Russell Roberts's Blog, page 156
April 1, 2022
Some Non-Covid Links
Second, global supply chains are, obviously, global. If inflation were truly the product of supply-chain issues, we would witness roughly the same rates of inflation throughout the industrialized world. But we don’t. Most industrialized countries have lower levels of inflation than the United States. These other countries also implemented significantly lower amounts of COVID-19 spending.
For instance, France, South Korea, and Norway all have inflation rates below 4 percent. Their governments spent less than 10 percent of GDP on fiscal stimulus in response to the pandemic, compared to about 26 percent in the United States.
One also needs to distinguish supply constraints, which increase the price of some goods relative to other goods, and inflation, which occurs when the prices of everything, including labor, rise. Supply shocks and constraints do not cause the same broad-based pattern of price hikes that true inflation causes. In addition, price-level hikes caused by supply-side shocks are generally not ongoing month after month; they are one-time jumps that gradually dissipate when the supply shock is over.
He could also strike a deal in Congress to remove regulatory obstacles to U.S. oil and gas production in return for more green-energy spending, as Sen. Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) has suggested. The 2015 deal between Paul Ryan and Barack Obama to lift the 40-year ban on oil exports in return for extending renewable-energy tax credits provides a template.
But markets are reacting as if they simply don’t take Mr. Biden’s pleadings seriously. That’s a dominant theme across his Presidency, and Americans are paying the price.
Pierre Lemieux writes: “Two contemporary books of political economy and political philosophy that any student of public affairs must absolutely read are Anthony de Jasay’s The State and James Buchanan’s Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative.”
In both Idaho and Rhode Island, the default for regulations shifted toward elimination. Regulators were required to justify keeping a rule. This is both revolutionary and necessary when thousands of obsolete or duplicative regulations fill the rule books in every state and no one has time to scrutinize each one. Pragmatic use of sunset provisions (expiration dates for rules), regulatory caps and reduction targets may be effective means of not only halting regulatory growth but reversing it.
Can reforms like these work at the federal level, where there is far more regulation than in any state? Partisanship may be the biggest hurdle. It’s relatively easy to generate consensus in states that are politically homogenous. Agreement is much harder for the nation as a whole. But it’s a good sign that three very different states all support pro-business, pro-growth policies. The “laboratories of democracy” are living up to their reputation.
About Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife’s texts, George Will describes it all as ” kerfuffle over appearances.” Three slices:
So, about the kerfuffle concerning Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife, Virginia. She is, politically, mad as a hatter. The shelves in her mental pantry groan beneath the weight of Trumpian hysterics about the 2020 presidential election having been stolen and the republic’s certain ruination under Joe Biden. She bombarded Donald Trump’s White House with 21 (that are known) texted exhortations, and received eight replies, about preventing Congress’s Jan. 6, 2021, certification of the electoral vote. To say that she was “strategizing” with the White House is akin to saying that the guy in the stadium’s upper deck yelling “Roll Tide!” and shouting suggested plays is strategizing with Alabama’s football team.
Be that as it may, let us assume, as feminists and other enlightened thinkers should set an example by doing, that Virginia is not under Clarence’s direction. Should we not also assume that he is not under hers? So, what exactly is the problem? Appearances, apparently.
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Particularly because the fastidious often are selectively so. Would Thomas’s current critics argue that a justice whose spouse is an environmental activist should recuse in cases involving the Environmental Protection Agency? Unlikely. This, however, is likely: A Venn diagram of people who think Thomas’s recusal is required to protect the court’s reputation for impartiality, and of people who denounce the court as a conservative, illegitimate mini-legislature, would show a substantial overlap.
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Thomas does not mind criticism — for the unbending originalism of his jurisprudence, for his minimal reverence for precedents he considers mistaken, for the company his wife keeps, or for many other things. People who consider his starchy independence a problem have a problem.
I love this letter that will appear in tomorrow’s print edition of the Wall Street Journal:
Your editorial “Taxes, Taxes and More Taxes” (March 30) concludes that the “Democratic appetite for your money really is insatiable.” I’m reminded of a quote by the economist Thomas Sowell from his 1999 book “Barbarians Inside the Gates and Other Controversial Essays,” in which he writes, “I have never understood why it is ‘greed’ to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.”
William Congleton
Falls Church, Va
Randy Holcombe is not impressed by Biden’s proposed billionaire tax.
My GMU Econ colleague Bryan Caplan reflects on Ukrainian refugees.
In a new paper, GMU-trained economists Yahya Alshamy, Christopher Coyne, and Nathan Goodman look at “noxious government markets.” Here’s the abstract:
Existing scholarship examines the moral status of markets, identifying some markets as “noxious”—markets deemed morally objectionable due to the background conditions preceding exchange and the resulting consequences. This literature primarily focuses on market exchanges between private parties. We broaden the analysis to include government markets—markets involving exchanges where either the buyer or seller, or both, are government officials. We develop a general theoretical framework to understand the conditions under which government markets are likely to be more or less noxious. We then apply the framework to the international arms trade to demonstrate its usefulness for understanding noxious government markets.
