It is really the same debate. There’s no chance we are all going to agree at what the level is, but at some level individuals are going to have to make choices that will impact not only their own safety and that of others.
And when those lines are drawn, such as deciding what a speed limit is, I do tend to favor those rules being set at the most local level. But I also believe that some of those rules should be set at the individual level.
This is probably not the best analogy but whether kids wear a mask in school is a kin to how much fast food they are allowed to eat. I just don’t think any level of government has the right to tell an adult and furthermore what they allow their children to eat. All you can do is educate them, encourage them and ask how they’re doing but in the end they have to make that decision for themselves.
I have to agree with
@CWSooner on this one.
The better analogy to masks is speed limits, not how much food a kid is allowed to eat.
While there are negative externalities to overfeeding a child with a trash diet (later health care costs, some of which may end up being borne by taxpayers), the primary effect of overfeeding a child is that it's screwing up that child's health.
Whereas in the middle of a pandemic, where we're dealing with a contagious virus and a respiratory disease, it's a completely different thing. Because one person, knowingly or unknowingly, might acquire the virus and transmit it to someone vulnerable, there are times when we have to make policies to reduce that spread that override individual choice, because the decision to wear a mask or not doesn't only affect the individual.
We wouldn't set speed limits at 65 mph in a residential area because it would likely cause too many crashes and deaths, because the ability for one person to hurt an innocent other is MUCH more likely if we do. Yet at the same time we don't set speed limits at 25 mph on the freeway, because we have determined that the cost to society of slower travel is worse than the death toll of freeway crashes--which aren't trivial numbers.
I personally don't feel it really matters either way whether kids have to wear masks in school. I don't see it as some horrible thing that will hurt them (as some do here), and given the absolutely minimal impact on kids from this virus, don't think it's saving them. I *did* feel that kids should have to wear masks in school before the vaccine availability was widespread, though, because although child-to-adult transmission appears to be less common than adult-to-adult transmission, adults who were vulnerable had no real recourse to protect themselves. But now that we have the vaccines, they do.
All that said, I disagree with the idea that a state government should
prohibit local governments from enacting more restrictive measures than the state itself requires. If Broward's school board or county gov't thinks it's necessary to have a mask mandate in schools to reduce spread, I think that should be Broward's decision, not made in Tallahassee.
