Russell Roberts's Blog, page 112
August 10, 2022
Some Links
Ben Zycher explains why a ban on the exportation of oil and refined products is a bad idea. A slice:
A number of perverse Beltway ideas never seem to die despite their underlying fallacies. The latest such nostrum is the argument that a renewed ban on the export of crude oil and refined products would reduce domestic fossil-energy prices, as asserted in a recent letter to President Biden from four U.S. senators urging Biden to “preserve petroleum supplies for the U.S. and our allies.”
Just such an export ban on crude oil was implemented by the U.S. beginning in 1975. This followed the 1973 global price increases and the imposition of price and allocation regulations on the U.S. market, resulting in an artificial suppression of domestic production. (It was the regulatory regime and not the “embargo” that created the queues and massive market dislocations.) The export ban was ended by legislation in 2015, after the technological revolution in fracking and horizontal drilling yielded a sharp increase in U.S. output.
Notwithstanding ubiquitous assertions to the contrary, the ban did not reduce U.S. prices below international ones because it created a disincentive for foreign producers to export oil to the U.S. Why should foreign producers sell to us for less? Market forces thus resulted in domestic and international prices being equated, controlling for such factors as transportation costs and exchange rates. The same is true for such refined products as gasoline.
But the ban had the effect of reducing domestic production of crude oil by shrinking the market for American petroleum. According to an October 2020 Government Accountability Office report, the repeal of the export ban increased the incentive for domestic crude production, adding to market incentives that yielded the production boom that began with the fracking revolution.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Jesse Fried and Charles C.Y. Wang explain the benefits of stock buybacks. Two slices:
Much of this money, our research shows, is in fact plowed into investment. Overall investment levels, as measured by capital expenditures and R&D, reached historical record highs in six of the last 10 years, totaling $12 trillion during 2012-21. Investment intensity at these firms, measured by the ratio of investment to revenue, has also been rising over the past 10 years and is now near two-decade highs.
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Because the buyback tax is only 1%, the damage may be limited. But with this taxing mechanism in place [through the “Inflation Reduction Act”], an anti-buyback Congress will be tempted to raise the tax to a point where it causes much worse damage—to investors, workers and the economy.
Between annual shareholder meetings, Strive will employ “shareholder engagement”—lobbying managers and directors on behalf of its profit-seeking agenda. “Shareholder engagement means letters, private meetings, public meetings, etc., exercising your voice and delivering that shareholder mandate,” Mr. Ramaswamy says. “As BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard do today, Strive will do in a different way. I will be the chief ambassador for delivering those messages. And the greater capital we have in DRLL, the more weight shareholder engagement will carry with the boards and management teams of U.S. energy companies.”
Emma Camp warns of government helping parents spy on their children.
Bryan Caplan reflects on travel by train compared to travel by plane.
Here are more excellent Venn diagrams from Mark Perry.
George Leef is correct: “The government shouldn’t decide who may practice law.”
truly covid response has masked the people, masked the truth, and masked very idea of informed consent.
but it has unmasked some dire facts about both the susceptibility of the populace to orchestrated attempts to panic them and about the politicians and agencies who did so.
It’s wrong to deny school to (predominantly poor & minority) kids in New Orleans & DC because their parents are making rational health care decisions for their children. Remote or no school will harm the kids far more the the vax would help them.
Roger Watson reviews Mark Woolhouse’s book, The Year the World Went Mad. Two slices:
This is the book every lockdown sceptic has been waiting for, and I place myself firmly in that camp. But to my fellow sceptics, I would brace for some disappointment. While author Mark Woolhouse, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh, has come out of the pandemic closet and declared himself to be a lockdown sceptic, he takes some time to get there. At times the reader may be forgiven for wondering if, after all, this was the book that they meant to order. His scepticism extends no further. Nevertheless, it should be noted that this book was published before Professor Woolhouse revealed that pressure had been put on him by Messrs Whitty and Vallance, respectively the chief medical officer and chief scientist, to modify his views on social media. The author had tried to reassure the public about the likely extent of deaths from COVID-19, but this was contrary to the UK government’s narrative. None of this is mentioned in the book.
