While alarmingly high fatalities signify a time of immense suffering, recent developments suggest the worst of the pandemic may be behind us. Covid-19 fatalities, cases, and hospitalizations are decreasing. Many universities plan to offer more in-person instruction during this fall. Texas ended its lockdown and mask mandate.

Some of these promising signs can be attributed to vaccination. According to the Wall Street Journal, over 100 million Americans have received at least one Covid-19 vaccine. Although the Pfizer and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines require two injections spaced two weeks apart, studies confirm that one injection provides effective immunity. Even as Covid-19 variants begin to appear across the US, t-cell tests confirm that the available vaccines can protect against mutations.

While there are many reasons to be optimistic that the worst of the pandemic is behind us, there have also been several signs governmental powers granted during the pandemic may not return to pre-Covid levels.

For example, Director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony Fauci announced that Americans may still need to wear face masks through the year 2022 and that CDC guidelines may not loosen by Independence Day despite drops in Covid-19 infections. More recently, Dr. Fauci urged Americans to “not get so fixated on this elusive number of herd immunity” even with millions of covid-19 vaccines administered daily.

In another attempt to keep the economy stabilized during the pandemic, President Biden signed a $1.9 billion Covid-19 relief bill. However, as one Reason article notes, “Biden’s coronavirus relief package has almost nothing to do with the coronavirus.” The same article also notes much of the funding provided by the previous stimulus bill has not been spent.

Some speculate a fourth Covid-19 relief bill may soon follow.

Federal agencies have also experienced an expansion of scope and authority stemming from the pandemic. Last October, the Department of Health and Human Services gained the authority to limit its agencies and operating divisions from enacting rules and regulations to slow down the approval of a Covid-19 vaccine. In another bizarre expansion of regulatory power, the Centers for Disease Control gained the authority to prevent residential evictions for non-payment of rent, “to prevent the further spread of Covid-19.”

These and other regulatory powers have little prospects of ever being retracted.

Unfortunately, powers granted to the government during a crisis are rarely revoked. In his pioneering book Crisis and Leviathan, economist and historian Robert Higgs explains the growth of government often displays a ratchet effect: expanding during a crisis but seldom returning to its pre-crisis level. Consequently, crises frequently expand the role and scope of government with little hope of containing it in the long run.

Pandemics and other public health crises are no exception to the ratchet effect. Writing last March as states began to shut down and the first Covid-19 spending bill was passed, Robert Higgs and Professor of Economics at George Mason University Don Boudreaux asked these hard-hitting questions:

“Will the quarantine of millions of people become a precedent? Will broad-scale distributions to the general population without a means test become an enduring public demand even when normal times return? Will the Fed’s exchange of trillions of dollars for rotten securities become a lasting feature of its monetary policy?”

Nearly a year later, we are getting our first glimpse of the answers. So far, history may be poised to repeat itself.

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As I summarized Higgs’s thesis in an earlier paper:

Higgs (1987) noted that the expanded role taken on by the state during the New Deal period remained largely in place once the crisis passed, leading to a “ratchet effect” in which government agencies expand to exploit perceived short-term opportunities, but fail to retreat once circumstances change. Higgs (1987) suggests that government officials (regulators, courts, and elected officials), as well as private agents (such as business executives, farmers, and labor unions) developed capabilities in economic and social planning during crisis periods and that, due to indivisibilities and high transaction costs, tend to possess excess capacity in periods between crises. To leverage this capacity, they looked for ways to keep these “temporary” measures in place. Indeed, many New Deal agencies were thinly disguised versions of World War I agencies that had remained dormant throughout the 1920s—the War Industries Board became the National Recovery Administration, the War Finance Corporation became the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the War Labor Board became the National Labor Relations Board, and so on. In many cases the charters for the New Deal agencies were mostly copied verbatim from World War I predecessors. Higgs’ (1987) ratchet effect illustrates that excess capacity in organizational capabilities isn’t necessary leveraged as soon as it is created, leading to smooth, continuous organizational growth, but may remain dormant until the right economic, legal, or political circumstances arise, leading to sudden, discontinuous jumps in organizational size or scope.

How will leviathan expand—temporarily and then permanently via the ratchet effect—in response to COVID-19? It’s too early to make any definite predictions, but we can make educated guesses based on experience and our knowledge of how governments work.

