Monthly Archives: February 2022

This article was originally published here

Bioethics. 2022 Feb 7. doi: 10.1111/bioe.13007. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

This study examines the practical implications of libertarian theories of justice in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. First, we show that the libertarian central value of freedom does not just include economic and political autonomy but also ones right to life. Secondly, we demonstrate that lockdown measures are acceptable to libertarianism if they are appropriately implemented. Nevertheless, in contrast to a utilitarian approach, libertarians reject excessive interventions, such as contact-tracing mobile apps, even if these promote peoples welfare. Thirdly, we show that there is a broad spectrum of lockdown implementation methods based on differing interpretations of Lockean property rights. By comparing three kinds of libertarianism, we outline a set of libertarian proposals that use markets for the exchange of permission slips to go out during a lockdown. We then show that libertarianism offers a reasonable and non-conflicting resolution for the trade-off between health and peoples freedom, thereby illustrating the suitability and legitimacy of a libertarian response to the current crisis.

PMID:35132660 | DOI:10.1111/bioe.13007

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Libertarian approaches to the COVID-19 pandemic - DocWire News

RICHMOND, Va. (WAVY) Its the tax that never goes away: Virginias infamous personal property tax.

For years down the road, you continuously pay for it, year after year after year, said Robert Dean, chair of the Tidewater Libertarian Party. Dean wants the levy often referred to as the vehicle tax or the car tax to go away.

I am so glad that you brought this subject up because nobody else has been talking about it other than the Youngkin administration, Dean said during a recent interview.

(Dean has registered the entity name Tidewater Libertarian Party with the State Corporation Commission, however the Libertarian National Committee and the Libertarian Party of Virginia disavow any connection with Dean.)

Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) talked about reducing or eliminating taxes as one of his key promises during his campaign. 10 On Your Side made repeated attempts to discuss the subject with Youngkin or a member of his administration. On Friday, as part of an interview on a separate topic, he told us he wants to empower taxpayers when it comes to tax increases.

A big initiative for us is to give Virginians the ability to review whats happening with their personal property taxes, Youngkin said, in the form of a potential referendum.

Not all states have the personal property tax on vehicles, and Virginia is at or near the highest rate among the 27 states that do have it. Twenty-three states including Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey, plus Washington D.C. have no annual vehicle tax at all.

It seems to me that if they can do it without all the infusion of federal dollars such as the military brings into this area from the Department of Defense, Dean said, then we should certainly be able to phase it out.

Tax rates vary in the seven cities of Hampton Roads. Virginia Beach has the lowest rate at 4%, or $4 per $100 of valuation. Chesapeake is next at $4.08, followed by Suffolk ($4.25), Norfolk ($4.33), and Hampton and Newport News (both at $4.50). Portsmouth has the highest rate at $5 per hundred. (Municipalities also offer some measure of car tax relief on the first $20,000 of valuation.)

Its over $30 million in our budget. Its a significant amount, said Portsmouth Commissioner of the Revenue Franklin Edmondson. He says the funds are vital to keeping Portsmouth competitive not only for city services but attracting quality job candidates.

We dont want the last and the least to come to Portsmouth. We want the best and the brightest. We want to offer a fair employment package, he said.

Virginia Beach currently generates about $172 million from the tax. Chief Deputy Commissioner of the Revenue Eric Schmudde says it can afford to charge a lower rate because of a bigger tax base with more vehicles to tax.

The rate and the value will dictate how much revenue is raised. I think some of it could be the value of the vehicles in Virginia Beach are just a little higher than those in Portsmouth, he said.

Pleasure boats are taxable too, but at a far lower rate. A millionth of a cent, Schmudde said. Because the tax is in the Virginia Constitution, local governments must charge something. But they can also set the rate, and it creates a massive disparity between the tax charged on a car and a boat.

For example, if your cars assessed value is $25,000 in Virginia Beach, youll pay about $640 a year with current discounts. If your pleasure boat is assessed at 10 times that value a quarter of a million dollars your personal property tax bill is essentially three cents a year.

Office equipment is also subject to the tax. Any equipment used in the operation of an office such as computers, desks, chairs, etc. is taxed at the same rate as a vehicle. However, if youre a manufacturer in Virginia Beach, you get the same low rate as a pleasure boat owner, a millionth of a cent.

Dean says the time is now to put pressure on Richmond to consider eliminating the tax over time or reducing it.

I think theres a great opportunity here to phase it out and I would love to see Youngkin work with all of us, he said.

