Russell Roberts's Blog, page 155
April 4, 2022
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 2 of my colleague Peter Boettke’s 2021 book, The Struggle for a Better World (original emphasis):
The economic consequences are also significant, as the economy was basically placed in a state of suspended animation from March to June [of 2020]. In a “normal” economic crisis, business either adjusts or adapts to changing circumstances, and labor and capital are reallocated to more valued uses by price signals and profit-and-loss statements. Economic crises are moments of recalculation of opportunities to meet imagined futures and redeployed labor and capital in that endeavor. But as a consequence of the lockdown, many businesses were unable to experiment with mitigation strategies and engage in the sort of risk assessment and risk management that would normally be required to address such an exogenous shock to ordinary business of life. Mandates and restrictions were issued, not public health guidelines and recommendations. Stay-at-home and stay-safe orders substituted for adapt-or-fail adjustments on multiple margins. Necessity can be the mother of invention, but only if the pressures of necessity are felt, not if they are suspended.
The Perniciousness of Price Controls
Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:
Editor:
Andy Kessler rightly warns of the destructiveness of price controls (“Here Come the Price Controls,” April 4). And he’s correct that support for such controls expressed by the likes of Pres. Biden and Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren reflects these politicians’ economic ignorance. But perhaps this support for price controls reflects also many politicians’ innate instinct for seizing all opportunities to expand their power.
The late, great UCLA economist Armen Alchian, writing in 1976 about the noxious mix of inflation and price controls then prevalent, described a troubling dynamic:
[D]irect attacks on the symptoms known to flow from inflation are politically convenient. As inflation occurs, politicians and the public blame businessmen and producers for raising prices and mulcting the public…. They provoke shortages; there obviously must be government action to set matters aright. The markets have failed; the economic system has failed.
The so-called shortage of gasoline and energy in the United States was precisely and only such a political attack. It could not have been brought about more cleverly and deceitfully even if the politically ambitious had explicitly written the script. Inflate the money stock; when prices rise, impose price controls to correct the situation. These controls lead to shortages which “require” government intervention to assure appropriate use of the limited supply and to allocate it and even to control and nationalize the production of energy. The powers of political authorities are increased; the open society is suppressed.*
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
* Armen A. Alchian, “Problems of Rising Prices” (1976), reprinted in Vol. 1 (Choice and Cost Under Uncertainty) of The Collected Works of Armen A. Alchian (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2006), pages 253-273; the above quotation appears on page 268.
Some Covid Links
Another committee member, Cody Meissner, agrees. Dr. Meissner, chief of pediatric infectious diseases at Tufts Children’s Hospital, told me last week that the fourth dose is “an unanswered scientific question for people with a normal immune system.”
A third member of the committee, Paul Offit of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told the Atlantic that he advised his 20-something son to forgo the third shot, which the FDA recommends for everyone 12 and over.
…..
But neither the CDC nor the National Institutes of Health has made a priority of studying vaccine complications. The CDC isn’t even transparent about its investigations into young people who have died after Covid vaccination. A Seattle Children’s Hospitals study published in the Journal of Pediatrics March 25 found that 69% of children who presented with myocarditis after the vaccine had late gadolinium enhancement, a related abnormality, in an MRI three to eight months later.
Instead of investigating these complications further, health agencies rely on messy and incomplete data from their clunky website called Vaers, or Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, where some patients report their own possible vaccination complications. When citizens inquire about vaccine complication rates, public-health officials point to the significant limitations of their own method of tracking them.
While the FDA has approved fourth doses quickly and with little supporting data, it’s also been sitting for months on ample data supporting two new Covid vaccines. Novavax and Covaxin use traditional vaccine technology, in contrast with the mRNA shots from Pfizer and Moderna. Covaxin, developed by Bharat Biotech and Ocugen, could yield broader protection against variants, and both shots could overcome some Americans’ hesitancy about a novel technology. But the FDA hasn’t acted on Novavax’s Jan. 31 application for emergency use, and it rejected Covaxin twice, once for adults and once for children. Both have been approved by the World Health Organization and other countries. “We don’t need another vaccine,” Anthony Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser, told India’s News Nation in December. “We have enough vaccines.”
