Mandates, Lockdowns and the Law with Richard Epstein. Part 2 | EP90

In this episode we talked about:

 

 • Richard’s view on Government Policies

 • Covid Mandates

 • Effects on businesses

Part 1: https://workingcapitalpodcast.com/mandates-lockdowns-and-the-law-with-richard-epstein-part-1-ep89/

 

Transcription:

Jesse (0s): Well, welcome to part two of our two part series with Richard Epstein. We talked a little bit about the pandemic and its global impact last week. We're going to continue that conversation today for those that don't know, Richard is a legal scholar. He's been practicing law for 40 years, was a professor at New York university and is also part of the Hoover Institute. So without further ado part two, what I'm curious about is we've had a number of different policies. You're at the state that you're in right now in California and New York state is probably most similar to a lot of the policies that we've had Canada wide now to the, the Supreme court.

 

 

First of all, it's interesting to see Clarence Thomas actually talking now and asking questions. I feel like he's, he's there to fill the, fill the Scalia void, but on these policies of mandates, this is what I'm curious about. I have people like we all do family members that are on opposite sides of this that maybe experts may not be experts. But what we're talking about is from a constitutional point of view, I guess, in the states and in Canada, we're facing a number of different policies most recently in Quebec, not surprisingly Quebec, their premier Francois legal, just basically put forth.

 

I'm thinking that they're going to try to put this into law to actually tax the unvaccinated as a, as a group. There's a number of legal scholars in Canada that think that that is a impingement on our charter freedoms, so that I'm sure is going to be played out over the next few months. But from a libertarian perspective perspective, a classical liberal perspective, the, the very aspect of somebody saying you can't do something or you have to do something. Maybe you could talk a little bit of, of how that is, is happening in the states and maybe extrapolate that to, to what we're seeing in.

 

Richard (1m 56s): Yeah, this was when I mentioned that the ups at the opening of the show that we got ourselves into mind, all that is not forbiddenness required. And so there's nobody in the middle. The reason why this is a terrible situation is that knowledge essentially equates in two different ways, this sort of background knowledge about the overall distribution of certain kinds of cases. And then there's private knowledge that you have about where does it fit into that particular distribution. So for example, if you know that you're at St my age and there's a very high risk of getting COVID, if you've got co-morbidities and you know, you don't have any coat, that is, was what bothers you is scout, which is not a comorbidities for these purposes.

 

Then what you do is you tamp down. If you're in other direction, you tamp up. So the theory is that in all of these cases, you have this two tier situations, generalize information is provided by collective authorities. That specific information is gathered by patients or in consult with their doctors. The moment you start putting these kinds of mandates on what you're saying is a certain kind of information matter. And it turns out it matters enorm