Airports and airlines, governed by federal law, never relaxed their mask mandate, even for the fully vaccinated. Yet if you actually fly nowadays, you’ll notice plenty of scofflaws on the ground and in the sky.
Which raises a big question: What exactly is the punishment for failing to wear a mask?
Until you board the plane, the punishment is simply: An authority orders you to put on your mask. Once they’re out of sight, you can safely remove your mask until another authority orders you to put on your mask.
Indeed, as long as you wear your mask in the security line, you probably won’t even experience this minor punishment. From what I’ve seen, airport enforcement is now near-zero. Airport police walk past scofflaws in silence. Some of the police are wearing their masks below the nose themselves.
Once you’re on the plane, however, the strategic situation changes. Some flight attendants just look the other way. Others, however, are actively hunting for scofflaws. So what kind of punishments do these enforcers mete out?
For the first offence, the sky is the same as the ground: They order you to wear your mask. But since you’re stuck together in a flying tube, you can’t simply obey, wait for the enforcer to disappear, then remove your mask again. If the attendant cared enough to enforce the rule once, they care enough to keep enforcing it. And each time they ask, they escalate. The first pseudo-polite “request” becomes a stern order. Then they start threatening to report you to the authorities. I’ve seen the situation reach this level more than once.
Are these all empty threats? Probably, but only probably. If you’re ordered to put your mask on six times on a single flight, perhaps there will be a police officer waiting for you when you exit the plane. How far you can push your luck? I’m not the right person to ask. What I am confident of, however, is that if you bluntly defy the flight attendant, there is at least a 20% chance that the police officer will be waiting for you when you land. And if you combine your defiance with profanity, I’m confident that the odds that the police are waiting for you rises to at least 35%.
Escalation. If you really pay attention, that’s the standard mechanism of government coercion. You can break most of the laws most of the time. But once you’re on the government’s radar, they keep ramping up the punishment until you back down. Speeding goes unpunished 99.9% of the time. Once you get a ticket, however, you’d better pay it. If you don’t, the amount you owe keeps rising. Eventually, you’ll probably lose your driver’s license. If you then drive without a license, they’ll arrest you. If you keep driving without a license, they’ll jail you. And if you vigorously resist that, they’ll kill you.
The same applies, as libertarians have been saying for ages, to taxation. No agent of the government has ever held a gun to my head and told me, “Pay your taxes or I’ll kill you.” But the government will predictably escalate to gunplay if you are loudly defiant. Indeed, you could say that predictable escalation is the essence of government. Almost everyone else in society peacefully backs down if you refuse to obey them. In the classic Milgram “obedience to authority” experiment, self-styled authorities kept subjects in line with solemn words like:
The experiment requires that you continue.
It is absolutely essential that you continue.
You have no other choice, you must go on.
Nevertheless, subjects were perfectly free to flatly say, “No” and walk away. And about a third of Milgram’s subjects ultimately did.
Government does not work that way. Government will not accept “No” as your final answer. You can hide, you can weasel, you can even get a lawyer. Still, if you stubbornly and openly refuse to obey the government, it will probably kill you. Act accordingly.
READER COMMENTS
Floccina
Jan 4 2022 at 10:20am
I can see why open defiance of laws cannot be tolerated by agents of the state once they choose to start enforcement. It’s human and natural, and that is why I believe people should be very careful when making laws and setting punishment for laws.
IMO if you have speeding laws the fines should be low, like start at say $5 and should be enforced as consistently universally as possible. There may be better, creative ways to get people to slow down but until those are implemented we should do better with what we have.
Phil H
Jan 4 2022 at 7:15pm
“…should be enforced as consistently universally as possible.”
OK, but have you thought about what that means in practice? Where I live (suburbs, southern China), traffic rules are enforced with great consistency, and traffic compliance is fairly high. They do it by having cameras everywhere.
What Caplan describes isn’t wrong. It’s the natural compromise between non-regulation and the panopticon. You can have consistent enforcement if you accept an all-seeing state.
Matthias
Jan 8 2022 at 2:32am
You could have private enforcement of traffic laws (especially on private roads).
