Russell Roberts's Blog, page 161

Some Non-Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Arnold Kling is thoughtful and wise. A slice:

Another concern that I have is the need for turnover. When agencies perpetuate themselves, there is little chance for new thinking to emerge. In government, we need to find a way to balance the advantage of institutional knowledge with the adverse consequences of thinking that becomes stale and rigid.

But most of all, we need an overall political culture that does not suffer from excessive faith in central government. Too many well-educated people believe that credentialed experts have all the answers. And too many anti-elitists believe that popular opinion provides all the answers. Skepticism, epistemic humility, and appreciation of my four propositions are all too rare.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Adam White warns against the further politicization of the the U.S. Supreme Court. A slice:

It is remarkable to see how little the court’s loudest critics even attempt to anchor their attacks to our basic constitutional principles. They attempt to delegitimize the court for failing to act like a legislature. They accuse it of being insufficiently representative and promoting the wrong policies.

In all of it, these critics ignore the fundamental requirements of their own role as citizens. Judicial legitimacy isn’t simply a matter of hecklers’ vetoes. It requires the critics themselves to grapple seriously with the court’s explanations. And it requires all of us to recognize that disagreements are a part of constitutional government.

Tim Padgett reviews, in the New York Times, William Neuman’s new book, Things Are Never So Bad That They Can’t Get Worse: Inside the Collapse of Venezuela. A slice:

Neuman skillfully explains just how insane. “Chávez’s socialism was all means and no production,” he writes. “It was showcialismo,” an endless bacchanal of multibillion-dollar projects — like a national electricity monopoly, Corpoelec — that were essentially left to rot after the ribbon-cuttings. As Venezuela gorged on imports and prices ballooned, Chávez and his handpicked successor, the witless ideologue Nicolás Maduro, kept forcing price controls that further discouraged domestic industry, spawning huge shortages and extortionate black markets.

“It was a Yogi Berra economy,” Neuman wryly observes. “Stuff was so cheap that nobody could afford to buy it anymore.”

Epic graft schemes proved even more crippling, especially after oil prices went south again. Using fraudulent contracts and invoices, Chavista mandarins and their business cronies gamed the chasm between the official and black-market bolívar-to-dollar exchange rates. They reaped Mafia-grade profits; they also bled the state-run oil monopoly, PDVSA, of cash and robbed Venezuelans of urgent necessities like food, housing and energy infrastructure.

And here’s an excerpt from Neuman’s book.

Here’s a short course from David Henderson in oil economics.

Robert Bork, Jr., busts some of today’s myths about the alleged monopolization of the American economy. Here’s his conclusion:

Perhaps the administration is right about one thing. There is excessive concentration of power – in Washington, D.C.

Stephanie Slade asks if libertarians must care about more than state power. A slice:

As good libertarians, we know better than to ask the state to solve these sorts of problems, but we don’t have to pretend they aren’t real. To say that a good society just is a free society and a good life just is a free life is to miss all of that. Greater freedom from force and fraud is always a positive thing. Greater freedom from cultural constraints may not be.

Smoke does not get into George Will’s eyes. As slice:

Today, many corporations slather their business calculations with a syrup of fashionable blather. By the time this geyser of corporate-gush concludes, no progressive trope has been unused: Ending “exclusionary policies” will ameliorate “climate change” and “institutionalized inequity.” PMI wants to achieve “a smoke-free future” by selling noncombustible tobacco products — e-cigarettes. PMI and Altria rightly resent those who insist that only zero-risk products are virtuous alternatives to the known high risks of cigarettes.

The behavior of many millions of Americans is generating an ocean of data that can be acquired no other way — data about harm-reduction from smoke-free, non-combustion products. Do they, over time, wean smokers off cigarettes? Or do they, particularly with flavors that delight the young, become a gateway to cigarettes? We will find out, unless government regulations truncate the experiment.

Robby Soave reports on the New York Times‘s admission of the dangers of cancel culture. A slice:

The New York Times published a terrific editorial on Friday that takes note of “America’s free speech problem” and points to both right-wing legislation and cancel culture—enforced by an uncompromising strain of progressivism—as culprits.

