Daily Archives: 17 April 2019

Vaccination and Quarantine

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Various jurisdictions in a number of States have begun barring unvaccinated students from schools following an outbreak of a contagious disease, particularly measles and chicken pox (so far).

Some school districts in the US are booting unvaccinated students from campuses where infectious-disease cases have been confirmed, as the spread of measles accelerates in some states.

“Quarantining” on the basis of vaccination status (not the classic quarantine, which blocks departure from a specific location, but one that prevents entry into specific locations) is hitting the courts, too.

In Kentucky, 32 cases of chickenpox at Our Lady of the Assumption Church and Academy in Walton resulted in unvaccinated students being removed from school in March for three weeks, the time it would take for symptoms to appear. An 18-year-old unvaccinated student lost a lawsuit challenging the ban on religious beliefs.

The court ruled entirely correctly on that suit.  A family is entirely within its rights to decline vaccination on religious grounds.  However, that right does not extend to exposing others to the outcome of that non-vaccination; that family may not expose others’ children to the disease targeted by the vaccination.

Nor do such families have any right to expose other families’ pocketbooks to the costs of outcomes from non-vaccination.  Families exercising their right to not vaccinate cannot, legitimately, inflict the costs of treatment on other families, whether those other children have been vaccinated or not.

Budget Surpluses and the IMF

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…and the US, at the just concluded International Monetary Fund meetings in DC.

The IMF, backed by the US, has pressed Germany and others with budget surpluses to cut taxes or raise spending to prop up growth. Countries with budget surpluses “should certainly make use of it and have the space to invest and to participate in the economic development and growth,” IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde said, “but not enough has been done on that front.”

The IMF has begun pressing Switzerland to spend more, too.

A little bit of this is accurate.

Several US States have set up rainy day funds into which they put budget surpluses in order to build up the resources for State emergencies or to tide them over during a recession without having to borrow excessively.  There’s no reason nations can’t do the same with their surpluses; indeed, such a savings pile should come first.

Once the savings have been built to a satisfactory level, though, surpluses should be used to cut taxes and to pay down debt (which is future taxes), never to increase spending.  Leave the citizens’ money in their hands; they know more about how to use it than Government.

Above all, don’t use surpluses in any effort to counteract the forces of a free, capitalist market.  For the vast majority of cases, market problems are self-correcting and only made worse by activist government intervention.