Russell Roberts's Blog, page 104

Some Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley has a justified beef with the California government’s destructive efforts ostensibly to help workers at fast-food restaurants. Two slices:

On Monday, state lawmakers in California, where the minimum wage is already $15 an hour, passed legislation that raises it to as much as $22 for fast-food workers. The bill would create a state commission with the authority to determine not only wages but also hours and working conditions at fast-food franchises. Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsomhasn’t said whether he’ll sign it into law and has until Sept. 30 to decide. But labor leaders and progressive activists, who know that what starts in California often doesn’t stay there, are hoping that the bill will serve as a model for workplace regulation nationwide. Heaven help us.

Proponents of a higher wage floor always say it’s needed to help lift the poor, and they play down or ignore significant trade-offs. Most poor people already make more than the minimum wage, and the people who do earn the minimum are much more likely to be teenagers or young adults working part-time (as I was) than they are to be the family’s sole breadwinner. Poor people need jobs more than they need a minimum-wage hike, and raising the minimum results in fewer employment opportunities than would otherwise be available. California’s new commission would be able to mandate how much Burger King pays you, but it can’t force Burger King to hire you in the first place.

…..

Last year, the economists David Neumark and Peter Shirley released an assessment of academic research on minimum-wage hikes that had been published over the previous three decades. The authors found that close to 80% of the papers they surveyed showed negative employment effects in the form of fewer jobs or hours, and that the negative impact was strongest for teenagers, young adults and people with less education. Because blacks and Hispanics are overrepresented among such workers, minimum-wage increases can also widen racial disparities.

Empirical evidence matters little to social-justice do-gooders, who maintain that government mandates are the best way to address inequality. But people in California and the rest of the country ought to know the cold facts and disappointing history of such schemes. You don’t help people by destroying low-paying jobs or by making it too expensive for employers to hire them. Rather, you help people by making them more productive. And that first job, however menial or low-paying, can be the first step in developing productive attitudes and skills that will serve someone well for a lifetime.

James Harrigan and Antony Davies identify three ill-consequences of student-loan ‘forgiveness.’ A slice:

Second, colleges and universities will respond to this new reality by raising tuition commensurately. Tuition and fees were a pretty constant 18 to 19 percent of family income from the 1960s until 1978. In 1965, the federal government started guaranteeing student loans. In 1973, Congress established Sallie Mae and charged it with providing subsidized students loans. And by 1978, tuition and fees had started a steady march to 45 percent of family income today. When the government makes it less painful for students to borrow, whether by guaranteeing, subsidizing, or forgiving loans, it takes away some of the pain of student borrowing, which makes it easier for colleges and universities to raise tuition.

GMU Econ alum Dominic Pino, writing at National Review, explains that Robert Lighthizer is not a national hero. Two slices:

Two Republican senators, Ben Sasse (Neb.) and John McCain (Ariz.), opposed Lighthizer’s nomination in 2017 on the grounds that his trade-war policies would harm American farmers by restricting their export markets. (Cory Gardner of Colorado was the only other Republican to vote against his nomination.) Their fears turned out to be justified when U.S. agricultural exports declined by $27 billion due to retaliatory tariffs under Lighthizer’s watch. Seventy-one percent of those losses were from soybean exports, and farmers had to be bailed out in 2019. Direct farm aid ballooned to $32 billion in 2020, larger than the entire Department of Agriculture’s discretionary budget. And American soybean farmers are still feeling the effects now.

…..

With lines such as “America became great by using subsidies, but mostly tariffs, and an America First policy,” Lighthizer is telling [Harry] Scherer that he fundamentally holds the same view as the Left on how economic growth happens. It was Barack Obama who told American entrepreneurs, “You didn’t build that,” and pointed to government policies as the ultimate source of economic prosperity. If subsidies make America great, then the billions of dollars in green-energy subsidies the Biden administration is doling out are smart policy, and subsidies for baby formula should be producing a thriving and resilient market.

In one important sense, Lighthizer is no different from the radical environmentalists who want to raise energy prices and transportation costs. Both want to make you poorer for your own good. They would define “good” differently, but the instinct is the same. It’s an instinct conservatives ought to reject. We ought to believe in the American people and their ability to create, adapt, prosper, and enjoy the fruits of that prosperity without the heavy hand of government to guide them.