I’m always honored and pleased to be a guest on my friend Ross Kaminsky’s radio show:
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from pages 275-276 of the late, great UCLA economists Armen A. Alchian’s and William R. Allen’s Universal Economics (2018; Jerry L. Jordan, ed.); this volume is an updated version of Alchian’s and Allen’s magnificent and pioneering earlier textbook, University Economics:
An entrepreneur is more than an investor. Entrepreneurs think of new ideas and make investments in research with trial and error in the hope of finding profitable products or methods of production and distribution. Entrepreneurs, though trying to augment their personal wealth, have improved the well-being of the populace, and not merely by competing in prices of goods. They have invested in attempts to discover better goods and methods of production and distribution.
DBx: Yes.
It follows from the above-described reality that market entrepreneurship and industrial policy are inherently incompatible with each other. Entrepreneurs create new products and methods of production and distribution. Entrepreneurs also discover opportunities to use resources in ways that generate more value both for themselves and for others. Industrial policy, though, requires that resources be used only according to the plans of the industrial-policy designers and enforcers. These plans might not specify the particular uses to which each resource is to be devoted, but these plans necessarily put bounds on permitted uses of resources. Attempts to use resources in ways not permitted by the policy are out of bounds. Any truly creative idea for changing the use of some resource or resources will be, by its nature, unforeseen by the industrial-policy designers and, hence, highly likely to be inconsistent with the industrial policy. If the industrial policy is to continue to be pursued, a great deal of genuine entrepreneurial creativity must – must – be squelched.
The fact that many industrial-policy proponents deny that industrial policy is inherently inconsistent with genuine entrepreneurship – inherently inconsistent with entrepreneurial creativity and discovery and, hence, incompatible with genuine innovation – does not eliminate this inconsistency. Such denials merely cast industrial policy in a false light, making it appear to the unwitting public, and to gullible pundits, to be less destructive than it inevitably is of the very source of economic growth and widespread prosperity.
Some Covid Links
Writing at UnHerd, Toby Green warns against letting lockdown hawks re-write history. Here’s his conclusion:
This is why the strongest advocates of lockdowns such as [Devi] Sridhar and [Kit] Yates cannot be allowed to set the tone of the debate as we move away from the pandemic. Strong lockdowns promoted policies that were utterly uncaring of the young, the elderly in care homes, women in abusive situations, the poor whose work disappeared, let alone the hundreds of millions of people whose livelihoods have been destroyed in the Global South.
Meanwhile, 40% of Covid deaths in the West took place in care homes. Far from protecting the vulnerable, lockdown policies did not even protect the most vulnerable. Meanwhile, they have rendered hundreds of millions of people newly vulnerable. That is their legacy, and those who advocated hardest for them must not be allowed to escape it.
Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel explains why we Americans are “Covid broke.” Two slices:
We are, somehow, Covid broke. How? Didn’t Washington, under the cry of “emergency,” spend $6.6 trillion in fiscal 2020 and $6.8 trillion more in 2021? Both years equaled at least 50% more in spending than in 2019—and all for “Covid.” Only a year ago, Democrats waved through a sixth Covid relief bill, President Biden’s massive $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan—enough money to buy every Covid vaccine, ventilator, and hospital chain on the planet. Only this week, the White House put out a $5.8 trillion 2023 budget proposal. Yet the administration insists that without $22.5 billion in emergency dollars now, we again face Covid apocalypse.
Where did all the money go? Everywhere but to Covid. The Rescue Plan handed $350 billion in “relief” money to the states, and the Associated Press recently described its uses. Some $140 million is going to a high-end hotel in Broward County, Fla. Colorado Springs, Colo., is dumping $6.6 million into golf-course irrigation systems. An Iowa county is using $2 million to purchase a privately owned ski area. Massachusetts is ladling $5 million to cover the debts of the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the U.S. Senate.
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Americans are increasingly realizing that Congress is barely capable of anything but spending money—and that only via shadowy back-room deals and last-minute votes. In recent years it’s proved unable to pass policing reform, any trade bills, or desperately needed changes to immigration policy, to name a few failures. But dangle in front of lawmakers a juicy infrastructure blowout, or an omnibus plumped with earmarks, or a payoff to states and the education lobby disguised as a Covid “relief” bill—and they’re all over it.
The mismanagement of Covid funds highlights the absurdity of the White House’s new demand for more, not to mention Mr. Biden’s $5.8 trillion budget. If Republicans can’t make spending discipline central to their midterm message, they risk alienating a voter base that is disgusted with Washington largesse.
