Postlibertarians argue lockdowns not so bad

Two former libertarians, Tyler Cowen of the Mercatus Center and Will Wilkinson of the Niskanen Center, argue in recent articles that the harms attributed to lockdowns are really caused by voluntary social distancing.

A Dangerous Libertarian Strategy for Herd Immunity | Bloomberg - Tyler Cowen:

October 15, 2020 - "It would be bad enough if the Great Barrington Declaration ... was simply misguided. But the statement, which now has more than 9,000 signatories, represents a potentially dangerous way of thinking — about not only pandemics but also human nature.... It strikes exactly the wrong tone and stresses exactly the wrong points....

"The declaration also sets up a false dichotomy by comparing its policy proposals to lockdowns. The claim is this: 'Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health.' The health problems are very real, but in most of the U.S., the lockdowns are not severe. In my home state of Virginia, there are relatively few commercial activities I cannot partake in, were I so inclined. I even can go see a live bluegrass concert in a nightclub (I won’t, not yet). The problem is that most people don’t want to go out to such concerts, and indeed probably should not. It is this self-enforced isolation, not a government order, which screws us up, sometimes creating mental and other health problems.

"Whatever you think of the stricter policies of last spring, they are now behind us, and the emphasis on 'lockdowns' is not helpful. The more useful question is whether the list of prohibited activities should be expanded or contracted. In some cases, surely, it should be expanded.... Even if you disagree with that judgment, the critics who emphasize lockdowns are setting up a straw man.... The truth is that lockdowns are extremely unpopular, and while they may have to be reimposed in extreme circumstances, they are not the main alternative on the table in the U.S. right now."

Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-10-15/great-barrington-declaration-is-wrong-about-herd-immunity

The Useful Libertarian Idiocy of The Great Barrington Declaration | Will Wilkinson - Niskanen Centre: 

October 27, 2020 - "Tyler Cowen has written a persuasive and quietly devastating analysis of the Declaration’s many non-medical shortcomings at Bloomberg Opinion. If you haven’t read it, please do. Cowen, who has been either libertarian or libertarian-adjacent his entire life, recognizes that these errors reflect AIER’s rigid libertarian outlook.... 'The Great Barrington strategy is a tempting one. Coming out of a libertarian think tank, it tries to procure maximum liberty for commerce and daily life. It is a seductive idea. Yet consistency of message is not an unalloyed good, even when the subject is liberty'.... This is, to my mind, exceedingly gentle. “[C]onsistency of message is not an unalloyed good, even when the subject is liberty,” is a generous way to say that purist ideology is a mind-warping reality-distortion field. I entirely concur with Cowen’s piece, but I think it’s worth drawing out further how the Declaration’s errors showcase some of libertarianism’s signature defects....

"Nobody is going to do this. What’s even the idea here? That a governor or mayor or city council will one day announce that it is now officially a Great Barrington 'focused protection' jurisdiction and everyone will just shout 'Hurrah!' and sprint to the nearest massage parlor or high step it to the hoe down[?]...  [V]ery few of us are willing to simply allow the virus to cull the weak. Which is why next to nobody’s going to try the Great Barrington strategy. And if somebody does try it, it obviously can’t work.... 

"I’m no angel, but it’s nevertheless important to me, as a matter of elementary moral duty, to avoid becoming a link in a chain of viral transmission that could kill somebody. But even if you’re completely bereft of any sense of responsibility for the lives and welfare of others, it remains that there are plenty of selfish reasons to steer clear of the maskless rager over at the Sig Ep house (an unfortunate reality here in Iowa City.).... So mere personal prudence is enough to lead many of us to decline invitations to weddings, retire our gym memberships, and eschew dine-in restaurants. It’s enough to keep managers and business owners from calling their workers back to the office. Now add a functioning moral compass to mix. In that case, a moderate level of entirely voluntary self-isolation and avoidance of un-distanced and/or mask-free social situations becomes practically inevitable. 

"Here in Iowa, we’ve never had an official lockdown, and we’ve had very, very few restrictions of any kind. Nobody’s stopping anybody from going to the movies, but nobody goes to the movies. Restaurants are open, but there aren’t many people in them.... It’s hard to tell the practical difference between the Great Barrington approach and Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds’ active hostility to city-level restrictions, mask mandates, and remote schooling. Yet it’s completely obvious, if you live here, that this approach hasn’t put us any nearer to 'normal'.... 

