Month: November 2022

In Israel’s recent election, the incumbent center-left coalition got only 20,000 or so fewer votes than the right-wing coalition of parties led by Bibi Netanyahu. But thanks to quirks in Israel’s electoral system, skillfully (and legally) manipulated by Netanyahu, the right won a clear parliamentary majority. This majority, however, depends on a real rogues’ gallery of religious fanatics, both nationalist and insular, racist uber-nationalists, and general nutjobs. Past Likud party leaders, including Bibi himself, would previously have either refused to deal with such people (recall that Menachem Begin put Meir Kahane in adminsitrative detention), or shunted them off to relatively inconsequential ministries.

But as Aaron David Miller and Daniel Kurtzer report:

Having brought to life the radical, racist, misogynistic and homophobic far-right parties, Netanyahu is now stuck with them. He has cut a deal with convicted inciter of hatred and violence Itamar Ben Gvir and made him minister of national security, with far-reaching authority for the West Bank, Jerusalem and mixed Arab-Jewish cities in Israel proper. Bezalel Smotrich, who has called for the expulsion of Arabs, is in line to run the finance ministry, with additional authority over the Civil Administration, which governs the West Bank. And Avi Maoz, who proudly espouses a fierce anti-LGBTQ agenda, has been made a deputy in the prime minister’s office in charge of “Jewish identity.”

Almost ninety percent of Israelis didn’t vote for these clowns, but they are the price Bibi is willing to pay to be in power.

I would love to think that the media is mis-describing these folks. But Israeli sources I respect tell me that unfortunately they are everything they are made out to be.

The most charitable spin one can put on this is that Bibi thinks that Iran is an immediate existential threat, that he is the only Israeli leader capable of dealing with it, that creating short-term tensions with everyone from diaspora Jews to the Palestinians is a price worth paying, and that he will US inevitable US, Abraham Accord, and Western pressure as a convenient excuse to back down from some of the more radical things he promised his coalition powers. Less charitably, he just wants power at any price. Either way, he is playing with fire.

This is a situation where responsible critics of Israel could play a role is ameliorating the effects of what could be a disastrous government. The problem is, the most vocal and powerful critics of Israel, such as the so-called human right NGOs, have already dismissed the country as an evil apartheid regime that should be replaced by the Palestine of their fantasies (most wouldn’t like the actual Palestine, some combination of Palestinian Authority kleptocracy and Hamas theocracy that could plausibly replace Israel). Having cried wolf over much more palatable Israeli governments and policies, no one will listen when the wolf may really be at the door.

The post Israel's Dangerous Government appeared first on Reason.com.

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[Earlier posts in this series: No. 1 / No. 2 / No. 3 ]

From George Orwell’s novel “Coming Up for Air” (published in 1939):

It really was unspeakably meaningless, that time in 1918. Here I was, sitting beside the stove in an Army hut, reading novels, and a few hundred miles away in France the guns were roaring and droves of wretched children, wetting their bags with fright, were being driven into the machine-gun barrage like you’d shoot small coke into a furnace. I was one of the lucky ones. The higher-ups had
taken their eye off me, and here I was in a snug little bolt-hole, drawing pay for a job that didn’t exist. At times I got into a panic and made sure they’d remember about me and dig me out, but it never happened. The official forms, on gritty grey paper, came in once a month, and I filled them up and sent them back, and more
forms came in, and I filled them up and sent them back, and so it went on. The whole thing had about as much sense in it as a lunatic’s dream. The effect of all this, plus the books I was reading, was to leave me with a feeling of disbelief in everything.

I wasn’t the only one. The war was full of loose ends and forgotten corners…. Nobody believed the atrocity stories and the ‘gallant little Belgium’ stuff any longer. The soldiers thought the Germans were good fellows and hated the French
like poison. Every junior officer looked on the General Staff as mental defectives. A sort of wave of disbelief was moving across England, and it even got as far as Twelve Mile Dump. It would be an exaggeration to say that the war turned people into highbrows, but it did turn them into nihilists for the time being. People who
in a normal way would have gone through life with about as much tendency to think for themselves as a suet pudding were turned into Bolshies just by the war. What should I be now if it hadn’t been for the war? I don’t know, but something different from what I am. If the war didn’t happen to kill you it was bound to start you thinking. After that unspeakable idiotic mess you couldn’t go on regarding society as something eternal and unquestionable, like a pyramid. You knew it was just a balls-up.

