Daily Archives: May 9, 2021

The conflict is right there in the opening words of the document that founded the United States of America. Everyone has a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Few would disagree with Thomas Jeffersons declaration of principle. But what happens when life and liberty come into conflict?

Plainly, liberty must have some limits. And the coronavirus pandemic, posing a threat to life that can only be fought by collective actions to which some wont consent, revealed that few in the Western world knew where to put those limits, or even what they meant when they talked of liberty.

China, whose dominant Confucian philosophy emphasizes life and social harmony, showed how much easier it was to protect life if governments could ignore individual liberties. In January of 2020, after a cluster of coronavirus cases emerged in theprovince of Hebei, which surrounds Beijing, authorities declared a "wartime state" once the case count reached 600.

What followed was a literal lockdown. Some 20,000 residents of outlying villages were bussed to government quarantine facilities. People in three cities with a combined population of 17 million had to stay in their buildings at all times. All 11 million residents of the provincial capital, Shijiazhuang, had two compulsory Covid-19 tests each week. Men in hazmat suits marched through empty streets spraying disinfectant. Apartment doors were taped shut from the outside after authorities dropped off vegetable packages to last five days. Many homes lacked fridges or ovens.

By the end of the month, the number of cases had topped at 865. Train service re-started after a 34-day gap. Things returned to normal.

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This is what happens if life trumps liberty. In the West, where it doesnt, there were onerous but more lenient stay-at-home orders, which generally ended before outbreaks had been extinguished.

On March 2, a month after the Hebei lockdown, Governor Greg Abbott of Texas announced that his state was 100% open. Abbott admitted that Covid-19 remained a risk, but declined to impose further infringements on liberty.

Each person has a role to play in their own personal safety and the safety of others, he said. With this executive order, we are ensuring that all businesses and families in Texas have the freedom to determine their own destiny.Texas had reported 7,750 new cases in the previous week.

Texas is a famously individualist state, but was not an outlier. The lockdowns of 2020 were well enough observed to causea savage economic recession, but provoked intensifying opposition. The universal theme was that freedoms had been violated.

In a viral video, a shopper entered a Costco warehouse in Colorado without a mask, and was asked toput one on because that is the companys policy.

Im not doing it because I woke up in a free country, replied the shopper, who complained that mask-wearers were sheep as the attendant took away his trolley.

In the U.K., a multi-party group called Keep Britain Free led protests on behalf of millions of people who want to think for themselves and take responsibility for their own lives. Banners at violent demonstrations in Germany proclaimed, Freedom isnt everything, but without freedom, everything is nothing.

There were arguments over whether lockdowns would work against the disease, and whether their heavy economic toll was justified. But the central point remained: Most Westerners felt the Hebei lockdown was immoral even though it successfully beat the virus, because it violated peoples freedom.The ends didnt justify the means.

But if liberty is so important, what exactly is it, and where does it come from?

Liberty has a surprisingly recent heritage. Neither the ancient Greeks nor the Jewish prophets had any great concept of it, nor do any of the great Asian traditions. Instead, the doctrine of a right to be free dates to the ferment in 17th-century England that saw one king executed and another dismissed.The country rejected the notion of an absolute monarchy operating by divine right, and the philosopher John Locke offered a new system to replace it.

John Locke

Source: Hulton Archive via Getty Images

Locke believed in natural rights to life, liberty and property. But for men to be free, he saw that they must allow others to be free. Thus, in his formulation, freedom did not include a right to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions and included an obligation to preserve the rest of mankind. That would seem to exclude the freedom to ignore doctors who warn against the risk of infecting fellow citizens with Covid-19 by leaving the house, refusing to wear a mask or refusing a vaccination.

Striking the right balance between individual freedom and social obligation has been the aim of philosophers ever since. As Lockes ideas became the founding philosophy of Englands rebel colony, but not of Lockes home country itself, defining the right to liberty that he promulgated has been the central debate within the U.S. throughout its history. It has proved maddeningly difficult.