The road provider or your insurance company could even offer to install a device in your car that tracks these offences in return for a discount.
The device could be made to open specifications and be carefully programmed to forget most details apart from the amount you owe.
Not sure if any of this is likely, but it’s possible.
Jed
Jan 4 2022 at 10:40am
This is interesting to read, mostly because its relevant to our family but in the context of young children which IMO is the most science-deficient and absurd part of the mandate. We have 2 young children (4yo and 2yo) and my wife’s sister is returning home from serving in Portugal as a missionary for our Church. Returning is culturally a big deal in our faith and it’s something everyone in the family makes an effort to attend. Sans COVID it would be simple – we would take a direct flight offered by Allegiant to Las Vegas to welcome my sister-in-law at the airport (and spend a week there on vacation escaping the frigid temperatures of Southeast Idaho). But with the mask mandate, we unfortunately will not be flying. There is no way on heaven or earth our energetic 2yo would wear a mask for any length of time and we’ve read about too many people being stranded or kicked off a flight (and therefore forfeiting hundreds of dollars) because their toddler wouldn’t wear a mask.
Another problem most people without young kids don’t think about: When you fly with toddlers, you bring with you their car seats, which most airlines let you check for free. But in cases we’ve read about, when you’re kicked off a plane they don’t reopen the bowels of the plane and fish out your luggage, including car seats. Which means you’re literally stranded at the airport (in our case with non-stop icy roads) with no safe way to get home and your important belongings are at an airport hundreds of miles away. All for having a 2yo who wouldn’t keep a cloth mask on that probably makes a micro-marginal difference at best.
We might brave the drive, but it means I would have to take two days of PTO that otherwise might be spent on actual vacation. Instead they might be spent driving 11 hours each way with two toddlers.
Jon Murphy
Jan 4 2022 at 11:07am
Your probabilities are way off here, Bryan. It’s closer to 100% if you get belligerent. The punishment to the crew is essentially loss of their livelihood. They are not taking nonsense from anybody
Art Carden
Jan 4 2022 at 11:56am
Regulations like these are also a great way to create a police state without looking like you’re creating a police state. If the feds put a “Mask Marshal” on every flight who was charged with making regular announcements and who walked the aisles to threaten people who weren’t masked properly, people would probably be outraged. By “delegating” in-flight enforcement and regular hectoring to flight attendants, they get all the power and none of the blame: in my admittedly anecdotal experience, people blame the airlines for strict-but-senseless enforcement.
Jon Murphy
Jan 4 2022 at 12:30pm
I’ve been thinking about exactly that with some other regulation folks. In my mind, I’ve been calling it “secondary enforcement.”
It seems like the same thing is happening in NYS right now with the new mask mandate. The enforcement falls upon the businesses, not the state. The businesses face the fines and penalties for mask violations and are essentially (through HHS regulations) required to enforce to be hit by the health department
Gene
Jan 4 2022 at 2:09pm
After 2 years of this, I no longer make confident pronouncements about people being “outraged” about anything. A few would, yes. Most would shrug their shoulders and accept yet another ratcheting up of control.
Jon Murphy
Jan 4 2022 at 4:14pm
I disagree. I admit what I am about to say is anecdotal, but I’ve seen just the opposite over the past few years where I have lived (MD, MA, NY). As the mandates press on, there is greater and greater resistance. A lot of it is passive (eg, malicious compliance), but some of it is active (eg, the massive protests around the world against lockdowns and mandates).
Jens
Jan 6 2022 at 2:19am
I’m actually quite amazed at how little protest and unrest there is after these long-standing pandemic periods (often media presentation also overemphasizes a small loud minority). Especially considering that the political opponents of the incumbent governments often try to jump on justified concerns and problems of the citizens.
Tom West
Jan 9 2022 at 12:54pm
Interesting. I’d say that in Ontario Canada, the opposite is true. We’ve had vastly stricter lock-down / mask mandates, etc. with a Conservative party government and the government is generally taking flack for being not strict enough. (They only closed restaurants to dining in and locked down to 5 people gatherings after Christmas, for example).
I suspect the pandemic really is highlighting the differences between freedom-minded and safety-minded cultures. I am slightly surprised to see just how sharp the divide is across the Canada/U.S. border.
