If the economic disruption from the convoy locking down Ottawa requires a quick end to that protest, doesn’t that apply also to the disruption from the Covid lockdowns? You have written eloquently about the folly of much of the world’s Covid policy, about how the FDA Delenda Est and the extra abuses perpetrated on children as a result of indefensible decisions on the part of politicians. You have called for change repeatedly, and as far as I can tell, entirely sensibly.
How, in your model, does change happen? Existing leaders do not have an incentive to improve policies in the absence of their victims creating such an incentive. Perhaps the leaders responsible can be voted out in the next round of elections, but how much damage, economic, social and medical, is needlessly caused in the interim?
If a rapid end to the protests is needed, the Canadian government can quickly lift the restrictions. While legislation is often slow, it seems unlikely that they would be incapable of repealing these laws quickly if they actually wanted to. Economic disruption to Ottawa is obviously regrettable, but you seem to be striking a much more urgent tone regarding this disruption than regarding the disruption the world has faced over the past two years.
I notice I am confused.
Trying to steelman your position, one could say that perhaps the disruption to Ottawa is more intense than that produced by the government lockdowns (is this true?), or that allowing policy to be so sharply influenced by a subset of the people is dangerous to the rule of law, and would cause more problems later, regardless of any benefits in the short term. But this still doesn’t seem plausible, to the best of my ability to judge plausibility and moral consistency. The policies implemented during this pandemic were murderous, as you yourself documented quite brilliantly. Do you believe that the convoy is doing even a tiny fraction of the harm of banning the vaccines for most of 2020, actively interfering with Covid testing or locking down the entirety of Canada (and most of the rest of the world as well)? Yet while you noted (correctly, as far as I can tell) that such regulations should be lifted, I never saw such urgency as “[this is] the time to realize this won’t go away in reasonable time on its own and step in and say enough”. One could say that the truckers saw the disruption of the Canadian economy and are doing exactly that.
That sounds a lot like the defenses of the social justice protests as a ‘health emergency’ a while back. And when I think about your argument, it basically implies that the Canadian government has no right to stop anyone from doing almost anything except perhaps physical violence. I don’t think one mistake or failure implies another, or that it would be reasonable to expect the government to allow it.
It’s reasonable in some situations to say that the government has indeed lost legitimacy (something akin to the ‘mandate of heaven’) and of course there has to be a sufficient level of failure/malevolence by a government where it is justified to attempt to overthrow it via increasingly illegal and disruptive (even lethal) means depending on what’s happened, whether or not it was elected, but if one goes down that road one accepts the consequences.
Maybe it also depend on how the aftermath of those 2y of covid will play out, if there will be credible investigations on the proportionality of the measures and judicial or at least political consequences for the people who decided to implement them, if we will be back to normal as if nothing had happened with those 2y not even mentioned in 10y, or if instead narrative is that the west was saved by its visionary leaders and great pharmaceutical sector, so let’s do more of the same, just to be ready, you know.
As you said in the bounded distrust analysis, the times they are a-changin, and the old rules no longer apply. 2y ago i would have agreed. Now i feel a lot of sympathy to those truckers from the other side of the atlantic, because the option 3 is not a parody, it’s on the table, clearly.
Do you believe that the Canadian government has a special moral status akin to the Mandate of Heaven or Divine Right of Kings, such that they may take actions that would be considered immoral in any other context? Quod licit Jovi, non licit bovi?
Where does the idea of legitimacy come from? Every state has claimed legitimacy, and every criminal would if they believed anyone would take their claim seriously. What separates legitimacy from special pleading?
The obvious answer would be Schelling points. Someone needs to uphold the law, and if just anyone is permitted to, there is a risk of clashes between people with different views of the law, and a risk that people will commit atrocities while claiming the sanction of the law. This is a common argument against vigilantism. One could further strengthen the Canadian government’s case by appealing to unity of command: it is better to have one mediocre plan that everyone enacts than ten brilliant plans which fail to be implemented because no one could agree on which one to try. Unity of command is essential, and it requires common knowledge of who decides the plan. Even if they are not very good at it, being the Schelling point for coordination creates a genuine reason to follow that coordination, so long as doing so is beneficial.
So long as doing so is beneficial.
But if the justification for according Ottawa special privileges is that doing so will produce better results for Canadians, then the limit of those privileges is the point at which the government’s actions are net harmful. It’s one thing to support uses of government authority that you believe will benefit the people. It’s quite another to support government authority because you believe the government inherently has the right to control people. Your argument implies that so long as a “legitimate” government does not cross the line into a certain degree of incompetence or evil, it has the right to dictate people’s actions regardless of the consequences. It’s worth noting that that’s a much stronger claim than is usually made for government! Plausible arguments for government usually center around some mechanism whereby the state is supposed to produce better results than liberty: correcting market failures, solving coordination problems, enforcing cooperation on prisoners’ dilemmas. The argument that the state is allowed to produce worse results, yet still be justified, is much harder to carry.