Sixty years ago, the Oxford University professor Isaiah Berlin, who fled the Soviet Union with his family when he was a child, made a famous speech defining two concepts of liberty.

The first was negative liberty: freedom from interference, the freedom to be left alone. This is the version that drove Jefferson and the other founding fathers. The Dont Tread on Me flag of a coiled rattlesnake, adapted by Benjamin Franklin as an emblem of resistance in the War of Independence, is now the flag of American resisters against pandemic restrictions.

Isaiah Berlin

Photographer: Sophie Bassouls/Sygma

Berlin also saw a rival concept of positive liberty, the freedom to do what one wants. This is whatFrench revolutionaries meant when they called for liberty, equality and fraternity.This notion of freedom motivated left-wing lockdown opponents, who held that quarantines were unfair to those who could not afford to go without income, and couldnt work from home. They were effectively deprived of their positive liberty.Those were the kinds of people who gained support from the Harvard philosopher John Rawls who published his massive Theory of Justice in 1970. Rawls imagined a social contract that people would sign behind a veil of ignorance, in which they did not know where they would rank in society. At great length, he argued that citizens would happily tolerate some degree of inequality, but that the worst off would have to be in an acceptable position. Put differently, everyone needs some positive liberty to have the chance to make something of themselves.

Such thinking justifies governments in clamping down on liberty in a pandemic, particularly if they pay money to those who lose their jobs as a result. Such a policy held sway, with regional variations, across the West.

Opposition to anti-Covid measures, from lockdowns to vaccines, has been dominated by negative, not positive liberty. George Crowder, a philosopher at Flinders University in Australia and author of several major books on Berlin, described it as the American revolutionary philosophy writ large.

I think these protests are just basically about negative liberty, he said in an interview. Its people wanting to do what they want to do and wanting government to get out of their way.

Berlin himself opposed positive liberty, fearing that it could become a Trojan horse for the kind of totalitarianism he witnessed in his youth. His last essay, published after his death in 1997 by the New York Review of Books, rang with the distrust of science that surfaced a quarter-century later:

There have always been thinkers who hold that if only scientists, or scientifically trained persons, could be put in charge of things, the world would be vastly improved. To this I have to say that no better excuse, or even reason, has ever been propounded for unlimited despotism on the part of an elite which robs the majority of its essential liberties.

The last years protests, then, have been an expression of a yearning for negative liberty. People expect to be left alone. But this entails leaving others alone, and that creates another set of problems.

Libertarians on the political right take Lockes notions of natural individual rights to their logical conclusion. Hugely influential in the U.S., where they have exerted a strong influence on the Republican Party, modern libertarians hold either for a limited state restricted to national defense, policing and safeguarding of contracts, or no state at all.

Ayn Rand

Source: New York Times Co./Getty Images

Its most famous exponent is another Russian emigre philosopher, Ayn Rand. Her acolytes included Alan Greenspan, who spent 18 years as chairman of the Federal Reserve starting in 1987, while Paul Ryan, a former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, based policy proposals on a speech by a character in Rands novel Atlas Shrugged.These ideas underpinned Reaganomics, tax cuts, school vouchers and other policies to shrink the state.

But when fighting a pandemic, even rock-ribbed libertarians acknowledge limits to liberty. Milton Friedman, the Nobel prize-winning economist and impassioned libertarian, accepted a role for the state in dealing with neighborhood effects, when the actions of one individual impose costs on others. He wrote in the 1950s that these justify substantial public health activities: maintaining the purity of water, assuring proper sewage disposal, controlling contagious diseases.

Others made no such concessions. Murray Rothbard, another libertarian economist of Friedmans generation, developed a theory of anarcho-capitalism that held that the state itself was illegal, along with taxation.

For this philosophy, saving lives is of no moment, Walter Block, a libertarian economics professor and follower of Rothbard, wrote in the Journal of Libertarian Studies last year. Rather, the essence of libertarianism concerns rights, obligations, duties, the nonaggression principle, and private property rights. Block argued that if libertarian rights are always respected, more lives would ultimately be spared.

