Month: June 2020

On Monday, New York City officially entered Phase 2 of its reopening plan, having recorded record-low COVID-19 infection rates in the previous week.

The new phase expands which types of businesses can open their doors. Salons, barbershops, offices, and retail stores are all allowed to reopen with proper precautionary measures, as are playgrounds and places of worship.

The previous phase had been restricted to low-contact industries such as construction, with retail service limited to curbside pickup.

In addition, the city’s Open Restaurants plan will allow restaurants to expand from takeout and delivery to limited outdoor dining. Restaurants have particularly suffered from coronavirus-related loss of business: According to the Wall Street Journal, 53 percent of shuttered restaurants on Yelp have permanently gone out of business, compared to 35 percent of closed retail outlets.

The Open Restaurants program would allow restaurants to use sidewalks and curbs, as well as existing patio space, to set up tables and chairs for outdoor dining this week; seating is supposed to expand to open streets on nights and weekends by July. Mayor Bill de Blasio believes the plan could save up to 5,000 businesses and 45,000 jobs.

Phase 2 also allows many more New Yorkers to return to the workspace after three months of remote work or joblessness. De Blasio estimates that 300,000 people could get back to work following this loosening of restrictions.

The reopenings will also benefit New York’s public transit system, which has suffered heavy financial losses due to underuse. The MTA expects Phase 2 to increase daily subway ridership to 1 million New Yorkers—a far cry from last year’s average of 5.5 million, but a change from just 366,000 at the peak of New York’s outbreak.

New York’s Phase 2 guidelines are still as arbitrary as one could expect from a state reopening plan. While offices, salons, and retail stores have been permitted to operate at half capacity, churches are restricted to just 25 percent. Playgrounds will finally reopen (with appointed “social distancing ambassadors” at New York’s 1,700 parks), but team sports are banned.

In light of unclear city guidelines and lingering uncertainty about the pandemic’s path, businesses continue to set their own safety criteria beyond the government’s recommendations, permitting many employees to work from home for the foreseeable future.

Early signs suggest that a lot of those workers will stay at home even if the government says they’re welcome to commute. One real estate company reported that just 5.2 percent of its employees reported back to its reopened offices on Monday. And a survey by the Partnership for New York City found that across 60 Manhattan-based businesses, just 10 percent of the workforce will return to the office by August.

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From Judge Gary Sharpe’s opinion today in Soos v. Cuomo (N.D.N.Y.):

Pending is an application for preliminary injunctive relief filed by plaintiffs Reverend Steven Soos, Reverend Nicholas Stamos, Daniel Schonbrun, Elchanan Perr, and Mayer Mayerfeld … seek an order restraining and enjoining defendants Andrew M. Cuomo, Governor of the State of New York; Letitia James, Attorney General of the State of New York; and Bill de Blasio, Mayor of the City of New York: (1) from enforcing any gathering limits to outdoor religious gatherings; and (2) from imposing any limitation on indoor gathering … for religious gatherings in parity with the 100% occupancy allowed for favored “essential businesses,” day camps and special education classes, or, alternatively, at least 50% occupancy in keeping with what is permitted for “non-essential” businesses and every other indoor activity allowed to continue under Phases Two and Three except religious activity, which alone is still arbitrarily confined to 25% occupancy.

The judge’s statement of the facts noted the government’s response to the anti-racism protests:

Mass race-related protests have erupted across the nation, including in the State of New York, in response to the death of African-American George Floyd on May 25, 2020. Protesters, sometimes in groups of thousands, have taken to the streets of New York City as well as other major cities in the State of New York. During this time, a “social media campaign” has encouraged theaters in New York, which are to be closed until “Phase Four” of New York’s reopening plan, to open their lobbies and restrooms for protesters.

[1.] [Response to the Protests by] Governor Cuomo

During a press conference held on June 1, 2020, when asked if he would “suggest people not go out and protest,” Governor Cuomo answered: “No, I think you can protest, but do it smartly and intelligently…. There were protests all across the country. Protest. Just be smart about it. With this virus, you can do many things now as long as you’re smart about it, right? You can reopen, you can go into a store and you can do a lot of things, just be smart.”

