Fund Students Instead of Systems

distance learning

Families need education options now more than ever. Education Week just reported that 85 percent of the largest 20 school districts in the U.S. aren’t beginning the school year with any in-person instruction. According to the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, most of the nation’s 120 largest school districts intend to begin the school year without any in-person instruction.

So it’s welcome news that Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) is introducing a bill to redirect federal K–12 education dollars to fund families directly. This would be a great step toward putting the needs of kids and parents before the needs of the public school monopoly.

Remote learning was a disaster for too many families this spring. A recent analysis found that only 1 in 3 school districts even required teachers to deliver instruction. And even if remote learning performs well in certain areas, the reality remains that families have structured their lives around the fact that in-person schooling lets parents go to work and earn a living.

A coalition of at least 10 teachers unions partnered with the Democratic Socialists of America and other groups to put together a “National Day of Resistance” last week to “Demand Safe Schools.” Some unions protested reopening schools with fake tombstones, obituaries, coffins, and body bags. Their demands also included several items not obviously related to COVID-19, including a ban on new charter schools, a ban on new private school choice programs, a ban on standardized testing, police-free schools, and a “massive infusion of federal money.” 

These protests come in stark contrast to responses from private schools and other sectors of the economy. While private businesses are fighting to reopen, many public school systems are fighting to remain closed. The incentives are different because one of these sectors gets your money regardless of whether they reopen.

If a Walmart stays closed, you can take your money elsewhere. If a public school doesn’t reopen, you should similarly be able to take your children’s education dollars elsewhere. In fact, even if your school does reopen, you should still be able to take your children’s education dollars elsewhere, because the money is for educating the child, not protecting a government monopoly.

That’s where the Support Children Having Open Opportunities for Learning (SCHOOL) Act comes in.

The SCHOOL Act, which Sen. Paul introduced on Wednesday, would allow a large portion of existing federal education dollars to follow students to wherever they received an education—be it in a public school, a private school, or a homeschooling option. This is how several other tax-funded initiates work, from Pell Grants to pre-K programs to food stamps. Although federal revenues account for only about eight percent of total K–12 education funding, the SCHOOL Act would provide substantially more dollars directly to families each year than the School Choice Now Act that was just introduced by Sens. Tim Scott (R–S.C.) and Lamar Alexander (R–Tenn.) two weeks ago.

The Act also includes a provision that prohibits additional federal or state control over non-public providers of education. And no family would be compelled to accept the money.

Some commentators have expressed concern about the possibility that certain families might waste the money on things that aren’t related to education. But it would be hard to waste more money than the public school system itself. The reality is that families are generally more likely to have the information and incentives necessary to spend money in ways that will benefit their children than bureaucrats sitting in offices hundreds of miles away. 

That said, this legislation—and related education savings accounts programs across the country—would require that the dollars be used toward approved education expenses, such as private school tuition, online learning, textbooks, curriculum, and private tutoring.

When I interviewed the senator on Thursday, he said that he would like to add his proposal as an amendment to the next federal coronavirus bill, but that these types of amendments do not happen often. Either way, his team would keep the SCHOOL Act as a free-standing bill as well.

Funding institutions rather than students leaves families powerless. This bill offers an opportunity to remedy that.

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Indictment in San Jose Concealed Carry License Sales Scheme

One disadvantage of a may-issue concealed carry license system, in which a government official gets to choose who gets a license, is the risk of corruption. The San Jose Mercury News (Robert Salonga) reported Thursday on an indictment alleging such corruption:

A grand jury has indicted a Santa Clara County Sheriff’s captain and three political supporters of Sheriff Laurie Smith for allegedly brokering a pay-for-play scheme in which campaign donations were exchanged for concealed-carry weapons permits. The sheriff herself avoided indictment, but prosecutors said Friday that their corruption probe is far from over.

Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen announced felony charges including conspiracy and bribery against Capt. James Jensen; Christopher Schumb, an officer for a sheriff reelection committee and a prominent South Bay litigator; attorney Harpaul Nahal; and Milpitas gun-parts maker Michael Nichols. All four are accused of plotting to illegally secure concealed-gun permits for employees of Seattle-based executive security contractor AS Solution.

The indictment marks the first criminal case to come out of a decade’s worth of complaints regarding political favoritism in Smith’s issuing of the hard-to-get concealed-carry permits. Rosen said Friday that an 18-month investigation uncovered a two-tiered policy for the concealed gun permits: a process for regular citizens whose applications were destined for a filing cabinet, and another for VIPs whose applications were fast-tracked for approval….

