Monthly Archives: April 2020

Short of opening a libertarian theme park ("Ride the Rockin' Road to Serfdom!"), it can be difficult to make the love of liberty a "lived experience," especially for kids. What we need is something hands-onan emotional, immersive experience that gets children and their parents totally involved.

Fortunately, this multimedia memory-maker already exists. It's called Passover.

Passover is the Jewish festival of freedom. It's an annual retelling of the Exodus story, complete with jingles, novelty foods, and cash prizes. Moses went down to Egyptland more than 3,000 years ago, yet the story miraculously manageslike last year's matzoto stay fresh as ever.

Not for nothing do some Jews jokingly call this holiday the "festival of constipation." Matzo is the corrugated cardboardlike bread substitute we are commanded to eat all eight days of Passover. The story says that when Pharaoh finally let the Jews go, they feared he might change his mind, so they fled without even waiting for their dough to rise. To this day, we eat the same thing they did: unleavened bread. The fact that it wreaks havoc on many a digestive system is actually quite clever: Our suffering reminds us of our forebears' suffering. In fact, on Passover, we can't even saythey, as in "They left Egypt." We have to saymeorwe, as in "This is to remember when God took me out of Egypt." Because, as the haggadah points out, if "they" hadn't been taken out, "we" would still be there. Touch!

This is the Passover playbook filled with stories, songs, and stage directions such as "lift the matzo and show it to everyone." What other holiday comes with its own instruction book? And since it's all right there, this is a holiday Jews basically celebrate in the same way from Texas to Tel Aviv. We eat an apple and nut mixture that reminds us of the mortar theyer,weused to build Pharaoh's temples. We eat bitter herbs to feel, well, bitter. We point to a lamb shank bone to remember how they (we!) painted lamb's blood on our doorframes so God wouldpass overus (yes, that's where the word comes from) when he got to Plague No. 10, the killing of the firstborn sons. We even spill some wine as a small sacrifice in honor of the suffering of the Egyptians themselves. Every bit of the service points back to how terrible it was to be enslaved, reminding us that our duty is to be grateful forand to work to spreadfreedom.

One particular song dominates this holiday: "Dayenu." In Hebrew,the word means "it would have been enough." As in: If God had just taken us out of Egypt, it would have been enoughbut He did so much more, which the song then goes on to list. The key here is the killer chorus, in whichdayenuis repeated endlessly. It's so simple that a toddler can sing it. Jews with Alzheimer's can sing it tooeven after they've forgotten almost everything else. (I've witnessed this myself.)Thatis a great jingle.

The freedom theme is front and center again when the youngest child at the Passover dinner is expected to ask the famous "four questions," beginning with: "Why is this night different from all other nights?" Why? Because this is the night we really try to feel what it was like to be a slave set free. Each of the four questions gets back to that point:Oppression bad. Liberty amazing! Assigning question duty to the youngest kid guarantees that every child will do it at some point, assuring a lot of buy-in. And since it's the kid's first big moment in the family spotlight, not to mention the great river of Jewish tradition, it's memorable for everyone at the table.

At the end of the meal, kids go hunting for a little piece ofyou guessed itmatzo, known as theafikomen. The winner gets a prize, often cash that he or she has to haggle for. Just like trade show organizers promising the grand prize drawing at the end, this scavenger hunt keeps people from leaving early. It also gets the kids running around, bonding (and fighting) with their cousins, assuring even more memories are made.

If the holiday just featured a special game,dayenu. If it featured a special game and a special food,dayenu. But Passover works on every level, hammering home the message: Thank God (literally!) for freedom.

Read more here:
Is Passover the Most Libertarian Holiday? - Reason

Some recent comments have faulted people (like me) for not being "principled libertarians" because we support various restrictions in a time of epidemic, including restrictions that we agree are extraordinarily burdensome. As it happens, I don't claim to be a principled libertarian: There's a reason the subheader of the blog says "Often libertarian" (though of course that reflects the aggregate of the cobloggers as well). But more broadly, I think that many facets of liberty rest on certain assumptions, and sometimes can't extend to situations where those assumptions don't apply.