First, we can expect that government controls on travel and assembly will tighten. Whether via legislative approval, unilateral executive action, or judicial decree, the principle that governments must control movement and gatherings of people to prevent the spread of disease has been clearly established (or reestablished). As we know from Higgs’s work, the additional capabilities in this area acquired by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other agencies will likely be retained and put to use long after the crisis has abated. And further government intervention in the biomedical and healthcare sectors is virtually guaranteed.

The second likely long-term effect is ideological. Already we’re seeing the meme that the crisis has been caused (or at least exacerbated) by “neoliberalism”—that thanks to pervasive (?) libertarian ideology public health agencies were “hollowed out” and thus unable to respond in force:

Of course, we know that in the US the CDC initially prevented private labs from testing or developing new tests without FDA approval. More generally, public (and private) health in the US, as in most countries, operates within a tangled web of federal, state, and local regulations, subsidies, restrictions, and other controls.

It is impossible to know how a free market medical system would handle something like corona. But we will be told that there are no free market enthusiasts during a pandemic (and that, at best, those of us who favor property rights, markets, and prices should embrace “state capacity libertarianism”). The case for markets will have to be made, as Mises would say, ever more boldly.

Originally posted to Mises.org.

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My own alternative is simply freedom. Get the government completely out of whatever it is now doing so badly, whether it be educating youth, protecting the public from crime, or keeping the economy in flourishing operation. Of course, the critic is likely to dismiss this answer on the grounds that it constitutes nothing but a shibboleth, a magic word that is taken to solve all the problems even though it lacks any definite plan or arrangement for a solution.

This response, however, only reveals that the critic does not understand how a free society operates or what may reasonably be demanded of its supporters. The essence of freedom is the unrestricted ability to make changes without the government’s permission and without spelling out how all the various elements of the change will operate or be brought about.

For example, when Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and a few other entrepreneurs were introducing and developing the technology and business arrangements of the personal computer industry, they themselves did not know how this industry would be developed over the years and all the ramifications it would produce throughout the economy and society. If asked, they could not have spelled out everything that would flow from their initial impetus, who would do what next, and how all of these free actions would play out in the larger context. No one could have said, and those who ventured a guess were often, as seen later, ridiculously off base in their forecasts. That’s how a free economy and society develop, in spontaneous steps taken by decentralized decision makers.

So when a critic demands, “What is your alternative?” and you answer, Freedom, do not feel dismayed if you cannot provide a detailed blueprint. No one can. Nor should anyone be expected or required to carry out this impossible task. Freedom cannot be reduced to a static diagram of specific inputs, transformations, and outputs. It is an ongoing process. It is the sum total of what people do when no overriding authority holds them back. No one should feel embarrassed or inadequate when someone demands, “What is your alternative?” and one cannot respond in great detail.

Freedom is an endless venture into the unknown, the working out of problems as they present themselves, by millions of individuals, firms, and other organizations who know best the facts of specific times and places and who have the tacit knowledge—the “feel” and intuition—for what might work and what will not. The conduct of countless experiments constitutes the dynamics of the free society. It has no blueprint, and even if it had one today, that plan would have been altered by the end of tomorrow.

The proper response to the demand, “What is your alternative?” is simply, “Give freedom a chance.”

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In sum, people (for external reasons) can’t get anywhere without organizations, but with organizations they are (for internal reasons) unlikely to make much headway. Political movements must motivate the mass of their followers with either ideological or material incentives. Because freedom-seekers, unlike other political actors, cannot promise followers a share of the loot—they seek no plunder—they must rely on ideology to carry the load. But ideological commitment is undercut by a growing awareness of corruption in the organizational leadership of their movement.

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Gaze upon the members of Congress, the president and his lieutenants, the justices of the Supreme Court, and the leading figures of the government bureaucracies. As I do so, I cannot help but wonder: Who are these people? I am not personally acquainted with a single one of them; they are complete strangers to me. I have not contracted with them for the provision of any services, nor have I agreed to support them financially. Why then do these strangers presume to dictate to me what I must do and not do, and to threaten me with violence if I do not obey? They might as well be alien invaders from outer space.

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Q: What are some examples?
A: Knives, clubs, stones, firearms of all types, 105 mm howitzers, B-2 bombers, hands, feet, and teeth.

Q: What’s so bad about these things?
A: Nothing in themselves; everything depends on how they are used. The problem is the assault, not the weapons used in committing it.

