Government After the End

Governments have several legitimate functions these days: to try to regulate activities, to provide services that are not profitable but are still essential, and to fill the pockets of the higher-ups; in addition, governments try to tell every Harry, Sue, John, and Jane how he or she should live his life in all details.  After the population drops to 20% of its present level there won’t be enough people available for government service, so government will not be able intrude into the lives of people as much as it might like, but there will still be those who think that the world will end (completely) if everyone doesn’t do everything according to their dictates. Those people will be very disappointed when their case-loads drop to a tiny fraction of what they presently are, and there is a fair chance that a larger than typical percent of these people will be lost in the pandemic, because they think that they have to have a hand in everything. But in addition to there being fewer people around who will need or want government services, and there will less activity that will need government regulation. Put it all together, and there won’t be nearly as much government after the Really Great Pandemic.

There will still be a few services that government will have to produce, but I fear that the ideological struggles that we presently are afflicted with will not go away; there will still be people who will think that individuals are incapable of living their own lives without government oversight and approval. It is also likely that the imperialists will feel that having less opposition will make it an excel time to be active. We can only hope that a higher percent of the population will realize that socialism and fascism are synonyms.

On the other hand, there will be many people who will notice that there isn’t much that will need government regulation. While there will not be nearly as many people to regulate, but the people who feel the need to regulate people would be strongly inclined to tell people what to do, and the pandemic would give plenty of ammunition to both sides. The regulators would assert that it would have been worse without regulation, while the liberals would point out that government intervention had made things worse in some places and no better anywhere. We probably would be stuck with government that pokes into places where it will not be needed. But there probably would be less economic regulation, mostly because there would be so much less economy to regulate, and some kinds of activity probably would cease to exist.

The law enforcement business probably will be vastly smaller, because there won’t be nearly as much crime. Sure there will still be robberies, assaults, murders, etc. but there won’t be many criminals left. Criminals are generally less intelligent than the average, and the pandemic probably will discriminate by intelligence; i.e., intelligent people are more likely to have followed the intelligent path and avoid other humans during the virulent stage of the pandemic, while people of less intelligence are more likely to seek medical assistance, which would bring them into contact with contagion. The re-spreading of liberalism after the pandemic will result in many laws being repealed. Fewer laws to break means fewer crimes. Then there is the matter of there being less economic rationale for criminal activity. There will be jobs for everyone, so crimes will be less attractive.

The great struggle for government will be eliminating old laws that will have become irrelevant. Considering that Massachusetts is still working at getting rid of Puritan inspired laws from the 1600’s, it is likely that the excessive laws of this period will remain until we completely overthrow the old order.

One part of the old order that is likely to remain is the existence of many independent countries, and there will be less need for international cooperation, because most trade is still local.  The call for a New World Order probably will continue, but the rationale for it will have largely disappeared. It will be ironic, if the order of the new world will be classical liberalism.