Colin Grabow continues to document damage done by the cronyist Jones Act.

Scott Gerber reviews GMU law professor David Bernstein’s new book, Classified. A slice:

Bernstein is the libertarian law professor and blogger who has done more than anyone else to “rehabilitate” the U.S. Supreme Court’s widely reviled liberty of contract decision, Lochner v. New York (1905). In fact, he titled his book about the case Rehabilitating Lochner: Defending Individual Rights Against Progressive Reform (2011). Bernstein’s thesis in Rehabilitating Lochner was that the Court’s decision in Lochner was well grounded in precedent, and that modern constitutional jurisprudence owes as much to the limited-government ideas of Lochner proponents as to the more expansive vision of its Progressive opponents.

Turning to Bernstein’s new book, most Americans already know that racial classifications are ubiquitous in American life. What makes Classified a must-read, however, is Bernstein’s legal history of their origins, his avalanche of evidence about how increasingly arbitrary and incoherent they are, and his proposed solution for cleaning up the mess they have created that, a mess that quite frankly, must be cleaned up if America is to truly be a nation committed to equal opportunity for everyone.

Arnold Kling wants economists to do less pop research and more research that’s economically relevant – and he’s got a few good ideas along these lines.

George Will is correct about Mikhail Gorbachev:

He is remembered as a visionary because he was not clear-sighted about socialism’s incurable systemic disease: It cannot cope with the complexity of dispersed information in a developed nation. Like Christopher Columbus, who accidentally discovered the New World, Gorbachev stumbled into greatness by misunderstanding where he was going.

…..

In 1988, when the French were about to celebrate and sensible people were about to regret a bicentennial, Gorbachev impertinently lectured the United Nations: “Two great revolutions, the French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian Revolution of 1917, exerted a powerful impact on the very nature of history.” Two? It was America’s revolution that unleashed the world-shaking passion for freedom grounded in respect for natural rights. The Soviet Union, hammered together by force and held together by iron hoops of bureaucracy, never achieved legitimacy as the United States has exemplified it — the consensual association of a culturally diverse population.

“Remembering the madness of lockdown.” A slice:

“A few enterprising barbers in my area began offering ‘illegal’ hair-cuts in the local park. I was half-way through getting my hair balayaged when the police arrived and we had to hide in the bushes until they’d gone.”

Tracy Høeg tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

New paper from @sdbaral et al on early impact of the covid-19 response
In LMIC [low- and middle-income countries], could lead to
1.4 million excess TB-related deaths by 2025
28,000 additional maternal deaths yearly
36% increase in malaria deaths over 5 yrs
6.7 million additional children <5 w/malnutrition
+ more

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 18 of the late Nobel-laureate economist Ronald Coase’s brilliant article titled “The Federal Communications Commission” – an article that first appeared in the October 1959 issue of the Journal of Law & Economics:

This “novel theory” (novel with Adam Smith) is, of course, that the allocation of resources should be determined by the forces of the market rather than as a result of government decisions. Quite apart from the malallocations which are the result of political pressures, an administrative agency which attempts to perform the function normally carried out by the pricing mechanism operates under two handicaps. First of all, it lacks the precise monetary measure of benefit and cost provided by the market. Second, it cannot, by the nature of things, be in possession of all the relevant information possessed by the managers of every business … to say nothing of the preferences of consumers for the various goods and services….

DBx: Each of the above two points – so familiar to all economically literate persons – are among the key arguments against industrial policy that advocates of such policy continue to ignore. Advocates of industrial policy have never bothered to explain just how the political officials charged with carrying out such a policy will get the detailed information that they must have if their interventions into the market are to improve the economy’s overall performance.

We proponents of free markets have an explanation of how such information is gotten and used rather well, if never perfectly, when markets are allowed to operate. (See, for example, here, here, here, and here.) It’s not as if industrial-policy advocates have an explanation of such knowledge acquisition and use by government officials that shows how industrial policy might outperform the market. No. Industrial-policy advocates simply don’t bother to answer the question of how industrial-policy mandarins will learn what these mandarins must learn in order to out-perform the market. The issue is completely ignored by industrial-policy proponents as if it is irrelevant or of only secondary importance. Yet, in fact, no economic issue can be more central and important.