"The governor’s aggressively laissez faire approach has delivered some of the country’s highest infection rates, but with very few mitigating economic benefits. I recently visited Massachusetts, which has responded to the pandemic far more aggressively and competently than Iowa has. It now has one of the lowest infection rates in the country, which is why economic and social life there was notably more active and normal than it is here in plague-ridden, anything-goes Iowa....

[As of October 31, 'plague-ridden Iowa' reported 127,966 official cases (93,200 recovered) and 1,716 deaths (544/million), while Massachusetts reported 158,576 cases (127,054 recovered) and 9,991 deaths (1,450/M).  - gd] 

"Casselman and Tankersley sum it up well: 'A growing body of research has concluded that the steep drop in economic activity last spring was primarily a result of individual decisions by consumers and businesses rather than legal mandates. People stopped going to restaurants even before governors ordered them shut down. Airports emptied out even though there were never significant restrictions on domestic air travel.'"

Read more: https://www.niskanencenter.org/the-useful-libertarian-idiocy-of-the-great-barrington-declaration/

Lockdowns and libertarianism (2): Crisis and ideology

by George J. Dance

As regular blog readers have no doubt noticed, since April I have given increasing space to the COVID-19 pandemic and the unprecedented government interventions (the lockdowns and business shutdowns) that accompanied it. I hope readers have enjoyed that because, whether you have or not, I expect it to continue. As I see it, we are living through another one of those pivotal crises  – like the two World Wars, the Depression, and the War on Terrorism  – that have defined modern history.

As a libertarian, I bring my ideological bias to the table. In this case, I have been informed by the work of economist Robert Higgs, whose masterwork Crisis and Leviathan documented well how governments (1) have a systemic bias towards increasing power; (2) use crises to vastly expand their power; and (3) retain much of their new power after a crisis is past. (Dr. Higgs explains his thesis at greater length in the accompanying video.) My bias obviously affects what material I forward, and I cannot pretend that it is non-existent. What I can and will do is admit that my bias can be wrong, and let it be challenged by empirical evidence.

At the same time, I can evaluate others' ideological biases the same way. In the mainstream media, I continually encounter a statist or pro-government bias: that "When public safety is threatened, whether by war or disease, our dependence on government becomes immediately and viscerally obvious"; that ""government has the power and resources to internalize the externalities of contagion and coordinate a rational response;" and that in March "a large and activist government was all that stood between us and mass privation and suffering on a mind-boggling scale" (as a Niskanen Center article recently summed up).

In early March, when no one knew much about the novel coronavirus, it was easy to believe that millions of us were going to die, and that only unprecedented, massive government intervention could save us from untold death and suffering. It was a mass panic reaction, but panic in a crisis is understandable and excusable. However, governance should not be informed by panic alone. Not only libertarian ideological biases, but the prevailing statist ones as well, should be challengeable by the evidence.

How dangerous the virus is, is an empirical question, one that depends on objective facts about the attack rate (how many people in a population are at risk) and the infection fatality rate (how many people who catch it will die). We had no way of knowing either in March, but there has been a surfeit of data in the succeeding three months. There is good reason to think that the "millions of deaths" claim was hyperbole. Nor can we rely on models that simply assume that lethality: we need at least a reasonable, fact-based estimate of the worst possible case, of how many people could possibly have been in danger.

Whether government interventions averted this mass death, or any death (on net), is also an empirical claim. It requires accurate death counts, and comparing them to the policies in place. It also requires causally linking specific deaths to specific interventions. (For instance, did stay-at-home orders increase infections within households more or less than they lowered them in the workplace?)

Finally, we need to measure the effects of voluntary social distancing. Hitherto, government's scientific advisers have often assumed the effect of voluntary social distancing to be zero. However, some of those advisers have begun noticing the phenomenon, if only to blame it for the recession that followed the lockdown.

I would like to discover that voluntary social distancing (combined with a use of government's police power consistent with libertarian principles) would have been enough to reduce most of the disease's harm, while avoiding the long-term harms that the government interventions have caused. That is my null hypothesis, which I think is supportable iff it cannot be overthrown. Hence my preoccupation with the subject in future months. While conclusions reached may be too late for this pandemic, I cling to the hope that what we learn this time will inform our response to the next one.

