Some less common (or perhaps not) arguments against central planning
Our experience this last year has certainly reawakened the libertarian fires within me, which thing I thought was not supposed to happen at age 37, but here we are. I think it was Canadian theologian Douglas Farrow I was reading recently expressing his dismay that forces (like religious leaders) that should have it within themselves to articulate opposition to our health-technocracy has been largely silent on the topic - indeed the only consistent resistance seems to come from the libertarian right which, unfortunately for him, is a movement that exists in serious numbers only in the United States. (He makes some of that point here.)
Just a quick post today - first, one must sympathize with Martin Kulldorff, infectious disease expert and Harvard Medical School professor.
If us “common folk” are frustrated by such rules, how much more frustrating it must be to actually be an expert in the field, and see your own judgment (and regarding your own children) overruled by people who are not experts and who you know are acting irrationally, but you can’t do anything about it. This is such a 21st century, where-we-have-rules-for-every-little-thing, problem. (Maybe we should stop having rules for every little thing?) But this tweet does illustrate a couple of the problems with central planning.
Coercion replaces a requirement to convince. If leaders want you to do X, but cannot order you to do it, then they have to do the work to convince you that X is a good idea. Many side benefits flow from the need to convince. Leaders must do the work to develop their own personal understanding of the topic, which thing I am convinced many of the people writing the rules right now do not have. They must deal seriously with objections to the case they are making and answer them - just ignoring them no longer works. They would have to actually answer Martin Kulldorff (they can’t). And they must demonstrate a respect for the populace, treating it as intelligent adults to be reasoned with rather than herd animals to be ordered around. In short leaders who cannot coerce are forced to become better leaders, or they don’t get what they want - incentives matter in human behavior and that is a good incentive.
Central planning means the same rules for everyone - but the same rules don’t make sense for everyone. OK so this is like the most common argument against central planning. But it has also been my drumbeat for months. Even if they were hypercompetent, a few people cannot possibly write rules that are reasonable for the individual lives of each of millions of people, because they do not know what those millions of lives look like. And so what you get is overly broad rules like “all children must wear masks”, without even the extremely reasonable exception of “unless they’ve had and recovered from COVID”. It’s absurd, but it’s an absurdity that automatically and always follows in large, centrally-planned societies.
Let me give you one more - I am not a video watcher myself usually, but it is worth your two minutes to watch this video, from a Roman Catholic priest in Ohio who is, basically, arguing against central planning. (Thanks to Twitter-friend Mitchell Scott for sending it to me.)
What does he say (and yes, this will sound almost pulled straight from The Road to Serfdom, if you’ve read that book)? Basically:
Central planning means a few people deciding for everyone what is considered more valuable, and what is considered less valuable. How we respond to COVID-19 is treated as a medical question, and the properly credentialed people in power are the experts, so we should just do what they say. But it isn’t just a medical question. It’s a question of what we value. And in making those judgments, actually the people are the experts. Because it is their lives. They are not medical experts, but when it comes to judging what matters most in their own lives, they are the experts. Ohio has been run as if it is a hospital… except worse, because it’s a hospital with the concept of “informed consent of the patient” deleted. Why do hospitals require the informed consent of patient? Because the patients are medical experts? No, by and large, they aren’t. But they are experts in their own lives.