We are, I take it, to accept the purported ability of industrial-policy mandarins to outperform the market as a matter of blind faith.

Nor Does the Free Market Read Shakespeare

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to Compact:

Editor:

Decrying the trade-offs that economic reality requires be made by people who start or grow families, Robert Orr complains that “[t]he free market doesn’t care about your family” (“The Free Market Doesn’t Care About Your Family,” August 16).

With due respect, this complaint is inane. The free market is simply the process of commercial exchanges and other voluntary interactions that occurs when government leaves adults unimpeded to engage peacefully with each other. Not being sentient, the free market not only doesn’t care about your family, it cannot possibly do so. A complaint such as Mr. Orr’s makes no more sense than complaining that English grammar or the Mississippi river doesn’t care about your family.

However, the free market does – especially but not only by increasing our material prosperity – enhance the ability of each of us to successfully care for our families. Mr. Orr is free to dispute this claim. It is, after all, an empirical one, and so is perhaps incorrect. But even Mr. Orr cannot seriously dispute a second claim about families made by those whom he smears as “libertarian ideologues,” which is this: Rather than socialize and politicize – and, hence, dilute and distort – responsibility for the care of the family, the free market concentrates responsibility for the care of each family on those persons – namely, parents and grandparents – who are in the best position to know, and who care most deeply about, the family’s needs and opportunities.

So, yes, the free market indeed doesn’t care about your family. In a free society, such caring is, as it ought to be, your responsibility. And you, as a decent husband, wife, or parent, should loathe having matters otherwise, for with responsibility comes authority – and no reasonable person wants his or her authority as a family member diluted, circumvented, or obstructed by politicians or bureaucrats.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 181 of the 2016 Mercatus Center re-issue of my late colleague Don Lavoie’s indispensable and now-more-relevant-than-ever 1985 volume National Economic Planning: What Is Left?:

The point is that the only way we even know which lines of production are better suited to concentrate on and to what extent is by observing the outcome of market rivalry. Whether we are squandering resources by over- or underinvesting in microprocessors or steel can be revealed only by the message contained in the relative profitability of rival firms in these industries. But this is precisely the information we garble when we channel money toward one or another of the contenders.

DBx: Proponents of industrial policy who accuse proponents of free markets of having “blind faith in markets” have got matters backwards. Such an accusation is indeed, as described by my intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy, “baloney.” Those with blind faith are those who would distort or even eliminate the information-generation process of market competition and replace this process, as a means of allocating resources, with the diktats of politicians and bureaucrats who inevitably lack knowledge not only of what to produce for final consumption, but of how best to produce whatever final-consumption items are chosen for production. The result would be a massive waste of resources, as well as a stifling of innovation – because genuine innovation is inherently incompatible with the sorts of economic plans that are “industrial policy.”

Some Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Jon Miltimore writes informatively about the transformation on covid policy of Dr. Leana Wen. A slice:

The good news is that Wen, to her credit, appears to have learned something throughout the tragedy of the Covid pandemic, as have so many others.

The tragedy is that for so long she overlooked tradeoffs and used her platform to advocate coercive policies that deprived individuals of the ability to choose, a tragedy that is compounded by the fact that Wen now finds herself a target of cancellation for advocating a more sensible approach.

It’s an ironic twist considering that only a year ago Wen herself was a proponent of confining unvaccinated people to their homes, and not one we should celebrate.

But hopefully it can be a learning experience for Wen and others, who now recognize the danger in turning what should be individual decisions over to bureaucrats and political tribes.

Also weighing in on covidians’ cancellation of Leana Wen is the Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal. A slice:

But her columns in recent months have sung a new Covid tune, encouraging governments to drop mask mandates and embrace “individual responsibility.” This is what some of us have argued all along. But no political epiphany goes unpunished. And now more than 600 activists are demanding that the American Public Health Association cancel her as a panelist at a conference this autumn.