Also read: Lockdowns and libertarianism (1)

Niskanen Center abandons libertarian label

The libertarian think tank Niskanen Center is abandoning libertarianism — Quartz - Michael J. Coren:

October 31, 2018 - "For millions of people, ideology is the lighthouse in a dark sea of politics. An uncompromising vision of how the world is supposed to work, and how to fix it, is just too alluring for partisans to ignore. Political parties’ most frenzied supporters are demanding ideological purity from their candidates as they push out moderates [and] ever fewer temperate souls are left to hold the middle ground in politics.

"Yet the libertarian think tank Niskanen Center in Washington, DC, argues the moderate middle is the future. Niskanen president Jerry Taylor wrote in an Oct. 29 essay that he is dropping the libertarian banner.... In a 3,595-word farewell to the libertarian world, he says libertarianism, and ideology itself, is a dead end. 'I have abandoned that libertarian project…because I have come to abandon ideology,' writes Taylor.... The future of American politics, he argues, is principled compromise....

"Trump’s authoritarian takeover of the Republican Party was Taylor’s breaking point ('I would have thought libertarians would have been on the ramparts, and they are not,' he said), but his disillusionment began years ago after working as a paid climate skeptic for the Cato Institute. He eventually came to see opposing action on climate change as both scientifically misguided, and wrong. After failing to get his libertarian colleagues to even engage with the argument, he slowly began to see how ideological fervor had engulfed a range of political issues, no matter what evidence pointed to the contrary.

"Taylor argues Americans need to give up on perfection in politics, the logical endpoint of which is fanaticism. As the head of a think tank aimed at lawmakers, not the US public, Taylor’s move is a politically opportunistic bet as much as a principled stand in defense of a pluralistic society.....

"The libertarian vision of 'night-watchman state' with a society dominated by the market is as distant a dream as ever. But a few libertarian causes have flourished in national politics of late.

"From legalizing marijuana to deregulating telecom to striking down sodomy laws, libertarian policy wins have come after being co-opted by the major political parties (and even by winning a few local elections). Taylor’s rejection of the libertarian label may be a gift to his (former) fellow travelers. Libertarians’ greatest impact may be felt most when they aren’t espousing an ideology at all."

Read more: https://qz.com/1443787/a-libertarian-think-tank-just-gave-up-on-libertarianism/
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Libertarians should support climate action, iff...

Should Natural Rights Libertarians Support Carbon Mitigation? The Answer May Surprise You - Niskanen Center - Kevin Vallier:

July 18,2017 - "Here are the conditions under which natural rights libertarians should support a carbon mitigation policy.

1. The actions of human beings generate carbon emissions significant enough to pose a non-trivial risk of violating property rights (in one’s body or external objects) of persons whom the state has a duty to protect.
2. A carbon mitigation policy (CMP) will provide an effective protection against the risk.
3. The CMP will not in itself violate property rights, or take an excessive risk of violating them, because it will generally be targeted at persons or groups that generate problematic carbon emissions (and persons don’t have rights against restraints upon their rights-violating actions), where: a. The CMP coerces the smallest number of people sufficient to deter the emissions;  b.  The CMP is the least coercive means of deterring the emissions.
4. No non-governmental, non-rights violating alternative to CMP is socially or politically feasible....

"A complication with condition 1 is that no one person or small group produces enough carbon emissions to pose a non-trivial risk to legitimate property holdings. But this did not prevent Murray Rothbard from arguing that ... these threats should be handled through class-action lawsuits. But appeals to Rothbard aside, it’s clear enough that libertarians should be prepared to hold large, diffuse collectives accountable for property damages....

"Condition 2 is critical because the coercion involved in imposing a CMP can only be justified if it actually protects property rights. Condition 3 is critical because natural rights libertarians are not consequentialists. You cannot justify violating John’s property rights in order to protect Reba’s property rights more effectively....  Condition 4 is critical because if there is a non-coercive, non-governmental solution to a negative externality, the natural rights libertarian will hold that this solution is morally superior to a CMP.... .

"But how can ... anarchist natural rights libertarians, support governmental action to do anything? Well, in lieu of abolishing the state, presumably libertarians ... will insist that states be as just as possible. So if justice requires protecting people from negative externalities, then states should act to protect people from negative externalities....

"I fully acknowledge that a CMP will be imperfect. But the mere fact that it will be imperfect doesn’t mean we should forgo our libertarian duty to support policies that protect property rights, a duty we have even if the costs of protection are large....

"[A] CMP has to impose no greater burden on people, and on no more people, than is required to prevent the rights violation. And it is a virtual certainty that the CMP will be either too stringent or too lax. But that again is not a reason to not have a CMP, any more than the fact that the police are usually too stringent or too lax is a reason not to have them stop thieves and killers....