When asked what the difference is “between protesting and a business, say, in the city who wants to reopen smartly if it’s not at the phase yet that they’re technically allowed to,” Governor Cuomo answered: “Well, that’s where we’re at, but it has to be a business where you can be smart. Be smart, meaning socially distant. You don’t conduct business in a way where you have people within six feet. You have to wear the mask. You have to do the hand sanitizer. That’s where we’re going to be.”

During a press conference held on June 4, 2020, when asked about his reopening plans, and if there was a way to “allow high school graduation ceremonies with social distancing,” Governor Cuomo remarked: “Did you hear anything that we’ve been talking about for the past 96 days? … [Y]eah I know everybody wants to go to a high school graduation, I get it. Not if they’re going to die.” When asked how he is able to justify opening a patio for outside dining, but will not allow high school graduation ceremonies with social distancing, Governor Cuomo answered: “What difference does it make? … The issue is a public health issue and you don’t want people sick and dead. It’s about death, it’s about balancing the risk versus the reward, balancing the desires and wants versus the consequences.”

During this same press briefing, Governor Cuomo also stated, “I want to thank the protestors…. I stand with the protestors on the point that we need meaningful reform.”

When explaining the modification of non-essential gatherings for houses of worship to no greater than 25% of the indoor capacity of such location, provided in Order 202.38, Governor Cuomo explained, in part: “We are going to accelerate the opening of temples, mosques, [and] churches…. 25 percent occupancy is not as easy as 100 percent occupancy but 100 percent occupancy is a mass gathering and you really can’t do social distancing.” He further advised New Yorkers to “[b]e smart. It does not mean you go to a temple or a mosque and you sit right next to a person. You have to socially distance.”

[2.] [Response to Earlier Gatherings and Then to the Protests by] Mayor de Blasio

On April 28, Mayor de Blasio appeared in Williamsburg at a Jewish funeral gathering, which was dispersed by the New York Police Department (NYPD). Via Twitter, Mayor de Blasio wrote: “Something absolutely unacceptable happened in Williamsburg tonite [sic]: a large funeral gathering in the middle of this pandemic. When I heard, I went there myself to ensure the crowd was dispersed. And what I saw WILL NOT be tolerated so long as we are fighting the Coronavirus.” This was followed by another tweet: “My message to the Jewish community, and all communities, is this simple: the time for warnings has passed. I have instructed the NYPD to proceed immediately to summons or even arrest those who gather in large groups. This is about stopping this disease and saving lives. Period.”

During a June 2, 2020 media conference, when asked: “What about the retail store owner facing imminent financial ruin or the religious person who cannot [attend a] house of worship? What about their pain and anger?” Mayor de Blasio replied, in part: “When you see a nation, an entire nation simultaneously grappling with an extraordinary crisis seeded in 400 years of American racism[,] I’m sorry[,] [t]hat is not the same question[] as the understandably aggrieved store owner, or the devout religious person who wants to go back to services.”

On June 4, 2020, Mayor de Blasio, without a mask, attended and addressed a political gathering, held in memory of George Floyd. Neither the ten-person limit on outdoor gatherings, nor the social distancing protocols, were adhered to….

The court then turned to the legal analysis:

Having carefully reviewed the relevant issues, and with a firm understanding that the executive branch response to the pandemic has presented issues with a degree of complexity that is unrivaled in recent history, it is plain to this court that the broad limits of that executive latitude have been exceeded. That is not to say that Governor Cuomo or Mayor de Blasio have utterly failed in their reaction to COVID-19. To the contrary, the State of New York, at the moment anyway, is among the best situated states in terms of infection and mortality rates. While there is more clarity every day with respect to the best practices for slowing the spread of COVID-19, there is wide and reasonable disagreement about exactly how to implement rules and regulations to achieve those ends, and, as is particularly present in this case, even more so with respect to reopening in a way that promotes safety, economic viability, and the enjoyment of all the rights that the people of this country and the State of New York are guaranteed. As the Chief Justice recognized in Newsom, it is not the judiciary’s role to second guess the likes of Governor Cuomo or Mayor de Blasio when it comes to decisions they make in such troubling times, that is, until those decisions result in the curtailment of fundamental rights without compelling justification….