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Libertarianism and Communicable Disease

In a recent post, I mentioned that I tentatively support UC’s new requirement that all students, faculty, and staff get vaccinated against the flu. (I say tentatively because it’s possible that the medical benefits aren’t great enough.) My reasoning there specifically focused on the government’s propriety role there: I think it’s generally legitimate for institutions (government or otherwise) to protect their clients (including students) and employees from the risk of harm—including inadvertent harm—inflicted by other clients and employees.

But I also think that it would be morally permissible for the government to require various vaccines for everybody, and not just for its employees or students. Again, it might be that the costs of some particular vaccine mandate would exceed the benefits; and we should count cost to liberty in some measure in this analysis. But I don’t think that vaccinations are categorically precluded on libertarian grounds, or in particular the Millian “free to do what I please so long as I don’t harm others” principle. Let me quickly lay out my thinking.

It is a sad fact of biology that we can spread communicable diseases without any conscious decision on our parts, even without knowing that we are infected. Any time we do this, we are causing physical harm to someone else, and indirectly causing physical harm to many others; and we do that without choosing to cause such harm.

An analogy might be guns. Libertarians generally frown on gun bans, and instead seek to ban misuse of guns. People who use guns properly, the theory goes, should be free to keep doing that; only those who choose to misuse them (to kill or to shoot recklessly or the like) should be punished. Likewise with alcohol and the like.

But say that you had a gun that had a 1% chance of just randomly shooting someone—or perhaps a 1% chance of leaking a deadly poison into the air around you—even when that wasn’t at all your desire; and there was a procedure that could be performed on your gun that would pretty safely eliminate or at least sharply reduce that chance. It seems to me that it would be reasonable to require you to have your gun treated with that procedure, to prevent you from inadvertently inflicting such physical harm to others. Likewise when the dangerous weapon (or the poison-leaking device) is your body.

Some libertarians respond that the right approach is to allow people to choose whether to be vaccinated, but to allow others to exclude the non-vaccinated from spaces that those others control. That might cut in favor of private universities or even public ones mandating vaccination, but might still forbid the government from imposing such mandates. And perhaps such an approach might work in a libertarian society where all property was private, and policed effectively for who is coming on the property and who isn’t.

But in our society, for better or worse, people routinely go onto shared government-controlled property, and are generally allowed to go on much private property (such as businesses open to the public) without any effective screening of such visitors. We need a second-best libertarian analysis that works for this society, and I think it makes sense to allow compulsory vaccinations, by counting exposure (even inadvertent) to communicable disease as an unconsented-to harm that people can be prevented from inflicting on others.

More concretely, let’s consider a topic that was in the news some years ago (when I first blogged a version of this post): immunizations against sexually transmitted diseases, such as HPV. I’ll start with that, and turn to flu immunizations at the end of the post.

Say Alan has sex with Betty, who then has sex with Carl, who then has sex with Denise; say Alan is infected with HPV, and each sexual act would (absent immunization) spread HPV; and say Betty isn’t immunized against HPV. Betty’s failure to get immunized would lead to her unwittingly spreading the virus, which ends up hurting Denise. Betty hasn’t intentionally harmed Denise, but she has harmed her—you might categorize the harm as negligent (in that it flows from negligent failure to get immunized) or not, but it is indeed the infliction of harm.

Now it’s true that the harm also flowed from Denise’s voluntary decision to have sex with Carl. But it’s hard to see why this should excuse the harm caused by Betty, any more than Denise’s voluntary decision to get on the road excuses the harm that someone imposes on Denise by crashing into her with a car (or, if you prefer, that Betty imposes on Denise by crashing into Carl’s car, which then crashes into Denise’s).

Even if you think that some people’s having many sexual partners should affect the analysis, remember that HPV can be spread even among people who are about as sexually constrained as can be expected. The Alan-Betty-Carl-Denise connection can happen even if Betty was a virgin when she married Alan; if she then didn’t have sex with Carl until she married him (assume Alan had died, or had left Betty); and if Denise was a virgin when she married Carl (again, assume Betty had died, or had left Carl).

This specific scenario might be rare—but lots of other scenarios in which people had led fairly safe lives, but find themselves getting HPV, are also quite plausible. And more broadly, even if people are leading somewhat riskier lives than this, participating in infecting them with a disease may still be quite rightly seen as harming them, despite their own role in choosing risky behavior.

