Big Government vs. Coronavirus Pandemic

Sometimes bigger is not better. Surely, this applies to the American government. Obviously, most of the media stories are spinning the coronavirus pandemic to the political advantage of their favorites, usually their Democratic favorites.

True enough, leadership comes from the top, but apparently, the federal government is so completely dysfunctional that it was simply overwhelmed by the coronavirus. Why? Because it is too big.

Niall Ferguson notes:

"I think the American state has become highly dysfunctional. There are more than 60 federal agencies, of which at least five had a stake in pandemic preparedness, and within each of these bureaucracies there's a report, and an acronym, and an action plan, and a PowerPoint presentation, and yet when the rubber hit the road and the pandemic came there was just an epic fail at the most basic level," he says.  

"They couldn't even get tests to people in the way that other countries were able to do with ease."

It’s one of those too-many-cooks stories. And yet, keep in mind, if a Democrat was in the White House the media would be flooded with stories about what a great job he or she was doing. After all, the press is praising Gov. Andrew Cuomo for leading the nation in coronavirus deaths while disparaging Gov. Ron De Santis for not having a sufficiently number of deaths in Florida.

Anyway, Ferguson harkens back to a time when the federal government was more functional. First, it was smaller. Second, it was more efficient. Third, it was staffed by people who had military experience. 

He takes us back to the influenza pandemic of 1957-1958:

By comparison Ferguson says the US response to the influenza pandemic of 1957 and 1958, during the Eisenhower years, was done effectively and at "lightening speed".

"Federal government was smaller then and, most people in it had served in WWII and their approach to a problem was a great deal more expeditious. It's absolutely staggering how quickly they go from hearing about the new virus in Hong Kong, which was where it was first reported, to having a vaccine. So we are a different world, and we have a different attitude to the late 1950s.

"I'm struck by how big government has failed here, and it's really institutions that evolved in the 1970s and thereafter that have broken down in the face of this challenge. That actually it was those people who wanted to expand the role of government and build a whole complex of agencies responsible for public health and the environment who've ended up building this behemoth or leviathan that doesn't really work.  

Fancy that, the people who wanted to improve public health and save the environment believed that they could do so by expanding government programs. It turns out that the more they expanded those programs, the more inefficient they became:

"We still don't know quite what it was that went wrong at the relevant government agencies. But over time state institutions will tend to get worse. And if you just let them go on in their own sweet way what they'll tend to do is become over-manned and steadily less efficient, and the ultimate bureaucratic incentives tend to be not to solve a problem, but just to cover your back."

Bureaucrats do not have to deal with profit and loss. They are not judged by bottom line outcomes.But they do need to make work for themselves, in order to ensure their jobs. If the problem gets bigger, you need more bureaucracy, and more government spending. The perverse incentive for bureaucrats is: not to solve problems.