Russell Roberts's Blog, page 144
May 7, 2022
Some Non-Covid Links
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, John Miller praises Milton’s Areopagitica. A slice:
Amid the rousing rhetoric and lofty abstractions, “Areopagitica” offers a compelling case for the social value of free expression: “Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.” Restricting it, wrote Milton, “will be to the discouragement of all learning, and the stop of Truth.” Even “bad books” have a role, as “they to a discreet and judicious Reader serve in many respects to discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate.” Their challenges promote the development of morals: “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloister’d vertue, unexercis’d & unbreath’d, that never sallies out and sees her adversary.”
Remarkably, White House press secretary Jen Psaki has declined to criticize the Ruth Sent Us intimidation tactics. “I think the president’s view is that there’s a lot of passion, a lot of fear, a lot of sadness from many, many people across this country about what they saw in that leaked document,” she rationalized.
Ms. Psaki also declined to criticize the leak of the draft opinion, though it clearly harms the reputation of the Court. What happened to President Biden’s concern for declining public trust in government institutions?
The threats against the Court are enough that a fence has gone up around the Supreme Court building, and new security has been laid on. A violent act by a fanatic can’t be ruled out, and this warrants the attention of Attorney General Merrick Garland. Federal law makes it a crime to threaten federal judges, and that includes threats of vigilantism.
Jesse Walker recalls history, pre-Roe v. Wade. Two slices:
Once upon a time, the country was crawling with pro-life liberals and leftists. Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy, one of the period’s preeminent liberal Democrats, once declared that the right to life begins at “the very moment of conception,” a position he held until 1975. Further left, the Black Panther Party fiercely denounced abortion, a procedure it associated with eugenics. When New York liberalized its abortion rules in 1970, the party paper declared the change a “victory for the oppressive ruling class who will use this law to kill off Black and other oppressed people before they are born….How long do you think it will take for voluntary abortion to turn into involuntary abortion to turn into compulsory sterilization?” Like Kennedy, the Panthers didn’t reverse themselves on the issue until the mid-’70s.
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The Republican Party, conversely, had far more room than it does today for people who favored the liberalization of abortion laws. But those liberalizers didn’t always deploy the rhetoric of choice. Early on, the movement was dominated by other arguments, such as the health risks of illegal abortions or, on a creepier note, the alleged need for population control. It was the feminists, with their rhetoric of “my body, my choice,” who did the most to introduce arguments about individual liberty to that side of the debate.
It wasn’t just the right as a whole that wasn’t united. Even the Christian right wasn’t united. In We Gather Together: The Religious Right and the Problem of Interfaith Politics, historian Neil J. Young notes that while conservative Catholics were forthrightly opposed to abortion throughout this period, conservative Protestants were at first divided. The Southern Baptist Convention “initially offered mild support for abortion law reform”—that is, for some degree of liberalization. “Some Baptists even scoffed at Catholic involvement in the issue before eventually taking an absolutist stand against abortion.” (The Catholic-Protestant-Mormon alliances that seem to come naturally today had to be built very delicately in the decades before.) And just as the supporters of abortion rights did not always rest their arguments on choice, their opponents did not always center the idea of life. Many focused instead on sexual morality, in some cases refraining from decrying abortion as murder.
Ilya Somin’s voice is among those calling on blue states to adopt less-restriction zoning.
David Boaz applauds genuine, liberal progress.
For instance, Congress should immediately repeal the 1920 Jones Act, also known as the Merchant Marine Act. Under the act, all freight moving by water between U.S. ports must be hauled on ships that are built, crewed, and flagged only by Americans. These requirements directly raise the costs of shipping freight by water. And by artificially increasing the demand to instead ship by rail and trucks, the Jones Act also increases the cost of hauling freight on land.
While at it, Congress should reform the Foreign Dredge Act, which requires that dredging barges are Jones Act compliant. This significantly inflates the costs of dredging U.S. ports, preventing expansions that could accommodate more and larger ships.
The Biden administration must also end former President Donald Trump’s punitive tariffs and import quotas. These measures inflate costs and reduce the supplies of goods—including goods that are themselves useful for further easing supply constraints. For example, Section 301 tariffs drastically reduce the supply of truck chassis in the United States, worsening bottlenecks in the surface transportation of other freight.
