It’s weird to see Americans frame the re-opening of the economy in terms of freedom. As in, a government directive to lock down in a pandemic is tyranny and what we really want is the freedom to expose ourselves to a virus in exchange for some wages.
It reminds me of story that Adolfo Pérez Esquivel — a human rights activist and Nobel Peace Laureate from Argentina — often tells, in which a chef turns to the chickens and asks: “Con qué salsa quieren ser cocinados?” (With which sauce do you want to be cooked?)
But where is the option to not be cooked?
In a lecture at the Rethinking Economics Festival, the economist Amos Witztum conceptualizes this (the option not to be cooked) as liberty, which he distinguishes from freedom. To have freedom, all you really need is at least two options from which to freely choose (e.g. work or not work). Liberty, however, requires both freedom and sovereignty — the ability to shape the options available to you, such that, in picking between them, you can meaningfully influence the circumstances of your life. For example, are you able to work safely? And are you able to take some time off work if and when crisis strikes?
The answer for most Americans is no.
What I wish more of us understood and problematized is our society’s obsession with the “free market.” Even though the free market is held up as the epitome of social freedom, it provides zero sovereignty and therefore cannot bring about liberty. All that free markets have given us is the freedom to choose how we die: toil in dangerous working conditions or starve.
It is true that getting to choose the way we die may be preferable to having that choice made for us, but if we want to live, we have to re-think free markets. This is something many other countries (some with far fewer economic resources than the US) have already done or are actively doing in the wake of the pandemic.
Countries with relatively better Covid-19 outcomes, both in terms of containing the virus and limiting economic damage, were those that did not shy away from government intervention to shape or completely override the market through policies like furlough schemes, free testing, state-enforced quarantine measures, and moratoriums on rent. In fact, the countries with the best outcomes were those who were no strangers to government-led industrial policy long before Covid, which I have written about here, as well as countries that already had substantial investment into social safety nets, which allowed vulnerable people to shield from the virus even absent a mandatory lockdown, like in Germany.
In short, Americans demand freedom because we are too civically illiterate to know that we can demand other things, like safety. We could demand protection, not only from the virus, but also from the extractive forces inherent in the free market.
But that’s a key point: we have to demand it. We won’t get anything until we demand it.
