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S ROSS suggests that I should have spoken earlier with regard to Matt Hancocks handling of Covid-19, (HAS June 13).

I am not an expert in any of these matters, but I do read the newspapers and listen to the TV.

There has been much criticism of the slowness of the Governments decisions and particularly of the timing of their moves.

The WHO were warning in January that extreme measures were necessary and countries which responded quickly were rewarded with much lower rates of infection and death.

We do not know the details of the advice from SAGE and particularly when it was given, but many experts, independent of SAGE, who have been willing to speak out have acknowledged that the Government should have acted much sooner and that thousands of lives could have been saved.

It has been suggested that the libertarian beliefs of Boris Johnson, not to impose restrictions on people until they were absolutely necessary, was the reason for the delays, with their disastrous consequences and the staggering death rate.

Eric Gendle, Nunthorpe, Middlesbrough.

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Letters: 'It is suggested that Boris's Libertarian beliefs were the reasons for delayed Lockdown' - The Northern Echo

Democrats seem surprised that Rep. Tom McClintock (RCalif.), a libertarian-leaning conservative, favors the abolition of qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that often shields police officers from liability for violating people's constitutional rights. The Democrat opposing McClintock in this year's election, Brynne Kennedy, claims his position on qualified immunity, which she calls "a welcome surprise," implies that he should support the rest of her agenda, including such completely unrelated issues as Medicare, Social Security, and price controls for prescription drugs. If McClintock really wants to prove his bipartisanship, she says, he should agree with her about those issues too.

Given McClintock's history and ideology, Democrats should not have been surprised by his position on qualified immunity, and Kennedy's argument implies that true bipartisanship requires Republicans to agree with Democrats about everything. Her reaction to his stance, whether sincere or not, reflects a broader obstacle to building a trans-ideological coalition for police reform in the wake of George Floyd's death and the ensuing protests. Many left-leaning supporters of that cause either do not understand or willfully ignore the perspective of people like McClintock, and that incomprehension or misrepresentation risks alienating potential allies who disagree with them about a lot of other things.

As the RaleighNews & Observer noted, McClintock is not a newcomer to police reform, which he supported as a state legislator. Back in 2007, McClintock was outraged by the California Supreme Court's decision in Copley Press v. Superior Court,which shielded police disciplinary records from public view. "The Copley decision basically said that disciplinary proceedings against police officers are none of the public's business, even if conducted by a civil service commission under all due process considerations and even if the charges are proven," he said. "In short, once a citizen complains about the misuse of police power, even though the complaint is found to be entirely true, the public has no right to know. That is nuts."

Nor is McClintock a milquetoast when it comes to police invasions of people's homes. Here is what he had to say about no-knock raids this week: "No-knock warrants have proven to be lethal to citizens and police officers, for an obvious reason. The invasion of a person's home is one of the most terrifying powers government possesses. Every person in a free society has the right to take arms against an intruder in their homes, and the authority of the police to make such an intrusion has to be announcedbefore it takes place. To do otherwise places every one of us in mortal peril."

Regarding qualified immunity specifically, the News & Observer notes, "libertarians have long been clamoring for change on the issue." The paper mentions the Institute for Justice, which for years has been backing cases aimed at restricting or eliminating qualified immunity. Conservatives such as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and 5th Circuit Judge Don Willett, a Trump appointee, also have criticized the doctrine.

McClintock's opposition to qualified immunity makes sense if you understand where he is coming from. During his 2008 House campaign, my formerReason colleague Dave Weigel observed, McClintock "saw the real political split in this country (and everywhere else) as between 'authoritarians and libertarians,' with authoritarians in the saddle now but libertarians coming on strong." McClintock also told Weigel, "I am concerned with civil liberties in this country, and with warrantless surveillance of Americans."

McClintock has been an outspoken critic of the PATRIOT Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and he supported amnesty for National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. "I think it would be best if the American government granted him amnesty to get him back to America where he can answer questions without the threat of prosecution," McClintock told a Sacramento TV station in 2013. "We have some very good laws against sharing secrets, and he broke those laws. On the other hand, he broke them for a very good reason:because those laws were being used in direct contravention of our Fourth Amendment rights as Americans."

McClintock also has broken with most of his Republican colleagues in backing marijuana reform. He was an early supporter of legislation aimed at stopping federal raids on medical marijuana dispensaries and repealing the national ban on cannabis as it relates to conduct that is allowed by state law. McClintock opposed federal marijuana prohibition years before many prominent Democrats decided it was safe or politically expedient to do so. That position reflects not just a libertarian sensibility but a principled defense of federalism, a cause that many conservatives abandon when it proves inconvenient.

The fact that progressives can find common ground with McClintock on some issues, of course, hardly means he is about to embrace the rest of their agenda. Likewise with other conservatives, libertarians, and moderates, whether they have long supported police reform or are newly sympathetic because of the problems highlighted by George Floyd's death and other recent travesties.

It may seem obvious that you cannot build a coalition on an issue like police reform if you insist that your allies agree with you about everything or if you mistakenly treat them as Johnny-come-latelies. But progressives are making both of those mistakes.

