Russell Roberts's Blog, page 162

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 776 of the late Fred McChesney’s excellent Winter 1991 Cato Journal paper, “Antitrust and Regulation: Chicago’s Contradictory Views”:

After a century of experience with antitrust, almost no one would disagree that it has developed in thoroughly undesirable ways….

[M]uch of antitrust jurisprudence is economic nonsense.

DBx: Pictured here is a newspaper report on the Federal Trade Commission’s decade-long case against makers of breakfast cereals – a case that featured the whackadoodle charge that makers of breakfast cereals harmed competition by producing too wide a variety of products.

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Trade and Creative Destruction

(Don Boudreaux)

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In this short video, GMU Econ alum Dan Mitchell eloquently reveals important realities about trade and creative destruction.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 189 of Deirdre McCloskey’s and Art Carden’s excellent 2020 book, Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich: How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World:

Governments worldwide are too big, too bossy, too much the Hobbes-Rousseau “family” of masters over children.

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: “The great anti-pollutant”

(Don Boudreaux)

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In my column for the April 25th, 2012, edition of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, I returned to the important theme summarized by the phrase ‘Cleaned by Capitalism.’ You can read my column in full beneath the fold.

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Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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The Stanford Review reviews Scott Atlas’s 2021 book, A Plague Upon Our House. (HT Jay Bhattacharya) Here’s the review’s conclusion:

Readers will find A Plague Upon Our House shocking. [Anthony] Fauci, [Deborah] Birx, and [Robert] Redfield caused irreparable harm to the country with their irrational rhetoric and wielded their authority shamelessly. Unelected public health officials should never be responsible for deciding the futures of millions of Americans, but that is exactly what the troika did. And Dr. Atlas’s warnings must be heeded for the next public health emergency. Otherwise, the country will once again pursue overly restrictive policies that do more harm than good and the public’s faith in science will be further undermined.

Jon Sanders pleads: “Mr. Employer, tear down these masks!” A slice:

Whenever we could, we let the servers, clerks, attendants, small business owners, and others we encountered in our mutually beneficial transactions know that they were welcome to doff the cloth. We wanted no part in the charade, either as participants or patrons. Furthermore, the spectacle of people smiling normally being catered to by people whose mouths and noses were covered like silenced servants struck us as offensive to the core.

Here’s a welcome headline from two days ago: “British Airways and Virgin Atlantic scrap face mask rule: Airlines say passengers won’t be forced to wear one on some routes from tomorrow as government ends remaining Covid travel curbs.”

David Henderson likes a great deal of what Alex Tabarrok said in a speech last month.

Reason‘s Eric Boehm reports that “Congress used the COVID-19 pandemic as an excuse to throw money around in ways that would be comedic if the results weren’t so tragic.” A slice:

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonprofit that advocates for smaller deficits, put together a useful website for tracking the unprecedented levels of borrowing, spending, and printing that went on during the first two years of the pandemic. Out of more than $5.7 trillion in COVID-related spending authorized by Congress (which doesn’t include actions taken by the Federal Reserve or executive branch agencies to respond to the pandemic), the group classifies a scant $682 billion—less than 12 percent—as “health spending.”

Of that amount, only $53 billion—that’s less than 1 percent of all COVID aid authorized by Congress—was spent on vaccines and other treatments.

Aaron Kheriaty calls on Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra “to immediately revoke his declaration that a Covid-19 public health emergency exists.”

“Thwarted by the arrival of omicron, Jacinda Ardern’s zero-Covid ambitions will effectively come to an end.” (DBx: Reality is not and never will be optional, despite government “leaders'” incessant insistence that they possess the power to work miracles.)

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 88 of Lionel Shriver’s great 2016 novel, The Mandibles:

Like Tom, Avery was queasy about these heedless opinions, which applied exclusively to other people and cost their advocates nothing.

DBx: Very many pet causes of Progressives are little more than heedless opinions that apply either exclusively, or at least disproportionately, to other people – and in all cases cost their advocates nothing, or vanishingly little, to express.

Perhaps no real-world example of such a pet cause is better than minimum-wage legislation. No intellectual who supports minimum wages – no professor, no pundit, no politician – holds a job from which that intellectual will be removed as a result of a minimum-wage hike. No such intellectual likely has children or grandchildren who will be pushed by a minimum wage into the unemployment ranks or into jobs worse than would be the jobs those children or grandchildren would hold absent a minimum wage.

And yet because of widespread economic ignorance, elite supporters of minimum-wage statutes are widely admired as they slather themselves in the ink of their own self-righteousness whenever they emote in support of raising the minimum wage. These elite supporters of minimum wages are applauded whenever they propose to make it illegal for low-skilled workers to compete for employment by offering to work at wages lower than that which elite supporters of minimum wages somehow divine is the minimally acceptable wage that anyone should be permitted to agree to accept as payment for his or her work effort. The arrogance and ignorance are stunning.

It Was Two Years Ago Today…

(Don Boudreaux)

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…”that ‘15 days to flatten everything but the curve’ began and america succumbed to the tyranny of superstition and pseudoscience from which it only now sputters to recover after countless cost to lives and livelihoods.”

DBx: As recently as March 15th, 2020, I had no idea just how irrational, just how unthinking, just how sheepish, just how pliable, just how gullible, just how cowardly, just how myopic, just how duplicitous, just how selfish, and just how cruel so many of my fellow human beings would soon prove themselves to be.

Some Non-Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Scott Sumner succinctly explains this important truth: “sanctions only work when there is globalization.”

Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley decries New Jersey governor Phil Murphy’s opposition to charter schools. A slice:

Mr. Murphy is said to have presidential ambitions, and he doesn’t want to anger the powerful teachers unions that spent more than any other interest group to back his gubernatorial campaigns.