Reason‘s Robby Soave reports that Covid Derangement Syndrome continues to afflict administrators of many colleges. Two slices:
Across the country, government-mandated masking is mostly over, with air travel being a notable exception. But that doesn’t mean mask mandates are dead and gone. Indeed, many college campuses still have mask mandates in place, even though their student populations are almost entirely vaccinated and at low risk of negative COVID-19 health outcomes.
George Washington University (GWU), for instance—located in Washington, D.C.—still has a universal indoor mask mandate in place and has no plans as of yet to get rid of it. This, despite the fact that the university requires students to be vaccinated and boosted, and tests them every other week.
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Every college that still clings, desperately, to mask mandates must ask itself one simple question: If not now, when? Students are as safe as they can be, but the policies at GWU and other places treat them like the most uniquely fragile population on the earth.
And see here. (HT Martin Kulldorff)
“Leading Covid authority Imperial College London BANS parents from attending children’s graduations because of ‘safety first’ social distancing – despite all restrictions being scrapped.” (DBx: Perhaps no faculty at any institution of higher learning, so called, have inflicted more harm on humanity as have some of the faculty – not least the reckless modeler and hypocrite Neil Ferguson – of Imperial College over these past two years.)
Aaron Kheriaty warns of the dangers of what Christopher Snowdon calls “public health paternalists.” Here’s his conclusion:
Fast forward to 2020. In the face of the novel coronavirus, and the fears generated by media propaganda, the principle of free and informed consent was once again abandoned. The most egregious, but by no means the only, example was vaccine mandates enacted while the vaccines were still under emergency-use authorization, and, thus, by our federal government’s own definition, “experimental.”
How and why was the bulwark of 20th-century medical ethics abandoned so quickly, and with so little opposition from the medical and scientific establishment? What were the immediate effects? What will be the long-term, consequences of the shift back to a crass utilitarian ethic governing science, medicine, and public health during a pandemic?
Covidocrats are addicted to fear-mongering.
“In China’s ‘zero-Covid’ lockdowns, patients with other diseases are struggling to survive.” A slice:
In another part of the city, Li Chenxi was also in a panic, unable to access care for her mother, who has endometrial cancer. For more than two weeks, her mother had received no treatment after the industrial city of 8.5 million went into lockdown on March 11. Their local hospital wasn’t accepting patients during the outbreak, Li said, and she hadn’t found another opening.
“The only thing we can do is wait. But the tumor won’t wait for us. The tumor is growing every day,” Li said.
“There are so many diseases that are more serious than Covid … My mom has been diagnosed with a terminal illness, and I just want to get the medicine as soon as possible so I can keep her alive,” Li said through tears.
For Li and Chang, their loved ones’ individual health crises are inexorably caught up in China’s larger one, as the country grapples with its first major outbreak of Covid-19 in more than two years. Now multiple cities — including the financial hub of Shanghai and several cities in the country’s northern “rust belt” — have been placed under government mandated lockdown, part of China’s uncompromising “zero-Covid” strategy.
For two years, that approach — to attempt to stamp out all infections through stringent isolation measures, mass testing and tracing, and blunt lockdowns — has been hailed by the ruling Communist Party as a success.
But now, as the country struggles to get a handle on a weeks-long outbreak of the highly infectious Omicron BA.2 variant, horror stories like Chang’s and Li’s are, too, becoming part of what “zero-Covid” means for China.
(DBx: Well, you see, all that matters is that people be protected from exposure to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Any other fate – including death from injury or a non-Covid illness – is less worrisome than is even mere exposure to the dreaded Covid monster. Or so goes the elite narrative.)
“Zero Covid has been a disaster.” (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
“Chasing scientific renown, grant dollars, and approval from Dr. Anthony Fauci, Peter Daszak transformed the environmental nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance into a government-funded sponsor of risky, cutting-edge virus research in both the U.S. and Wuhan, China. Drawing on more than 100,000 leaked documents, a V.F. investigation shows how an organization dedicated to preventing the next pandemic found itself suspected of helping start one.” (HT Phil Magness)
Quotation of the Day…
… is from pages 42-43 of Columbia University law professor Philip Hamburger’s 2020 monograph, The Administrative Threat:
When agencies make law in the guise of interpreting statutes, they rely on the courts to defer to their interpretations. But this judicial deference is unconstitutional. One problem is the judicial abandonment of independent judgment. When judges defer to agency interpretations, they depart from their judicial office or duty, under Article III of the Constitution, to exercise their own independent judgment. Recognizing this duty, Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in Marbury v. Madison: “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is. Those who apply the rule to particular cases, must of necessity expound and interpret that rule.” The judges therefore cannot defer to an agency’s interpretation without abandoning their duty – indeed, their very office – as judges.
March 31, 2022
It’s Impossible for Any Country to Be the Low-Cost Producer of All Outputs
Here’s a letter to a sympathetic correspondent. I apologize for its wonkiness.
Mr. W__:
Thanks for your e-mail.
In response to my piece on microchips and potato chips, you ask “But what happens when they [foreigners] not only make [micro]chips cheaper than we can but also make potato chips and everything else cheaper than we do?”
