Category: reason

School closures have affected over 55 million K–12 students in the U.S. since March as the nation deals with the coronavirus pandemic. Although numerous private schools and day care centers have adjusted to the pandemic and reopened, many public school districts and teachers unions are fighting to remain closed in the name of safety. In fact, 85 percent of the country’s 20 largest public school districts have already announced that they will not be reopening schools for any in-person instruction as the school year begins.

Some have noted these reopening decisions often appear to be driven by politics rather than public health. Unfortunately, many teachers groups are contributing to this appearance. In their report on safely reopening schools, for example, the Los Angeles’ teachers union went beyond detailing the safety needs of teachers and students, also calling for politicians to enact a wealth tax, Medicare for All, and a ban on charter schools. 

Similarly, 10 teachers unions across the country joined a coalition that included the Democratic Socialists of America to “Demand Safe Schools.” But rather than focus on student and teacher safety, they demanded a ban on new charter schools and voucher programs as well as the cancellation of rents and mortgages. 

When a reporter asked Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser if trends in the city’s COVID-19 cases justified the all-virtual start to the school year, Bowser responded, “No. I wouldn’t say the attention to the health metrics is the only thing that’s leading to our decision today” and that “clearly we want to work with our workforce.”

New data suggest these anecdotes—and the underlying theory that reopening has more to do with power dynamics than safety—have some merit.

Education Week recently compiled data on the reopening decisions made by 563 school districts in the U.S. The data indicate a stark relationship between school district reopening plans and whether the school district is located in a state that requires union membership as a condition of employment as a teacher. Right now, school districts in states that require union membership are 25 percentage points less likely to plan to reopen with full-time in-person instruction available than school districts in right-to-work states. About 38 percent of school districts in right-to-work states have decided to offer full-time in-person instruction, whereas only around 13 percent of school districts in states that require union membership are offering the same.

The data also suggest that districts in states with stronger teachers unions—as measured by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank, in 2012—are significantly less likely to reopen in person this fall. In Florida, for example, the largest school districts in the state’s biggest cities are only offering remote learning to start the year but, statewide, 73 percent of the school districts in the dataset are reopening full-time with in-person instruction this fall. Meanwhile, just 4 percent of districts across California, a state with much stronger teachers unions, are offering in-person instruction. 

Although these results are correlational, they make sense. Teachers unions with more power are in better positions to influence school districts not to reopen in person.

In theory, school districts in unionized states could be more likely to go fully online this fall simply because they might be in areas with more COVID-19 cases and risk. But the data generally do not support that theory. The relationship between unionization and reopening decisions remains substantively and statistically significant even after controlling for school district size and coronavirus deaths and cases per capita in the county during the month of July.

Jon Valant, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, also recently found, COVID-19 risk was not statistically related to school district reopening decisions. Valant’s analysis found school district reopening decisions are instead related to people’s political leanings and support for President Donald Trump. The latest data show that a 10 percentage point increase in the share of Trump voters from the 2016 presidential election in a county is associated with an 11 percentage point increase in the likelihood of a school district reopening in person this fall. Likewise, the less support Trump had in an area, the less likely that school district is to offer in-person learning right now.

Like so many other things in this highly polarized moment, school reopening decisions are likely being influenced by factors other than the safety of students, families, and teachers. To be clear, this doesn’t mean teachers unions have bad intentions. Their leaders are often just trying to do their jobs by pushing for policies that benefit their members, particularly older teachers who could be at higher risk for COVID-19 complications. 

But this debate is highlighting the problems with our school finance model. Public school districts are funded primarily through property taxes, regardless of whether they meet the needs of students and families, so schools have little incentive to focus on students. 

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/326IgZY
via IFTTT

So reports Voice of San Diego (Kate Nucci):

San Diego Police Chief Dave Nisleit has instructed officers to stop enforcing a century-old law that forbids “seditious language” as elected officials begin the process of repealing it.

Earlier this month, VOSD reported that police since 2013 had issued at least 82 tickets for what’s generally understood as speech advocating to overthrow the government….

