You would think that if any issue would make people set aside their partisan passions it would be the coronavirus pandemic. Isn’t crystal clear that the proper response to this crisis must rest on science, and only on science? It’s not as if we are debating wealth redistribution, or the competing values of free speech and equality, or some such issue where to an important degree values determine the respective positions.

Yet on the pandemic issue it has become clear that people on the left generally support government-mandated lockdowns, where people on the right generally oppose them. This is mind-boggling. Why would opinions on a matter that should be governed exclusively by science split along ideological lines?

Some have suggested explanations centered around signaling. People adopt a position, not because they believe it, but because they want to signal to others that they are ideologically reliable. I like these explanations, in part because Guido Pincione and I pioneered them in a book written 14 years ago. But here I want to suggest, without completely eschewing these other hypotheses, a reason why this bizarre ideological alignment has occurred.

People on the left do not believe that economic freedoms are important. To them, society owns everything, and we allow voluntary transactions exclusively for efficiency reasons. These folks think that, unlike freedom from torture, freedom of physical integrity, and (less so these days) freedom of speech, the freedom to trade, contract, and invest can be safely disregarded to achieve equality, or dignity, or better health care. To the left, people do not have strong property rights. Society may allow owners to enjoy these rights for the sake of efficiency, but the state is always empowered to cancel or curtail them in the pursuit of collective goals. On the mainstream Rawlsian version of this idea, people don’t even own the fruits of their labor (see also Murphy and Nagel’s influential book).

This means that it is much easier for folks on the left, who have a lifelong commitment to rejecting property and contract rights, to be comfortable with governmental suppression of business during this crisis. They don’t think it is particularly serious to prevent people from buying and selling. (There is even a simple imagery floating around according to which “lives are more important than money.”)

Now, please understand the import of my argument. I’m not saying that people on the left support lockdowns because they hate capitalism. I’m saying that it is easier for them to support these measures because they don’t believe the measures violate fundamental rights, and so the moral hurdle that government action must overcome in a crisis like this one is lower.

And lest I am misunderstood, I’m not saying the lockdown measures are wrong. I don’t know if they are or aren’t. Maybe they are right. I’m just suggesting that the ideological breakdown can perhaps be explained by the prior different attitudes that people have toward property, contract, and capitalist exchanges.