That guy could really write (see his wonderful essays “Why I Write” and “Politics and the English Language” for some of his views on the process of writing**). I can’t think of another writer in English who will be equally long-remembered and admired both for his fiction (“Animal Farm,” “1984”—surely the most influential fiction of the 20th Century) and for his non-fiction (“Homage to Catalonia,” “Down and Out in Paris and London,” and the remarkable “Road to Wigan Pier”). The excerpt above is as good a snapshot capturing the stupidity, and the tragedy, of WWI as anything of comparable length that I’ve ever read.

**Aspiring writers might wish to contemplate Orwell’s six rules for good prose:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

“Coming Up for Air” was Orwell’s fourth published novel, the last to be published before “Animal Farm” and “1984.” It is largely unknown and unread today, which is really a shame; told through the eyes of George Bowling, a down-and-out, middle-aged insurance salesman (‘two kids and a house in the suburbs’), it’s a beautifully crafted picture of Britain-between-the-wars—although neither the characters in the novel nor Orwell himself knew for certain that the ’20s and ’30s would soon be known as the “between the wars” decades.

And it has that great final sentence: “You knew it was just a balls-up.” I don’t think I have ever seen or heard that expression anywhere else; for all I know, Orwell may have invented it. But it could not be more perfect.

The post From My Commonplace Book, No. 4 appeared first on Reason.com.

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As Sam notes below, one notable feature of the vacatur arguments in US v. Texas was the strong resistance of former D.C. Circuit judges, arguing from their personal experience. Here’s Chief Justice Roberts:

I mean, this is a long—that’s what the D.C. Circuit and other courts of appeals have been doing all the time as a staple of their decision output.

And then an extended . . .  statement from Justice Kavanaugh:

Can I move to remedy then because I still have—I have some problems with that, as you might imagine. Set aside, you said the judges on the D.C. Circuit haven’t paid attention to text, context, and history. I guess I would respectfully push back pretty strongly on that. I sat with judges like Silberman and Garland and Tatel and Edwards and Williams. They paid a lot of attention to that.
And the government never has made this argument in all the years of the APA, at least not that I remember sitting there for 12 years. I haven’t seen it made. It’s a pretty radical rewrite, as the Chief Justice says, of what’s been standard administrative law practice. And you devote three pages in your brief to this complete change that all these judges have been doing for all these years, and the government comes up and acknowledges that in case after case after case with labor, energy, environmental. And I think it’s a big step.
And you say they’re not paying attention to the text. Yeah, we did. Set aside means set aside. That’s always been understood to mean the—the rule’s no longer in place. No one’s really had this—no case has ever said what you’re saying anywhere. No one—you know, it’s a recent law review proposal, good for that, but, you know, that’s not been the law. And so I find it pretty astonishing that you come up here and make—and I realize it’s not your—you know, the main part of your submission, but I’m just going to push back pretty strongly on the, you know, three pages for just—just toss out decades of—of this Court’s law, of circuit law. . . .

So that’s not really a question, but that is a . . . comment on what I think is a pretty extreme argument . . .

And then by the time Justice Jackson piled on (“As you might imagine, I would like to circle back to the concerns that the Chief Justice and Justice Kavanaugh raised about vacatur and the argument that you’re making in this case,”) Justice Kagan chimed in: “Seems to be a kind of D.C. Circuit cartel.” Justice Jackson agreed: “It is. It is.”

Anyway, this dynamic reminded of something I’ve read before. In Dred Scott v. Sandford, one of the many astonishing legal claims that Chief Justice Taney made was to question Congress’s Article IV authority over the territories. Justice Catron responded with a rejoinder from his personal experience serving on a judge on circuit applying territorial law:

It is due to myself to say, that it is asking much of a judge, who has for nearly twenty years been exercising jurisdiction, from the western Missouri line to the Rocky Mountains, and, on this understanding of the Constitution, inflicting the extreme penalty of death for crimes committed where the direct legislation of Congress was the only rule, to agree that he had been all the while acting in mistake, and as an usurper. 60 U.S. at 522-523.