“For all the tolerance and enlightenment that modern society claims, Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned,” wrote The Times.

The editorial includes a predictable (and mostly well-deserved) condemnation of conservative attempts to legislate away uncomfortable discussions about sex and race in schools. But it stands out for directly attacking the left’s censorship impulse.

“Many on the left refuse to acknowledge that cancel culture exists at all, believing that those who complain about it are offering cover for bigots to peddle hate speech,” wrote The Times.

Daniel Hannan explains that “[i]dentity politics is eroding the values which set the West apart from Putin.” A slice:

Could we be returning to that older ethic? We might dismiss Putin as an outlier. But can we be certain that he is not also an augur? It might seem a trivial thing, but look at how quickly we have extended our quarrel with Putin to all Russians. An orchestra in Montreal cancels a Russian pianist, despite his opposition to the invasion; Tchaikovsky is dropped from programmes; Russian paintings are removed from exhibitions. My tribe good, your tribe bad.

These cancellations are happening in a culture newly primed to categorise and condemn. We damn institutions for some ancient benefaction. We stop publishing authors because of opinions that had nothing to do with their work. We teach identity politics, encouraging people to believe that they have grievances or obligations purely on grounds of their physiognomy.

GMU Econ alum Eli Dourado offers several excellent suggestions for raising economic productivity. A slice:

If we wanted to raise American productivity, for example, we could simplify geothermal permitting, deregulate advanced meltdown-proof nuclear reactors, make it easier to build transmission lines, figure out why high-speed rail is so expensive, fix permitting generally, abolish the Jones Act, automate our ports, allow drones to operate autonomously, legalize supersonic flight over land, reduce occupational-licensing requirements, train more medical workers, build more hospitals, revamp our pandemic-response institutions, simplify drug approvals, deregulate land use to allow denser housing and mixed-use neighborhoods, allow more immigration, cancel inefficient programs, restrict cost-plus procurement contracts in favor of more effective methods, end appropriations based on job creation, avoid political direction of scientific research, and instill urgency in grantmaking.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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In this Twitter thread, Alexandros Marinos exposes the misinformation being spread by the U.S. Surgeon General in a document marketed as a guide for helping Americans avoid misinformation. (HT Jay Bhattacharya) A slice:

In fact, the CDC has been a source for comically bad science throughout, or more likely, papers constructed in violation of the scientific method, to provide backing for a politically expedient position.

Also justifiably dismayed by the U.S. government’s peddling of misleading information – specifically, here, misleading assertions of the alleged net benefits of vaccinating young children against Covid-19 – is el gato malo. A slice:

one fact in medical care is unarguable:

medical interventions are everywhere and always a risk/benefit calculation.

this is just bedrock reality. nothing is free. you must always compare that which a treatment will gain you to that which it will cost you. you must weigh risk as well as reward.

anyone pushing just reward is lying to you.

i could douse you in gasoline and light you on fire. it would reduce your chance of being stung by a bee.

seem like a good trade?

and the CDC is, yet again, failing to do this or even acknowledge the concept.

Using as an example the experience of Hong Kong, Ian Miller busts some myths about masking.

Other than the laughable assertion that “lockdowns structurally reinforced key sections of capitalism” – the author mistakes ‘benefits to existing big businesses’ with ‘capitalism’ – this criticism, from the far left, of zero-Covid lunacy is quite good. A slice:

The left zero-covid cultists, however, ‘knew’ they were right because they had the right politics. This superior politics told them that ‘non pharmaceutical interventions’ could eliminate the disease. It told them they did not need an understanding of the nature of respiratory disease in general and the four coronaviruses in particular. It left them clueless about the nature of transmission. They remained ignorant of the inevitability of the process of evolution that characterises the 200 or so respiratory viruses humans live with or the resulting limits of vaccines.

“MIT’s new mask policy bans groups from forcing people to wear masks.”

The Telegraph‘s Science Editor Sarah Knapton reports on the difficulty of getting an accurate measure of Covid deaths in Britain. Two slices:

The number of people who have died from Covid in Britain during the pandemic is impossible to determine because of the inconsistent definitions of what is meant by a coronavirus death, researchers have concluded.