Immigration restrictions affect supply chains, too. As the Cato Institute’s Scott Lincicome notes, these restrictions have “removed at least 1 million potential (and lawful) workers from the U.S. labor market, putting acute pressure on labor-intensive industries like warehousing. (And backed-up warehouses make it more difficult to clear containers that are stacked up at various ports.)”
George Will’s take on Shurtleff et al. v. City of Boston et al. is characteristically deep and informative. Here’s his conclusion:
It is axiomatic that hard cases often make bad law. Boston’s flag case was easy, but beneath the surface unanimity, within the concurrences, there bubbled a ferment of disagreement that might be a harbinger of better law resulting from renewed respect for the original meaning of “establishment.”
Jim Geraghty asks a sensible question: “Why does the U.S. still have tariffs on steel from Ukraine?” A slice:
My first thought was that the continuing steel tariff was silly but irrelevant, because Ukraine wasn’t likely to be exporting much steel for the foreseeable future. But go figure, one of the country’s other large steel mills, ArcelorMittal Kryvyi Rih in central Ukraine, restarted one of its blast furnaces on April 9, and said it could restart a second furnace in May, if conditions allow.
So the Biden administration could make it easier for Ukraine to export steel to the U.S., but its just choosing not to do that.
Bjorn Lomborg explains that the “Ukraine crisis reveals the folly of organic farming.” A slice:
The energy crisis caused by the war in Ukraine disabused many politicians of the notion that the world could make a swift transition to green energy powered by solar, wind and wishful thinking. As food prices skyrocket and the conflict threatens a global food crisis, we need to face another unpopular reality: Organic farming is ineffective, land hungry and very expensive, and it would leave billions hungry if it were embraced world-wide.
For years, politicians and the chattering classes have argued that organic farming is the responsible way to feed the world. The European Union pushed last year for members roughly to triple organic farming by 2030. Influential nonprofits have long promoted organic farming to developing nations, causing fragile countries like Sri Lanka to invest in such methods. In the West, many consumers have been won over: About half the population of Germany believes that organic farming can fight global hunger.
The rise in food prices—buoyed by increased fertilizer, energy and transport costs—amid the conflict in Ukraine has exposed inherent flaws in the argument for organic farming. Because organic agriculture shirks many of the scientific advancements that have allowed farmers to increase crop yields, it’s inherently less efficient than conventional farming. Research has conclusively shown that organic farming produces less food per acre than conventional agriculture. Moreover, organic farming rotates fields in and out of use more often than conventional farming, which can rely on synthetic fertilizer and pesticides to maintain fertility and keep away pests.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 68 of David Mamet’s new 2022 book, Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch:
It is the immemorial tactic of a dictatorial regime to accuse its opponents of what it is doing.
May 6, 2022
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 98 of the late Stanford University economic historian Nathan Rosenberg’s insightful 1992 paper “Economic Experiments,” as this paper is reprinted in Rosenberg’s 1994 book, Exploring the Black Box: Technology, Economics, and History (original emphasis):
The freedom to conduct experiments required not only a high degree of autonomy; it also required, as already discussed, a large number of decision-makers as opposed to a high degree of centralization and/or hierarchy. In effect, this meant not only decentralization but also the inability of the experimenters to influence the outcome of the market evaluation of the new products. In fact, some of the most decisive failures of twentieth-century socialism flow from the failure to allow experimentation, and from the consequent failure to benefit from the opportunity to observe the outcome of such experiments.
DBx: Proponents of industrial policy are proponents of reducing such decentralization and experimentation. Proponents of industrial policy are proponents of socialism-lite. They propose, for those parts of the economy they wish to control, to replace decentralization and market experimentation with hierarchy and pre-determined outcomes. The fact that industrial-policy proponents typically don’t wish to subject the entire economy to their conscious control means only that the ill-consequences of their arrogant schemes will not be as extensive as are the ill-consequences of the schemes of socialists who propose for the entire economy what industrial-policy advocates propose for a part of the economy.
The following advice is worth repeating: Whenever you encounter an industrial-policy proposal, ask that proposal’s advocates how they, or the government officials charged with implementing the proposal, will acquire the knowledge necessary to generate an allocation of resources that is superior to the allocation that would result when consumers and producers are all left free to peacefully spend and invest their own money as they choose, being guided by market prices, profits, and losses. Pay close attention to the answer. I guarantee you that that answer will be without substance. The answer will boil down to this assertion: ‘We just somehow know.’
