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When coronavirus crept across the world in early February, talk of how different nations were dealing with the virus came to resemble the Olympics for state capacity. Which country had the authority, the supplies and the expertise to crush the curve? A balance sheet of national progress marked out a bleak race to the horizon, enumerated in case numbers and death figures.

Although the focus over recent months has remained on leaders in crisis mode and the central agencies delivering forecasts and quarantine measures, local authorities have also played a prominent role during the pandemic. Chinese mayors, US governors and Indian chief ministers have coordinated local responses, taking responsibility for populations and even locking horns with national politicians.

Most people would read the pandemic as a sign that populations and nation states should band together, and for the people at the head of the rope to pull even harder, to use the metaphor favoured by the French president, Emmanuel Macron. But there are others who see matters quite differently. They spy opportunity in the crisis, and wager that we might be able to ride the wave of the pandemic into a new tomorrow, where the virus shatters the global map and undermines the power of democratic nation states.

The US is ground zero for this type of thinking. Across the country, regions have broken up into compacts, with states competing against each other for life-saving ventilators and PPE. The atmosphere is one of competitive federalism, where states are reconfigured as economic units bidding in a marketplace. Washingtons state governor, Jay Inslee, accused Trump of fomenting domestic rebellion for his calls to liberate individual states; governor Gavin Newsom termed California a nation-state. One Maryland governor confessed to keeping Covid-19 tests in an undisclosed location under armed guard, in part to prevent their seizure by central state authorities.

Although North Americas economy is gradually reopening, the virus is still rampaging through its population. What will economic recovery look like in the midst of a pandemic? The presidents economic advisers have some ideas. In an analysis released at the end of April, Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore, two of Trumps closest economic confidants and authors of the book on Trumponomics, predicted that blue Democratic states would be slower than red states to recover, because of what they saw as their pre-existing excess of regulations and taxes.

Their analysis divided the US map into laggard anti-growth states and momentum pro-growth states. The former have minimum wages, pro-union laws and state income tax; the latter are free of such regulations. In the established mode of disaster capitalism, Laffer and Moores analysis appears to see the pandemic as a way to compel anti-growth states to adopt ever lower tax rates in order to attract mobile capital and labour. It suggests those who resist will not be bailed out by redistribution from the central government, but left to languish in a deserved economic depression. The effect is reminiscent of social Darwinism, applied as a philosophy of government.

The most articulate cheerleader for this kind of post-pandemic libertarianism is Balaji Srinivasan, the electrical engineer and former general partner at Silicon Valley venture capital fund Andreesen Horowitz. Since the pandemic began, Srinivasan has foretold a redivision of the world map into green zones that have controlled and contained the virus and red zones, which have not.

We are entering this fractal environment, Srinivasan recently told a virtual summit organised by the Startup Societies Foundation, in which the virus breaks centralised states. The virus does not stop at the border, so nor will this process of fragmentation. As regions seal themselves off to prevent contagion, you can drill down to the state, or even the town or county level, Srinivasan observed, noting that any state without the virus under control will face defection in an intensified contest for talent and capital. After the pandemic has passed, nations are going to turn into effectively vendors and entrepreneurs and relatively mobile people will be applicants, he predicted.

Its easy to imagine how a particular breed of investor could see this pandemic as an opportunity that will accelerate existing trends. The loose attachments that investors feel towards this or that nation will grow even looser as capital becomes more mobile, and a sorting process will separate the productive few nations from the malingering many. States that dont fall in line with the demands of this investor class will be starved by the voluntary expatriation of the wealthy, with their assets and abilities in tow.

If you assume this is merely a pessimistic vision, youd be wrong. In fact it accords with a long-cultivated ideology that Srinivasan shares with a group of like-minded venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, who subscribe to variations of the radical libertarian philosophy known as anarcho-capitalism. The idea at its root is that a wealthy class of investors and entrepreneurs should be free to exit nation states and form new communities whose members can choose which rules (and tax laws) theyre governed by as if those rules were products on a store shelf.

