Desperate Times Call For Disparate Measures

An empty Interstate 280 in Cupertino during the Friday morning rush hour, April 2020. Photo by Travis Wise, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

I recently wrote about some restaurateurs I used to work for who have been driven out of business by the pandemic, or more specifically the shutdowns associated with the pandemic. Most of the pushback I received on the piece centered around claims that liberals would just LOVE to help these poor downtrodden schmoes, but those big fat meanie-pants conservatives just won’t let them give out endless streams of money to people in need!!

Since it was such a common complaint I decided it was worthy of a response.

It is true that most conservatives and the vast majority of libertarians do not like or want the government to come riding to the rescue of businesses who have fallen on hard times. Conservatarians generally believe that in normal, everyday circumstances, when a business fails it’s usually because it was being run badly or had some fundamentally flawed premise to it or because the owners hadn’t adequately planned ahead for an uncertain future. The free market rewards smart and well prepared businessmen and un-smart unprepared businessmen should probably just get a job working for those guys rather than trying to go it alone. Nowhere is that more true than in the cutthroat restaurant business, where nearly 80% of restaurants close before their fifth anniversary. Restaurants fail too often for the taxpayers to fund failing ones.

But we are not living in normal, everyday circumstances. A shutdown where the government literally forbids businesses from opening for indefinite periods is not a normal occurrence in the free market. It’s not even an act of God the likes of which wise businessman could prepare for in advance. The government shutdowns are unprecedented; no one could have been reasonably expected to foresee them. 

One of the things people don’t seem to understand, or perhaps willfully misunderstand, about conservatarians is that most of us think it’s ok — indeed a necessity — for the government (not to mention corporations, the Catholic Church, polluting industrialists, and similar entities) to be held financially accountable for wrongs they’ve perpetuated. Fiscal responsibility for government agencies is a huge deal for those of us in the smaller government camp. It is not in any way anti-conservatarian to expect government to pay debts or penalties they have incurred, even though we might very much loathe the fact that they’ve incurred those debts and penalties to begin with.

Under normal circumstances, a person’s lungs are great at breathing. Even when we go swimming in deep water, we can survive it by not swimming in poor conditions or beyond our capabilities, by coming out of the water when we get tired, by making sure we’ve trained our bodies to go the distance. But if some government bureaucrats grabbed a swimmer who had been doing just fine on their own, and held them underwater for three minutes, they would be drowning. They would need to be rescued and resuscitated. They would likely need supplemental oxygen for a time. They might need to be on life support until their lungs healed and they’re capable of breathing on their own again. But their lungs worked before and after the incident. The injury they suffered had nothing to do with some fundamental inability of their lungs to function, and everything to do with solving a problem that was inflicted upon an innocent person just trying to live their life.

You can both believe that lungs work well under normal circumstances and still believe that a person who was forcibly drowned needs assistance. No one of any political stripe believes that a person who temporarily needs life support after a crime was committed against them should be denied it because of “survival of the fittest”. Even those who believe in survival of the fittest in ordinary circumstances are capable of differentiating between normal circumstances and extraordinary ones.

And so it goes for small businesses staying alive in the free market.

If the government messes something up (such as having a shutdown which possibly went on too long) I have absolutely no issue with them being required to pay compensation for the people their policies hurt. And that’s what stimulus money is! Paying businesses to stay afloat during the shutdown can coexist with smaller government philosophies, because it entails holding government accountable for the decisions it makes and the paths it pursues. A temporary, government-induced handicap is not the same as a business that cannot compete under ordinary circumstances, thus it isn’t corporate welfare.

Now, it may or may not be a good idea to hand out stimulus money and bailouts for a host of reasons, starting with the economic consequences of printing off and handing out money like it’s stolen from a game of Monopoly. We already owe a whole hell of a lot of money to some pretty shady customers and it may not be the best of ideas to end up owing them more. And clearly, the government money went to some people who didn’t deserve it while missing some people who did. We can certainly have a discussion on those merits and about the necessity of the ongoing shutdown itself, but to write off my piece on the basis of “conservatives refuse to give money hurr de durr” is both factually untrue, and a complete dodge of the many legitimate questions at hand.  

While I understand that some — I believe a minority, but some — on the right prefer powerful people to the unwashed plebes (because in their minds, they would BE one of the powerful people if not for pesky old government standing in the way), levying that criticism against ME is ludicrous. As some of you know, if I couldn’t have the libertarian world I hope for (and I can’t) I would prefer a wisely run non-Woke-Fascist socialism that respects individual liberties over the corrupt oligarchy we have now. But of course a wisely run non-Woke-Fascist socialist government that respects individual liberty is even more of a pipe dream than a libertarian one, so.

One of the biggest reasons I prefer liberty to socialism is that I happen to believe in normal circumstances – indeed, in MOST circumstances – that the free market is a darn good arbiter of which businesses should succeed and which ones shouldn’t. Businesses sink, businesses swim, and it shouldn’t be the government who decides that but the free market itself, for the free market is as impartial as water and cannot be corrupted in the same ways the government can. The free market can’t enact policies that benefit its friends’ businesses or hand out grant money to some businesses and industries at the expense of others. The free market cannot write laws to benefit multinational corporations and fatcat lobbyists at the expense of the little guy. Only government can do that.

Yet I simultaneously believe that in exceptional circumstances, circumstances in which the hand of government is actively interfering in the operation of the free market to start with, the rules must be different. This neither changes my views about how things should work ideally, nor does it make me an intellectually disingenuous hypocrite. The government broke it, the government buys it, because a limited government must be held responsible for the choices it makes even when I strongly dislike the choices it made.

It’s in the job description of the government to make hard calls sometimes, to sometimes have to put the needs of the many ahead of the needs of the few. But a limited, fiscally responsible government must pay just compensation for the things it buys and the things it takes, rather than going around seizing the means of production. 

In the case of the coronavirus, the government was buying businesses’ compliance with a quarantine, in order to save lives.

SHOW ME THE MONEY!