The subject of her panel: “Harassment, bullying and death threats: Staying the course while under attack.” She is supposed to give advice to fellow public-health officials about how to brave a backlash to their overreaching policies. Now she’s under attack for walking back support for the left’s overreaching policies.

Her opponents accuse her of promoting “unscientific, unsafe, ableist, fatphobic, and unethical practices.” They take issue with a column in which she argued that large events such as Washington’s Gridiron Club dinner in April should go on despite the contagion risk. “This is our new normal—one that’s based on individuals being thoughtful about their own risks and the risks they pose to others,” she wrote.

Dr. Wen’s positions “assumed a capacity for personal responsibility that was not available to vast swaths of the population,” Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation epidemiologist David Swedler told Inside Higher Ed. He captures the mindset of the public-health ruling class: People are too stupid or selfish to be allowed to make their own choices.

K. Lloyd Billingsley is rightly critical of U.S. government policy that prevents tennis star Novak Djokovic from playing in the U.S. Open. A slice:

The ban on Djokovic is a project of Joe Biden, who declares that all non-citizens traveling to the United States must be vaccinated. Djokovic rejects vaccination based on “the freedom to decide what you put into your body.” Biden denies that freedom and claims his policy offers “science-based public health measures,” but Djokovic has to wonder.

He did get Covid, and that grants a certain immunity, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci. On the other hand, fully vaccinated Fauci and fully vaccinated Joe Biden both got Covid, which is not the best support for the claim of science. As embattled Americans might recall, Biden called Covid “a pandemic of the unvaccinated.”

Bhaskaran Raman poetically conveys the lockdowner’s lament.

Green Bay Packers’ future Hall of Fame quarterback Aaron Rodgers talks with Joe Rogan about the vileness of covid-vaccine mandates. (HT Tim Townsend)

Dr. Kulvinder Kaur reprises her wise tweet from nearly two years ago: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

Lockdowns do not save lives

Lockdowns are catastrophic
Lockdowns are unscientific
Lockdowns cost human lives
Lockdowns cause suffering
Lockdowns cause suicides
Lockdowns harm children
Lockdowns cause mass global poverty, starvation & deaths

Lockdowns are crimes against humanity

Under the headline “Income Equality, Not Inequality, Is the Problem,” Phil Gramm and John Early write in the Wall Street Journal that “[t]hose in the middle work much harder, but don’t earn much more, than those at the bottom.” A slice:

On these pages, we have debunked the myth that income inequality is extreme and growing on a secular basis by showing that the Census Bureau measure of income fails to include two-thirds of all federal, state and local transfer payments as income to the recipients and fails to treat taxes paid as income lost to the taxpayer. The Census Bureau measure overstates current income inequality between the highest and lowest 20% of earners by more than 300% and claims that income inequality has risen by 21% since 1967, when in fact it has fallen by 3%.

Our most significant finding from correcting the census income calculations wasn’t the overstated inequality between top and bottom earners. It was the extraordinary equality of income among the bottom 60% of American households, regardless of employment status. In 2017, among working-age households, the bottom 20% earned only $6,941 on average, and only 36% were employed. But after transfer payments and taxes, those households had an average income of $48,806. The average working-age household in the second quintile earned $31,811 and 85% of them were employed. But after transfers and taxes, they had income of $50,492, a mere 3.5% more than the bottom quintile. The middle quintile earned $66,453 and 92% were employed. But after taxes and transfers, they kept only $61,350—just 26% more than the bottom quintile.

Emma Camp reports that now “New Yorkers under 21 can’t buy whipped cream cans.”

Jennifer Huddleston is no fan of Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s proposed so-called “Journalism Competition and Preservation Act.” Two slices:

What this bill reveals is that the heart of the antitrust crusade by Klobuchar and other neo-Brandeisians is not actually about consumer protection or small businesses. They seek to use antitrust and the force of the government to protect the companies and industries they prefer.

The JCPA pits digital platforms like Facebook and Google against “traditional” media services such as newspapers. To “help” these traditional media companies against the supposedly big, bad tech companies, the JCPA mandates that platforms pay news publishers to link to their articles, creates an artificial limit discouraging news platforms from expanding their newsrooms’ reach to reap the law’s benefits, and creates an eight-year safe harbor from existing antitrust laws including allowing news companies to collude with one another. In short, this proposal empowers the government to help out its favored, eligible news services while also attacking today’s successful tech companies. The real losers, however, are the American people.

