All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
All right, you guys, introducing the great Ted Galen Carpenter, Senior Fellow in Security Studies at Cato and Contributing Editor at the American Conservative Magazine, and he's got a great one here at TAC, liberty and the coronavirus, not an either or proposition.
Welcome back to the show, Ted.
How are you, sir?
Thank you very much, Scott.
It's great to be back with you.
Very happy to have you here.
And I suppose you and yours are all hunkered down there over Lakeway, huh?
Well, I'm keep a relatively normal life at the margins, at least.
But the authorities keep shutting everything down.
For instance, I was able to play a couple of rounds of golf over the past two weeks.
But now the affected golf courses are pretty well shut down, unless you're willing to carry your own bags and walk the course.
Because of course, golf carts apparently might be breeding grounds for coronavirus.
Well, being 72 years old, walking an 18-hole course is a little bit of a challenge for me.
You know, yeah, it's golf for you, and it's something for everybody else, too.
They got us all on lockdown.
And well, I guess I'll just say for my part, I'm the law around here.
And my wife keeps coming up with reasons to leave the house, and I keep not letting her.
And that's because she has lupus.
I might be willing to take a few more risks, but she's immunocompromised.
And so the rule around here is we have to definitely not get this thing.
You mentioned you're over the age of 70.
You better not get it either.
And so, yeah, I wonder just how you feel about the clampdown, and you can take it whichever direction you want, local, state, federal, the different degrees of coercion involved and the rest here.
I think this may be a classic case of a cure being even worse than the disease.
I take the coronavirus outbreak very seriously.
And again, I am not only elderly, but immunocompromised.
So I exercise caution.
But to me, that's my decision to make.
I don't want elected officials or government bureaucrats issuing one-size-fits-all diktats covering citizens and just constraining every aspect of their liberty.
And that's what we're really beginning to see.
The initial measures at least made some sense, for example, getting sponsors to postpone large-scale events where you're going to have thousands of people together.
That was not a bad idea.
But we're now getting edicts that groups of less than 10 should not assemble.
I think there are a couple of jurisdictions where they're trying to get it down to no more than two people.
I guess if you have a married couple and a child, that could prove to be a problem, too.
But this shows signs of panic and overreaction at this point.
And worst of all, I don't see a path out of this in terms of public policy.
Our so-called leaders have not made it clear just what standards have to be met before we can begin to get back to normal, whether it has to happen all at once or, as President Trump apparently has in mind, doing it in stages, freeing up the areas of the country that are at relatively low risk, and then moving on to the higher risk areas.
The lack of communication on this has been extraordinary.
Yeah.
And now, so back to the original point about the voluntary basis and all of that.
You're making good decisions, but what about all the dummies out there who just aren't?
And this has always, I think, kind of been a dilemma among libertarians.
It's something that different libertarian theorists over the years have spent quite a bit of time actually working on, right, is public health crises.
And what about people who, you know, they may not even deliberately be, you know, meaning to spread the virus around, but they don't even know they're sick and they're going around engaging in risky behaviors and they're putting other people's lives in jeopardy.
It's not the same thing as robbing a store, but it's somewhere on the continuum there.
What's to be done?
I understand the argument, but it's also true that that has been perhaps the most popular excuse for restricting liberties on so many subjects that, well, we can't let people smoke marijuana because other people who do that move on to harder drugs, they ruin their lives, they commit crimes and so on.
So therefore, everybody's liberty has to be greatly restricted.
I don't know if the proponents of that approach actually believe it or they just use it as a pretext.
But the effect is the same, a dramatic reduction in fundamental liberties for people who are behaving in a responsible manner, or at least in a manner that doesn't harm other people.
This is a little bit of a tougher call.
And governments have had the authority for a very, very long time to quarantine people who have certain types of extremely contagious diseases, sometimes even quarantining entire homes where the family member has a particular disease.
But I don't think we've ever seen a situation where entire businesses are ordered shut down, entire areas are declared off limits.
That's what we're seeing here, the kind of near total lockdown that truly is unprecedented in American history.
Well, have we ever been faced with a situation where the hospitals are likely to be completely overwhelmed and we're going to end up triaging people to die out in the parking lot because it's just too many people at once?
Well, I think there certainly has been at least one case of that in 1918 with the Spanish flu pandemic.
And historians differ on just how well that was handled.