Because the tickets were filed in recent years as infractions rather than misdemeanors, the process has played out administratively, not criminally. On par with speeding tickets, infractions don’t entitle defendants to legal counsel or a trial by jury. Lawyers for both the city and the public defender said they were unaware that SDPD was still enforcing that section of the municipal code.

I certainly had never heard of this recent practice in San Diego, or anywhere else; the ordinance was enacted in 1918, and reads,

[It is] unlawful for any person … to utter or use within the hearing of one or more persons any seditious language, words or epithets, or to address to another, or to utter in the presence of another, any words, language or expression or seditious remarks, having a tendency to create a breach of the public peace.

At the time, “sedition” was understood to mean “the stirring up of disorder in the State, tending toward treason, but lacking an overt act.” But under modern First Amendment law, such a prohibition is clearly unconstitutional. (The article doesn’t make clear just what speech has led to the tickets, and thus how the police officers who were giving the tickets were actually interpreting “seditious.”)

There are of course some narrow exceptions to the First Amendment: Advocacy intended to and likely to persuade people to commit imminent crimes (revolutionary, treasonous, or otherwise) is punishable as “incitement”; face-to-face personal insults that tend to lead to a fight are punishable “fighting words”; and there are similar exceptions for solicitation of specific crimes, true threats of crimes, and the like. But a broad prohibition on “seditious language” goes way beyond that. And even if the “seditious remarks, having a tendency to create a breach of the public peace” clause were read as applying only to fighting words, it would still be unconstitutionally viewpoint-based in its limitation to “seditious” fighting words.

Thanks to Prof. Eric M. Freedman for the pointer.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3l34gNM
via IFTTT

From today’s decision by Judge Victoria A. Roberts in Gerber v. Herskovitz (E.D. Mich.), in a case I blogged about in March:

Marvin Gerber and Dr. Miriam Brysk (“Plaintiffs”) allege a group of protestors infringes on their federal and state rights by regularly protesting in front of a Jewish synagogue where Plaintiffs attend religious services. Plaintiffs also allege the City of Ann Arbor … and several of its employees contribute to this infringement by failing to enforce the Ann Arbor City Code ….

There are two groups of Defendants: (1) the protestors; and (2) the City and several of its employees (collectively “Defendants”)….

Every Saturday since September 2003, Defendant Henry Herskovitz leads a group of protestors. They typically place 18-20 signs, posters, and placards on the grass section adjacent to the sidewalk in front of the Synagogue, as well as on the grass section across the street, facing the Synagogue. They also lean them against trees and portable chairs that the protestors bring with them. The protestors also carry signs in their hands or attach them to twine hanging from their necks. The signs display statements such as “Resist Jewish Power,” “Jewish Power Corrupts,” “Fake News: Israel Is A Democracy,” “Stop Funding Israel,” and “End the Palestinian Holocaust.” Plaintiffs say these signs are anti-Israeli, anti-Zionist, and antisemitic.

They show up every Saturday morning—the Jewish Sabbath—at approximately 9:30 AM, position their signs, and stay until approximately 11:00 or 11:30 AM. This time period coincides with the time Synagogue members arrive to conduct and participate in Sabbath service. The signs are readily visible to Synagogue members and their children.

Plaintiffs describe the signs as offensive; causing anger and extreme emotional distress significantly diminishing their enjoyment of attending Sabbath services; and, adversely affecting their willingness to attend Sabbath at this location.

Plaintiffs say this conduct violates the Code because it requires the protestors to have a permit to place the signs on the grass sections. They do not have one. Further, Plaintiffs say the protestors would not even qualify for a permit. The City Defendants disagree. They believe the Code does not prohibit the protestors’ activities, nor does it require them to obtain a permit….

Plaintiffs allege that because of Defendants’ conduct and speech, they suffer “extreme emotional distress,” and that the conduct interferes with their right to practice their religion without being “harassed” under the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. They say the protestors’ conduct is not protected by the First Amendment, that placement of signs and placards on the grass sections violates the Code, and the City’s failure to enforce its Code against the protestors contributes to Plaintiffs’ injury.

Even taking all of these allegations as true, Defendants say Plaintiffs fail to demonstrate an injury in fact. They say Plaintiffs’ allegation that they were injured by having to walk past the protestors’ signs as they entered Synagogue property does not rise to the level of an “actual concrete particularized injury.”