It should be noted, however, that part of Canadian provincial governments’ moves towards heavier virus control is motivated by the fact that we don’t have the extra slack in our health services. One of the trade-offs for health costs about 1/3 that of the U.S. is not a lot of unused capacity for a rainy day. And it’s definitely been raining for the last two years. To simplify greatly, our choices were between 1/3 the US death rate or 3x the US death rate.
João Pedro
Jan 4 2022 at 11:40am
In this case it appears mask regulations are government-mandated. But what about private mask mandates? Should a libertarian obey those?
KevinDC
Jan 4 2022 at 2:48pm
Yes, of course. Where I live (Minnesota) mask mandates at the statewide level have been basically repealed, outside of a few narrow and specific circumstances. However, individual establishments are still free to mandate masks if they so choose, and some do. A few weeks back, I went to the Apple store to pick up a Christmas gift for someone, and they require all customers wear masks to enter the store. So, I did. Their property, their rules, and I’m fine with that. In a free market, a deal will not take place unless the terms are acceptable to both parties. In this case, one of Apple’s terms was wearing a mask to enter the store – and I was willing to meet those terms to carry out the transaction. Someone who says otherwise would be on tenuous ground describing themselves as “libertarian,” at least as I understand the term.
Fazal Majid
Jan 4 2022 at 11:54am
This is so typical of extreme libertarian ideology unmoored from practical considerations. A government incapable or unwilling to enforce its own laws will succumb to anarchy, Somalia-style, or be replaced by another that will, as happened to the Weimar Republic. Free markets and political freedoms require as a minimum prerequisite consistent and reliable enforcement of the laws, whether good, bad or indifferent, which is why it took the 19th Century to escape the malthusian trap.
robc
Jan 4 2022 at 2:02pm
In Parliament of Whores, P J O’Rourke had a chapter titled “Would you kill your mother to pave I-95?” The point being, as pointed out by Bryan, that all government action is enforced, eventually, with violence.
I agree with you that government needs to enforce its rules, but combining the two observations means that there is little that government should be doing. What is worth the ultimate price? There are some laws that are necessary, and my Mother should obey them, and I can’t really complain if she tries to fight the government. But most of what government does isn’t worth dying for. And that is the ultimate standard.
Jon Murphy
Jan 4 2022 at 4:12pm
Recall that a lot of the issues with police brutality and qualified immunity in this country is that the cops are not acting in self-defense when they kill a suspect. And some folks (like Eric Gardener) were killed for trivial things, like selling cigarettes. Bryan’s take is a little rhetorically hyperbolic, but it is nothing close to ignorant.
Mark
Jan 4 2022 at 5:14pm
That’s why Martin Shkreli got 7 years in prison, and Elizabeth Holmes will get three. Max. And even that in a cushy no-fence prison. He was loud, stubborn and didn’t want to bow down to authority. As a matter of fact, he called for “scalping” of Hillary Clinton! The gvmnt doesn’t like cowboys like that. Clyde Darrow, Dillinger… All criminals, teasing the gvmnt, ended up almost the same way.
Mark Z
Jan 4 2022 at 9:18pm
Well that and being a pretty young woman helps shave a few years off a sentence.
steve
Jan 4 2022 at 11:13pm
Pretty sure flight attendants are not govt agents so dont really see the point of the story. Anyway, just so we all know, how would you enforce property rights without ever resorting to violence?
Steve
David Henderson
Jan 5 2022 at 10:28am
Jon Murphy above explains how the government HAS made flight attendants into de facto government agents.
AMT
Jan 6 2022 at 9:25am
Translation: if you threaten the safety of officers, they will engage in self-defense.
False. You will not be killed unless you threaten to kill or seriously harm others, which is, by the way, a serious crime that is separate from the initial offense. What actually happens to everyone who peacefully refuses to cooperate, is prison, not death.
Pierre Lemieux
Jan 8 2022 at 2:38pm
But what if you escape prison? And what about Waco?
AMT
Jan 9 2022 at 9:21am
What do you think is the relevance? You think Waco was peaceful refusal to cooperate?
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