Ronald Reagan, as a candidate for president in 1980, kept telling us
that government--at least big government--is a bad thing. Government is sprawling,
bureaucratic, inefficient, corrupt. And anything that government does can be
done better and cheaper by private industry.
And, as president, Reagan put this policy into practice, and
cut, defunded, or eliminated many government agencies and programs. (For
example, the day of his inauguration he stopped all Department of Energy
funding for alternative-energy research, thereby setting back our work on
sustainable energy sources by 30 years or more.
This ultimately cost me my job so--disclosure!--okay, maybe here I have
an axe to grind.)
Reagan's continued railing against government convinced a lot
of people--someone said, "Reagan won that battle"--and has perhaps become the prevailing philosophy in America.
Certainly we see it in Trump, who also has been cutting and defunding a lot of government
offices and programs. Just as an example, he cut funding to the Centers for
Disease Control.
I want to quote a little publication called Catalyst,
published by the Union of Concerned Scientists:
In 2014, the Obama administration established an office within the National Security Council to coordinate the federal government's future response to pandemics and provide accountable and organized leadership.In 2017, the Trump administration abolished this office--and perhaps as a direct result, its response to the coronavirus pandemic was initially haphazard, inept, and lacking in overall accountability. We didn't have a clear sense of who is coordinating federal agencies to address public health and safety. We do have bungled efforts, like the failure to arrange for an adequate supply of testing kits. . . .Conventional wisdom holds that private markets are the best way to satisfy society's needs, and the role of government should be primarily focused on ensuring that markets work properly. COVID-19 puts the lie to this proposition. When a crisis hits, there is no substitute for effective action directed and mandated by government. Market signals alone will not ensure that the right people get tested, that emergency hospitals are set up, that ventilator manufacturing is ramped up, and so on.
Catalyst, Volume 20, Spring 2020, pp. 2, 20
As of a few days ago, the death toll from this virus had
surpassed 100,000. I believe that Trump and the philosophy I have cited here
are at least partly to blame for these deaths. However much Reagan and other
conservatives influenced public thinking and subsequent politics, I strongly
believe that, as this article suggests, it's time to say that here we have a
real-life situation that shows that this philosophy is flawed.