Instead of supporting the four-page, stand-alone qualified immunity bill that Rep. Justin Amash (LMich.) introduced, House Democrats produced a 134-page billthat addresses qualified immunity but also includes several provisions Republicans are likely to oppose, including increased Justice Department scrutiny of local law enforcement polices and practices, government-backed racial profiling lawsuits, "training on racial bias" for federal law enforcement agents, and financial penalties for states that fail to ban chokeholds or are deficient in reporting data on traffic and pedestrian stops, body searches, and the use of force.

There is a huge gap between the Democrats' grab bag of proposalsmany of which are worthy ideasand the reforms that Republicans seem inclined to support. "The fact that it has no Republican sponsors, the fact that there was no effort to contact any of us to have us weigh in on the legislation, suggests it's designed to be a message piece, as opposed to a real piece of legislation," says Sen. Mitt Romney (RUtah), who plans to introduce a bipartisan police reform bill. "We should vote on each proposal separately," Amash argues. "Massive bills with dozens of topics aren't serious efforts to change law. They're messaging bills with no expectation of getting signed. They cram in so much that they're never written well or reviewed carefully."

The "defund police" slogan adopted by many activists (but wisely eschewed by most Democrats in Congress) poses similar problems. Some people who use it mean it literally, while others have in mind a restructuring of police departments and/or the transfer of money from them to social programs. Whatever the intent, the slogan is bound to alienate people who would otherwise be inclined to support reforms aimed at preventing police from abusing their powers and holding them accountable when they do. The fact that Donald Trump has latched onto the meme as a way of discrediting Democratic reformers is not a good sign. While "defund police" may appeal to some progressives and libertarians, it is not a message that will help attract broad public support for reforms.

It is also a strategic mistake for progressive reformers to act as if they own this issue when many people who don't agree with them on other subjects have been fighting this battle for a long time. As a libertarian who has been covering police abuse, the drug war, criminal justice reform, and civil liberties for more than three decades, I find that attitude irritating, and I'm sure other nonprogressives do as well. But this is not about personal pique; it's about how people with different ideological perspectives can come together on this issue now and avoid squandering an opportunity, perhaps the best we've had in many years, to do some good.

David Menschel, a criminal defense attorney, activist, and documentarian who runs the Vital Projects Fund, describes himself as a "left-winger," but he recognizes that progressives and libertarians are natural allies on this issue. He poses some provocative questions to libertarians about whether they are prepared to support social programs aimed at performing functions currently handled by the police. While that is a good conversation to have, it is not directly relevant to seizing this moment, which requires not only getting along with people who have different political views but also compromising with grudging supporters of reform who may be willing to back specific, concrete proposals to address police abuse that fall far short of the fundamental restructuring Menschel has in mind.

Much of the action on police reform is happening on the local and state levels, as you would expect given our federalist system of government. But to the extent that Congress can address the issue, we should be thinking about changes that might gain the support of not only Tom McClintock and Mitt Romney but also Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (RKy.), who has not heretofore distinguished himself as a criminal justice reformer but lately has been making noises about racial disparities in law enforcement. I'm not sure how much change someone like McConnell can stomach, but reform-minded legislators should find out before it's too late.

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How Not To Build a Transpartisan Coalition for Police Reform - Reason

I have become increasingly cognizant of a tendency of many libertarians to conflate "libertarian" with "antigovernment." There are a variety of groups and movements in the U.S. who hate "the government" for their own reasons, but aren't by any stretch of the imagination libertarian. If you hate the U.S. government because you think is it's controlled by "Zionists" who are trying to destroy European American culture by organizing an alliance of Third World immigrants and native African Americans, you will likely support dramatic cuts in government; but you are not libertarian, because if you thought "your people" were in control, you would happily have a massive, unlibertarian federal government.

Back when Ron Paul's presidential campaign was receiving support from various racist individuals and groups, his campaign's official position was that it welcomed support from *anyone* regardless of ideology, so long as they supported limiting the federal government. That's exactly the mentality I object to.

Libertarians hopping on the "defunding the police" bandwagon once again reminds me of the crucial but neglected distinction between being libertarian (or classical liberal) and being antigovernment. Protection of life, safety, and property is a legitimate function of government. Even Robert Nozick was fine with funding the "night watchman" of the night watchman state.

There are plenty of police reforms that could be enacted from a libertarian perspective that would improve matters. Qualified immunity reform is libertarian. Holding police accountable for misbehavior is libertarian. Reducing the power of police unions is libertarian. Getting rid of overtime and pension abuse is libertarian. Banning no-knock raids is libertarian. Reducing bloated police department bureaucracies is libertarian.

Broader reforms that would reduce the need for police and reduce police/civilian encounters are also libertarian. Getting rid of victimless crimes, especially the drug war, and certain categories of criminal business regulation that should be handled civilly is libertarian. Getting rid of taxes that lead to black markets that in turn lead to police/civilian encounters is libertarian. Abolishing laws that allow local governments to put people in jail for failure to pay civil fines is libertarian. Separating forensic science services from prosecutors' offices is libertarian. Holding prosecutors accountable for misconduct is libertarian. Finding alternatives to prison for certain categories of offenders is libertarian.

