On the Arrogance of Self-Entitlement during a Pandemic

In the midst of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, libertarians in San Francisco, California objected to wearing face masks. Other people there were simply fed up with wearing masks by late 1918. The libertarians, who objected on the basis of rights, actually prevented the Board of Health from renewing a mandate to wear masks.[1] In early 1919, another spike in influenza cases there led the board to put a mandate in place. So in March of 2020, the failure of mass transits and retail stores to enforce physical distancing and the failures a few months later to enforce mandates on wearing face masks to reduce the spread of the coronavirus can be seen as recklessness (and fecklessness) that could have been prevented by looking back a hundred years. But could the willful disregard of store policies and local law both by customers and store managers have been prevented had business had heeded history? I contend that human nature, which had not changed in such a short time by evolutionary standards, played the heavy, or anchor.

The full essay is at "On the Depth of Selfishness."

---

1. Kristen Rogers, “What the 1918 Flu Pandemic Can Teach Us about Coronavirus,” CNN.com, September 25, 2020.

Can an American Member-State Exit the Union?

A war was fought over it. In early 2013, the White House made it explicit in replying to a petition. Yet still there was a sense among at least some Texans that something was amiss. Following U.S. President Obama’s re-election in 2012, citizens of Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, and five other member-states in the U.S. signed petitions for the White House to allow their respective states to secede from the Union. At the time, few people other than the secessionists themselves took the petitions seriously. Yet the underlying contending principles deserve more serious reflection even if no "exit" is anticipated. Most importantly, the matter concerns how and whether the rights of member-states (and majorities of the people, therein) are to be circumscribed in a federal union that leaves said republics semi-sovereign and with residual sovereignty.

The full essay is at "Can an American Member-State Exit?"

Assessing a “Funded Right” to Education as Constitutional in the U.S.

According to the Texas constitution, the government must provide funds for a “general diffusion of knowledge.” This is a worthy purpose in a representative democracy, as an educated electorate is generally presumed better able to self-govern by voting for candidates and even on policy-oriented referendums. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams had their differences to be sure, but they both believed that an educated and virtuous citizenry is vital to a republic. Accordingly, the “Texas constitution imposes an affirmative obligation to provide adequate financial resources for education, whatever the economic cycle,” according to Mark Trachtenberg, an attorney who represents more than seventy school districts that sued the government of Texas.[1] Altogether, four funding suits were pending in Texas as of January 2012. Five hundred districts, which together educate more than half of all public school students in Texas, were involved in those suits at the time. In 2010, the Texas legislature had cut more than $5 billion from school district budgets. In the wake of the cuts, the districts claimed that they lacked the resources to provide the level of education required by the constitution. One major question is whether the courts are the proper venue for this matter.

The full essay is at "Assessing a 'Funded Right'."

1. Nathan Koppel, “Schools Sue States For More Money,” The Wall Street Journal, January 7-8, 2012.