…..

But the potential damage that laws like the JCPA could do is not purely theoretical. We can look at the consequences Australia has faced in light of a similar law. Like the JCPA, Australia’s Media Bargaining Code was portrayed as protecting journalism from its loss to social media. Its actual results remain murky at best, and the way it’s designed favors certain media players like Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Increasingly, it has been revealed that proposals like the JCPA are less about helping local news and more about crony capitalism.

Today’s journalists face many serious challenges, including the pressure to conform rather than innovate and improve. But the JCPA would further fail today’s independent journalists, decrease the amount of information available, and raise costs for consumers, small outlets, and online platforms.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from pages 64-65 of the 1903 3rd edition of Edwin Cannan’s Elementary Political Economy:

It is true that each individual’s income is generally produced by the co-operation of many individuals, but it is not true that the co-operation carried on by means of exchange creates a joint or aggregate income which has to be divided among the cooperators.

DBx: Cannan offers this observation in that part of his book in which he warns of the misunderstanding lurking in phrases such as “the distribution of wealth” and “the distribution of income.” In a market economy, wealth and income are not distributed; they are earned by each recipient (or gotten by gift or bequest from the producers of the portions of income and wealth that are gifted or bequested).

The resulting pattern at any particular time of earned, gifted, and bequested monetary wealth or income can, of course, be arrayed from lowest to highest and the resulting array called “the” distribution of wealth or income. But here the term “distribution” is a noun – and, further, it’s a noun that does not refer to the verb “to distribute” (or at least not to this verb describing real-world differences in wealth or income). Confusion arises, however, because talk of “the distribution of wealth” or “the distribution of income” too easily gives the impression that the measured, statistically reported array of wealth or incomes is the result of some action described by the verb “to distribute.”

This confusion is only heightened by talk of wealth or income redistribution. Talk of wealth or income redistribution is talk of the consequences of an activity. “Redistribution” here always refers to the consequence of the action described by the verb “to redistribute.”

The above-quoted passage from Cannan warns us also against falsely supposing that a nation’s economy is akin to the operation of a business firm. Unlike for a firm such as Apple Inc., there is for a market economy no overall concrete purpose and, hence, no plan. Workers, entrepreneurs, investors, and firms in a market economy are not inputs into some giant and planned production process that, should all work according to design, generates profitable results for the economy. Instead, a market economy is what Hayek called an order while a firm is an organization. These two different modes of human cooperation differ from each other categorically.

I suspect that much of the anger or upset that proponents, from the left and right, of ‘redistribution’ feel toward differences across persons or households in income or wealth arises from these ‘redistributionists” false belief that the national economy is a giant firm. These ‘redistributionists’ don’t understand that the gains (and losses) of each participant in a market economy depend exclusively upon how well that participant better enables his or her fellow citizens to pursue their individually chosen plans. And not only do the gains of each producer in a market economy reflect that producer’s productivity – and hence are not decrements from the income or wealth of others – such gains are also not the result of any design or plan. Therefore, for the economically literate person there is nothing at all unfair or unjust in even huge differences in the incomes earned, and the wealth possessed, by individuals or households within a market economy.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 22 of George Will’s superb 2019 book, The Conservative Sensibility:

A government thus limited [as proposed in the American Declaration of Independence] is not in the business of imposing its opinions about what happiness the citizens should choose to pursue. Having such opinions is the business of other institutions – private and voluntary ones, including religious ones, that nourish the conditions for liberty. The Founders did not consider natural rights reasonable because religion affirmed them; rather, the Founders considered religion reasonable because it secured those rights.

DBx: Indeed so.

I am not religious, yet I’m convinced as an empirical matter that religious belief has often – although not always – served to secure the natural rights that are necessary if a great commercial society such as ours is to survive and flourish. I do not, however, believe that religion is the only source of such security. But I do believe that such security of natural rights – whether supplied by religion or by some secular ideology – is essential if liberal civilization is to last.

