Category: reason

There’s not a lot of bipartisanship these days, and legislative efforts around COVID-19 are no different. One exception: Over the last year, both major political parties have shown a like-minded affinity for sneaking policy prescriptions into pandemic relief packages that have little or nothing to do with the pandemic.

The most glaring example in President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID-19 legislation is arguably the $15 federal minimum wage, which seems to have met its demise at the hands of the Senate parliamentarian. But there’s another subtle measure that has flown under the radar.

It shouldn’t. The bill gifts federal employees up to 15 weeks of paid leave if their lives have been impacted in various ways by COVID-19. 

Some of the hall passes laid out in the bill are relatively benign: For example, those “experiencing symptoms of COVID-19 and seeking a medical diagnosis” qualify. Yet that list gets longer and more convoluted. Most notably, it includes any federal worker with children in places where schools are closed—including in areas where there is a mix of virtual and in-person instruction.

That applies to those “caring for a son or daughter of such employee if the school or place of care of the son or daughter has been closed, if the school of such son or daughter requires or makes optional a virtual learning instruction model or requires or makes optional a hybrid of in-person and virtual learning instruction models, or the child care provider of such son or daughter is unavailable, due to COVID–19 precautions,” reads the bill. It also includes government employees who are “experiencing any other substantially similar condition,” though the legislation does not describe what exactly that entails.

Based on the data, the carveout would cover quite a few employees, including every federal worker in Washington, D.C., where residents are currently operating under a partial school closure order.

One problem bears addressing first. Millions of parents across the country are struggling with how to financially support their families while also assuming the role of teacher, test proctor, and Zoom technical support. The poor are bearing the brunt of that—those working low-wage jobs who cannot tune in virtually from their dining room tables. In most cases, it is not federal employees, who on average earn about $110,000 a year, in need of such aid.

Then there’s that glaring question: Just how relevant is this measure? On its face, it checks off the COVID-19 box. But it also comes with a dose of strategic politicking. Democrats have long fought for a paid sick leave program. As I reported almost exactly a year ago, the House’s first coronavirus relief bill included a permanent paid leave package, including for victims of stalking and domestic violence—a well-intentioned goal that was utterly divorced from anything to do with COVID-19. The new provision has been watered down, massaged, and married to the pandemic, but I’d venture to say that’s a means to an end, at least to an extent. 

That a 106 percent increase in the federal minimum wage was also marketed as direct COVID-19 relief is instructive. People hurt by the pandemic need higher wages, the thinking goes. That thinking fails to account for the millions of people projected to lose their jobs, should that policy take shape—a policy that would obviously long outlive the pandemic. There’s also the $350 billion that Biden wants to give to states hurt by pandemic woes, including those running a budget surplus. (To be clear, Republicans are not immune to this phenomenon, as evidenced by the billions of dollars allotted for new weapons in their summer relief bill. Let’s blow up the coronavirus!)

And, perhaps most importantly, there’s something distinctly cronyistic about the measure. There’s the obvious bit—they’re federal government employees receiving an exclusive handout from the federal government. But there’s also the notion that it might give Biden himself a handout. That wouldn’t come in the form of paid leave. Rather, it would come in time bought on addressing school closures, something he pinpointed as one of his foremost priorities upon taking office. 

“Biden ran on reopening most schools for in-person instruction within a hundred days—a promise his administration has both walked back and then kinda-sorta attempted to un-walk back,” writes Reason‘s Peter Suderman. “But reopening, he has insisted, is conditioned on schools obtaining sufficient funding in a relief package. Accordingly, his plan includes about $128 billion for K-12 schooling ‘or preparation for, prevention of, and response to the coronavirus pandemic or for other uses allowed by other federal education programs,’ as part of a $170 billion boost in education-related spending.”

Even more fraught is that schools already have $100 billion leftover from past COVID-19 aid legislation. They have to spend that money first, meaning that it will be years before they will see the bulk of the additional funding Biden is pushing for. Translation: Schools cannot open in the near future until they receive billions more that won’t be used…in the near future. In full-circle fashion, it appears to be another measure potentially meant to outlast the pandemic.

The paid leave program is not one of those policies. Federal employees who meet the eligibility requirements have until September 30, 2021, to take advantage—enough to get them through the end of the school year.

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The lingering effects of “Russian influence” hysteria are still being felt. While Facebook is ending a ban on political advertising that was enacted amid moral panic about overseas influence in U.S. elections, Democrats in Congress are still pushing regulations and restrictions based on the idea that simply seeing foreign people’s speech about U.S. issues and elections is bad for feeble-minded Americans and dangerous to our democracy.