Experts from Oxford University discovered that public health and statistics organisations across the UK are operating under 14 different definitions to classify a death from Covid.

Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, collated for a new report published on Saturday, show that many people who died in the first wave never tested positive for the virus, particularly older people who died in care homes.

Instead, their deaths were registered as Covid simply based on a statement of the care home provider, and because coronavirus was rife at the time.

In some care homes, more than half of the Covid deaths were registered in people without pre-existing conditions, which the report authors said was “implausible” for people who needed residential care.

The authors also point out that it is unlikely that a Covid infection on its own could cause death in the absence of contributing factors, such as other illness, or the infection leading to a more deadly condition such as pneumonia.

The report also found that in some trusts, up to 95 per cent of Covid deaths were in people with Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) orders.

The team said the confusion meant they were unable to separate deaths caused by Covid from those triggered by the pandemic response, and called for a proportion of deaths to be verified by post-mortem in future pandemics to determine the true reason.

Dr Tom Jefferson, of the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine (CEBM) at Oxford University, said: “Every night we were given this diet of cases, admissions and deaths. But we found that even the ONS doesn’t have a standard definition for deaths. We found 14 different ways to express the cause of death.

“There are a number of death certificates where Covid-19 is the only cause of death, and that is not possible. It has to be something like Covid-19 induced pneumonia, if it goes to the kidneys and you get kidney failure.

“We found some organisations coded Covid deaths even in the absence of positive Covid tests. Some nursing homes had allocated causality to Covid-19 not on the basis of tests but when those deaths occurred, usually in the Spring of 2020. Nursing homes decide themselves what was the cause.

“All of this means that we don’t really know who has died of Covid, or how severe it is, and this continues to this day. Separating the ravages of the virus from the ravages of human stupidity is not possible.”

…..

The UK Statistics watchdog has said that excess deaths give the closest indication, but researchers said it was impossible to separate deaths from Covid and those caused by the pandemic response.

“It’s very hard to understand who is dying of Covid and who is dying from the measures put in place to tackle the virus,” added Prof Henghan.

“For example, if you’re elderly and have dementia and are left alone, you’ll be dead in two to three days. We were in panic mode.

“When you look across the devolved nations there are real problems. There are subtle variations in how the deaths were recorded, and these different interpretations have left everyone seriously confused.”

See also this report by Eve Simmons.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 651 of the 1988 collection of Lord Acton’s writings and notes to himself (edited by the late J. Rufus Fears), Essays in Religion, Politics, and Morality; specifically, it’s a note drawn from Acton’s extensive papers at Cambridge University:

You may govern by force, but you cannot at the same time hold by both physical and moral means.

DBx: Indeed so.

The greater is the amount of physical coercion that the state must credibly threaten to use against its citizens in order to pursue its goals, the more immoral are those goals.

Beware Drawing Parallels Between Smallpox and Covid-19

(Don Boudreaux)

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Much of this letter relies on Jay Bhattacharya’s and my op-ed in the August 5th, 2021, edition of the Wall Street Journal.

Editor, Los Angeles Times

Editor:

Saad Omer concludes his op-ed on the surge of omicron in China by praising the U.S.’s and U.S.S.R.’s earlier joint effort to eradicate smallpox (“China’s lockdowns are a warning to us all,” March 18). As admirable as was this effort to eradicate a deadly disease, we must beware of drawing too many parallels between smallpox and Covid-19.

Smallpox was dozens of times more deadly than are earlier strains of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Because omicron is less deadly than are earlier Covid strains, the huge gulf separating the lethality of smallpox from that of omicron is even larger. Another notable difference is that smallpox killed children in droves, while Covid is disproportionately dangerous to the elderly while posing almost no danger whatsoever to children – and hardly any danger to young adults.

Also, unlike SARS-CoV-2 which uses as reservoirs animals in addition to humans, smallpox used only humans. This reality helps explain why smallpox is only one of two contagious diseases that humans have deliberately eradicated – the other being rinderpest, which affected only even-toed ungulates.