For like-minded libertarians, the colour-coded zones used in public health to control the virus are the blueprint for a new political economy. Since Srinivasan began discussing the framework, colour-coded zones have been rolled out to control the virus in Malaysia, Indonesia, Northern Italy and France; the strategy was also considered as a model for biocontainment in the White House in early April. As of early May, India has divided its 1.3 billion people into a patchwork of green, yellow and red zones, with different freedoms and restrictions based on each.

The red-green zone schema has already informed the strategies of global investors. In April, Henley & Partners, the global citizenship broker, released its annual ranking of national passports for mobile investors, and predicted that coronavirus would spark a dramatic shift in global mobility. Its chief source forecast that as the curtain lifts, people will seek to move from poorly governed and ill-prepared red zones to green zones, or places with better medical care. In early May, it reported a 42% increase in applications for new nationalities, compared with the previous year.

Nobody can tell what the world will look like after the pandemic. But what we can be sure of is that some investors appear to be already placing their bets on a vision of the future where the wealthy are freed from tax constraints. As nations are divided into different zones according to their respective stages of viral and economic recovery, the well-off could follow Elon Musks recent threat to relocate from California to Texas, voting with their feet for locations that elude redistributive taxation. In our post-pandemic future, the flight to safety, away from contagious red zones, could be a flight from the nation state as we know it.

Quinn Slobodian is an associate professor of history at Wellesley College, US

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How the libertarian right plans to profit from the pandemic - The Guardian

I am saddened to report that the Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog, one of the most important libertarian blogs on the internet is closing down, as of today. Matt Zwolinski, one of the regular contributors, announced the decision in this post:

Back in 2011, a group of academic philosophers started a blog called "Bleeding Heart Libertarians." The idea behind that blog was simple, but also somewhat vague in terms of its specifics: that you could be a libertarian who favored free markets and limited governments, and still care about the kind of things people on the left refer to as "social justice" relieving poverty, racial and sexual equality, immigrant rights, LBGTQ rights, and so on. Hence, the slogan of the blog, "free markets and social justice."

Reconciling free markets and social justice seemed like an especially worthwhile project to undertake in 2011. Academic political philosophy was largely dominated by followers of John Rawls, for whom a commitment to social justice (of a particular sort) was paramount. And libertarianism remained a fringe and unfamiliar view within the academy for most academic philosophers, it was a view that was born and died in 1974 with the publication of Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia. But a critical mass of scholars were working out new ways of thinking about libertarian ideas; and many of us who were excited by the work of scholars like David Schmidtz, Gerald Gaus, and John Tomasi thought that there was a different style of libertarian thought beginning to crystallize. And we didn't only want to publicize that; we wanted to encourage it, to help build and develop the research program associated with it.

Moreover, if we sought to open mainstream Rawlsian political philosophy and theory to the influence of market-friendly classical liberalism, we also wanted to wanted to steer classical liberal scholarship toward taking egalitarian liberal ideas much more seriously than it often had.

Things have changed quite a bit in the last nine years, both in the realm of academic philosophy and that of real-world politics. Rawlsianism and its particular interpretation of social justice have receded in prominence. The variety of libertarian and classical liberal views within the academy has become better known, even by those who reject those views. And that variety is now a more firmly established fact among libertarian scholars and students themselves

I like to think that this blog, or at least the people who write for it, have played some role in at least the second of those two developments. We set out with the aim of articulating a new and distinct vision of libertarianism. And while there are certainly a great number of important details of that vision that have yet to be worked out I think we have succeeded. The project of establishing the intellectual space for bleeding-heart libertarian ideas has also more or less succeeded, giving way to the various different intellectual projects people are going to pursue in that space.

In other words, we've said what we needed to say.

I can understand Zwolinski's reasoning. But I wish he and his co-bloggers would reconsider. The world needs the BHL blog today at least as much as it did back in 2011. The brand of liberalism that combines free markets with cosmopolitanism, rejection of ethnic nationalism, and concern for the poor and disadvantaged has never been more necessary than in this difficult time, when liberty is besieged on both the right and left. Whatever may be the situation in the specialized arena of academic political philosophy, the forces of nationalism and socialism are gaining group in the broader intellectual and political world.