Russian bot operations undoubtedly tried to stir up mayhem and inflame partisan passions during the 2016 presidential election, but the effects of that attempted chaos-sowing are way less clear (and less common) than Democrats—incredulous that Hillary Clinton could’ve lost to Donald Trump in a fair election—liked to pretend. And apparently, this delusion is still driving Democratic policy proposals in Congress. On Wednesday, the House passed a measure to require all politics-related social media posts from non-Americans to bear a disclaimer saying as much.

The Foreign Agent Disclaimer Enhancement (FADE) Act of 2021, introduced by Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D–Va.), passed the House yesterday as part of a larger voting rights and election-related bill called the For the People Act (which only one Democrat and all Republcians in the House voted against).

The FADE Act states:

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The era of the sovereign influencer. The latest Pirate Wires, a newsletter by Founders Fund’s Mike Solana, has a really interesting section on “the new class” of social media and the rise of the “sovereign influencer.” Solana posits that platforms are enabling a certain sort of “cancel-proof” and transferable social media experience:

Over the last decade, companies that focused on things like creator monetization, creator control, and certainly any kind of alternative, cancel-proof social media all generated trivial amounts of revenue by comparison to the social media giants. They still do. But companies focused on the dominance of sovereign influencers are riding the most important trend in media, while social media incumbents are almost incapable of capitalizing on the trend without disrupting their own dominance. In the technology industry, the dynamic at work here is legendary. A decade ago, when I first learned “Silicon Valley” was an actual place, rather than a metaphor, and began my journey with Founders Fund, I picked up a book called the Innovator’s Dilemma. Long, fascinating story short: large and powerful companies are pressured by the market into obsessive focus on their core business, even when leadership is cognizant of new and important technology trends just outside their company’s core competency. A few of these trends become tidal waves that reshape our world, and smaller companies better equipped to capitalize on new trends ride the waves to new and more significant markets. By the time a dominant incumbent fully commits to the new game in town — because it finally has to — it’s too late. Congratulations, you’re the foremost purveyor of film in a world of digital photography.

Patreon and OnlyFans, subscription services for creators, represent the first wave of companies that meaningfully monetized influencers, and decoupled them in some critical sense from the dominant social media platforms. But Patreon loves a wrongthink cancellation, and OnlyFans is a platform as well as a tool for monetization. While losing either monetization or a platform will harm a creator, the ability to distribute is critical. Substack, with email subscription baked into its DNA, represents the cancel-proof second wave. With a slight hiccup while they find a new tool for monetization, a writer could conceivably leave Substack and continue sharing content with their followers. In other words, we trust Substack because we don’t have to trust Substack. Elsewhere, Discord walked so Clubhouse could run. Interactive voice chat may not be helping creators monetize (yet), and Clubhouse has way too much attack exposure to ever cancel-proof a user — though they’ve admirably resisted the New York Times thought police — but these are mixed social platforms. Partly they enable groups of people who know each other to chat, but they’re also broadcast platforms for sovereign influencers. This is the future. Every successful new company in media and social media exists in sync with this future.

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The results are in for a two-year experiment with universal basic income (UBI) in Stockton, California:

QUICK HITS

• The House of Representatives yesterday passed a bill to ban police officers from using chokeholds and to reform the qualified immunity process. Called the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, it had the support of all House Democrats and only one Republican, Rep. Lance Gooden (R–Texas)—who said afterward that he voted for it accidentally. The measure now goes to the Senate, “where it will need at least 10 Republican votes for passage,” notes NBC.

• Here’s a good explainer on Twitter Spaces, the company’s attempt to compete with Clubhouse in the audio chatroom sphere.

• “Safe injection sites are a proven method for reducing overdose deaths, but the Department of Justice has been using a 1986 law that President Joe Biden championed in the Senate to prevent their operation,” notes The Appeal.

• Shikha Dalmia dissects the U.S. Citizenship Act, noting that while it contains many good provisions, “the administration is primarily helping immigrants stuck in America’s broken immigration system, not fundamentally fixing the system to ease future flows. Indeed, the bill as written will set the country up for yet another immigration war, just as happened after President Ronald Reagan’s immigration reforms.”

• It’s time to repeal the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, writes Radley Balko.

