Libertarianism Is the Other Deadly U.S. Pandemic

On Thursday, the United States reported more than 37,000 new COVID cases and 914 COVID deaths. Also on Thursday, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), the highest-ranking elected official who self-identifies as a libertarian, voted against the meager Republican COVID relief bill, claiming that we should not spend ANY more money on COVID relief unless we can fully offset that money with other spending cuts. (All Democrats also voted against the bill, but they did so because it didn’t do enough, not because it did too much.) These two developments are closely linked and show that in order to recover from COVID and future crises, we must also deal with the libertarianism that has infected our society.

It is indisputable that our society is afflicted with a serious case of libertarianism. We see it in people who think they have a constitutional right not to wear a mask and to go to bars and restaurants during a pandemic. The idea that we have a personal right to infect other people with a deadly disease for our own convenience is madness, but it’s endemic in our society. People are willing to take up arms to defend this so-called right. If people were not infected by libertarianism, it’s indisputable that fewer people would have died. If the entire country had taken the disease seriously, we would now be doing as well as New York City or the European countries who took the disease seriously.

Italy, for example, one of the first hot spots outside China, has seen only one day with more than 50 COVID deaths since mid-June. The last day on which its seven-day rolling average number of deaths was more than 50 was June 18. The United States, by contrast, with five times the population hasn’t seen a day in which its seven-day rolling average number of deaths was less than 250 since March 27. Every day since then, we have been living with an average of at least 250 people dying a day. We now average more than 700 deaths a day and will soon reach 200,000 total deaths.

No wonder Italian children are safely returning to school while our kids scramble for devices and internet coverage to engage in distance learning.

The libertarian infection in the United States is no accident. The Koch Brothers and other ultra-rich CEOs have spent decades and billions of dollars to push libertarianism into the mainstream of academia and politics. The libertarians have gotten the results they wanted: Extreme union-busting and deregulation in order to continue to push corporate profits to ungodly heights combined with tax cut after tax cut after tax cut that went almost entirely to the richest Americans to make sure they get to keep all their profits.

But shouldn’t libertarians adjust their view during a pandemic when everyone is particularly strongly affected by what other people do? When their very lives are at stake?

The reality is that billionaires aren’t really as affected by COVID as the rest of us. Wealth is a major predictor, along with race, of whether a person contracts COVID. And no wonder. Wealthy people have the luxury of teleworking while essential workers must show up for work every day. Wealthy people have generous health insurance plans while people further down the income scale can’t even get checked for COVID for fear of the bills they will incur. And all of this is exacerbated by the fact that the truly rich can simply pick up stakes and move every time COVID threatens to strike the community in which they live, apparently repeating a defense against disease that rich people have used since the time of Henry VIII.

This brings us back to libertarian senator Rand Paul who voted against ANY more COVID relief. Rand Paul is an MD. He knows the risks of COVID. He also knows the reality of how COVID has ravaged our economy. He knows that 13 million people are unemployed. It is causing serious financial pain to half of American households. The Republican version of the COVID bill is so miserly that even a previous version that clocked in at double the price was too stingy for most Republicans to support it.

So why does Rand Paul so coldly believe that we should spend no more money on COVID relief? Well, he is a moderately rich white man, and as detailed above, he therefore has less to fear from COVID then most Americans.

Furthermore, Rand Paul is in particularly good shape when it comes to COVID. He actually contracted COVID in March. Unlike most of us, who would not have been able to get a test in mid-March, Rand Paul was able to receive the test. While awaiting the test results, he refused to quarantine, endangering many people, including the low-income people who work in the Senate office buildings and do not have the same access to testing and health insurance that he does. Rand Paul also has excellent health insurance, so when he tested positive, he was able to receive top-notch medical care and recovered from the disease. Although there is some chance that he could be re-infected with COVID, he now is in far less danger from COVID than the rest of us due to his earlier infection.

So Rand Paul is basically saying “I’m doing fine. If the rest of you aren’t, I don’t really give a damn, but you certainly aren’t going to increase the deficit because that might endanger future tax cuts for me and the people even richer than me who got me elected.” That attitude is basically libertarianism in a nutshell. It’s also the reason why we must develop a solution for libertarianism alongside a vaccine for COVID if the United States is to survive and thrive.