It's not free market though, it's not voluntary, to tell GM they have to build them. 🤔🤔
But it's kind of like this.
There should be a free market. It should all be free, including health.
And so what happens then? Well, the demand for ventilators and respirators becomes obviously high, and there's naturally a surge to want to create them.
GM would have every incentive in the world to want to point their manufacturing at creating them. Others would rush to learn how.
In today's world, besides all the red tape and licensing and who can sell what to who and blahblahblah, there's also an emotional discomfort and illegality around "price gouging" (which is really just a natural change in demand for certain things as surrounding conditions change).
People will say things like "there shouldn't be a price on human life!!!"
OK well, for one there is, and that's just reality. That in a world of scarce resources, the resources that happen to have the attribute of keeping us alive do have a price. (You can fantasize about there not being one, but IRL there is one.)
And the consequence of your fantasy is that infrastructure that gives us life will instead not get built.
If you allow "price gouging" to occur, there really wouldn't be any anyways. The honey can only be so sweet before it attracts some bees. The high price is a signal to create more of this. And as people rush to build them (to capture the profits even if they don't see the humanitarian side), supply meets the demand and price is normal.
It's just a purer and better version of "hey you can't charge too much for that! hey you over there.. you have to build that!!"
Isn't it neat that life actually makes sense? That there isn't this horrible riddle of worrying that things will spiral out of control if you aren't being aggressive and a busybody?
Freedom across the board would solve it beautifully.
Treating people non-violently is all you ever need to do.
But back to Trump..
He's such a legend.
Hated from the onset, and now he's dealt basically an impossible situation, and is just crushing. Plus he still finds a way to needle them on Twitter in between his Presidential vibe at the pressers.
Since there isn't a free market (since the mechanism by which ventilators would naturally emerge is blocked), I do think it's responsible and correct for him to use his war power clause or whatever to order ventilators to get built.
There shouldn't have been the first act of aggression against the free market. But when there is, when you take out that leg, now we might need you to do other things to counter-balance what you did there.
Of course, it'd be better if Trump could free the health care market from all its various restrictions and make it okay to "price gouge" and all that. But in practice we know that the President doesn't have the power to just order all that, and of course it isn't gonna happen (at all, but..), certainly not overnight in the manner needed to get the ventilators built.
Plus a lot of the free market response would be anticipatory, as in there would already be ventilators built ready for a rainy day, and/or built at the early stages of coronavirus being a known thing. So in a sense even "overnight" is already late.
So while my fellow libertarian and voluntaryist type of people would often say tsk tsk not free market..
It wouldn't be free market either way. The free market solution is not available to us.
It's like if a chef has his hands tied behind his back, you're not gonna get his creation either way.
If you put yourself in Trump's position, at the controls of President of this state structure that does currently exist whether we like it or not, what would you do?
Trump is essentially using what's available to him to offset an imbalance that coercion and restrictions in health care have caused. He's approximating what an actually free market would probably have done.
Which isn't to say GM shouldn't be compensated with some inflato bucks or whatnot for doing it..
(They probably will be, idk.)
And the other side of my point here is..
Statists or minarchists might look at this or similar things and say "see, sometimes you need to use power to make things work out okay".
But no, that's only because there isn't a free market in health care and across the board.
A full onslaught of free behavior would be better. That would produce the best, smoothest outcomes, even in a time of crisis. (Especially in a time of crisis.)
But that not being the case (it being the case that one of our legs will be compromised - and in practice there being no way to change that), I believe it's correct for Father Trump to click the button that says "GM has to build ventilators". 🤷🤷
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