“The general applicability requirement [under the Free Exercise Clause] prohibits the government from ‘in a selective manner impos[ing] burdens only on conduct motivated by religious belief.'” “It ‘protect[s] religious observers against unequal treatment, and inequality [that] results when a legislature decides that the governmental interests it seeks to advance are worthy of being pursued only against conduct with a religious motivation.'” “While ‘[a]ll laws are selective to some extent, … categories of selection are of paramount concern when a law has the incidental effect of burdening religious practice.'” “A law is therefore not generally applicable if it is substantially underinclusive such that it regulates religious conduct while failing to regulate secular conduct that is at least as harmful to the legitimate government interests purportedly justifying it.”

“Individualized exemptions are [another] way in which a law can fail to be generally applicable.” In Smith, the Supreme Court explained that, “where the State has in place a system of individual exemptions, it may not refuse to extend that system to cases of ‘religious hardship’ without compelling reason.” Case law within this Circuit supports the notion that individualized de facto exemptions can demonstrate that a challenged law is not generally applicable, and is therefore subject to heightened scrutiny. Along these lines, when the challenged law does not carve out an exemption on its face, the history of enforcement is relevant to the existence of an exemption….

The State argues, in overly-simplistic fashion, that the challenged laws only incidentally impose a burden on religious exercise, and they are neutral and generally applicable, and therefore, only rational basis need be shown, which is self-evident: preventing the spread of COVID-19.

The State was silent with respect to the mass race protests in its written submissions until it filed a supplemental memorandum of law following the return on the motion. In that supplement, the State argues that Governor Cuomo’s “political speech” cannot support a de facto exemption vis-à-vis the mass race protests.

The City initially responded with respect to only the ten-person indoor/outdoor limitation that was applicable in New York City during Phase 1. It argues, like the State, that the challenged laws are neutral and generally applicable, but, unlike the State, the City initially acknowledged the mass race protests and contended that they are not comparable because protests occur outside and religious activity typically occurs inside. Further the City asserts, relying on Calvary Chapel Dayton Valley v. Sisolak (D. Nev. June 11, 2020), that the enforcement of the challenged laws against protesters creates safety concerns and, absent clear patterns of unconstitutional selective enforcement, the court should not second guess the State’s determinations. In its supplemental submission, the City contends that the orthodox Jewish plaintiffs “may no longer seek redress for their alleged injuries” because, as of June 22, New York City has entered Phase 2, which lifts the ten-person indoor/outdoor limitation and imposes a 25% indoor capacity limitation. The City also amplifies its contention, explained for the first time during the motion return, that a de facto exemption has not been created for mass race protesters.

In light of the developments and natural progression of the challenged laws since the motion return, the restrictions and limitations at issue are: (1) a 25% indoor capacity limitation for Phases 2 and 3; (2) a twenty-five-person outdoor gathering limit in Phase 3 locations; and (3) a ten-person outdoor gathering limit in Phase 1 and 2 locations. And the  City’s argument that Schonbrun, Perr, and Mayerfeld “may no longer seek redress” because their region has gone into Phase 2, is rejected. While it is true that their allegations are tailored to the ten-person indoor/outdoor limitation that existed when this matter was commenced, it is readily and reasonably inferable from their allegations that the 25% indoor capacity limitation would continue to burden their free exercise of religion.

The court then held that the restrictions likely weren’t generally applicable, and thus likely violated the Free Exercise Clause:

Assuming, without deciding, that the challenged laws are neutral, plaintiffs have demonstrated a likelihood of success on the merits with respect to their free exercise claim because it appears that the challenged laws are not generally applicable, and that they would fail strict scrutiny.

