From the beginning of the panic-induced shutdown of much of what we call “the economy,” many of us were wondering if the cure might not become worse than the coronavirus disease.
The ramifications of the near-total curtailment of the production, processing and movement of goods and services? Potentially disastrous.
The notion that politicians and bureaucrats inhabit that sweet spot which allows them to distinguish “essential” from “non-essential” work activities? Dubious at best.
It smacks of what F.A. Hayek called “the fatal conceit” and “the pretense of knowledge.” The consequences of the shutdown have from the first suggested a tragedy in the making.
On Tuesday, The Washington Examiner’s Emma Colton reported on a tweet: “Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie warned that the United States could face food shortages due to the ‘brittle’ supply chain, bankrupting farmers and forcing them to euthanize livestock.”
Massie does not mince words: “We are weeks, not months, away from farmers euthanizing animals that would have been sold for meat/food. Also, fruits and vegetables are going to rot in the fields.”
The late psychiatrist Thomas Szasz liked to use a word applicable here: iatrogenic. Doctor-caused.
The insistence that President Trump follow every jot and tittle of advice from Dr. Anthony Fauci and the federal medical establishment may provide an object lesson on why we must not trust “doctors” and “scientists” to make policy alone.
They specialize.
And our commercial society (as Adam Smith called “the economy”) is the very opposite: a veritable cosmos of human interaction.
Which makes the politicization of medical doctoring potentially quite fatal, as Rep. Massie warns.
Just ask anyone who’s lived through Communism’s command economy.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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