Rigorous libertarian arguments lead to some surprising places.Since libertarians must respect property rights, the hapless Costco customer who refused to wear a mask inside the privately owned store would have had little support from Rothbard or Rand.

And even lockdowns are complicated for those who treat the liberty of others as seriously as their own, creating controversy among libertarians. The right to walk down the street with a gun in a holster would not extend to firing it at random without running afoul of thenon-aggression principle so familiar to libertarians that they give it a nickname, NAP. What does the NAP imply in a time of contagious disease?

Rothbard worried that the NAP might be misused to justify an over-active state, and warned in his book The Ethics of Liberty that force should not be used against someone just because his or her behavior is risky: Once one permits someones fear of the risky activities of others to lead to coercive action, then any tyranny becomes justified, he wrote.

But other libertarians are prepared to countenance a different balance in a pandemic, and remain agnostic on quarantines. If spreading illnesses is not a rights violation, then nothing is, Block wrote in the Journal of Libertarian Studies.

Libertarians are often accused of justifying selfishness, and Rand even wrote a book called The Virtue of Selfishness. But the arguments that say the state shouldnt tell people what to do might also imply an obligation to voluntarily wear masks and observe social distancing. Liberty is a two-way street. Unmasked protesters gathering in large crowds under rattlesnake flags might not have thought this one through.

After a year of anger, the West is nocloser to defining the limits of liberty. Most countries ended up with compromises that satisfied nobody, with lockdowns tough enough to inflict misery but not to thwart the disease from claiming a dreadful toll.

That failure is dispiriting, and governments actions during the pandemic leave legitimate reasons for anger and protest. But even though liberty became a rallying call, its not clear that its adherents knew what liberty they wanted, or even whether liberty was what they wanted at all.

Crowder, the philosopher and Berlin chronicler, has probably thought about liberty as much as anyone now living. He put it this way: A lot of people abuse the idea of liberty and they present it as a fine sounding concept that in fact is just a placeholder for something else that concerns them or bothers them. Its a fine sounding placeholder for saying that they will do what they want to do and get out of my way.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story:John Authers at jauthers@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:Jonathan Landman at jlandman4@bloomberg.net

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Covid, Liberty and Responsibility: Where's the Line? - Bloomberg

PHOENIX Political parties have no legal right to observe extra audits that counties perform on election equipment beyond those required by state law, a judge has ruled.

In a decision published Tuesday, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Joseph Mikitish said the Arizona Libertarian Party was invited to oversee the four audits that are required by state law. That includes two before each election and two afterwards, including the random hand count.

This year, the judge said, county supervisors agreed to two additional "forensic audits'' following complaints by some, including Republican state legislators, who questioned the outcome that saw Joe Biden get 45,109 more votes in the county than Donald Trump. That enabled the Democratic challenger to win Arizona and its 11 electoral votes by 10,457.

But in both cases, the county declined to have party observers. Instead, it invited the League of Women Voters and deputy registrars, arguing the space restrictions at the county offices due to COVID-19 precluded party participation.

The Libertarian Party sued, contending its exclusion violated the law. And the Arizona Republican Party filing arguments in support, arguing that keeping out the political parties "aggravates the atmosphere of distrust that the county has fostered over the past year through their own misconduct and lack of transparency.''

Judge Mikitish, however, said there's one major flaw to all of this: There's no basis for the argument in state law.

He said the record shows what the county wanted and conducted was an examination of its hardware and software to analyze its vulnerability to being hacked, verify there was no malicious software installed, test to ensure that tabulators were not sending or receiving information from the internet, and conduct a logic and accuracy test to confirm that there was no vote switching.

Judge Mikitish said both Arizona laws and the state Election Procedures Manual do have specific requirements for political party participation or observation of these. But what the county conducted, the judge said, is separate from these and not legally required.