Plaintiffs certainly assert a particularized injury. “For an injury to be ‘particularized,’ it ‘must affect the plaintiff in a personal and individual way.'” However, the Supreme Court repeatedly makes clear that “an injury in fact must be both concrete and particularized.” A “concrete” injury must be “‘de facto’; that is, it must actually exist.” …

Although the Supreme Court held that intangible injuries can be concrete, … it instructs that when determining whether an intangible harm constitutes injury in fact, “both history and the judgment of Congress play important roles,” and “it is instructive to consider whether an alleged intangible harm has a close relationship to a harm that has traditionally been regarded as providing a basis for a lawsuit in English or American courts.” Congress can identify intangible harms that meet the minimum Article III requirements for standing; however, even when Congress elevates intangible harms, that “does not mean that a plaintiff automatically satisfies the injury-in-fact requirement,” because “Article III standing requires a concrete injury even in the context of a statutory violation.” …

The Supreme Court is emphatic about the path to standing when it comes to First Amendment litigants: “[a]llegations of a subjective ‘chill’ are not an adequate substitute for a claim of specific present objective harm or a threat of specific future harm.” “A subjective chill, without more, does not confer standing on a party.”

There is no allegation that the protestors prevent Plaintiffs from attending Sabbath services, that they block Plaintiffs’ path onto the property or to the Synagogue, or that the protests and signs outside affect the services inside. Plaintiffs merely allege that the Defendants’ conduct causes them distress and “interferes” with their enjoyment of attending religious services. This is the “subjective chill” that is “not an adequate substitute for a claim of specific present objective harm or a threat of specific future harm.” Laird v. Tatum (1972). This type of “chill” does not confer standing and is not actionable….

Indeed, the First Amendment more than protects the expressions by Defendants of what Plaintiffs describe as “anti-Israeli, anti-Zionist, [and] antisemitic.” Peaceful protest speech such as this—on sidewalks and streets—is entitled to the highest level of constitutional protection, even if it disturbs, is offensive, and causes emotional distress. McCullen v. Coakley (2014). The Defendants do nothing that falls outside of the protections of the First Amendment, since “a function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute,” Terminiello v. City of Chicago (1949). In public debate we must tolerate “insulting, and even outrageous, speech in order to provide adequate breathing space to the freedoms protected by the First Amendment.” Boos v. Barry (1988).

In principle, this should still leave plaintiffs free to file their purely state-court claims (perhaps for intentional infliction of emotional distress, if they’d like) in state court (see this post for more); the court here holds only that any emotional distress caused by the signs isn’t enough to create standing to sue over alleged interference with the plaintiffs’ religious freedom. But for the reasons given in the court’s concluding paragraph, I think the plaintiffs’ emotional distress claims will fail in state court as well.

And even if the city isn’t properly enforcing the sign code against the defendants (which I’m far from certain is true), I don’t think the plaintiffs would have standing even in state court to object to such underenforcement. (Perhaps other speakers against whom the sign code is enforced in similar circumstances, if any such speakers exist, could claim that they are being discriminated against based on viewpoint, but that’s not the plaintiffs’ claim here.)

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3hdeARf
via IFTTT

Class 2: Foundational Cases on Constitutional Structure (8/19/20)

• The Necessary and Proper Clause (115-116)

• McCulloch v. Maryland (116-128)
• Cabinet Battle #1 from Hamilton, an American Musical – Read the lyrics as you listen to the song
• The Commerce Clause (138-139)
• Gibbons v. Ogden (139-148)
• The “Bill of Rights” (152-153)
• Barron v. City of Baltimore (154-157)

Class 2: Mechanics of Adverse Possession: Tacking and Adverse Possession of Chattels (8/19/20)

• Howard v. Kunto, 95-102
• Adverse Possession against the Government, 102-103
• O’Keeffe v. Snyder, 103-110

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2Egi8DB
via IFTTT

During a panel discussion led by Joe Biden at the Democratic National Convention on Monday night, Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo emphasized the need for “national standards” to prevent the sort of abuse that led to George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis on May 25. “This is a watershed moment, and we can’t lose this moment,” Acevedo said. “We have got to have action at the national level. We have got to have congressional action.”