Trust in public health is at an all-time low. When agencies bypass their own experts, it only reinforces the perception that health policy is driven by groupthink and politics.
“Covid restrictions have left young children lacking social skills.” A slice from this Telegraph report:
A few providers said that wearing face masks is continuing to have a negative impact on young children’s language and communication skills.
Those turning two “will have been surrounded by adults wearing masks for their whole lives and have therefore been unable to see lip movements or mouth shapes as regularly”, the report said.
“Some providers have reported that delays to children’s speech and language development have led to them not socialising with other children as readily as they would have expected previously,” it added.
Crucial conversations between teachers and parents had not taken place because parents were not allowed inside school buildings, and some whose children started attending after the start of the pandemic have not seen inside classrooms or met teachers.
New York has done it again. The city has managed to find the most useless, but harmful, policy possible to impose on the safest segment of the population.
On Friday, Mayor Eric Adams and his health commissioner, Ashwin Vasan, announced that children aged 2 to 4 will have to remain masked in day-care and pre-school settings. No other age group is forced to mask similarly.
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Michael Chessa, the parents’ attorney, told me, “These mandates are anti-science, anti-child, anti-parent and, according to last week’s court decision, against the law. Each day that goes by where Mayor Adams keeps these mandates in place is a stain on his legacy.”
In life, there are trade-offs. If the argument went, “Kids will mask, and we will risk them having speech and cognitive delays, because they are uniquely at risk from COVID and this is how we protect them,” that might be understandable.
Instead, toddlers will mask, they will risk speech and cognitive delays, and it will offer absolutely no protection from COVID.
Even if masks worked for the older set, which has never been proven by a study with a control group, the under-5s could never wear them correctly. This demographic is also not prioritized for vaccination because they simply don’t need it.
This strategy of information suppression and intimidation of dissent, along with the manufacturing of a fake consensus that in fact did not exist, continued through 2020 and arguably to the present. Among the other victims of such propaganda and smears were the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration. We know from emails that Fauci and Collins collaborated in a deliberate attempt to drum up a “quick and devastating” takedown.
It was a rather bizarre thing to do. The GBD was a rather conventional statement of public health principles along with a warning against the devastating consequences of extreme measures of coercion. Today it reads almost like a summary of what most people have come to believe after long and terrible experiences. Why did the Fauci cabal believe it was so very important to stop this statement?
The White House just unveiled a brand-new Web site — COVID.gov — to help people “find COVID guidance.” Problem is, the feds’ atrocious advice all through the pandemic makes Uncle Sam the last place to go for guidance.
Look at the latest big news from the CDC: its move to a “community levels” metric to govern indoor-masking rules. That shift — correct but long, long overdue — was prompted not by any change in the science around COVID but by the fact that mask mandates had become a politically disastrous issue for Democrats.
And the agency still hasn’t updated its absurd guidance that kids in pre-K, literally the lowest-risk group for COVID on the planet, should have to mask “regardless of vaccination status.”
Speaking of schools, consider the dismal CDC record on closures. Even after months of data showed that 1) COVID was never a real risk to school-age kids unless they have serious comorbidities and 2) schools are not major vectors of transmission, the agency still slow-walked its re-opening guidance, largely at the behest of teachers unions (another Dem powerhouse). New reporting even reveals that the United Federation of Teachers actually had “line-by-line” influence on the language of the guidance itself.
…..
When it comes to COVID rules — and the science behind them — the federal government has displayed a mixture of brute incompetence and political opportunism that has hurt millions in ways that may prove irreparable.
Anyone who takes suggestions from COVID.gov does so at his own peril.
I honestly cannot tell if I should applaud or decry this action by British police.
