John Robson: Here's a plan for the post-COVID economy: Get government out of the way – National Post

In addition to a schedule for reopening the economy we also evidently need a map. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be one in the glove compartment, nor is there a reliable app. Instead it’s like one of those Renaissance deals with “Here be dragons.” So I’ve drawn one on a napkin.

It says “Focus on the medical aspects and reread ‘I, Pencil.’ ” Pencils may have gone mechanical, or for all I know digital, since Leonard Read penned (penciled?) his classic essay back in the slide rule era. But as the economy has only grown more complex since 1958, let alone 1850 when Frédéric Bastiat wrote Harmonies Économiques, their central insight has only become more valid.

For those not fortunate enough to have been forced to read his piece years ago, Read has a humble lead pencil explain that making it required the co-operation of an astounding global network from the loggers who cut the trees to those who made their chainsaws and coffee to the metallurgists who created the “ferrule.” Even this mundane object requires a web of interactions so complex no human brain could contain it all. Including that the people who made the ships carrying the loggers’ coffee beans themselves use pencils.

Focus on the medical aspects and reread ‘I, Pencil.’

No person or people can understand and guide such a process. Nor could any computer. It’s literally “transcomputable.” Which is why central planning can’t work. Including here.

It is tempting to think “restarting the economy” resembles restarting a ship from drydock. Especially for politicians who’ve long believed the economy is a machine they can rev up at will, and a fairly simple one at that, it seems intuitively like a linear task: Boot up the emergency generators, activate critical command and control systems, start main engines, turn on bilge pumps and so on down to lighting and air circulation in crew quarters. But economies are enormously more complicated, with feedback loops no one can hope to comprehend.

Luckily in market economies nobody needs to. As Read said, prices compress all the information any individual person needs to figure out whether something is worth more to them than it costs or not. I was going to write “producer or consumer” instead of “person” but we are almost all both at once.

For the same reason it’s not possible for anyone to know what’s “essential” or isn’t. As John Locke wrote before Read, Bastiat or even the Industrial Revolution, the very “bread we eat” requires “the labour of those who broke the oxen, who digged and wrought the iron and stones, who felled and framed the timber employed about the plough, mill, oven, or any other utensils” etc.

So do not attempt to decide which restaurant, hair salon or bicycle shop should be allowed to reopen or why. (Just kidding — in Ontario bike shops were apparently “essential” all along, unlike marinas or jury trials.) Do not try to determine who should make the fiddly plastic bits needed to get groceries to market or when. Just try to figure out who has COVID-19, who might get it and what to do about them.

The key job of the public authorities now is public health. And surely it’s enough to tax the capacity of any group of mortals. Focus on how to test, track and quarantine the infected so the second wave is not a disaster. Not to prevent it; it is inevitable. And don’t go locking down the economy again.

Focus on how to test, track and quarantine the infected so the second wave is not a disaster

Also, don’t go placing too much faith in epidemiological models. It’s not that they’re so unsophisticated the U.K. was relying on undocumented code 13 years old, although that revelation would embarrass lesser beings than the experts in charge. It’s that human conduct is too complex to model. (And don’t get me started on climate.)

When I was nearly finished scribbling on my napkin, a map from Britain’s Adam Smith Institute worthy of high-class velum not increasingly scarce wood pulp reached my inbox. It said: “The economic heart of the nation has slowed, and it needs major and urgent action to revive it. … We look not to those on high to save us, but ideas and initiatives from the little platoons Edmund Burke correctly said made up a nation … Companies stand on the edge of ruin and our prosperity with them. … So we want to hear from you of every tax cut that can lift a burden, and every regulatory change that can lighten the load on businesses that want to grow again. Let us hear of every bureaucratic impediment that stands in the way of renewed growth and expansion, and let us hear of the ways in which it might be suspended or permanently extinguished.”

There’s your map. Get government out of the way of the economy and into the way of the disease. And the sooner the better.