He also also said there are procedures about who is entitled to watch the official counting of ballots. But that's not what occurred here, Judge Mikitish said."The forensic audits did not count or audit ballots from the November 2020 general election,'' he wrote. "Because the audits at issue in this case did not related to the counting of ballots, the statutes do not require that they include observation or participation by political parties.''

Judge Mikitish acknowledged nothing prohibited the county from including parties in the special audits. But he said it's not up to judges to decide whether they should have done so.

"Such policy decisions are left to other branches of government,'' the judge wrote.

Tuesday's ruling does not affect a separate audit of Maricopa County election results being conducted at Veterans Memorial Coliseum.

But there are links. Most notably, Republican senators ordered that audit after they said the county's audits the ones at issue here were insufficient.

And attorney Michael Kielsky, who represents the Libertarian Party, said there's a bit of irony in the county using the results of its own audits to boast of the accuracy of the 2020 general election and then criticizing the Senate for following up with one of its own.

"The fact is, what they did is everything they're complaining about now that the Senate is doing, which is just an audit with a pre-determined outcome,'' he said of the county.

"They hand picked who they wanted to do what they wanted to do,'' Mr. Kielsky continued. "And they didn't want anybody to look too closely.''

Mr. Kielsky also noted that the Republican-controlled Senate, unlike the county, invited members of other political parties to observe the process at Veterans Memorial Coliseum.

Mr. Fischer, a longtime award-winning Arizona journalist, is founder and operator of Capitol Media Services.

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Judge: Arizona political parties don't have to be invited to extra election recounts - Your Valley

Former President Donald Trump has claimed at times that hell start a third political party called the Patriot Party. In fact, most Americans 62% in a recent poll say theyd welcome the chance to vote for a third party.

In almost any other democracy, those Americans would get their wish. In the Netherlands, for instance, even a small third party called the Party for the Animals composed of animal rights supporters, not dogs and cats won 3.2% of the legislative vote in 2017 and earned five seats, out of 150, in the national legislature.

Yet in the U.S., candidates for the House of Representatives from the Libertarian Party, the most successful of U.S. minor parties, won not a single House seat in 2020, though Libertarians got over a million House votes. Neither did the Working Families Party, with 390,000 votes, or the Legalize Marijuana Now Party, whose U.S. Senate candidate from Minnesota won 185,000 votes.

Why dont American voters have more than two viable parties to choose among in elections, when almost every other democratic nation in the world does?

As Ive found in researching political parties, the American electoral system is the primary reason why the U.S. is the sole major democracy with only two parties consistently capable of electing public officials. Votes are counted in most American elections using plurality rules, or winner take all. Whoever gets the most votes wins the single seat up for election.

Other democracies choose to count some or all of their votes differently. Instead of, say, California being divided into 53 U.S. House districts, each district electing one representative, the whole state could become a multi-member district, and all the voters in California would be asked to choose all 53 U.S. House members using proportional representation.

Each party would present a list of its candidates for all 53 seats, and you, as the voter, would select one of the party slates. If your party got 40% of the votes in the state, then it would elect 40% of the representatives the first 21 candidates listed on the partys slate. This is the system used in 21 of the 28 countries in Western Europe, including Germany and Spain.

In such a system depending on the minimum percentage, or threshold, a party needed to win one seat it would make sense for even a small party to run candidates for the U.S. House, reasoning that if they got just 5% of the vote, they could win 5% of the states U.S. House seats.

So if the Legalize Marijuana Now party won 5% of the vote in California, two or three of the partys candidates would become House members, ready to argue in Congress for marijuana legalization. In fact, until the 1950s, several U.S. states had multi-member districts.

Under the current electoral system, however, if the Legalize Marijuana Now party gets 5% of the states House vote, it wins nothing. It has spent a lot of money and effort with no officeholders to show for it. This disadvantage for small parties is also built into the Electoral College, where a candidate needs a majority of electoral votes to win the presidency and no non-major-party candidate ever has.

Theres another factor working against third-party success: State legislatures make the rules about how candidates and parties get on the ballot, and state legislatures are made up almost exclusively of Republicans and Democrats. They have no desire to increase their competition.

