The coronavirus is bad news for everyone, obviously, but it is especially bad news for free-marketeers. An epidemic, like any perceived common threat, makes people warier, more collectivist, more authoritarian. We are thrown back onto our Pleistocene heuristics: hunker down; make sure you have enough food stored; avoid outsiders; keep your kids close.
Translate these instincts into policies, and you end up with closed borders, closed economies, and closed schools. “The crisis shows why we need to be more self-sufficient,” previously reliable free-traders keep telling me. Actually, it shows nothing of the sort. Even a simultaneous global shock did not prevent international food markets from functioning normally. If anything, the coronavirus has reminded us of how critical it is to be able to import supplies from a wide variety of places. In Britain, the closures hit during what farmers call the “hungry gap”—the lean weeks between late March and early May when winter crops such as potatoes and cabbages have run out, but when we have not yet reached the first summer harvests. Had we not been able to source what we needed from around the world, we’d have been living on rhubarb, asparagus, and maybe a bit of nettle soup.
The trouble is, few people think logically in times of generalized panic. They begin with their hunches, their Paleolithic intuitions, and then they cast around for ways to rationalize them. No amount of empirical data will settle their unease at the thought that their country depends
