Decentralization and Secession

Tho Bishop joins David Gornoski on A Neighbor's Choice.

Federal regulation of medical tests and testing needs to be ended and left to the states. And then state authority must be broken up and decentralized even further.

So far, when it comes to disarming the population, governments haven't been quite as terrible as one might have predicted during the COVID-19 panic.

“Whenever a single definite object is made the supreme end of the State…the State becomes for the time inevitably absolute.” We cannot allow combating a virus to overwhelm all other values in society.

The coronavirus demonstrates how crises become local.

The idea that a free and mostly privatized society would let pandemics rage unchecked is based on a crude caricature. The truth is that a free society offers flexibility and resilience that a centralized system lacks.

Buckley does an excellent job of outlining the problems with large centralized states. But he ends up calling for “secession lite,” that is to say, mere devolution of power to the states and localities. I wish he had moved in the other direction and explored the ways people can solve their problems without resort to the state.

The coronavirus crisis must cause us to rethink the idea governments can manage these situations. It is absolutely true that most private industry can be trusted, because the alternative for poor or unscrupulous providers is failure.

As the member states of the EU begin to shut their internal borders to their neighbors, we're reminded that state-to-state open borders in a place like the US do come with a downside.