The coronavirus crisis has, once more, reminded us all of how much we live in an interdependent world in which what happens in one part of the globe has serious impacts in many other places, and how each of our own actions potentially have implications and importance for the well-being of multitudes of others around us, both near and far.
The question is, what societal arrangement is most likely to effectively and successfully assure cooperative coordination of all that we are doing?
Dr. Diane Coyle, professor of economics at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom, believes that the coronavirus pandemic demonstrates the need for greater politically organized collective action, both in the current crisis and looking ahead. She argues in, “Covid-19 and the End of Individualism,” that the market economy has met its match, and political paternalism in the forms of regulation and control is needed in its place, more than ever.
However, some of us would reply that it is precisely because of our mutual interconnectedness in a global division of labor and exactly because each of our individual actions have influences on the well-being of others that we need to utilize a system of open, competitive markets even more than before to overcome the personal and societal effects from the coronavirus.
Richard M. Ebeling – American Institute for Economic Research – May 12, 2020.
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