The answer to your question is indisputable: The outcome you describe is, because of the principle of comparative advantage, impossible. Explaining why, alas, requires an unusually long letter, for which, I trust, you’ll forgive me. (You can also consult here, here, here, and here.)
Suppose China can produce microchips at a lower cost than we Americans can. This fact means that the value of other goods and services that China gives up – the value of other goods and services that China does not produce – as a consequence of producing microchips is less than is the value of other goods and services that we give up were we to produce microchips.
To offer a concrete hypothetical, suppose that each week China can produce $1,000,000 worth of microchips or $1,000,000 worth of other goods and services – “widgets.” This fact means that for each dollar’s worth of microchips that China produces, it sacrifices – it doesn’t produce – $1 worth of widgets. As for us, suppose that each week we can, like China, produce $1,000,000 worth of microchips. But the amount of widgets we can produce each week is $2,000,000 worth. Our cost of producing one dollar’s worth of microchips is thus $2 worth of widgets – twice as high as is China’s cost of producing microchips. China produces microchips at a lower cost than we do.
But these numbers also mean that we produce widgets at a lower cost than does China. Producing $2,000,000 worth of widgets requires that we sacrifice the production of $1,000,000 worth of microchips – meaning that each dollar’s worth of widgets that we produce cost us only $0.50 in foregone microchip production.
In this example, China is the low-cost producer of microchips (and so has a comparative advantage at producing microchips). America is the low-cost producer of widgets (and so has a comparative advantage at producing widgets).
Now suppose that Beijing decides that it wants China to produce both microchips and widgets at lower costs than America produces these outputs. In pursuit of this goal, Beijing strives – say, using industrial policy – to improve China’s ability to produce widgets. Suppose Beijing succeeds spectacularly. Each week China can now produce, not merely the $1,000,000 worth of widgets that it could produce earlier, but $4,000,000 worth of widgets. Nothing, however, has happened to China’s ability to produce microchips; it can still, as before, produce each week $1,000,000 worth of microchips.
Because China can now, in a week, produce $4,000,000 worth of widgets, its cost of producing each dollar’s worth of widgets now is $0.25 worth of microchips – down from $1 worth of microchips. BUT – and here’s the kicker – this fact means that China’s cost of producing a dollar’s worth of microchips has risen from $1 worth of widgets to $4 worth of widgets. (By making itself an economically better producer of widgets, China necessarily makes itself an economically worse producer of microchips.) Yet America’s cost of producing a dollar’s worth of microchips remains at $2 worth of widgets – now only half of China’s new, higher ($4) cost of producing a dollar’s worth of microchips.
In short, it’s impossible for a country to gain a comparative advantage in the production of output W by lowering its cost of producing output W without simultaneously increasing its cost of producing other outputs (such as output M) and thereby ensuring that other countries come to have a comparative advantage at producing output M.
In our world of inescapable resource scarcity, what matters for determining trade patterns is not how many resources are used in country A to produce output W and to produce output M compared to how many resources are used in country B to produce output W and to produce output M. What does matters is how much of output W is sacrificed in country A to produce a unit of output M compared to how much of output W is sacrificed in country B to produce a unit of output M. As long as countries A and B sacrifice different amounts of value of output W to produce $1 worth of output M, one country will be the low-cost producer of output W while the other country will be the low-cost producer of output M. And the peoples of these countries can gain from freely trading with each other. (If both countries sacrifice the same amount of output W to produce a unit of output M, then both countries have the same cost of producing both outputs. In such an unlikely circumstance, there would be no need for government to obstruct trade between countries because there would be no incentive for people in these countries to trade with each other to begin with.)
Comparative advantage is one of the most counterintuitive concepts in all of economics. Economists have struggled for more than 200 years, with various degrees of success, to explain it clearly. I keep striving for clarity, but I’m painfully aware that I always come up waaaaay short. But please don’t be misled by my obtuseness: Once the concept of comparative advantage is grasped, it forever deepens and sharpens a person’s understanding of economics generally and of trade specifically. And this concept makes clear that it’s impossible for one country (or person, or firm, or you-name-the-economic-entity) to be the low-cost producer of everything.
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 Non-Covid Links
Ex-Im has been reauthorized 17 times, despite evidence that it is unnecessary: Between 2015 and 2019, when its board was three members short of a quorum, it was unable to approve guarantees of loans larger than $10 million. From 2014 to 2018, the portion of U.S. exports the bank subsidized fell from not much (less than 2 percent) to minuscule (0.3 percent) — yet U.S. exports increased.
Ex-Im is known as “Boeing’s Bank.” From 2007 through 2017, Boeing received 34 percent of the bank’s assistance. During those 10 years, allsmall-business loan guarantees amounted to 22 percent of the bank’s assistance.