Some Covid Links
John Tierney identifies the correct lessons that must be learned from “America’s disastrous COVID response.” Two slices:
More than a century ago, Mark Twain identified two fundamental problems that would prove relevant to the COVID pandemic. “How easy it is to make people believe a lie,” he wrote, “and how hard it is to undo that work again!”
No convincing evidence existed at the pandemic’s start that lockdowns, school closures and mask mandates would protect people against the virus, but it was remarkably easy to make the public believe these policies were “the science.”
Undoing this deception is essential to avoid further hardship and future fiascos, but it will be exceptionally hard to do. The problem is that so many people want to keep believing the falsehood.
Adults meekly surrendered their most basic liberties, cheered on leaders who devastated the economy and imposed two years of cruel and unnecessary deprivations on their children. They don’t want to admit these sacrifices were in vain.
They’re engaging in what social psychologists call “effort justification,” which has been observed in studies of painful initiation rituals for fraternities and other groups. Once people endure the pain, they convince themselves that it must have been worthwhile even when their reward is actually worthless.
If one brief bad experience can transform people’s thinking, imagine the impact of the pandemic’s ceaseless misery. It’s been a two-year-long version of Hell Week, especially in America’s blue states, with Anthony Fauci and Democratic governors playing the role of fraternity presidents humiliating the pledges.
Americans obediently donned masks day after day, stood six feet apart, disinfected counters and obsessively washed their hands while singing “Happy Birthday.” They forsook visits to friends and relatives and followed orders to skip work and church. They forced young children to wear masks on the playground and in the classroom — a form of hazing too extreme even for Europe’s progressive educators.
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The public needs to learn what went wrong during the pandemic, but they’re not going to hear it from the Biden administration. For now, the best opportunity for a public airing of the facts may be the 2022 election campaign. Some candidates are already attacking the lockdowns and mask mandates, and pandemic strategies could become a major issue in the 2024 presidential race, especially if Ron DeSantis runs on his success as Florida’s governor.
Florida employed some of the least restrictive COVID policies, avoiding lockdowns and mask mandates, and it still fared as well or better than the national average in measures of age-adjusted COVID mortality and overall excess mortality (how many more deaths than normal from all causes occurred during the pandemic).
Florida flourished economically by comparison with other states, especially California, which imposed singularly strict COVID mandates and suffered one of the nation’s worst surges in unemployment. Yet California’s overall death toll has been slightly worse than Florida’s.
If California’s cumulative rate of excess mortality equaled Florida’s, about 5,000 fewer Californians would have died during the pandemic. And if California’s unemployment rate equaled Florida’s last year, 500,000 fewer Californians would have been out of work.
Reason‘s Eric Boehm reports on how the NHL playoffs reveal the idiocy of covid travel restrictions. Two slices:
The Toronto Maple Leafs are headed southbound after splitting their first two playoff games against the Tampa Bay Lightning—but the journey is a bit more complicated than you might expect.
Instead of flying from Toronto to Florida, the Leafs’ players, coaches, and staff piled into buses and drove to the airport in Buffalo, New York, after their loss on Wednesday night, according to TSN hockey reporter Darren Dreger.
Why the scenic route? Per the current rules governing cross-border travel into the United States, air travelers must show a negative COVID-19 test within 48 hours of entering the country. But there’s no testing required to drive into the country—so by bussing to Buffalo, the Leafs avoid an unnecessary complication in their travels. They also avoid the possibility of a positive test that keeps one or more players from making the trip at all.
Toronto is not the only National Hockey League (NHL) team doing this. Dreger reports that the Edmonton Oilers had an even more complicated travel schedule to commute to their upcoming playoff games in Los Angeles. Unlike Toronto, Edmonton is not within easy driving distance of an American airport, so the Oilers flew to Vancouver, took buses to Seattle, then boarded planes bound for L.A.
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Like with other nonsensical COVID rules, the only thing the testing mandate seems to be accomplishing is the making of creative travel arrangements. It might not rise to the level of, say, New York City mandating vaccines for players on the city’s home teams but exempting visiting players from the same rules, but the testing mandate is clearly not accomplishing a public health purpose.
Jacob Sullum reviews The Infodemic: How Censorship and Lies Made the World Sicker and Less Free, a new book by Joel Simon and Robert Mahoney. A slice from Sullum’s review:
But folding censorship into the “infodemic” creates an inescapable tension, since democrats as well as autocrats were frequently tempted to address “fake news” about the pandemic through state pressure, if not outright coercion. The Biden administration, for instance, demanded that social media platforms suppress COVID-19 “misinformation,” which it defined to include statements that it deemed “misleading” even if they were arguably or verifiably true.
