Read on Twitter
. @tylercowen has an interesting post on libertarians and pandemic policy today. If I'm internalising correctly, I see him as making two separate points: that the libertarian response to a pandemic in terms of policies to control infectious diseases is a lot murkier than many
most vocally opposed to lockdowns suggest, and that many libertarians in this crisis have focused a lot more on fighting lockdowns than arguing positively that, left unimpeded, a lighter regulated market wd have provided us with testing, vaccines etc sooner to mitigate crisis.
My own take as someone who self-describes as libertarian is that in Spring, for the Friedman-esque reasons Tyler cites, there was a precautionary case for government action on lockdowns given the uncertainties and risks perceived at the time. BUT...the need for this arose
in significant part because of the usual problems libertarians highlight as failures of the state (especially on testing). Those original sins made a painful crisis inevitable in the form of a horrible trade-off of deaths and activity. But then more govt mistakes again that
libertarians would classically highlight (on rapid testing, public health officials thinking of mask markets as zero-sum, fine-tuning rules, price gouging, lack of challenge trials etc) made this crisis much worse than it needed to be. Ultimately the position we find ourselves
now in owes a lot to government failures--I oppose full lockdown-like policies now, but in large part I see them as proof of failures to do the other lower cost things that have substantially mitigated the crisis elsewhere. And for that, I think libertarians have a strong story.
So, to Tyler's piece: I think that there need not be any inconsistency between libertarians' stated positions on Ebola and COVID-19 given the relative risks of both and given that those libertarians were mainly advocating individual isolation for that disease.
However, I do agree with Tyler in the sense that too few libertarians right now emphasise that the *reason* we haven't got to a situation where we can rapidly identify infectious individuals is often because of government regulation holding back technologies to deliver that!
So TLDR: I'd like to see a lot more from libertarians about all the regulatory failures that have constrained the choice set in many places to lots of death or locking lots of people up.
For what it's worth, my @CatoInstitute colleagues are trying to do this through our "Pandemics and Policy" series: https://www.cato.org/pandemics-policy#:~:text=The%20Cato%20Institute%20aims%20to,new%20series%2C%20Pandemics%20and%20Policy.&text=In%20the%20coming%20months%2C%20the,of%20meeting%20the%20challenges%20ahead.