Finally, it’s worthwhile to recall the wisdom of the late epidemiologist Donald Henderson, who’s credited with playing a key role in smallpox’s eradication. In a 2006 article, Henderson, et al., counseled careful thinking about disease-mitigation measures such as “travel restrictions, prohibition of social gatherings, school closures, maintaining personal distance, and the use of masks.” The authors conclude:

Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted. Strong political and public health leadership to provide reassurance and to ensure that needed medical care services are provided are critical elements. If either is seen to be less than optimal, a manageable epidemic could move toward catastrophe.

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

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 6 of Columbia University law professor Philip Hamburger’s 2020 monograph, The Administrative Threat:

Ever tempted to exert more power with less effort, rulers are rarely content to govern merely through the law, and in their restless desire to escape its pathways, many of them try to work through other mechanisms. These other modes of binding subjects are absolute power.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Jen Psaki claims that the White House doesn’t know that a 79-year-old man who gets Covid might suffer more seriously than would someone in his or her 20s who gets Covid. (DBx: Please tell me again why government officials are to be trusted to “follow the science.”)

“CDC reports of historical covid deaths drop by 70k to correct ‘coding error.'”

Reason‘s Eric Boehm reports yet more gross incompetence by America’s public-health (so-called) bureaucracy.

Covid hysteria further battered the democratic ethos.

Maybe some good news out of China?

Dr. Eli David tweets: (HT Martin Kulldorff)

Two years after the entire world (except Sweden) locked down, it is now clear that they were all wrong and Sweden 🇸🇪 was right.

Will they admit it? Will Fauci apologize for causing the most damage any scientist ever caused? Don’t hold your breath…

Linking to a (gated) piece that she recently coauthored in the San Francisco Chronicle, Leslie Bienen tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

Our nation’s top health officials must undo the fear they helped create and reassure families and educators that normal pre-pandemic school is safe.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 227 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:

Knowledge is a valuable (economic) resource. To assume it is free is, for example, to deny that teachers perform a useful and desirable service. A substantial fraction of our wealth is devoted to gathering information of one kind or another. Do not suppose that ignorance is always irrational, ridiculous, or the result of inefficiency or lying.

DBx: Because we humans aren’t gods, we spend huge amounts of time gathering knowledge. But because time is scarce (and, hence, valuable), we waste it if we do not rationally choose which sorts of knowledge to pursue and which to ignore.

Ignorance – that is, the absence of knowledge – being what it is, we prospectively can only make reasonable guesses about which sorts of knowledge are worthwhile to pursue and which to not pursue. What we subsequently learn might well – indeed, often does – reveal to us that our earlier decisions are ones that we would not have taken had we then knew what we later come to know. Such is the inescapable fate of us mere mortals.

Yet no person will knowingly spend his or her scarce time and effort acquiring knowledge that he or she believes will be of no use to him or her. I chose the above photo to accompany this quotation because each semester I teach my freshman students about “rational ignorance” – meaning, ignorance that it is rational not to dispel. There in a classroom, I ask my students “Without looking up, how many of you can tell me the correct answer to this question: What’s the number of lightbulbs in the ceiling above your heads?” I have never had a student offer an answer to this question.

I then point out that knowledge of the number of lightbulbs that are in the classroom ceiling is very easy knowledge to acquire. First graders can gather it. Yet no college student – or their professor – has an answer to this question. The reason for our ignorance, I inform my students, is that that piece of knowledge is utterly useless. Gathering this piece of knowledge isn’t worth spending even the tiny amount of time and effort required. So this ignorance is rational. Acquiring this knowledge would be wasteful and irrational.

Even the smartest and most well-informed human who has ever lived or who will ever live will come to know only an invisible fraction of the total amount of knowledge available to be known. One of the great challenges of an economy is to prompt individuals to acquire knowledge that is worthwhile to acquire while not tempting them to waste time and effort acquiring knowledge that is pointless.

Some Non-Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy is correct: Today’s battering of free speech on college campuses is ultimately rooted in a toxic campus culture. A slice:

In a recent New York Times op-ed, University of Virginia senior Emma Camp powerfully defended freedom of expression as she described her own practice of self-censoring while on campus. In doing so, she highlighted the disappearance of free-speech culture, both in America at large and at a university with respectable free-speech credentials.