Some examples, of course, are familiar. Sexual liberty is very important, for instance (as a matter of libertarian principles, whether or not you think the U.S. Constitution is properly interpreted as protecting it). But it rests on assumptions of individual capacity to make potentially risky decisions that might not apply to, say, young children, or mentally handicapped people. Likewise, the right to procreate is very important. But if we were living on a spaceship that was limited to recycling a sharply constrained amount of air and food, that might call for limits on the number of children one has that wouldn't be justifiable in our current world of plenty.

Liberty of movement and of physical associationcoming together for political, religious, social, professional, recreational, or other purposesis likewise tremendously important. "The right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances" is just one particular express elaboration of this liberty. But the premise behind the liberty is that people assembling together can choose to be "peaceable," and thus physically safe for each other and for bystanders, and we should punish only those who deliberately abuse the right (by acting non-peaceably).

Contagious disease, unfortunately, has the property that I can sicken or even kill you with it entirely inadvertently, without any choice on my part. It's not like carrying a gun, which I might misuse but which I can choose to use properly. It's like carrying a gun that every so often (and largely unavoidably) just shoots a bullet in a random direction, without my pulling the trigger.

What's more, not only can I sicken or kill you when you've voluntarily agreed to be around me (e.g., agreed to go to a political rally or a religious service where many potentially infected people gather): I can end up helping cause the sickness or death of other parties with whom you later come into contact, or those even more steps removed.

Libertarians often articulate the basic principle that people cannot initiate the use of force or fraud against others. But I don't think it makes sense to see the "force" prong as limited to deliberate injury; causing sickness or death to others inadvertently may be less morally culpable, but it is just as injurious. Right now, our bodies (at least until the availability of highly reliable tests for not being infected, or, better yet, being immune) are, for most of us, a potential source of infection and thus injury and death to third parties. The normal conditions that have justified liberty of movement and assembly in the U.S. for all my life unfortunately do not apply right now.

Now of course this raises all sorts of complicated questions. Obviously liberty emerged at a time when contagious diseases were both much more common and more deadly than they are today, because of the absence of effective prevention and treatmentconsider, for instance, tuberculosis. Some amount of unintended risk created for others was seen as acceptable.

My sense is that our society is now insisting on a much lower threshold of acceptable risk, perhaps because we have gotten so used to a very low death toll from casually communicated illnesses (mostly from the flu and similar diseases). One can certainly debate whether we have adopted too low a threshold: Perhaps massive restraints on travel and assembly might be acceptable for diseases with the lethality of Ebola or some unvaccinatable-against mutation of smallpox, but shouldn't be acceptable for this strain of coronavirus.

And of course this is further complicated by the uncertainty of just how reliable various protective measures might be: For instance, if it we were confident that wearing a certain kind of mask would prevent the wearer from infecting others, then there would be much less justification for banning mask-wearers from traveling and gathering with others. Unfortunately, so much remains unknown about the facts here.

But the broader point is that the normal conditions that justify liberty of movement and travelthat make this liberty consistent with the libertarian judgments that each of us should have the right to do things that don't physically harm othersare regrettably not present when each of us (with no conscious choice on our parts) is potentially highly lethal to people around us. However peaceable we might be in our intentions, our assembling is a physical threat. Our judgments about liberty, I think, need to reflect that.

Read the rest here:
Liberty of Movement and Assembly - Reason

And yet, for the past two-plus weeks, Tiger King has consumed the pop-cultural imagination. Its the stuff memes are made of, heavy on visual absurdity and light on meaning. The series is a carnival sideshow not unlike Joe Exotics central-Oklahoma park: You see the sign on the side of the road and you stop, not because you want to, necessarily, but because its there.