[1.] 25% Indoor Capacity Limitation

On its face, the 25% indoor capacity limitation applies only to houses of worship. Indeed, that limitation is the only one of its kind in the tangle of executive orders and the Guidance Document that have been issued in response to the pandemic; in other words, no other secular entity, save for those that remain closed in their entirety until Phase 4 or beyond, are limited to only 25% capacity. The “nonessential businesses,” dubbed “Phase 2 industries” by executive order, that enjoy a 50% capacity limitation are, however, not justifiably different than houses of worship.

For example, offices, retail stores that are not inside of shopping malls, and salons were permitted to open at 50% capacity beginning in Phase 2. To a greater or lesser degree, the Phase 2 industries involve the congregation of people for a length of time. And restaurants in Phase 3 locations are permitted to open at 50% capacity indoors. Restaurant patrons sit and congregate with family and friends in close proximity for a lengthy period of time, and have close contact with their hosts and servers. Face coverings may be removed while seated. Additionally, special educational services will be permitted during “the summer term in school districts” with no indoor capacity limitations.

All of this is to demonstrate that these secular businesses/activities threaten defendants’ interest in slowing the spread of COVID-19 to a similar or greater degree than those of plaintiffs’, and demonstrate that the 25% indoor capacity limitation on houses of worship is underinclusive and triggers strict scrutiny review.

{There is also an arguable basis to find a de facto exemption in light of the open lobbies social media campaign. In light of the court’s conclusion that the 25% indoor capacity limitation is not generally applicable because it is underinclusive, it need not reach the individualized exemption argument. Admittedly, the basis of such an argument here is on far shakier footing, given the lack of acknowledgment or endorsement by defendants, than it is with respect to the mass race protests discussed below.}

[2.] Twenty-Five-Person Outdoor Limitation in Phase 3; Ten-Person Outdoor Limitation in Phases 1 and 2

Despite the State’s claim that enforcement power rests with local authorities in an effort to show that selective enforcement against mass race protesters is not a de facto exemption imposed by Governor Cuomo or Attorney General James, Governor Cuomo clearly has authority over the New York State Police and broad powers of enforcement. And, in any case, Governor Cuomo’s comments, which applauded and encouraged protesting and discouraged others from violating the outdoor limitations, likely demonstrate the creation of a de facto exemption.

Mayor de Blasio is a “local authority” with clear enforcement power and has at his disposal one of the largest municipal police departments in the world, and has also actively encouraged participation in protests and openly discouraged religious gatherings and threatened religious worshipers as set forth above. The City’s argument that temporary selective enforcement of the challenged laws with respect to mass race protests is a matter of public safety based on the rationale of Sisolak would perhaps be legitimate but for Mayor de Blasio’s simultaneous pro-protest/anti-religious gathering messages, which clearly undermine the legitimacy of the proffered reason for what seems to be a clear exemption, no matter the reason.

Governor Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio could have just as easily discouraged protests, short of condemning their message, in the name of public health and exercised discretion to suspend enforcement for public safety reasons instead of encouraging what they knew was a flagrant disregard of the outdoor limits and social distancing rules. They could have also been silent. But by acting as they did, Governor Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio sent a clear message that mass protests are deserving of preferential treatment.

Another case of individualized exemption seems even more obvious. The State has specifically authorized outdoor, in-person graduation ceremonies of no more than 150 people beginning today, June 26.  This is an express exemption from the ten- or twenty-five-person outdoor limits that apply across Phases 1, 2, and 3, and the State must extend a similar exemption to plaintiffs absent a compelling reason to the contrary. And there is nothing materially different about a graduation ceremony and a religious gathering such that defendants’ justifications for a difference in treatment can be found compelling.

The judge therefore restrained the defendants

• from enforcing any indoor gathering limitations against plaintiffs greater than imposed for Phase 2 industries, provided that plaintiffs follow social distancing requirements as set forth in the applicable executive orders and guidance; and
• from enforcing [presumably, also just against plaintiffs -EV] any limitation for outdoor gatherings provided that participants in such gatherings follow social distancing requirements as set forth in the applicable executive orders and guidance ….