Writing at Spiked, David Livermore describes “the catastrophe of Zero Covid.” (HT Martin Kulldorff) A slice:
China, however, remains aggressively wedded to Zero Covid, with Hong Kong dragged along with it. And the strategy isn’t going well. Hong Kong’s recent Omicron outbreak is estimated to have infected up to half of the population, though official figures indicate far fewer. Hospitals have been overloaded, and deaths are spiking, which reflects the authorities’ failure to vaccinate many care-home residents. Whereas South Korea and Hong Kong recorded similarly high Omicron infection peaks, the peak death rate was disproportionately higher in Hong Kong, at 285 deaths a day versus 350 a day in South Korea, despite Hong Kong having a population that’s seven times smaller.
China, too, now has multiple Covid outbreaks. It is responding to these with larger and more numerous local lockdowns, including in Xi’an, Beijing and Shenzhen. The Chinese authorities are now conducting a bizarre experiment on Shanghai, after it recorded 6,000 cases a day, most of them asymptomatic. First, one half of the city will be locked down for five days while mass testing is done, and then cases will be identified and isolated. Then the exercise will be repeated on the other half of the city. It is hard to see how this will stop viral circulation, so further lockdowns are to be anticipated. The fact China has built large quarantine facilities suggests it is in for the Zero Covid long haul.
Dr. Joseph Fraiman, an ER physician in Louisiana, admits that he was wrong earlier to support Covid lockdowns. (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
Anthony LaMesa quotes from a New York Times report: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
“Over the past two years, doctors have also reported a sharp rise in young people being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, an increase that many believe is tied to the drastic spike in childhood obesity during the pandemic.”
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 45 of Deirdre McCloskey’s 2021 volume, Bettering Humanomics: A New, and Old, Approach to Economic Science:
If you know, for example, that real income per head has risen in Europe since 1800 by a factor of about thirty, they your political impulse to condemn “capitalism” as impoverishing or riddled with “imperfections” is at least disciplined. You may continue to be a socialist or a regulator, but you will need to sharpen your argument in some other way than going on and on using the same alternative false facts and fake science of impoverishment and imperfection.
DBx: I’m now reading Thomas Piketty’s new book, Time for Socialism. No one is in more need of the advice offered above by Deirdre than is M. Piketty and his many fans.
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April 3, 2022
Bogart/Wilder Celebrate Market Entrepreneurship
I thought that I’d long ago shared this short clip from the delightful 1954 Billy Wilder movie Sabrina, but I can find no evidence of having done so. So I share it now:
Some Covid Links
From Jay Bhattacharya’s Twitter feed:
Dean Broyles explains the harm that lockdowns inflicted on religious institutions. A slice:
Finally, in April 2021 the last holdout anti-church state, California, waived the white flag, removing its mandatory capacity limits and indoor religious singing and chanting ban. Governor Newsom agreed to statewide permanent injunctions against his sweeping restrictions on places of worship, paying out millions in dollars in attorney’s fees to dismiss civil rights lawsuits. But the damage had already been done. The collateral damage to people of faith and places of worship is significant and is still being calculated. It may take many years to understand the full impact of foolish public health policies.
Damage to religious individuals has been significant. Believers struggling with anxiety, depression and hopelessness during the pandemic were physically and emotionally cut off from their faithful community and spiritual support systems.
David Simon advises skepticism of the hype about second booster shots.
David Cohen describes the disintegration of New Zealand’s deranged pursuit of zero Covid. A slice:
As Europe groaned and North America tottered, outsiders marvelled at clips of carefree Kiwis playing on golden beaches washed by azure seas and the soothing words of Ardern’s coterie of scientific advisors and media fans of the ‘zero-Covid strategy’. With a possible nod to the acclaimed E.J. Thribb, one of the country’s leading poets even ventured a memorable ode to mark the world-beating moment and the emergence of our ‘stately queen’.
