The average libertarian thinks Peru and India had the best COVID responses in the world
I originally thought libertarians wanted to minimize COVID restrictions’ disruptions to daily life. I have been convinced otherwise. Maximizing COVID deaths is a terminal value for libertarians, and they view the maximization of COVID restrictions’ disruptions to daily life as a positive good, though it is less important to them than maximizing COVID deaths. Thus, the average libertarian thinks India and Peru had the best COVID responses in the world. Don’t believe me? Read this blog post. Tyler Cowen has also claimed the same thing, except in a more falsifiable (and thus more moronic) fashion. Now, very simple question: which countries in the Anglosphere had the best COVID response? A sane person (that is, not a libertarian) would answer plainly: “New Zealand, followed by Australia. They had the smallest COVID death spikes as well as the fastest returns to pre-pandemic unemployment levels. New Zealand also saw the smallest spike in unemployment, so it clearly had the best COVID response of any Anglosphere country.”. Unfortunately, libertarians are not sane people. Despite New Zealand and Australia’s obvious wins on the metrics, Bryan Caplan claims “Which is why despite everything, I’m now convinced that the U.S. had the least-bad Covid response of any major English-speaking country.”. Yes, the country that had by far the largest COVID unemployment rate spike of any Anglosphere country had the best COVID response (and the one that ties with Canada for both the highest unemployment rate reached during the pandemic and slowest speed of return to normalcy)! If this is not proof that libertarians’ terminal value is to maximize COVID deaths, even if (or, perhaps, especially if) it maximizes unemployment, nothing is. By this measure, they certainly wouldn’t dare fault Modi for his ridiculous lockdown, or that of the idiotic leadership of Peru. Indeed, Venezuela might be their model of how to optimally handle a COVID pandemic. Luckily, certain countries (China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, Vietnam) had saner socialists than Venezuela. This is also why libertarians don’t look up to Uruguay, which was among the lightest hit countries in Latin America in terms of deaths, and was unique in the region for not instituting a lockdown in the first half of 2020 (Brazil didn’t institute a centralized lockdown, but local governments caused quite a bit of disruption). Of course, Uruguay also has one of the highest vaccination rates and lowest COVID death rates in the world now, and we all know how bad that is in the libertarian brain.
Note: same thing goes for Sweden lovers.