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Throw a Billion Dollars from the Helicopter is a new documentary about the wildly successful (and incredibly stupid) 2016 ballot initiative led by Jeff Williams, the mayor of Arlington, Texas, to throw $500 million in subsidies at a new ballpark for the Texas Rangers. If you care at all about sports, you’ll want to stream this movie, at the risk of killing whatever residual pleasure you might still get from watching baseball. And if you care about tax policy, crony capitalism, and good governance, you’ll want to watch it too, even though—spoiler alert—the ragtag bunch of ex–Tea Party renegades opposed to an indefensible giveaway got bowled over like Ray Fosse trying to protect the plate against Pete Rose at the 1970 All-Star Game.

Director Michael Bertin advances two intertwined storylines. The first is tight study of local politics, showing how Arlington Mayor Jeff Williams came into office in 2015 as a small-government, tax-cutting, low-spending character straight out of central casting. Once in office, Williams almost immediately starting pimping for taxpayers to cover half the cost of a new billion-dollar stadium for the Rangers (a team once partly owned by former President George W. Bush).

Williams expertly works the levers of local boosterism, and Bertin relishes showing the mayor and other stadium supporters invoking the phrase “world-class city” over and over again. The new ballpark will feature a retractable roof! It will be not just a stadium but a family “destination” with bars, restaurants, and concert venues! All of which will be “world class” and make Arlington a “world-class city”! Smaller cities—Arlington has about 400,000 residents and is part of the Dallas-Forth Worth metro area—often have inferiority complexes, and sports leagues and national chains know how to take advantage of that when looking for sweetheart subsidy deals.

“Someone in Cleveland once said that, without the sports teams, Cleveland is just Omaha,” Bertin told me yesterday in an interview. In 2009, Arlington lured the Dallas Cowboys from Irving, largely by giving billionaire team owner Jerry Jones $325 billion in subsidies.

Opposing the stadium is group called Citizens for a Better Arlington, a handful of folks left over from the Tea Party movement. They come across as an amiable group of people who don’t want the city to issue $500 million in bonds to cover half the cost of the park, especially since the old one was opened relatively recently (in 1994) and remains popular with fans. The bonds would be paid off by continuing a half-cent sales tax put in place to cover the debt incurred on the Cowboys’ deal, plus a series of hospitality taxes on rental cars, hotel rooms, stadium parking, and tickets. It’s a classic David-and-Goliath story, with the stadium backers funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars into the campaign while opponents scrape together loose change to cover the cost of yard signs and Xeroxed factsheets.

The second storyline deals with the phoney-baloney economic analysis that gets mustered up every time a team owner and pliant politicians want to sell a stadium to wary taxpayers. The Stanford economist Roger Noll compares stadiums to pyramids in ancient Egypt, structures built to honor dead pharaohs but paid for by the sweat and toil of living, breathing people. Noll and others point out that entertainment spending is generally a fixed pie and that local residents substitute one option for another. Teams thus don’t create new spending; they take it from other businesses, most of whom are actually paying property and other taxes. Bertin drives home the fact that most stadium boosters talk about the “economic impact” of having a team, not the actual economic benefits. Invariably, when you factor in the costs of building and financing a stadium and all the extra giveaways to team owners (who keep most or all revenue from parking, concessions, and the like), stadium projects are municipal money pits.

As Bertin shows, Irving’s economy has boomed relative to Arlington’s since the Cowboys vamoosed. It might be true that Cleveland without sports teams is just Omaha, but Omaha has a median household income of nearly $54,000 while Cleveland’s is just over $27,000.

The movie’s title comes from the University of Chicago economist Allen Sanderson, a longtime critic of subsidized stadiums (and a one-time Reason contributor). Rather than spending massive amounts on a stadium deal to keep a team in town, Sanderson says you’d get a bigger payoff by taking the money, converting it $20 bills, renting an aircraft, and then throwing “a billion dollars from the helicopter” while hovering over a city.

The good news is that publicly financed stadiums and arenas seem to be on the decline. As one economist mentions toward the end of the movie, “Arlington is the old world” when it comes to things. Here’s hoping.