I think of this as the “Catron principle.” Apparently there is an analogous proposition about asking former D.C. Circuit judges to agree that their past practice in administrative review was mistaken. I wonder what they think about Chevron.

The post Vacatur and the Catron Principle appeared first on Reason.com.

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I was invited to participate in a Hofstra Law Review symposium on free speech in law schools, which will be happening in February, and I thought I’d serialize my current draft article; there’s still plenty of time to improve it, so I’d love to hear people’s comments. Here are some follow-up thoughts on what I think law schools should try to teach, though you can read the whole PDF, if you prefer:

[* * *]

F. Building Coalitions

Lawyers also often need to build coalitions in order to win. The most effective amicus supporting our position, for instance, might be a group with which our client would sharply disagree on most things—but which may agree with our client’s position on, say, the freedom of speech, or the right to jury trial, or whatever issue is important in this case. If we’re arguing against a regulation, we might deliberately want to seek comments from people on all points of the political spectrum. If we’re lobbying for a statute or arguing to the voters in favor of a ballot measure, we may need to do the same.

Again, we can’t do that if our first reaction is the natural human reaction of shunning one’s adversaries for their ideological sins. Law schools need to teach students the habits and attitudes needed for effective coalition-building, and to unlearn the normal inclination towards viewing each one’s ideological adversaries as permanent enemies.

G. Unflappably Confronting Unpleasant Facts and Arguments

Lawyers also need to be prepared to deal with difficult and unpleasant facts and arguments, whether in court, when reading precedents, when reviewing documents, or when interviewing witnesses or the client. Indeed, we need to react to such matters as calmly and rationally as possible, even when they are understandably disturbing.

Sometimes, these matters can come up in legal debate: The other side makes an argument that we find offensive, and we have to be able to respond to it substantively, rather than being distracted by its offensiveness. Occasionally, the other side’s argument might not just be offensive but might violate legal ethics rules, for instance if it involves a personal attack on us; but those are just a small fraction of the arguments that may be understandably upsetting.

And sometimes such matters may arise simply because people feel they should tell lawyers everything, or just get on a roll and turn off their internal self-censors, or feel an emotional need to unburden themselves to their own lawyers. We’re interviewing a witness about what he heard, perhaps in an employment case or a criminal case or even a business partnership breakup case, and he reports on some racist or antigay slurs that someone said.
[1] Or we’re asking the witness why two people weren’t working well together, and he reports on some sexist or anti-Semitic or anti-Muslim sentiments that one had expressed about the other.

Or perhaps we’re interviewing a witness who is bad for our side, and he starts launching on some offensive tirade of his own. Say, for instance, I’m interviewing a witness who doesn’t know I’m Jewish, and he starts talking about how everything is the Jews’ fault. That’s potential litigation gold right there: The more I can draw him out, the more effectively I’ll be able to undermine his position at trial, and the stronger my position will be in negotiating a settlement. (To be crass but realistic, imagine that, if given free rein, the witness will start talking about how much he admires Hitler.) But that will happen only if I can keep my cool, and resist the natural human temptation to argue with him or admonish him,[2] or the equally human tendency to get flustered and not know what follow-up questions I should ask.

Or say we’re talking to a client about why he did or failed to do something—even in some normally bland commercial situation—and the answers come out of the blue: The client didn’t come to a meeting because he had been targeted for a racist attack. The client didn’t work well with someone because he had been sexually assaulted by that person a decade before. The client didn’t work well with someone because that client had some prejudices, even highly offensive prejudices, against that person.

The client’s revealing this might actually be a testament to the bond of trust we’ve created with the client: The client feels he can tell us everything, even things that both he and we find disturbing, or things that reflect badly on him. The last thing we should want to do is to damage that trust by lashing out at the client, or perhaps even visibly bristling. Perhaps at some point we might feel that the client’s disclosures of his own viewpoints—or even his willingness to discuss things that happened to him, which might be disturbing for us—might lead us to want to stop representing him. But there are times when we can’t ethically do that, for instance if the trial is coming right up. And in any event, any such reaction on our part should be carefully thought through. In the moment, we need to react as calmly as possible.