The problem of defining misinformation is evident from the debate about face masks as a safeguard against COVID-19. After initially dismissing the value of general masking, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) decided it was “the most important, powerful public health tool we have.” More recently, the CDC has acknowledged that commonly used cloth masks provide little protection, largely agreeing with critics whose statements on the subject had previously triggered banishment from platforms such as YouTube.
Simon and Mahoney make it clear that they do not favor state speech controls. But their concerns about the ways governments used the pandemic as an excuse to expand their powers are curiously limited. While they view censorship as beyond the pale, they are inclined to see other restrictions on freedom—even sweeping impositions such as stay-at-home orders and mass business closures—as justified by the public health emergency.
Jeffrey Tucker decries Orwellian surveillance of the population done in the name of fight covid.
Also decrying covid surveillance is Aaron Kheriaty.
“Sweden’s Covid death rate among lowest in Europe, despite avoiding strict lockdowns.”
TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.)
Jay Bhattacharya talks with Brendan O’Neill about the “lockdown on dissent.”
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 78 of my colleague Peter Boettke’s 2007 paper “Liberty vs. Power in Economic Policy in the 20th and 21st Centuries,” as this paper is reprinted in Pete’s 2021 book, The Struggle for a Better World:
Human beings are in possession of two competing natural proclivities: to pillage and plunder, on the one hand, and to truck, barter, and exchange, on the other. Which proclivity is stimulated and encouraged is a function of the institutional context with which man finds himself interacting with others.
DBx: Yep. If pillaging and plundering are regarded as – and are spoken of as being – honorable (perhaps by being described with euphemisms such as “redistributing wealth” and “imposing tariffs to protect jobs”), then society will be filled with pillagers and plunderers. The most successful pillagers and plunderers are those who convince their victims that the pillaging and plundering are noble activities. But if pillaging and plundering are recognized for what they are, and are roundly condemned, the willingness of people to abandon productive pursuits in order to pillage and plunder will shrink.
May 5, 2022
Some Non-Covid Links
In a letter in response to a solicitation of funds by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Steven Pinker pushes back – eloquently yet firmly – against the politicization of science. (HT James Freeman) A slice:
Science magazine appears to have adopted wokeism as its official editorial policy and the only kind of opinion that may be expressed in the magazine. An example is the recent special section on the underrepresentation of African Americans among physics majors, graduate students, and faculty members. This situation is lamentable and worthy of understanding. But the six articles in the issue assume as dogma that the underrepresentation is caused by “white privilege”: that “the dominant culture has discouraged diversity,” and “white people use their membership in a dominant group to assert political, cultural, and economic power over those outside that group.” Though Science is ordinarily committed to open debate on scientific controversies, no disagreements with this conspiracy theory were expressed. And though the journal is supposedly committed to empirical tests, no data were presented that might speak to alternative explanations, such as that the cause of the under-representation lies in the pipeline of prepared and interested students. If we want to increase the number of African Americans in physics, it matters a great deal whether we should try to fix the nation’s high schools or accuse physics professors of white supremacy. Yet Science magazine has decided, without debate or data, to advocate the latter.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, John Tamny explains how Elon Musk enriches us all. A slice:
This is worth remembering when considering Mr. Musk’s purchase of Twitter. His much-publicized bid stirred little competition, perhaps because some feared getting into a bidding war with someone of his net worth. But a more realistic scenario is that Mr. Musk sees possibilities for Twitter that the rest of us don’t—possibilities so distant from the Twitter we know that Mr. Musk is taking the underperforming social-media company private—at least for a few years—to put his contrarian stamp on it.
Mr. Musk sits atop the wealth pyramid not because he’s a copycat, or because he has prudently invested in index funds, but because with each venture he has tried to usher a widely dismissed or unseen future into the present. Mr. Musk is incredibly rich because he continues to pursue the impossible.
Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger calls for the plug to be pulled on the Disinformation Governance Board. Two slices:
I’ll admit to being struck when the media began to slip the words “disinformation” and “misinformation” into stories almost daily. Reporters can be clever in how they make words work for them, and here it was clear that associating those words with a person was shorthand for erasing them from the debate. It was a one-way ticket to ostracism on social media.
