Category Archives: Libertarianism

Harvard Law Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz came out fighting for Michael Flynn in a column published early Friday morning by the conservative think tank the Gatestone Institute.

Titled: Flynn Was Innocent All Along: He Was Pressured to Plead Guilty, Dershowitz reiterates his longstanding belief that the former lieutenant general and national security advisor should never have pleaded guilty because he did not commit a crime.

Per the largely pro-Flynn piece (emphasis in original):

For a lie to be a crime under federal law, it must be material to the investigation meaning that the lies pertain to the issues being legitimately investigated. The role of the FBI is to investigate past crimes, not to create new ones. Because the FBI investigators already knew the answer to the question they asked himwhether he had spoken to the Russian Ambassadortheir purpose was not to elicit new information relevant to their investigation, but rather to spring a perjury trap on him. When they asked Flynn the question, they had a recording of his conversation with the Russian, of which he was presumably unaware. So his answer was not material to the investigation because they already had the information about which they were inquiring.

This territory is well-trod for the famous legal analyst.

Dershowitz was roundly criticized on Twitter in late 2018 after telling Fox News that lying to the FBI is not a crime.

I hope the judge understands when he has the case tomorrow that Flynn did not commit a crime by lying, Dershowitz told Bill Hemmer at the time. Because the lie has to be material to the investigation. And if the FBI already knew the answer to the question and only asked him the question in order to give him an opportunity to lie, his answereven if falsewas not material to the investigation.

Earlier this year, and well after a high-profile defense team shakeup, Flynns attorney Sidney Powell appeared to repay the public attention paid to her client by approvingly paraphrasing Dershowitz in a bid for probation.

Still, Dershowitzs column also calls Flynn out for hypocrisy:

There must be a single standard of justice and civil liberties including the presumption of innocence that transcends partisan politics. This message has been forgotten by both parties. Flynn himself was among those who shouted, Lock her up, regarding Hillary Clinton. Then when the Justice Department tried to lock him up, he got religion.

But Mondays column doesnt hone in too deeply on the details of Flynns case. Rather, Dershowitz appears to mainly be using Flynn as a cautionary tale to explain his perspective on law enforcement excess and the value of consistently prizing civil liberties.

Some may wonder why an innocent man would ever plead guilty, Dershowitz tees. Anyone who knows how the system works in practice would understand why an innocent manor a defendant in a close casemight be coerced into pleading guilty. The cruel reality is that if a defendant pleads not guilty and is found guilty, the sentence will be far greater than if he had pled guiltyperhaps even 10 times greater.

These are the kinds of pressures routinely used by prosecutors, the column continues. Civil libertarians have long been critical of these pressures, but fair-weather civil libertarians refuse to object when these improper tactics are used against Trumps associates. Partisan hypocrisy reigns.

The points raised in the column are particularly salient for criminal defendants in the country that locks more people up per capita than any other country. Over all, there are now more people under correctional supervision in Americamore than six millionthan were in the Gulag under Stalin at its height, The New Yorkers Adam Gopnik noted in 2012.

Law&Crime asked Dershowitz if he thought police routinely over-charge and if his admonishment for federal law enforcement to stop creating crimes bears any applicability to the overall criminal justice system.

To which he replied: Yes and yes.

[image via screengrab/ The View]

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Dershowitz Defends and Criticizes Flynn by Railing Against Entrapment and Fair-Weather Civil Libertarians - Law & Crime

JACKSON, Miss (AP) Mississippi Republican Gov. Tate Reeves is having to balance his libertarian-leaning instincts with public health concerns during the coronavirus pandemic.

Its been his job the past several weeks to order some businesses to temporarily close and to restrict peoples face-to-face interactions to try to slow the spread of the highly contagious virus. His statewide shelter in place order remains in effect until May 25.

Reeves is gradually letting businesses reopen even as numbers of confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths continue to rise.