• David Shor on why the Democratic Party has been getting more liberal, and how it could hurt the party’s electoral prospects:

There’s a narrative on the left that the Democrats’ growing reliance on college-educated whites is pulling the party to the right (Matt Karp had an essay on this recently). But I think that’s wrong. Highly educated people tend to have more ideologically coherent and extreme views than working-class ones. We see this in issue polling and ideological self-identification. College-educated voters are way less likely to identify as moderate. So as Democrats have traded non-college-educated voters for college-educated ones, white liberals’ share of voice and clout in the Democratic Party has gone up. And since white voters are sorting on ideology more than nonwhite voters, we’ve ended up in a situation where white liberals are more left wing than Black and Hispanic Democrats on pretty much every issue: taxes, health care, policing, and even on racial issues or various measures of “racial resentment.” So as white liberals increasingly define the party’s image and messaging, that’s going to turn off nonwhite conservative Democrats and push them against us.

• Puerto Rico statehood may be up for a vote again soon.

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This post is adapted from our new book, Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives, available March 2. To learn more about the book, visit minethebook.com.

New Yorkers are rarely a soft-spoken group, particularly when boasting about their city.  Time Out magazine lists fifty reasons why New York is the “greatest city in the world” – greatest skyline, greatest theater, and on and on.  These brags should come as no surprise.  Everyone has heard of the Empire State Building and Times Square.  But you may be surprised at what the magazine lists as the number one reason New York is so great.

Its drinking water.

And you don’t need to take the magazine’s word for it.  New York tap water routinely wins blind taste contests against even the priciest bottled water.

While New Yorkers may know their tap water tastes great, few know that it comes from 125 miles northwest of the City; and even fewer know that innovative ownership design lies at the heart of providing over a billion gallons of safe and refreshing water to nine million people every day.  But Al Appleton knows.

Appleton is a bear of a man with a quick wit and disarming candor. In 1990, he became Commissioner of the New York City Department of Environmental Protection and Director of the City’s Water and Sewer system.  He immediately faced a dilemma.  Unlike most big American cities, New York did not have treatment plants for its tap water.  Showing great foresight in the early 1900s, the City had laid huge pipes from the undeveloped Catskill Mountains, far to the north and west, to bring the region’s pristine water down to giant reservoirs near the city.  Apart from mechanical filters at the collecting reservoirs to keep out sticks and leaves, and chlorination to kill bacteria, the water went almost directly from the mountains to faucets in apartments in Manhattan and homes in the Bronx.

Starting in the 1980s, though, small farms in the Catskills watershed came under economic pressure.  They increased fertilizer use and began selling land to residential sub-developers.  As the population grew and land use intensified, the clean water that New York City had taken for granted came under threat.  Coupled with a revision to the Safe Drinking Water Act, it looked like New York would need to build a huge treatment plant for Catskills water with a price tag up to $4 billion, along with $200 million more annually to operate the plant.

Instead of going ahead with construction, though, Appleton took a step back and looked to the ownership toolkit.  Most everyone assumed a new treatment plant was inevitable.  But Appleton reframed the problem.  The watershed’s vegetation and soil had been doing a great job breaking down contaminants, trapping sediments, and filtering toxics.  The result was admirably high-quality drinking water.  Instead of spending enormous sums to treat water downstream, how about investing instead to restore the upstream landscape?  Was it possible to avoid spending money at all on a big plant?  As Appleton put it, “a good environment will produce good water.”

Thus began an eighteen-month process of more than 150 meetings with local groups in the Catskills, negotiating land management practices to ensure water quality.  One participant described the endless meetings as similar to a “rolling Thanksgiving dinner with relatives you only want to see once a year.”  The final agreement was signed by sixty towns, ten villages, seven counties, and environmental groups.  New York City committed to spending $1.5 billion to acquire sensitive lands, restore stream corridors, and fund partnerships that would foster water quality and support economic development in the watersheds.

The results have been impressive.  Water pollution dramatically declined.  New York City payments have proven popular with rural upstate landowners. And the EPA was persuaded that the watershed initiatives would provide safe drinking water, so the federal government has repeatedly waived the requirement that New York City build the multi-billion-dollar treatment plant.  As a result, in purely financial terms, New York came off ahead by investing in natural capital rather than in built capital, investing in green rather than gray infrastructure.  The program has paid for itself many times over.

But what does all this have to do with ownership?  Tomorrow, in our next post, we show how Al Appleton adapted one of the six simple stories of ownership to preserve New York City’s premier drinking water.

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Please feel free to write comments on this post on whatever topic you like! (As usual, please avoid personal insults of each other, vulgarities aimed at each other or at third parties, or other things that are likely to poison the discussion.)

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The United States will have COVID-19 vaccine doses for every adult in America by late May, President Joe Biden announced Tuesday, moving the timeline up by a glorious two months. It may take some time after that landmark moment to get all those shots into arms, but availability by Memorial Day means we can justifiably hope for normalcy by Independence Day. The end of the pandemic is really, truly nigh.

