COVID and Leviathan.

AuthorHinkle, Barton
PositionFINAL WORD

In his seminal Crisis and Leviathan, Robert Higgs described the ratchet effect: Government expands during a period of upheaval. Afterward, government scales back some, but not all the way to the status quo ante. And when the next crisis comes, the process repeats itself.

Anyone who has a passing knowledge of history will recognize this pattern. The U.S. Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay--still very much operational, and occasionally controversial--was established during the Spanish-American War. Long after the Great Depression, a host of New Deal agencies and statutes that were created to combat it remain in place. Nearly two decades after 9/11, presidents continue to use the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force as a fig leaf to cover whatever military operation they wish to conduct. And so on.

More insidious than the institutions and policies born of these crises is the public acculturation to them. Chicago politician Rahm Emanuel famously observed: "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that [is] it's an opportunity to do things that you think you could not before." During a crisis, leaders will employ--and people will accept-government expansion that previously would have been out of the question. Soon everyone gets used to it. Eventually, it seems perfectly natural.

In 2001, a terrorist named Richard Reid tried to bomb a Paris-to-Miami flight using an explosive concealed in his shoe. Today, despite the absence of similar plots and the lottery-like odds against being killed in any terrorist attack, let alone an aviation-related one, Americans placidly remove their shoes and submit to full-body scans before boarding a flight. There is no great public outcry that the nation revisit the policy, let alone repeal it. The notion of reversing even older policies--perhaps shutting down a New Deal-era agency such as the Federal Housing Administration--borders on the unthinkable.

All this suggests post-coronavirus America will be less free and more comfortable about being less free. President Trump and state governors have sparred over who has the authority to issue and repeal shelter-in-place orders, social-distancing rules, and similar measures. But only a small minority of citizens have questioned what limits there are or should be on such authority. So far, given the sweeping infringement on basic liberties--suspending the constitutional right to peaceful assembly, forbidding retailers to sell items a...

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