It is obvious that Camp values free expression and welcomes a diversity of viewpoints. In fighting for changes, she is also willing to face some consequences for her speech. Yet you feel her pain as she admits being fearful of speaking up, and her disappointment when she confesses to often taking the easy way out by remaining quiet.

As an adult with views that are often distinctly different from those of my personal and work friends, I can relate. Of course, it’s sometimes good to hold one’s tongue about dissenting opinions, like at Thanksgiving dinner or a birthday party with friends whose opinions vary widely. There is more to life than just the debate of ideas. However, such silence is a problem when one feels pressure to hide opinions, or even acknowledge them, in settings — such as classrooms — that should encourage the search for truth by welcoming different viewpoints.

Juliette Sellgren talks with Jim Otteson about Adam Smith.

J.D. Tuccille warns of the looming drastic contraction of prosperity-creating globalization. Two slices:

Casualties were inevitable the moment Vladimir Putin sent Russia’s army across the border into Ukraine. But after the initial tally in lost and shattered lives, destroyed homes, and depleted wealth, we’re likely to discover that we’ve also lost a world of expanded trade that pulled billions of people out of poverty by removing barriers to free exchange. The walls were already rising because of pandemic restrictions and politicians’ thirst for greater control, but the war in Ukraine has accelerated a process that threatens human freedom and prosperity.

Economic sanctions and the retreat of Western businesses in response to the invasion of Ukraine have left Russia largely isolated. But they’ve also made clear that the integration of the global economy in recent decades wasn’t inevitable and is vulnerable to political decision-making.

…..

That’s a shame because free-trade advocates are correct. While a strong case can be made that free trade is a basic human right involving consensual relations among individuals, it’s also a miraculous cure for misery. Over the last half-century or so, economists have rediscovered comparative advantage and that “trade openness is a necessary—even if not sufficient—condition for economic growth and reducing poverty,” as Pierre Lemieux wrote for the Cato Institute’s Regulation in 2020.

Steven Greenhut is wise. Two slices:

As a long-time critic of American military interventionism, I’ve been dismayed by the lack of moral clarity expressed by some libertarians and conservatives regarding Russia’s inexcusable attack on Ukraine. There’s a difference between opposing, say, direct American military interference with a nuclear-armed Russia and excusing its autocratic leader, Vladimir Putin.

Sadly, many of these folks haven’t just gotten close to the latter. They’ve gone over the line. It’s one thing to argue that perhaps the United States shouldn’t have pushed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to Russia’s borders and another to sound like those old Soviet commentators spewing unsophisticated agitprop.

…..

Many conservatives seem willing to toss aside our nation’s constitutional protections and market economy in favor of post-liberal autocrats because they’re frustrated by our nation’s cultural tilt. Prominent conservative writer Sohrab Amari famously tweeted that he’s “at peace with a Chinese-led 21st century,” because “(l)ate-liberal America is too dumb and decadent to last as a superpower.”

Liberal democracy is perhaps too messy for them.

Fraser Nelson is also rightly critical of conservatives who have a soft spot for Putin because Putin says things that give the impression that he has a soft spot for them and their values. A slice:

Mostly, all this was the bovine logic of embracing your enemy’s enemy. Spend your life fretting about neocons and Washington hawks and you’ll find, in Putin, a doughty opponent of the Iraq war and Nato expansion. Eurosceptics like Le Pen and Salvini wanted to see an unapologetic defender of traditional values and the nation state. They all wanted to believe that the idea of Russia as a military threat died in 1989.

But Russia is back as a threat precisely because Putin hasn’t proved very convincing, finding the public far harder to dupe than the populists. He has become more desperate in his anti-woke ruse and a few months ago devoted a speech to trying to rescue the agenda. What’s the civilised world coming to, he asked, when Shakespeare is being dropped from school curricula? “In Hollywood,” he went on, “memos are distributed about proper storytelling and how many characters of what colour or gender should be in a movie. This is even worse than the USSR agitprop department.”