Acevedo’s passing of the buck to Congress was unsurprising, given the deadly corruption in his own department, which he was reluctant to acknowledge and slow to address. But policing is primarily a local responsibility, and Acevedo should not get away with shifting the focus from his own manifest failures by calling on the federal government to intervene.

In recent months, Acevedo, who is president of the Major Cities Chiefs Association, has been presenting himself as an avatar of police reform, joining Black Lives Matter protesters in condemning racism and expressing outrage at Floyd’s death. “We will march as a department with everybody in this community,” he told local demonstrators in May. “I will march until I can’t stand no more.” But Acevedo’s response to a deadly 2019 drug raid shows a different sort of police chief, one who reflexively defends his officers when their actions have lethal consequences, credulously accepts their version of events, and denies the existence of a systemic problem even when their lies are revealed.

The operation that killed Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas in their home on Harding Street does not fit the usual Black Lives Matter template. Tuttle and Nicholas were white, while Gerald Goines, the veteran narcotics officer who instigated the no-knock raid based on a heroin sale that never happened, is black. The incident nevertheless illustrates the same basic problems as a case that has figured prominently in the nationwide protests triggered by Floyd’s death: the shooting of Breonna Taylor, a black EMT and aspiring nurse, in Louisville, Kentucky, last March.

In both cases, police obtained no-knock warrants based on dubious evidence, broke into homes when the residents were asleep, responded with overwhelming force when their victims tried to defend themselves, and found no evidence of drug dealing. And in both cases, there was no body camera video to show what happened.

Acevedo’s initial response to the Harding Street raid was telling. Although it was clear right away that something had gone horribly wrong, he repeatedly praised the officers as “heroes,” uncritically regurgitated their account, and posthumously tarred Tuttle and Nicholas as dangerous heroin dealers, claiming neighbors had thanked the cops for finally taking action against a locally notorious “drug house.” As evidence of the couple’s criminal activity, Acevedo cited a telephone call in which an anonymous woman had reported that “her daughter was in the house, and there were guns and heroin.” He blamed Tuttle for the deadly gun battle, which injured four officers, even while acknowledging that the cops had opened fire first, using a shotgun to kill the couple’s dog immediately after entering the home. He indignantly rejected the suggestion that the officers might have been hit by friendly fire—a question that still has not been publicly answered.

Even after investigators discovered that Goines had invented the heroin sale that was the basis for the search warrant, Acevedo said he still thought the officers who killed Tuttle and Nicholas were heroes. He even bizarrely insisted that “they had probable cause to be there,” and he continued referring to Tuttle and Nicholas as “suspects.” A federal investigation later revealed that the neighbor whose phone call Acevedo cited as independent evidence against the couple had made the whole thing up.

To his credit, Acevedo rebuked the president of a local police union for implying, on the night of the raid, that the department’s critics were responsible for violence against cops. But instead of withholding judgment until the circumstances of the raid could be investigated, Acevedo presented the word of a corrupt, habitually deceitful officer as the unvarnished truth. In that respect, his attitude was no different from that of union officials who automatically defend officers accused of misconduct.

The fact that Goines, who had previously been accused of perjury, thought he could get away with a trumped-up drug raid suggested broader problems within the Houston Police Department’s Narcotics Division. So did the willingness of another narcotics officer, Steven Bryant, to back up Goines’ fake story. But even after the raid led to state and federal charges against Goines and Bryant, Acevedo said he saw no evidence of “systemic” failures, while simultaneously saying this sort of thing was apt to happen again.

“Police officers have been engaged in misconduct since the advent of time,” Acevedo told reporters in December. “Human beings have been sinning since…the days of Adam and Eve, right? I mean, we’re imperfect beings. I can’t guarantee that nothing will ever happen again….What I can guarantee is that, number one, we will continue to be vigilant in our processes and our systems and our audits….We will always ask the tough questions when we take a life. What I can tell you is that the chances of this being systemic are not going to happen because of the processes in the systems that we have.”