For many years, the world has been awash in savings, and therefore in cheap loans. Historically low interest rates make Ex-Im even less necessary than it once was — not that it was ever a necessity.
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So, first Ex-Im fabricates a vast mandate to improvise industrial policy — “rebuilding” manufacturing’s 11.4 percent of the economy. (Presumably, Ex-Im will rely on its clairvoyance about future markets for future goods and services.) Next, the bank construes its mandate to “facilitate” exports to include financing the needs of “suppliers to exporters.” But, Ex-Im says, do not worry about overreach: Ex-Im’s financing must have a “reasoned and articulated” nexus to exports, as determined by: itself.
When government resorts to opaque terminology, it is rarely straining for clarity. Consider “additionality,” which Ex-Im says “refers to the existence of reason(s) why a transaction would likely not go forward without EXIM’s support.” The bank decides there are “gaps” between financing that the private sector is willing or able to provide for a project and what the project requires. Or what the private borrower prefers to get from Ex-Im. The bank says its “gap analysis” includes “anecdotal, aggregated information directly from multiple wide-ranging one-on-one interviews with senior market participants.” That is, from potential recipients of Ex-Im benefits.
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[Sen. Pat] Toomey wonders: Why, exactly, do private lenders need to be supplemented? Why does government need to encourage private lenders to do something that, absent such encouragement, prudence tells them to not do? By opposing Ex-Im’s aggrandizement, Toomey is doing as James Madison directed: “It will not be denied, that power is of an encroaching nature, and that it ought to be effectually restrained from passing the limits assigned to it.”
Stan Veuger – to put it mildly – is unimpressed with Oren Cass’s case for protectionism. Here’s Stan’s conclusion:
First, on substance: It is worrisome that the national-conservative movement is now so isolated from America’s mainstream intellectual life that its leading thinkers struggle with relatively well-known facts about economics and the economy in the manner highlighted here.
Second, the discovery Mr. Cass thought he had made led him to consider a potential “global conspiracy.” What he thought he had discovered was, so he claimed, “enough to send one searching for the meeting minutes from whichever Illuminati subcommittee had jurisdiction.” This is not a normal response. The normal response would have been to assume he must be missing something, and to read a book on the intellectual history of free trade like Doug Irwin’s Against the Tide (which includes the full quotation Mr. Cass believes to have uncovered, for what it’s worth), or to reach out to someone with advanced training in economics. It is not a normal response, but it is an all too common one.
DBx: While I agree with nearly all that Stan writes in the above link (although he doesn’t sufficiently qualify his mention of the theory of the optimum tariff) – and while I myself have been, and continue to be, highly critical of Oren Cass’s argument against free trade and for industrial policy – Oren and his colleagues at American Compass deserve much credit for publishing Stan’s harsh critique. These days, such generosity, civil-mindedness, and scientific integrity are too rare. I tip my hat to Oren and his colleagues.
Samuel Gregg continues eloquently to make the case for economic freedom. Two slices [second link added]:
This question of causality is a perennial problem with industrial policy. As a 1993 World Bank assessing industrial policy’s contribution to the East Asian economic miracle famously stated: “It is very difficult to establish statistical links between growth and a specific intervention and even more difficult to establish causality. Because we cannot know what would have happened in the absence of a specific [industrial] policy, it is very difficult to test whether interventions increased growth rates.”
Compounding the problem with [Aaron] Renn’s arguments is that, like many industrial policy advocates, he conflates defense policy and industrial policy. Industrial policy is specifically concerned with making selective interventions into the economy with the goal of realizing a different set of outcomes than would otherwise be delivered by markets. But this is not the objective of military R&D. Governments promote such research to help secure national security. There may be spillover effects, but neither these nor the uses to which they might be put can be known in advance.
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These facts point to a hard conclusion: that if entrepreneurship and competition are to play the role that I think they should in America’s economy, the prerequisite is, as [Iain] Murray puts it, “nothing less than a wholesale program aimed at eliminating the administrative state as it exists today.”
Therein lies an economic project worthy of conservatives, and one with immense potential to bolster America’s common good. Yes, the modern regulatory state has been around a long time and it seems only to grow. It is also bolstered by the many Americans—government employees, crony businesses, lobbyists, legislators etc.—whose livelihoods and power depend significantly upon the administrative state remaining firmly in place.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Bruce Gilley makes a strong case against a global minimum tax. A slice:
The Finance Committee Republicans are also correct on the economics. Corporate taxes, in addition to being costly to collect, are bad for the economy. According to an International Monetary Fund study, 45% to 75% of the burden of corporate taxes is recouped through lower employee wages. Sales, income and property taxes are better ways to pay for government because they are easier to collect and they cause less to distortions to wealth-creating economic choices.
It gets worse. Public companies already have to keep two sets of books, one for the Securities and Exchange Commission and one for the Internal Revenue Service. The first tells shareholders how well the business is doing; the second tells the government how much is owed and to whom. The new global tax would require multinationals to keep a third set of books to avoid being the target of tax raids by, say, France. The agreement would create many new jobs for accountants and lawyers. It would also force major companies to become think tanks as they scramble for statistics on consumer spending to estimate final sales in each place where their products are sold.