Last weekend, Mr. Mayorkas was on Fox News expressing wide-eyed wonder at the controversy over the Disinformation Governance Board, which he claimed is only about “disinformation from Russia, from China, from Iran, from the cartels.”
But foreign propaganda isn’t quite how the board’s proposed singing director, Ms. Jankowicz, defines the national-security threat from disinformation. Her definition extends to something called “gendered and sexualized disinformation.”
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White House press secretary Jen Psaki says the Disinformation Governance Board will be “apolitical.” If you believe that, you still think Mary Poppins and the children climbed a stairway made of smoke.
Elon Musk took over Twitter in part because he sensed, like many of us, that something isn’t quite right with how progressives and much of the media handle what they call the truth.
For better or worse, everything today is political: climate, Covid, race, gender identity, crime, abortion. And social media is where many people talk about it.
When Democrats, the media or the country’s huge domestic security agency starts tossing around words and phrases like disinformation governance, gendered abuse, misinformation and false narratives, one hopes they don’t profess shock that some people think they are being euphemized into silence.
Reason‘s Eric Boehm decries Biden’s “phony fiscal responsibility.” A slice:
In fact, if you look at the actual budgetary baselines published by the Congressional Budget Office—that is, the ongoing amount of annual federal spending absent any emergency stimulus bills like the ones passed on several occasions during the height of the pandemic—Biden has overseen a noticeable increase in the deficit above the pre-pandemic baseline. According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a fiscal watchdog group that advocates for lower deficits, Biden’s policies have added about $2.5 trillion to the deficit over the next 10 years.
James Pethokoukis talks with Virginia Postrel.
Stefanie Slade offers “a qualified defense of letting states decide on abortion.” A slice:
“In reality,” wrote former Reason Editor Virginia Postrel way back in 1989, “overturning Roe would put the abortion question back where it belongs—in the legislative arena.”
The Court didn’t overturn Roe that year, but a leaked draft of Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has raised the possibility that, more than three decades later, it is now poised to do so.
By finding that “the Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion,” and by “return[ing] that authority to the people and their elected representatives,” the draft would allow New York to have extremely permissive laws on abortion while Mississippi has much more restrictive ones.
Many people on both sides of this issue understandably recoil from the idea of what they see as a fundamental human right being subjected to a vote. (There’s more to life than mere democracy!) Yet on a practical level, if not on a moral one, there is a case in favor of devolving decision making on an issue that has split the country for decades.
“How Biden’s ‘Buy American’ is undermining the arsenal of democracy.” A slice:
These regulations will shrink the number of defense suppliers willing to do business with the Pentagon, both at home and abroad, potentially choking off the US military’s access to critical technology. In order to prove they are meeting the Biden administration’s higher domestic content threshold, companies will be required to produce complex and expensive compliance documentation to the government. For those US companies that sell exclusively or primarily to the government, they will have no choice but to shoulder this enormous paperwork burden while passing the cost of compliance on to taxpayers.
But many other companies have a choice of whether to do business with the government, which is not their only or even primary customer. That’s especially true of innovative companies leading the way in emerging technologies in the commercial sector—technologies our warfighters need to stay ahead of Russia and China. These American companies may very well conclude that complying with so-called “Buy American regulations—not only through administrivia, but potentially by changing the content of their products—just isn’t worth the hassle.
Remembering the late David Theroux.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from pages 37-38 of Eamonn Butler’s 2021 book, An Introduction to Trade & Globalisation:
International trade greatly widens the pool of talent involved in supplying products to markets. Such increased competition means domestic producers have to make their own activities more cost-effective, or risk losing business to outsiders. They have to control costs and cut waste. They must stay sharp in order to understand what customers want and how those wants can be satisfied, and to anticipate future trends on both fronts. They need to keep trying new things, to innovate and improve both their offer to customers and their own production processes. And this constant pressure to innovate and improve in turn drives progress.
May 4, 2022
Some Non-Covid Links
GMU Econ alum Nathan Goodman, writing at EconLog, reviews electoral-politics’s ABCs. A slice:
B is for Bundling
Even when voters do know about a political action they find unacceptable or upsetting, their ability to offer feedback by voting is still limited. One reason for this is that in most elections issues are bundled. When you vote for a presidential, congressional, gubernatorial, or mayoral candidate, you are not voting in a referendum on any specific policy issue. Instead, you are voting to elect a politician, who will then have increased power to act on all their policy preferences. There is no way to signal that you are voting for a particular candidate based on their foreign policy views but disagree with their views on financial regulation.