Of course, if HPV immunization were 100% reliable, and 100% available, then this analysis wouldn’t apply with quite the same strength: Presumably any person who remains at risk of HPV infection would be at risk because of her own refusal to get the vaccine. Yet some people don’t get the vaccine, possibly because they can’t afford it; some can’t get it because they’re in the small but significant group of people for whom the vaccine would be unsafe; for some classes of people, the vaccine hasn’t been tested (for instance, for people in their age group); and for at least some vaccines, the vaccine may be far from 100% effective for any individual recipient.

So I think that a libertarian may reasonably conclude, I think, that refusing to get immunized is wrongful behavior. Such refusal may lead to one’s becoming a vehicle for transmitting a dangerous and sometimes deadly disease to third parties, and thus harming those third parties (in a way that an “assumption of risk” argument would not excuse). And while a vaccine will step in before the harm is inflicted, rather than as punishment for inflicting harm, it doesn’t make sense to take a punishment model: Again, the harm of spreading communicable disease generally isn’t inflicted through deliberate choice to do something unusually dangerous (other than the deliberate choice not to get vaccinated).

And that’s for sexually transmitted diseases. When a disease can be spread through casual contact—sneezing, coughing, perhaps even breathing—the disease is even harder for people to reliably avoid spreading, or to reliably avoid acquiring. The case for forbidding people from inflicting this disease on others, by requiring them to take reasonably safe and effective steps to keep their bodies from being deadly, is thus even stronger.

So a brief summary: There may well be practical problems with truly mandatory immunization, and it may well be that herd immunity would mean that 90% immunization is good enough to reduce the risk to a level that doesn’t merit regulation. There may of course also be practical objections to immunization if the immunization seems unduly risky.

But as a moral matter of individual liberty, it seems to me that there’s little support for a claimed freedom from getting immunized—and especially a claimed freedom from getting your underage children immunized. A requirement that people not allow their bodies to be media for unwitting transmission of deadly diseases strikes me as quite compatible with a generally libertarian perspective on the world.

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Economic prosperity is no longer the priority. Guess what happens next…

Recently I held a live Q&A Zoom call with my friend Peter Schiff, and several dozen members of our Total Access group.

And towards the end of the call, one of our members asked– what do you think the future looks like for the US, and the West in general?

Peter went off into one of his classic tirades about how the US dollar is doomed because of how much money the central bank is printing.

And while I generally share Peter’s dim view about the dollar (were it not for all the other world currencies that are being printed into oblivion), my answer was a bit different.

In deference to the 20th century Danish Proverb– “predictions are hard, especially about the future”– I do think it’s possible to look at major trends to at least have a sense of direction.

So if you want to understand where things are going, just take a look at everyone’s priorities.

Most governments’ Covid reponses are an obvious example.

The economic destruction they’ve created is staggering. Tens of millions of people unemployed, countless businesses gone bust, trillions of dollars of wealth wiped out.

In the first wave back in March, they shut down the economy to protect us from the virus. Then they opened up again… but– shocker– the virus was still there.

What a surprise! Shutting down the economy did not eradicate a virus.

So what did a lot of these people do when the second wave hit? They started shutting down the economy again.

It didn’t work the first time, so let’s keep trying the same approach and expect a different result. It’s genius!

This is clearly economically destructive. But again, economic prosperity is no longer the priority. All that matters is force-feeding people a false sense of safety.

Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York probably captured this mentality the best when he said back in May,

“We don’t want to lose any lives [to reopen the economy]. We’ll figure out the dollars, and we’ll figure out the economic impact, but we’ll protect people in the meantime, and we’ll protect their health.”

This is total BS. The sad reality is that lives are lost all the time in the normal course of economic activity.

In New York City, two workers died during the construction of Freedom Tower. Plus there were dozens of life-altering injuries, like spinal fractures and paralysis.

The government knew the tower’s construction would likely cost human lives. But they approved the construction permit regardless, because they knew the benefit would outweigh the human cost.

Similarly, over 100 people died constructing the Hoover Dam in the early 1930s. The government knew that people would die. But the benefit outweighed the cost.

Today there can be no discussion of cost or benefit. There is one priority, and it’s no longer economic prosperity.

But the shift in priorities doesn’t stop there.

Basic fiscal responsibility is no longer a priority– and it hasn’t been for a long time.