Now, to be sure, each professor (and each event organizer) may decide differently how and when such calmness in the face of offensive materials should be taught. Thankfully, being a lawyer isn’t quite like being a Navy SEAL, so one doesn’t have to train accordingly, with frigid-water practice and “‘drown-proofing’ exercises underwater with bound hands.”[3] But law schools do need to make sure that they don’t teach students counterproductive habits and attitudes, in which exposure to unpleasant material is seen as an occasion for complaint rather than resilience.[4] And if students say that they are “traumatized” by exposure to such material, then we should ask how we can train them to avoid such trauma—and thus avoid a serious threat to their future effectiveness as lawyers[5]—rather than to use the asserted trauma as justification not to expose them to certain matters.

[* * *]

Still to come, in future posts (or you can see it now in the PDF):

II. Specific Practices
A. Protecting Student Speech (and Speech of Invited Speakers)
B. Responding to Unpopular Views in Ways That Promote Discussion
C. Evenhandedly Encouraging Debates or Conversations Among People Who Disagree
D. Organizing Law-School-Sponsored Events That Model Thoughtful Disagreement on Controversial Topics
1. The value of law-school-organized events
2. The insufficiency of leaving such debates to the classroom
3. Focusing on real current debates
E. Inviting Leading Successful Advocates from All Points on the Ideological Spectrum
F. Encouraging Faculty to Express Dissenting Views
III. Responses to Some Possible Objections
A. Student Upset (Especially as to Views That Are Seen as Derogatory of Their Identities)
B. Vulnerability of Powerless Minority Groups
C. Risk of Persuasiveness
D. Risk of “Legitimizing” Certain Perspectives
E. Losing the Opportunity to Chill Political and Ideological Participation and Organization by the Other Side

[* * *]

[1] Cf., e.g., Randall Kennedy & Eugene Volokh, The New Taboo: Quoting Epithets in the Classroom and Beyond, 49 Cap. U. L. Rev. 1, 40–41 (2021) (citing business law cases in which the facts incidentally involved offensive material, such as racial slurs).

[2] “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” U.S. Army (@USArmy), Twitter, Sept. 2, 2012, 9:13 am, https://ift.tt/JEyFjTZ (crediting Napoleon).

[3] See Dave Phillips, Navy Orders High-Level Outside Investigation of SEAL Course, N.Y. Times, Sept. 9, 2022. The article noted that the investigation focused on “a damaging ethos of forced suffering that often dismissed serious injuries and illnesses as weakness and a growing subculture of students who saw illicit performance-enhancing drugs as the only way to get through the course”; but the investigation apparently doesn’t cast doubt on the need for demanding training for a demanding profession.

[4] See Kennedy & Volokh, supra note 5, at 33, 42–45 (discussing this with regard to material that accurately quotes slurs, as over ten thousand court cases have done).

[5] See id. at 49–50; Jesse Singal, Stop Telling Students Free Speech Is Traumatizing Them, N.Y. Mag., July 18, 2017; Jesse Singal, Conservative Law Students at Georgetown Were ‘Traumatized’ by an Anti-Scalia Email, N.Y. Mag., Feb. 22, 2016; Conor Friedersdorf, Are Today’s Law Students Tough Enough?, Atlantic, Jan. 12, 2015.

The post Free Speech Rules, Free Speech Culture, and Legal Education: Still More on Teaching for Effective Lawyering appeared first on Reason.com.

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In the wake of the Supreme Court’s West Virginia v. EPA decision in June, prominent commentators complained that Congress is too broken to solve major problems, and thus, the executive branch must take action—even if it’s unlawful. The passage of the Respect for Marriage Act is an important reminder that Congress can still play its constitutionally assigned role of legislating in response to Supreme Court decisions.

West Virginia v. EPA held that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) lacked the statutory authority to enact the Clean Power Plan, a policy aimed at reducing U.S. emissions of global warming gasses. Several opinion pieces following the decision took no apparent issue with its statutory analysis but claimed that the Supreme Court nonetheless erred because Congress is no longer capable of taking on complex problems like climate change. 

Memorably, labor lawyer Thomas Geoghegan argued for a “mild species of dictatorship” to address global warming. Richard Lazarus, a Harvard Law School professor, avoided explicitly calling for dictatorship but decried “the obvious reality that the current Congress is incapable” of enacting major legislation when it comes to environmental issues. 