Some of us were not entirely convinced. As a short-term idea, fashioning a Fortress New Zealand had obvious appeal, but as a long-term arrangement it always felt a little bananas. Hiding under the bed while an intruder can be heard prowling outside your window is all well and good, but as a domestic arrangement sustained over many months it has drawbacks.
When and how was it supposed to end? Were Ardern and what she ceaselessly hailed as her obedient ‘team of five million’ just expected to remain under the bed indefinitely rather than facing up to the inevitable reality of endemicity that most other nations had already accepted as their eventual lot?
And what about the other ‘team’ of New Zealanders, the many thousands of expatriate Kiwis stranded abroad? Would they simply stay put forever? Could New Zealand, which makes much of itself as a stickler for international protocols, refuse to repatriate its own while at the same time outsourcing their welfare needs — including Covid-related care — to various host governments?
Noah Carl reports on the 2004 version of Anthony Fauci. A slice:
As Fauci’s comments from 2004 and March of 2020 make clear, the John Snow Memorandum was simply wrong to claim “there is no evidence for lasting protective immunity to SARS-CoV-2 following natural infection”.
After all, evidence from other respiratory viruses surely counts (even if it’s not as powerful as evidence from SARS-CoV-2 itself). Each time a new respiratory virus emerges, do scientists go back to the drawing board and pretend they know nothing about how it interacts with the immune system?
In fact, the first challenge trial for Covid was published way back in May of 2020, although it involved monkeys rather than humans. There was clear evidence for natural immunity, with the researchers finding “near-complete protection in all animals after SARS-CoV-2 rechallenge”.
So we’ve always had good circumstantial evidence for natural immunity from Covid. But health authorities chose to ignore or downplay it.
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Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 291 of the 2003 Liberty Fund collection, edited by Henry C. Clark, Commerce, Culture, and Liberty: Readings on Capitalism Before Adam Smith; specifically, it’s part of an excerpt from the Anne Cohler, et al., 1989 translation of Montesquieu’s 1748 book, The Spirit of the Laws (De l’esprit des lois):
The natural effect of commerce is to lead to peace. Two nations that trade with each other become reciprocally dependent; if one has an interest in buying, the other has an interest in selling, and all unions are founded on mutual needs.
DBx: Of course, commerce between the peoples of different nations doesn’t guarantee perpetual peace, just as absence of commerce between nations doesn’t guarantee war. But commerce between nations does indeed promote peace; peace is made more likely and more long-lasting. And the freer is the commerce, the greater the promotion of peace because the more extensive are the resulting mutual bonds of dependency and cooperation.
Perhaps even more importantly, people bound together in a web of commercial relationships come over time to think of themselves as part of the same society; cultural differences fade away as cultural richness rises. (An American who is skeptical of this claim might ask himself or herself this question: “When was the last time I worried about a shooting war erupting between Americans and Canadians?”)
Those of us who celebrate commerce – who champion free trade – who are not deceived by the false pretenses of rent-seekers cynically playing on popular feelings of national pride, or stirring up popular fears of foreigners – ought not shrink from offering full-throated praise of free and open commerce. Leave in the classroom, where they should be forever confined, the theory of the ‘optimum tariff’ and other academic curiosities that would have practical use only if our governors were benevolent and omniscient gods – and even then only on occasions fewer than the economic illiterati suppose.
There is nothing sophomoric, jejune, or naive about championing a policy of unilateral free trade that can be violated, if ever, only on the presentation of extraordinarily compelling evidence of extremely unusual and dangerous or inhumane circumstances.
We Americans are as wealthy as we are because we are fortunate to be citizens of one of history’s greatest commercial republics. Celebrate, by all means, the Declaration, the Constitution, federalism, and republican democracy. But celebrate too, and no less, commerce; celebrate our commercial history and spirit. Without commerce, we would be, by our commerce-forged standards, poverty-pressed barbarians. To be true to our commercial culture, we should embrace not only free trade between Americans living in different states, but also free trade between Americans and everyone else across the face of the earth.