In that sense, Tiger King is also the latest and most acute iteration of a Netflix trend toward extreme storytelling; the more unfathomable and ethically dubious, the better. The point is viralitycontent so outlandish that people cant help but talk about it. In 2018, the docuseries Wild Wild Country set the model, with its jaw-dropping chronicles of an alternative Oregon faith community whose antics allegedly included spiritual orgies, gun hoarding, electoral fraud, and mass poisonings. Last years Abducted in Plain Sight captured the appalling story of a teenage girl who was abused and kidnapped by a family friend, seemingly in full view of her parents. With its reality programming, too, Netflix has been courting eyeballs with simple insanity, via the hit dating series Love Is Blind and the upcoming Too Hot to Handle, a show in which ridiculously good-looking people are sequestered on an island to compete for a cash prize that diminishes every time they hook up, or even masturbate. The more scurrilous or degrading the concept, the more we watch.

Read: The strangest true-crime story yet

This truism wasnt news for P. T. Barnum, and it isnt news now. But theres still something wretched to me about the way Tiger King has managed to define a cultural moment in which empathy and communitarianism are so crucial. America right now, in the midst of a pandemic, is reliant on collective behavior, adhering to rules, and taking sensible precautions to avoid danger. Tiger King is the TV equivalent of licking the subway pole. Its characters have managed to construct whole worlds around themselves rather than curtail their worst impulses in any way. These characters are so colorful that they obliterate everything else around them. Theyre any documentarians dream, and yet you cant help but wonder what the directors hope to get out of giving showmen the mass exposure that they want. Who, in the end, benefits?

On its face, Tiger King is about a remarkable subculture in the U.S.: people who collect and (illegally) breed big cats. There are, the show reveals early on, more privately owned tigers living in America than there are existing in the wild, kept in independent zoos and parks across the country. (In 2003, authorities discovered that a man in Harlem was cohabiting with a 400-pound tiger named Ming, in the same apartment that his mother was using to babysit children.) If the people drawn to tigers have a shared quality, Tiger King emphasizes, its extroversion, which it illustrates in one scene with footage of Doc Antle riding an elephant into town while opining in voice-over about the primordial calligraphy of exotic animals.

Read the rest here:
The Most-Watched Show in America Is a Moral Failure - The Atlantic

After the coronavirus spread, left-leaning writers began declaringthat no one is a libertarian during a pandemic. We all need collective action to save us from this frightening health risk, they say.

But a funny thing happened on the way to big-government Nirvana, as officials try to ramp up testing and assure that we all have access to vital medical and other services.

The first thing that state officials did was grab various executive powers to order us to stay at home. Now, the federal government is pumping$2 trillionin taxpayer funds into the economy in the form of various bailoutssomething that might help ease the economic pain in the short term, but will cause more harm (exploding debt) in the long run.

These governmentresponsesgrab headlines, but offer little relief. Most serious approaches to the crisis, however, are decidedly libertarian. They involve reducing regulations that keep industries from responding rapidly in an emergency situation.

I recentlyexplainedhow the market economyand its sophisticated supply chainsis keeping us fed in these isolated times. Now we're seeing that government is more of an obstacle than a help. Pretty soon, we'll all be libertarians during a pandemic. The question is why more of us aren't libertarians the rest of the time, given what we're learning about the nature of government.

Let's start at the federal level. AsReason'sJohn Stossel recently explained, the Centers for Disease Control's COVID-19 tests were woefully inaccurate, but private companies were forbidden from developing tests unless they went through the long process of Food and Drug Administration approval. The Trump administration has temporarily waived those rules, but they left our country in a precarious position when a pandemic struck.

"The federal government regulates and monitors practically every activity that takes place in the US economy, from where and when truck drivers drop off their deliveries, to what tests hospitals and labs can use on patients," CNNreports. That's an eye-popping statement about the degree to which government controls everything. (So much for America being the land of unbridled capitalism!)

Because of the delays these rules cause, the Department of Transportation now iswaiving restrictionson how many hours truck drivers can work. The Department of Health and Human Services is waiving privacy laws so more Americans can use telehealth servicesallowing them to access medical advice from home. During good times, few people notice the burdens. They are more obvious when the chips are down.

