While some have used the coronavirus crisis as an opportunity to bang the drum for socialist healthcare, welfare for the rich, or corporate bailouts, the actual events unfolding show that, sometimes, the best thing the government can do is get out of the way.

Big government has made the crisis worse from the beginning. It was the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration that blocked private industry from creating and distributing coronavirus tests. Their centralized control is at least partly to blame for the massive delays in testing and for the spread of the disease this scarcity enabled. And, already, we’re seeing how deregulation can boost our collective response to the pandemic by removing unnecessary government barriers.