Anonymous Libertarian

In keeping with the spirit of the times, I will share some of my thoughts on the coronavirus outbreak, and what kind of public policy response would enable us to prepare for such an outbreak while still being economically feasible. I've found much of the popular writing on what the right policies are for epidemic preparedness to be disappointing. It is often too vague (Bill Gates's article in the New England Journal of Medicine struck me as short on details, which is bizarre given his foundation's involvement in many specific responses to the ongoing epidemic). Sometimes it's shamelessly partisan. Sometimes it's implausible (e.g., demanding that society constantly have enough resources on hand to handle an epidemic at any moment). But I think the problem must be talked about in greater detail for viable policies to be conceived and implemented. In this post, I won't discuss such key elements of epidemic policy as how to enforce quarantines, travel restrictions

This week, congress and the president clashed over the details of a coronavirus relief package (I believe a deal has now been reached). One source of the conflict was congressional Democrats' efforts to include a mandate that employers give paid leave to employees. The mandate, it is worth noting, would be permanent. I don't know whether the bill that stands to pass mandates paid sick leave for all employees; news sources are rather ambiguous at the moment, as the term "sick leave" is used to refer to the provision of paid sick leave to health care workers specifically, or to federal employees, or payment by the federal government to sick workers. Originally at least, though, there was a proposed provision to mandate private employers generally to provide paid sick leave. This, I argue, is a bad idea, particularly during an epidemic. The reasoning behind why this policy is specifically necessary or useful during an infectious disease epidemic is, as I understand it,

I suspect a major reason why political discourse is the way it is has to do with how we perceive what it means to be – and how we explain being – wrong. I don’t merely mean in our ‘polarized times’  (the extent to which we are more polarized today than in earlier eras is a matter of dispute among political psychologists)  but rather the way people think about politics in general, and the way it seems they always have. There are a couple persistent and remarkable phenomena about politics that should make us a priori suspicious of how political beliefs are formed: 1) people tend to cluster into few (mostly, two) political ideologies with remarkably little intra-cluster heterogeneity; and 2) there is little transit between clusters. 1 is remarkable because what one believes about abortion should not really predict what one believes about gun control, capital gains taxes, foreign policy, or the macroeconomics of business cycles. And yet, one’s opinion on any one of these issues predicts