Most western governments were racking up enormous debts even before Covid started.

In the US, even during the economic boom of 2015-2018, the federal government added at least $1 trillion to the debt each year.

Now the debt growth is completely insane: the US Treasury Department expects to add $5-$6 trillion to the debt this calendar year.

(That’s more than the entire national debt as recently as 2001!)

And not to be outdone, the Federal Reserve has conjured trillions of dollars out of thin air since the start of Covid and slashed interest rates, once again, to zero.

Plus, there’s a good possibility they’ll make interest rates negative. Just imagine how much prosperity you’ll achieve once you have to start paying your bank just to save money.

Of course, all of these tactics– printing money, going deeper into debt, negative interest rates, paying people $600/week to stay home and NOT work– are destructive to economic prosperity.

Then we have the rise of the Bolsheviks… a growing chorus of politicians (and voters) who despise capitalism.

Like Seattle city councilwoman Kshama Sawant, who claimed she wants to overthrow “the racist, sexist, violent, utterly bankrupt system of capitalism” and replace it with “a socialist world.”

A few years ago this was a fringe view. Now it’s mainstream fever.

They want to get rid of capitalism– the system that created the most prosperous nation in the history of the world– and replace it with the same economic model as Cuba and the Soviet Union.

And Joe Biden, of course, unveiled his economic plan last month, built around ending “the era of shareholder capitalism.”

He wants the government (and Twitter mob) to set the priorities and stakeholders in your business, rather than the market.

This, again, is an obvious reflection of priorities. And economic prosperity is clearly not on the list.

Economic prosperity also takes a backseat to social justice.

Yes, most reasonable people probably agree that the mistreatment of minority groups should change. But that’s not an excuse to go on a violent rampage.

Yet whenever angry mobs take to the streets and destroy private property, the media elite and their political allies justify criminality as necessary to end systemic racism.

Meanwhile, universities have turned into hotbeds of progressive radicalism to perpetuate white fragility and the evils of capitalism.

Corporate America has also caved. You can’t even sell beans anymore without things turning political.

Countless people who are talented, productive, and made valuable contributions to their companies have been fired because they used the wrong words or expressed some intellectual dissent from the Twitter mob.

Firing a rock-star employee because of his/her personal (and non-controversial) views would ordinarily be considered completely stupid. But now it’s the norm… because economic prosperity is no longer the priority.

This trend is obvious: several powerful movements have gripped the world… and most of them are economically destructive.

So it’s not terribly difficult to see where things are headed.

Source

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Fund Students Instead of Systems

distance learning

Families need education options now more than ever. Education Week just reported that 85 percent of the largest 20 school districts in the U.S. aren’t beginning the school year with any in-person instruction. According to the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, most of the nation’s 120 largest school districts intend to begin the school year without any in-person instruction.

So it’s welcome news that Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) is introducing a bill to redirect federal K–12 education dollars to fund families directly. This would be a great step toward putting the needs of kids and parents before the needs of the public school monopoly.

Remote learning was a disaster for too many families this spring. A recent analysis found that only 1 in 3 school districts even required teachers to deliver instruction. And even if remote learning performs well in certain areas, the reality remains that families have structured their lives around the fact that in-person schooling lets parents go to work and earn a living.

A coalition of at least 10 teachers unions partnered with the Democratic Socialists of America and other groups to put together a “National Day of Resistance” last week to “Demand Safe Schools.” Some unions protested reopening schools with fake tombstones, obituaries, coffins, and body bags. Their demands also included several items not obviously related to COVID-19, including a ban on new charter schools, a ban on new private school choice programs, a ban on standardized testing, police-free schools, and a “massive infusion of federal money.” 

These protests come in stark contrast to responses from private schools and other sectors of the economy. While private businesses are fighting to reopen, many public school systems are fighting to remain closed. The incentives are different because one of these sectors gets your money regardless of whether they reopen.

If a Walmart stays closed, you can take your money elsewhere. If a public school doesn’t reopen, you should similarly be able to take your children’s education dollars elsewhere. In fact, even if your school does reopen, you should still be able to take your children’s education dollars elsewhere, because the money is for educating the child, not protecting a government monopoly.

That’s where the Support Children Having Open Opportunities for Learning (SCHOOL) Act comes in.

