This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, August 26, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Economists don't have solutions.

Economists offer trade-offs.

In the struggle between the defiantly anti-mask-warers and those who want a national

mask mandate with some teeth.

Some important considerations are being forgotten.

Tom Fiery is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and managing editor of

Regulation magazine.

We discussed masks, mandates, and trade-offs last week.

When the notion of wearing a mask in public, and not specifically in public, indoors in mixed

company became the Well, look, if the state is going to mandate this sort of thing, give businesses three options.

Masks required, Masks optional,, masks prohibited.

And if you want to have your culture war, you go right ahead,

but you have to tell your customers up front

that this is the policy and whatever the policy is we're going to

enforce it and in your you're working on a paper that basically details another element of this and that is the fact that there

are inherent trade-offs in mandates, there are inherent trade-offs for individuals,

individual businesses and individual people that are not immediately obvious right now.

So detail that for us. That's a great point. You know, your

intuition, why can't we give places options and just as long as they tell people before they come in what the option is we can sort into the

places we want to go. In fact if people visit Cato.org and Google my name. They'll find that I've argued something similar

...