Dean says he will take his campaign to get rid of the personal property tax to the board of his Libertarian Party as well as the Tea Party, Republican womens groups and the Democratic Party of Virginia Beach.

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Investigation: What can Youngkin do about the annual aggravation known as the personal property tax? - WAVY.com

Members of the Libertarian Party of Los Angeles County have gotten permission to gather signatures to attempt to overturn a city ordinance that forces citizens to show proof of vaccination in order to enter many local private commercial venues.

Last October, the Los Angeles City Council voted to implement an ordinance that would require citizens to prove they're vaccinated to dine inside restaurants, hang out in bars, work out at gyms, get haircuts, or otherwise spend time at many indoor venues. The burden of enforcing the mandate actually fell on the businesses, who were obligated to demand citizens cooperate or face fines that would eventually reach $5,000 per violation.

Now, a group of Libertarian Party of Los Angeles County members have organized under the banner of "Medical Freedom LA" and are attempting to overturn the mandate.The Los Angeles City Clerk gave clearance to the group on Thursday to circulate the repeal petition. The group has 120 days to collect signatures of close to 65,000 registered voters in L.A. to force a vote.

"We believe you own your body, and that you have the right to decide what goes into your body," the site promoting the petition states. "We don't believe that government should punish people for exercising their natural rights, or force business owners to exclude people based on their vaccination status. We believe people have a right to medical privacy."

"We just think the vaccination mandate is a gross violation of our constitutional rights and our bodily autonomy," Angela McArdle, chair of the Libertarian Party of Los Angeles County, tells Reason. She says she has heard support for the petition across the political spectrum. Some don't want to be vaccinated or have had bad medical reactions to vaccinations. Others are voluntarily vaccinated but oppose the city forcing mandates and vaccination checks on citizens and businesses.

L.A. residents have been living under heavy COVID restrictions throughout the pandemic. Indoor masking mandates were lifted briefly in the summer of 2021, only to be restored when the delta variant caused infection rates to spike in the fall. They currently remain in place. The county announced Thursday that masking rules might be eased soon if infection numbers continue to drop.

At the time the city instituted the vaccination mandates, nearly 70 percent of L.A.County residents had been fully vaccinated. L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti said when he was supporting the vaccination mandate that the ordinance would encourage more people to get their shots in order to comply.

Four months later, though, the total percentage of people vaccinated in L.A. County is nearly unchanged. Nearly 70 percent of L.A. County residents are fully vaccinated, just as in October. L.A. has done very well with getting high-risk residents vaccinated (90 percent of those over 65 have been fully vaccinated), but the data doesn't show what Garcetti hoped would happen. The mandate has not, in fact, convinced holdouts to get their shots.

But it has forced service employees to demand that people who have gotten their vaccines provide documentation in order to participate in any number of common activities. It has made daily interactions more burdensome without actually achieving the goals used to justify the ordinance.

McArdle says the petition was submitted to the city in November to start the process of getting it to a public vote. Despite the brevity of the petitionit simply repeals the mandate ordinance and replaces it with nothingshe says she had to make five revisions to finally get clearance to go gather signatures. They plan to get started on Monday.

McArdle predicts that it will take five months at least for the process to play out before citizens can vote, assuming they get enough signatures. By the summer, the city might already be thinking about repealing the ordinance. McArdle would be fine with that outcome as well.

"I think filing the petition might push the City Council to save face and set it aside, and I'm fine with that," McArdle tells Reason. "It's not like I need to get a win on this. I just need things to be right."

Link:

L.A.'s Vaccination Mandate Has Not Increased Compliance. A New Petition Would Force Its Repeal. - Reason

The more disputatious sort of those opposing circuit breaker lockdowns and vaccine mandates, two of the statutory (mark the inverted commas) bellwethers of western nations scramble to curb the spread of Omicron, would likely agree with the famous lines from Percy Bysshe Shelleys 1819 lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound:

. . . but man

Equal, unclassed, tribeless, and nationless,

Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king

Over himself . . .

Linking a work supposed to have been recited to Eleanor Marx by Edward Aveling, her partner and a founding member of the Independent Labour Party at the turn of the 19th century, to a neoliberal (most people would agree) sensibility may raise eyebrows. Not to mention that approaching a matter where the lives and deaths of countless human beings are at stake through a literary prism may provoke familiar quibbles about the actual value of distilling concrete experience into airy abstractions for the sake of self-administered intellectual back-patting. Such criticisms would be far from mere pettifogging, but working through the rich (and unintended?) ambiguity of Shelleys lines should urge us to puzzle over the all-too-neat conflict between collectivism and libertarian individualism through which most of us are likely to have been interpreting state responses to the pandemic.