The SCHOOL Act, which Sen. Paul introduced on Wednesday, would allow a large portion of existing federal education dollars to follow students to wherever they received an education—be it in a public school, a private school, or a homeschooling option. This is how several other tax-funded initiates work, from Pell Grants to pre-K programs to food stamps. Although federal revenues account for only about eight percent of total K–12 education funding, the SCHOOL Act would provide substantially more dollars directly to families each year than the School Choice Now Act that was just introduced by Sens. Tim Scott (R–S.C.) and Lamar Alexander (R–Tenn.) two weeks ago.

The Act also includes a provision that prohibits additional federal or state control over non-public providers of education. And no family would be compelled to accept the money.

Some commentators have expressed concern about the possibility that certain families might waste the money on things that aren’t related to education. But it would be hard to waste more money than the public school system itself. The reality is that families are generally more likely to have the information and incentives necessary to spend money in ways that will benefit their children than bureaucrats sitting in offices hundreds of miles away. 

That said, this legislation—and related education savings accounts programs across the country—would require that the dollars be used toward approved education expenses, such as private school tuition, online learning, textbooks, curriculum, and private tutoring.

When I interviewed the senator on Thursday, he said that he would like to add his proposal as an amendment to the next federal coronavirus bill, but that these types of amendments do not happen often. Either way, his team would keep the SCHOOL Act as a free-standing bill as well.

Funding institutions rather than students leaves families powerless. This bill offers an opportunity to remedy that.

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Indictment in San Jose Concealed Carry License Sales Scheme

One disadvantage of a may-issue concealed carry license system, in which a government official gets to choose who gets a license, is the risk of corruption. The San Jose Mercury News (Robert Salonga) reported Thursday on an indictment alleging such corruption:

A grand jury has indicted a Santa Clara County Sheriff’s captain and three political supporters of Sheriff Laurie Smith for allegedly brokering a pay-for-play scheme in which campaign donations were exchanged for concealed-carry weapons permits. The sheriff herself avoided indictment, but prosecutors said Friday that their corruption probe is far from over.

Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen announced felony charges including conspiracy and bribery against Capt. James Jensen; Christopher Schumb, an officer for a sheriff reelection committee and a prominent South Bay litigator; attorney Harpaul Nahal; and Milpitas gun-parts maker Michael Nichols. All four are accused of plotting to illegally secure concealed-gun permits for employees of Seattle-based executive security contractor AS Solution.

The indictment marks the first criminal case to come out of a decade’s worth of complaints regarding political favoritism in Smith’s issuing of the hard-to-get concealed-carry permits. Rosen said Friday that an 18-month investigation uncovered a two-tiered policy for the concealed gun permits: a process for regular citizens whose applications were destined for a filing cabinet, and another for VIPs whose applications were fast-tracked for approval….

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Libertarianism and Communicable Disease

In a recent post, I mentioned that I tentatively support UC’s new requirement that all students, faculty, and staff get vaccinated against the flu. (I say tentatively because it’s possible that the medical benefits aren’t great enough.) My reasoning there specifically focused on the government’s propriety role there: I think it’s generally legitimate for institutions (government or otherwise) to protect their clients (including students) and employees from the risk of harm—including inadvertent harm—inflicted by other clients and employees.

But I also think that it would be morally permissible for the government to require various vaccines for everybody, and not just for its employees or students. Again, it might be that the costs of some particular vaccine mandate would exceed the benefits; and we should count cost to liberty in some measure in this analysis. But I don’t think that vaccinations are categorically precluded on libertarian grounds, or in particular the Millian “free to do what I please so long as I don’t harm others” principle. Let me quickly lay out my thinking.

It is a sad fact of biology that we can spread communicable diseases without any conscious decision on our parts, even without knowing that we are infected. Any time we do this, we are causing physical harm to someone else, and indirectly causing physical harm to many others; and we do that without choosing to cause such harm.

An analogy might be guns. Libertarians generally frown on gun bans, and instead seek to ban misuse of guns. People who use guns properly, the theory goes, should be free to keep doing that; only those who choose to misuse them (to kill or to shoot recklessly or the like) should be punished. Likewise with alcohol and the like.

But say that you had a gun that had a 1% chance of just randomly shooting someone—or perhaps a 1% chance of leaking a deadly poison into the air around you—even when that wasn’t at all your desire; and there was a procedure that could be performed on your gun that would pretty safely eliminate or at least sharply reduce that chance. It seems to me that it would be reasonable to require you to have your gun treated with that procedure, to prevent you from inadvertently inflicting such physical harm to others. Likewise when the dangerous weapon (or the poison-leaking device) is your body.