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April 2, 2022
Bad Medicine
This letter is to the Wall Street Journal. (Why are politicians taken seriously? Nearly all are clowns – well, clowns with guns.)
Editor:
Reading Yuka Hayashi’s report on politicians debating alternative trade policies reveals that, among most politicians, the level of understanding of trade remains antediluvian (“New Asia-Pacific Economic Pact Exposes Rift Among Democrats Over Trade Policy,” April 1). Contrary to the assumptions that motivate these debaters, exports are a cost of trade, not a benefit, while imports are a benefit and not a cost. And our gains are greater the more we import in exchange for any given amount of our exports.
Further, protectionism inevitably stifles the economic adjustment and dynamism that are indispensable for economic growth. Although peddled as policy that’s pro-worker, trade restrictions – whether unilaterally imposed or incorporated in trade agreements – protect some workers today in their existing jobs only by harming all workers over time. And by the way, protectionism also, by making us less innovative and prosperous, weakens over time our national-defense capabilities.
Nothing that we’ve learned about trade since Adam Smith in 1776 exposed the folly of protectionism appears in politicians’ trade yammering in 2022. If politicians were to debate medical care with the same sophistication that they today bring to debates over trade, one side would insist that the best medicines are healing crystals while the other side would promote the curative properties of potions concocted with eyes of newts and toes of frogs.
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
Some Covid Links
Entrepreneurial capitalism rocks! Christian Britschgi reports on a fake mask, one that better enables proper breathing as it fools Covidocrats and Covidians. (Of course, this ‘mask’ still masks that key form of communication: facial expressions.)
J.D. Tuccilli writes about yet another bit of Covidian dystopianism that will long linger. A slice:
As was the case elsewhere in society, pandemic fears overwhelmed civil libertarian concerns about privacy with public health arguments that prioritized limiting the spread of disease. Companies that ran into headwinds peddling surveillance products in normal times eagerly latched onto concerns about contagion to market their products.
“As offices and schools around the country plan to reopen, the Volan system offers the only private location tracking and geo-fencing option available that provides [a] precise and fast contact tracing solution combined with emergency response capabilities,” boasted Volan Technology, which sells tracking badges among other things, in June 2020.
Volan touts the use of artificial intelligence to ease contact tracing and social-distancing enforcement. That’s a feature also included in the modern incarnations of surveillance cameras, which claim the ability to not just monitor hallways and classrooms, but even to automatically identify what the lenses see.
“Motorola Solutions—whose security and communications systems are already installed in thousands of schools around the country—has developed artificial intelligence compatible with its existing cameras to recognize when an individual isn’t wearing a mask,” The Wall Street Journal reported in August 2020.
Debbie Lerman decries the still on-going fear-mongering over Covid. Two slices:
Today, March 31, 2022, a headline in the New York Times reads: “Caution Urged as States Slow the Virus Fight” with a subhead “Experts Voice Concern as Variant Spreads.”
The article occupies a 7-paragraph column on the front page and continues to fill an entire half page inside.
A person confronted with such a headline naturally asks herself: What newsworthy event has triggered this story not just on the front page of a major national newspaper, but at the very top? Has a panel of SARS-CoV-2 experts issued a statement? Who are the “experts” and in what forum are they “voicing concern?” Was there a press conference or announcement made by someone in charge of Covid policy?
The answers the reader gathers from the first seven paragraphs of the article are that, in fact, no event triggered the story, and there was no statement or forum or press conference or announcement. The rest of the article confirms this total lack of actual news.
Okay, the reader thinks. Who, then, are these experts who are voicing concern? Maybe the reporters scored exclusive interviews with prominent epidemiologists or public health leaders who issued serious warnings that are important to publicize. Perusing the article once again, she gets to the seventh paragraph before any “experts” are mentioned at all.
The first is identified as “Dr. Ben Weston, chief health policy advisor for Milwaukee County, Wis.,” and he is quoted as saying that when a boat has just gotten off a large tidal wave it “would be a strange time to throw out the life jackets.” So… nothing newsworthy, medically or scientifically relevant, or in any way helpful there.
