In case you’re still socially distancing in a cave, yes, yet again, most Nevadans and most of our visitors must wear masks indoors once again (mandate not valid in Lovelock, Virginia City, Winnemucca, Battle Mountain, Eureka, or where otherwise not required by law).

This, along with the mandates requiring masks in our state’s two most populous school districts, attracted a ton of attention last week and understandably so. They are the most obvious, most noticeable, and most immediate demonstration that government officials believe we’re not quite done with COVID-Two Years Ago, especially now that the Delta variant is making its way into our state. Looking at our steadily increasing case count and, much more importantly, our steadily increasing hospitalization and death rate, it’s hard to argue with them.

Unfortunately, though masks are indeed better than nothing (they really are!), that doesn’t mean they’re anywhere near good enough to get us back to normal on their own. According to a report on face mask effectiveness published by the EPA in April, most household mask types have a filtration efficiency under 50 percent; in other words, they allow in or out at least as many particles, including potentially COVID-laden water droplets, as they filter out. Even so, they keep out (or in) some droplets, and when you’re about to drive into a wall, the difference between hitting it at full speed and slowing down 30 percent might be the difference between an unpleasant hospital stay and a trip to the morgue. That’s why, regardless of how you feel about mask mandates, you really should wear one anyway, especially if you’re unvaccinated.

Even so, it is a little strange that Nevada is bothering with yet another mask mandate, especially since mask mandates can’t even be enforced in Los Angeles. This is doubly true since none of the other pre-vaccination restrictions appear to be on the table — social distancing and capacity requirements remain limited solely by pre-pandemic fire codes and the eviction moratorium will expire on schedule.

What gives?

The answer is credibility. When people talk about governments having credibility, they generally prefer to talk about whether those in power actually know what they’re doing. Yes, this is partially because no op-ed columnist ever went bankrupt writing about the real or perceived ineptness of people in power, but it’s also partially because most people prefer to think happy thoughts, and nothing brings happy thoughts faster than being able to do what they want to do. If those in power are smart enough to let them do that, whatever that might happen to be, then the world would be a more pleasant place to live in, at least for them.

This particular form of credibility, however, is nowhere near as important as people think. There are always going to be people who, when told to go one direction, will reflexively go the other way out of spite. Where governments actually derive credibility from is their ability to compel. Will the government make you do what the government wants you to do, even if you’d prefer not to?

Put more concretely, do you interpret speed limits more liberally in the middle of a small town or in an urban neighborhood? It’s not like you know whether the people responsible for setting speed limits on either road are doing so on a rational basis (much of the time, it turns out, your driving is helping to set it). Your difference in behavior, if there is one, is probably based on which jurisdiction you’re more likely to think you’ll receive a speeding ticket. In this context, the Esmeralda County Sheriff’s Department is frightfully credible when it comes to militantly punishing drivers for speeding infractions, whereas most urban police departments won’t even show up with a radar gun until someone gets run over. Whether Goldfield’s urban planning department has set an appropriate speed limit for their county seat’s main thoroughfare or not is entirely immaterial (as is, for that matter, whether Goldfield has an urban planning department or not), both to you and to local law enforcement. 

In order for a government to effectively compel you to action, however, your behavior must be legible to it and it must be able to respond promptly. Paraphrasing from a paraphrasing of James Scott’s Seeing Like A State, a credible government needs to efficiently know whether you’re following the law or not, and, if you’re not, it needs to be able to quickly and reliably correct your behavior. Whether someone is wearing a mask or not is extremely legible — either the mask is on or the mask is off — which makes enforcement trivially easy provided the mandate is universal. 

By contrast, conditioning mask wearing on vaccination status was never going to work because nobody believed the government or anyone else had information, nor the willingness, to actually check vaccination statuses of unmasked people. Even corporate human resources departments, conditioned under the principle that any labor measure which is not allowed by the complex web of local, state, and federal labor laws all businesses operate under is forbidden to them, were reluctant to enforce mask mandates on unvaccinated workers even though they could gain access to each worker’s vaccination records for liability and insurance purposes. Those in power had lost credibility — not technical competence but the ability to enforce their will.

Until now.

The most important change in public policy over the past week wasn’t the reintroduction of universal indoor mask mandates — it was the introduction of ostensibly legal vaccine enforcement regulations in workplaces.

On their own, the announcement that unvaccinated government workers in Nevada, California, New York City, and the Department of Veteran Affairs will soon have to undergo weekly testing for COVID-19 affects a relatively modest number of workers, though if the rest of the federal government joins in, that alone will potentially cover over two million employees. However, private sector employers know, or at least rationally assume, that before a government commits to a sweeping policy such as this, they’ve probably run it by the very same regulators the policy would apply to. Consequently, it’s probably safe to assume that, if a private company (like, for example, MGM Resorts) copies the very same policy and applies it to their workplace, those same regulators working under the very same policies won’t object. Even if private sector employers don’t reliably follow suit, applying the same mandates to the remainder of the nation’s government employees would cover over 20 million workers.

Not a single layer of the American government could credibly enforce a vaccine mandate against the population at large, but employers, including each of our governments as employers, always could and now will. They have the medical information, they have the leverage, and workers are already conditioned to follow workplace rules and regulations. Now they’ve been given a green light and a roadmap. 

Before you get the wrong idea, it’s about time people are held accountable for their choices. For many Americans, being unvaccinated has been a choice, not a medical necessity, and like all choices, there are costs and benefits, not only for the person making the choice but also for those around them. Pandemics and infectious diseases more generally are bad for business and bad for living things. The costs are almost immeasurable, both in lost labor productivity and in lives. It’s only natural that businesses, once given a chance, will do everything within their power to prevent their employees and customers from propagating COVID-19 — even if some of their employees and patrons would rather choose to live dangerously.

However, at the risk of sounding a little wistful and naive, I preferred living in a world in which employers were a little less immediately aware of exactly how much leverage and control they had over their employees. I also preferred living in a world where the personal was a little less political, where vaccine status wasn’t some sort of in-group loyalty signal for politically active young adults, where most Americans could be relied upon to take basic preventative measures against infectious diseases, and where employers didn’t have to threaten their employees’ jobs or repetitively annoy their staff into submission before people would actually receive a vaccine or two.

I don’t know what it will take to get back to that world, if it even really existed, but I’ll tell you this — there are far more contagious and far more lethal diseases than COVID-19 out there, and we’re struggling to do the right thing against them, too.

David Colborne was active in the Libertarian Party for two decades. During that time, he blogged intermittently on his personal blog, ran for office twice as a Libertarian candidate, and served on the Executive Committee for his state and county Libertarian Party chapters. He is now an IT manager, a registered non-partisan voter, and the father of two sons. You can follow him on Twitter @DavidColborne or email him at [email protected].