'Public Health' Has Become a Catchall Excuse for Bad IdeasFrom to-go cocktail bans to Neil Young to teachers unions, the pandemic has provided a convenient pretext for selfish advancement.
By Peter Suderman
February 1, 2022
One of the notable developments of the pandemic era has been the tendency to use public health as a pretext for some other goal that has little or nothing to do with public health. You can see this, in different ways, in everything from Neil Young's war on Spotify and Joe Rogan to teachers union recalcitrance to President Joe Biden's legislative agenda. But let's start with an issue close to my heart: the fight over to-go cocktails in the state of New York.
Until the onset of COVID, it was illegal to purchase a to-go cocktail in New York. Bars and restaurants were strictly limited to on-premise sales. Legally, you couldn't take your end-of-night Appletini home with you. But when local officials shut down indoor dining in 2020, they made an allowance: Cocktails produced in a bar could be sold for takeout consumption. Suddenly, that Appletini became a grab-and-go purchase.
Like many policies enacted in spring 2020, New York's legalization of to-go cocktails was passed on an emergency basis. And in June 2021, the emergency authorization expired rather unexpectedly.
One reason why it expired was that liquor stores, who would prefer to have the market for booze consumed at home all to themselves lobbied heavily against extending the policy. So it's no surprise that in the weeks since New York's Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul announced that to-go cocktails would be back on a permanent basis, liquor stores have renewed their campaign to stop the policy.
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Everywhere you look these days, you can see versions of this tendency, in large and small ways: Teachers unions have spent the last two years using public health fears as an excuse to stay out of classrooms. Biden and congressional Democrats have used the pandemic as an excuse for massive expansions of social spending that have little to do with responding to the coronavirus.
It's not that every emergency measure or public stand taken in response to the pandemic has been a cynical act of self-advancement. No doubt some have been the product of sincere, if sometimes misguided, desires to improve public well-being. But some amount of cynicism seems appropriate; the totalizing emergency of the pandemic has created an aura of permission whereby moves that might otherwise seem selfish can be recast as pure and selfless when the reality is anything but.
Source:
https://reason.com/2022/02/01/public-health-has-become-a-catchall-excuse-for-bad-ideas/
