The Coronavirus-Relief Package Isn’t Socialism – By Dan McLaughlin (National Review) / March 23 2020
It isn’t a bailout or a stimulus, either.
Congress is, at this writing, debating a bill that would direct nearly $2 trillion to individuals and businesses to provide emergency health care and mitigate the effects of the coronavirus-induced shutdown of much of the economy. While Congress and President Trump are still bickering over the details, official Washington is more or less unanimous on the need for the bill. A lot of wishful-thinking progressives, fresh from their own party’s decisive rejection of its openly socialist wing, are telling us this means “everyone’s a socialist now.” But the truth is the opposite: America does not want a permanent do-everything, be-everywhere government; it wants firefighters. And firefighters are not socialism.
The right model for understanding the proper role of government is the fire department. Why are firefighters typically among the most popular government officials? Because they show up when they are needed, they finish the job, and then they leave. There is all the difference in the world between firefighters’ running through my house when it is on fire and firefighters’ setting up permanent shop in my living room when there is no fire. There is no contradiction in Americans’ welcoming the firefighters when they arrive at the blaze but preferring that they leave when it is over. The essence of the progressive/socialist vision of government is that the firefighters never leave.
The size and powers of your local fire department can be flexible. Fire departments started as private associations: You agreed to pay for and/or participate in fighting fires, and in return, you got on the list of houses the fire company would protect. Because fires can spread from one house to the next, that arrangement eventually gave way to a more official mission to protect every home. But even today, smaller towns tend to mostly have volunteer fire departments organized like colonial militias: Though the town pays for the trucks and equipment, there are few if any permanent employees. The volunteers show up when the siren wails. Larger cities need full-time professional firefighters, given their population density. Most people, however, still deal directly with the fire department only when their place is in flames.
This is why rapidly expanding the government’s role in health care in a pandemic is not the same thing as embracing Medicare for All on a permanent basis. The government does have a role in stopping the blaze from engulfing an entire neighborhood. That role requires a more permanent infrastructure in the most densely populated areas, but it still draws significantly on the volunteer capacity of our vast and creative private sector of doctors, nurses, medical-device manufacturers, and pharmaceutical companies. Mobilizing them on a national basis in time of crisis is not the same as turning them into a standing army of civil servants. The resources they can draw on now would not exist if we attained the progressive dream of draining most or all of the profit motive and local diversity out of our health-care sector.
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