Fortunately, many of the BHL contributors will remain active in the public arena in other ways. Zwolinski lists some of the venues in which they will continue to write in his post linked above.

In the meantime, it's hard to deny that the BHL participants have had a big impact on political thought since they began the blog in 2011. While I am not a BHL-er as such, my own recent book Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom is very much in their tradition of combining free markets and cosmopolitanism. It is no accident that it is an outgrowth of an article I wrote for a volume edited by BHL-er Jacob Levy.

I have also been much influenced by the works of other BHL contributors, such as Jason Brennan's books on political ignorance, and the ethics of voting, and Fernando Teson's writings on democratic deliberation and international justice. Brennan's book In Defense of Openness (coauthored with Bas van der Vossen) is one of the best political philosophy books on the morality of international trade and migration.

There are, of course, a number of issues on which I differ with some of the BHL contributors. But, even when we do disagree, I always learn much from what they have to say. Hopefully, they will continue to contribute to debates over politics and political theory elsewhere.

Read more:
Farewell to the "Bleeding Heart Libertarians" Blog - Reason

Despite the passage of many months of investigation and observation, the most remarkable thing about the COVID-19 virus is how little anyone truly knows about it. Unless of course, you consider how much certain segments of the population think they do know about it.

There is nothing historically unique about recognized experts finding themselves befuddled and divided over novel phenomena, nor is there anything unusual about other groups of citizens thinking they have a better handle on things.

What is weird, though, is how impervious to reason and common sense both groups are becoming. There is an extremist element among certain civil authorities, along with many scientific and medical experts, who are doubling down on the need for ever-increasing government restrictions and social control. At the other end, there is an extremist civil libertarian element that is doubling down on their demands for freedom from any precautions at all.

The expert/authoritarian extremists have taken to arguing that this pandemic can (and perhaps should) alter human civilization forever, before we all go extinct, or something close to it. The layman/libertarian extremists counter that we have to throw off the yoke of public health busybodies and opportunistic tyrants through pointed defiance before were all serfs, slaves and lab animals permanently existing at the pleasure of power-mad technocrats.

There ought to be a middle ground, and I suspect there is. It appears the majority of Americans (and the majority of the human race) are concerned, but not terrified; cautious, but not obsessed. Weve all been through influenza epidemics before, and this one doesnt seem much worse than some of those. Common sense dictates that COVID-19 casualty rates are comparable to other strains we have experienced not in spite of unusually stringent mass precautions, but because of them.

It has become apparent in places such as China, Iran and Brazil, where large segments of the population were either oblivious or unconvinced of the danger of business-as-usual living, that this virus has proven far deadlier and more virulent than the average seasonal flu. But in much of the rest of the world, the simple regimens of masking, sanitizing and social distancing have demonstrably kept casualties to levels capably handled by medical systems.

But the extremists seem unimpressed. The expert/authoritarian types maintain these precautions are the only thing holding the lid on, and they have to be redoubled and extended indefinitely to prevent global human catastrophe. The layman/libertarian types either think the threat has passed or was a hoax all along, and that things must go back to normal immediately or they never will again.

In the face of these alternatives, we can only hope most people can intellectually locate some middle way in which to continue going on about their lives. Yes, the expert/authoritarians have a point in that the virus could come roaring back if it is suddenly ignored, and an even better point that it could mutate over time and worsen this autumn and beyond. These are very plausible scenarios.

But the layman/libertarians also have a point in that technocratic elites and civil authorities do not rule by divine right, and if they cant bring themselves to trust the majority of our species to make their own basic survival decisions, then life for the masses is hardly worth living (or certainly worth risking in a return to normalcy, or even revolution, for the cause of freedom.)

But if history proves anything, its that neither group of extremists is likely to be rewarded by future events with clear vindication. The human race will probably survive, as will earthly pockets of American-styled self-determination and liberty at least so long as neither minority of extremists gets the upper hand.

Meanwhile, the rest of us would do well to keep an open mind and remain adaptable to changing circumstances. This virus could soon subside like all of the others, drag on for another season or mutate into something different. And if the Chinese communists allowed it to spread on purpose, theres always the possibility theyve got something even worse in the works. We must be ready to change, but not precipitously.