Some libertarians respond that the right approach is to allow people to choose whether to be vaccinated, but to allow others to exclude the non-vaccinated from spaces that those others control. That might cut in favor of private universities or even public ones mandating vaccination, but might still forbid the government from imposing such mandates. And perhaps such an approach might work in a libertarian society where all property was private, and policed effectively for who is coming on the property and who isn’t.

But in our society, for better or worse, people routinely go onto shared government-controlled property, and are generally allowed to go on much private property (such as businesses open to the public) without any effective screening of such visitors. We need a second-best libertarian analysis that works for this society, and I think it makes sense to allow compulsory vaccinations, by counting exposure (even inadvertent) to communicable disease as an unconsented-to harm that people can be prevented from inflicting on others.

More concretely, let’s consider a topic that was in the news some years ago (when I first blogged a version of this post): immunizations against sexually transmitted diseases, such as HPV. I’ll start with that, and turn to flu immunizations at the end of the post.

Say Alan has sex with Betty, who then has sex with Carl, who then has sex with Denise; say Alan is infected with HPV, and each sexual act would (absent immunization) spread HPV; and say Betty isn’t immunized against HPV. Betty’s failure to get immunized would lead to her unwittingly spreading the virus, which ends up hurting Denise. Betty hasn’t intentionally harmed Denise, but she has harmed her—you might categorize the harm as negligent (in that it flows from negligent failure to get immunized) or not, but it is indeed the infliction of harm.

Now it’s true that the harm also flowed from Denise’s voluntary decision to have sex with Carl. But it’s hard to see why this should excuse the harm caused by Betty, any more than Denise’s voluntary decision to get on the road excuses the harm that someone imposes on Denise by crashing into her with a car (or, if you prefer, that Betty imposes on Denise by crashing into Carl’s car, which then crashes into Denise’s).

Even if you think that some people’s having many sexual partners should affect the analysis, remember that HPV can be spread even among people who are about as sexually constrained as can be expected. The Alan-Betty-Carl-Denise connection can happen even if Betty was a virgin when she married Alan; if she then didn’t have sex with Carl until she married him (assume Alan had died, or had left Betty); and if Denise was a virgin when she married Carl (again, assume Betty had died, or had left Carl).

This specific scenario might be rare—but lots of other scenarios in which people had led fairly safe lives, but find themselves getting HPV, are also quite plausible. And more broadly, even if people are leading somewhat riskier lives than this, participating in infecting them with a disease may still be quite rightly seen as harming them, despite their own role in choosing risky behavior.

Of course, if HPV immunization were 100% reliable, and 100% available, then this analysis wouldn’t apply with quite the same strength: Presumably any person who remains at risk of HPV infection would be at risk because of her own refusal to get the vaccine. Yet some people don’t get the vaccine, possibly because they can’t afford it; some can’t get it because they’re in the small but significant group of people for whom the vaccine would be unsafe; for some classes of people, the vaccine hasn’t been tested (for instance, for people in their age group); and for at least some vaccines, the vaccine may be far from 100% effective for any individual recipient.

So I think that a libertarian may reasonably conclude, I think, that refusing to get immunized is wrongful behavior. Such refusal may lead to one’s becoming a vehicle for transmitting a dangerous and sometimes deadly disease to third parties, and thus harming those third parties (in a way that an “assumption of risk” argument would not excuse). And while a vaccine will step in before the harm is inflicted, rather than as punishment for inflicting harm, it doesn’t make sense to take a punishment model: Again, the harm of spreading communicable disease generally isn’t inflicted through deliberate choice to do something unusually dangerous (other than the deliberate choice not to get vaccinated).

And that’s for sexually transmitted diseases. When a disease can be spread through casual contact—sneezing, coughing, perhaps even breathing—the disease is even harder for people to reliably avoid spreading, or to reliably avoid acquiring. The case for forbidding people from inflicting this disease on others, by requiring them to take reasonably safe and effective steps to keep their bodies from being deadly, is thus even stronger.

So a brief summary: There may well be practical problems with truly mandatory immunization, and it may well be that herd immunity would mean that 90% immunization is good enough to reduce the risk to a level that doesn’t merit regulation. There may of course also be practical objections to immunization if the immunization seems unduly risky.