This poses problems, because a voter might know about some action or policy by an incumbent politician that they strongly condemn. However, while they strongly oppose the politician on that issue, they may disagree with the politician’s opponent even more strongly on another issue. They may therefore feel that they cannot in good conscience vote against the incumbent, even though they would like to offer negative feedback.
Politicians use their power to influence a wide variety of issues, including foreign policy, fiscal policy, environmental regulation, parks and recreation, public health, and many more. The list is potentially endless. Given the diversity of issues that politicians influence, a voter who cares about policy must vote based on a complex bundle of positions rather than offering neat, legible feedback regarding any specific issue. This means that electoral feedback is a rather noisy signal.
Arnold Kling likes George Leef’s new novel. Here’s the opening paragraph of Arnold’s review (link added):
George Leef, a scholar and pundit known as an advocate for traditional standards of excellence and viewpoint diversity within higher education, recently published a novel called The Awakening of Jennifer Van Arsdale. The main character is a young progressive journalist, Jennifer Van Arsdale, who gets mugged by reality. As the novel begins, she feels smugly assured that progressive policies that expand government and stifle opposition are noble causes. Meanwhile, other characters in the novel reveal the devastating consequences of these policies for the people they are supposed to help.
According to F.A. Hayek, liberty “not only means that the individual has both the opportunity and burden of choice; it also means that he must bear the consequences of his actions and will receive praise or blame for them. Liberty and responsibility are inseparable” (Hayek 1960, p. 71). Such a definition not only illustrates why the right to private property is not only the cornerstone of liberty. More importantly, it also alludes to the notion that fundamental nature of private property as a social relationship is not to physically assign goods and services to individuals, but to assign the consequences of action over goods and services, both negative and positive, in relation to others. The enforcement of private property rights imply that individuals are accountable and liable for their decisions when private property rights are well-defined.
Here’s George Will on the leak of Justice Alito’s draft opinion on the Constitutional flimsiness of Roe v. Wade. Two slices:
The person, whose name might soon be known and should be forever odious, who leaked the draft Supreme Court opinion is an appropriate symbol of 49 years of willfulness that began with Roe v. Wade in 1973. The leaker accomplished nothing but another addition to the nation’s sense of fraying and another subtraction from the norms that preserve institutional functioning and dignity.
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Hysteria is the default mode of many Americans of all persuasions who engage in civic arguments. So, by late June, when the court would normally be expected to issue a momentous opinion, such people will have worked themselves into an apocalyptic frenzy. If the court overturns the postulated constitutional requirement for America’s almost uniquely radical abortion regime, there will still be a frenzy, but two months of emotions will have been vented.
Last year, based on a scenario in which 22 states banned abortion, Middlebury College economist Caitlin Knowles Myers projected that the annual number of abortions in the U.S. would fall by about 14 percent. In Texas, which banned the vast majority of abortions last September and avoided early judicial intervention by restricting enforcement to private civil actions, the net impact seems to have been a drop of about 10 percent.
Americans should keep those surprisingly modest estimates in mind as they try to predict what will happen after the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, as a leaked draft of the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organizationsuggests it will soon do. While many states are expected to respond by imposing severe restrictions on abortion, most probably will not. And even in states that ban elective abortions, workarounds will mitigate the impact of those laws.
Jacob Sullum also decries the Biden administration’s hostility to free speech. A slice:
Politico reported that the board was supposed to “coordinate countering misinformation related to homeland security, focused specifically on irregular migration and Russia.” But when a reporter asked White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki about the working group last Thursday, she said “it sounds like the objective of the board is to prevent disinformation and misinformation from traveling around the country in a range of communities.” She added that “I’m not sure who opposes that effort.”
That broad description of the board’s mission, combined with Psaki’s apparent obliviousness to the civil liberties issues raised by government efforts to “prevent disinformation and misinformation from traveling,” seemed to validate the concerns of conservative critics. It did not help that the “expert on online disinformation” appointed to head the working group, Nina Jankowicz, had disparaged “free speech absolutists,” criticized Republican legislators for “laundering disinfo,” and described the New York Post‘s accurate reporting about emails from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop as part of “a Russian influence op.”
