LRB Vol. 42 No. 7 · 2 April 2020
Too early or too late?
David Runciman on political timing and the pandemic
But it isn’t just Johnson. In the fights about crisis management we have all been following our political instincts, even when we insist we’re just talking about the science. It’s true that there has been a big difference between the response of the British government – which appears genuinely to have been guided by the scientific advice it received – and that of the US government, which for a long time seemed to be operating on a wing and a prayer. Yet there’s no such thing as simply doing what the science says. This is partly because the science itself is political – how could it not be, when so much of it is the science of human behaviour? […]
If you believe that most citizens are more or less capable of doing what is asked of them at the appropriate time then a more interventionist approach will almost certainly save lives in the long run. This is a real argument, based on real evidence. But it still starts with an ‘if’.
Hayek was wrong about the slippery slope. If planning inevitably led to public demands for more and more preferential treatment and therefore to more and more planning we would hardly be where we are today, trying to deal with a crisis for which we are so ill-prepared, with government bureaucracies stripped of many of the capabilities they are going to need. But the reason we’re in this situation is that Hayek won the argument. Some Western democracies elected Hayekians to government, beginning with Thatcher, who once banged down a copy of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty in a meeting and declared: ‘This, gentlemen, is what we believe!’ The direction of travel over the last forty years has been in the Hayekians’ favour: towards deregulation, market competition, global interdependence and winner-take-all economies. The 2008 financial crisis arrested the momentum of that movement but didn’t fundamentally alter its course. Now, though, the future may be more open to lasting change. If this crisis does represent a turning point towards the assertion of greater government control over economic outcomes it won’t be because we were on that slippery slope all along. It will be because – as Hayek claimed to believe, without ever seeming to think the lesson applied to him – politics is never predictable.