Opinion – Paul Krugman: Guns, germs, bitcoins and the antisocial right

In February 2021, a deep freeze caused widespread power outages in Texas, leaving an estimated 10 million residents without electricity, in many cases for days. Hundreds of people died.

The main immediate cause of the crisis was the interruption of the production of natural gas, the main source of energy in the state. After a freezing cold season in 2011, federal regulators had asked Texas to require gas and electricity facilities to be adapted for this climate. But he didn’t.

And generally speaking, it still hasn’t. So far, no winter adaptation requirements have been imposed on the politically powerful gas sector. Instead, Governor Greg Abbott hopes to secure the power grid by encouraging the…mining of bitcoins. This would supposedly reduce the risk of blackouts because bitcoin’s massive electricity consumption would eventually expand the state’s generating capacity.

Yes, it’s as crazy as it sounds. But it fits a pattern. When faced with problems that could easily be mitigated by cooperative action, the right-wing radicals who have dominated the Republican Party often resort to bizarre non-solutions that appeal to their antisocial ideology. I’ll explain why I use that word in a minute.

First, let’s talk about the most obvious current example: Covid policy. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis has tried to block virtually every measure aimed at limiting the spread of the coronavirus; he and his aides were almost explicitly against vaccines, but they pleased the “anti-vax” crowd, with DeSantis even refusing to say whether he got the booster shot.

However, they all approved antibody treatments that are much more expensive than vaccines, and DeSantis urged the Food and Drug Administration to allow the use of antibodies that the agency found do not work against the micron.

Why do they support expensive and ineffective treatments while opposing measures that would help prevent severe illness in the first place? Well, consider a parallel that may not be immediately obvious but is actually quite close: the school shootings.

Among the larger advanced countries, these shootings are an almost exclusively American phenomenon. And while there may be any number of reasons the United States leads the world in school massacres, we could certainly mitigate the horror with common sense measures like restrictions on gun sales, police records checks, and a ban on assault weapons for individuals.

But not. Republicans want to expand access to guns and, in many states, protect students by arming teachers.

What do these examples have in common? As Thomas Hobbes might have said, human beings can only flourish, can avoid a state of nature in which lives are “nasty, brutal, and short,” only if they participate in a “community”—a society in which government takes over. much of the responsibility for making life safe. So we have the police precisely so that individuals don’t have to walk around armed to protect themselves from other people’s violence.

Public health policy, if you think about it, reflects the same principle. Individuals can and should take responsibility for their own health when they can; but the nature of the infectious disease makes collective action an essential role, whether it’s public investment in clean water supplies or, yes, demands for masks and vaccines during a pandemic.

And you don’t have to be a socialist to recognize the need for regulation to maintain the reliability of essential aspects of the economy, such as the electricity supply and the monetary system.

And that’s why I’m calling the modern American right antisocial — because its members refuse any policy that depends on social cooperation, and instead want us to return to Hobbes’ dystopian state of nature. We’re not going to try to keep guns away from potential mass murderers; instead, we’re going to rely on vigilante teachers to shoot them after the shooting has started. We are not going to try to limit the spread of infectious diseases; let’s tell people to take drugs that are expensive, ineffective, or both, after they’re sick.

And bitcoin? I don’t think it’s worth trying to understand Abbott’s devious logic—why does he imagine that promoting an energy-guzzling, environmentally destructive industry will somehow make his state’s electricity supply more reliable? (An energy grid overloaded by cryptomining helped spark a recent crisis in Kazakhstan.)

A better question is why have Republicans become fanatical about cryptocurrency, to the point where a Senate candidate defined his position as being “pro-God, pro-family, pro-bitcoin”? The answer, I would argue, is that bitcoin plays on a fantasy of self-sufficient individualism, of protecting your family with your personal AR-15, treating your Covid with a dewormer or urine, and running your financial affairs with currency created at a private, immune level. institutions such as governments or banks.

After all, none of this will work. The government exists for a reason. But the right’s constant attacks on essential government functions will take a toll, making our lives more unpleasant, more brutal and shorter.

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves