has had as an economic positive step the appreciation that tariffs in preventing the flow of goods—something I know you care about a great deal, Jeffrey—the tariffs have been quietly reduced to invite the flow of goods. And maybe, maybe when this is over, the Chinese and our US administration will realize it’s better to have the goods than to allegedly protect the jobs. So who knows, there might be some bright lights in this whole experience.
Jeffrey Tucker: Well, you know, it’s funny you should say that. I didn’t even think about that until Bruce Yandle, an economist, wrote an article for AIER, and he said that that could be one of the effects of the coronavirus in the long run is a freer trade. And he cited certain historical precedents in the past that disease panics actually lead to greater flow of goods. And I was really intrigued by that. I thought, “How could that be?” But he cited a lot of history, and there may be a point to that.
The other thing is that it’s also possible that—you mentioned that some people have shown discriminatory attitudes towards Asian people as a result of this coronavirus, and that’s certainly true, but also it could increase people’s sense of empathy towards China and lead to a diminution of this Cold War style environment that’s been cultivated by the Trump administration over the last three years. And maybe increase ties between us and underscore the need for international cooperation for disease control and medical research and various therapies and trading of goods. So I think all that’s very possible. I think that would be the best outcome of this, if that does happen, that would be wonderful.
Bob Zadek: One can only hope that we learn the lessons of history from this experience. In making reference to how the fear takes over people, it wasn’t a long time ago, in 1900 in San Francisco, there was a fear of, of all things, bubonic plague. And San Francisco, the city of San Francisco, promptly quarantined 25,000 residents of San Francisco, Chinese descent. And not only that, but they forced them to be injected with an injection to cure the bubonic plague. It turned out that the whole exercise was totally pointless, and there was damage from the injection. Now just imagine, we are talking about citizens of the United States being forced to accept an injection for no other reason than they were of Chinese descent. And this is not in the Dark Ages. This is in 1900 in San Francisco. So I just would remind our listeners that do not be sanguine just because, well, we’re more enlightened now. 1900, there was plenty of enlightenment, and notwithstanding that, how easy it was for an American city and the population to succumb to these fears.
So to me, as we wind down, Jeffrey, the lesson, if it’s not too early, the lesson of the coronavirus is: of course intelligent steps should be taken, but we must be super vigilant to not allow this to be an excuse for the ugly exercise of government power in a way that compromises our core values. The core values must triumph over all. That’s the most important. And we certainly expect the government to take steps to protect us within very limited range of options, but we must always guard our freedom because once it’s surrendered, we don’t get it back.
Now Jeffrey, how could our friends out there follow your writings and the work of your organization?
Jeffrey Tucker: Well, my recommendation is that people go to aier.org and subscribe to our daily email where we dish out all kinds of economic wisdom every single day. I mean, we’ve got two million readers on the website right now, and we’d welcome anybody to join us. I write there almost every day, but I’ve got thousands of articles up there, and I’m so glad to have such good colleagues who are all about economic research. We try to put the best research that’s out there and serve as a public service as a reflection of our historic mission, and I’d welcome anybody to join us.
Bob Zadek: Jeffrey, you do great work at AIER. I recommend to our listeners out there that they make it a regular part of their day to check out your writing. Thank you so much for giving us an hour of your time this Sunday. Bob Zadek saying so long for now, I’ll be back of course next Sunday. Have a good week.