So a minor-party candidate typically needs many more signatures on a petition to get on the ballot than major-party candidates do, and often also pays a filing fee that major party candidates dont necessarily have to pay.

Further, although many Americans call themselves independents, pollsters find that most of these independents actually lean toward either the Democrats or the Republicans, and their voting choices are almost as intensely partisan as those who do claim a party affiliation.

Party identification is the single most important determinant of peoples voting choices; in 2020, 94% of Republicans voted for Donald Trump, and the same percentage of Democrats voted for Joe Biden.

The small number of true independents in American politics are much less likely to show interest in politics and to vote. So it would not be easy for a third party to get Americans to put aside their existing partisan allegiance.

The idea of a center party has great appeal in theory. In practice, few agree on what centrist means. Lots of people, when asked this question, envision a center party that reflects all their own views and none of the views they disagree with.

Thats where a Trump Party does have one advantage. Prospective Trump Party supporters do agree on what they stand for: Donald Trump.

[The Conversations newsletter explains whats going on with the coronavirus pandemic. Subscribe now.]

Yet theres an easier path for Trump supporters than fighting the U.S. electoral system, unfriendly ballot access rules and entrenched party identification. Thats to take over the Republican Party. In fact, theyre very close to doing so now.

Trump retains a powerful hold over the partys policies. His adviser, Jason Miller, stated, Trump effectively is the Republican Party. This Trump Party is very different from Ronald Reagans GOP. Thats not surprising; the U.S. major parties have always been permeable and vulnerable to takeover by factions.

There are good reasons for Americans to want more major parties. Its hard for two parties to capture the diversity of views in a nation of more than 300 million people.

But American politics would look very different if the country had a viable multi-party system, in which voters could choose from among, say, a Socialist Party, a White Supremacist Party and maybe even a Party for the Animals.

To get there, Congress and state legislatures would need to make fundamental changes in American elections, converting single-member districts with winner-take-all rules into multi-member districts with proportional representation.

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Why Trump is more likely to win in the GOP than to take his followers to a new third party - The Conversation US

Despite years of advocacy and legal activism from libertarian-leaning academics, the federal government continues to bar Americans from selling their kidneys. Now a service dog trainer and a personal injury attorney are teaming up to take this prohibition down.

Last month, New Jersey man John Bellocchio filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York against U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, challenging the constitutionality of a decades-old federal ban on compensating organ donors.

"Risks are associated with the donation of an organ, yet individuals are wrongfully excluded from being provided with any incentive or compensation for the potential risks that may occur in giving their organ to another," reads his complaint. "There is no valid constitutional or public policy rationale why one should not be able to receive a profit from such a transaction."

For Bellocchiothe owner of Fetch and More, which places service dogs with veterans and other low-income clientsthe issue of organ sales is personal. His company works primarily in Appalachia, he says, where he's encountered many clients who are desperate for a new kidney or some extra cash.

"My colleagues and I saw that there was an enormous need both for kidneys and for money," he tells Reason. "I think what was sort of an esoteric or ephemeral constitutional question became very real for me."

According to his lawsuit, Bellocchio also recently experienced financial distress that led him to look into options for selling his kidney. Through that research, he learned that doing so would put him on the wrong side of the 1984 National Organ Transplant Act (NOTA), which makes it a crime for anyone to "acquire, receive, or otherwise transfer any human organ for valuable consideration for use in human transplantation if the transfer affects interstate commerce."

Violators of this ban face a maximum fine of $50,000 and up to five years in prison.

That prohibition has left the 90,000 patients in need of a kidney on the national transplant list dependent on either finding a donor who is both a physical match and altruistic enough to part with an organ for free or waiting for the exact right stranger to die unexpectedly while they are still young and healthy. Due largely to those constraints, it's estimated that between 5,000 and 10,000 people die for want of a kidney transplant each year. Many more are left to undergo expensive, draining dialysis treatment.