A first-time filmmaker, director Bertin tells me that he started the project because he loved baseball. Before the coronavirus shut down sports (including the planned opening of Arlington’s new billion-dollar stadium), he used to get MLB’s streaming package that allowed him to watch just about any game he wanted to on his computer. Working on the documentary has kind of ruined it all for him, because it’s just so awful to watch teams bilk taxpayers for so much money. Speaking as a fan of baseball, football, soccer, college basketball, and the Olympics (the biggest boondoggle of them all!), understanding the economics of most modern sports had me turning away long before COVID-19 cancelled everything.

Oh, well. At least we’ve got documentaries like Throw a Billion Dollars from the Helicopter to pass the sports-free days.

Bonus video: “5 Cities That Got F*cked by Hosting the Olympics.”

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In previous posts based on my new book Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom, I explained what the book is about and why I wrote it, described the advantages of foot voting over ballot box voting, took a closer look at the three major types of foot voting, and summarized the book’s answers to a number of common justifications for restricting migration rights. In this post—the last in the series—I provide an overview of the final two chapters of the book, which explain how both domestic constitutions and international law can be structured in ways that facilitate foot voting, while minimizing potential downsides.

There are many ways in which domestic constitutional law can promote foot voting. Some are relatively obvious. For example, it can ban restrictions on migration from one state or locality to another. At least until the current Coronavirus crisis, modern Americans have taken interstate mobility for granted; and even now states have enacted only relatively modest restrictions on it, such as 14-day quarantines for people arriving from high-risk locations. Historically, however, state governments imposed more severe restrictions, including trying to keep out African-Americans and “paupers”—often citing the same sorts of justifications that are today used to justify restricting international migration. Internal mobility is still restricted in some other countries today, notably including China, with its hukou system.

Foot voting can also be facilitated by constitutional limitations on the scope of central government power. The more issues are devolved to regional or local governments, the greater the opportunities for people to “vote with their feet” between them. The same goes for constitutional rights that leave issues such as speech, religion, and other questions to the private sector. That facilitates foot voting between private institutions, which often offers greater choice, higher quality, and lower moving costs than is possible with public-sector foot voting.

Constitutional limits on central government subsidization of regional and local governments can help facilitate foot voting by incentivizing competition between jurisdictions seeking to attract new taxpayers. As I discuss elsewhere in the book, this is entirely compatible with a centralized system of redistribution to the poor, provided that the funds go to poor people directly rather than getting channeled through subnational governments.

At the same time, strong constitutional protection for property rights in immobile assets can prevent subnational governments from expropriating or otherwise exploiting immobile property to make up for the fact that they cannot “trap” mobile assets. This is one of several ways in which constitutional law can mitigate potential downsides of foot voting.

Constitutional design can also be used to facilitate international migration. The most obvious way is by placing tight limits on the national government’s power to exclude immigrants, as the US Constitution was understood to do during the Founding era and long after. If the central government is nonetheless given a broad power to exclude, that power should at least be subject to the same limitations as other national government powers. For example, it cannot be used to exclude migrants on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, speech, and other criteria that would be unconstitutional in the context of other government policies. Sadly, current US Supreme Court precedent instead largely exempts immigration restrictions from constitutional constraints that apply to other policies.

In federal systems, the constitution can allow subnational jurisdictions to issue visas to immigrants, who otherwise would not have been accepted by the central government. Such systems already exist in Canada and Australia, and the US should consider adopting a similar approach, as has been proposed by GOP Senator Ron Johnson and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, among others (see discussion of their proposals in Chapter 7).

While the central government’s power to ban migrants should be severely restricted, it should have the power to adopt “keyhole solutions” limiting potential negative side effects of migration. These may include restricting eligibility for the franchise and for welfare payments, temporary quarantine provisions to limit the spread of disease, and—possibly—imposing special taxes or entry fees, where necessary to offset costs. Most Western governments, in fact already have such powers. They should be kept limited so as to prevent their use as backdoor restrictions on immigration.

In Chapter 7, I also discuss a range of less obvious ways in which constitutional rights can facilitate foot voting. They include protections for freedom of religion, broad rights to marriage—including same-sex marriage, economic liberties, property rights, due process rights for people arrested and detained by the government, and others.