Last month, an internal audit report that Acevedo had tried to keep under wraps showed serious deficiencies in those “processes” and “systems,” revealing routine sloppiness, if not outright fraud, in the Narcotics Division’s records. On the same day, Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg announced new criminal charges against Goines and Bryant, along with charges against four other former members of the Narcotics Division, including three supervisors. The prosecutors’ allegations suggested that Goines and other narcotics officers routinely built their cases on lies.

“Goines and others could never have preyed on our community the way they did without the participation of their supervisors; every check and balance in place to stop this type of behavior was circumvented,” Ogg said. “This was graft and greed at every step in the process, and prosecutors are making their way through the evidence one incident at a time….The new charges show a pattern and practice of lying and deceit. There are mountains [of] more evidence to review, and more charges are likely as we push into the next phase of our investigation.”

If that is not a “systemic” problem, I don’t know what would be.

Even the reforms that Acevedo announced in response to the Harding Street raid, including high-level approval of no-knock raids and a requirement that narcotics officers wear body cameras while executing search warrants, raise the question of why he did not take those steps sooner. The hazards of no-knock raids have been a topic of national discussion for decades, and it seems like a no-brainer to mandate video documentation of potentially lethal police operations. Acevedo’s belated safeguards hardly make him look like the forward-thinking, reform-minded police chief showcased at the Democratic convention.

Acevedo wants us to ignore all this and instead talk about “action at the national level.” But what sort of action does he support? He mentioned “a national database” (of what, exactly, wasn’t clear) and “use of force” rules that prohibit chokeholds. Congress does not have the authority to directly ban chokeholds, although it can encourage that policy by attaching conditions to federal grants, as the legislation backed by House Democrats would do. From Acevedo’s perspective, that reform has the benefit of being irrelevant in Houston, where the police department has prohibited chokeholds for decades and the mayor announced a seemingly redundant ban after Floyd’s death.

What about legislation that would abolish qualified immunity, the court-invented doctrine that makes it very difficult to hold police accountable for the use of excessive force by requiring plaintiffs in federal civil rights lawsuits to locate precedents with nearly identical facts? Acevedo is not exactly enthusiastic about that idea.

“We don’t support eliminating it,” he said during a June 18 interview on The View. “I don’t think that we’ll ever get to the point where we’d want to get rid of it completely, because we don’t want to create a situation where police officers will hesitate to take decisive action protecting our community. But we do believe that we have to explore how it can be adjusted to have greater justice and accountability in our country.”

Those sound like the words of a police chief who wants to get credit for paying lip service to reform without actually committing to changes that could have a meaningful impact. That is Art Acevedo in a nutshell.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2EkAumQ
via IFTTT

The Democratic Party Platform for 2020 is blunt about how it feels about the war on drugs:

It is past time to end the failed “War on Drugs,” which has imprisoned millions of Americans—disproportionately Black people and Latinos—and hasn’t been effective in reducing drug use.

That’s slightly stronger wording than the 2016 party platform, which also acknowledged that the war on drugs disproportionately impacts minorities and doesn’t stop drug use, but that’s really the only difference. Four years later, the Democrats are once again promising to chart a new federal course on cannabis policy and extolling the virtues of “prioritiz[ing] prevention and treatment over incarceration.”

While the platform says that “Democrats believe no one should be in prison solely because they use drugs,” it doesn’t call for the legalization of any drugs. As in 2016, the platform’s position on cannabis takes a cue from federalism: respect state laws, reschedule cannabis out of Schedule I (the category for drugs deemed dangerous, addictive, and non-medical). This is apparently the boldest position Democrats are willing to take, perhaps because Joe Biden does not support recreational marijuana legalization. Regardless of why, the official party platform remains behind the curve of the majority of Americans.

Instead of actually ending the drug war, the 2020 platform’s emphasis takes the same approach as the 2016 platform in calling for the expanded use of drug courts and diversion programs “for those struggling with substance use disorders.”

The problem: Drug courts, in practice, have been shown that they do not reduce policing encounters; some evidence supports the idea that they reduce incarceration rates or recidivism. A 2018 report from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) analyzed drug court systems in the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America, and found many cases where drug courts actually increased, rather than reduced, a drug users’ interactions with police and the criminal justice system. The SSRC analysis of five years of New York City drug courts determined that sentences for those who “failed” drug court were two-to-five times longer than those who just accepted a conventional sentence for drug possession. In other words, they would have been better off just pleading guilty.