The average Russian, of course, couldn’t care less about English lessons in Connecticut or casting in Bridgerton. Putin was hoping to make common cause with Eastern Europeans, even Ukrainians, and telling them that these Western ways were not their ways. But the Slavs were having none of it. Surveys in Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary showed that most voters said Putin has been “cynically pretending to stand up for European values”. They might be more socially conservative than in Western Europe, but theirs is the conservatism of people who remember being ruled by Soviet-imposed leaders. By a vast margin, they say they are culturally closer to Europe than to Russia.

John O. McGinnis laments the fragmentation of America’s democracy.

Gary Galles reminds us of the value of federalism. A slice:

In political democracy, your vote has no influence on the outcome when it is not aligned with majority wishes, and others’ rights are always at risk of being sacrificed. Under federalism, the potential of voting with your feet into jurisdictions that offer a preferred mix of burdens and benefits allows those with similar preferences to voluntarily share those bundles and limits the burdens majorities can impose on those who disagree. Voluntary market arrangements also offer a superior form of democracy. Those arrangements do not require the permission of the majority, yet markets represent a democracy in which every dollar vote counts and each person’s dollar votes determines their results, without providing the ability to violate others’ rights in the process.

Here’s part 15 of George Selgin’s invaluable series on the New Deal.

What Are Schools Teaching??

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to a New York high-school student who reads Café Hayek:

Mr. B__:

Thanks for your e-mail and for reading my blog.

Your teacher argues that, as you describe it, “law should be changed to require anybody who emits any potentially harmful substance to first get explicit permission from everybody that will be impacted or by their chosen representatives.”

You’re wise to be skeptical of your teacher’s proposal. Any serious effort to put it into effect would grind human life to a halt. The reasons for my conclusion are too many to list, but here are two prominent ones.

First is the impossibility in many cases of identifying everyone who will be affected by the emitted substance. If nothing else, we must ask if this group includes only people who are alive today, or also future generations. If government were to adopt such a rule as your teacher recommends, you can be sure that environmental activists, along with special-interest lobbyists, would insist that “everybody that will be impacted” includes future generations – that is, individuals from whom it is impossible to “acquire explicit permission.”

Second, the category “potentially harmful substance” is harmfully ambiguous. Your teacher, no doubt, is thinking of industrial emissions. But what about the “potentially harmful” substances emitted by nature? Respectfully ask your teacher if he believes that government should prevent him from planting in his yard a flower garden or a new tree until and unless he gets explicit permission from all the individuals who will breathe in pollen emitted by – and potentially be stung by insects attracted by – his newly planted vegetation. People have died from allergic reactions to pollen and to insect stings.

My serious point is that, were your teacher’s proposal to be implemented, economic and even household activities would be dramatically slowed by disputes over what substances do and don’t qualify as “potentially harmful.” Just as bad, the definition of such substances would surely be expanded to include substances that even your “deep green” teacher would be horrified to discover are classified as “potentially harmful.”

Sincerely,
Don Boudreaux

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Barry Brownstein warns of the dangers of the administrative state. A slice (with link added):

Administrative mandates and rules are unconstitutional. “Through administrative power,” [Philip] Hamburger argues, there now exists a third but “unconstitutional” way by which the “the executive purports to create legal obligation.” Administrative lawmaking is not justified as “delegated power.” Congress has no power to subdelegate its responsibilities to bureaucratic administrators. In short, administrative power, Hamburger writes, is “the very sort of power that constitutions were expected to prevent.” He warns that power wielded through government bureaucracies “binds Americans and deprives them of their liberty.”

Many citizens yield to administrative power believing we need experts, such as Fauci, to guide us. Hamburger cautions, “A person with specialized expertise will tend to overestimate the importance of that area and underestimate the significance of others. As a result, although experts can be valuable for their specialized knowledge, they cannot be usually relied upon for decisions that take a balanced view of the consequences.”

Hamburger was writing before COVID. Clearly, of the administrative agencies and bureaucrats threatening our liberties today, Dr. Fauci has led the charge. Fauci is arguably one of the most powerful unelected officials in American history.

Jay Bhattacharya tweets:

On the one hand there is the Swiss chees model, which justifies almost any intervention (like plexiglass) on the basis of even low quality evidence. On the other hand there is evidence based medicine, which demands the highest quality evidence. Public health chose Swiss cheese.