I certainly do not claim that the protection and expansion of foot voting should be the only factor considered in constitutional design; still less do I believe that there is one constitutional structure that is ideal for every nation. But foot voting should be an important element in evaluating constitutions, one that is too often neglected.

In Chapter 8, I consider the implications of foot voting for international law and global governance. In the first part of that chapter, I describe how foot voting can be promoted by expanding the range of people who qualify as a “refugees” whom governments are forbidden to expel. Current US and international law draw a sharp distinction between “economic” migrants and those fleeing persecution based on race, ethnicity, gender, and other similar characteristics. I argue that this distinction is untenable, in large part because it ignores the fact that many “economic” refugees are actually victims of oppressive government policies. I discuss a number of proposals for incrementally expanding refugee rights, and also consider which types of refugees should be given priority in a second-best world where we cannot (at least not yet) establish a general presumption of free migration for all.

The last part of Chapter 8 offers a warning against the dangers of world government and strong forms of “global governance.” While such ideas may seem consonant with the cosmopolitan orientation of Free to Move and especially with the critique of ethnic nationalism in Chapter 5, they are in fact inimical to foot voting. The reason is simple: a world government is a regime with no exit—one whose authority we cannot use foot voting to escape. Moreover, foot voting and political freedom would be even more seriously compromised if the world government became corrupt, oppressive, authoritarian—or—worst of all—degenerated into a totalitarian state. The same risks arise, albeit to a lesser degree, from proposals for strong forms of “global governance” that fall short of full world government.

In the book, I discuss why the risks of world government are not sufficiently mitigated if that government is democratic, has a federal structure, or both. Among other things, there is good reason to fear that a global democratic or federal state wouldn’t stay that way in the medium to long-run. The discussion of world government in Chapter 8 expands on “A Cosmopolitan Case Against World Government,”  a 2017 article I wrote for the World Government Research Network. In that article—and more fully in the book—I also discuss why world government and global governance are subjects worth thinking about and debating, even though it is unlikely that a world government will be established in the near future.

I do not claim that world government or strong global governance can never be justified. If, as advocates claim, they are the only way to forestall some enormous evil like global nuclear war or environmental catastrophe, then their benefits might outweigh the enormous risks. But there should at least be a strong presumption against creating such dangerous institutions. In the book, I explain why the problems world government advocates cite as justifications are better addressed by other means. Some of them might even be exacerbated rather than ameliorated by the establishment of a world state.

In these chapters and in other parts of the book, I emphasize how my argument is both radical and moderate at the same time. It is radical because I advocate a massive expansion in foot voting rights, both domestic and international. But it is moderate because I emphasize that there is much to be gained from more moderate incremental reforms. Even a modest 10% increase in the number of new immigrants allowed into the US and other liberal democracies would mean vastly greater freedom and happiness for millions of people. A 10% increase in domestic freedom of movement in the United States—accomplished by reducing obstacles to mobility such as exclusionary zoning—would also benefit large numbers of people, particularly the poor and disadvantaged.

At various points in the book, I discuss a number of incremental reforms that can expand both domestic and international freedom of movement without major changes to current political institutions. But I also emphasize that the ultimate goal should be the one Frederick Douglass outlined in a great 1869 speech on immigration, decrying then-widespread opposition to Asian migration to the United States:

There are such things in the world as human rights. They rest upon no conventional foundation, but are external, universal, and indestructible. Among these, is the right of locomotion; the right of migration; the right which belongs to no particular race, but belongs alike to all and to all alike. It is the right you assert by staying here, and your fathers asserted by coming here. It is this great right that I assert for the Chinese and Japanese, and for all other varieties of men equally with yourselves, now and forever.

This is the last in the series of posts based on my new book Free to Move. Like previous posts in the series, it provides only an overview of points discussed in much greater depth in the book itself. I hope those interested in these will consider reading it. As previously promised, I will donate 50% of all royalties generated by the book to causes benefiting refugees.

NOTE: The Introduction to  Free to Move, which provides an overview of the rest, is available for free download on the SSRN website here.

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