The report found that the existence of drug courts in a community perversely causes police to focus on finding people to arrest for minor drug possession crimes, even absent evidence that these people actually had a drug addiction problem:

Evidence also suggests drug courts have led law enforcement to intensify its focus on people who use drugs but have either no or minor substance use disorders, which in turn has increased arrest and punishment for systematic drug use. A 2016 study of more than eight thousand cities and counties nationwide found evidence that local police increased attention to minor drug offenses in jurisdictions where drug courts were implemented.

Accordingly, research indicates many drug court participants do not have diagnosable or clinically significant substance use disorders and therefore are not in need of treatment.

And that’s a big, fundamental problem with how the Democratic Party platform is approaching drug use. It is assuming that every single person who is using an illegal drug is addicted and needs intervention. In order the get access to drug court, users are often required to plead guilty, surrender their rights, and “confess” to having an addiction, even if they are in fact just casual users.

The Democratic Party, as an institution, remains unwilling to accept and tolerate the existence of non-problematic recreational drug use. If it can’t even do this with cannabis, it’s certainly not going to accept the same is true of other Schedule I drugs, which means it’s not actually ready to end the war on drugs.

The Democrats say they don’t want to see people incarcerated “solely for using drugs,” but that’s what happens if you test positive for drugs while enrolled in drug court: you get incarcerated. Drug courts and compulsory drug treatment programs are enforced by men with guns, and you can’t end a war if you’re not willing to stop pointing guns at people.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3aDuS3g
via IFTTT

Brookings Institution economist Robert Litan has an insightful new article making the case for paying people to take a coronavirus vaccine, once one is approved and ready for distribution (as may well happen by sometime next year). I had been planning to write a piece making a similar argument. But Litan beat me to it, and he therefore deserves the credit for the idea. As he explains, this could save both lives and money, and is likely to be better than simply mandating vaccination:

When I was a child, doctors giving vaccine shots used to hand out candy or a little toy to take the sting and fear out of the shot. A similar idea could rescue the U.S. economy when one or more COVID vaccines are approved by the FDA and widely available for mass uptake.

Infectious disease experts, such as Minnesota’s Michael Osterholm, tell us that “herd immunity” – or the point at which the virus will quit spreading like wildfire – will be reached when at least 60 percent of the population is immune. A truly effective vaccine… will avoid the tragedy of the million-plus deaths it otherwise could take for the country to reach herd immunity.

Provided enough people take the vaccine when they can. Since no vaccine will be perfectly effective – Dr. Fauci has said he could live with a vaccine that was 75 percent effective, which could be optimistic – that means that at least 80 percent of the U.S. population (60 percent divided by 75 percent) must be vaccinated if the virus is to be tamped down to the point where enough people will feel safe to patronize service establishments and travel so the country and the economy can return to some semblance of normal.

But now that seemingly everything about the virus – its severity and whether to wear masks in public, to take two examples – has become deeply politicized, is there any hope of reaching that 80 percent threshold?

Not according to a poll by NPR/PBS/Marist released on August 14, which reported that more than one third – 35 percent to be precise – of Americans won’t take the vaccine when it is available, which means that the population take-up percentage would only be 65 percent, or well short of the 80 percent target. The take-up rates predictably differ by party, with 71 percent of Democrats saying they’ll take the shot versus 48 percent for Republicans…

In principle, a President Biden could take executive actions or seek legislation – assuming Democrats control both the House and Senate and the filibuster rule is abandoned – penalizing those who don’t take the shots (for example, by requiring vaccination certificates before entering most public spaces). But imposing any penalties on people who don’t take the vaccine at the outset of his presidency – even if the penalties were both effective and constitutional, which is not at all clear it would be – would aggravate polarization, conceivably cause violence, and prevent any healing of the country that Biden has promised to usher in….

The “adult” version of the doctor handing out candy to children, fortunately, points toward a solution: pay people who get the shot (or shots, since more than one may be required).

