This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, April 22nd, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Government-run vaccine passports are a bad idea,

but what about prohibiting private parties

from doing something similar with no government involvement?

Is that similarly anti-freedom?

Samuel Staley of Florida State University argues that it's fundamental to America that people be allowed to meet out

their own associations and there are few situations where your choices do not

create consequences. I recorded a podcast a while back with Jeff Singer and Julian

Sanchez. Okay. And it was about the notion of vaccine passports. Oh yeah.

Very controversial, very hot right now.

And among libertarians, it seems that the predominant opinion that I see is, uh, hell no. Hell no, and we don't really care what the circumstances are.

Interesting.

And my thought is, there are private people who have a certain clientele and they want to serve

that clientele the best they can and they would be well served by having information about the people who enter their businesses.

And there are people who want to patronize those places. And they want to patronize those places and they want to feel safe.

And maybe it's a predominantly older group, maybe it's predominantly immunocompromised people who want to feel safe even though they've

you know they've all received a vaccine and they're feeling a little better than they were

feeling a year ago a a little more safe.

And I don't hear anyone trying to even address that.

Yeah, that's an interesting thing.

So one of the things I do at Florida State is I advise a lot of group,

...