…..
To summarize: A top headline on the front page of arguably the most influential newspaper in the United States makes it sound like states are doing something wrong by scaling back their Covid response efforts and that experts think we should worry about a variant that’s spreading. The actual content of the article reveals that there is no new evidence or reason to believe states are doing anything wrong, no new evidence that we need to be concerned about the variant, and the experts are mostly local public health officials and doctors with little expertise or research in fields related to SARS-CoV-2.*
The only purpose this reader can infer for such a front-page headline and article is to continue fueling public anxiety. To what end? Maybe the reporters and editors at the Times believe they’re advancing the cause of public health by stoking panic, even long after it is justified by the level of the threat (if it ever was justified in the first place). Or maybe, to be a bit more cynical (or realistic?) about it, the reporters and editors know that fear and panic draw readers, especially around Covid, so they just can’t let go.
Bad news out of New York City: Mayor Eric Adams reverses his decision to unmask young school children. (DBx: It’s almost as if the Chambers of Commerce in Florida, Tennessee, and Texas are paying Mr. Adams under the table for his help in drumming up new residents for those southern states.)
First, there’s what I would call “institutional risk aversion”, as evidenced by Imperial College London still requiring graduation ceremonies to be watched online. Parents have been banned from witnessing this huge moment in their children’s lives in person because of “safety first” social distancing – despite all measures having been scrapped (and most students spending their free time nightclubbing and becoming romantically involved with each other).
Universities in general have spectacularly failed to move on from 2020, with many still reluctant to bring back 100 per cent face-to-face learning despite Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi saying there was “no excuse” for online lectures.
Other public bodies like the Passport Office also appear to be clinging onto mask diktats. A colleague went to its office in Victoria, London, this week and was told masks were mandatory inside, even though they are no longer required by law.
Seemingly oblivious to the sheer “covidiocy” of requiring people to cover their faces in one place but not in another, these publicly funded organisations, in which many staff still appear to be largely working from home, remain stuck in a quasi-lockdown.
As Russia dominates the headlines, China’s collapsing zero-Covid strategy lurks in the background, causing havoc in some of its biggest cities, cracking down on the daily routines of millions of people – and creating disturbances in supply chains that will hit Western consumers in the months ahead.
And in the medium-term, China’s decision to flick the switch off and on again with its own economy will present as great a threat, if not a greater one, than the energy crunch being created by Russia right now.
China has been playing economic yo-yo with its cities for the past month. Two weeks ago, Xi Jinping’s regime placed manufacturing city Shenzhen, with a population of close to 18m, under lockdown, in a bid to curb rising infection.
Now, parts of Shanghai (covering roughly 25m people) are being put under harsh lockdown restrictions, including quarantine.
In response to this truly horrifying news of the depths to which Covidocratic tyranny will sink, Jay Bhattacharya tweets:
I thought preventing dying patients from seeing loved ones was the cruelest covid policy I would see during the epidemic. I was wrong. There were further depths of cruelty to plumb, apparently.
In this long essay, John Jay College economist Christian Parenti describes and decries the many ways the American political left lost its way during Covid. Six slices [footnotes removed]:
For two years the left has championed policies of surveillance and exclusion in the form of: punitive vaccine mandates, invasive vaccine passports, socially destructive lockdowns, and radically unaccountable censorship by large media and technology corporations. For the entire pandemic, leftists and liberals – call them the Lockdown Left – cheered on unprecedented levels of repression aimed primarily at the working class – those who could not afford private schools and could not comfortably telecommute from second homes.
Almost the entire left intelligentsia has remained psychically stuck in March 2020. Its members have applauded the new biosecurity repression and calumniated as liars, grifters, and fascists any and all who dissented. Typically, they did so without even engaging evidence and while shirking public debate. Among the most visible in this has been Noam Chomsky, the self-described anarcho-syndicalist who called for the unvaccinated to “remove themselves from society,” and suggested that they should be allowed to go hungry if they refuse to submit.