But you might not know it from the baleful tone of many recent public health recommendations. Even after vaccination, so much of the present messaging says, you must keep wearing a mask. Keep social distancing. Keep not seeing your loved ones. Keep living your strange and difficult half-life.

“Currently, we do not have enough data to be able to say with confidence that the vaccines can prevent transmission,” National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci said last month. “So even if vaccinated, you may still be able to spread the virus to vulnerable people,” he continued, and therefore you should continue to wear a mask and socially distance. Don’t go back to normal, he advised, even after you’ve gotten the shot that is supposed to put things back to normal. In fact, we may still be in masks in 2022, Fauci added a few weeks later. Guidance from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), expected to be released this week, strikes similar notes.

This is not how we should be talking about vaccines and the return to normalcy. However good the intent—and the intent is almost certainly to discourage reckless behavior that could undermine the vaccines’ impact on disease transmission—the effect is discouraging and detrimental. Insofar as it might dissuade some people from getting vaccinated, advice like Fauci’s might even be dangerous.

The relevant thing to know about the three COVID-19 vaccines approved in the United States so far (Moderna, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson) is that they’re all good. Spectacularly good. They’re better than the best-case scenario we were hoping for a year ago, when Fauci was widely dubbed pollyannaish for suggesting we could have a vaccine within 12-18 months. These vaccines were developed quickly and tested rigorously. They cannot give you COVID-19, because none contain the virus that causes the disease. The two-shot Moderna and Pfizer regimens are more than 90 percent effective at preventing infection altogether, while the single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine is 66 percent effective by the same measure. Most importantly, all three are 100 percent effective at preventing hospitalization or death from COVID-19.

That means if you get one of these vaccines, you will not die of COVID-19. And though it’s true, as Fauci warned, that we can’t say with equal certainty that vaccinated people can’t transmit the disease, post-vaccine spread is quite unlikely. That’s not how most vaccines work, and real-world data looks incredibly encouraging here. The vaccines are good.

Normalcy is the whole point of vaccination, and these vaccines can get us there. So when public health advice says “no” to normalcy even after vaccination, it misleads the public and wildly undersells the vaccines. A year into this, that’s cruel and dispiriting. For some, it needlessly raises fears that we’re stuck in lockdown limbo forever; for others, it suggests there’s no reason to keep being careful.

What would better messaging look like? I’m not an expert in public health or public relations, but three things come to mind.

First, we should say loudly and repeatedly how great the vaccines are and how much good they can accomplish. (Dolly Parton and Bill Gates—an odd couple!—are doing this better than many public health professionals.) Recognizing these truths doesn’t preclude ongoing risk mitigation while vaccine distribution is underway, and this positive slant will help overcome some people’s vaccine hesitancy.

Next, we should increasingly distinguish between public and private social interactions (and, to the agency’s credit, the forthcoming CDC guidance moves in this direction). In private gatherings among a known group of people, there’s no reason for vaccinated people to be masked, distanced, or—as some scientists in the U.K. absurdly advised—refusing to hug their kids. After vaccination, we can hang out with friends, family, and maybe even coworkers, depending on workplace format, without the precautions we continue to take among strangers.

Meanwhile, in public, indoor spaces where we interact with people we don’t know, it makes sense to keep the masks and distancing going, including for the vaccinated, until vaccine distribution is complete. That’s not because vaccinated people still spread the disease in any significant way. It’s because other people in the grocery store have no way of knowing who’s vaccinated and who’s merely irresponsible. Dropping masks early would for that reason create unnecessary fear and chaos.

It might be tempting to shorten this phase by announcing our vaccination status with some sort of “immunity certificate,” an ID indicating the bearer can appear in public without a mask. This idea has come up repeatedly, but the legal and ethical risks—fraud, invasion of privacy, enforcement overreach, and more—amply outweigh its appeal.

Finally, instead of special papers for some, there must be a firm end date to those public measures for everyone. I can’t say exactly when it should be, nor do I think a single national date would make sense. I’m envisioning something like six weeks after vaccines have become available (as in, you can easily get an appointment) to all who want them in a given city, county, or state. A scheme like that would give time for immunity to build and for risk to decline to an acceptable level, even for those who can’t be vaccinated for medical reasons.

And when that condition is met, masks and distancing should be done. Not prohibited for the cautious, of course, but done for all who want it. We need that goal to work toward. We need to be able to look forward to this hope as it fast approaches.

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3/4/1861: President Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration.

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