It certainly caused a tremendous amount of difficulties.
And that was a disease that had an extraordinarily high mortality rate.
One of the questions that still has to be answered about the coronavirus outbreak is just how large the mortality rate is going to be.
It started out at truly panic levels where the assumption was, and the early data tended to support it, the fatality rate might be as high as four or 5% of any of the people getting that disease.
Now, certainly in the United States and most other developed countries, it looks like it's near 1% and dropping.
So we may end up eventually with this disease, unpleasant as it is, dangerous as it is, not being much worse than seasonal flu outbreaks.
And we don't shut down the entire country over those episodes, nor should we.
I don't think you could even have a modern interconnected economy functioning if you tried to do that.
We also have to ask, what happens if this isn't an isolated incident, that this virus, like many flu-like viruses, ebbs and flows with the seasons?
And we'll find this back when the next winter arrives.
Are we going to shut down the entire society, the entire economy again?
That's something that has tremendous economic costs, not to mention the costs in terms of the impact on individual rights, individual liberties.
Well, a couple of things there.
First of all, it's really hard to do all the statistics and all of that with the different countries and the different age ranges and all the different things.
But it sure seems like even, say, reports out of New York right now, where the hospitals are getting right up to the limit of overwhelmed here.
We don't see that with the flu, with that many people being hospitalized at once, where the hospitals themselves go into crisis and that kind of thing, right?
Well, we do come close.
This is getting, again, to be an especially severe event in certain areas.
But we also have to realize the New York City metropolitan area is truly the epicenter of this epidemic in the United States.
Over half the cases are in the greater New York metropolitan area.
The rest of the country, for the most part, you're not seeing that kind of strain on the health care system.
A few places like Seattle and Chicago have had strains, but nothing like the impact on the health care system in and around New York.
Well, the hawks are going to say that's because of the clampdown, right?
They might say that, but we don't know why the difference.
I think one of the reasons it's not accidental that New York is the most densely populated in the United States is they're going to spread faster and to more people in that setting than it would, let's say, out in the middle of Nebraska.
I don't think you're going to see a coronavirus epidemic shutting down hospitals or dramatic hospitals in places like that.
That's not very likely.
And we have to have policies that are flexible enough to deal with different situations, different conditions.
Again, not a one-size-fits-all policy.
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So now let's talk about some of the instances in history that you mentioned here when it comes to the Ratched Effect, Robert Higgs Ratched Effect, and the growth of government power in the name of this, that, and the other emergency here.
I think in here you mentioned that when we're talking about the horrible persecution of the heroic Julian Assange, that's Woodrow Wilson's Espionage Act left over from World War I.
And there's a great many other examples where we're still suffering under the tyranny created by temporary emergencies in the days of even your grandparents, much less mine.
Right.
And I think that is one of the biggest dangers in terms of the reaction to the coronavirus crisis.
As I indicated in the article in the American Conservative, I mean, we're still haunted by the Espionage Act of 1917.
You know, that's the statute that authorities use to prosecute those who leak classified information.
And prosecutors keep flirting with the idea of even prosecuting journalists for printing such material.
With Assange, they've forged another argument, kind of a hybrid argument, that Assange was not really a journalist.
He was a co-conspirator with people leaking classified documents, people who are not given any kind of guarantees that they won't be prosecuted.
So they've kind of delegitimized Assange as a journalist and then did that to justify a prosecution.
And of course, the huge danger is not just to Assange, which is bad enough.
I agree with you.
I think you ought to be getting a medal for disclosing illegal actions on the part of the U.S. government, sometimes exposing downright war crimes.
But even if he were not an admirable figure, the government can expand that and delegitimize any journalist, any critic that it chooses.
And you can bet that will be part of the strategy going forward.
We have so many other things that started out as temporary measures or emergency measures and have become part of the permanent expansion of the Patriot Act being a huge example of how governmental power exploded because of a public panic, a public overreaction to the 9-11 terrorist attacks.
And we have numerous other examples throughout our history where governments have exploited crises to expand their power.
And there's always a major residue of that increase that never goes away.
And we have to be very careful that that doesn't happen again.
I think there's a tremendous danger that it will happen in the aftermath of the coronavirus crisis.
Well, and as you said, this could be a permanent crisis from now on.
