Catastrophes are accelerants of government expansion, and the pandemic will go down in history as one in a series of quantum leaps into a more statist world.
Catastrophes are accelerants of government expansion, and the pandemic will go down in history as one in a series of quantum leaps into a more statist world.
B oris Johnson is set to introduce a social-credit system in the United Kingdom with a view to combating obesity and improving bodily health among the British public.
According to the Telegraph newspaper, “the scheme will monitor family supermarket spending, rewarding those who reduce their calorie intake and buy more fruit and vegetables. People increasing their exercise by taking part in organized events or walking to school will also accumulate extra ‘points’ in a new app.” These “loyalty points” can then be cashed in for discounts and other incentives.
The prime minister believes that his own obesity was to blame for the near-death experience he underwent while infected with COVID-19 during the pandemic. Now, Mr. Johnson appears intent on bringing the entire nation along with him on his personal quest for rude health. The preferences of the one will be visited upon the grocery receipts of the many, as part of a softer, more Huxleyan imitation of Kim Jong-un’s rules for North Korean haircuts.
British government sources are speaking about this program as if the apparatus of the state is an appendage of the prime minister’s personal lifestyle. One Whitehall source told the Telegraph that Johnson “has been on a very rigorous diet and exercise programme and it is likely he will play a leading role in fronting this whole campaign.” The connection being drawn here between the prime minister’s diet and activities on the one hand and the merits of a government policy on the other are somewhat cultlike. The anonymous government source who gave this quote speaks of the prime minister as a pagan acolyte might speak of a priest-king who recapitulates in his own person the trials and triumphs of the whole tribe.
If a viable argument existed for this policy (and no such argument does), it would be as a corollary to the United Kingdom’s single-payer health-care system. Britain’s National Health Service is almost entirely owned and operated by the state. Consequently, there’s a very real sense in which high rates of obesity and the diseases that accompany them are expensive to the taxpayer. A healthier society would alleviate pressure on the NHS, opening up more beds, doctors, and funding for other patients and their needs.
The reason this argument fails is that the condition of one’s body and one’s health are, in a moral sense, just about the most private concerns imaginable. Conceding the premise that the state has a right to manipulate and cajole matters as invasive as one’s blood pressure or one’s body-fat percentages amounts to conceding that the state has a right to do just about anything to whomever it pleases. (And before pro-choicers leap on those last two sentences, I would remind them that unborn children have bodies too.) What appears to be an argument for nationalizing fitness is, in fact, an even better argument for abolishing single-payer health care altogether, since only decades of habituation to a technocratic and impersonal system such as the NHS could ever produce enough bureaucratic oxygen for a such a nakedly abhorrent moral intuition to kindle and catch flame among an entire people in the first place.
This humiliating scheme of Chinese-style social credit is clearly a product of the pandemic in more than one sense. Of its genesis in the prime minister’s confrontation with his own mortality in the form of the virus, there is no need to say more, but broader historical forces are also in operation as well. One of the many reasons that wars, pandemics, and other cataclysms have such dire consequences long after they end is that governments feel emboldened by the powers they assume in crises to stake out their new prerogatives as a fresh front from which they will not retreat. Rarely does the state ever relinquish powers that it accrues to itself. Income tax was first introduced in Great Britain by William Pitt the Younger in January of 1799 as a temporary emergency measure to cover the cost of Britain’s war with France. Now, 222 years later, it is still with us. Similarly, the disorganized and scattershot confectionary of federal programs that we call “the New Deal” was enabled by the Great Depression, and the NHS itself was born in the wake of the Second World War, during which Britain had exhausted what remained of its military, economic, social, and spiritual reserves in the fight against Hitler.
Now, the pandemic has given the governments of the free world another generational carte blanche to swell the state into even greedier and more imperilling proportions. There’s a reason that Her Majesty’s government can now afford, politically speaking, to experiment with policies that are native to stratified east Asian states. It’s the very same reason why the Democratic Party here in the States can attempt to spend multiple trillions of dollars during just six months of unified government without any obvious public dismay. Catastrophes are accelerants of government expansion, and the pandemic will go down in history as one in a series of quantum leaps into a more statist world — a world in which governments feel increasingly emboldened to attempt the previously unthinkable.