Wretchard:
As the northern hemisphere begins to emerge from the worst of the pandemic, political punditry is focusing on two issues: how to reopen the economy and how to decouple from China. The two subjects are related because a large part of the Western economy is joined at the hip with Beijing. To a substantial degree, China produces what America consumes. Each country's holdings in the other are enormous. They are bound by innumerable contracts, deals, projects and cross-posted personnel that are not easily severed.
This system of cross-dependency was consciously pursued to vaccinate the world against a repetition of the two world wars. However, globalization also significantly eroded the independence and freedom of action of individual nations, though not each to the same degree. It permitted asymmetries to arise between the more aggressive and secretive regimes at the expense of those which, perhaps naively, adhered more closely to the posted rules.
The Great Firewall of China, currency manipulation, the infiltration of network equipment, island grabbing in the South China Sea and technological espionage are examples of asymmetry which the great economic interests were willing to turn a blind eye to to preserve existing deals, though the populist uprising in the West served notice that things could not continue that way forever. When the coronavirus erupted in Wuhan in mid-December 2019 and Beijing misled the world to catastrophe, the model was no longer viable.
So what now?
Perhaps nothing will prove more difficult to salvage from the train wreck than individual rights, the fundamental building block of subsidiarity, which are being eroded at an unprecedented rate. The need to track the whereabouts of literally every citizen in the name of "contact tracing" the public means government will demand to know exactly where you've been and who you've ever met with. Scrupulous records will be kept on the public's biometric profile to make offices habitable again.
Or not. Death is preferable to the loss of liberty; and governments that insist on that deserve to be destroyed. George Washington fought his revolution during a smallpox epidemic. We don't have to accept the loss of freedom, as long as we are willing to accept the risk of death.
6 comments:
A small point in this large discussion: I'd like to see the return (I could have sworn we had them at some point) of the laws that require companies to tell me where their products are manufactured. I'm happy to take some of the burden of decoupling from Mainland Chinese goods but I need information to do so.
It's too bad I'm not on Twitter. I'd love to start a hashtag: #NoCCP - No Communist Chinese Products.
I'd love to start a hashtag: #NoCCP - No Communist Chinese Products.
I'd go with paired hashtags: #NoToPRC and #BuyRoC.
Eric Hines
I think this is mixed, but ultimately more bad than good. The tracing of citizens will cease soon, because there will be less emergency, and those effecting this are generally not evil fascists bent on enslaving us. Sure, go back to your regular lives now. We don't need to do this anymore. Only in an emergency, y'know? They are, however, naturally intrusive and do not see how their actions enable the more fascistic types.
But the seal has been broken, and this will be instituted for less cause next time. Rinse. Repeat.
I see the present wrangling over pandemic-related issues (both epidemiologic and economic) as an indicator that we are strongly trending from a high-trust to a low-trust society.
At the (admittedly not-achievable-given-human-nature) upper bound, a high trust society would look like this: public officials and other experts would clearly lay out what they know (and don't know) about the public health threats, and the best-available understanding of how to address them -- all while trusting the public will neither ignore the possible risks, nor panic over the information. The public, on learning of the risks, would voluntarily agree to the official recommendations, even if the burden was heavy, understanding that the response required a significant public cooperation, but with the understanding that they could trust the public officials and experts to not extend those burdens any longer than necessary (and likewise trusting that no public official would make a temporary expediency into a permanent restriction on freedoms).
A low-trust society looks a lot like what we have today: Public officials and experts withholding information to avoid public panic. (Also, withholding information about mask use to protect the supply for their own use.) Using emergency declarations to further political agendas. Spreading rumors to discredit other public officials or experts. Regarding any discovered uncertainty about facts or data as proof of intentional deceit.
In short, IF we had reason to trust each other, we wouldn't need to worry that pandemic-response measures - even extreme measures - were the death knell of personal liberty. It's pretty clear that we don't live in that world anymore.
It's pretty clear that we don't live in that world anymore.
We never did. As a man said a few years ago, our republic was built for a virtuous people. Humans aren't particularly virtuous. We're not particularly bad, either, but "not so bad" does not approximate "virtuous."
That's what makes, in politics, the various balancings and divisions of power formally built into our structure so important, and in our economy a free market capitalism that balances our individual self interests so important. The vector sum of each of those (and both of them), can they be preserved, works out to a fairly adequate outcome.
Eric Hines
The most dangerous thing in a preparation style disaster or collapse, are other human things.
All the AR 15 pea shooter ammo in the world, plus lethal hand to hand skills, can't fight off billions of cockroaches after all.
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