But as a moral matter of individual liberty, it seems to me that there’s little support for a claimed freedom from getting immunized—and especially a claimed freedom from getting your underage children immunized. A requirement that people not allow their bodies to be media for unwitting transmission of deadly diseases strikes me as quite compatible with a generally libertarian perspective on the world.

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Global iPhone Shipments Could Plunge 30% If WeChat Removed From App Store 

Global iPhone Shipments Could Plunge 30% If WeChat Removed From App Store 

Tyler Durden

Mon, 08/10/2020 – 10:02

President Trump’s executive order banning Chinese messenger app WeChat next month could have a severe impact on Apple worldwide sales. 

TF International Securities’ Ming-Chi Kuo published a research note (viewed by MacRumors) describing his optimistic and pessimistic scenarios of Apple worldwide sales concerning the potential ban of WeChat from the App Store. 

Kuo’s optimistic scenario outlines if WeChat is removed from the US App Store it would impact annual iPhone sales by around 3–6% with other Apple products down 3%. 

Kuo’s pessimistic scenario would be devastating for Apple, estimates annual global iPhone shipments could plunge 25–30% if the messenger app is completely removed. 

“Because WeChat has become a daily necessity in China, integrating functions such as messaging, payment, e-commerce, social networking, news reading, and productivity, if this is the case, we believe that Apple’s hardware product shipments in the Chinese market will decline significantly. We estimate that the annual ‌iPhone‌ shipments will be revised down by 25–30%, and the annual shipments of other Apple hardware devices, including AirPods, iPad, Apple Watch, and Mac, will be revised down by 15–25%,” Kuo said in the note. 

Apple has a significant Chinese customer base. Many of the users utilize the multi-purpose messaging, social media, and mobile payment app on a daily basis. 

In total, China accounts for 15% of Apple’s total revenue during 2Q20. Kuo describes several emerging risks throughout Apple’s supply chain if a WeChat ban is seen: 

“Kuo recommends that investors reduce their stock holdings of companies in Apple’s supply chain such as LG Innotek and Genius Electronic Optical due to the risks of a WeChat ban. It does, however, remain to be seen what will happen as the prohibitions laid out in the executive order do not take effect until September 20. As a result, there is still time for the order to be clarified, modified, or rescinded,” MacRumors said. 

Apple shares are still melting up after reporting record revenue…

Though this morning’s opening bid is fading fast…

If the Trump administration goes ahead with the ban on September 20, a lot of Chinese iPhones will no longer be able to access WeChat could trigger a move to Huawei smartphones and lead to a massive decline in global iPhone sales for Apple. 

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2PF18cD Tyler Durden

Gold, Silver, Small Caps, & Bonds Are All Soaring As Nasdaq Tumbles

Gold, Silver, Small Caps, & Bonds Are All Soaring As Nasdaq Tumbles

Tyler Durden

Mon, 08/10/2020 – 09:54

Buy all the things!!

As the dollar erases overnight gains…

Small Caps and The Dow were suddenly panic-bid at the open as Nasdaq dips)…

Bonds are bid…

Gold futures spiked above $2050…

And Silver futures are surging…

One of these things is not like the other.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2XJHReo Tyler Durden

Rabo: Once Again The Global Architecture Is At Risk Of Collapse… Which Is Why Markets Will Keep Rising

Rabo: Once Again The Global Architecture Is At Risk Of Collapse… Which Is Why Markets Will Keep Rising

Tyler Durden

Mon, 08/10/2020 – 09:45

By Michael Every of Rabobank

Action, sanctions, action,…sanctions

The US Congressional stand-off between Democrats and Republicans over a new stimulus bill was temporarily resolved in controversial fashion by President Trump on Saturday via a series of executive orders which: extend unemployment benefits for two months at a level of USD300 per week, down from USD600, with an additional USD100 top up possible from states by tapping FEMA funding; extend the moratorium on rental evictions, although critics say the wording is too vague to help; extend zero rates and deferments on student loans; and defer payments of payroll taxes backdated to 1 July, with the explicit promise from Trump that if he is re-elected he will make this permanent.

Obviously this is less stimulus than was previously available, which was probably already not enough to stop the economy from slowing –regardless of the good US employment news on Thursday and Friday– and kicks the can at best. However, it is mathematically better than nothing. Markets get to see action – and, crucially, so do voters…and it’s the president taking it. (Yes, this is an election year, and all actions need to be viewed through that lens.) Of course, it is also highly controversial and, Democrats claim, of dubious constitutionality which may be challenged in court. Objectively, however, the measures don’t seem to be any more of a stretch than ones previously taken by the Democrats when in office. It does seem that the door is opening for the White House to dip into the huge Treasury balance it has on hand to keep kicking that can until 3 November.

