Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

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Introduction

This is a handsome little book. With the approach of Christmas, I suggest it would make good presents—for loved ones and perhaps not-so-loved ones.

This short book is a collection of essays written and published during the Coronavirus Panic of 2020. Some of these had a wide circulation. One was viewed, on the main site where it appeared, more than a hundred thousand times. None was viewed fewer than five thousand times. I have, moreover, several writers for the Establishment media on my distribution list. Though, since I came to their notice during the Iraq War, the rule is that I can be copied but never acknowledged, I was pleased to see arguments and sometimes whole sentences reproduced for a still larger readership. Therefore, if short, the content of the essays has made some contribution to the British debate on the Coronavirus. This, I think, justifies my publishing them now as a collection.

My general argument is that the Coronavirus Panic should be divided under two headings. The first is the Virus itself as a medical fact and the immediate responses. The second is a set of changes already evident and sometimes advanced before the March of 2020, but that have now been greatly accelerated. Of these, the second is by far the more important. The first, even so, is of interest in its own right.

The Virus has not been all that we were told it would be. Last March, much of the world was ordered into indefinite lockdown on the grounds that we faced the greatest pandemic since the Spanish Flu of a century ago. For weeks in my own country, the BBC filled the television screens with statements by scared, sweating politicians, and lifted all restraint from its own hyperventilating staff. Now, as I write in the middle of September, we can be sure that it killed no more people than a seasonal influenza, and that most of its victims were very old or had been already weakened by some other condition. We can be sure it killed no more than seasonal influenza. Given the questionable definition of Coronavirus deaths, it may have killed many fewer.

I know that pandemic infections often come in several waves, and second waves can be more deadly than the first. But the second wave we are now said to be entering is evidenced by infections rather than deaths, and these infections are counted and published in ways more questionable than the counting and publishing of the earlier alleged deaths. I do not know what will have happened by Christmas. I suspect, however, that nothing much will have happened.

I have no fixed idea of what caused the panic. I am told that the Coronavirus was a bioweapon that escaped from a government laboratory. If it was, I can imagine that political leaders all across the world were taken aside by their own scientists, who were working on something similar, and told of the coming apocalypse. I lack the scientific understanding to judge the truth of this claim. But, if true, it would explain the panic. It would also justify the panic, so far as no one might have known for sure how infectious and how deadly this bioweapon was.

I am more inclined, though, to believe that the panic was a universal hysteria just waiting to be realised. The world at the beginning of this year was in a similar moral state to the world in 1914. There had been a generation of rising prosperity and of rising discontent. Some groups had benefitted out of proportion to their numbers and believed merit. If only relatively, others had fallen behind. Some believed the progress had not been fast enough, and that it could be hastened by various institutional changes, others that it was bad in its effects, and that it should be at least slowed. In 1914, all these discordant energies were channelled—both by deliberate policy and by popular enthusiasm—into a catastrophic war. This year, they found their outlet in the Coronavirus. Since I am making the same point, I might as well quote Marx:

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. I will only add that, on the real stage of world affairs, farce is always preferable to tragedy. Facemasks are better than gasmasks. Better the statistical mirage of last spring than the genuine casualties of Verdun and the Somme.

Enough, though, of the first heading: I pass to the second. Whatever happens that anyone thinks untoward can and will be explained as part of some conspiracy. I have no doubt that, if an asteroid fell into the Pacific, there are those who would claim it had been brought down for the enrichment of the bankers, or the Jews, or the Illuminati, or the shape-shifting lizards. When the panic began, I read that the Coronavirus had been engineered to thin the world population. When it failed to thin any population in any worthwhile degree, attention shifted to the disproportionate response. This was explained as a plan to make ordinary people into impoverished slaves of the New World Order. I find this as unlikely as the earlier claims.

In all times and places, ruling classes have endeavoured to preside over populations of the unthinking and obedient, and to extract whatever surplus they can by a combination of taxes and artificial rents. Once a system of rule is settled, disruptions are as likely to reduce the surplus as to increase the share extracted. Disruptions, then, are avoided. They mostly happen because of some external shock, or because of the unavoidable response to an external shock, or because the ruling class itself is falling apart. The only difference now is that the ruled must consume as well as produce.

I cannot see what interest group in the ruling class, political or economic, has benefitted from the sudden and spectacular economic collapse of the past six months. Almost every big business is making a loss. The banks appear to be insolvent. All the main governments are in or drifting towards a fiscal crisis, and their most likely response will be a default on debts that are owned or managed by the rich. The incompetence the authorities in my own country have shown is even bringing on a crisis of legitimacy, a crisis similar in its nature to the strains that emerged in the warring powers after 1916.

As for the beneficiaries, these are most likely to be ordinary people. I accept that the authorities appear to want a softer version of the Chinese social credit system, in which they can watch us and direct us in ways that would have been shocking before last March. I also accept that many ordinary people are about to lose their jobs or businesses if these are in the affected sectors. At the same time, millions of people have been sent off to work from home, and millions of children have had a six-month break from the prison that is school. People have had a taste of freedom. They have had to carry on working and studying, but they have been working and studying in conditions more of their own making. Many of us, indeed—those of us in particular who can use modern information technology—are coming out of the lockdowns considerably better off in every sense that matters.

This decentralising of work and learning were growing facts before last March, but are now set to become established facts perhaps a decade before they otherwise might have. Politicians may dream of a Panopticon State. But their dream will beat unanswered on the closed doors of the homes where much activity will have relocated.

In the main content of this book, I speak about the relocalising of production. As a free market libertarian, I am supposed to speak favourably of global free trade. I do speak favourably of it. But I am also aware of the structures of global government raised up in the past generation to manage this trade—structures that we do not fully understand and over which we have no effective control. And I am aware of the new technologies that are able to give affordable costs without an international division of labour. If there will inevitably be losses in the new emphasis on home production, these will not be so great as they were after 1914. They will be balanced by the weakening of global institutions like the European Union and the World Trade Organisation.

I am even relaxed about the endless talk of a “green recovery.” Of course, I dismiss all the apocalyptic warnings as at best nonsense. I have no doubt the more stupid or insane among our rulers are itching to make everyone but themselves into vegans with unwashed hair and unheated homes. The logic of the technologies they are funding says otherwise. For the past century and more, we have relied for our energy needs on large and extended networks of distribution. These have taken us close to the tyrannical systems of control that Karl Wittfogel called “hydraulic civilisation.” So far as we generate our own electricity in our homes, and so far as we grow more economical in our use of resources, there will be less of an excuse for the maternalistic government we have known and more of which is intended for us.

In summary, I take a wholly optimistic view of what has happened this year. The Coronavirus has not so far been the great killer we were told it would be. If the frequently despotic responses were and are unwelcome, the effects in the longer term will be liberating. I could have allowed the essays republished here to have their effect at the time of writing, and then to languish unregarded on my personal website. Instead, I assemble them in a book that may, if I am wrong, bring me into considerable and avoidable ridicule. But I do not think I am wrong. For this reason, I commend this short book to my readers.

 

Sean Gabb
Deal
September 2020

 

Reprinted from Website of Sean Gabb.