John Tamny on how the free market would have handled the coronavirus differently than government lockdowns

If there hadn't been any kind of lockdowns, I think it's a safe bet to say that Disney, a big American business, would've shut down its theme parks.  Now why could it have done that?  Because as a good business with a good track record of treating its shareholders well, it could've gone to investors and said, "we are going to step aside briefly to see where this virus is going; we don't want to risk our brand on becoming known as a super-spreader."  Ok, fine. Small businesses, let's assume they have less access to capital.  So they would've probably said, "we can't risk being shut down even for a day; our margins are so razor thin, we've got to be operating at 100% no matter what."  Well, good, you need both.  The small businesses became businesses in the first place by figuring out the needs of customers in some way.  They would've had to evolve.  They would've had to innovate to meet the needs of customers who perhaps had been changed or perhaps fearful, and in doing this they would've created crucial information for the Disneys of the world about how to evolve in a new kind of environment.  So you needed, as always, millions of different businesses trying millions of different things rather than forced one-size-fits-all for everyone simply because it robbed everyone of the information necessary about how to fight this, how to evolve. 

You have the cruise industry, this wildly prosperous industry, that's still trying to get permission to be back in operation.  Don't we want to know what they would've done if they'd been left alone?  The ships would be sailing by now and they would've figured out ways to meet the needs of a different customer base we never even learned.

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Imagine companies that have billion dollar ships that are quite literally amusement parks/hotels/entertainment centers on the water.  They figured out how to grow to meet the customers' needs in staggeringly brilliant ways.  Imagine what they could've done if they'd been free to say, "hey, look, you love your customers; the last thing you want to do is create a scenario where your customers get sick or die.  Do what you have to do to stay in operation."  I wish we could've seen what they came up with, but of course we can't.  They're not allowed to operate to this day.

~ John Tamny, "The Economic Fallout of 2020," The Tom Woods Show, April 8, 2021