The Libertarian Case for Masks, and our Culture War is Getting Dumber

In case you’ve been vacationing in Atlantis since the dawn of the decade, you’re probably aware there is a global pandemic raging that, as of this writing, has killed over 585,000 people worldwide and nearly 140,000 Americans. For perspective, that’s like having a 9/11 every single day for the last 47 days. Truly horrifying stuff. And I’m sure your life has been disrupted in many ways, whether you’re a student who hasn’t been to school in months, a healthcare worker who’s dealt with packed ICU’s, a service worker who’s been laid off, or a blue collar worker without a job to do. All of us have been, and continue to be impacted by the disease and associated rolling lockdowns all over the country. My favorite bar in Chapel Hill (shout out to Linda’s!) has been closed since late March for chrissakes. All this sounds pretty awful, and it certainly has been. But, follow me on this, what if there was a relatively simple, cheap, and painless way to make this all go away more quickly? Wouldn’t that be awesome? Turns out it’s your lucky day because there is! It’s as simple as just putting on a face mask whenever you go out in public and have to be near people. Yes, that’s literally all you have to do.

So why should Americans, a notoriously ungovernable people (seriously, we’re outliers in the developed world for both violence and religiosity, go figure) look to all the authoritarian countries around the world where masks are a cultural norm? First, as Ron Bailey at Reason Magazine puts it, own your microbes! What’s more individualistic than that? Establish property rights and reap the benefits. In economics, we would call a person breathing virus into the air (intentionally or not) as an externality, meaning an individual action that imposes costs on others. Oliver Wendell Holmes articulated it thusly, “The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.” Or in the case of COVID-19, the right to breathe without a mask ends where my ability to be infected begins. This would be less of a problem if you were only contagious when you were sick, but unfortunately people can be pre-symptomatic for up to two weeks, and there is significant evidence of presymptomatic and asymptomatic spread. It bears repeating, own your microbes!

This setup works because, contrary to popular opinion, masks don’t do a great job at preventing virus from entering your body. But they do a very good job at preventing them from getting out. Additionally, people that refuse to wear a mask are in a sense free riding off those who do. They’re taking advantage of everyone else limiting the spread so they’re at marginally lower risk of infection. Nobody likes a free rider. So how do we translate that to our current predicament?

Well, we can do some free market economics. Our old friend Ronald Coase came up with a brilliant way to use the free market to regulate relationships instead of the government. After all, if you can privatize instead of regulate, probably a great idea. His theorem states that since everything has a price, two actors in the market can use the price system and property rights instead of regulation to accomplish the same goal. Here’s a classic example. Imagine we have a farmer and a nuclear power plant, and the plant dumps its waste in the farmer’s field, turning the farmer’s wheat radioactive. The horror! Surely the government should step in and either force the plant to not pollute or pay damages to the farmer, right?

In Coase’s world, there are two alternatives. One, the farmer could pay the pay the power company to not pollute her field. The power company would accept payment equal to the extra cost it would incur for not polluting. Also, the power company could pay the farmer to dump on her land. Eventually, so long as property rights are clearly defined, the two parties will end up in a mutually beneficial agreement. And the cool part, no matter which party possesses the initial property right, the agreement will be the same. Of course, the initial property rights matter for who pays who, but will not affect the end bargain.

Let’s re-run the scenario with a person and a shopkeeper. The consumer, let’s call him Kris (hehehe), places some value on not wearing a mask. The shop owner has a property right to the space in her store and derives a lot of value from keeping a safe store. So the owner (let’s call her Lynn, hehehe) says to Kris, “Hi. You can shop here without a mask but you’re going to have to compensate me for putting my property at risk for contamination.” Kris says, “Lynn, I really hate wearing a mask because I’m not a nice person. So I’m willing to pay triple your prices to shop here without it.” Lynn replies, “Make it ten times the price to account for having to clear the store and disinfect after you leave and you can shop here.” Kris obliges, gets the goods he wants, and Lynn makes a metric ton of cash (Kris has no idea how much it costs to do lots of things, especially in business.) Everyone wins! We could also assign the initial property right to Kris. But we get the same result. In this case, Lynn would have to pay Kris the price to wear the mask, so Kris would end up with more money, but the end result is the same: Kris gets to shop in Lynn’s store (just with a mask).