Damon Root identifies some flaws in Justice Alito’s leaked opinion. Here’s his conclusion:
I am reminded of the words of the political theorist Stephen Macedo, who, while debating the late Robert Bork in 1986, offered this memorable description of the American constitutional system: “When conservatives like Bork treat rights as islands surrounded by a sea of government powers, they precisely reverse the view of the founders, as enshrined in the Constitution, wherein government powers are limited and specified and rendered as islands surrounded by a sea of individual rights.”
The opinion’s careful analysis of text therefore represents not only the overruling of Roe but also a sea change in the appropriate method of reasoning about the Constitution. What was notable about Roe was that it failed to locate the abortion right in the text of the Constitution or even in previous precedent. As law professor John Hart Ely said about Roe, “it is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.” (Not surprisingly, Alito quotes Ely.) But Roe was also the culmination of decades of loose thinking about constitutional interpretation, as expressed in cases that ignored the original meaning of text and were driven by what the justices thought of as good policy. If the Dobbs decision follows this draft opinion, then its most important legacy will be the restoration of a more rigorous method of reasoning to the heart of constitutional law.
My friend Reuvain Borchardt recently spoke with me about inflation.
Bryan Caplan writes about his new book, How Evil Are Politicians?
Allison Schrager is not impressed with Thomas Piketty’s A Brief History of Equality. Two slices:
The overwhelming majority of economists agree on a few things: secure, well-defined property rights are a vital ingredient of growth; people respond to incentives; the economy is not zero-sum; sustainable growth comes from innovations that enable us to make more from less; some trade-off between equality and growth is necessary because innovation often makes some people rich, and they must be rewarded for their risk-taking and talents.
In his latest book, A Brief History of Equality, Thomas Piketty rejects these assumptions. He has written more of a manifesto than a history or economics book. As an economist and market enthusiast, I am not his target audience, as he makes clear in his introduction. Throughout the book he makes some assertions that don’t square with standard economic thinking. Like most economists, I expect explanations for why all those other studies were wrong, but Piketty offers none.
He also has no interest in converting nonbelievers like me. I think markets are wonderful—not only for their ability to provide order through prices but also because of how much they have enriched the world, yielding once-unimaginable improvements to our quality of life and longevity and facilitating the emergence of a prosperous middle class.
Piketty acknowledges these improvements and agrees that they are wonderful. He believes, however, that they happened not because of free markets but despite them. And he sees economic growth as not such a great achievement, given that it coexists with so much inequality in wealth and income. Above all, people “need justice,” he maintains. An economically equal society is his ultimate goal, a vision that stems from deep convictions that reflect his personal values.
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I don’t doubt that Piketty genuinely believes his solutions would create a fairer and more just world, but I wish that he had tried harder to convince skeptical readers. I also would like to live in a world where there is less poverty and more opportunity, but I believe that market-friendly policies are a better way to achieve this goal. To some degree, the dispute comes down to a difference of values. People of my persuasion put a higher value on rising living standards than on equality for its own sake. We also have different (and equally valid) readings of the history and data, which are surely influenced by our values. Yet Piketty frequently dismisses people who disagree with him as corrupt, ignorant, or stupid. He would do better not to assume the worst of his opponents and to reckon honestly with their arguments.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 7 of my colleague Bryan Caplan’s hot-off-the-press 2022 book, How Evil Are Politicians?: Essays on Demagoguery (footnote deleted):
Under democracy, politicians are less candid about their motives; they need us to like them, and power-hunger is not likeable. But given its ubiquity throughout most of political history, can we really believe that the motive of power-hunger is no longer paramount? One of my favorite political insiders privately calls politicians of both parties “psychopaths” – and he’s on to something. Rising high on the pyramid of power is hard unless the love of power fuels your ascent.
May 3, 2022
Some Covid Links
Robby Soave reports that Fauci is among the hordes of hypocritical covidocrats. A slice:
Fauci is certainly free to make whatever decision he thinks is best for him: In the post-vaccination landscape, as COVID-19 becomes a milder and milder illness for the overwhelming majority of healthy, vaccinated people who catch it, risk assessment absolutely rests with the individual. Much of the public frustration with Fauci and government health officials like him is that for far too long, they insisted risk assessment be calculated by federal health bureaucrats. Disastrously, these bureaucrats were often far less willing than the general public to countenance any risk whatsoever. They also evinced misplaced priorities: Mask requirements for school children remained in place even as governments relaxed most other restrictions, despite COVID-19 posing less risk to kids and teenagers than any other cohort.