There is, of course, a defense to be made of making sense of our times as a series of successive jolts undergone by the vaunted cornerstone of Western culture: individualism. Wed better be aware, though, of the nuances intrinsic to the perennial quandary between individual rights and collective security that is now manifesting itself in our day-to-day experience; nuances that highlight the folly of restrictively affixing, in cookie-cutter fashion, politically identifying labels to the diverse implemented (or proposed strategies) to tackle Covid we see all around us.

Individual freedom, the Wests cherished doctrinal brainchild, is of course no abstract ideological self-profiling. It is enshrined in declarations that may not per se be enforceable, legally binding, but have over time been codified into international law. Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees every individuals prerogative to life, liberty and security of person, while article 7 of the European Charter of Fundamental Rights declares, in a similar vein, everyones right to respect for his or her private and family life. Needless to point out that in their core, these prerogatives are woven into the fabric of neoliberal or libertarian and welfarist credos alike. And despite their glaring socialist and communist implications, the lines by Shelley that I just quoted suggestively blur any boundaries between mutually antagonistic positions. Notice the way in which his exalted man morphs from a protocommunist archetype of a particularly extreme form into a paradigm of self-ownership at which any libertarian would beam approvingly: a king/Over himself. We may do well to beware of Twitter platitudes like that of Arizonas current state treasurer, who back in September furiously branded Bidens federal mandate requiring vaccination or weekly testing of companies with more than 100 employees as socialism in action. It is not only that (inventively) uncovering abstract spectres behind a single policy attests to the looming absolutes and dramatic oppositions studding a partisan mentality (i.e., obliging all employees in a company to comply with certain illness prevention standards is socialist, making whether employees in a company get vaccinated or tested discretionary is pro-choice and hence libertarian). It is also simply that such labelling risks coming across as genuinely oblivious as to what a truly socialist anti-Covid strategy should entail, which should in turn spawn a whole other series of questions: is there such a thing as a truly socialist policy? What would a wholly socialist policy against Covid consist of? Would any left-wing policy worth its salt ever possibly exclude elements commonly labelled as neoliberal, centrist, libertarian, individualist, etc?

This is, of course, not to contest the fact that there are gulfing discrepancies between neoliberal and welfarist approaches to tackling ever-new surges of the virus that stem from an ethical rift between individual and societal well-being. Diametrically divergent outlooks are decidedly real rather than a collective superstition. Australias libertarian firebrand Harrison Mclean, a self-christened Freedom Activist on Twitter, was arrested back in September for inciting a week-long mayhem against vaccines and lockdowns in Melbourne. Its equally no shock that Olaf Scholz, Germanys new chancellor and a member of the countrys Social Democratic Party, has vocally endorsed compulsory vaccination for the general population. The rationale underpinning such a decision, so commonsensical political wisdom would have it, being that each citizen is neither no less nor no more than any other entitled to the right to remain alive insofar as a vaccine is the closest route to safeguarding this right at present. Given the equal value of each human life, the imperative to secure the collective survival of a unit of individuals trumps ethically the duty to see to the security of a particular individuals right over their body. Isnt this as thorough, as ideal a fulfillment of article 7 of the Universal Declaration as one should wish for? Come to think of it, doesnt a slew of individuals shielded unexceptionally against a life threat bring the right to life and security into tenfold as great a fruition as respecting a single individuals volition to bar foreign matter from entering their organism does? Not an outlandish take on the Declaration, surely. Taking this logic further should show that relying on a binary political terminology to neatly define statutory actions may be untenable if seeking to ensure a collective wholes survival equates to defending a myriad of constitutive parts. Theoretically, at least, to the extent that a democratic socialist (or social democratic) policy is in no danger of devolving into a version of the communist authoritarianism to which the 20th century has born horrid witness, it shuns an inhumanly abstract whole in favour of a diversitarian collectivist vision. A vision firmly anchored in actual social experience experience that is manifold, messy, and ever-liable to disparities.