On the topic of businesses, we’d all like them to be open, right? I know I miss it. Masking is pro growth! We can look to our pro-freedom brethren halfway around the world in Hong Kong (PSA: FREE HONG KONG). Here’s the contrast. Good old USA has had nearly 3.7 million cases and 140,000 deaths. Hong Kong, which has a norm around wearing a mask, and never had a full lockdown, has had all of 1,656 cases and 10 deaths. TEN. If you’re doing math, the U.S.’s death rate is 426 times higher than that of Hong Kong, which again, no lockdown. Universal masking. Not convinced by the Hong Kong data since, like I mentioned above, the American people are the “hold my beer” people of the world? The fine (?) folks at Goldman Sachs just released a very interesting study on the effect of masking on COVID prevalence and GDP. Their main finding, “…the upshot of our analysis is that a national face mask mandate could potentially substitute for renewed lockdowns that would otherwise subtract nearly 5% from GDP.” Back of the envelope, that’s about $1 trillion, or in more meaningful terms, $3140 per American. What’s your disutility of wearing one? Certainly not that much, unless you’re a crazy person. But “OH NO HE SAID MANDATE!” Actually not really. Like the freedom-loving people of Hong Kong, we just need to exercise personal responsibility and the CDC suggested we could have this thing clamped down in 4-8 weeks. What’s not to love?

So what does this have to do with our long running culture war?

I’ve run long (if you’re still around, hey!) and may do a fuller post on this at some point, but the mask debate has to be the dumbest skirmish in the culture war in my life. Like it makes Bill Clinton’s… um… affair… look like the Lincoln-Douglas debates. I can’t think of any real principle that would drive it to this very, very dumb end. We’ve all seen the viral videos where “concerned” citizens rail against mask wearing, calling them the “devil’s laws.” I’m not up to date on my theology, but I’m pretty sure the Bible has no prohibition on mask wearing to prevent the spread of disease, even though it has a litany of regulations on keeping food clean.

It’s mostly, but not exclusively on the right, but it seems as though any reference to the common good is equivalent to tyranny. I liken it to a toddler throwing a fit in the store that his mom wouldn’t buy him a candy bar. Very slight inconveniences like masks or getting a temperature check to enter a place just drives people bonkers. They’ve even gone so far as to print up cards from a fake government agency that says under the ADA, you can’t discriminate based on wearing a mask. Turns out, you absolutely can. Just have to make a reasonable accommodation and work around the mask. Like use text messaging to someone who’s hard of hearing and reads lips. And when there are real consequences to their actions, it’s never their fault or worse, the consequences don’t exist. Schrödinger’s virus perhaps?

And not to place all the blame on the right, even though I do think the right has largely lost its way on cultural issues in the age of Trump. But there is a strong virtue signaling aspect to it on the left. It’s fairly common here in the Triangle in North Carolina to be very public about masking. I see people running in wide open trails with one on, which seems odd unless you’re actually sick (in which case why are you running?) But there’s definitely something disconcerting about the public shaming that goes on of people who are like, out in a field, and some scold yells to put their mask on.

But what makes this really, really dumb is the absolutely vapid nature of it all. There’s not some grand principle at play. At least in the abortion conversation, the two sides are extremely principled in their stances: bodily autonomy vs. protecting life. And the religious liberty debate features liberty vs. universalism. What does the mask debate really boil down to? It’s a piece of cloth on your mug. Not an invasive medical procedure, not a tax, not anyone taking your property. It’s not brave to run around saying I WILL NOT COMPLY. You look like a dunce. Don’t be a dunce.

I’m thinking it’s time to wrap this up. But suffice it to say, this whole thing has me mystified and probably why this read kind of as a stream of consciousness. Maybe I’m losing my mind in quarantine. Either way, I really think there’s a strong case to be made for embracing the ideal of personal responsibility and avoiding strict lockdowns that come with increasing COVID case growth. With that,

WEAR YOUR DAMN MASK.