"However, there is an alternative to a CMP: geo-engineering, such as cloud-seeding with sulfuric compounds, diamond dust, or calcium carbonate, which can prevent rising sea levels by reflecting more sunlight from the Earth. These solutions are in principle far less economically costly than any proposed CMP and are much easier to coordinate (the US could do enough cloud seeding for the whole world all by itself). Moreover, while many climate change activists don’t take geo-engineering seriously and few support it, it is not obviously infeasible that the way in which Rothbardian mass-class-action lawsuits are. Most importantly, geo-engineering solutions appear to violate property rights less in comparison with CMPs....

"Geo-engineering is seriously problematic for lots of reasons. But there is nonetheless still some case for qualifying support for a CMP by making it conditional on the infeasibility or excessive risk of geo-engineering solutions that violate property rights less (if there are any)."

Read more: https://niskanencenter.org/blog/natural-rights-libertarians-support-carbon-mitigation-answer-may-surprise/
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Tech, libertarian groups press for strong encryption

Tech, libertarian groups up pressure on Obama on encryption | TheHill - Cory Bennett:

October 7, 2015 - ""In two separate letters, a major tech trade group and a libertarian-leaning coalition pressed President Obama to publicly support strong encryption, even if it locks out law enforcement officials.

"'As organizations committed to free markets and limited government, we urge your administration to take a clear stand in support of the individual’s right to protect his or her security and privacy with strong encryption technology,' said one letter, signed by groups like TechFreedom and the Niskanen Center.

"''Regardless of good intentions, any efforts to undermine the security and effectiveness of strong encryption are misguided, shortsighted, impractical and ultimately counterproductive,” said a second letter from Ed Black, CEO of the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA), which represents major tech players like Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft.

"The letters come a week after privacy advocates and digital rights groups officially petitioned the White House to take the same stance.

"The combination has created a unique and powerful coalition pressing the White House on encryption.

"The Obama administration has been considering possible proposals that would give law enforcement guaranteed access to encrypted communications. Silicon Valley, privacy advocates and technologists have pushed back against this, arguing any such access makes encryption vulnerable to hackers and cyber spies.... Officials have countered that without access, investigators may not be able to get legitimate data on criminals and terrorists, even when armed with a warrant....

"In recent weeks, leaked memos have shown the White House is considering backpedaling from its desire for a technological solution that would let investigators bypass encryption.

"Privacy advocates have jumped on these signals, collecting signatures on a petition that would require the White House to publicly respond to a call for it to support full encryption.... As of Wednesday, the appeal had collected over 48,000 signatures in nine days."

Read more: http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/256281-tech-libertarian-groups-up-pressure-on-obama-in-encryption-fight
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New libertarian think tank aims to "move legislation"

Libertarian Group Aims to Influence Immigration, Climate-Change Policies - Washington Wire - WSJ - Patrick O'Connor:

January 29, 2015 - "Libertarians are known more for their provocative ideas than their ability to get those ideas enacted into law.

"A new Washington-based think tank is trying to change that. The Niskanen Center was launched last year with the aim of influencing policy fights, not just authoring headline-grabbing proposals that go nowhere in Congress.

"'Our metric for success is that we have indeed been able to move legislation,' said Jerry Taylor, president of the Niskanen Center who previously worked at the Cato Institute, another libertarian think tank....

"Down the road, Mr. Taylor said the Niskanen Center will cultivate ideas for reforming the country’s entitlement programs and beefing up civil-liberties protections in the Patriot Act.

"One of the group’s most provocative proposals centers on an issue rarely viewed as a Republican priority: climate change. The Niskanen Center advocates a tax on carbon emissions that would replace existing environmental regulations. Prominent conservatives have long advocated a carbon tax as a way to let the market determine the cost of burning fossil fuels, but using it as a bargaining chip to limit environmental regulators is relatively new. Mr. Taylor admits this proposal faces little prospect of becoming law in the next Congress, but he said it will help set the stage for the environmental debate in the 2016 presidential race.

"The Center was named after the late Bill Niskanen, a former Cato chairman who served in the Reagan administration and once left Ford Motor Co. to protest its support of trade protection. Mr. Taylor said they picked the name because Mr. Niskanen was both principled and pragmatic."

Read more: http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2015/01/29/libertarian-group-aims-to-influence-immigration-climate-change-policies/
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