Numerous instances at our tense sociopolitical juncture debunk the rigid political labeling that has gone rampant. Widely displayed anti-vaccination slogans may chiefly be the shamelessly prideful creations of neoliberal right-wingers, but it is worth noticing that it is Austrias liberal conservative government, led by the Austrian Peoples Party, that has been outlining a stringent policy of mandatory vaccination. Given the partys Catholic affiliations, it may as well be that it is its basis in Christian humanism that is motivating its decision, given its explicit self-labelling as anti-socialist. Things are no less opaque in the leftist camp. Its no surprise that far-leftists should denounce draconian measures against Covid such as those implemented in China at the dawn of the pandemic as egregiously authoritarian. And many left-wingers credulity toward paranoid conspiracy scenarios points to an all-too-familiar moral outrage over the mileage to be gotten insidiously out of a societal crisis by elite contingents: the current state of affairs being a godsend for governments with an autocratic streak by legitimising a crackdown on citizen autonomy, pharmaceutical giants fishing for swayable guinea pigs to churn out absurd loads of cash. No wonder then that while a left-leaning figure like Scholz in Germany advocates mass immunisation, the leader of Frances democratic socialist party La France Insoumise and 2022 presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mlenchon has criticised the French parliaments approval of vaccine passports required for accessing bars and restaurants, cultural venues, and domestic travel.

It is by no means politically nave to see the vast majority of lockdown and vaccine mandate refuseniks as neoliberal avatars and those supporting collective immunisation against any pro-choice argument as compatible with a welfarist ethic. Yet it is at the same time useful to take stock of what Shelleys lines from two centuries ago imply, even in spite of themselves. Political doctrines are constructed categories that often seep into one another in theory as much as in praxis. Genuine political savviness should complicate our outlook on the inveterate clash between universalism and particularism that the Covid era has brought into fresh attention.

Tumisu via Pixabay

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Collective security and individual freedom in the Covid era: how clear-cut of a conflict is there? - Cherwell Online

A new report that has grabbed headlines on Fox News and other Murdoch-owned news outlets claims that regulations aimed at curtailing spread of the coronavirus through mandatory masking, lockdowns, and school closures in 2020 only reduced deaths from SARS-CoV-2 infections by 0.2 percent. The 62-page study, much-hailed by leading Republican politicians, has grabbed mainstream media headlines, as well. But closer scrutiny reveals that it is an example of motivated reasoning, indulging in scientific cherry-picking to prove a preferred thesis about public health.

Described as a Johns Hopkins study, the report was in reality published online by the Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise at Johns Hopkins University, an academic enterprise tightly linked to the libertarian Cato Institute think tank. The institute is separate from the famed medical institution and school of public health affiliated with the university. It is co-directed by one of the authors of the new report, economist Steve Hanke, who also directs the Troubled Currencies Project at the Cato Institute.

The other two authors of the report are Scandinavian economists Jonas Herby and Lars Jonung. Herby advises the Center for Political Studies, in Copenhagen, a self-described independent, liberal, free-market think tank in Denmark that strongly opposes coronavirus lockdown policies across the Nordic region and is generally anti-regulation. He is also tied to the American Institute for Economic Research, where he has written in favor of the Swedish governments very loose pandemic policies in 2020 that resulted, by the end of the summer of that year, in death rates more than five times higher than in neighboring Denmark, over 9 times greater than in Finland, and more than 11 times worse than the toll in Norway. Herby wrote that Swedens huge mortality was due to a mild flu season in the country in 2019, which left too many dry tinder vulnerable people, particularly the elderly, who burned up with coronavirus infections.

A new report that has grabbed headlines on Fox News and other Murdoch-owned news outlets claims that regulations aimed at curtailing spread of the coronavirus through mandatory masking, lockdowns, and school closures in 2020 only reduced deaths from SARS-CoV-2 infections by 0.2 percent. The 62-page study, much-hailed by leading Republican politicians, has grabbed mainstream media headlines, as well. But closer scrutiny reveals that it is an example of motivated reasoning, indulging in scientific cherry-picking to prove a preferred thesis about public health.

Described as a Johns Hopkins study, the report was in reality published online by the Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise at Johns Hopkins University, an academic enterprise tightly linked to the libertarian Cato Institute think tank. The institute is separate from the famed medical institution and school of public health affiliated with the university. It is co-directed by one of the authors of the new report, economist Steve Hanke, who also directs the Troubled Currencies Project at the Cato Institute.

The other two authors of the report are Scandinavian economists Jonas Herby and Lars Jonung. Herby advises the Center for Political Studies, in Copenhagen, a self-described independent, liberal, free-market think tank in Denmark that strongly opposes coronavirus lockdown policies across the Nordic region and is generally anti-regulation. He is also tied to the American Institute for Economic Research, where he has written in favor of the Swedish governments very loose pandemic policies in 2020 that resulted, by the end of the summer of that year, in death rates more than five times higher than in neighboring Denmark, over 9 times greater than in Finland, and more than 11 times worse than the toll in Norway. Herby wrote that Swedens huge mortality was due to a mild flu season in the country in 2019, which left too many dry tinder vulnerable people, particularly the elderly, who burned up with coronavirus infections.