Q: Should the government outlaw assault weapons?
A: Are you serious?

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By now, probably thousands of articles have been published in economics journals in which the author constructs an economic model, derives from it the optimality conditions, and concludes by making policy recommendations that prescribe how governmental authorities should act—that is, should use their coercive power—to force the real world into conformity with the model’s optimality conditions.

All this—above all, the policy recommendations—is for the most part an enormous waste of time and intellect.

First, because any clever undergraduate, at least if this student is good at math, can build a simple economic model, doing so is not a scientific big deal. Moreover, because real economies are enormously complex dynamic systems that defy useful modeling even more than the global climate defies accurate modeling by meteorologists and other climate scientists, the simple models that fill the journals are remote from reality. Indeed, they are often ridiculously far-fetched, being more mathematical characterizations of a wholly imaginary world than revealing abstractions of conditions in the real world. Supposing that one can derive useful policy conclusions from simple or even fanciful models requires a gigantic leap of faith that is rarely justified.

Second, even if a useful model were constructed and helpful policy conclusions were derived from it, the idea that policy makers—politicians and their bureaucratic henchmen—would either care about it or be able to achieve the recommendations economists proffer them is so counterfactual as to be ludicrous. Politicians are not philosopher kings, not dedicated social engineers selflessly focused on the public interest (itself an elusive concept). They know how to gain election or appointment to public office, and hardly anything else. They give no greater damn about making the world a better place than I seriously seek to invent a perpetual motion machine or to prepare myself to join the Olympic synchronized swimming team. Devising other-worldly systems of equations as a basis for advising these clown princes is a hopeless endeavor, and the mainstream economists/idiot savants would serve the general public better if they did nothing at all, because all too often their exercises serve only one purpose—the purpose of providing seemingly plausible excuses for the counterproductive and even destructive policies the politicians and their bureaucratic bird dogs implement.

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So, in the late nineteenth century, despite the prevailing embrace of freedom, a growing group Americans set out, slowly and haltingly at first, to put their own forms of paternalism in place, beginning with campaigns against alcohol and tobacco, proceeding to mandatory-school-attendance, anti-child-labor, and women’s working-hours laws, and continuing until today, when governments seek to prohibit even forms of speech that some people dislike and perceive as harmful and to punish parents for letting children get out of their sight even in safe circumstances. Compared to the German paternalism of a century or more ago, the American paternalism of today extends much more broadly and deeply into social and political life, and its march shows no sign of losing momentum.

It seems to me, however, that this broad, multifaceted development ought to be called not paternalism, but maternalism. It seeks in many ways to give the state powers to do what for the most part mothers traditionally did: supervise, instruct, restrain, correct and, if need be, punish their children in order to turn them into decent, responsible adults. The difference, however—and it is a vitally important difference—is that today’s U.S. governments at every level impose their maternalism not only on children, but on everyone, as the saying goes, from the cradle to the grave. In short, contemporary maternalistic government in the USA treats the entire population as children. Small wonder that so many adults resent such treatment and bridle against it. After all, the whole point of becoming an adult is to leave the protective confines of the family, including one’s constantly monitoring mother, and enter a world in which one is free to act as one thinks best without oversight and instant correction by one’s mother, not to mention unrelated, distant strangers.

Moreover, the state that undertakes to replace mothers in guiding, monitoring, and punishing people has taken on a task that it cannot possibly accomplish successfully. The reason is not far to seek: whereas mothers generally do their mothering out of love and concern, the bureaucrats who take on this job simply check boxes in the paperwork and impose rules mindlessly without discretion and compassion, and certainly without the love required to do the job properly. It’s like replacing real mothers with enforcement machines, only worse, because a machine cannot be blamed for doing what it is designed and programmed to do, but a bureaucrat, being a human being, surely can and ought to be blamed for acting rigidly and mercilessly regardless of the consequences.

Governments cannot successfully replace mothers, and the century and a half of moving in this direction must be seen by dispassionate observers as among the greatest political and social blunders of the past five or six generations of Americans. It is long past time for a reversal of this misbegotten development. Government, if it is to exist at all, should be confined to its role as an enforcer of just rules of conduct along the lines of the natural law. Mothering must be returned to the mothers—and to the fathers who ought to assist and play an important role of their own in rearing children.

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