However, it is a good book. It is very readable and, as the author is one of the world’s leading epidemiologists and eminently qualified, it is incredibly informative. Look no further if you want easy-to-understand, lay explanations of concepts that became household words during the pandemic, such as the ‘R’ number, ‘generation time,’ and ‘infection fatality rate.’ Other technical aspects of the pandemic and epidemiology are likewise explained with clarity and few people will come away from the book without being better informed than they were prior to picking it up.
I detected the author’s pain in his writing. Pain at his part in the mistakes that were made (he states clearly that he was one of the people officially supporting immediate and full economic lockdown on March 23, 2020). Pain at some of the criticism and hate mail he received when he began to make it clear that the measures introduced to manage the pandemic may have been excessive. He apologises to his daughter in the dedication for this generation letting hers down. As someone who condemned the lockdown from the outset, I feel no vicarious responsibility. Moreover, he should have tried being critical of the lockdown early in 2020 when, for example, calls were made to my university to have me dismissed and I was mobbed on social media.
Woolhouse explains the essential problem was with the modelling—the so-called ‘science’—that was so influential on UK government planning and implementation of measures. The models were not ‘segmented’ which means that they treated the population as a homogeneous mass. In other words, a newborn baby was considered at as much risk of becoming infected with and dying of COVID-19 as someone in their sixties; in reality, the difference in risk is around three orders of magnitude. This led to a one-size-fits-all approach which, while intended to reduce risk equally across the demographic board, simply inflicted equal and entirely pointless misery on younger and economically active people. This approach, according to the author, was also partly implemented due to an exaggerated level of risk aversion and, while he does not say it, I will: the UK government did absolutely nothing to mitigate that, even justifying the use of the ‘virtuous lie’ to cajole the population into lockdown and to keep it there for the best part of two years.
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I undoubtedly come across as more critical of the book than I really am. But I maintain the position that lockdown was never an approach that should have been implemented. I would hold that view even if lockdown was a measure that was considered, based on evidence, effective. The cost to personal liberty was too great ever to contemplate and that was compounded in the UK by the fact that the costs of lockdown were never estimated prior to implementation. We witnessed a prolonged curtailment to basic freedoms assumed under common law of freedom of movement, freedom of association, and freedom of speech. But Woolhouse does not address this fundamental aspect of lockdown and the government’s attempt to control the COVID-19 narrative. In fact, while he clearly comes out as lockdown sceptical, it is not entirely clear why.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 495 of F.A. Hayek’s July 11th, 1978, letter to the editor of The Times (of London) as this letter is reprinted in the hot-off-the-press Essays on Liberalism and the Economy (2022), which is volume 18 (expertly edited by Paul Lewis), of The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek:
A limited democracy might indeed be the best protector of individual liberty and be better than any other form of limited government, but an unlimited democracy is probably worse than any other form of limited government, because its government loses the power even to do what it thinks right if any group on which its majority depends thinks otherwise.
August 9, 2022
On the Great Great Barrington Declaration
Upon returning to my computer this afternoon I discovered an irate e-mail from the mother of a George Mason University freshman. Here’s my reply to her.
Ms. L__:
I’m dismayed to learn from your e-mail that, because you’ve just discovered that I endorse the Great Barrington Declaration, you’re demanding that your son transfer out of my upcoming Econ 103 course. That decision, obviously, is for you and your son to make. You should advise your son to do what you think best.
But you took time to write to accuse me of “intellectual incompetence,” so I’ll take a moment to defend myself.
Because you offer no objection to the Great Barrington Declaration other than that “it is so anti-science, anti-social and anti-humane a competent professor should loudly critique it,” I challenge you actually to read the Declaration and write back to me with your specific objections. Identify particular passages that you believe are so outrageous that no intelligent person can assent to them.
The central message of the GBD is its call for Focused Protection. Do you object to this message? Do you object to the advice that protection be focused on those groups that we know – and that we knew at least as early as March 2020 – are especially vulnerable to covid, while leaving the great majority of humankind (who are not especially at risk) to continue life as normal? And if you do object, what about this advice is so outrageous that it marks anyone who supports it as being unfit to teach an introductory course in economics? (For the record, I foresee no occasion for me, in the course of mine that your son will now not take, to mention the Great Barrington Declaration.)
Or do you object to the GBD’s implicit – yet economically sound and relevant – understanding that spending resources willy-nilly to protect everyone, regardless of risk profile, from exposure to covid is to waste resources even if the only goal is to reduce illness and death from covid? After all, in many cases, resources used to protect low-risk persons from covid are resources no longer available to protect high-risk persons from covid. As all competent economists would say, reallocating resources from where they have low impact to where they have higher impact results in these resources having more impact. Do you not believe that this outcome – that is, getting from the same number of resources greater defense against illness and death – is desirable?
Or perhaps you object to the GBD’s warning that the massive and unprecedented suspension of economic and social life is destined to have horrendous unintended consequences, including – although not limited to – worse non-covid health outcomes for swathes of people much broader than those who are especially vulnerable to covid.
I close by noting that, regardless of your objections to the GBD or to the merits of those objections, the GBD’s advice is not original. As GBD co-author Jay Bhattacharya explains in this excellent podcast from this past May, the Declaration merely reminded humanity of what was until early 2020 the consensus among public-health officials, including those at the World Health Organization, of the best means of dealing with respiratory pandemics. All the GBD did, really, was to advise that that long-standing consensus be regained and followed.
I’m genuinely sorry that your son will not be in my course. I recommend that he enroll in the section taught by my colleague Tom Rustici, who is an excellent professor from whom your son will learn much.
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: “Smart people, smart process”
In my column for the March 26th, 2013, edition of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review I argued that the catalyst for the creation of modernity’s abundance of material wealth isn’t smart people but, instead, smart economic processes. You can read my column in full beneath the fold.
Some Links
Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby decries the authoritarian impulse. A slice:
Anthony Fauci has regrets.
In an interview Monday, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said that if he could go back and change anything about the government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, it would be to press for “much, much more stringent restrictions” than the ones that were imposed in the spring of 2020.
More stringent. More than the abrupt shutdown of the US economy, which destroyed 21 million jobs in a matter of weeks and drove the unemployment rate to nearly 15 percent. More than the unprecedented closure of every public school in the country, which inflicted a staggering degree of learning loss and emotional turmoil on American children. More than the sweeping shelter-in-place limitations, which did little to reduce the spread of COVID but severely exacerbated harms ranging from domestic violence to mental health to untreated medical conditions. More than the top-down orders — issued with no chance for public or legislative input — that unilaterally prevented Americans from traveling, attending church, holding weddings, or comforting the dying.
The response to the pandemic was an extraordinary diminution of Americans’ freedom to make choices for themselves and a corresponding enlargement of the power of government officials to rule by decree. And Fauci is chagrined that it didn’t go far enough.
To be fair, he is hardly alone in thinking this way. When it comes to COVID or almost any other significant public concern, the authoritarian impulse — a preference for achieving policy goals through coercion rather than the untidy give-and-take of democratic negotiation — now seems to be the default.
Most Covid restrictions in the U.S. have long since ended, but the school districts in New Orleans and the District of Columbia are mandating Covid vaccines for children to attend school in person this fall. In the capital, the mandate applies to students 12 and older and requires a booster in addition to the initial two-shot course, while in the Crescent City it kicks in at age 5 and requires only two shots. In neither city are exceptions made for kids who have immunity from prior infection, which provides good protection against severe illness.
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As pediatricians, we generally favor childhood vaccines. But the benefits of these mandates aren’t worth the costs.
(DBx: Covidians’ mania to have children vaccinated against covid – a mania that springs in part from most covidians’ refusal to acknowledge that covid poses almost no risk to children – is powerful evidence that the principal impetus behind public “policy” regarding covid since early 2020 was not any serious respect for science. For more such evidence, see the following link….)
David Henderson reports on Senate Democrats’ convenient – and telling – easing of covid restrictions.
“Flatten the Curve”: the song.
Michael Senger isn’t a fan of covidian Deborah Birx’s book. A slice:
In what may be her most damning remark about the entire U.S. response to COVID, Birx tells us that she’d always known “two weeks to slow the spread” was a lie and knew in advance that she wanted the timeframe extended, despite having no data to support why such a step was scientifically sensible:
No sooner had we convinced the Trump administration to implement our version of a two-week shutdown than I was trying to figure out how to extend it. Fifteen Days to Slow the Spread was a start, but I knew it would be just that. I didn’t have the numbers in front of me yet to make the case for extending it longer, but I had two weeks to get them. However hard it had been to get the fifteen-day shutdown approved, getting another one would be more difficult by many orders of magnitude.
This is one of several quotes in which Birx refers to “our version” of a lockdown, though she never makes it clear what the original “version” of a lockdown was (read: China’s). In fact, though Birx spends hundreds of pages boasting about her crusade for lockdowns across America, she never once explains why she wanted them or why she felt they were a good idea, other than the aforementioned brief asides about China’s supposed success using social distancing to combat SARS-1.
GMU Econ alum Dominic Pino describes Edmund Burke’s path to free markets. A slice:
He asked [Samuel] Span whether England’s 1707 union with Scotland, which abolished trade barriers between the two, had ruined his business. It hadn’t, Burke wrote, noting that the union had allowed for far more trade that had made both sides better off, even though Scotland was much poorer than England. “Such virtue there is in liberality of sentiment, that you have grown richer even by the partnership of poverty,” he wrote.
John Hinderaker warns of the expansion of the IRS. (HT George Leef)
Richard Brookhiser remembers David McCullough, who died on Sunday. A slice:
David was always polite, genial, with never a trace of entitlement or hauteur — a delight to know. He epitomized the serious popular historian. He told engaging stories, often hung on a biography or biographies, but bolstered with research and attention to detail. His interests were wide: TR, Truman, American painters in Paris, the grim year 1776, the founding of Marietta, Ohio. His grand slam was his bio of John Adams. Author and subject were made for each other. Adams’s contemporaries, friends and enemies alike, all seemed to sense that he was a great character as well as, maybe even more than, a great public figure. Add his wife Abigail, as well-spoken and as prickly as her husband, and you had a fine entrée into a great time.
Larry Reed reminds us of Hannah Arendt’s “chilling thesis on evil.” A slice:
Some of Arendt’s friends on the Left swallowed the myth that Hitler and Stalin occupied opposite ends of the political spectrum. She knew better. Both were evil collectivists and enemies of the individual…. “Hitler never intended to defend the West against Bolshevism,” she wrote in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, “but always remained ready to join ‘the Reds’ for the destruction of the West, even in the middle of the struggle against Soviet Russia.”
When looking at the impact of legislation on the federal deficit, projections always take into account the next 10 years of federal spending and expected revenue—in other words, that $300 billion reduction created by the bill is the expected total amount over the next decade. That sounds like a lot of money—and it is!—but it looks a lot smaller when you stack it up against other bills Congress has passed in recent years. According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the 10-year deficit has increased by about $2.4 trillion since President Joe Biden took office, thanks to items like the American Rescue Plan, the bipartisan infrastructure package, and this year’s budget omnibus bill.
So, rather than looking at the Inflation Reduction Act as a $300 billion reduction of future budget deficits, it’s probably more accurate to describe it as a plan to actually pay for about $300 billion of the estimated $2.4 trillion that Congress has agreed to borrow in the past 18 months.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from pages 253-254 of former Caltech physics professor and provost – and former Energy Department undersecretary during the Obama administration – Steven Koonin’s excellent 2021 book, Unsettled? What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters:
I’m less bullish on “forced and urgent” decarbonization, either through a price on carbon or by way of regulation. The impact of human influences on the climate is too uncertain (and very likely too small) compared to the daunting amount of change required to actually achieve the goal of eliminating net global emissions by, say, 2075. And for me, the many certain downsides of mitigation outweigh the uncertain benefits: the world’s poor need growing amounts of reliable and affordable energy, and widespread renewables or fission are currently too expensive, unreliable, or both.
August 8, 2022
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 42 of the 2022 paperback edition of C. Bradley Thompson’s superb 2019 book, America’s Revolutionary Mind (link added):
Jefferson and his fellow revolutionaries understood that there are two basic ways to deal with men in political society: either by faith and force or by reason and freedom. According to Jefferson, once man has surrendered his reason, he “has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind.”
Economic Competition Is Not a Tort; Its Costs are Internalized By the Market Process
Here’s a note to frequent EconLog commenter Thomas Lee Hutcheson:
Mr. Hutcheson:
In response to David Henderson’s EconLog post highlighting the benefits to consumers of competition that disrupts long-standing patterns of local commerce, you comment:
I do not see how your example which is perfect for showing the benefits of localized disruption, says anything about the costs. The community may benefit from the new Walmart outside of town, but the fate of all the small businesses “in town” can be sad.
The costs of this creative destruction are obvious; they pretty much define the limits of what, in such cases, everyone – other than a competent economist – sees. Given the context of this discussion, David hardly needs to point out that the creation of new products or new forms of enterprise displace older products and older forms of enterprise.
What’s not obvious is that the benefits of this competition exceed the costs. We know that these benefits exceed the costs precisely because the small businesses in town choose to shutter their doors when new competitors arise. If the costs to these small businesses of shutting down were greater than the benefits enjoyed by those who take advantage of the new competitors, the owners of the small businesses would – to escape the cost of shutting down – cut their prices to attract enough customers to remain in operation.
But whenever a business that is confronted with new competition refuses to cut its prices sufficiently to remain in that particular line of operation, the reason is that that business’s owner has better options than to continue to operate earning only the lower ‘profits’ that are possible in face of the new competition.
Therefore, rather than join the economically untutored public in focusing on the “sad” result of businesses being creatively destroyed by new competition, excellent economists such as David Henderson survey the whole picture. Doing so requires emphasis of the benefits of this competition – benefits that, again, exceed the costs but that are largely overlooked by most policy pundits.
Among the many important ‘unseen’ realities made visible by the economic way of thinking is the fact that firms and workers who are displaced by competition ultimately choose to be displaced. They do so by refusing to accept the lower incomes that would prevent them from being displaced. That this choice is often unpleasant is undoubtedly true. Yet when we take into account the whole range of relevant actions and decisions that fuel the competitive market process we see that – contrary to what many people suppose – the market does not ignore or even discount the costs of competition. These costs are fully internalized.
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
In Praise of Liberalism
My latest column for AIER was inspired by a recent rest-area stop on the New Jersey Turnpike. A slice:
Nearly every adult in that rest area with me is – or was, before retirement – a highly specialized producer of some useful good or service, a good or service that is a drop in the gigantic prosperity pool in which we all swim. There’s a slim chance that some of the individuals visiting the rest area that day once assisted me in some way directly – say, by having delivered a package to my door, or by shepherding my mortgage application toward approval. Yet most of the rest-area visitors, and likely all of them, never assisted me directly. Nearly all of them, however, assisted me indirectly – indirectly but no less surely than had that assistance been direct.
Maybe one of the rest-area visitors is a hotel clerk. In the course of her job she contributes to lowering the cost of business travel and, in turn, lowers the cost to airlines of putting their flight crews up for the night. As a result, my airfare to visit my son, and your airfare to visit a client, is a few cents lower than it would otherwise be.
Another rest-area visitor might operate a crane that unloads and loads cargo ships. This worker indirectly assists me (and you) by improving my (and your) access to goods from foreign producers. Yet another rest-area visitor perhaps is a lab technician at a pharmaceutical company and, thus, helps to lower my and your health-care costs.
Whatever are the detailed facts of the employment of each of the hundreds of ordinary people who shared with me the rest-area space that day, almost all of them regularly help each other – and me. Indeed, we all routinely help each other. And we do so despite the fact that we’re all strangers to each other and are unaware of this connection that we have to each other.