Writing at UnHerd, Vinay Prasad counsels against panicking about unvaccinated children. A slice:
As Covid restrictions and mandates have been dropped across the America and the Western world, unvaccinated kids have become a rallying cause for Americans unable or unwilling to leave the pandemic behind. But the truth is that children under five don’t need to wear masks and don’t need to have their lives put on hold pending vaccination. Hysteria about the risk to them is not just unhelpful but harmful. It deprives them of a normal childhood without any countervailing justification.
When will New York City’s insane COVID alarmism end?
According to health czar Ashwin Vasan, the city has now reached “medium” risk, per the Centers for Disease Control’s “community levels” metric. So he wants New Yorkers to exercise “greater caution” in the name of “slowing the spread” — and start wearing masks again indoors in public even if vaccinated.
Utter nonsense.
COVID deaths in the city are about as low as they’ve ever been, averaging four per day for the past four weeks, while hospitalizations average 46 a day. And both, per the data gathered by the city health authorities, are trending even lower.
Cases are ticking up slightly, but nowhere near the recent peak we saw with the first Omicron wave.
Also, the whole selling point of the CDC’s new metric was that it supposedly pays more attention to actual bad COVID outcomes than raw case numbers. So why all this concern over a modest rise in infections when ultra-low deaths and hospitalizations show the opposite?
Here’s Dan McLaughlin on what remains of the absurd mania for masking. Here’s his conclusion:
I was able to ride the LIRR and walk through Penn yesterday without a mask and was stopped by nobody, so the will to enforce any of this seems to have dissipated on the ground. Hochul is under fire from both parties in the state for this nonsense and is trying frantically to distinguish herself from Andrew Cuomo’s heavier-handed lockdowns. It is past time for Democratic politicians to end the pretense entirely.
Michael Senger applauds the great unmasking.
Jeffrey Tucker wisely warns us never to forget the dystopian authoritarianism under which most Americans were living two years ago. Here’s his conclusion:
Let us not forget those months when the haircut was illegal. When governments finally allowed them, it didn’t allow blow dryers and made customers follow arrows on the floor and use only “touchless” payment methods.
That’s pandemic control in a nutshell. What a disgrace this entire period was to science, rationality, human rights, and freedom.
Big cities like Washington, Baltimore, Wilmington, Philadelphia, and Newark have no shortage of problems. But a sluggish, plodding, foot-dragging lifting of pandemic measures and restrictions didn’t help. Until Valentine’s Day, you had to show proof of vaccination to enter a Washington business or restaurant. And a few of the measures are still in place; in Washington, D.C., you must still wear a mask while using a ride-sharing service like Uber and Lyft, while the movers and shakers party maskless at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Maybe Washington has the advantage of all of that federal spending and federal jobs, but it has the disadvantage of terrible leadership and local policies.
Respiratory viruses are extremely pervasive; they’re everywhere and this is totally normal. What isn’t pervasive, is virus testing. We’ve only ever tested widely for a single virus. So much of Corona mythology depends upon presenting data in isolation from what we know about the behaviour of all the other pathogens we’ve lived with for centuries. Our governments have spent two years hyperventilating about incidences of infection that turn out to be minuscule, or at worst normal, when compared to the other pathogens that infect us. This should also make you very, very sceptical of uncontrolled studies cataloguing alleged Long-Covid symptoms. If we tested this widely for rhinovirus, imagine all the totally unrelated symptoms we’d find in our vast pool of positive results.
Joseph Cox reports this alarming news: “CDC Tracked Millions of Phones to See If Americans Followed COVID Lockdown Orders.” (HT Iain Murray) A slice:
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) bought access to location data harvested from tens of millions of phones in the United States to perform analysis of compliance with curfews, track patterns of people visiting K-12 schools, and specifically monitor the effectiveness of policy in the Navajo Nation, according to CDC documents obtained by Motherboard. The documents also show that although the CDC used COVID-19 as a reason to buy access to the data more quickly, it intended to use it for more general CDC purposes.
TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid).
NYC Angry Mom tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
They are all backing away from school closures. Yet what is so frustrating is that the data was there, in APRIL 2020. We knew that European countries were already working on their reopening plans, and some never closed. We knew about the age stratification in FEB 2020.
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