At the local level, police departments are suspending the enforcement of picayune infractions. Some cities, such as Philadelphia, are not making minor drug and prostitution busts. Los Angeles isreleasingsome low-level inmates from its jails. It makes you wonder why law enforcement focuses on such things during normal times.

California state officials, however, have been resistant to eliminating the nonsensical rules that are making it tough for hospitals to treat increasing numbers of coronavirus patients. The state already has a vastnursing shortage, caused largely by the bureaucracy's limits on nursing-school attendeessomething designed to reduce the numbers and boost salaries.

As The Orange County Register reported, a number of hospitals are discontinuing clinical rotations during the crisis, which will delay nursing graduations because students are required to spend 75 percent of their clinical education in a hospital. The other 25 percent is done through simulations. The schools are asking the governor to reduce that requirement to 50 percent. He has yet to give an OK, but relaxing that rule will reduce nursing shortages.

Meanwhile, California is in a minority of states that does not recognize nurse-licensure compactsagreements that allow qualified and licensed nurses from other states to work here. Licensing rules in general impose steep barriers to entryfor workersand mostly are about established industries artificially boosting pay by reducing competition. They unquestionably create shortages, which create real dangers in a health emergency.

Sen. John Moorlach (RCosta Mesa) has introduced Senate Bill 1053, which would include our state in a 34-state nursing compact. It's a sensible reform, especially in these dire times. If the Legislature were serious about assuring that we have enough trained staff to deal with coronavirus patients, they ought to pass this measure as soon as possible. Remember this when you hear lawmakers complain about healthcare shortages.

If the governor were serious about improving resilience during the current mess, he should immediately postpone enforcement ofAssembly Bill 5, which forbids many industries from using contractors as workers. The law impoverishes freelancers during a time of hardship, discourages people from working at home and imposes hurdles on those providing vital delivery services. It creates a real impediment.

Government has a role, but a lot of what it does isharmful. We need to suspend counterproductive rules nowand then think twice before we reinstitute them after the crisis has passed.

This column was first published in the Orange County Register.

See the article here:
The Coronavirus Outbreak Is Exposing Government Follies on Many Levels - Reason

As the coronavirus pandemic escalates, countries are facing increasingly complex ethical decisions in their bid to control the virus and save lives.

ICU Physicians are being forced to ration healthcare resources like ventilators and medication. Governments have introduced sweeping public health restrictions that have radically altered peoples day to day lives. And as authorities seek to stop the spread of the virus, questions are being asked about our duties to prisoners, migrants, and people on sea vessels.

These ethical dilemmas lead us to reflect on the philosophical frameworks that inform our decision making when faced with a global threat like the coronavirus. Commentators have discussed three philosophies in particular in recent days: communitarianism, utilitarianism, and libertarianism.

Communitarianism

Communitarianism is a political philosophy that emphasises the connection between individuals and communities. Communitarian thinkers suggest that individuals derive their identity from social groups, and that individual rights cannot and should not be viewed in isolation from community norms and interests. Communitarians, furthermore, see the welfare of society or communities to be the orienting principle of political decision-making, and are inclined to prioritise the public interest over the preservation of the liberties of individual citizens. Notable communitarian thinkers include Princeton philosopher Michael Waltzer and Harvard political theorist Michael Sandel (though Sandel is somewhat reluctant to identify as a communitarian).

As Bloomberg columnist John Authers observes, China practiced an authoritarian kind of communitarianism after the coronavirus first appeared in Wuhan in January. The people of the city of Wuhan were told to lock themselves in their houses, and often forcibly quarantined, for the good of the community and the state, largely identified with the Communist Party.

Yet there is a democratic form of communitarianism that is more in line with Western liberal values. The latter form of communitarianism is more defined by solidarity with societys most vulnerable rather than an idolisation of the State or some other political entity. Many of the restrictions on civil liberties in Western countries have been brought in under the guise of protecting societys most vulnerable (such as the elderly or people with disabilities).

