In 1722, Daniel Defoe published A Journal of the Plague Year, recounting the Great Plague of 1665 in London. This fictionalized but fact-based narration of the bubonic plague’s last outbreak in England is strangely relevant today, despite advances in the understanding of disease in the three centuries since it was published.
Londoners in those times experienced some of the same challenges that today’s coronavirus pandemic has created for the modern world. Defoe recorded the difficulty that public authorities had in keeping even sick and symptomatic people from sneaking out of their homes and spreading disease. There were obviously enormous disruptions to the economy, as even the simple act of bringing produce from farm to the city brought with it a risk of infection.
But the differences between then and now are surely greater than the similarities, and not just in the sense that the modern scientific understanding of infectious disease is vastly improved. As much anxiety as the current situation brings, the technological advancements that free markets have generated are making today’s plague much more tolerable.
Today, as many as 60% of U.S. workers can do their jobs remotely as if there were no plague at all. This greatly reduces the risk of infection and the long-run cost in lives and wealth. Most vital transactions, including even grocery shopping, can now be conducted from within the home. News and information remain available, often from reporters who are working from remote locations in their own quarantine bubbles.
For the bored, there is also an almost infinite amount of entertainment available at the touch of a few buttons. If you don’t like what’s on Netflix, Amazon, Disney Plus, or CBS All Access, there’s 60 years’ worth of new video being uploaded to YouTube every day, and that’s all free. Surely, there’s something worth watching. In fact, you can download Defoe’s book for a minimal cost in multiple formats and languages to listen to or read.
What’s truly astounding is that nearly everyone in the Western world, and a majority of the entire world, possesses at least one device that can access this limitless commerce, news, and entertainment to make life tolerable during the coming weeks of quarantine.
For all this, the modern world can thank the free market.
Those who now ignorantly hanker for failed systems such as socialism, perhaps out of a naive desire for novelty, need not look any farther than their iPhones for the symbols of their own folly. Such things would never have come to be in a world of central planning. Free enterprise, the chaotic interaction of individual economic decisions, is what ultimately made such things possible and what has created today’s environment of remote commerce.
Yes, the U.S. military did originally create the method of connectivity that came to be the internet. But note two things: First, it could only do so thanks to resources derived from private taxpayers, and second, the system only became what it is today because private companies made it so, operating according to the forces of supply and demand.
The internet’s ubiquity, accessibility, and utility are all direct consequences of free markets, as are all of the devices we use to interact over it.
In the last 40 years, free markets, international trade, and the abandonment of socialist economic systems have pulled more than a billion people out of poverty. Today, free enterprise is taking the edge off a difficult situation, making it much more manageable than it might be otherwise.
As Congress offers the public a massive relief package, a government intervention to keep the economy afloat through a period of enforced idleness, consider a few other basic modern realities.
First, Congress can only provide relief using the abundance of wealth that the economy creates in good times.
Second, a plague in times passed would have been too great for Congress to make much difference. The public holds forth hope for economic continuity only because so much of today’s economy can keep functioning right now without interruption in a way it never could have in Defoe’s time.