Lars Jonung is retired from the Lund University Department of Economics in Sweden, where he for decades favored conservative financial policies. Since the pandemic emerged, Jonung has argued that the Swedish constitution renders such actions as mask mandates and business closures illegal.

Now the trio of economists claims, in a meta-analysis of allegedly thousands of coronavirus studies, to show that none of the nonpharmaceutical measures taken by governmentslike mask wearing, social distancing, bar closures, virtual school, and stay-at-home ordershave had any clear benefit in reducing the burden of death in the pandemic. Their lengthy literature review has not been peer-reviewed or submitted for review to a major journal.

The effect of border closures, school closures and limiting gatherings on COVID-19 mortality yields precision-weighted estimates of -0.1 percent, -4.4 percent, and 1.6 percent, respectively, they wrote. They added that lockdowns, compared to no lockdowns, also do not reduce COVID-19 mortality.

They reached this conclusion by culling though Google Scholar anda coronavirus economic research website affiliated with the University of Cambridge for papers about the spring 2020 lockdowns in Europe and North America. They said they found 18,590 relevant papers. The first 13 pages of their study explains how and why they decided that only 34 of those 18,590 papers merited inclusion in their analysis. They tossed out studies that fail to provide what they deem as high quality and long-term evidence of association between specific anti-COVID nonpharmaceutical policies and deaths. Though few public health interventions can typically be credited with averting specific deaths, that is what they are demanding.

By this measure, studies that show, for example, that measles vaccination in Africa decreased child death rates during famines would be tossed out for lack of a clear cause-and-effect relationship between the vaccine and a subsequent comparative resilience of a child against starvation. In the case of COVID, the authors reject studies that point to declines in deaths due directly to diabetes or suicide, though it is clear that lowering the pandemic burden on urgent care facilities allows health care providers time and resources to address other medical issues.

Most of the selected 34 papers were written by economists, rather than public health experts, and only 22 of them have been peer-reviewed. After all of this cherry-picking, the trio further discounts contrary findings by declaring that the methodology of some of these 34 papers are of low quality, according to their vague standards, or cannot be reconciled with higher forms of analysis. This conveniently leaves only a handful of solid papers from which they draw the conclusion favored by right-wing and libertarian politicians: Public health restrictions to curb the spread of the coronavirus are a sham.

There are many reasons, both methodological and analytical, why the new report is wrong, which have been noted elsewhere. But the most obvious evidence that lockdownshowever authoritarian or heinous they may bestop the spread of SARS-CoV-2 and prevent associated mortality is China. Though the pandemic started in Wuhan in late 2019 and the coronavirus spread widely across the nation of 1.4 billion people, the zero COVID policy pushed by President Xi Jinping, which entails the worlds most aggressive lockdowns whenever and wherever a handful of cases are found, leaves it with one of the lowest death rates on earth.

The United States, by contrast, imposed among the longest periods of school closures of any country in part to make up for its failure to stringently enforce other public health interventions. The difference in results is stark. The United States has suffered around 2,690 deaths per million people. The rate in China has been around 3 deaths per million. (Among OECD nations, the United States has the highest death rate, by far.)

Chinas policies have, of course, been brutal, shutting entire cities of 14 million or more people off from the rest of the nation when fewer than a dozen suspected cases have been identified, and placing hundreds of thousands of households under quarantines so strict that families faced starvation as they were prohibited from shopping.

But less despotic lockdowns surely help explain why New Zealand has had only 11 deaths per million people, South Korea at 132, and Japan at 150. (The authors also dont acknowledge that strict border closures imposed by countries like New Zealand, Australia, and China may have played a role in limiting the spread of the coronavirus.) By excluding all Asian nations from their analysis, the trio ends up comparing measures in the dismally-mortality-stricken United States and the similarly hard-hit European Union, which has 2,150 deaths per million.

In the United States, multiple studies show markedly higher mortality rates in counties that voted Republican in the 2020 presidential election, where regulatory actions to address the pandemic are less likely to be in place, compared to counties that voted Democrat. Similarly, getting vaccinated, wearing masks, and taking the debunked ivermectin treatment for COVID all follow partisan lines in the United States.