You do, of course, note that a loss of legitimacy can occur. But that raises two questions. First, why would we tolerate harmful policies under a “legitimate” regime if we have the option of improving them? It feels as though there is an implication that this is a binary, that reform through popular force can only come at the cost of losing all benefits of the government, and thus that it ought only to be considered when the state is net negative (or whatever other criteria you consider to lose it its putative legitimacy). But why would that be the case? One could draw a parallel to the Civil Rights Movement, which quite sharply altered policy without eliminating the benefits of the rule of law.
And second: we have seen senseless restrictions on masking, testing and vaccination. These then morphed into requirements for all three, even in situations where this made no sense as epidemiology. We have seen the economy disrupted, the medical system disrupted for anything other than Covid (one of my best friend’s grandmothers died in 2020 because the hospital refused to let her in after she took a dangerous fall...), the supposed benefits of quarantine completely ignored when it was politically convenient during the BLM riots, Paxlovid slowed without reason, and a complete disregard for the public in the middle of a lethal pandemic. This has indisputably contributed to a catastrophe that has claimed over 20 million lives. Where is the line, if this didn’t cross it long ago?
Sure. But protesting, even disruptive protesting, does not have to result in regime change. Also, there’s a high cost if the government knows it can get away with arbitrary harm.
Indeed. That’s why covid end game is so important. It will signicantly affect what liberal democracy really means (which is very much what governments can go away with, plus relative strenght of various other power centers). This continuously change, but sometimes much more rapidly, like after sep 11, or during those last 2 covid years.
I hate the direction of most of these changes since 30y (berlin wall falls...), and those last 2y are especially bad.
The most brutal way of understanding a pandemic in economic terms is to view humans as “widgets”
lockdowns can be thought of as recalling a defective product
the value of humans is marked down, leading to an economic crash
through a mixture of vaccination and infection, we create covid-proof humans. Some of the non-covid-proof humans die. In order to avoid the law of diminishing returns we need lots of different production methods. The hot mess of vaccination/restrictions being loosened to get more people infected is a feature, not a bug
eventually most humans will be either dead or covid-proof
If the economic disruption from the convoy locking down Ottawa requires a quick end to that protest, doesn’t that apply also to the disruption from the Covid lockdowns? You have written eloquently about the folly of much of the world’s Covid policy, about how the FDA Delenda Est and the extra abuses perpetrated on children as a result of indefensible decisions on the part of politicians. You have called for change repeatedly, and as far as I can tell, entirely sensibly.
How, in your model, does change happen? Existing leaders do not have an incentive to improve policies in the absence of their victims creating such an incentive. Perhaps the leaders responsible can be voted out in the next round of elections, but how much damage, economic, social and medical, is needlessly caused in the interim?
If a rapid end to the protests is needed, the Canadian government can quickly lift the restrictions. While legislation is often slow, it seems unlikely that they would be incapable of repealing these laws quickly if they actually wanted to. Economic disruption to Ottawa is obviously regrettable, but you seem to be striking a much more urgent tone regarding this disruption than regarding the disruption the world has faced over the past two years.
I notice I am confused.
Trying to steelman your position, one could say that perhaps the disruption to Ottawa is more intense than that produced by the government lockdowns (is this true?), or that allowing policy to be so sharply influenced by a subset of the people is dangerous to the rule of law, and would cause more problems later, regardless of any benefits in the short term. But this still doesn’t seem plausible, to the best of my ability to judge plausibility and moral consistency. The policies implemented during this pandemic were murderous, as you yourself documented quite brilliantly. Do you believe that the convoy is doing even a tiny fraction of the harm of banning the vaccines for most of 2020, actively interfering with Covid testing or locking down the entirety of Canada (and most of the rest of the world as well)? Yet while you noted (correctly, as far as I can tell) that such regulations should be lifted, I never saw such urgency as “[this is] the time to realize this won’t go away in reasonable time on its own and step in and say enough”. One could say that the truckers saw the disruption of the Canadian economy and are doing exactly that.
That sounds a lot like the defenses of the social justice protests as a ‘health emergency’ a while back. And when I think about your argument, it basically implies that the Canadian government has no right to stop anyone from doing almost anything except perhaps physical violence. I don’t think one mistake or failure implies another, or that it would be reasonable to expect the government to allow it.
It’s reasonable in some situations to say that the government has indeed lost legitimacy (something akin to the ‘mandate of heaven’) and of course there has to be a sufficient level of failure/malevolence by a government where it is justified to attempt to overthrow it via increasingly illegal and disruptive (even lethal) means depending on what’s happened, whether or not it was elected, but if one goes down that road one accepts the consequences.