Restaurants could start serving food and drinks their dining rooms and patios Thursday, after more than a month of being limited to carry-out service or deliveries. Barbershops, beauty salons and gyms are allowed to start reopening Monday. They all must meet safety standards such as limiting customers and taking extra steps for sanitation.

The governor has said repeatedly that people should use their own best judgment.

If you are in the vulnerable category, if you are over the age of 65, if you have pre-existing conditions, getting out of your home has risks, Reeves said Friday. Going to a salon has risks, but were trying to put measures in place to minimize those risks. We recognize also that the spread of the virus has risks. The spread of the economic collapse has risks.

Reeves spent eight years as state treasurer and eight as lieutenant governor before being inaugurated as governor in January. He has consistently advocated a limited role for state government. Legislators cut several thousand jobs from the state government workforce when Reeves had a big role in writing budgets as lieutenant governor.

Fairly early in the pandemic, Reeves said hes concerned about people facing abject poverty because of job losses. Its a phrase he has not often used in speeches or interviews during 16-plus years of serving in public office in a state that has been one of the poorest in the U.S. for generations. During news conferences about COVID-19, Reeves often mentions people who are having to file unemployment claims for the first time in their lives.

The governor says his top adviser during the pandemic is the state health officer, Dr. Thomas Dobbs. He is also listening to business executives and to people who express concerns about the economy.

Reeves frequently says that restarting Mississippis economy is not like flipping a light switch from off to on but like using a dimmer switch to go from dull to bright.

He emphasizes the role of personal responsibility, saying that people should mostly remain home and that they should wear masks in public, keep distance between themselves and others and avoid taking the whole family to the grocery store if possible.

If we do not want to return where we were several weeks ago, with more businesses closed and more shelter-in-place I have to ultimately make that decision, Reeves said last week. But the thing is, the people of Mississippi can make that decision first if the people of our state will be smart, if theyll stay safe.

Reeves said city and county law enforcement officers have done a fantastic job of enforcing safety orders during the pandemic, and state law enforcement officers are available to help them. As more businesses reopen, Reeves said the best enforcement of safety standards will come from within.

The number one person that it is going to enforce this is the person that is actually opening the business. Its the employees. Its Mississippians. Its people who care about not only themselves, but about their fellow man, Reeves said. I am convinced that the industries that we are reopening are going to do a better job of monitoring it themselves than any governmental entity ever will.

____

Emily Wagster Pettus has covered Mississippi government and politics since 1994. Follow her on Twitter: http://twitter.com/EWagsterPettus.

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Analysis: Reeves tries to balance concerns of health, jobs - Associated Press

Last month, Adrian Vermeule wrote an essay titledBeyond Originalism. The Harvard Law Professor contended that originalism had already served its purpose, and our polity should shift to what he called "common-good constitutionalism." Co-blogger Randy Barnett responded to Adrian, and warned about the risks of any non-originalist approach to the Constitution.

Last week, my friend Josh Hammer wrote another reply to Vermeule that seeks to stake out something of a half-way position. He calls it "common good originalism." Here is a snippetthough I encourage you to read the entire essay.

Common good originalism should adopt the conservatism of Hamilton, Marshall, and Justice Joseph Story as its jurisprudential lodestar. The interstices naturally permitted by a more expansive constructionism will, assuredly, provide ample room for jurists to deploy substantive moral argumentation along the lines favored by scholars like Jaffa and Arkes. Furthermore, by rejecting hyper-literalist free speech absolutism, common good originalism permits (within reason) natural law-undergirded arguments about the moral worth of one's speech, such as Alito's dissent inSnyder: "Our profound national commitment to free and open debate is not a license for the vicious verbal assault that occurred in this case."

Common good originalism also rejects natural law-subversive "originalist" claims aboutconstitutionally mandated marriage redefinitionthat would undermine the common good, risible anti-sovereigntist "textualism" claims aboutconstitutionally mandated open bordersthat would wreak havoc upon the common good, and so forth.