The Constitution vests legislative power solely in Congress, and for good reason. The executive branch may issue rules that fill in minor gaps inevitably left in legislation, but this minor role should not be interpreted to delegate legislative power to the executive branch.

Unfortunately, all too often, Congress has ducked its fundamental responsibilities by passing bills with open-ended grants of authority that unconstitutionally delegate legislative power to the executive branch. This is rarely, if ever, because Congress can’t craft more detailed laws, but rather because it wants to avoid the difficult work and attendant political consequences of making hard decisions. In contrast, executive agencies have also been all too happy to discover unheralded powers granted to them in long-extant statutes in response to new problems. The related nondelegation and major questions doctrines exist to ensure that both legislative and executive branches stay in their constitutionally assigned lanes.

Geoghegan, Lazarus, and other critics of the nondelegation and major questions doctrines claim that judicial enforcement of these doctrines is a non-starter given what they perceive as Congress’ fecklessness. Complex social problems can only be solved, they say, by the executive branch taking bold (if legally questionable) action. 

The recent passage of the Respect for Marriage Act indicates that Congress remains capable of acting in response to Supreme Court decisions on controversial issues. The catalyst for this bill was a passage in Justice Clarence Thomas’ Dobbs v. Jackson’s Women Health Organization concurrence, suggesting that some of the Court’s other substantive due process precedents should also be re-examined—including the Obergefell opinion that upheld a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. Although Dobbs’ threat to Obergefell may well be overstated, the Respect for Marriage Act is an important indicator that Congress is able to legislate in response to Supreme Court rulings.

Same-sex marriage is politically popular, with Gallup finding that support for it rests at 71 percent in the United States. One lesson here may be that Congress will act to counter a Supreme Court ruling when such legislation is broadly popular—but not when it isn’t. The failure of Clean Power Plan-like legislation to get through Congress may not reflect an institutional failure by Congress but instead a failure of persuasion by environmental advocates.

The Respect for Marriage Act also illustrates the merits of addressing social issues by a bipartisan, multimember Congress instead of executive agencies controlled by presidential appointees of one party. Rule making by executive appointees from one party tends to reflect an all-or-nothing approach to a given issue. When the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) reinterpreted Title VII to cover discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, for example, it took a more absolutist approach than had earlier bills proposed in Congress to address the same issue. 

A bipartisan legislature is more likely to try to accommodate concerns from all perspectives. The Respect for Marriage Act, for example, primarily codifies the right to same-sex marriage, a cause more commonly associated with liberals and Democrats. But it also contains provisions intended to preserve religious liberty, a view more typically associated with conservatives and Republicans. 

Infantilizing Congress has had pernicious effects on our constitutional system of powers. Whatever one’s opinion of the merits of the Respect for Marriage Act, it should be hailed as a positive sign that Congress can reclaim its rightful place in our system of constitutionally limited and enumerated powers.

The post The Respect for Marriage Act Shows That Congress Can Still Do Its Job appeared first on Reason.com.

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11/30/1981: Harlow v. Fitzgerald argued.

The post Today in Supreme Court History: November 30, 1981 appeared first on Reason.com.

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They’d like you to forget, but at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic many Western public health experts praised the draconian measures that have now brought thousands of furious Chinese protesters into the streets in defiance of their totalitarian government. In some circles, China’s response was actually seen as a model for other, freer, countries. Now, of course, few people want to associate themselves with lockdowns that have tallied up vast costs in lives, health, prosperity, and liberty.

The reasons for the backtrack are obvious. After years of unpredictable, rolling lockdowns that have seen whole neighborhoods fenced off and residents welded into their apartments, often to suffer from hunger and medical neglect, the people of China are fed up.

“As thousands took to the streets in cities protesting against Covid restrictions, an exhausted nation has been asking how much longer must they endure Xi Jinping’s zero-COVID policy,” the BBC reported Monday. “Suffering under COVID restrictions has become a unifying experience, breeding anger in many corners of China from major cities to far-flung regions like Xinjiang and Tibet.”

Precipitating the protests was first an outbreak of anger among workers at a pandemic-restricted Foxconn facility in Zhengzhou. Hundreds of employees at the massive prison-like plant clashed with police. Then, people died in an apartment building fire in Urumqi because lockdown barriers prevented responders from getting to the building.