To Advocate Industrial Policy Is to Pose As a Fortuneteller

(Don Boudreaux)

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A correspondent continues to e-mail me to insist that I am unfair to the national-conservatives’ case for industrial policy.

Mr. F__:

You claim in your latest e-mail that I’m wrong to argue that I and other opponents of industrial policy “have a theory of how markets acquire information to allocate resources but researchers calling for industrial policy like Oren Cass do not.” You elaborate by writing that you

don’t know of any accurate prediction by free marketeers like [Milton] Friedman, [F.A.] Hayek and the tenured economists at George Mason of what the economy of tomorrow is going to look like. Why should Oren Cass be criticized for not having any accurate prediction?

You’re correct that those of us who you call “free marketeers” offer no predictions of what will be the details of the economy tomorrow. The reason for our refusal to so predict is central: Essential to our opposition to industrial policy is precisely our recognition that no human mind or minds can make any such accurate predictions regarding a modern economy that sustains, at high material standards, the lives of billions of people. We understand that such an economy can succeed only insofar as it relies upon the never-ending process of trial-and-error in competitive markets by entrepreneurs, unobstructed by government, to experiment with new ways to use resources. To the extent that such a market process is allowed to operate, the result will be the on-going discovery of ever-better, but never perfect, ways to use resources.

In stark contrast, proponents of improving the overall economy by using industrial policy necessarily claim to know enough about the economy’s hyper-complex and ever-changing particular, local facts in order to predict in incredible detail both what the economy would look like tomorrow in the absence of industrial policy and what it will look like as a result of industrial policy. Support for industrial policy, then, is support for empowering government officials today to (attempt to) impose on the economy patterns of resource allocation that are predicted to be tomorrow better than would be the resource-allocation patterns that would arise absent industrial policy.

In summary, central to the case for free markets is recognition of the impossibility of detailed economic prediction, while for industrial policy to work as its proponents advertise these proponents must be able to predict the future not only under alternative scenarios but also in amazing detail.

Anyone who proposes to improve the performance of the overall economy by using industrial policy necessarily is someone who presents himself or herself as a fortuneteller. The fact that most proponents of industrial policy are unaware that they pose as fortunetellers only further discredits their case for industrial policy.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: “Scale of state”

(Don Boudreaux)

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In my column for the April 22nd, 2013, edition of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review I warned – with the help of an insight from Walter Lippmann – against a common error committed by people who are willing to turn ever-more power over to the state. You can read my column, with a link added, in full beneath the fold.

(more…)

Some Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Richard McKenzie details many of the ways that Biden & Co. fail Econ 101. A slice:

Even more importantly, President Biden appears oblivious to the unseen but inevitable effects of his well-intended “green” policies, which is to say that he doesn’t seem to realize that he cannot aggressively pursue a green-energy policy—a central goal of which is drastic reductions in fossil fuel emissions over the coming years and decades—without a spike in the prices of various sources of energy, and not only oil prices, which rose by nearly three-fifths during his first year in office. This is because he has or plans to adopt long-term policies that restrict fossil fuel production and distribution such as, for example, terminating the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to the middle of the country and prohibiting drilling on federal lands. The result of these long-term supply restrictions can be expected, as intended, to push up fossil fuel prices and at the same time shift demand to higher-cost and less reliable energy sources such as solar and wind.

Cato’s Colin Grabow continues to write insightfully about the cronyist and harmful Jones Act (and New Englanders had better hope for a mild winter).

Wall Street Journal columnist Allysia Finley explains that “student-loan forgiveness is really a bailout for woke higher ed.” Two slices:

Some argue that even if jobs don’t require a college education, a bachelor’s degree can help employers screen for attributes such as a strong work ethic and sense of personal responsibility. That might have once been true. But professors report that many students nowadays don’t show up for class or turn in assignments on time, make ridiculous excuses, and try to intimidate instructors into being treated leniently.

…..

Government subsidies have been driving too many young people to pursue degrees whether or not they are worthwhile investments. The president’s loan forgiveness and 5% income cap on monthly loan payments will compound all these misaligned incentives that have produced a growing class of underemployed and over-credentialed young progressives.

The Babylon Bee‘s reaction to Biden’s ‘forgiveness’ of student-loan debt is excellent.