Maybe it also depend on how the aftermath of those 2y of covid will play out, if there will be credible investigations on the proportionality of the measures and judicial or at least political consequences for the people who decided to implement them, if we will be back to normal as if nothing had happened with those 2y not even mentioned in 10y, or if instead narrative is that the west was saved by its visionary leaders and great pharmaceutical sector, so let’s do more of the same, just to be ready, you know. As you said in the bounded distrust analysis, the times they are a-changin, and the old rules no longer apply. 2y ago i would have agreed. Now i feel a lot of sympathy to those truckers from the other side of the atlantic, because the option 3 is not a parody, it’s on the table, clearly.
Do you believe that the Canadian government has a special moral status akin to the Mandate of Heaven or Divine Right of Kings, such that they may take actions that would be considered immoral in any other context? Quod licit Jovi, non licit bovi?
Where does the idea of legitimacy come from? Every state has claimed legitimacy, and every criminal would if they believed anyone would take their claim seriously. What separates legitimacy from special pleading?
The obvious answer would be Schelling points. Someone needs to uphold the law, and if just anyone is permitted to, there is a risk of clashes between people with different views of the law, and a risk that people will commit atrocities while claiming the sanction of the law. This is a common argument against vigilantism. One could further strengthen the Canadian government’s case by appealing to unity of command: it is better to have one mediocre plan that everyone enacts than ten brilliant plans which fail to be implemented because no one could agree on which one to try. Unity of command is essential, and it requires common knowledge of who decides the plan. Even if they are not very good at it, being the Schelling point for coordination creates a genuine reason to follow that coordination, so long as doing so is beneficial.
So long as doing so is beneficial.
But if the justification for according Ottawa special privileges is that doing so will produce better results for Canadians, then the limit of those privileges is the point at which the government’s actions are net harmful. It’s one thing to support uses of government authority that you believe will benefit the people. It’s quite another to support government authority because you believe the government inherently has the right to control people. Your argument implies that so long as a “legitimate” government does not cross the line into a certain degree of incompetence or evil, it has the right to dictate people’s actions regardless of the consequences. It’s worth noting that that’s a much stronger claim than is usually made for government! Plausible arguments for government usually center around some mechanism whereby the state is supposed to produce better results than liberty: correcting market failures, solving coordination problems, enforcing cooperation on prisoners’ dilemmas. The argument that the state is allowed to produce worse results, yet still be justified, is much harder to carry.
You do, of course, note that a loss of legitimacy can occur. But that raises two questions. First, why would we tolerate harmful policies under a “legitimate” regime if we have the option of improving them? It feels as though there is an implication that this is a binary, that reform through popular force can only come at the cost of losing all benefits of the government, and thus that it ought only to be considered when the state is net negative (or whatever other criteria you consider to lose it its putative legitimacy). But why would that be the case? One could draw a parallel to the Civil Rights Movement, which quite sharply altered policy without eliminating the benefits of the rule of law.
And second: we have seen senseless restrictions on masking, testing and vaccination. These then morphed into requirements for all three, even in situations where this made no sense as epidemiology. We have seen the economy disrupted, the medical system disrupted for anything other than Covid (one of my best friend’s grandmothers died in 2020 because the hospital refused to let her in after she took a dangerous fall...), the supposed benefits of quarantine completely ignored when it was politically convenient during the BLM riots, Paxlovid slowed without reason, and a complete disregard for the public in the middle of a lethal pandemic. This has indisputably contributed to a catastrophe that has claimed over 20 million lives. Where is the line, if this didn’t cross it long ago?
It isn’t enough for the government to become net harmful. It has to be worse than the cost of moving to a new government.
Sure. But protesting, even disruptive protesting, does not have to result in regime change. Also, there’s a high cost if the government knows it can get away with arbitrary harm.
Indeed. That’s why covid end game is so important. It will signicantly affect what liberal democracy really means (which is very much what governments can go away with, plus relative strenght of various other power centers). This continuously change, but sometimes much more rapidly, like after sep 11, or during those last 2 covid years. I hate the direction of most of these changes since 30y (berlin wall falls...), and those last 2y are especially bad.
And yet the history of protests specifically involving trucks frequently does lead to coups.
The most brutal way of understanding a pandemic in economic terms is to view humans as “widgets”
lockdowns can be thought of as recalling a defective product
the value of humans is marked down, leading to an economic crash
through a mixture of vaccination and infection, we create covid-proof humans. Some of the non-covid-proof humans die. In order to avoid the law of diminishing returns we need lots of different production methods. The hot mess of vaccination/restrictions being loosened to get more people infected is a feature, not a bug
eventually most humans will be either dead or covid-proof