How much? I know of no hard science that can answer that question, but my strong hunch is that anything less than $1,000 per person won’t do the trick. At that level, a family of four would get $4,000 (ideally not subject to income tax) – a lot of money to a lot of families in these difficult times, and thus enough to assure that the country crosses the 80 percent vaccination threshold.

As Litan explains, even if we end up “overpaying” to get people to take the vaccine, it would still be a massive savings of money on net. Every day without herd immunity is a day when many lives are lost, and the economy continues to stagnate—costing us far more than vaccine payments would.

I agree with most of Litan’s analysis, and have a few points to add.

First, the poll he cites is far from the only one indicating many Americans will refuse to take a Covid vaccine. Other surveys paint a similar picture (see, e.g., here and here). It is possible that such attitudes will decline once a vaccine is actually available, and taking it holds out the promise of returning to normal life. Vaccination might also be incentivized by businesses requiring employers and/or customers to have vaccination certificates. But it’s hard to say whether either of these will happen quickly enough or on a large enough scale. Even a few weeks or months delay in getting to vaccine-driven herd immunity is likely to be extremely costly.

Second, many will be tempted to reject the idea of paying people to get vaccinated because vaccination is a moral duty we must fulfill in order to protect others against the disease. We have mandatory vaccination against other contagious diseases. Why not this one?

In principle, I agree. Mandatory vaccination against deadly contagious diseases can even be justified on libertarian grounds, overcoming the strong presumption against coercion. Libertarian political philosopher Jason Brennan has a good explanation of the reasons why.

But that which is justifiable in principle isn’t always the right approach in practice. Coercing tens of millions of unwilling people to get vaccinated is likely to be a huge and painful undertaking. It is far from clear that either the federal government or the states are up to the task. Currently, most mandatory vaccinations are imposed on children; parents can be relatively easily incentivized to permit them on threat that the children will otherwise be excluded from schools. Imposing mandatory vaccination on some 300 million (mostly adult) Americans is a far dicier proposition.

Moreover, using law enforcement to coerce so many people is likely to lead to serious abuses. If you believe (correctly) that police too often use excessive force, engage in racial profiling, and otherwise abuse their authority, imagine how often these things would happen in the process of forcing millions of people to take a vaccine.

It’s worth emphasizing that African-Americans—the group with the worst relations with police—are also disproportionately likely to be suspicious of vaccines. If mandatory vaccination leads to high-profile incidents of violence between police and the black community, it could simultaneously set back race relations and undermine the vaccination campaign.

If you think federal law enforcement officers can take up the slack from local and state police, you should remember that there aren’t nearly enough of the former to do the job. There are only about 100,000 federal law enforcement officers in the United States (compared to about 700,000 state and local ones), and most of them can’t simply be turned into full-time vaccination enforcers. Many of the federal law enforcement agencies we do have are notorious for their brutality and disdain for due process  and the kinds of abuses we recently saw  when they were deployed in Portland. A federally-enforced vaccination mandate might lead to the repetition of such events on a massive scale. Paying people to take the vaccine is likely to be more effective, more humane, and less dangerous than coercion.

I do have a few reservations about Litan’s analysis. First, as he recognizes, we don’t have a good way to gauge the right amount of payment to incentivize a sufficient number of people to take the vaccine. I tend to agree, however, that $1000 per person should be sufficient, perhaps even more than enough.  To the extent that, as Litan notes, the incentive is stronger for the poor, that’s a feature not a bug. For a number of reasons, poor people are more likely to get infected than the relatively affluent.

Finally, I am skeptical of Litan’s idea that the government should only pay a small percentage of the money up front, and defer the rest until enough people have been vaccinated to reach herd immunity. Doing so might lead many people to hold off on getting vaccinated until it is clear that enough others have done so that herd immunity is likely to be reached. In order to incentivize the fastest and most widespread possible acceptance, it would be better to pay all or most of the money up front, as soon as the individual in question gets vaccinated.

There are likely to be aspects of this idea that need more detailed consideration, including angles that Litan and I may have overlooked. I hope experts in various relevant fields will begin to consider these issues. The sooner the better.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3gdVzww
via IFTTT