While it’s understandable that Rory Little wants to defend his students at UC Hastings (“Open Minds, Loud Voices and Cancel Culture,” Letters, March 28), he ends up twisted in logical knots. If an event that can’t be conducted because of incessant disruption doesn’t count as a cancellation, nothing does. It may well be that, “after the intermittent chanting and speaking, everyone quietly and peacefully left the room,” but that was only after I had departed—because the room’s lunch-hour reservation expired ahead of an afternoon class.
That’s the crux of the matter: This was not some speaker’s corner where opposing activists face off, but a space duly reserved by a student organization for an invited speaker (and faculty commentator) to discuss issues that are plainly germane to a law school’s mission. Constitutional law may well be “murky, inconsistent and unsettled” in many areas, but neither the First Amendment nor UC Hastings’s policies countenance a heckler’s veto. And if shouting down were protected speech, opponents of critical race theory and other progressive causes could likewise cancel events.
Moreover, Prof. Little contributed to my being silenced. He rapped the table and chanted along. He is recorded on video saying he was “all for it,” and then signed a letter reiterating support for the disrupters because “statements of commitment to diversity and inclusion ring hollow when salient issues of racial equity are ignored or discounted in the service of prioritizing the ideal of free speech.”
While I’m heartened that “the college is now engaged in constructive, if also unsettling, discussions,” that has nothing to do with me. I would have happily engaged the “message of discontent from a group of neglected and undervalued members of the community”—my tweet was racist only to someone misreading it in bad faith—but the disrupters didn’t want to hear it and, given Mr. Little’s description of the Hastings dynamic, they are being rewarded for their actions.
Chris Edwards looks at the language in Biden’s budget.
John Stossel pleads for the U.S. government to let Ukrainian refugees into the U.S.
Phil Magness exposes the alleged ‘scholarship’ behind the 1619 Project for what it is: junk. A slice:
“I too yearn for universal justice,” wrote Zora Neale Hurston in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, “but how to bring it about is another thing.” The black novelist’s remarks prefaced a passage where she grappled with the historical legacy of slavery in the African-American experience. Perhaps unexpectedly, Hurston informed her readers that she had “no intention of wasting my time beating on old graves with a club.”
Hurston did not aim to bury an ugly past but to search for historical understanding. Her 1927 interview with Cudjoe Lewis, among the last living survivors of the 1860 voyage of the slave ship Clotilda, contains an invaluable eyewitness account of the middle passage as told by one of its victims. Yet Hurston saw only absurdity in trying to find justice by bludgeoning the past for its sins. “While I have a handkerchief over my eyes crying over the landing of the first slaves in 1619,” she continued, “I might miss something swell that is going on in” the present day.
Hurston’s writings present an intriguing foil to The New York Times‘ 1619 Project, which the newspaper recently expanded into a book-length volume. As its subtitle announces, the book aims to cultivate a “new origin story” of the United States where the turmoil and strife of the past are infused into a living present as tools for attaining a particular vision of justice. Indeed, it restores The 1619 Project’s original aim of displacing the “mythology” of 1776 “to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding.” This passage was quietly deleted from The New York Times‘ website in early 2020 just as the embattled journalistic venture was making a bid for a Pulitzer Prize. After a brief foray into self-revisionism in which she denied ever making such a claim, editor Nikole Hannah-Jones has now apparently brought this objective back to the forefront of The 1619 Project.
Vacillating claims about The 1619 Project’s purpose have come to typify Hannah-Jones’ argumentation. In similar fashion, she selectively describes the project as a work either of journalism or of scholarly history, as needed. Yet as the stealth editing of the “true founding” passage revealed, these pivots are often haphazardly executed. So too is her attempt to claim the mantle of Hurston. In a recent public spat with Andrew Sullivan, Hannah-Jones accused the British political commentator of “ignorance” for suggesting that “Zora Neale Hurston’s work sits in opposition to mine.” She was apparently unaware that Dust Tracks on a Road anticipated and rejected the premise of The 1619 Project eight decades prior to its publication.
Dan Klein and Erik Matson ask: “What’s natural about Adam Smith’s natural liberty?” A slice:
Is liberty, in Smith’s time and ours, usual or expected? Yes and no. We will come back to the “yes” in our next essay, but here we highlight the “no.” Arbitrary political arrangements that yield economic and religious monopolies, burdensome tax schemes and regulations, restrictions on the freedom of movement and expression are the norm. We might say that the unnaturalness of liberty is presupposed by Smith’s entire project. Why write a book like The Wealth of Nations if one believes liberty to be a natural tendency in political affairs?