A new study published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and California health authorities found that people in that state who wore any type of masks when among others in indoor settings reduced their odds of infection by 56 percent. If they wore N95 or K95 masks their risk dropped by a whopping 83 percent. Imposing mask-wearing guidelines in this pandemic appears to spare millions of infections and related deaths.

The appalling pseudo-science produced by Herby, Jonung and Hanke can be easily dismissed by public health advocates and scientists. But that will not be the end of it. The enemies of public health measures in the West are already using the study to fuel their ire. From Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson to Alex Jones and Senator Rand Paul the message is loud and clear: All community precautions aimed at stemming the spread of SARS-CoV-2 are violations of our libertiesand do not work to boot.

For months, Republican leaders have attacked all forms of public health mandates across the United States, both nonpharmaceutical and vaccine-based. Republican governors led the charge against Biden administration efforts to impose vaccine mandates on large employers, an effort overturned by the Supreme Court in a partisan vote. In December, one faction of the Republican Party threatened to shut down the federal government to block mandates. They were eventually overruled by Senator Mitch McConnell and other Republican leaders.

Rand Paul, whose father, Ron, led the Libertarian Party and named his son after libertarian icon Ayn Rand, has for two years led Republican opposition to wearing masks, outdoor dining orders, and social distancing measures, and insists that millions of Americans are, like himself, naturally immune after having COVID. He also supported the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocates allowing SARS-CoV-2 to spread freely and spawn herd immunity that would allegedly lead to disappearance of the coronavirus. As with this new report, the herd immunity claims drew accolades from right-wing media, and led President Donald Trump to bring advocate Scott Atlas into his White House pandemic response team.

With more than 900,000 coronavirus deaths in the United States, the most in any nation, and the pandemic nearing its third year, Americans are understandably fed up and vulnerable to messages that direct their rage while providing justification for abandoning disease control measures. This Johns Hopkins report is easily cast aside as bogus science, but it will nevertheless live on, exacerbating partisan divides and casting doubt on the Biden administrations COVID response. It should not. It is mere disinformation.

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Economists Are Fueling the War Against Public Health - Foreign Policy

Cryptocurrency may be coming to a Texas government in 2023. Turns out there has been an upswing in the number of politicians across the country who think it's a good idea to bring it into government and this state has its share of adherents.

Take for instance the 2022 midterm Libertarian candidate for Llano County Treasurer, Joe Burnes, who is really into Bitcoin.

Governments drive adoption? Sure, if you consider runaway printing of fiat which robs value and subesquently [sic] motivates people to buy Bitcoin...then yeah, they drive adoption, he recently said on Twitter in response to a pro-Bitcoin posy by investment YouTuber Anthony Pompliano. Burnes then added, "LOL".

Burnes formerly ran as a Libertarian in 2020 for Texas Congressional District 19, garnering 2.4 percent of the vote. The race was handily won by Republican Jodey Arrington.

Though listed as the candidate for treasurer on the official Libertarian Party of Texas site, Burnes does not seem to be doing much actual campaigning. He spends most of his time promoting cryptocurrency and trolling people who arent doing as well as he is.

Burnes did not respond to multiple requests for comment about him possibly introducing crypto into Llano County government, nor has he expressed specific plans to do so.. Nonetheless, his entry into the race is part of a disturbing trend.

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies may be heralded by their adherents as the money of the future, but more and more people are discovering the whole exchange is closer to a giant pyramid scheme. Because of the processing power required for each transaction, Bitcoin is mostly useless for day-to-day buying activity. Though nominally decentralized, the market has increasingly come under the control of several unregulated bank-like entities that essentially do the job of current world currencies, just worse. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies function more as a commodity, and the only possible payout in the end is cashing out for dollars.

The way a good pyramid scheme continues to operate is by bringing in more people at the bottom. Introducing Bitcoin into government is a fine way to accomplish that. The Libertarian Party of Texas seems happy to push that, as their dues can be paid in Bitcoin. In Arizona, Republican State Senator Wendy Rogers has filed legislation to make Bitcoin legal tender there.

Dan Olson is the creator of the incredibly detailed Bitcoin video essay Line Goes Up The Problem With NFTs. He says that while researching for the essay, he noticed a lot more attempts by politicians to get Bitcoin into local and state government.

I think it's just starting to form into something more coherent and organized. Says Olson. Where for most of the last decade it's mostly been Libertarian Party candidates who have crypto as just one bullet point in their platform to, like, do away with drivers licenses, I get the sense that there's a newer more mainstream, more local crop that are more focused on promoting crypto via positions in government (like the proposal in Arizona that will almost certainly be struck down as being extremely unconstitutional). I also know that the industry has ramped up a pretty substantial lobbying wing that's not just three kids in a trench coat.

