by Hans-Hermann Hoppe
Mises.org
Thomas Jacob: Professor Hoppe, you are known as a critic of the state and of political centralization. Doesn’t the coronavirus prove that central states and central government regulations are necessary?
Hans-Hermann Hoppe: On the contrary.
Of course, the various central states and international organizations, such as the EU or the World Health Organization (WHO), have tried to use the covid-19 pandemic to their own advantage, i.e., to expand their power over their respective subjects, to try out how far one can go with ordering other people around in the face of an initially vague and then systematically dramatized danger of a global epidemic. And the extent to which this has succeeded, up to and including a general house arrest, is frightening.
But if the course of current events has demonstrated anything, it is not how necessary or efficient central authorities and decisions are, but conversely how critically important decentralized decisions and decision-makers are.