How the Libertarian Right Plans to Profit From the Pandemic — Quinn Slobodian

Most people would read the pandemic as a sign that populations and nation states should band together, and for the people “at the head of the rope” to pull even harder, to use the metaphor favoured by the French president, Emmanuel Macron. But there are others who see matters quite differently. They spy opportunity in the crisis, and wager that we might be able to ride the wave of the pandemic into a new tomorrow, where the virus shatters the global map – and undermines the power of democratic nation states.

The US is ground zero for this type of thinking. Across the country, regions have broken up into “compacts”, with states competing against each other for life-saving ventilators and PPE. The atmosphere is one of competitive federalism, where states are reconfigured as economic units bidding in a marketplace....

In the established mode of disaster capitalism, Laffer and Moore’s analysis appears to see the pandemic as a way to compel “anti-growth” states to adopt ever lower tax rates in order to attract mobile capital and labour. It suggests those who resist will not be bailed out by redistribution from the central government, but left to languish in a deserved economic depression. The effect is reminiscent of social Darwinism, applied as a philosophy of government.

You probably know this already, but this post fills in some details and names names. You can't tell the players without a scorecard.

The post is also significant in that it is posted on the blog of the Stigler Center at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

ProMarket — The blog of the Stigler Center at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business
How the Libertarian Right Plans to Profit From the Pandemic
Quinn Slobodian | an associate professor of history at Wellesley College, US