Post #4626 Rant of the Day: Tom Massie's Tweet on the Pandemic and the Constitution

I've subscribed to the Young Americans for Liberty Facebook group, even though I'm way overage to the target audience. In part, I'm interested in seeing the memes aimed at younger audience, and generally speaking I'm in broad agreement, like with FEE, which aims at similar audience. I recently blasted FEE over a couple of bad posts, one arguing that Carter had decided on withdrawing from the ILO in 1977 (apparently related to the Trump WHO kerfuffle). In reality, Congress during the Ford Administration, furious over the PLO's admission to the ILO, cut funding, which required a 2-year warning. Carter could have reversed the decision but didn't. The FEE article wrongly argued it was a Carter initiative.

I got into my first YAL kerfuffle over the weekend (it dealt with Trump's claim he would crackdown on states violating religious rights under the First Amendment),  but then YAL approvingly posted the following Massie tweet as if it were a self-evident truth:

Okay, I've recently talked about forced vaccination, Now I have one limited exception to this, in that a small percentage of people cannot tolerate vaccines for health reasons and hence depend on herd immunity (a sufficient immune proportion of the population) for protection. And when Trump first floated the idea of the military doing mass COVID-19 vaccinations (if and when they are available), I pointed out it would be immoral to forcibly vaccinate such vulnerable people.

But is Massie right? He talks about the ninth amendment but overlooks the tenth amendment--state responsibilities and mandates. One of these, perhaps the most legitimate, is public health/safety/security. To resurrect my argument in the above-cited post, the non-aggression principle  implies, among other things, you can't impose your contagion/disease on me. Now there are nuances to all things; in the case of COVID-19, some one-third of the infected remain asymptomatic and there is at least some anecdotal evidence that they can infect others, but clearly symptomatic individuals should be quarantined, and people in close contact with them should be monitored. For the most part, masks make sense mostly in close proximity with others, especially in enclosed areas, and since COVID is a respiratory virus, you want to be sensitive to people doing things which exert on breathing, e.g., singing or yelling, coughing or sneezing, etc. You want to be wary of commonly used surfaces on which the virus can be transferred and live for hours or days. At the same time, by most estimates over 95% of the population is uninfected, and Draconian lockdown policies are, at best, dubiously effective.

Let me quote Singer who was writing with respect to the ebola outbreak, but his comments are directly relevant:

Public health policy should not be exempt from the “non‐​aggression principle.” Force must be prohibited from interpersonal relationships, except when used in self‐​defense or retaliation.

In the case of a highly contagious lethal disease, I believe that screening potential carriers, and containing them via quarantine, represents an act of self‐​defense. 

One of the few legitimate functions of the government is to protect people from physical assault. The transmission of a disease with significant lethal potential fits that description. 

Therefore, it is appropriate to screen people reasonably considered potential carriers. It is completely proper to confine people found to be a threat to the lives of others until that threat no longer exists.

Of course, quarantines, vaccines, masks, and tracking all compromise aspects of human freedom. And the rationing of COVID-19 tests to date has impacted isolating and containing the disease, and one of my longest, most persistent criticisms of the Trump Administration has been the early government monopoly over testing and failure to engage the private sector.

One of the key aspects to voluntary association is mutual recognition of rights in a healthy community. Preventive measures like vaccination and covering yourself when you are ill are reasonable restraints on individual liberty; if you do not share the costs of herd immunity, you are  a freeloader which in sufficient numbers undermines herd immunity, and the community has the right and responsibility to quarantine and restrain you, particularly during an outbreak, and track you and your close social associates.

All depends on context. For example, if you rarely interact with others, it's unlikely you'll catch or spread an infectious disease. I would also prefer to focus on softer means of compliance, e.g., healthcare providers may stipulate compliance, say with immunizations, in contracts for services, financial/tax incentives, shopping convenience, remote knowledge worker support, etc.

Tom Massie's tweet is populist cotton candy. For example, I personally dislike tattoos and body piercings (although my late Dad had forearm tattoos). I'm not going to impose my preferences on other people. But things like masks and vaccines are not paternalistic preferences; they provide two-way protections, e.g., against the full effect of contagious respiratory droplets. If there were a vaccine against COVID-19, it's not just myself who might catch the disease in not using it, but I would endanger others I come into contact with, including those who cannot physically tolerate vaccination, health care providers, close friends and relatives, etc. I would expect others to do their own shared responsibility as well.