And I think to answer your hypothetical question earlier about, well, what if this is just seasonal and we end up suffering through the coronavirus season along with the flu every year and this kind of thing?
It seems like at that point, they would have to call off these levels of restriction.
This is to try to see if they can nip it in the bud and prevent that from happening.
But if we are going through this again next year, it seems like the consensus will be that, geez, we are just stuck with this virus the way we are with the flu.
And we'll have as many vaccines and treatments as possible, as many ventilators as we can get, but that we won't be able to do this kind of shutdown to try to flatten that curve and prevent this kind of thing if we already know that it just can't work and that the virus is truly here to stay.
But I mean, the other side of that argument would be that it's worth it to try this time and see if we can really, you know, isolate this thing and knock it all the way out the way at which worked with SARS, for example, previously.
The question is, though, what is the not just economic cost of this strategy, but but the human cost?
You know, how many careers are going to be wrecked?
How many lives are going to be wrecked because of the virtual shutdown of the economy?
And there are health consequences to that.
We know for a fact that stress related diseases and consequences increase during periods of severe economic downturns.
Suicide rates go up.
Cardiovascular events, fatal cardiovascular events go up.
So it isn't a sense consequence.
It's the effect on basic liberties.
It's the effect on on health.
There are always tradeoffs.
And we have to decide whether this tradeoff is is a very disruptive.
This will end up being to the economy, to human lives, to our society.
And again, if if we get a recurrence, I think you're right.
There is no way we can do this again.
This is a one shot option.
Yeah, and after that, what I would expect are focused restrictions, in other words, people who are vulnerable, elderly, those with underlying conditions, that they would be forcibly quarantined and and the rest of the society would go on as something close to normal.
Hmm.
Well, and yeah, we don't know yet about the effects on herd immunity or whether, you know, for people who have had it and recovered, they're they're just beginning testing right now to see how immune they are to further infection.
Of course, with the flu, the flu virus mutates all the time.
And even if it didn't, I think it's established that immunity to the flu after getting it still only lasts a little while before it goes away again.
And that may be because of the mutations.
But I'm not I'm no epidemiologist.
But anyway, it's it could be a real problem, of course.
And then, you know, on the on the lost liberty thing, one of the things that they're talking about a lot now that I think is really important is what was kind of a revelation.
Some of us knew this and predicted this with our cynicism back in the 1990s, when cell phones started to become so ubiquitous in the first place that they're triangulating all of our signals and keeping track of everywhere we go.
And we know from the Edward Snowden revelations that they keep a database of everywhere our phone has been for five years, going back to see who all we've associated with and so forth.
And they're now blatantly around the world talking about the intelligence agencies using this data in order to protect us from the virus.
But it's really the normalization of tracking every single one of us around like a package.
Yeah, I mean, this has been a a big boost to the surveillance state generally.
It's also encouraging some really awful attitudes.
People are being encouraged by authorities.
I know this was in one case, I believe, the St. Louis area, where people were encouraged to report their neighbors if they were violating the social distancing or people who were supposed to be in their homes unless they were on essential business and they appear to be out just enjoying themselves.
You know, that's encouraging an East German mentality.
And I don't think we want that kind of development in this country that that will really undermine the entire culture of freedom.
If you get the encouragement of being a police state snitch, that that's your highest role as a citizen.
It's disgusting that the authorities would even encourage that.
Absolutely.
And in fact, we've heard from all across the country, people are calling 911 when they hear their neighbor cough and this kind of thing.
It's going completely overboard.
In fact, Americans are already like this, right?
I mean, they call 911 if their chicken McNuggets are cold.
They call 911 if the wrong guy wins the American Idol contest or whatever.
People are completely crazy about what the role of the police is in this society anyway.
And so this is completely driving them over the edge.
We've already seen.
But now, so let me ask you this, because you're talking about the economy.
And unfortunately, I tried to quit Twitter, but they keep pulling me back in and I just can't help it.
And I see there's so many of these takes on the right say things like, well, you know, we got to save the economy.
And so if some people have to die, then how much is a human life worth anyway?
And this kind of thing.
And then on the other side, on the left, they're saying that, oh, yeah, sure.
Just sacrifice lives for the cult of the almighty dollar and the Wall Street banks and this kind of thing.
And there doesn't seem to be much of a recognition on either side of, you know, kind of the reality of what you were talking about, that when we say shutting down the economy, that costs human lives, too.
