Principles and the Virus

“I know of no law forbidding our vanquishing of COVID-19; the knowledge of how to do so is therefore discoverable, and our foe is extinguishable.”

In our fight against COVID-19, we must respect the universal principles that allow for problem-solving in general. While these principles will never tell us exactly what we should be doing in any given problem-situation (such as the one in which we currently find ourselves), they provide the framework in which we are able to solve problems and make progress in the first place. As such, it can save us many civilizational headaches if we invest time into the ideas that are necessary to get right when waging a war on a virus such as this one.

Economics

Wealth is not a fixed pie. It is not generally true that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. In a free market, this is next to impossible. It mustn’t be taken for granted that we, in the West, are orders of magnitude wealthier than our ancestors, while much of the rest of the world is escaping from the Hobbesian poverty into which our species was born.

Wealth is essentially our ability to transform resources into solutions. For example, nations currently have some number of hospital beds, masks, and countless other medical technologies. These did not fall from the sky but, instead, were created through a decentralized, multi-step capitalist production process in which the raw materials of Mother Nature were transformed—by people—into these life-saving consumer goods. At any slice in time, this elegant process has delivered a finite number of each consumer good to the market. The free minds of civilization have created this solution, while Mother Nature has sent us the virus.