For Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other comrades in the socialist vanguard of the Democratic Party, the coronavirus epidemic proves that the world needs socialism. For admirers of Western European universal health-care systems, the outbreak proves the need for the United States to build a Western European universal health-care system. (Like Italy’s?) For Joe Biden, the plague proves that the world needs Joe Biden. It is pretty easy to imagine Joe Biden demanding “More cowbell!” but that is what every political opportunist is saying right now. Like climate change or that infinitely plastic thing known as “national security,” the coronavirus epidemic is a policy palimpsest that political entrepreneurs will be writing over forever, or at least until something more convenient comes along. We know how that story goes, because we have heard it so many times before: Al-Qaeda flies airplanes into a building and Arianna Huffington gets to tell you what kind of car to drive.
For the trade protectionists and anti-globalists, the coronavirus epidemic makes the case against free trade. There are anti-trade Buchananites on the right — one of them, a former professor in the nation’s 67th-best business school named Peter Navarro, is Donald Trump’s director of trade and manufacturing policy — and there are fellow travelers on the left, too. Consider the case of Farhad Manjoo, who argues in the New York Times that the shortage of face masks for medical staff exposes “a very American set of capitalist pathologies” stemming from “the rise and inevitable lure of low-cost overseas manufacturing.” Borrowing from Benjamin Franklin, he laments, “For want of a 75-cent face mask, the kingdom was lost.”
There are many problems with that line of analysis, beginning with the fact that notwithstanding the angst and wailing in Washington, the kingdom has not been lost. The United States is experiencing an epidemic for which it was ill-prepared, and our lack of preparation is going to impose a heavy cost. Manjoo sees in this “capitalist pathologies.” Perhaps. But most of the hospitals in the United States are operated by nonprofits or by government. Must we detect “nonprofit pathologies”? The federal government, the states, the counties, and the cities have health departments. Few if any of these made anything resembling adequate preparations. Neither have the national health-care systems of the United Kingdom or many European countries. (Canada once again reminds us that North America has one reasonably well-governed country.) To insist that these developments speak to deficiencies in capitalism is not quite right...
No comments:
Post a Comment