In Jacobin, a magazine claiming to support the working class in all its struggles, Branko Marcetic demanded the unvaccinated be barred from public transportation: “one obvious course of action is for Biden to make vaccines a requirement for mass transport.” Journalist Doug Henwood has scolded the unvaccinated with: “Get over your own bloated sense of self-importance.” But Henwood has championed shutting down all of society in the name of safety, while refusing to engage counter-arguments – a combination that suggests a bloated sense of self-importance of his own.
Other left intellectuals, like Benjamin Bratton, author of a Verso book on the pandemic called Return of the Real, are notable for hiding amidst academic blather: “the book’s argument is on behalf [of] a ‘positive biopolitics’ that may form the basis of viable social self-organization, but this is less a statement on behalf of ‘the political’ in some metaphysical sense than on behalf of a governmentality through which an inevitably planetary society can deliberately compose itself.” This is, as the late Alex Cockburn once said, “what dumb people think smart people sound like.”
Even the American Civil Liberties Union – long a bastion of objective thinking and civil liberties absolutism – has supported the mandates, lockdowns, and censorship. David Cole, the group’s legal director, debased himself in the New York Times with a tortured op-ed explaining how everything the ACLU stood for over the last 100 years suddenly did not apply during the season of freakout and overreach.
When activist left influencers did stray from the official line, it was to occasionally harumph about how school closure would be ok if we just had “free childcare for all.” That argument is so flimsy one wants to respond with: “Yes, and let’s call these new socialist childcare centers: public schools!”
All of this unmasks the Lockdown Left’s blue-city provincialism. Its adherents drink high-quality coffee and enjoy bike lanes, but have revealed themselves to be as narrow-minded, clannish, mean-spirited and faith-based as any group of small-town “deplorables” might be. If you don’t agree with the consensus in Cambridge, Brooklyn, Bethesda, or Berkeley, then you are very obviously insane. End of story. For this set, Covid vaccines have become a fetish, a talisman to wave against the specter of “contagion”; while lockdowns and censorship are treated as purely technical, apolitical interventions. Prominent left intellectuals have embraced the weaponization of solidarity and made it into a lifestyle via their obsessive masking, scolding, and hiding. They pretend to care for society while actually applauding deeply anti-social and scientifically ungrounded policies like the indefinite shuttering of schools.
All of this is contingent upon the status of Lockdown Leftists as relatively privileged laptop workers who can operate from the comfort of home, dependent on anonymous “frontline workers” ferrying food and Amazon packages to their doorstep. Prior to the pandemic quarantines, many left intellectuals already lived as if they were on lockdown. I know this because I am part of that class.
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Covid repression portrays itself as apolitical and purely “scientific.” Sadly, most leftists accept this canard. But class war from above is always masked as “merely technical.” Proponents of the War on Drugs never described their open-ended campaign of domestic repression and surveillance as a war on workers and the poor. Likewise, proponents of the War on Terror never described their campaign of forever wars as a permanent assault on the Global South and a war to maintain American hegemony. The left saw through those concoctions. We opposed drug testing not because we were in favor of sharing the road with stoned truck drivers, but rather because we saw the political utility and inherent value in workers having autonomy from coercion by bosses. Alas, the War on Covid, has (at least temporarily) erased our side’s analytic capacities. For large parts of the left it is still March 2020.
Arguing reason against Covid hysteria is like attempting to put out a magnesium fire using water.
…..
Before Covid, the left led the critique of captured agencies, but now even the likes of Chomsky take the official pronouncements at face value; even as those pronouncements change to the point of self-contradiction, as in: Do not wear masks, do wear masks. The vaccines stop the disease, no the vaccines merely blunt its lethal edge. Asked by Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman why people should trust large pharmaceutical companies like Moderna and Pfizer, Chomsky waved away the issue with, “If the information came from Pfizer and Moderna, there would be no reason to trust it.” But of course much of the most important information does come directly from these companies.