“The deadly incident, which claimed the lives of 10 people, was the ultimate nightmare scenario for millions of urban Chinese who live in high-rise apartments: trapped in one’s flat, unable to escape a roaring blaze because of a strictly enforced lockdown,” adds the BBC.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, a high-profile architect of America’s pandemic response who is retiring from his roles as President Biden’s top medical adviser and as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious diseases, criticized the policies that brought people into the streets.

“Their approach has been very, very severe and rather draconian in the kinds of shutdowns without a seeming purpose,” he commented on NBC’s Meet the Press. Even so, he allowed room for lockdowns, so long as they’re “for a temporary period of time for the purpose of regrouping, getting more personal protective equipment, getting people vaccinated.”

And it wasn’t that long ago—July of 2022—that Fauci told Reason‘s Robby Soave he would recommend “much, much more stringent restrictions” if he could go back in time to redo America’s COVID-19 response.

In fact, before their current public dismay at what China’s pandemic policy has wrought, public health professionals often showed signs of envy at Beijing’s ability to impose tough measures.

“In the face of a previously unknown virus, China has rolled out perhaps the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease containment effort in history,” fawned a February 2020 World Health Organization report on the country’s COVID-19 response. “China’s bold approach to contain the rapid spread of this new respiratory pathogen has changed the course of a rapidly escalating and deadly epidemic.”

“These extreme limitations on population movement have been quite successful,” insisted Michael Osterholm, an infectious-disease specialist at the University of Minnesota, in a March 2020 assessment of China’s response (he became more skeptical of the approach with the appearance of Omicron).

And while Western countries rarely went so far as China’s total lockdowns, to the significant extent that schools and businesses were closed, movement curtailed, and life disrupted, much of the inspiration for such policies came from the allegedly successful Chinese model.

“They claimed to have flattened the curve. I was skeptical at first. I thought it was a massive cover-up by the Chinese. But as the data accrued it became clear it was an effective policy,” Professor Neil Ferguson, the U.K.’s counterpart to Fauci until he violated his own rules and resigned in disgrace, told The Times of London in December 2020. “It’s a communist one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought. And then Italy did it. And we realized we could.” (unpaywalled summary here.)

Public health officials may have found they could “get away” with imposing the policies of a communist state on democratic countries, but what about their assumption that China’s approach was successful? That claim is based on mortality rates reported by the Chinese government, which has a vested interested in touting its successes, whether or not they actually exist.

“The mortality rates presented for China are plainly implausible,” George Calhoun of the Stevens Institute of Technology wrote earlier this year. “The Chinese death rates are much higher than what is published.” He points to challenges to the Chinese government’s data, including a 2021 model from The Economist that put COVID-19 deaths closer to 1.7 million than the then-official figure of 4,636.

Officials also focused on minimizing COVID-19 infection to the exclusion of other concerns including liberty, education, mental well-being, and the unintended economic consequences of restrictions.

“China’s COVID-19 lockdowns are probably costing the country at least $U.S. 46 billion … a month, or 3.1 per cent of GDP, in lost economic output, and the impact could double if more cities tighten restrictions,” the Australian Financial Review reported in March of this year, based on research from economists at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Such severe economic downturns tend to breed unrest, “including demonstrations, strikes, and other forms of potentially violent disruptions” I warned in March 2020 of the potential impact of restrictive measures imposed in the name of public health. “Unemployment, impoverishment, and despair are frightening outcomes in themselves. They’re also a recipe for social unrest that will afflict even those of us who weather both the pandemic and the accompanying economic storm.”

And here we are in November 2022, watching the people of China protest against lingering lockdown measures. They follow in the footsteps of Americans, Belgians, Canadians, Germans, Italians, New Zealanders, and others who protested earlier against pandemic polices that emulated, if in diluted form, Beijing’s model. And they follow despite the inevitable harsh response from the Chinese government.

Public health officials around the world took inspiration from China’s draconian pandemic response. The recent round of criticism of Beijing’s lockdowns suggests they are now taking their lead from anguished reactions to those policies. Given the harm to liberty, prosperity, and human well-being restrictions caused, with minimal benefit, the long-term lesson should be learned from the Chinese people and not their government.

The post China's COVID Lockdowns Once Inspired Western Officials; They Should Listen to Protesters Instead appeared first on Reason.com.

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