It is the human condition to perpetually live with calculations of acceptable risk. (Usually at the subconscious level.) For example, about as many Americans died in driving accidents last year as in the entire Korean War. Yes, we could cut this in half by driving slower, or to zero by giving up motor vehicles entirely. But how many of us would seriously consider such measures? Those casualties are not only known and predictable, but a tacitly acceptable risk (and cost) of having and driving our vehicles as we are accustomed.

Public health crises are much the same. So long as the casualty numbers, tragic though they are, remain near normal levels, and we can continue to have meaningful lives, we may conclude were thinking and behaving reasonably. Even if an extremist minority of chicken-littles and free spirits around us refuse.

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Edmonds: Extremism in the face of COVID-19 is not reasonable - Wyoming Tribune

LITTLETON, CO Coloradans have a lot of voting to do this year a few months after the March presidential primary has ended, the June primary is coming up.

Elections officials in Arapahoe, Douglas and Jefferson counties have issued the following important information for voters:

Which seats are up for election?

Sample ballots for the Republican, Democratic, and Libertarian primaries:

Important dates:

Drop Boxes: The 24-hour drop boxes remain the most efficient and secure way to return your ballot, officials said. Find the latest locations:

Mail: Voters can also use the U.S. mail to return their ballots. Postmarks do not count, so if you choose to mail your ballot, officials recommend doing so at least eight days before Election Day.

Vote Centers: Few voters will need to vote in person, officials said. In light of COVID-19, elections officials are taking special precautions with in-person vote centers and are still finalizing sites that will officer adequate social distancing. Jefferson County will post locations at VoteJeffco when they're ready, officials said. Arapahoe County vote centers can be found here, and Douglas County centers can be found here. In the meantime, residents are encouraged to register to vote or update their registration at GoVoteColorado to receive a ballot in the mail, officials said.

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June State Primary: What Littleton Voters Need To Know - Patch.com

The Boogaloos are mobilizing to the front lines of the nationwide protest movement. They are coming armed with mainly assault rifles and traveling where the protests are.

The Boogaloos are an emerging extremist group that has yet to be truly categorized. In a world of Antifa and looters vs. protestors, they are confounding efforts to phase out agitators looting businesses.

Boogaloos are a sect of libertarianism.

Libertarian historian George Woodcock defines libertarianism as the philosophy that fundamentally doubts authority and advocates transforming society by reform or revolution.

However, some pockets of the group have espoused white supremacy while others reject it. But they have an affinity for toting guns in public and a boogaloo rallying cry. This is commonly viewed as code for another US civil war.

The movement started in obscure online platforms but is now growing on mainstream platforms. During this moment of protest, it is starting to move offline. Boogaloos resemble the militia movement which has historically been a force for promoting violence.

The Antifa movement in the United States is a left-wing, anti-fascist political activist movement that comprises autonomous activist groups. They aim to achieve their political objectives through the use of direct action rather than through policy reform.

In Los Angeles, roving bands of thieves drove around in cars and communicated by cellphone, identifying businesses to loot.

Three former US servicemen and self-proclaimed members of the far-right boogaloo movement were arrested on domestic terrorism charges. They are accused of carrying unregistered firearms and trying to spark violence during protests against police brutality.

According to the Clark Country Detention Center records: Stephen Parshall, 35, Andrew Lynam Jr., 23, and William Loomis, 40, are each being held on $1 million bond.

A preliminary hearing will be held on June 17.

The three white male defendants previously served in the US Navy, US Army, and US Air Force.

Reports also noted that the men self-identified as part of the Boogaloo movement.

The men planned to sow discord at a protest in Nevada in early April. One of the men said the group was not joking around.

Also, that is was for people who wanted to overthrow the United States government.

Peaceful protests are looking to create change through nonviolence. However, extremist groups are galvanizing on their momentum to create a civil war.

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Anti-Government 'Boogaloos' are Showing Up at Protests Armed to Incite Civil War - The Source