Long term, its very unlikely that a few random conservative politicians will end up forcing Texans to have a crypto wallet, but we should know that they are currently trying.

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Does Bitcoin Belong in Texas Government? - Houston Press

Support for continued mask mandates is collapsing among previously mask militant Democrats and public health officials. California Gov. Gavin Newsom is ending the state's strict indoor mask mandate next week, and New Jersey and Connecticut will no longer require masks in schools. CNN medical analyst Leana Wen, who has flirted with some truly dystopian policies concerning the stigmatization of the unvaccinated, now sounds positively libertarian: This week she heralded the end of mandates as "a needed shift from government-imposed requirement to individual decision."

Wen claims that "the science has changed." In reality, little has changed in the last six monthsthe vaccines continue to be the only significant policy intervention to drastically prevent severe cases of COVID-19except that many, many more people have caught and recovered from coronavirus. Case numbers fluctuate as more contagious variants run wild through the populationwith masks and other measures doing little to deter thembut the vaccinated enjoy robust protection.

Still, Team Blue giving up on mask mandates is a welcomed development.

Not every member of the cautious coalition has jumped ship just yet, however. American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingartenwhose significant influence over the Biden administration makes her the person most responsible for the education system's failures during the pandemicis still reluctant to let kids lose their masks. In an interview with MSNBC, she said she was theoretically in favor of a masking "off-ramp," but only when "the spread [is] low enough so that there's no dissemination or transmission in schools."

But COVID-19 is not going away entirely anytime soon: There will always be the possibility of one student transmitting the disease to another. Vaccinated staff who catch COVID-19 are likely to experience a mild bout; the students themselves will probably suffer mild cases, whether vaccinated or not. Healthy young people are at little risk of severe illness, and whether they choose to get vaccinated is really no one's business but their own.

Nevertheless, Weingarten was only willing to commit to a de-masking policy in schools where the vaccination rate is at least 80 percent. "I like what Massachusetts has done," she said. "What they've said is that on a school by school basis, if there's an 80 percent vaccination rate then those schools can lift the mask mandates." This measure is overly cautious: Schools can certainly let students take off their masks, even if the vaccination rate among kids and teens is lower than that. In any case, there's little reason to think that compulsory masking is making a significant difference in schools, contrary to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) sloppy reporting on this subject.

Indeed, one of MSNBC's other guests, Dr. Lucy McBride, said mask mandates are doing more harm than good. "There's no convincing evidence in the real world that masking children in schools makes a significant difference in transmission in schools," she said.

Many students have gone two years without regularly seeing the faces of their teachers and classmates. When Weingarten is speaking and needs to be heard, she understands that it's better to remove her mask, as she did during a recent conference appearance. Why would this be any different in the classroom?

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Randi Weingarten Says Masks Can Come Off When There's 'No Transmission in Schools' - Reason

NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!

GoFundMe's suspension of millions to support protesting truckers in Canada shocked many, particularly when the company initially announced its intention to distribute the money to other charities.

It was less of a surprise for those of us who have criticized the company for years over its use of the platform to target and block funds for conservative and libertarian causes. Indeed, the company has revised an old practice known as the "Nag's Head light" in luring the unsuspecting into what has become a liberal lockbox on funds.

GOFUNDME, NOW NIXING CANADIAN TRUCKER FUNDRAISER, PROMOTED CAPITOL HILL OCCUPIED PROTEST APPEAL

In the Carolinas, locals would sometimes tie a lantern under the head of a horse to lure ships to their doom.Thinking the light was a ship in deep water, the ships would unwittingly sail into the shore rocks, where they would be stripped of their cargo. That is how the resort town Nag's Head, North Carolina, got its name.

GoFundMe is the ultimate Nag's Head operation. It draws conservative and libertarian causes to its shore with promises of being a neutral crowdfunding site. At its creation, the founders pledged to change the world by "disrupting giving" by handing control to average people in supporting others with common values and views.

The easy-to-use technology and need for crowdfunding services quickly expanded the company into a multibillion-dollar enterprise. However, it soon became clear that the company was using its control of funds to advance its own political agenda. Worse yet, the company effectively coaxed groups into fundraising campaigns on its site, only to freeze accounts before the money could be used.