This is only a bare-bones beginning. And I know, of course, that I will not persuade Vermeule himself. But my aim is to lay out a framework upon which to build an assertive, moralistic, Burkean/Hamiltonian conservative jurisprudence. This jurisprudence is also legitimate, from a positive law perspective, because it is rooted in (an expansive construction of) the constitutional text and thereby avoids the "oath-breaking problem" posed by Article VI of the Constitution.

Vermeule has now responded to Hammer.

JoshHammer has written a characteristically thoughtful and engaging response toCommon-Good Constitutionalism, arguing for an approach he calls "Common-Good Originalism." I see Hammer's approach as a laudable development, a movement half-way to the right approach. But as with many half-way positions, it is unstable. The structure built of originalism and the common good fits together poorly, for the former is a positivist approach and the latter a nonpositivist one. Thus nothing at all guarantees that the original understanding will necessarily or even predictably track the common good (however the latter is defined), and conversely it is always possible, indeed likely, that the common good (however defined) will prescribe an interpretation that cannot be justified in originalist terms.

Adrian adds that Hammer's position may become something of a middle-ground:

To be sure, even if originalism and the common good cannot be combined in a stable manner, a house with shaky foundations may happen to be shored up by external buttressing. I wouldn't be wholly shocked to see a position like Hammer's become a new political equilibrium, one that supersedes the currently reigning libertarian originalism, and theoretical coherence be damned. But that contingent political dimension is not my concern here. My point is one of theory: common-good originalism, whatever its political appeal, has an inherent tendency to break down into one or another of two distinct views, one which subordinates the common good to originalism, and the other which subordinates originalism to the common good.

And Adrian praises Hammer's non-libertarian approach to originalism:

There is much to admire in Hammer's argument. It is a long step away from the libertarian form of originalism that has colonized the legal right at least since the second Bush administration, and that until recently dominated the scene. Justice Scalia'smodus operandi (viewed from the outside; I do not suggest that this was a deliberate strategy) was to stake out a principled position, resting on internally coherent arguments, that would expand the range of the thinkable on the Court, and then to watch his colleagues struggle part-way towards his views with positions that were uneasy compromises. In that Scalian sense, Hammer's piece,internally conflicted though it may be, amounts to an ominous sign of the times for conventional originalists. When a prominent young conservative commentator like Hammer expressly rejects "pure legal positivism and the elevation of procedure to the complete detriment of substance, most frequently associated with the jurisprudences of the late Judge Robert Bork and the late Justice Antonin Scalia," one can almost feel the winds of change freshening.

We are watching an important debate play out in front of our eyes. And the stakes are high. In the past, I have described the "libertarian" wing of the FedSoc legal movement as "ascendant." I still think that is the case, but there is movement afoot. Contrary to left-wing caricatures, we are not monolithic lemmings. There are some common grounds of agreement, and there are other areas of sharp disagreement. Randy wrote about this shift:

In particular, I have sensed a disturbance in the originalist force by a few, mostly younger, socially conservative scholars and activists. They are disappointed in the results they are getting from a "conservative" judiciarynever mind that there are not yet five consistently originalist justices.Someattribute this failing to originalism's having been hijacked by libertarians. Some have been drawn to the new "national conservatism" initiative, which makes bashing libertarians a major theme. These now-marginalized scholars and activists will be delighted to fall in behind the Templar flag of a Harvard Law professor like Vermeule.

Josh Hammer makes this point expressly, and ties it to a current case:

Within this broader context of conservatives reconsidering orthodoxies, Vermeule's proposal fits quite neatly. What Georgetown University Law Center Professor Randy Barnett calls a "disturbance in the originalist force by a few, mostly younger, socially conservative scholars and activists" could evolve into amore thorough exodusaway from originalism if, as is heavily rumored, putative originalist Justice Neil Gorsuch sides with his progressive colleaguesthis termby reading into Title VII legal protection thebiological and linguistic liethat is "transgenderism."

I agree with Josh Hammer that Adrian has shifted the Overton window. This issue warrants far more discussion.

