The Power Grabs to Watch Out for in the Wake of COVID-19

SUMNER, A SOCIOLOGIST, wrote these words in 1886, long before the federal government was the massive, powerful, ubiquitous force it is now. He was keenly aware of the consequences of government responses to crises. Any given policy or intervention effort might go away. The less visible ones, however, often remain and take on a life of their own.

This principle can be seen in government responses to crises of all kinds, from foreign wars to wars on poverty or terrorism, from economic crashes to crime spikes, and now pandemics. The experiment cannot just be dropped.

In response to the COVID-19 crisis, governments and politicians at every level have (both properly and improperly) claimed unprecedented authority over our lives. And they’re not going to surrender all of those powers when the crisis has passed.

The economist Robert Higgs memorably described the dynamic as a “ratchet effect”—that is, government power is a mechanism that moves in only one direction, toward greater control and less freedom. That’s a useful analogy, but it’s overly simplistic.

The reality is a little more complex, because government doesn’t always permanently retain all the powers assumed in a crisis situation. For the sake of simplicity, let’s classify these emergency powers into two categories: I’ll call them the “Type 1 Power Grab” and the “Type 2 Power Grab.”

• In a Type 1 Power Grab, the government assumes a power that is truly novel or unprecedented, on the basis that it’s a necessary response to a novel or unprecedented emergency. These powers are more likely to be truly temporary and are rolled back when the crisis has passed, often in response to public discontent.
• In a Type 2 Power Grab, the government massively expands a power that already existed beforehand, and gives it a huge boost, on the grounds that it’s needed to respond to the emergency. These types of power grabs are far more dangerous, because they are more likely to be retained when the crisis passes and give rise to a lasting growth in state power.

A couple of historical examples from the first half of the 20th century illustrate the difference.

During World War II, the government of the United Kingdom took on unprecedented powers that were viewed as necessary to support the war effort, including food rationing and directing workers to specific occupations. After the war, the new Labour Party government, led by Prime Minister Clement Attlee, kept many of these wartime policies in place, even going so far as to extend them in 1947. Some argued that it was a good thing for rationing and other controls, such as identity cards, to become permanent. However, there was considerable popular opposition to this course, and in 1951 the Conservatives regained control of the government, leading to those powers being completely repealed.

Similarly, President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration in the United States instituted a planned economy under Washington, D.C.’s command to support the war effort, with stringent and extensive wage and price controls. After the Allied war victory, Congress did away with those powers in 1946. The economic controls that the U.K. and U.S. governments instituted during World War II are examples of Type 1 Power Grabs—when the crisis was overcome, those extraordinary powers fell away.

But also during the first half of the 20th century, the U.K. and the U.S. both embraced large, government-administered welfare programs aimed at improving the material well-being of the populace. These programs were accelerated during the Great Depression and post-war years, with the government playing a more aggressive and expansive role in health care (it was during this time that the U.K. government established the National Health Service) and various large-scale social insurance programs to alleviate unemployment and poverty. Indeed, these programs have continued to expand, producing lackluster results for those in need while consuming more taxpayer dollars with time and resisting efforts at even modest reform. The growth of the welfare state is an example of a Type 2 Power Grab—it was an existing trend that was turbocharged in response to a crisis, and the government retained and reinforced those powers once the crisis was past.

We can apply that same type of analysis to today’s COVID-19 pandemic response, in which government officials have asserted significant powers, but some of those powers are more dangerous than others. In order to “flatten the curve” and slow the infection rate, U.S. state and local governments instituted a wide range of lockdown measures, restricting citizens’ activities and commerce. Americans initially accepted this response, though in many cases with some discontented grumbling, as a necessary exercise in risk reduction in a time of uncertainty.

While pushback and challenges to politicians and state leaders grew as some states began enforcing and expanding lockdowns inconsistently and arbitrarily, the lockdowns are not in the government’s long-term interest. Stifling commerce and consumer activity only causes continued economic contraction (and not coincidentally, constrains government tax revenues), so it’s likely the lockdowns will fade away soon enough—an example of a Type 1 Power Grab.

Meanwhile, many countries are moving to a test, trace, and isolate strategy to suppress the pandemic. To work effectively, this approach requires a highly intrusive level of surveillance, with governments tracking the movements and activity of every person. We already have a substantial surveillance and data collection regimen, based on a range of justifications from counterterrorism to combatting crime, so test, trace, and isolate would expand upon those existing capabilities—a classic Type 2 Power Grab.

This is far more dangerous and is much more likely to produce a lasting growth of government power. Many citizens, uncritically trusting their government to do the right thing in the face of uncertainty, will accept that extending these surveillance powers to fight the pandemic is not only justified but something that should be retained. Moreover, these measures have the self-interested support of powerful commercial interests (in this case the tech companies that provide the collection platforms, data management, and technical support for the surveillance state) that will profit from their expansion. Those conditions could lead to pandemic surveillance becoming a permanent feature of the landscape.

It’s reasonable to fear the ratchet effect, and to be worried that the powers taken up by government officials to fight the pandemic will lead to many of those powers becoming permanent. However, some powers are much more likely to become permanent than others. In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, lockdown policies may be annoying but are likely to fall away soon enough once they’ve served their purpose. The greater threat is the expansion of the government’s surveillance and data management powers afforded by the pandemic—and it’s these powers that we should focus on fighting if we hope to restrain further government expansion and protect individual liberty.