Medicare, which covers kidney patients of all ages, spent $81 billion on patients with chronic kidney disease in 2018. Medicare-related spending on patients with end-stage renal disease totaled $49.2 billion that same year.

These preventable deaths, high treatment costs, and perceived injustice of prohibiting people from voluntarily using their own body as they see fit has led a small but enthusiastic cadre of legal scholars and policy wonks to try to amend or overturn the ban on organ sales.

That includes Lloyd Cohen, a professor at George Mason University's Antonin Scalia Law School, who has been making the case for a market in organs in journal articles and media appearances since the early 1990s.

Because of his long history of public advocacy on this issue, Cohen is usually the first stop for people looking to get more involved in the fight to end the organ war.

"My name is out there in this literature [as] one of the promoters of a market in transplant organs," he says. "What happens is every once in a while, every three months, six months, somebody gets it in his head that this is a good idea. And they start doing research and they find my name and then they get in touch with me."

That includes Bellocchio, who reached out to Cohen a few months ago hoping the law professor might represent him in a lawsuit challenging the federal ban on organ sales.

Cohen, who teaches but doesn't practice law, declined to take up Bellocchio's case. But he was able to connect him with someone who was more than eager to do so.

At the time Bellocchio reached out to him, Cohen had been corresponding with Matthew Haicken, a personal injury attorney in New York City. Like Bellocchio, Haicken became interested in the issue of kidney sales after knowing a few clients who were undergoing dialysis treatment.

"I Googled what it was and I saw videos and it just seemed awful. The more I learned about it and just how inefficient the system was. It's always seemed ridiculous to me," he says. Soon enough, he was reading Cohen's writings and watching his interviews (including one video he did with John Stossel for Reason.)

His growing interest in the issue also dovetailed with his desire to do some public interest pro bono work. "I was brainstorming and I thought, hey, why not the organs issue?" he says. "As a personal injury lawyer, I'm always thinking about what is life worth, what is suffering worth, what are body parts worth?"

Once Cohen introduced Haicken to Bellocchio, the former agreed to represent him on a pro bono basis, and the two were off to the races.

Bellocchio's lawsuit makes two constitutional claims: The first is that a ban on kidney sales violates his freedom of contract as protected by the Fifth and 14th Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. The second is his right to privacy under the 14th Amendment.

His lawsuit cites Supreme Court precedent on birth control and abortion, arguing that "the decision to have a portion of one's own body extracted and sold to one in need is an extremely personal one and must be afforded the same privacy rights that have frequently been extended to matters of personal, bodily autonomy as mentioned above."

This most recent challenge likely faces an uphill battle according to Ilya Somin, another law professor at George Mason University.

"Much as I wish it were otherwise, I fear the lawsuit has little, if any chance of succeeding. Under current Supreme Court precedent, laws restricting economic transactions are subject only to very minimal 'rational basis' scrutiny," writes Somin at The Volokh Conspiracy (which is hosted by Reason). "I believe that precedent should be reversed, or at least significantly revised. But that is unlikely to happen any time soon."

Past efforts to challenge the ban on organ sales have also come to naught.

Cohen says about a decade ago he worked briefly with Sally Satel, a physician and scholar at the American Enterprise Institute to try and assemble a legal challenge to the ban on compensating kidney donors.

Satel tells Reason that she and Jeff Rowes, an attorney with the Institute for Justice, had collaborated briefly on the idea, but it eventually morphed into a narrower (successful) challenge to the NOTA's ban on compensating people who give renewable bone marrow.

On the legislative front, Rep. Matt Cartwright (DPenn.) has proposed a bill that would clarify which types of payments to kidney and other organ donors count as legal reimbursement of expenses under NOTA, and not illegal compensation. Cartwright last introduced this bill in July 2020, but it stalled in committee.

Former President Donald Trump also issued an executive order that expands the definition of kidney donors' legally reimbursable expenses to include the costs of travel, child care, and lost wages.