Some Covid Links
Writing at National Review, Steve Hanke and Kevin Dowd decry the Imperial College’s “fear machine.” Two slices:
Before hurrying into panicked policy decisions, U.K. policy-makers should have been aware that Neil Ferguson’s Imperial College team had a history of defective modeling. With minimal effort, policy-makers would have quickly discovered that that team had a track record that makes astrology look respectable.
That dreadful record started with the U.K. foot-and-mouth disease epidemic in 2001, during which the Imperial College modelers persuaded the government to adopt a policy of mass animal slaughter. Their model predicted that daily case incidences would peak at about 420. At the time, the number of incidences had already peaked at just over 50 and was falling. The prediction missed its mark, and as many as 10 million animals, most of which could have been vaccinated, were needlessly killed.
Shortly thereafter, in January 2002, the Imperial team suggested that up to 150,000 people in the U.K. could die from mad cow disease. As it turned out, the total number of U.K. deaths was 178 — another miss for the Imperial team.
Then, in 2005, Neil Ferguson suggested that “up to around 200 million” could die from bird flu globally. He justified this claim by comparing the lethality of bird flu to that of the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak, which killed 40 million. By 2021, bird flu had killed 456 people worldwide, making it Imperial’s biggest miss yet.
Neil Ferguson and his team were back at it again in 2009 when they claimed that 65,000 people could die of swine flu in the U.K. By the end of March 2010, the outbreak had killed fewer than 500 people before petering out. Neil Ferguson’s “reasonable worst case” scenario was over 130 times too high — yet another big miss.
…..
Governments across the world should also initiate their own public inquiries to draw lessons and address the measures needed to protect their citizens from reckless public-health modeling. Never again should “scientists” armed with flawed models get away with shouting, “Pandemic!” in a theater filled with politicians and bureaucrats eager to grab yet more power.
Reason‘s Christian Britschgi sees no sense in the stubborn continuation of mask mandates in the United States for users of public transportation. Here’s his conclusion:
Almost everyone seems to view masks as a temporary expediency that is no longer necessary. The number of people who think that will only grow as the pandemic continues to fade away. It seems more likely that their preferences about the social norms of mask-wearing will win out in the end.
Robert Higgs won’t be surprised.
Kyle Smith is right that Ron DeSantis was right (while most other U.S. governors were wrong). A slice:
Not least among the reasons I hope Ron DeSantis is the next Republican nominee for president is this one: The nation deserves a clear, honest reckoning with how we faced up to the Covid crisis, unclouded with any distractions such as the personality defects of Donald Trump. DeSantis is the one potential candidate who can vigorously represent what has become the conservative position: that non-pharmaceutical interventions such as masks were generally useless in stopping the spread of a highly contagious airborne disease, and even if they did have some small benefit, it was certainly not worth the immense psychological and developmental cost imposed cruelly and mindlessly on the children of this country. Florida children went back to school unmasked in August of 2020 and got on with their lives. I wish I could say the same of New York children, who have been beaten into submission and in many cases are still wearing masks, though they are no longer mandated.
Joe Wang criticizes the CDC for suppressing information about natural immunity against Covid.
Noah Carl reports on paper by the University of Washington’s Kevin Bardosh, et al., the title of which is “The Unintended Consequences of COVID-19 Vaccine Policy: Why Mandates, Passports, and Segregated Lockdowns May Cause more Harm than Good.” A slice from Carl’s report:
Yet as Bardosh and colleagues note, many unvaccinated people had perfectly good reasons for remaining unvaccinated, such as being in a low-risk category or having natural immunity from previous infection.
Turning to the legality of Covid vaccine policies, the authors note that many measures were merely decrees, passed under states of emergency in the absence of normal democratic governance. As a result, injured parties (such as those who lost their livelihood) have had fewer or no opportunities for proper redress.
Vaccine passports also constitute a significant infringement on privacy, insofar as they require the sharing of medical information with people other than one’s doctor, including not only border officials, but owners of pubs, restaurants and nightclubs.
What’s more, vaccine mandates that disproportionately restrict people’s access to things like work, education and social life can be considered violations of basic human rights, the authors argue. This may explain why the WHO’s Director of Immunisation said in 2020, “I don’t think we envision any countries creating a mandate for vaccination.”
At least some people in Shanghai are protesting China’s especially brutal and deranged Covidocracy.
George Leef rightly applauds a recent essay by Aaron Kheriaty. A slice from Leef:
Nothing better illustrates the difference between true liberals (i.e., people who believe in allowing individuals to act without coercion) and the statists who want to exert the maximum of control over society, which satisfies their authoritarian urges and also gives them access to lots of tax dollars, than the reaction to Covid. The latter have used it as the excuse for an astounding grab for power while declaring that everything they wanted was based on science.
PLC tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
South Korea is ending covid restrictions at a time of record infections and deaths.
Covid tyranny is coming to an end not because it succeeded but because it failed, utterly and completely.
