Alternative Title: No Lockdowns without Just Compensation!
You may remember the case of Shelley Luther, the Dallas beauty salon owner who was thrown in jail for defying a bogus court order shutting down her business during the pandemic. But have you heard of Ana Isabel Castro-Garcia or Brenda Stephanie Mata? Exactly one year and one day ago (April 15, 2020) undercover police agents in Laredo, Texas arrested these two self-employed women for operating clandestine beauty salons from their homes in violation of local coronavirus “lockdown” orders. Although these ladies faced up to 180 days in jail and huge fines, thankfully these bullshit charges were ultimately dropped. The real criminals were the public officials (the undercover police agents, district attorneys, and judges) who attempted to enforce these illegal and un-American “lockdown” orders in the first place. Why were these emergency lockdown orders illegal? That is the subject of my latest paper “Lockean Takings,” which is available here via SSRN. I will begin blogging about the main ideas in this paper next week.
I’ll read your paper at some point. Work is killing me right. One of the reason I abandoned the Adam Smith project. I’ll report back in the near future.
Ditto!
PS: here is the “tweet version”: why aren’t takings of labor a “takings”‘under the takings clause?
We have to be careful here to avoid any “labor theory of value” arguments, but I agree with this general premise. If we own ourselves, we certainly own our labor. A dynamic first observed on Locke’s 2nd Treatise on Civil Government.