Covid-19 Fear Used to Justify Expanded Government Power
In the political response to the Covid-19 pandemic, everything is proceeding just as economist Robert Higgs has foreseen. But that doesn t make it any easier for him to watch it. I have an overwhelming feeling that I am reliving a bad experience I ve lived through several times before, only this time it s worse, Higgs says. I have no doubt that even if the current situation plays out in the best imaginable way, it will leave an abundance of legacies for the worse so far as people s freedom is concerned.
Higgs sees government, as usual, vastly expanding during the crisis, and he s sure that it will not shrink back to its former scale once the crisis is over. It never does, as he famously documented in his 1987 book, Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government, and in later works exploring this ratchet effect.