In a recent address in St Peters Square, Pope Francis offered communitarian perspective on the current crisis, stating that we have realized that we are on the same boat, all of us fragile and disoriented, but at the same time important and needed, all of us called to row together, each of us in need of comforting the other.

Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism is a philosophy that gives primary importance to the consequences of actions, and, in particular, the utility that those actions produce. In the context of politics, utilitarianism takes the form of a calculus about political decision-making, whereby actors consider which course of action would bring about the greatest benefits for society at large.

One controversial example of a utilitarian approach to COVID-19 pandemic would be the so-called herd immunity strategy for managing the coronavirus threat. Some epidemiologists, as well as politicians, have advocated intentionally exposing society at large to the virus, with the aim of developing population immunity to COVID-19. This strategy would involve massive rates of infection and loss of life, but would allow for greater economic activity during the pandemic and would address the problem of the virus head on. A herd immunity policy was recommended to the UK government by its Chief Scientific Advisor Patrick Vallance in mid-March, though the government says it is not currently pursuing this approach.

Utilitarianism is also exemplified in the rationing policies currently being advocated by many influential medical ethicists. Recently, several prominent doctors and ethicists in the United States published an article in the New England Journal of Medicine, arguing that the value of maximising benefits is the most important value in ICU rationing.

Libertarianism

Libertarianism is a political philosophy that prioritises individual liberties over other goods. Libertarians are deeply suspicious of any attempt to limit individual freedom, even if this may be necessary to prevent some grave risk to society. Libertarians suggest that people should be free to take risks if they want to, even if this behaviour may be seen as imprudent, immoral or unreasonable by other members of society.

Libertarianism is exemplified in the behaviour of some members of the public in response to government warnings about the risk of contagion. Social media in recent weeks has been full of images of big social gatherings -- often in luxurious social settings -- even after governments have introduced strong new measures to stop the spread of the virus. If I get corona, I get corona, as a 22-year-old said on video recently in Florida. At the end of the day, Im not gonna let it stop me from partying.

Recently, scholars from the Mises Institute -- a libertarian think-tank in the United States -- argued that governments should immediately rescind lock-down laws, and instead allow individuals and families to decide what level of risk the wish to take in continuing with their daily lives during the pandemic. In a recent editorial, the editors of Institutes official blog state:

Xavier Symons is deputy editor of BioEdge

MORE ON THESE TOPICS |

See the original post:
Three political philosophies, and how they apply to the coronavirus pandemic - BioEdge

In the absence of federal leadership, governors have become the public face of the effort to combat the coronavirus pandemic. Some of them, like New Yorks Andrew Cuomo and Californias Gavin Newsom, have risen to the media status of national hero, certainly in comparison to the deadly, daily clown show on display at the White House. Others have exposed themselves as unfit for office such as Georgias Brian Kemp, who this week expressed shock after learning a basic fact about the disease, namely that asymptomatic carriers can spread it.

Lost between the coasts, meanwhile, is the remarkable story of Kentuckys Andy Beshear, whose handling of the coronavirus crisis looks especially strong next to neighboring Tennessee. The two states are like a life-and-death experiment, showing the difference between governing and not governing in the face of a pandemic.

The 42-year-old son of former Gov.Steve Beshear, he won a contested Democratic primary against a more progressive opponent, and then went on to face the extraordinarily unpopular Matt Bevin in the general election in the fall. The Libertarian Party, which Bevin had tussled with, decided to field a candidate simply to undermine him. The libertarian pulled 28,000 votes, enough to swing the election; Beshear beat Bevin by just 5,000 votes.

Republicans in the state legislature immediately began calling the result illegitimate, with Republican Kentucky Senate President Robert Stivers saying it was appropriate of Bevin not to concede and that the GOP-controlled legislature might end up choosing the victor. He specifically cited the libertarian vote, claiming the results werent a genuine reflection of support for the Republican incumbent. It felt like a dry run of the 2020 presidential election, which skeptics have warned Donald Trump may not concede even if he loses.

