by Richard Schulman
Governors are basking in the powers they have assumed in response to the COVID-19 (Wuhan virus) pandemic. Deciding whether to keep a state under lock-down comes close to being a life-or-death decision resting in the governors’ hands. But states vary greatly between urban and rural districts, different rates of infection, available medical facilities, and ages and states of health of their residents. A policy of One Size Fits All will inevitably be a bad policy. One size doesn’t fit all. That’s why decisions regarding quarantines, shelter-in-place commands, school, business, and other re-openings should be devolved to mayors, county commissioners, doctors and hospital boards, businesses, and individuals.
Subsidiarity
Governors don’t have the requisite knowledge about local conditions any more than the president of the US does. There’s a sensible way to resolve the trade-offs between the health of citizens and the health of the economy needed to keep them sheltered and fed: subsidiarity.
In the words of the Acton Institute:
One of the key principles of Catholic social thought is known as the principle of subsidiarity. This tenet holds that nothing should be done by a larger and more complex organization which can be done as well by a smaller and simpler organization. In other words, any activity which can be performed by a more decentralized entity should be. This principle is a bulwark of limited government and personal freedom. It conflicts with the passion for centralization and bureaucracy characteristic of the Welfare State.
Hayek and the dispersion of knowledge
Not only is it the case that Catholic social thought, as Acton notes, mirrors the Framers’ outlook in the Declaration and the US Constitution, it also accords well with the thoughts expressed in one of the most famous and influential essays by a social scientist in the 20th century, Friedrich Hayek’s 1945 essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” In it he discusses why central planning doesn’t work: there is no way the central planners could possibly have access to the knowledge that is dispersed among all the citizens:
Today it is almost heresy to suggest that scientific knowledge is not the sum of all knowledge. But a little reflection will show that there is beyond question a body of very important but unorganized knowledge which cannot possibly be called scientific in the sense of knowledge of general rules: the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place. It is with respect to this that practically every individual has some advantage over all others because he possesses unique information of which beneficial use might be made, but of which use can be made only if the decisions depending on it are left to him or are made with his active coöperation.
Xi Jinping’s China is the locus classicus of how deadly government by central planners can be. Ignoring — nay, suppressing — the local knowledge of doctors in Wuhan, the Beijing dictatorship gave the world the COVID-19 epidemic. We don’t need fifty little Xi Jinpings, however temporary and well-intentioned, in our state capitols.
Avoidable citizen rebellions
Governors, not to mention the US president and officials at the CDC and FDA, need to constantly bear in mind Hayek’s warning to not fall into the planner’s false belief of having knowledge of local circumstances that in point of fact they do not have and could not possibly have. One size does not fit all, nor should there be one policy for an entire state, even one as small as Rhode Island. If governors keep this in mind and devolve as many decisions to local authorities and individuals as feasible, the growing rebellions of citizens against governors’ coercive exercise of powers will quickly cease.
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