A Decentralized Approach to Fighting the Coronavirus

The estimates of a million or more deaths in the US from the Coronavirus neglect that fact that people, groups, businesses, cities, and states alter their behavior voluntarily in the face of an epidemic. Some people seem to think that if the Federal government doesn't do something, then nothing gets done. That's not true, especially in a some-what free society. The ham-fisted totalitarian crack-down we have seen in China has slowed the spread of the virus, but that doesn't mean that this should be emulated. We should have an American answer to the virus, one which works with our strengths of freedom, decentralization, and ingenuity.

Let's start with something that needs to be said: Big Media is owned by global corporations, and so it should not be surprising that they have a pro-globalist outlook in their news, reporting, and entertainment. As such we cannot expect them to tell the truth about how secure national borders, a fire-walled economy which makes many of its own products and whose companies are national rather than global is much better at protecting people from pandemics than an open-borders globalists society which is always and in mass quantity sending and receiving goods and people to all other nations. In other words, decentralization is security. It is insurance. It is a firewall. And not just against highly contagious diseases. If our economy is vitally linked with that of say, China, when they go down, we go down too. Globalism has a lot of hidden costs, and the globally-owned media and the politicians they promote cannot be trusted to tell you that particular truth.

So if we were a more localist nation and society we would already be safer than we are now. Our economy and stock markets would already be more stable and resilient than they are now. We would not have to take any government action to make us safer than we are now because a decentralized government is inherently safer from the kind of threats we are now facing.

This is a problem made worse by an over-connected global economic and political system. Naturally, those who made the problem worse with over-centralization also advocate centralized responses to fix the problems which over-centralization caused. There are all sorts of government responses to prop up the stock market and provide "liquidity" to Wall Street financiers. There are calls to mandate lockdowns, China-style. And of course there are calls for more funding for various central-government programs to provide top-down management of the issue.

The reason doctors and health care is so expensive in America is that long ago the medical profession colluded with government to artificially restrict the supply of doctors by erecting unnecessary barriers to entry into the medical field. Government intervened on the supply-side to limit supply. Restricting supply always causes price increases. Normally that would reduce demand and the situation would correct, but this is health care, which is an inelastic good. People pay whatever it takes because they can die if they don't. So government's "solution" was to intervene on the demand side as well!  So government started throwing government money at health-care to make it "affordable". In other words, intervening to prop up the demand-side too.

Government first intervened in a way guaranteed to increase costs, and then tried to make up for it be heavily subsidizing those costs for increasing numbers of people. That didn't fix the underlying affordability problem which government helped produced, it just made it bigger by transforming it from a family issue to a national issue. 

Central government intervention has the potential to mess up pandemic response just like they did the rest of health care. They've already done it. For example the bottleneck in testing for the Wuhan Virus in the United States was in large part due to the fact that the Food and Drug Administration had ordered that all testing for the virus go through the Centers for Disease Control. Until last week only FEDGOV could process the tests! The CDC developed the tests. Only in the face of a massive bottleneck did the bureaucrats loosen their grip and on March 9th, less than a week ago, lifted this burdensome restriction. It is madness to look at facts like these and think that the root problem is inadequate central government action.

Still, people are focusing on socialist answers. For example I have heard calls for making any vaccine developed "free". No doubt socialists expect some drug company to risk massive amounts of money developing a vaccine and then give it out to the government at cost! This is an example of how, no matter how reasonable it sounds, socialism kills people with stupidity masked as caring and virtue. Socialism only looks good compared to what we have- Corporate Crony Rule where they get to socialize their losses but keep most of their profits. 

A better government response would be one which frees private firms from the government restrictions which hinder them. For example, I'd ask drugmakers what the ten most useless regulations government has imposed on them that slow down the roll out of vaccines. Then I'd suspend them as regards to this vaccine. I'd also push for legislation making the first billion dollars in profits tax free for any company with a safe and effective vaccine for the virus. And I'd push for legislation allowing them all to deploy without worrying about patent issues for two years- we could sort out who came up with the version that's going to get patent protection later. 

I'd also push for cheaper general flu anti-bodies right now using some of the same tactics. My kid had the flu last year. We payed $153 plus a doctor's visit for a general flu anti-body so that a flu which normally took three weeks to run its course took only a few days. That's available right now to lessen the impact of basically any flu. We just need to make sure people know that's a viable option, plus provide incentives similar to those described above to get the cost down, and awareness up. The central government needs to be a clearing-house for best practices used by others, not a command center. State and localities can decide for themselves what measures are truly necessary. Somewhere out there is an effective batch of strategies to beat this disease. We just need to free everyone to find it and let them reap the rewards for doing so, instead of them worrying about politicians jumping in and stealing both the credit, and the rewards with counter-productive government action disguised as "helping".