Monthly Archives: April 2021

Op-Eds

“Vaccine Passports” and the Holocaust: An Invalid Comparison?

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Jewish Synagogue in German-occupied Bydgoszcz (Poland). Inscription in German language means: "This city is free of Jews." September 1939. Public domain.
Jewish Synagogue in German-occupied Bydgoszcz (Poland). Inscription in German language means: “This city is free of Jews.” September 1939. Public domain.

On March 29, the Libertarian Party of Kentucky issued a tweet that aroused considerable controversy (not least among partisan Libertarians themselves):

“Are the vaccine passports going to be yellow, shaped like a star, and sewn on our clothes?”

Kentucky governor Andy Beshear called the tweet “shameful” and implied it was “anti-Semitic.”

Rabbi Shlomo Litvin called the comparison “morally wrong,” but treated it, kindly, as part of a widespread habit of “using Holocaust comparisons to make literally any political point you want to make.”

Was the tweet over the top? Well, maybe.

Was the tweet anti-Semitic? Ask the Jewish protesters in Israel who equate that country’s vaccine passport scheme not only with the yellow Star of David badges forced on Jews by the Nazis, but with  death camp prisoner tattoos.

Was the comparison valid? To at least some degree, yes.

Early on, the Nazis used a “public health” excuse for their targeting of Jews and the imposition of the patches. Jews, they said, spread typhus, and needed to be identified so that others could avoid them and stay healthy.

Yes, that supposed “public health” concern was completely false.

But the notion that COVID-19 represents a permanent, existential threat to humanity, that we can never return to “normal” again, and that those who choose not to get vaccinated represent a significant danger to those who choose to get vaccinated is completely false, too.

Novel viruses hit humankind hard occasionally, then recede as we learn to treat them and vaccinate for them, and as they weaken through mutation. No sane society completely remakes itself around them.

Supporters of vaccine passports tout them as a way to “allow” us to do things such as attend concerts and sporting events.

We’ve never needed health-based government permission to do those things before, and there’s no compelling argument that we should be required to seek such permission in the future.

Vaccine passports aren’t needed to “allow” things. They’re not designed to include, they’re designed to exclude. They’re designed to do something with a long history that includes, yes, the Holocaust: They’re designed to ghettoize (“put in or restrict to an isolated or segregated place, group, or situation”).

Absent government involvement, if a business doesn’t want to accept un-vaccinated customers (or any other kind of customers), that’s, well, their business. But they should shoulder the costs themselves instead of asking governments to create and impose uniform identification schemes for them.

A federal vaccine passport would create yet another government surveillance tool. It would also inevitably be used by local governments to legally exclude the un-vaccinated from particular types of businesses (such as nightclubs), particular expressions of public life (such as youth sports), and quite possibly entire zones of public commerce (such as large shopping centers), all in the name of “public health.”

And the scheme wouldn’t end with COVID-19. It would be continually repurposed and probably made permanent.

I’d like to see everyone choose to get vaccinated, but we should all be opposed to forcibly ghettoizing those who don’t.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Op-Eds

The Finest Trick of the Developer is to Persuade You That Free Markets Should Not Exist

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“Henry George and the Dragon” cartoon. Public domain.

New York City Council candidate Alexa Avilés asserts that “the free market will never provide decent housing for all, and we should stop pretending otherwise” (“The Free Market Will Never Provide Decent Housing for All,” The Indypendent, April 2).  Who’s pretending?

Avilés doesn’t outright claim that the current housing market is free, but implies that a free market would reinforce the existing power of “banks and corporate landlords” over “tenants in private housing, NYCHA [New York City Housing Authority] residents, and small homeowners.”

In treating the latter as the only beneficiaries of intervention in the market — and conflating a free market with policies that “let big developers take control” — Avilés ignores what Roderick T. Long notes are the far larger effects of “regulations that strangle competition in the housing market.”

Assuming that “developers’ greed drives gentrification and displacement” obscures the ways that limiting competition distorts supply and demand. Market competition compelled stockbrokers, who are not generally distinguished by an absence of greed, to reduce trading fees from $199 to $8.

Long concludes that a free housing market would be one “with landlords competing for tenants,” so that “rental contracts would cease to be as one-sidedly favorable to the landlord as they often are today.” Tenants would also enjoy more power to take many of the steps recommended by Avilés toward ownership, such as “the opportunity to collectively purchase” their buildings.

Moreover,  any free market approach must make unjustified land claims null and void. As Murray Rothbard put it, in such cases any “reform is picayune and fails to reach the heart of the question” short of “an immediate vacating of the title … with certainly no compensation to the aggressors who had wrongly seized control of the land.”

Avilés’s “Green New Deal for NYCHA” could take a page from Franklin Delano Roosevelt and revisit the writings of Henry George, who carried forth the tradition of combining free trade with land reform pioneered by such market liberals as Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer. FDR wanted George’s works to be “better known and more clearly understood” since they “contain much that would be helpful today.”

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a contributing editor at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Op-Eds

Time to Get Government Off Our Lawns

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Photo by Magda Ehlers via Pexels
Photo by Magda Ehlers via Pexels

It’s spring, and for many Americans that means it’s time to drag out the mower and trimmer, invest in various seeds, feeds, pesticides, etc., and quite possibly put the water bill on steroids with daily sprinkler operation. According to the American Time Use Survey, the average American spends 70 hours — nearly two full work weeks — on lawn maintenance every year.

The lawn is such a familiar part of everyday American life that it might seem like the natural state of things.  In reality, it’s evolved over the last two centuries from an aristocratic plaything to what Washington Post columnist Christopher Ingraham rightly calls a “soul-crushing timesuck” that most of us would be better off without.

More to the point, the lawn is effectively a regressive tax scheme that benefits the sellers of expensive equipment and  those who use that equipment in our stead if we can afford to hire them.

Lawns originated with the European nobility of the late Middle Ages — people who owned plenty of land and could afford staff (assisted by large herds of sheep) to keep the grass cut short. By the 18th century, lawns were places for snobbish parties and social games such as croquet and tennis.

The first lawnmowers appeared in the 1830s, and over the next century, culminating with the introduction of “affordable” gas-powered push mowers, lawns became increasingly popular with “lower-class” imitators of the rich.

But until after World War 2, most of us regular people, even if we had houses, still didn’t have “lawns.” We had “yards.” Yards were generally smaller, and were more likely to be bare dirt or vegetable garden than carefully manicured grass of a single species.

Yards became lawns as they got bigger and as they became situated in the post-war cookie-cutter housing developments where developers or homeowner associations promoted property-value-preserving uniformity. You had to have a “lawn” of St. Augustine grass kept to no more than three inches in height for the same reason you couldn’t paint your house pink or put your old Chevy up on blocks in the driveway.

Local governments, seeing an irresistible opportunity to pass new ordinances, took their cue from the developers and HOAs and joyfully added lawn care to their already endless excuses for levying fines on the neglectful and recalcitrant.

The ill effects go beyond lost time, wasted money, and forced dealings with nosy bureaucrats. In addition to reduced biodiversity (exacerbated by ordinances dictating a few types of acceptable lawn vegetation) and the use of millions of pounds of unnecessary pesticides every year, Ted Steinberg tells us in American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn, our palsied hands spill 17 million gallons of gas — half again as much as the Exxon Valdez vomited onto Alaska’s coastline in 1989 — every year while refueling lawn maintenance equipment.

Xeriscaping, ornamental and vegetable gardening, etc. are increasingly popular alternative approaches to yard use. But for those of us who really want to be done with lawns, an important first step is getting governments off of them.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY