Russell Roberts's Blog, page 128

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 82 of Matthew Hennessey’s excellent 2022 book, Visible Hand:

Everybody dreams of a free lunch. Everybody wants something for nothing. Economists remind us that we’ll have to pay eventually because resources are scarce and life is about trade-offs.

More on the Standard of Living of Pets Under Capitalism

(Don Boudreaux)

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Prompted by this post on how well household pets fare under capitalism – and how poorly they’d far under socialism – Tim B. sent to me the following e-mail, shared here with his kind permission:

I lived in Italy in the late 1980s and had an expatriate American friend who was married to a German who worked for the WHO nutrition programs. The first time they visited the U.S. together (his first time ever), she lost him in a supermarket. When she finally found him he was in the pet food section reading the labels on the pet food. He apparently commented that pets in the U.S. eat more nutritious food than was natively available to most of the populations he worked with.

Some Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Wall Street Journal columnist Allysia Finley correctly notes that “these days it’s news when the CDC does something right.” A slice:

Consider the CDC studies on school mask mandates, which have uniformly claimed benefits. Two researchers at the University of Toronto and University of California, Davis recently sought to replicate a CDC study that found that pediatric Covid cases increased faster in U.S. counties that didn’t have school mask mandates compared with those that did.

News media cited the CDC’s work as evidence that mask mandates in schools could help reduce community spread of Covid. Journalists ridiculed Republican governors who opposed mask mandates for ignoring this “science.” But the CDC studies were deeply biased.

While the two academic researchers trying to duplicate the study employed the same analytical methods as the CDC, they examined a larger sample of districts over a longer period. They found no difference in Covid cases between counties with and without mask mandates.

Michael Senger writes about the mainstream media slowly, and obviously reluctantly, coming around to admit that much unnecessary net harm was inflicted by governments on humanity as a result of lockdowns.

Noah Carl interviewed Matt Ridley.

Thorsteinn Siglaugsson busts one of the latest in a long line of Twitter-spread covid myths.

Writing in today’s Wall Street Journal, John Lott reports that “more legal guns reduced crime in Brazil.” A slice:

Before Mr. [Jair] Bolsonaro, Brazilians had to pay $260 for a new gun license and $25 every three years to renew it. This put legal gun ownership out of reach of the poor. The initial license fee has fallen to around $18.50, and licenses are good for 10 years.

Instead of surging, crime declined sharply in Brazil. In three years under Mr. Bolsonaro, the homicide rate has fallen 34%, to 18.5 per 100,000.

(DBx: Note that my posting this favorable remark about Bolsonaro does not imply that I generally support his policies. I do not. But this particular policy of increasing poor Brazilians’ access to guns does seem to have reduced Brazil’s murder rate – for a perfectly understandable reason.)

J.D. Tuccille warns about an inescapable reality of efforts to prevent abortions.

Barry Brownstein describes tribalism’s big lie.

Rich Vedder decries instances of dystopian irrationality at Duke and Princeton. (HT George Leef)

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from GMU Econ alum Steven Horwitz’s March 31st, 2011, Freeman essay, “Getting it Right or Knowing You Got it Wrong? The Austrian Edge” (original emphasis):

For Austrians, the fundamental issue is not whether markets get it right. True, Austrians think markets are pretty good and governments quite bad in that respect. And even though Austrians might explain things differently from the mainstream, there are plenty of mainstream economists who would agree with those general conclusions. Note, though, that the question here is still about getting it right.

Where the Austrian view differs, I would argue, is in understanding that markets are also really good at helping people to know when resources are not optimally allocated and providing the signals and incentives needed to correct the mistakes. Being adept at getting things right at a given point is of course a good thing. But it is probably more valuable – given that we aren’t likely to get things perfectly right on a regular basis – to be able both to know when we are wrong and to have an incentive to do better.

DBx: Steve died, at far too young an age, one year ago today.

Courts Are Neither Legislatures Nor Constitutional Conventions

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to The Telegraph:

The usually wise Zoe Strimpel entirely misses the mark with her hostile reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade (“America is headed for another civil war where one side has to vanquish the other,” June 25.) It’s perfectly appropriate to criticize the legal reasoning and ruling in Dobbs, perhaps concluding that these are errors committed by a court. But Ms Strimpel instead criticizes the ruling as if it’s the product of a legislature or of a constitutional convention.

The ultimate question before the Court in both Roe and Dobbs was not the normative one of whether or not American women should have legal access to abortion. Instead, the question was one of fact, namely: Does the U.S. Constitution protect the right to abortion? Roe found that it does; Dobbs found that it doesn’t. Even if the majority of justices in Dobbs are mistaken, no less mistaken are the many pundits – including Ms Strimpel – who judge the Court according to how well or poorly it achieves particular policy outcomes rather than according to how well or poorly it interprets and applies the law of the Constitution. Not all that is desirable is protected by the Constitution, and not all that is undesirable is prohibited by it.

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

…..

Nothing in the above letter implies anything about my personal views on the morality of abortion, about appropriate abortion policy, or about the merits or demerits of the reasoning and rulings in Roe and in Dobbs.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from pages 12-13 of Randy Barnett’s and Evan Bernick’s important 2021 book, The Original Meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment: Its Letter and Spirit (footnotes deleted):

Why good-faith construction? Upon taking their Article VI oath to adhere to the Constitution, all constitutional actors receive a great deal of discretionary power. With this power comes a corresponding normative obligation to implement the Constitution in good faith in a way that is analogous to the duty that private law imposes on “fiduciaries.” Fiduciaries are power-exercising parties who have been delegated control over resources belonging to other (think attorneys, agents, and boards of directors). Similarly, to fulfill their duty, judges and legislators must act consistently with the letter of the instrument from which they draw their power. They also must not abuse their delegated powers by using whatever discretion that original meaning gives them to pursue their own extralegal ends, goals, purposes, or objects, rather than serving the interests of their principals. Where the letter of the Constitution is unclear, fidelity to the Constitution’s design requires that judges, legislators, and other constitutional decision-makers turn to the law’s original spirit.

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(Don Boudreaux)

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Peter Calcagno and GMU Econ alum Edward Lopez encourage us to remember the lessons of James Buchanan’s and Richard Wagner’s pioneering 1977 book, Democracy in Deficit. A slice:

On the eve of the early 1980s high inflation rates, mainline economists James Buchanan and Richard Wagner drew attention to the rising debt and inflationary risks of the time. Their 1977 book carried the evocative title, Democracy in Deficit: The Political Legacy of Lord Keynes. Buchanan and Wagner’s prose minced few words, describing the Keynesian influence as the culprit behind “continuing and increasing budget deficits, a rapidly growing governmental sector, high unemployment, apparently permanent and perhaps increasing inflation, and accompanying disenchantment with the American sociopolitical order.”

Buchanan and Wagner argue that the post-Keynesian era suffers from the “presuppositions of Harvey Road.” Harvey Road is a reference to the Keynes family home in Cambridge. A biographer of Keynes, R. F. Harrod, coined this “presuppositions” expression, and Buchanan and Wagner use it to argue that Keynes’s economic theory operates in a political vacuum where the world of monetary and fiscal policy is carried out by wise men in authority. This intellectual aristocracy could ensure conditions of prosperity, freedom, and even peace. In 2011, after President Obama’s stimulus package, many remarked that “Keynes was back.” In reality, the Keynesian influence never died, and modern macroeconomists and policymakers still suffer from the presuppositions of Harvey Road.

Jim Dorn warns of “the menace of fiscal inflation.” A slice:

John Cochrane (2022), a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, makes a convincing case that, although inflation generally can be understood as a monetary phenomenon, its roots often can be traced to fiscal dominance—that is, to political pressure to use the central bank to accommodate government deficit spending. Both debt monetization and fiscal helicopter drops—or what Cochrane calls “fiscal inflation”—need to be recognized.

Eric Boehm is correct: “Biden ignores his own role in inflation.”

Ryan Bourne reports that, thankfully, “economists still believe in the price mechanism.” (DBx: Well, most economists still believe in the price mechanism. It’s distressing that not all do. Those economists who don’t believe in it – those economists who ‘agreed’ with the propositions in the survey reported by Ryan – are the equivalent of modern-day ‘biologists’ who do not believe in natural selection.)

This past February, Deirdre McCloskey gave “an address on liberty” on the Occasion of the 800th Anniversary of the University of Padova. A slice:

But the second pair of Roosevelt’s four freedoms, “freedom from fear” and “freedom from want,” are positive ones, and dangerous. They are freedoms to have, like Amartya’s “capabilities.” In the short run, obviously, if the state taxes Giovanni and is enabled thereby to give a positive liberty of free goods and services to Dario, Dario is mightily pleased—at any rate if he does not have ethical worries about the negative liberty not granted to Giovanni. Giovanni in turn views the transfer as an act of goberno ladro, and feels justified to turn to the Italian indoor sport of evading the taxes.

Ray Domanico says that Betsy DeVos “has much to teach.” A slice:

The true threat DeVos posed to the Washington education “blob” was her commitment to localism, pluralism, and federalism in educational matters and her belief that parents should be the ultimate arbiters of how and where their children are educated. These values are anathema to Washington’s self-appointed mandarins and the self-serving national teachers’ unions, which are more interested in pressing their influence in Washington than in fighting for better schools state by state.

Heather Mac Donald rightly criticizes Biden’s “green hypocrisy.” A slice:

Mocking climate-change warriors for their private jets and yachts, far-flung vacation homes, and chauffeured SUVs has become routine among jaundiced observers of the world’s increasingly numerous environmental conferences. Such mockery hasn’t had the slightest effect on the conferees’ conspicuous consumption of the miraculous products of Western innovation and capitalism. The celebrities and climate ministers continue to enjoy their fabulous lifestyles in plain view, confident in the cardinal rule of all environmentalism: one’s own activities are always important enough to be exempt from any environmental limits. Only the other person should have to sacrifice.

Matt Ridley calls for an independent inquiry into covid’s origins.

Matt Ridley and Alina Chan ask: “What happened to the lab-leak hypothesis?”

Blake Stone-Banks reports on life in lockdowned Shanghai. Two slices:

Raising two-year-old twins, my wife and I faced the real prospect of having our children taken from us into quarantine facilities with no way to contact them. We deliberately began sharing cups and utensils with our kids with the hope that if one of us contracted Covid, we would all test positive and avoid family separation. We made plans to bar our door if we tested positive and kept a list of emergency numbers, including that of the U.S. Consulate in Shanghai, which would soon order non-emergency employees to depart China.

We also began hearing reports of more compounds in both Pudong and Puxi where residents were unable to receive food deliveries. I began calling colleagues and friends to check in on them, and I discovered, to my horror, how lucky our family was to live in a large, centrally located compound. Several of them who lived in smaller compounds were struggling to get food. The logistical nightmare of a 25-million-person lockdown was already coming into focus.

…..

Nothing made much sense about how the lockdown was implemented, and we had nowhere to turn for answers. In the first month of lockdown, almost no one could leave their apartment for access to healthcare. Of the three times I am aware someone in our compound called an ambulance, each time the ambulance was denied. There is no official toll of those who died due to Covid hospital restrictions, but many stories were shared on WeChat, including that of a nurse who died from asthma after being refused access to her own hospital. Every time one of our kids bumped his head or choked on his food, we immediately entered triage mode because the ambulances weren’t getting through.

So True

(Don Boudreaux)

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el gato malo posted the image just below at his blog, bad cattitude. If you doubt its veracity, behold, when you’re next in a modern supermarket, the entire – or, in some cases, almost entire – aisle devoted to pets. Pet food (available for animals of different ages and body weights). Pet snacks. Pet toys. Pet accoutrements. Pet grooming equipment. It’s no exaggeration to say that pet dogs and cats – and perhaps even pet parakeets – in America and other rich countries today live better than did most of humanity prior to the industrial, capitalist age – and that, were these countries to make a serious move toward socialism, many of these pets would become human food.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 226 of my colleague Peter Boettke’s 2017 paper “Rebuilding the Liberal Project,” as this paper appears in Pete’s 2021 book, The Struggle for a Better World:

True liberals must be vociferous critics of the intellectual errors committed by the progressive elite, and the empirical consequences that such errors have brought in their wake.

DBx: Pictured here is FTC chairwoman Lina Khan – a progressive elite who fancies that she knows better than markets what are the details of competitive processes and outcomes – and when, and by how much, market competition should be suppressed in order to attempt to promote other goals and fancies.

Some Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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David Henderson understandably is flabbergasted by the obliviousness of a university president.

