2020 was a challenging year for the restaurant industry. The National Restaurant Association reports that 17 percent of restaurants in America have closed, with many more on the brink of failure. Restrictions on capacity and indoor service during the coronavirus pandemic forced many restaurants to pivot to a carry-out or delivery model.

For restaurants without a pre-existing, self-run delivery system, delivery systems like DoorDash and GrubHub were critical to reaching customers. These services publicize restaurants, process orders, and deliver food via independent couriers. These companies remain profitable by charging restaurants and customers fees for this convenience.

However, lawmakers around the country have begun to crack down on what they consider unreasonable fees. Los Angeles, New York City, Seattle, Chicago, and Washington, DC are among the cities that have imposed caps on the fees that delivery services can charge. These caps are misguided.

Introducing price controls will disincentivize delivery services from partnering with low-volume or remote restaurants, from increasing contractor pay, or from improving service. To make up for the revenue shortfall from restaurant fee caps, DoorDash and GrubHub will likely increase delivery and service fees for customers, which will then reduce demand for these services and ultimately harm restaurants.

Trying to protect restaurants while increasing costs to consumers is thus short-sighted. Many restaurants have failed, and many more will. Fee-limiting policies targeting the delivery middlemen will at best prolong the inevitable and more likely hasten that outcome.

The first wave of Pfizer and Moderna COVID vaccines arriving at health facilities across the country in the past few weeks sparked optimism that we may soon see a light at the end of the tunnel. As more people get vaccinated, the goal of herd immunity—where enough of the population is immune to the virus to prevent its easy spread to the vulnerable—becomes more attainable.


Markets provide the most efficient means of distributing the vaccine to those who want and need it. Instead, policymakers on all levels of government have chosen the opposite: central planning. Now we read of reports in the news than many frontline health workers—those assigned top priority for immunization—are not following the plan. They are reluctant to take the vaccine.

On New Year’s Day, the Los Angeles Times reported that anywhere from 20 to 50 percent of Southern California health care workers are refusing immunization. The New York Post reported similar resistance in New York, Ohio, and Texas.

This is very disappointing. Frontline health workers are not only at greater risk of contracting the virus but at greater risk of spreading it around their institution or bringing it home. It is reasonable to expect that, with their background in health care, they would have a greater appreciation for the value as well as the reported safety and efficacy of the two new vaccines. The longer it takes to get an estimated 70% of the population immunized, the longer it will take to reach herd immunity. (Of course, the millions of people who have already contracted and recovered from COVID are immune as a result and contribute to the goal of herd immunity as well.)

Many people who public health officials designated as lower priority for the vaccine are particularly frustrated to learn of this news. They very much want to receive the vaccine but are currently denied the chance, while vaccine vials allocated to first priority designees may go unused since manufacturers require them, regardless of any state policies or lack thereof, to be discarded if they are stored beyond safe time periods.

This unfortunate paradox—people denied vaccination while some unused vaccines are discarded— should come as no surprise to those aware of the failures of central planning. Markets provide the most efficient and accurate way of getting goods and services to those who most value them. In the face of the national public health crisis, policymakers instead resorted to central planning.


At this juncture, the federal government is the purchaser of all COVID vaccines and distributes them to state governments according to state population requirements. The states, in turn, delegate state, county, and municipal public health agencies to work with local health care providers to immunize the population. While the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued guidelines to prioritize who gets vaccinated, states reserve the right to establish their own priority schedules, and some states have not followed CDC recommendations.

Central planning suffers from a lack of local knowledge along with an inability to rapidly adjust to changes in supply and demand. Therefore, it is fortunate that our federal system allows for 51 different possible central plans instead of just one. This reduces potential harm from a one-size-fits-all plan and allows the various states to learn from one another’s experiences. In most instances, states are establishing phased approaches to immunizing the population. Initially, the highest priority groups receive the vaccine. Lower priority groups are phased in as vaccine supplies permit.

As long as central planning remains the approach to immunizing the population, one way to mitigate the unfortunate misallocation of vaccines described above might be to follow the approach most commercial airlines use for boarding planes. States should consider announcing in advance a schedule that, say, gives the first 2–3 weeks of vaccines only to the top priority people; then the next 2–3 weeks to the top plus the next priority level; then the next 2–3 weeks to the first three priority levels, and so on. This way, if first priority people choose not to take the vaccine, lower priority people who wish to take it will not miss out on the chance to do so before the first vaccine batch needs to be discarded. It would also incentivize people in the higher priority levels to hurry up and get vaccinated before the lines get longer.

This proposal might help to reduce the waste of precious vaccine and permit more people who both want and need the vaccine to get it.

News reports indicate that COVID-19 vaccinations in the United States are happening more slowly than officials promised and in comparison to other countries. Some health care providers are racing — and some are failing — to administer their stock vaccines before they expire. In one case, more than 500 doses spoiled when an employee removed them from a freezer, allegedly on purpose.

These episodes highlight just some of problems inherent to using government rationing rather than market prices to distribute vaccines.

If manufacturers and retailers could charge, and consumers could pay, whatever they like, distribution of COVID-19 vaccines likely would be more rapid than today and likely none of the existing stock would expire.