More here:
Originalism, Common-Good Originalism, and Common-Good Constitutionalism - Reason

Its normal for us to be on the ballot were good at it despite the obstacles that are put in place, Morris said. I think if there arent Libertarians, Greens or any independents allowed on the ballot in November, we do not have a democratic process and we do not have a legitimate election.

An established party candidate for president, for example, needs at least 3,000 signatures or more if someone challenges their validity. That same person would need 5,000 signatures to run for U.S. Senate.

Independents or those in a new party, including Libertarians and Greens, need at least 25,000 signatures for both positions. Whitney said candidates in his party often collect at least 40,000 signatures.

He added it is ridiculous that in both cases, candidates have 90 days to gather the required number.

What this means is that the minority parties the new parties trying to break through and become established are unfairly burdened and their campaigns are unfairly burdened. They have fewer resources because of all the time spent petitioning, Whitney said.

Illinois signature requirements were established in 1891 and were not, according to the lawsuit, substantially updated or improved ... despite the availability of less burdensome alternatives enabled by modern technology

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Libertarian, Green parties sue over Illinois election rules - The Southern

The Associated Press reports that the Green and Libertarian parties in Illinois have filed a federal lawsuit claiming Gov. J.B. Pritzkers stay-at-home order has impeded the petition process necessary to get on the November ballot.

AP reports that the lawsuit, filed last week in Chicago, alleged the order intended to curb the spread of coronavirus and social distancing recommendations have made it practically impossible to collect signatures safely in person.

Under Illinois election rules, candidates not from established parties have to collect signatures from March 24 until June 22 for the general election. They also need more required signatures.

State and federal officials have recommended social distancing for weeks. Pritzker issued an order March 20, requiring most residents to stay home with few exceptions.

The parties argued that even if the order was lifted in May, little time would remain to get signatures.

According to the lawsuit, "requiring in-person contact to satisfy Illinois petitioning requirements is not presently possible and will be problematic for weeks to come after emergency measures are lifted."

The lawsuit seeks to have the signature requirements waived or suspended for this election.

The lawsuit named Pritzker and the Illinois State Board of Elections. Pritzkers spokeswoman didnt return a request for comment Tuesday. An elections board spokesman said the board doesnt have legal authority to change state law.

Story by the Associated Press.

The rest is here:
Lawsuit Filed by Green and Libertarian Parties Over Petitioning Issues Because of Stay at Home Order - wcsjnews.com

Hail! Hail, Freedonia!

The country of Freedonia has successfully fought off the COVID-19 virus successfully. This small European nation in the middle of the coronavirus maelstrom reportedly used free market forces to keep its citizens safe.

President Rufus T. Canard remarked on the remarkable story of laissez-faire economics and public health. Did you know the invisible hand of the market belongs to God? He is better than a legion of unelected bureaucrats telling you to put face masks on.

Once the government of Freedonia realized the pandemic was sweeping through its neighbors it took tough action nothing. Privately funded hospitals had all the respirators they needed because thats how capitalism works. The citizens of this nation whose motto isHail Freedonia, land of the Brave and Free!immediately engaged in complicated statistical analysis and realized they had all better start practice social distancing. And best of all no one hoarded toilet paper.

Unrestrained market forces do not create panics where people hoard items like toilet paper, remarked President Canard. You can look that up in any economics textbook.

Citizens of Freedonia are proud of their nations dedication to Ayn Rands ideals,Friedrich Hayeks economics, and a total disregard of reality. They point to how the Great Depression never depressed and their successful pay-by-the-minute education system. The world envies how each and every enrolled student has their own coin operatededu-meter,Canard quipped.

I dream of a world where people can do what they want whenever they want regardless of facts, President Canard said. And that will make the world a better place.

In related news, an American televangelist pays for a private jet with sperm bank donations.

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This Libertarian Country Defeated The Coronavirus With The Free Market - Patheos

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.

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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.

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The Coronavirus Outbreak Is Exposing Government Follies on Many Levels - Reason