Marty Makary tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
A snapshot into America’s uncanny booster enthusiasm: Pfizer applied for a 4th dose for people >65, but the FDA granted them an authorization for people >50. In other words, the FDA gave Pfizer more than what they asked for. And bypassed their own expert advisors voting to do it.
There was never any scientific basis for the idea that vaccinated people do not “carry the virus.” This false idea was the fundamental premise behind the discriminatory vaccine mandate/passport scheme that has violated the civil rights of countless people worldwide.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 88 of my late, great colleague Walter Williams’s 2011 book, Race & Economics: How much can be blamed on discrimination? (footnotes deleted; ellipses original to Williams):
Said Marcus Garvey, in urging blacks to undercut union wages as a means to employment and combating union racism, “the only convenient friend the Negro worker or laborer has in America at the present time is the white capitalist.” Similarly, in 1924, Howard University’s Professor Kelly Miller urged blacks to “stand shoulder to shoulder with the captains of industry” in opposition to labor unions. J.E. Bruce wrote that unions were a “greedy, grasping, ruthless, intolerant, overbearing, dictatorial combination of half-educated white men…. I am against them because they are against the Negro.” Both Frederick Douglas and Booker T. Washington were lifelong foes of unions.
DBx: Were Walter (1936-2020) still alive, he would today celebrate his 86th birthday.
March 30, 2022
On Economic Sanctions
Here’s a letter to the Washington Post:
Editor:
Dana Milbank’s “Koch Industries’ valentine to Vladimir Putin” (March 30) is a parade of unwarranted assumptions and leftists’ boogeymen camouflaged as well-grounded conclusions.
Consider, for example, his implication that people who now express skepticism of economic sanctions against Russia are greedy scoundrels or mercenary rogues. It’s possible, of course, that such people are mistaken. But the fact is that powerful and sober arguments have for decades been offered by serious scholars against the effectiveness of such sanctions. It’s simply not clear that sanctions work as intended, or that they won’t backfire or concentrate the bulk of their harms on innocent citizens of sanctioned countries.
How sad that a Post columnist apparently is unaware of these arguments. Even sadder is this columnist’s assumption that expression of dissent from a popular policy is evidence of moral depravity rather than of legitimate intellectual disagreement borne of the enormous complexity of economic processes and international relations.
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
What’s Worth More? $1,000 of Microchips or $1,000 of Potato Chips?
There’s little doubt that the US government could use tariffs, import and export quotas, and subsidies to redirect more resources into the domestic production of microchips. And the government might even arrange for a disproportionately large chunk of these redirected resources to come from the snack-food industry. (I here overlook the fact that, in reality, a disproportionately large amount of resources artificially directed into the production of microchips are likely to be drawn, not from the likes of the snack-food industry, but from other high-tech industries.) Yet it’s very unlikely that success at arranging for Americans to produce fewer potato chips and more microchips would yield for Americans net economic benefits.
Production is not consumption. Using tariffs, quotas, and subsidies to arrange for increased domestic production of fewer potato chips and more microchips does not ensure that Americans will be able to afford to use more microchips. If the cost of domestically producing these additional microchips is higher than are the costs that we once incurred to import the same amount of microchips – and that, absent the tariffs, quotas, and subsidies, we’d still incur to import these devices – then these domestically produced microchips become less affordable to us. How, then, can such a result be said to work to our economic advantage?
Having to sacrifice greater amounts of goods X and services Y to acquire some given amount of good Z is the very meaning of good Z becoming less affordable. The fact that we produce more Z doesn’t imply that we thereby can afford to acquire and use more Z. This reality is inescapable whether “Z” stands for potato chips or for microchips.
If you doubt me, ask yourself how affordable would automobiles be to you if you produced your own automobiles rather than bought them from companies such as Toyota or General Motors. How affordable to you would automobiles be if you produced your own cars?
If the goal is to increase Americans’ access to microchips – to improve our ability to acquire and use these high-tech devices – we should acquire them in the least-costly way. And if foreigners are willing to sell microchips to us at prices lower than are the costs that we’d incur to produce these chips domestically, then our access to microchips increases if we import them rather than produce them ourselves.
“Wrong!” I hear the anxious protest already. “By importing microchips, we put ourselves at the mercy of foreigners who might in the future restrict our access to this important product.”
It’s possible. But this possibility isn’t as telling as it initially appears to be.
Trade is not a process of unilateral gifting. Trade is exchange. By exporting microchips, foreigners put themselves at the mercy of us Americans who might in the future restrict their access to whatever important products they buy from us with the dollars they earn from their microchip sales. We Americans export lots of petroleum, pharmaceuticals, industrial machines, agricultural products, and higher education – that is, we Americans produce and export many important goods and services that foreigners rely upon. Foreigners’ loss of access to these American exports would weaken their economies. Do we have good enough reason to believe that foreigners will cut off our access to microchips given that they would thereby cut themselves off from access to the likes of petroleum and medicines?
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