According to Ian Miller, “Fauci has caused such tremendous damage throughout the past few years that it’s almost impossible to comprehend.” Two other slices:

The incomprehensible amount of lying that Fauci has done over the past few years extends past masks to lockdowns and business closures and capacity restrictions.

Fauci now claims that he never said to lock down the country.

Except, of course, that’s exactly what he said on the record in 2020….

…..

The headline of a story out of Jacksonville in April 2021 read: “Fauci: Opening Florida for business as COVID-19 variants surge a ‘risky proposition.’”

Just a few months prior to this remark, he had pointedly criticized Florida for reopening, only to see other states that followed his advice have significantly worse results.

You’d think that being proven wrong would create some humility, uncertainty, and willingness to admit mistakes.

But that’s not what Dr. Fauci does.

Instead, he doubled down, and said that Florida reopening in April 2021, months after vaccines had been available, was “risky.”

Except that California reported significantly higher rates of age-adjusted COVID mortality than Florida for all of the first and second quarters of 2021, with mask mandates and capacity limits for part of that time frame….

Podcaster Alan Miller talks with Sunetra Gupta, one of the three co-authors of the great Great Barrington Declaration.

Evidence continues to accumulate that Australia’s tyrannical response to covid – a response diametrically opposite that which is recommended in the great Great Barrington Declaration – has failed even on the narrow grounds of protecting Australians’ health.

Toby Young offers here a long extract from Jonathan Sumption’s excellent recent piece in The Times.

Martin Kulldorff tweets:

It will take decades, but the only way to gradually restore trust in the scientific community is to first come clean about the misguided, disastrous and unscientific covid policies that too many scientists supported.

Telegraph columnist Janet Daley wonders “why on earth did we give up our freedom without an argument”. Three slices:

We need to go on talking about lockdown. You might think now that both candidates for Tory leader have begun what is likely to be a stampede of government ministers denying they ever supported it, that the story of this unprecedented historical event was finished.

So discredited will the policy and its sinister propaganda programme have become that sooner than you might have thought possible, records will be amended and memories erased in the great totalitarian tradition, to make it appear that this terrible thing was somehow inflicted on the nation without anybody’s official approval.

So why not let it go? It’s over, thank God. It will never happen again. Let’s just forget it and get on with life as we used to know it rather than wasting time on post hoc analysis.

But we cannot – must not – give in to this seemingly reasonable temptation. Because what happened over the past two years, in this country and most of the developed world was not just a mistake: not merely a failure of judgement, or a misreading of the facts (or, more specifically, a confusion about what constitutes fact).

It was something far bigger and more alarming: a surrender of the fundamental principles of liberty and individual responsibility which we had assumed were unassailable in the West and were envied (with much consternation) in the East.

…..

So what really happened here? Not only was there the introduction by fiat of the most extraordinarily invasive legal prohibitions, exceeding anything that had been imposed in the modern era even during wartime (children were not banned from embracing their grandparents during the war, nor was it a crime to have a sexual relationhsip with someone outside your household) but any public criticism of these measures was effectively prohibited or stigmatised to an extent that was almost unendurable.

But let’s get past the outrage and condemnation and ask the real question: why? How did it come to this? The explanation has to go beyond politics – at least in the ordinary sense of the word. It has to be pathological. The world went crazy. There is no other way to account for what was an almost nihilistic dismantling not just of particular liberties and rights, but of the very idea of liberty.

…..

Making a conscious decision to embrace policies that damage the economy should be morally unacceptable except under the most horrific circumstances. Some people in power clearly thought the pandemic was such a circumstance. Other people simply used it as a pretext for shutting down an economic system that they had always disliked. If we had got the argument out in the open, that second group might have been exposed.

But there was a more insidious difference between the pro and anti-lockdown camps which is older than the divide between the supporters of free markets and the champions of command economies. Perhaps it is the most basic disagreement of all because it goes right to the heart of the human condition.

There is an eternal struggle in every organised society between the longing for freedom and the need for security. (Indeed, that struggle exists within every individual.) In political systems, those two polar impulses have taken the form of liberal democracies which prioritised freedom, and authoritarian governments which promised (often falsely) security.