John O. McGinnis argues that the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in Carson v. Makin will further energize the movement for school choice. Here’s his conclusion:

Carson is not only important for what it does for Establishment Clause jurisprudence but what it does for the school choice movement. That movement already has political momentum. First, many public schools have been heavily criticized for closing for too long during the pandemic with substantial losses of learning, particularly for the poorest students. Second, many parents are furious with what their public schools are teaching, viewing commonly used history curricula in particular as tendentious and unpatriotic. Many also worry about an emphasis on equity over excellence. As a result, a parental rights movement is emerging as a powerful electoral force.

School choice is the logical institutional manifestation of parental rights. A parent who can choose the school his or her child attends has more influence on the child’s education. At a traditional public school, a parent can only vote in a school board election, and once the school board is elected, he or she retains no substantial leverage at all. School choice provides the invaluable right of exit.

Carson assures those who want to send their children to religious schools that religious choices can never be excluded from a choice program. Thus, it energizes parents who want a religious alternative to the traditional public school to join with parents who want alternatives for secular reasons. The ruling thus contributes even more energy to one of our most important contemporary social movements.

Chris Freiman explains that “vouchers for religious schools don’t threaten the separation of church and state.”

Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley reports on Betsy DeVos’s important efforts to free the hostages held by teachers’ unions. A slice:

As the teachers unions continue to throw their weight around the Democratic Party, Mrs. DeVos said their behavior during the pandemic has hurt their standing with Americans. “There’s a real tone-deafness to the kind of damage their politicized agenda and decisions have inflicted on kids, and we won’t know the full extent of it for years.” she said. “It’s the kids who could least afford to be locked out of school who were out the longest.”

Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins decries the malignant mission creep of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Oodles upon oodles of excessive, useless government are foisted on us by enterprising appointees building résumés for an afterlife as an influence peddler “of counsel” at a D.C. law firm. Examples are legion, but consider the recent initiatives of Joe Biden’s Securities and Exchange Commission chief, Gary Gensler.

Mr. Gensler would ordain that publicly traded companies, as part of their disclosure obligations, report their financial vulnerability to climate change and climate regulation. A fatuous New York Times headline declares that investors “deserve” such information. No, investors want such information, and diligently seek it out, if it bears on the expected value of their investments. Why not require disclosures about the financial impact of every conceivable tax-law change, man-made disaster or asteroid strike? Because markets already price securities in view of all the possible calamities that could cause them to go to zero. Collectively, investors are in a better position to judge such nonproprietary matters than is management, which has a daily business to run.

Chelsea Follett talks with GMU Econ alum Rosemarie Fike about the importance for women of economic freedom.

Juliette Sellgren talks with Dan Klein about Adam Smith and justice.

Writing at The Hill, the great Bruce Yandle explains that “inflation is putting a price tag on past political actions that only sounded free at the time.”

Mark Oshinskie writes about the oppressions of forced solitude. Two slices:

Those whom I knew were sure the lockdowns were for our collective benefit and would only last for two weeks. They stridently said we should all be nice and embrace this temporary disruption. I think many of the lockdowners perversely enjoyed being part of some (overblown) historical crisis and thought it was cool that humans could be so savvy and modern as to crush a virus; though they turned out to be wrong about that second part. Others just liked the time off from work.
I was dumbfounded, not only by the numbers of people who supported locking down but also by their certainty that doing so made sense; they expressed no doubt about this approach.

…..

The Urban Dictionary defines a “tool” as “someone who is not smart enough to realize that he is being used.” I decided that my ex-friend, and anyone else who was going along with the “Stay home” and “We’re all in this together” was a tool. Of course, like the other lockdowners I knew, he could afford to be a tool because he could work from home and loved to watch TV.

Among all of the other obvious nonsense, saying that by staying home, we’re together is perhaps the most plainly Orwellian. Plus, in clearly observable ways, we weren’t “all in this together” during the pandemic; its logistical and economic impacts varied widely across the population. And in our pluralistic society, we had never all been in anything together. Why should a respiratory virus suddenly unify everyone. I still can’t believe that people bought such cheesy Madison Avenue slogans.

K. Lloyd Billingsley accuses Fauci of “white coat supremacy.”

Harriet Sergeant reports on the “devastating toll” of lockdowns on children. (HT Toby Young)

Adam Brooks tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

When will everyone finally admit that the cost of living crisis is down to Lockdowns, the printing of money to pay for Lockdowns & the supply chain issues caused by them here and around the world?