One alternative is to continue with the system we have today, one in which the federal and state governments are in charge of addressing the coronavirus pandemic. This is a system called "central planning." It relies on public officials to plan, in a top-down, command-and-control manner, the response to the coronavirus crisis. That's what the FDA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other federal and state healthcare agencies are all about.

One big problem with central planning is that it relies on the knowledge and expertise of the planners. Why is that a problem? Because there is no way that a group of central planners can possibly have the requisite knowledge and expertise to deal with a crisis as complex and rapidly moving as a pandemic.

Don't tell that to government planners. They have what the Nobel Prize-winning libertarian economist Friedrich Hayek called a "fatal conceit." He was referring to the mindset of the planners, a mindset that convinces them that they can successfully address things like a complex, rapidly moving pandemic.

The results are predictable and can be summed up in the words of another Austrian economist, Ludwig von Mises, who called the results of central planning "planned chaos." When we consider the shortages of essential items, such as testing kits, masks, and ventilators, the massive indifference by federal and state planners to the crisis in its critical early stages, and the haphazard tyrannical responses to the crisis, it is easy to see that Mises' term "planned chaos" fits the government's system of central planning perfectly.