Anecdotal reports indicate that some consumers are willing to pay $25,000 to receive the vaccine. If retailers could make thousands or even hundreds of dollars in profit from every dose they sell, they would have the incentive and the ability to invest greater resources in securing the vaccines and distributing them quickly. They would take greater steps to protect the vaccines from sabotage by deranged employees. (The law could also do so, if penalties for destroying the vaccines rose with the market valuation of each dose.) They would hire more personnel (e.g., nurses) at higher-than-usual wages to organize distribution and/​or to administer the vaccines. They could even train more personnel to administer vaccines — and form a lobby to demand that states suspend government regulations that prevent them from doing so.

If manufacturers could make thousands or even hundreds of dollars in profit from every dose they sell, they would have greater incentive and ability to expand production and produce more vaccines faster.

Would market prices guarantee that vaccines would go to the highest-value recipients first? Not at all. But market allocation doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to outperform the alternative of government rationing.

In an earlier post on government vs. market distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, I wrote, “If the government could allocate vaccines in a way that gets more of them to the highest‐​value recipients than market forces would,” then government distribution would be defensible. But, “To improve on market forces, government must actually know who the highest‐​value recipients are[,] actually be able to allocate vaccines on that basis, [and] not detract from whatever good market forces would do on their own, or…diminish the incentives for pharmaceutical companies to boost production.” That does not appear to be happening.

Government rationing is detracting from the good that market forces would do, and slowing the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, by diminishing the incentives for speed and security on the part of manufacturers and retailers. In many cases, it is resulting in low-value recipients receiving vaccinations before high-valued recipients do. It is diminishing the incentives for manufacturers to accelerate production. And in some, cases it is costing lives by allowing vaccines to spoil.

Mona Zhang has a good piece on marijuana and political corruption at Politico. She writes:

In the past decade, 15 states have legalized a regulated marijuana market for adults over 21, and another 17 have legalized medical marijuana. But in their rush to limit the numbers of licensed vendors and give local municipalities control of where to locate dispensaries, they created something else: A market for local corruption.

Zhang describes how the mayor of Fall River, Massachusetts, allegedly tried to extort $600,000 from cannabis companies in exchange for granting them sales licenses. She discusses numerous other cases in a “rash of cannabis-related corruption across the nation, from Massachusetts to California to Arkansas and beyond.”

The problem is not marijuana, but rather that politicians are overregulating and micromanaging the market. Zhang notes:

Almost all the states that legalized pot either require the approval of local officials — as in Massachusetts — or impose a statewide limit on the number of licenses, chosen by a politically appointed oversight board, or both. These practices effectively put million-dollar decisions in the hands of relatively small-time political figures — the mayors and councilors of small towns and cities, along with the friends and supporters of politicians who appoint them to boards … They have also created a culture in which would-be cannabis entrepreneurs feel obliged to make large campaign contributions or hire politically connected lobbyists.

It is sickening that people in “public service” are not satisfied with their fat salaries and pensions and seek illegal ways to further line their pockets. But that is what excess regulation often leads to, particularly when governments put artificial limits on valuable items and then dole out access in a discretionary manner. Chicago has been plagued by corruption partly because the government requires businesses to obtain masses of permits, licenses, and other approvals, and then gives individual city council members discretionary power over whether to grant them.

A similar problem exists with the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC), as discussed here. The federal government assigns each state a fixed amount of valuable tax credits, which the states dole out to local governments who distribute them to their favored developers. That setup has led to LIHTC corruption scandals in Dallas, Los Angeles, and other cities.

For the marijuana market, Zhang finishes her piece touching on the solution to the corruption problem:

States that have largely avoided corruption controversies either do not have license caps — like Colorado or Oklahoma — or dole out a limited number of licenses through a lottery rather than scoring the applicants by merit — like Arizona. Many entrepreneurs, particularly those who lost out on license applications, believe the government shouldn’t be in the business of picking winners and losers and should just let the free market do its job.

Congress is set to pass a $2.3 trillion spending bill, including $900 billion in further coronavirus relief.

The bill is an astounding 5,585 pages in length, including 544 pages for coronavirus relief, 1,915 pages for appropriations, and 3,126 pages for extensions and corrections.

If it were printed at 11 inches per page, that’s 61,435 inches or 5,120 feet. Since there are 5,280 feet in a mile, the bill is almost a mile of paper end to end.

Yesterday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that the drug overdose death rate, already accelerating after a brief pause in 2018, increased at an alarming rate coinciding with the mobility restrictions and emotionally stress of the COVID-19 pandemic. There were more than 81,000 overdose deaths during the 12 months ending in May 2020—a new record. There were just over 71,000 deaths reported for the 12 months ending in December 2019.

To be sure, the isolation, loneliness, and anxiety of the pandemic and its management exacerbate mental health problems, including substance use disorder. Their effect on the overdose rate was noted by White House “drug czar” Jim Carroll in the late spring of this year.