And the question is, how many lives are you sacrificing in this direction in order to save that many lives in the other direction?
And of course, government doesn't know the answer to this question, even though they're the ones in charge of deciding for the rest of us.
That's exactly right.
I mean, there are always tough tradeoffs.
And some people don't want to recognize that they want to elevate one value above all others and act as though, well, if my preference succeeds, that's all that matters.
Let's not look at any downsides to the policy I advocate.
And I think that's an attitude that is not very constructive at all.
What I would like to see at a minimum, since our authorities are kind of enjoying their power and running amok, at least indicate how we return to something resembling normal.
What kind of standards?
Do we have to see a decline in the number of new cases of coronavirus, for example?
If so, how much of a decline?
For how long?
We are getting next to nothing in the way of statements or plans for how we transition out of the state of emergency.
And that's, I think, a dereliction of leadership.
If these people who are elected to public office or who are high-level appointees want to assert their leadership, then they better answer to the public about all of these kinds of questions.
Yep.
And, of course, the answer is because there are no Ted Carpenters in charge, just a bunch of Trumps and Warrens and people like this, that it's just like Bovard says, when the Republicans and the Democrats fight, it's like watching drunks fight in a bar.
They swing and they miss.
And so Donald Trump's going to try to send everybody back to work sooner, because that's what Goldman Sachs wants, or something like that.
I actually had a friend email me, said he got an email from Wells Fargo that said, congratulations, your deposit limit has just been raised.
Because, of course, his $1,200 check is really just a welfare payment to Wells Fargo rather than to him, the check he's got coming, and this kind of thing.
You'll have that on the right, where they're saying, everybody go back to work faster, sooner, regardless of the consequences for the collateral damage and all that.
And then you'll have, on the other side, these people who refuse to accept the reality of scarcity and where capital comes from, or any of these things, and who just think that government and the economy can be run by magic wishes, and that if only we just abandon capitalism and put Congress in charge of all the decisions from now on, then we can all just stay home through Christmas, I guess, and figure out later when is the appropriate time for people to go back to work.
And so it doesn't sound like there's going to be much reason in between those kind of extremes at all.
Yeah, one of the precedents that worries me the most is, well, this is working pretty well with the government in charge of everything, giving orders to other players in the economy, and so on.
That's a very unhealthy attitude.
You know, I would just quibble with one point that you raised.
With the drunks fighting in the bar, very often they don't end up hitting each other, but they very often end up hitting or slamming into bystanders.
Right.
That's what I'm afraid with the political disputes that we have here in the United States about this issue or about a lot of other issues.
The people getting hurt are the people just on the sidelines.
They're not active participants in the fight.
Right.
And there's no accountability for the people who are in charge and making the wrong calls either.
Never on any issue, it seems.
Yeah.
Think of all the people in charge of foreign policy who have gotten us into one dumb war after another over several decades.
How many of them are discredited?
Yeah, and look at the guys who've been running the CDC and the FDA this year, who should have all been hanged from lampposts and replaced by others after their massive failures in deploying the testing.
There's a million ways that they were preventing people from testing each other and helping each other at the outbreak of this crisis.
That's one of the great scandals of this crisis.
How the CDC and the FDA especially got in the way, impeded needed actions for days or weeks in some cases.
And that is shameful.
And you're right.
There should be consequences.
There should be careers coming to an end as a result of that.
Well, listen, Ted, I'm so sorry I'm out of time here, but let me just tell you how much I appreciate your cool head here.
And I'm so glad that you're keeping it and continue writing about this because we definitely need to hear from reasonable men like yourself.
Well, thank you very much, Scott.
And hopefully this will be just one disagreeable footnote in history, not the start of the collapse of American liberty.
That is the real danger.
I think we do have to worry about.
And that is all of our responsibility as well to make sure.
So thank you, sir, for doing your part.
Appreciate it a lot.
Thank you very much, Scott.
All right, you guys, that is the heroic Ted Galen Carpenter over at the Cato Institute.
And have I ever told you guys how much I love every single member of the foreign policy department over at the Cato Institute?
These guys are the world's greatest heroes.
And where would we be without them?
Dead already, probably.
That's the great Ted Galen Carpenter.
And you can find this piece at TAC, Liberty and the Coronavirus.
Not an either or proposition.