Libertarian ideas about bodily autonomy have proven surprisingly successful in recent years at liberalizing drug laws. They're starting to move the conversation on things like sex work as well. The prohibition on kidney sales remains stubbornly stalled, however.

Satelwho once received a donated kidney from former Reason Editor in chief Virginia Postrelchalks up the lack of progress to people's own instinctual distaste at the idea of a market for organs, and the narrow appeal of kidney disease as an issue.

"Unfortunately, because it's so niche, there's only one major interest group and that's the National Kidney Foundation," which she says remains opposed to compensating kidney donors.

Cohen says much the same thing: "It doesn't have an interest group that can coalesce. It's not like a race or religion. People who themselves have had some bad luck or people in their family who've had bad luck and have kidney disease."

Both Haicken and Bellocchio hope that their lawsuit can be that catalyst for change.

"I've been contacted by people all over the country. People are very positive about it," says Haicken. "I have gotten some hate mail, but that's mostly been from my friends and family."

Only time will tell if they'll be successful. It would be a great thing if they were, says Cohen.

"There are organs that can be restoring people to life and health instead of being fed to worms," Cohen tells Reason. "Not because people have a fundamental objection to giving up their organs, but because it is illegal for them to get any compensation."

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Meet the Dream Team Suing the Biden Administration Over Your Right To Sell Your Kidney - Reason

Tuesday, 4 May 2021, 10:24 amArticle: Eric Zuesse

On May 3rd, the New York Times bannered Reaching HerdImmunity Is Unlikely in the U.S., Experts NowBelieve and reported that there is widespreadconsensus among scientists and public health experts thatthe herd immunity threshold is not attainable at leastnot in the foreseeable future, and perhaps notever.

In other words: the news-sources thatwere opposing the governments taking action againstCovid-19 libertarian news-sites that opposegovernmental laws and regulations, regardless of thepredominant view by the vast majority of the scientists whospecialize in studying the given subject are lookingwronger all the time, as this novel coronavirus (whichis what it was originally called) becomes less and lessnovel, and more and more understoodscientifically.

The herd immunity advocates foranti-Covid-19 policies have been saying that governmentsshould just let the virus spread until nature takes itscourse and such a large proportion of the population havesurvived the infection as to then greatly reduce thelikelihood that an uninfected person will become infected.An uninfected person will increasingly be surrounded bypeople who have developed a natural immunity to the disease,and by people who dont and never did become infected byit. The vulnerable people will have become eliminated (died)or else cured, and so they wont be spreading the diseaseto others. Thats the libertarian solution, thefinal solution to the Covid-19 problem, according tolibertarians.

For example, on 9 April 2020,Forbes magazine headlined AfterRejecting A Coronavirus Lockdown, Sweden Sees Rise InDeaths and reported that, Swedens chiefepidemiologist Anders Tegnell has continuously advocated forlaid back measures, saying on Swedish TV Sunday that thepandemic could be defeated by herd immunity, or the indirectprotection from a large portion of a population being immuneto an infection, or a combination of immunityand vaccination. However, critics have argued that withacoronavirus vaccine could be more than a year away, andinsufficient evidence that coronavirus patients that recoverare immune from becominginfected again, the strategy of relying on herd immunityand vaccinations [is] ineffective.

The libertarianproposal of relying upon herd immunity for producingpolicies against this disease has continued,nonetheless.

CNN headlined on 28 April 2020, Swedensays its coronavirus approach has worked. The numberssuggest a different story, and reportedthat

On March 28, a petition signed by 2,000Swedish researchers, including Carl-Henrik Heldin, chairmanof the Nobel Foundation, called for the nation's governmentto "immediately take steps to comply with the World HealthOrganization's (WHO) recommendations."

Thescientists added: "The measures should aim to severely limitcontact between people in society and to greatly increasethe capacity to test people for Covid-19infection."

"These measures must be in place assoon as possible, as is currently the case in our Europeanneighboring countries," they wrote. "Our country should notbe an exception to the work to curb thepandemic."