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The real IFR demonstrated by [John] Ioannidis suggest that the approach called “focused protection” put forward in the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) – a statement drafted by several prominent epidemiologists that promoted an alternative strategy which sought to protect the most vulnerable, for example the elderly with pre-existing health problems, while minimizing the social harm of overly broad lockdowns – would have been the most effective public health strategy. But the left, like the liberal mainstream, immediately attacked “focused protection” not on the merits of the argument but with guilt by association – because the GBD was associated with a libertarian think tank.
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Death, or “all-cause mortality” increased during the pandemic but not all of it was caused by Covid. This fact is often overlooked. A study out of the UK published in January 2022, found that non-Covid deaths due to delayed medical care quadrupled during the Covid pandemic. This sort of dangerous unintended consequence from lockdown was predicted during the pandemic’s first year. A study published in late 2020 estimated that over-zealous Covid restrictions would lead to 18,000 extra cancer deaths in the UK that year.
Most left intellectuals however, following in lockstep with the Democrats, refused to acknowledge that lockdowns also kill. They could not do so for a very simple reason: Trump had done it first, when he called for the economy to reopen. “Permanent lockdown is not a viable path forward…Ultimately [it would] inflict more harm than it would prevent,” Trump said during an April 3, 2020 White House briefing. “Lockdowns do not prevent infection in the future. They just don’t. It comes back many times, it comes back,” Trump said.
Trump’s concerns about the risks of lockdown were immediately excoriated and mocked in the press. But we now know he was right – lockdowns also kill. The pandemic has seen record surges in fatal drug overdoses and homicide. The CDC found a 28 percent increase in drug overdose deaths from April 2020 to April 2021. While the homicide rate increased by 30 percent. Bizarrely, traffic deaths went up by 7 percent in 2020, even as the total number of miles driven declined by 13 percent.
Early on, the New York Times briefly acknowledged the health risks from lockdowns. An op-ed by two physicians turned healthcare executives noted that: “The toll from deaths caused by lockdown related impacts may have killed as many as the disease.”
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The left has turned its back on liberty. Worse yet, the left now campaigns against freedom. ACLU luminaries editorialize for de facto forced vaccination and vaccine passports. This has devastating social, political, and economic consequences; and the left’s failure to acknowledge and understand this will haunt it for years after the pandemic.
The left invokes “the greater good” to justify support for vaccine mandates, vaccine passports, lockdowns, and censorship; in so doing the left supports undemocratic rule by unaccountable bureaucrats. During the Covid crisis, there have been no lockdown and mandate related periods of public comment, no environmental impact reports, thus there has been no public scientific debate about disease severity, vaccine efficacy, and the unintended consequences of mandates and lockdowns.
Left forces, broadly defined, have for our national history fought for personal liberties while elites have opposed such freedoms. The Bill of Rights itself is a concession to the people. The only way the framers could compel the states to ratify the new US Constitution was to agree that ten amendments protecting personal liberty and autonomy (the Bill of Rights) would be passed into law upon ratification.
Recall all the struggles: Abolitionists vs. slavery, the Slave Power, and the gag rule. The Industrial Workers of the World’s multi-year, nationwide campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience in defense of free speech. The now pathetically debased, pro-mandate and pro-lockdown ACLU was born of resistance to the Espionage Act of 1917 and Sedition Act of 1918.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 81 of the late, great Harold Demsetz’s richly rewarding 2008 book, From Economic Man to Economic System:
Capitalism is an economy based on decentralized private ownership of resources and open markets; “based on” means that private ownership rights are acknowledged and respected. Most members of society must feel a duty to respect the private rights of others. Ownership rights must be exercisable without fear, ridicule, or disrespect from other members of society. An economic system that is forced on people will not perform as would one to which there is general assent.
DBx: Indeed, and Deirdre McCloskey would agree.
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