Dear Libertarians,
The wealthiest country in the world is now the epicenter of a pandemic that originated elsewhere. A relatively hands-off federal response has given the free market free rein to facilitate situations like states entering into bidding wars with one another for medical supplies. Whether or not you support price gouging, bidding wars, or wage inflation for healthcare workers on the front lines is irrelevant if we're failing to make an adequate response to this threat. Right now, I can look and see that my county has tested 800 people out of 2 million residents. That's simply not acceptable.
People are willing to pay for tests! Perhaps tens of millions of Americans would pay to test themselves semi-regularly. Where are the tests? Who are the people preventing the market from responding to this situation in a way that prevents millions of deaths? Other countries managed to produce enough tests to track the virus spreading because of the big governments you warned us about.
Are we... not free market enough for you, yet? That might be what you tell yourself. "Yes, it's because we're not fully anarcho-crypto yet, too many laws preventing us from a true free market response to covid-19". OK! There is probably nothing that will ever convince you that government may have some proper place in keeping society on the rails. This would have been it.
It's actually quite radical that you cheer along any process that undermines faith in government institutions. It baffles me that you enjoy doing so, but most libertarians cannot point me to a good model showing how society should gradually transition away from our current gov't and economic systems, A previous model was electing Trump. Good fucking job!
Society's pretty fragile. Covid-19 has shown us such, in bold letters, with a billion exclamation points. I think you're going to have a bad time explaining how small government is actually doing a great job. Wow, it sounds Trumpian already.
Objectively, address why we are failing to respond as well to covid-19 as other developed countries who instated aggressive federal policy.
Good luck,
- am_U