The single most important contributor to the successful coordination of the productive economic efforts of hundreds of millions of strangers is the system of market prices – the prices that tell (and incite) producers to produce less of this good whose price has fallen and more of that service whose price has risen; the prices that tell (and incite) producers to use more of this input whose price has fallen and less of that input whose price has risen. Without market prices, each of us would be able to coordinate our productive efforts only with the relatively minuscule number of individuals with whom we are able to conduct a verbal dialogue. The number of individuals who would routinely help us would be, at most, a few dozen instead of the hundreds of millions who help us today.
However, as crucial as are market prices to a successful modern economy, no less crucial is the ethos of liberalism – the liberalism of John Locke, Adam Smith, Frédéric Bastiat, F.A. Hayek, James Buchanan, and Robert Nozick. Liberalism is what allows strangers with very little in common with each other nevertheless to co-exist peacefully and productively. Each of the individuals who were that day my fellow visitors to the rest area on the New Jersey Turnpike has his or her own preferences and dreams. I don’t know what these are, and none of those people knows my preferences and dreams. But we nevertheless daily and successfully cooperate with each other – and with hundreds of millions of other strangers – in the market.
The liberal market order doesn’t require that I share your particular preferences or dreams, or that you share mine. All that is required by the liberal market order is that each person respects the same rights in others that that person wants others to respect in him or her. The ‘thinness’ of this liberal requirement leaves each of us free to pursue our own individualized dreams without having to secure the approval of others. I’m confident that everyone at the New Jersey Turnpike rest area, if pressed to think seriously about this feature of the liberal market order as he or she surveyed fellow rest-area visitors, would heartily applaud.
Some Links
The dinner session featured keynote speaker Robert Lighthizer, U.S. trade representative under Donald Trump. [Johnny] Burtka introduced him as “one of Washington’s greatest statesmen.” He praised as prophetic a 1997 New York Times op-ed from Lighthizer which said that if China were allowed to join the World Trade Organization, “virtually no manufacturing job in this country will be safe.” (Manufacturing employment in the United States peaked in 1979 and had already been declining, following the same trend as in other highly developed economies. As of 2021, 14.7 million Americans are employed in manufacturing, which is more than in leisure and hospitality or financial activities.)
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A panel followed about whether Wall Street is good for the country. National Review Capital Matters’ Andrew Stuttaford opened with a defense of America’s financial sector, acknowledging its imperfections but pointing to its contributions to helping the human flourishing that free markets make possible. Longtime Washington financial-regulatory expert [and GMU Econ alum] Mark Calabria, who was chief economist to Mike Pence, also presented a reasoned defense of Wall Street. Calabria noted that finance allows people to bridge the present and the future through lending and borrowing, but the sector is hampered by government, which creates perverse incentives through subsidies and bailouts.
American Compass executive director Oren Cass responded by saying, “If that was the defense for Wall Street, the prosecution can rest its case.” He said Wall Street is bad for America because it does not allocate capital, talent, or risk well. American Affairs editor Julius Krein dismissed Stuttaford and Calabria’s case as “Adam Smith nonsense.” He and Cass talked about the need to “redirect” people away from finance jobs. Stuttaford had mentioned how regulatory missteps had contributed to the financial crisis that led to the Great Recession. Cass objected, saying, “It’s not that the financial companies did well for themselves. They ran their companies into the ground.” Calabria responded to Cass by explaining how government regulations and the actions of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac led to the preference for mortgage-backed securities in many financial institutions.
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There’s nothing inherently wrong with entertaining new perspectives on economic policy. Conservatives are at their best when they debate among themselves because those debates sharpen our ideas. But the Left’s government-knows-best approach to economics isn’t wrong only because it comes from the Left; it’s wrong because government does not know best.
America needs relief from government planning, not a new conservative flavor of the same failed prescription.
Samuel Gregg and Kate Wand discuss the merits of free markets.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Steve Moore and Tomas Philipson explain that
The so-called Inflation Reduction Act will be one of the greatest misallocations of federal resources in American history. The bill has many moving parts, but here’s a simple way to sum up its macroeconomic impact: It would transfer about a quarter of a trillion dollars from America’s pharmaceutical industry, which saves and extends lives, to the climate-change industrial complex, which makes energy more expensive.