The petition said that trying to"create a herd immunity, in the same way that occurs duringan influenza epidemic, has low scientificsupport."

Swedish authorities have deniedhaving a strategy to create herd immunity, one the UKgovernment was rumored to be working towards earlier on inthe pandemic -- leading to widespread criticism -- before itenforced a strict lockdown.

FORTUNEmagazine headlined on 30 July 2020, Howparts of India inadvertently achieved herd immunity,and reported that, Around 57% of people across parts ofIndia's financial hub of Mumbai have coronavirus antibodies,a July study found, indicating that the population may haveinadvertently achieved the controversial herd immunityprotection from the coronavirus.Furthermore:

Herd immunity is an approach to thecoronavirus pandemic where, instead of instituting lockdownsand other restrictions to slow infections, authorities allowdaily life to go on as normal, letting the disease spread.In theory, enough people will become infected, recover, andgain immunity that the spread will slow on its own andpeople who are not immune will be protected by the immunityof those who are. University of Chicago researchersestimated in a paperpublished in May that achieving herd immunity from COVID-19would require 67% of people to be immune to the disease.Mayo Clinic estimates70% of the U.S. population will need to be immune for theU.S. to achieve herd immunity, which can also be achieved byvaccinating that proportion of a population.

On 27September 2020, Reuters bannered InBrazil's Amazon a COVID-19 resurgence dashes herd immunityhopes, and reported that, The largest city inBrazils Amazon has closed bars and river beaches tocontain a fresh surge of coronavirus cases, a trend that maydash theories that Manaus was one of the worlds firstplaces to reach collective, or herd, immunity.

Rightnow, the global average of Covid-19 intensity (total cases of the diseasethus far) is 19,693 persons per million population. Forexamples: Botswana is barely below that intensity, at19,629, and Norway is barely above that intensity, at20,795. Sweden is at 95,905, which is nearly five times theglobal average. Brazil is 69,006, which is around 3.5 timesworse than average. India is 14,321, which is slightlybetter than average. USA is 99,754.

However, the dayprior, on May 2nd, America had 30,701 new cases. Brazil had28,935. Norway had 210. India had 370,059. Swedens latestdaily count (as-of May 3rd) was 5,937 on April 29th, 15times Norways 385 on that date. Swedens population is1.9 times that of Norway. Indias daily count is soaring.Their population is four times Americas, but the numberof new daily cases in India is twelve times Americas.Whereas India has had only one-seventh as much Covid-19intensity till now, India is soaring upwards to becomeultimately, perhaps, even worse than America is on Covid-19performance. And Brazil is already almost as bad as America,on Covid-19 performance, and will soon surpass America inCovid-19 failure.

There is no herd immunityagainst Covid-19, yet, anywhere. Its just anotherlibertarian myth. But libertariansstill continue to believe it they refuse to accept thedata.

Investigativehistorian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of TheyreNot Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican EconomicRecords, 1910-2010, and of CHRISTSVENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that CreatedChristianity.

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This Monday, Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie dish on their least favorite parts of President Joe Biden's State of the Union address and the messaging around the newest coronavirus guidelines. Plus, The Reason Roundtable answers a listener question about the ties between self-proclaimed libertarians and people against the coronavirus vaccine.

Discussed in the show:

1:36: Biden's SOTU address takeaways.

22:34: The government's newest coronavirus guidelines.

36:56: Weekly Listener Question: The current anti-vax sentiment within a significant portion of the libertarian world has me questioning everything. Weren't we the folks who, a mere couple of years ago, were saying "Get the FDA out of the way so big pharma can cure things?" That literally happened, and now a significant number of libertarians are kvetching about how quickly the vaccines were developed. How can I have faith in the rationality of libertarianism when there is a significant portion of the movement that is so breathtakingly wrong on vaccines?

48:52: Media recommendations for the week.

This weeks links:

Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.

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Audio production by Ian Keyser.Assistant production by Regan Taylor.Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve.

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The Red Flags in Biden's State of the Union Address - Reason