Meanwhile, if Trump vs. Biden is the lens for most market actions, the other is still the US vs. China. Friday saw the US impose sanctions on Hong Kong CEO Carrie Lam as well as senior members of the Hong Kong government. Markets didn’t like this, presuming as usual that no such boats would be rocked. Indeed, the Hong Kong Autonomy Act (HKAA) allowed Trump far longer to make this decision, and there had been whispers, always wrong in my view, that only small-fry would be targeted rather than the head of government. For the bulls, the new “She’ll be right” mantra is that no *banks* were named and, as China has officially stated, this US action is both an egregious insult and ultimately meaningless.

Yet as the Financial Times’ Simon Rabinovitch tweeted over the weekend, quoting an unnamed executive from the Chinese unit of a major European bank:

“…the impact will begin to be felt on Monday morning. He variously described all officials on the list as “toxic” and as “pariahs” for all foreign banks, not just US banks, who deal with them…his view is that major Chinese banks, afraid of trouble with the US, would themselves comply with the sanctions.”

Indeed, as has been underlined before, the HKAA starts with individuals and then automatically moves to banks, and to the USD. So she won’t be right on this glide path.

Then today anti-Beijing Hong Kong press billionaire Jimmy Lai and his sons were arrested for “collusion with a foreign country, uttering seditious words, and conspiracy to defraud,” according to press reports of the words of an arresting officer. The HQ of Lai’s media empire, the newspaper HK Apple Daily, was also raided by dozens of police, all journalists made to show their IDs, and crates of evidence taken away.

Obviously, this does not help sell Hong Kong as an international media center any more than US sanctions on its government help to sell it as an international banking centre.

Moreover, what are the odds the US escalates sanctions in response to China’s reply to Friday’s action? Be assured if there is one thing feuding Democrats and Republicans have in common it will be anger at what China has just done.

So risk on for Trump’s actions, or risk off for China’s? What is actually happening seems to bear very little relation to what markets do nowadays.

One thing we can say, however, is that with July Chinese CPI at 2.7% y/y, only higher than consensus due to food inflation at 13.2% y/y, with core CPI at the lowest since 2010, and key PPI at -2.4% y/y, deflation is still the name of the game, not inflation; and despite the enormous USD62bn Chinese trade surplus for July, and the lack of outbound tourism, and the assumed gain in valuation in non-USD FX reserves from a weaker USD, China’s FX reserves did not move much in the month from their obligatory “none shall pass!” USD3.1x trillion level. Which means more money flowed out than in even when the USD was being talked about as a busted flush.

Meanwhile, New Zealand, which just celebrated 100 days with no local virus transmission, just saw ANZ business confidence FALL from -31.8 to -42.4 and the business outlook from -8.9 to -17. You can beat Covid-19, but if you are doing it all alone then you are still facing a very hard slog. Wait until nobody turns up for the key summer tourist season and imagine how things will look. Let’s see what the RBNZ has to say when they meet later this week.

And in the northern hemisphere, if it’s Monday it must be another bout of selling in TRY, which was below 7.30 at time of writing. As noted last week, this is a situation which is not going to resolve itself: outside involvement is likely to be needed in terms of foreign exchange. Ironically, today marks the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Sevres, which dismantled the Ottoman Empire post-WW1, and which is likely to get far more attention in Turkey than it does in the West –where nobody seems to study history anymore– even as France jostles with Turkey over both Cyprus and Libya. Of course, it is also the date that saw the start of the French mandate in Syria and Lebanon, which coincides with French President Macron’s recent visit to ruined Beirut, a promise that France won’t walk away from it (which will be very expensive, if so), and a Lebanese petition signed by 61,000 people so far demanding the country once again “be placed under a French mandate for the next 10 years.”

Even if that is highly unrealistic, it underlines that once again the global architecture is at risk of collapse as we see realpolitik trump the ‘liberal world order’, huge explosions, warnings of war, political polarization, dubious constitutionality, warnings of election fraud, sanctions, tariffs, and now the arrest of press barons.

You know, the perfect environment for markets to keep rising.

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2DtNIOl Tyler Durden