By contrast, "defunding the police," if that just means willy-nilly cuts, is not libertarian. This is true especially given that police departments will inevitably follow the "Washington Monument" strategy, in which bureaucracies respond to budget cuts by cutting what is most painful to the voting public. What is very likely to suffer is the legitimate function of the state in preserving people's lives, safety, and property from criminals, while not reforming the system at all nor doing anything about abusive police officers.

If defunding the police means getting rid of the police entirely, without any remote prospect of alternative means of protecting lives, safety, and property suddenly arising in its place (and in the current legal environment, the anarcho-capitalist dream of private protection services replacing police is impossible, even if it were somehow practical), is both crudely antigovernment and stupid.

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Is Defunding the Police Libertarian? Reason.com - Reason

With Republican and Democratic voters rallying around their partys respective presidential candidates ahead of the November election, the chancesofa victoryfor the Libertarian Party lookbleak. While the Libertarian Party may not be successful this fall, writeOlivier LewisandJeffrey Michels, former Republican JustinAmashsrecent short-lived candidacy for the party may point to alonger termrealignmentfor Republican voterswho seekless government involvement in their lives.

After a12-hour-longnominatingconventionon May 22-23,the first held in cyberspace, the Libertarian Partyselectedpsychology lecturerDrJo Jorgensenasitscandidate for President of the United States.Followinganights rest, thedelegatesreturned totheir computers to selectself-proclaimed anarchistSpike Cohen astheirVice-Presidentialcandidate. The delegatesstamina wasimpressive, especiallyconsidering the fact thattheir ticket has virtually no chance of winning the presidential elections in November.

Theobstaclesare even greaterinthis extraordinary election year.Some of this is inherent to the race itself.Agrowingnumberof Republican voters have a favourable view of President Donald Trump, and avast majorityof Democrats have a favourable opinion of former Vice-President Joe Biden. Unlike in 2016, this yearsthird-party candidateswill receive few protest votes; the Republican and Democratic candidates are simply too appealing to their respective party faithful.

MeanwhiletheCOVID-19pandemic hasfurthercomplicated the prospects for third parties.With many states under lockdown and social distancing customary throughout the country,third partiesare unable tocollectthe signatures necessarytoget their candidates names on state ballots the Libertarian Party stoppedpetitioningon March 7th.These partieswill needtoturn to the courts, in the hope of liftingsignature requirements. The Green and Libertarian parties didsowithsuccessin Illinois.

Themanysocial consequencesof the health crisis willmostlikelylimitsupport for third party campaigns. Due toCOVID-19,theUS population is, to a historic extent,politicallypolarized,prone to saving,jobless,andhungry.As a result,theelectoratelacksthepatienceand resourcesto back outsidercampaignswith little prospectfor success.These are likely the circumstances that the ex-Republican congressman from Michigan, Rep. JustinAmash,had in mindwhen heannounced on Twitteron May 16ththat he wasfoldinghis exploratory committee to seek the Libertarian Partys presidential nomination.

While the immediateclimatemay be harsh foranoutside challenge to the current bipartisanconstellation, this mayslowlychange.As wewrote earlier this month,Amashsshort-livedcandidacyrevealsasmallbut meaningful riftwithin the Republican Party, whosesupport of President Trump has often overruled itscommitment to libertarian ideals. Questions surrounding the role of government inpublic andprivate life canlead tosignificantconflict amidst Republicans, especially as the party decideswhether to follow the course Trump laid out during his presidency.

The COVID-19 pandemicis likely toexacerbate thisriftin the longer term.Crisis measures undertaken bygovernmentsworldwidehavereinforced and accelerated ashift away from libertarian values:the trend is towards lessmigrationand freetrade,and morecapital controls,state aidandpublic debt.In the US, wecan already seeolddebatesre-emergeregarding threats topersonallibertiesandexcessive government intervention, and this, most of all, inconservativeAmericanmedia. Michael Dougherty of theNational Reviewsummarises this as a debate betweennational autonomy and individual autonomy.Jack Butler,also writing for theReview,boils it downto blue-collar versus white-collar.Can these tensions be reconciled within the Republican Party?A historic pandemic has led to a historic recession,which has led to a historical governmental response. It is only logical that the political repercussions will be historictoo,though they may take an election cycleto be felt.

Please read our comments policy before commenting.

Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of USAPP American Politics and Policy, nor the London School of Economics.

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About the authors

Olivier Lewis College of EuropeOlivier has been a Research Fellow at the College of Europe,Natolincampus, since August 2019. Olivier is currently writing his first book,Security Cooperation between Western States, to be published with Routledge. He is also working on shorter publications related to counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, and Brexit.

Jeffrey Michels College of EuropeJeffrey Michels is a Parliamentary Assistant at the European Parliament and an Academic Assistant forthe European Interdisciplinary Studies Department at the College of Europe.

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Justin Amash's presidential bid shows that some Republicans' future may be with the Libertarian Party. - USAPP American Politics and Policy (blog)

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