Advocates for minimum wages and rent controls justify both as compassionate. But they ignore both logic and the far from compassionate violations of employers’ and landlords’ property rights imposed. Despite those coercive abuses, both also present lower-income individuals and households with fewer options, harming many. And compassion cannot justify hurting those whose interests you are trying to advance.
Heather Mac Donald decries woke medicine. A slice:
At the end of their second year of medical school, students take step one of the U.S. Medical Licensing Exam, which measures knowledge of the body’s anatomical parts, functioning and malfunctioning. Topics include biochemistry, physiology, cell biology, pharmacology and the cardiovascular system. High scores on step one predict success in a residency; highly sought-after residency programs, such as surgery and radiology, use exam scores to help select applicants. But some students complain that the pressure to score well inhibits them from “antiracism” advocacy.
Writing in an online forum, a fourth-year Yale medical student describes how the specter of step one affected his priorities. In his first two years of medical school, he had “immersed” himself in a student-led committee focused on diversity, inclusion and social justice, and he ran a podcast about health disparities. All that political work was made possible by Yale’s pass-fail grading system for classes, which meant that he didn’t feel compelled to put studying ahead of diversity concerns. Then, step one “reared its ugly head.” Getting an actual grade on an exam might prove to “whoever might have thought it before that I didn’t deserve a seat at Yale as a Black medical student.”
The solution was obvious: abolish step-one scores. Since January, the test has been graded on a pass-fail basis. The Yale student won’t have to worry that his studying will cut into his activism. Whether his future patients will appreciate his chosen focus is unclear.
Thomas Fazi warns of the dangers of monkeypox hysteria. A slice:
Meanwhile, three US states, including California, have declared states of emergency over the monkeypox outbreak, just as they did for Covid-19, potentially allowing them to enact mask mandates, lockdown orders, and other restrictions. And two weeks ago, a south London school sent reception classes home until the end of term after a child came into contact with a monkeypox case, sparking fears of an outbreak. The school said it was acting on advice of the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) and were “obliged to follow these precautionary guidelines”. Authorities also advised parents to avoid hugging their child.
It is simply baffling that anyone would willing to go down this road again — shutting down schools; denying children physical contact — with everything that we now know about the devastating effects of such measures on children’s mental and physical well-being throughout the Covid pandemic. But that doesn’t seem to register. Today, we are seeing the first stirrings of yet another bout of mass hysteria, with politicians, the media and public health officials (including the WHO) all repeating the same mistakes they made with Covid-19: spreading misinformation about the nature of the disease, and sowing unnecessary panic and fear among those who risk little or nothing from it, while denying those who actually are at risk the kind of targeted messaging and protection they deserve.
Jay Bhattacharya, writing at Spiked, is correct: “Zero Covid has cost New Zealand dearly.” Two slices:
With two-and-a-half years of hindsight, a tentative evaluation of New Zealand’s lockdown-focused Zero Covid strategy is possible. On the plus side of the ledger is that New Zealand’s strategy delayed the inevitable spread of Covid throughout the population to a time after the development, testing and deployment of a vaccine capable of reducing the burden of severe Covid disease. Despite having experienced more Covid cases per capita throughout the pandemic than the US, New Zealand has a tiny proportion of the US’s Covid-attributable deaths per capita.
On the negative side of the ledger is the tremendous burden on the New Zealand population that has come from being isolated from the rest of the world for such a long time, and from the intermittent lockdowns the government imposed on the population. All-cause excess deaths – below baseline levels in 2020 – shot up in 2021 and in 2022. Some weeks, recorded death rates were at 32 per cent above the norm. New Zealand delayed and reduced Covid deaths at the expense of increasing deaths from other causes. And then, of course, there are the enormous economic, psychological and additional health costs of lockdown that the population will pay out for over the coming years.
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Ultimately, New Zealand’s Zero Covid strategy was immoral, incoherent and a grand failure.
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