It’s a curious thing that the people who say you should leave the country if you don’t like it are so often the ones who favor legal barriers to doing it. Having the option is a valuable freedom, though.

We take for granted the freedom of Americans to travel from one part of the country to another, or at least we did until 2020. Now governments are imposing interstate travel restrictions in a futile attempt to contain a virus which is already on both sides of every state line. Shortly before I started writing this, I learned that if I travel six miles to Massachusetts, I now have to show a recent negative COVID-19 test or quarantine for 14 days. I don’t know how they plan to enforce it. Putting checkpoints on every road that crosses the state line would be ridiculous. Maybe they’ll pull over cars with out-of-state plates and demand test documentation. Maybe friends and family members will start standing on opposite sides of the state line to talk to each other as the police watch to make sure they don’t step over the border.

The freedom to “vote with your feet” is the topic of Ilya Somin’s book, Free to Move. Somin is probably best known for his writing in the collaborative legal blog “The Volokh Conspiracy.” He presents an argument for maximizing the freedom to relocate from one country, state, or town to another.
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