But the most important feature of the latest report from the CDC is the fact that illicit fentanyl, made in clandestine labs in Asia and Mexico, was responsible for roughly 57 percent of all overdose deaths. Cocaine was found in roughly 22 percent of overdoses. And methamphetamines were found in 23 percent of all overdose deaths.

Yet the CDC maintains its focus on doctors prescribing opioids to their patients in pain in its list of recommendations for dealing with this dispiriting news. It tells health care providers to co-prescribe the opioid overdose antidote naloxone to their pain patients when they prescribe high doses of opioids—despite the fact that prescription opioids account for an ever-decreasing percentage of the drugs involved in overdose deaths, with overwhelming evidence that the overdoses are from illicit drugs obtained in the black market. As Josh Bloom and I recently pointed out, the crackdown on prescription opioids has fueled a “street drug epidemic” while it has harmed patients in pain.

The CDC also gives lip service to a few harm reduction strategies in its recommendations. For example, it recommends more widespread distribution of the overdose antidote naloxone, without urging the Food and Drug Administration to reclassify naloxone as an over-the-counter drug—an obvious way to increase its dissemination.

The CDC also encourages the expansion of medication assisted treatment (MAT) programs with drugs such as methadone and buprenorphine, which it recognizes as the most effective form of treatment for substance use disorder due to opioids. Yet it makes no mention of proposals to deregulate methadone and buprenorphine treatment programs by letting health care practitioners more easily prescribe these drugs to their patients, as they do in many developed countries. Congress can build upon the temporary relaxation of MAT regulations during the COVID pandemic and implement permanent reforms.

The tragic report by the CDC lacks the boldness to admit that restricting patients’ access to legal drugs (e.g., prescription opioids in the case of opioid-related deaths and pseudoephedrine in the case of methamphetamine-related deaths) has, if anything, inflamed the drug overdose crisis while harming patients. It failed to argue for reforming or repealing laws that obstruct harm reduction strategies. So it should come as no surprise that it failed to identify the ultimate source of the drug overdose crisis: drug prohibition and the dangerous black market it fuels.

As my Cato colleague Chris Edwards and I have been documenting here recently, COVID-19 has accelerated the longer-term migration of many Americans from expensive cities like New York and San Francisco to places with lower taxes and a lower overall cost of living. Examining changes to LinkedIn members’ zipcodes and various cost-of-living metrics, Bloomberg’s Misyrlena Egkolfopoulou today provides more evidence of the “Expensive Exodus”:

Citing these and other data, as well as various anecdotes, Egkolfopoulou concludes that cost of living — especially housing — is playing a “major role” in movers’ decisions:

[S]ome of the most expensive urban areas [are] seeing the biggest population loss versus previous years. Outbound moves in the Bay Area rose 8% in May-September, compared with the same period in 2019, while Seattle and New York both experienced a 7% increase… Meanwhile, Jacksonville, Raleigh, Charlotte, Nashville and Phoenix were among cities with the most inbound moves, according to the Webster Pacific and United Van Lines data.

She adds that tax policy is another important driver:

…Covid-19 is accelerating a decision that was being made by scores of others even before the pandemic. While cost of living, lifestyle, property prices and jobs influence the moves, the cities that are attracting the most people are in states with lower or zero local income tax rates.

As Edwards and I have noted, these migration trends pre-dated COVID-19 but have been amplified for wealthier Americans who are more likely to be working from home during the pandemic and have the means to change addresses relatively quickly. While their departure from expensive “superstar” cities has been cheered by some, the University of Toronto’s Richard Florida warns that this trend could have a serious impact on local budgets: “A whopping 80% of New York City’s income tax revenue, according to one estimate, comes from the 17% of its residents who earn more than $100,000 per year. If just 5% of those folks decided to move away, it would cost the city almost one billion ($933 million) in lost tax revenue.” He remains optimistic about superstar cities’ long-term prospects but warns that, if these places’ “policies don’t change, their budgets will suffer in the meantime, and their least-advantaged people and neighborhoods will bear the brunt of it as budget cuts and austerity measures eliminate key services.” Because Florida blames much of the current exodus on the 2017 federal tax law’s limitations on deductions for state and local taxes (SALT), which once gave high-tax cities “a fighting chance against their lower-tax rivals,” he suggest that city and state governments develop “new revenue models that account for the locations of both the people and their businesses” to counter the “effect of new remote technology on state and local taxes.”

However, that approach would seem to ignore the many non-tax reasons why wealthier Americans — now unburdened by a physical office — are leaving costlier places (though the SALT deduction is indeed likely playing a role). Most notable in this regard is housing: beyond the home price data noted above, for example, St. Louis Fed’s Regional Price Parity (RPP) indices, which allow economists to compare living costs across state metro areas, shows that rent differences between out-migration states and in-migration states are in most cases quite substantial:

A novel “revenue” solution also elides the far more straightforward policy approach that high-cost states and cities could undertake: attacking costs head-on through less-punitive taxes (on both income and goods), less regulation (especially for housing), better governance, and more personal freedom. As Edwards notes in his 2018 paper, such policies could not only dissuade current residents from leaving, but also attract new people and investments.

These places can’t change their weather, but they can certainly improve their economic climate.