But instead of the quivering response the public has come to expect from Democrats a threat of a lawsuit, complaints about norms to the media Beshear plowed forward, talking and acting like the rightful winner of the election. He began naming cabinet members and setting up his government, and in the face of his show of force, the media recognized him as the winner of the election and the GOP crumpled.

Beshear was sworn in as governor on December 10, 2019, and immediately began wielding power. That day, he signed an order restoring voting rights to more than 100,000 felons. On December 16, he killed Bevins Medicaid overhaul, which had been designed to throw people off the rolls. Another key issue in the election had been anger from teachers at Bevin over a slew of assaults, chief among them his attempt to undercut their pensions. Bevin had been concealing a 65-page official analysis of that plan showing its cost to public workers and its ineffectiveness in the long term. Beshear spiked the plan, and, on December 20, publicly released the assessment, in all its gory details.

In February, Beshear, a deacon at his local church, became the first governor to appear at the Fairness Rally, an anti-discrimination event organized each year by LGBTQ leaders.

A photo he took with a group of drag queens launched a local scandal, and one Republican lawmaker lashed out at him for defiling the state Capitol. Beshear again fought back, calling the lawmakers attack homophobic and demanding he apologize personally to everybody in the photo. Beshears aides, and the state party, called on the man to resign, transforming the scandal into one about Republicans and their backward views on social issues.

Days later, on March 6, Beshear became one of the first governors in the country to treat the coronavirus pandemic with the seriousness it deserves, declaring a state of emergency when he announced the states first confirmed case a day before New York state.

Trump was still laughing the pandemic off as no worse than the common flu. That same day, March 6, Trump toured the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, declaring himself a natural expert. Anybody that wants a test can get a test, Trump lied from the CDC. I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said, How do you know so much about this? Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.

Trumps expertise had led him to conclude, on March 2, the pandemic would be less of a problem than the flu. Were talking about a much smaller range of deaths, he said. Two days later, he told Fox Newss Sean Hannity, Its very mild. The day after Beshear had declared a state of emergency, Trump said, at a dinner with Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and his entourage (who all went home with the virus) at Mar-a-Lago, Im not concerned at all. On March 10, he was still full of bliss. It will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away, he said.

Tennessees Republican Gov. Bill Lee followed Trumps lead, telling his states residents no emergency declaration was necessary, even though Tennessee has more large urban centers than neighboring Kentucky. He finally switched course nearly a week later and declared an emergency, citing new information.

By that point, Beshear had already ratcheted up his warnings, urging Kentuckians to take the crisis seriously and to avoid large gatherings. By March 11, he announced the coming closure of schools. Beshear began 5 p.m. daily press briefings that have become appointment TV for a nervous public, even as Kentucky has one of the lowest spreads of the virus producing endless memes celebrating the governors empathy and authoritative style.

Less than two weeks later, Beshear began warning Kentuckians not to travel to Tennessee, where cases were exploding. Here in Kentucky, we have taken very aggressive steps to try to stop or limit the spread of the coronavirus to try to protect our people, he said. We have made major sacrifices such as shutting down bars and restaurants, nail salons, all these forward-facing businesses. But our neighbors from the south in many cases have not. On Sunday, the U.S. Army restricted travel to Nashville from nearby Fort Campbell in Kentucky, as well.

Tennessees mistakes couldnt be allowed to harm Kentuckians, he warned. I cannot control that Tennessee has not taken the steps that we have, Beshear said. I need you to be strong in your pride in this state, and I need you to make sure that you dont take someone elses lack of action and ultimately bring it back to Kentucky to harm us.

Beshear, by choosing to govern, has gradually risen to his own hero status, and, like Cuomo, become an unlikely sex symbol. A Reddit thread titled Govern me, daddy, became a Salon headline and a T-shirt.

See original here:
A Little-Known Democratic Governor Is Breaking Out in Kentucky - The Intercept