Daniel Nuccio – who interviewed me by telephone a few weeks ago – reports correctly that universities (including George Mason University) follow, not the science, but the politics. A slice:

Like [Rachel] Fulton Brown and his GMU colleague, Todd Zywicki, Boudreaux was ready to take his university to court. “I was all prepared to be a plaintiff to resist the booster mandate,” he said.

A lawyer with the NCLA had offered to represent him, Boudreaux stated.

However, before Boudreaux’s case could be brought to court, the issue became moot.

A divergence in policy: GMU reluctantly inches closer to normal while UChicago stays the course

The reason Boudreaux’s legal case became moot was because newly elected Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin signed an executive order prohibiting Covid vaccine requirements for state employees.

Shortly thereafter, Virginia attorney general, Jason S. Miyares, issued a non-binding opinion stating, “Public institutions of higher education in Virginia may not require vaccination against Covid-19 as a general condition of students’ enrollment or in-person attendance.”

Although nonbinding, it did effectively nullify the opinion of the previous attorney general, Mark R. Herring, which was supportive of such mandates. Hence it was sufficient to get several state universities in Virginia, including GMU, to rescind vaccine requirements for students.

Whatever GMU officials actually believed about the science backing their mandates and vaccines being “the most effective tools to combat COVID-19”, it would appear the politics of state leadership superseded all else.

Lucia Sinatra and Joni Ruller McGary call for all colleges and universities to end their requirements that students be vaccinated against Covid. A slice:

Rachel Walensky confirmed as early as July 2021 that the vaccines did not prevent infection or transmission, yet colleges and universities continue to use the falsehood that student vaccination protects the vulnerable and prevents community spread.

As early as August 5, 2021, Dartmouth College reported a “sudden rise in cases” (Delta) in “fully vaccinated students and employees,” confirming that vaccination did not offer community protection. Cornell had a surge of more than 900 cases (Omicron) in their nearly fully vaccinated student population in December. These two examples are not outliers.

In short, vaccination does not prevent community outbreak, even on campuses with greater than 95% vaccination rates. The argument that students must take the vaccine to protect others is invalid.

What about protecting otherwise healthy individual students? It turns out that this population has an extremely low risk of serious illness from Covid-19, and a near-zero risk of death, even if unvaccinated.

“Did flawed PCR tests convince us Covid was worse than it really was?” (HT el gato malo)

David Henderson continues with his commentary on Alex Tabarrok’s recent talk, at Bowling Green State University, on Covid and Covid policy.

Beware, fellow Americans: Fauci endorses the possibility of potentially severe “mitigation” measures against a new strain of Covid. (HT Phil Magness)

Here’s the abstract of David Campbell’s and Kevin Dowd’s new paper on Covid policy:

The ‘lockdown’ policy adopted in response to an outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 has been the worst example of government failure in peacetime history. Justified by the perceived grave emergency, lockdown was based on epidemiological and medical advice at the heart of which was a Report by the Imperial College Covid-19 Response Team. This Report predicted 510,000 deaths on the basis of absurd assumptions about a zero probability event and advocated a ‘suppression’ policy the empirical possibility of implementing which was never remotely adequately assessed. But though it had consequences of a quantitatively different order to other government failures, lockdown was qualitatively merely an example of the common form of such failures. The work of assessing empirical possibility is rarely adequately addressed, and difficulties of implementation are dismissed by what will be called the ‘ceteris paribus reasoning’ which follows from, as the Report makes particularly clear, an inchoately communist belief in political will.

And here’s another passages from the paper (page 8, footnote 32) – a passage that makes a point as subtle as it is important; it’s a point that applies not only to the U.K. yet one that was ignored by most governments and lockdown proponents:

For lockdown to be plausible, the UK spread of known and reasonably suspected infection had to be sufficient to make only targeting identified cases alone fruitless and to justify action at the level of the entire population. On the other hand, the spread had to be insufficient to make lockdown pointless because the contact rate was unmanageable or unnecessary because the herd immunity threshold had been exceeded.

Phil Kerpen has been doing some research, some of which is nicely summarized in this screenshot from his Twitter feed. (HT Jay Bhattacharya)