GOFUNDME BACKTRACKS ON REDISTRIBUTING MONEY FOR CANADIAN TRUCKERS, UNDER THREAT OF FRAUD INVESTIGATION

In the case of the Canadian truckers protesting COVID mandate, the company perfectly replicated the Nag's Head light. It allowed people to donate over $10 million, thinking that they were helping the truckers and presumably not donating to other sites. It then suspended the account and announced that it would distribute the money to other charities in consultation with the truckers. Once the ships crashed on its rocks, it was literally going to salvage the wreckage.

It is a familiar pattern for the company in allowing people to send money for badly needed support only to lock the funds away at the last minute.

The announcement was breathtakingly moronic and led some to call for criminal investigations.It turns out that soliciting funds for one reason and then using them for another ("better") cause is considered fraud in some circles. The company quickly backtracked. However, it still refused to allow the donations to go to the truckers. It will return the money. In the meantime, critical time and support has been lost for those who trusted the company.

It is a familiar pattern for the company in allowing people to send money for badly needed support only to lock the funds away at the last minute. The company's record has moved it well beyond any plausible deniability that it is not using access to donations as a way of advancing its own priorities.

Consider GoFundMe's freezing of funds for legal defense funds. One would think that funding litigation costs would be unassailable since it is an effort to secure judicial review of the underlying merits of a case or a cause. After all, if a cause is based on disinformation, a court can quickly sort out the truth. Right? Wrong.

GoFundMe froze donations needed to support Kyle Rittenhouse's legal defense because he was accused of a violent crime. However, that is the point of a trial. He wasaccusedof a crime, and he was entitled to a presumption of innocence. However, the media ran false accounts of the story while social media companies like TikTok censored pro-Rittenhouse material. One police officer was fired for simply donating to Rittenhouse anonymously on GoFundMe. Neither the company nor the media came to the defense of Norfolk Police Officer William Kelly. Rittenhouse was, of course, acquitted. Then GoFundMe released the funds after they were no longer needed to support his trial.

The company also suspended litigation funds for accused police officers as well as parents who sought to challenge vaccinate mandates in courts.

When the company blocked the distribution of donations to Rittenhouse, it declared, "GoFundMes Terms of Service prohibit raising money for the legal defense of an alleged violent crime."

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It is a ridiculous policy since defendants have a presumption of innocence and all parties should be able to present their best cases before independent judges. That includes Canadian truckers, Black Lives Matter, Antifa and other groups facing litigation. Moreover, critics have noted that the company has supported legal funds supporting rioters in various cities as well as an appeal for the 2020 SeattleCapitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP).

The hypocrisy of the company on such issues has been flagged repeatedly, including by Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

It does not matter. Like the social media companies, GoFundMe controls billions in funds and has become the very scourge that it was designed to combat. Rather than empower average people, it now operates more like a corporate overlord on what causes are worthy of crowdfunding.

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Notably, GoFundMe relied on accounts from the Canadian government to label the truckers as violent despite the fact that the truckers are protesting the government.

GoFundMe controls billions in funds and has become the very scourge that it was designed to combat. Rather than empower average people, it now operates more like a corporate overlord on what causes are worthy of crowdfunding.

The protests have been largely peaceful, particularly in comparison to the "mostly peaceful" protests in past summers (by groups allowed to crowdfund by the company). It is the same pattern used by other companies in serving as a conduit of government priorities and policies.

YouTube and Twitter have blocked critics of Vladimir Putin or governments like India. Even the WHO has supported such censorship to deal with what it now calls the "infodemic," which includes criticism of itself. In the United States, Democratic leaders, including President Joe Biden, have pushed for more corporate censorship on subjects ranging from global warming and gender issues to election integrity and vaccines.

As companies like Twitter actively silence dissenting voices, GoFundMe has served as a chokepoint for funds. The result is that many are finding it not only difficult to use social media to voice their views but to use crowdfunding to garner the support of like-minded people.

The inclusion of GoFundMe in this increasingly united front is particularly chilling. As the Supreme Court has repeatedly held, money is a critical part of free speech. You speak through your donations and those funds then support further free speech and associations.

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As companies like Twitter actively silence dissenting voices, GoFundMe has served as a chokepoint for funds. The result is that many are finding it not only difficult to use social media to voice their views but to use crowdfunding to garner the support of like-minded people.

GoFundMe can clearly redefine itself as a progressive company. It has free speech rights like those who it is seeking to silence. Like many in the media, the company has largely written off half of the country. The problem for the company will be when the crowd in its crowdfunding business goes somewhere else.

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GoFundMe's left-wing roadblock Canada truckers not the first cause targeted by crowdfunding site - Fox News