This explains Mr. Murphy’s appalling decision last month to block the expansion of New Jersey’s best-performing charter schools, including North Star Academy and Philips Academy, even while thousands of families wallow on waiting lists. A majority of residents in struggling cities like Newark and Camden are lower-income blacks and Hispanics, and high-quality public schools are a lifeline. Anyone yapping about equity while denying underprivileged minorities access to better schools deserves to be ignored.

Larry Summers argues that “[t]he Fed is charting a course to stagflation and recession.” Two slices:

The hope is that the Fed can engineer the proverbial soft landing, whereby inflation returns to around its 2 percent goal and the economy remains strong without a substantial increase in unemployment. Judging by their statements to date, Powell and his colleagues seem to believe they have a good chance of success.

Anything is possible, and wishful thinking can sometimes prove self-fulfilling. But I believe the Fed has not internalized the magnitude of its errors over the past year, is operating with an inappropriate and dangerous framework, and needs to take far stronger action to support price stability than appears likely. The Fed’s current policy trajectory is likely to lead to stagflation, with average unemployment and inflation both averaging over 5 percent over the next few years — and ultimately to a major recession.
…..
Paul Volcker would not have had to put the economy through the wringer if his predecessors had not lost their focus on inflation. To avoid stagflation and the associated loss of public confidence in our country now, the Fed has to do more than merely to adjust its policy dials — it will have to head in a dramatically different direction.

Eric Boehm rightly criticizes Biden for trying to pin the blame for inflation on Putin. A slice:

Among the critics were people like Lawrence Summers, who served as Treasury Secretary during the Obama administration. “There is a chance that macroeconomic stimulus on a scale closer to World War II levels than normal recession levels will set off inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation,” Summers warned in a Washington Post op-ed in February 2021. “Administration officials’ dismissal of even the possibility of inflation, and the difficulties in mobilizing congressional support for tax increases or spending cuts, there is the risk of inflation expectations rising sharply.”

“I think we do not need to spend $1.9 trillion…and we should have a smaller program,” Olivier Blanchard, the former chairman of the International Monetary Fund, wrote on Twitter in response to Summers’ op-ed. Biden’s plan to shovel another $1.9 trillion into the economy was coming on top of unprecedented fiscal stimulus and high personal savings rates (due to the pandemic). Americans were already poised to spend a lot more money chasing the same amount of goods as the pandemic waned, and the increase in demand would require impossible levels of output to match. “Strong inflation” would be the natural result, he warned.

“This would not be overheating,” he wrote. “It would be starting a fire.”

By July, a few months after the American Rescue Plan passed, economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal said Americans should be bracing for levels of inflation not seen in more than 20 years. That dire prediction was an underestimation.

These are not politically motivated criticisms launched by Republicans who hope to hang high levels of inflation around Democrats’ necks in advance of the midterms. They were sober assessments from mainstream academics and economists, one of whom served alongside Biden in the Obama administration. The White House consistently ignored or downplayed those worries, even as prices ticked upwards throughout the second half of 2021, claiming that rising inflation was a “transitory” problem. By the end of the year, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell was forced to admit that wasn’t the case.

George Will offers some sound ideas for improving Major League Baseball.

“100 House Progressives Call on President Biden to Usurp Their Role” – so reports Charles Cooke, accurately.

Rich Vedder understandably admires Purdue University president Mitch Daniels. (HT George Leef)

Amelia Janaskie and David Waugh report on the superb new Economics Journal paper by my GMU Econ colleague Vincent Geloso, along with Phil Magness, John Moore, and Philip Schlosser. A slice:

Geloso et al. rewrite our understanding of economic history in an important way. Their revised data series demonstrates Piketty and Saez overstate US inequality prior to 1960 by up to 20 percent in some years. Further, their paper provides evidence that the Great Depression was a stronger “leveler” of inequality than World War II and tax policy changes, as Piketty and Saez claim. These new adjustments change our reading of economic history, diminishing the emphasis on tax policy as a driver of economic equality in pre-1960 America.

Geloso et al.’s evidence discredits one of the main takeaways from Piketty and Saez’s work: that fiscal policy tools, such as progressive taxation, are an effective way to reduce inequality. The revised data series do not support the claim that income tax policies reduce inequality in the United States. This development is significant because prominent policymakers rely on Piketty and Saez’s research to justify tax increases. Inequality is a hot button issue in today’s political climate. These revisions must be taken into account by policymakers seeking to reduce inequality via tax policy.

John Cochrane shares a video of a recent talk, on trade reform, given by the great trade scholar Doug Irwin.

Upon reading this CNN report headlined “Biden demands faster drop in gas prices as oil tumbles,” Washington University economist Ian Fillmore e-mailed to me his appropriate reaction: “I immediately imagined some tribal chieftain loudly commanding the sky to rain or a volcano to stop erupting.“

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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J.B. Shurk identifies ominous parallels between the nuclear calamity at Chernobyl and the calamity of governments’ response to Covid-19. (HT Todd Zywicki) Here’s his conclusion:

Nothing the West has done in response to COVID distinguishes it from the Soviets’ handling of the preventable Chernobyl tragedy. After brute force was used against citizens from Australia and New Zealand to Austria and Democrat-controlled cities in the U.S., Canada’s recent “emergency” declaration and bank account confiscation against protesting citizens proved just how Sovietized the West has become. The worst part is that everything done against us has been repeatedly defended as for our own good.

As an old communist in the Chernobyl miniseries exclaims before a rousing ovation: “The State tells us it wants to prevent a panic. Listen well! It’s true, when the people see the police, they will be afraid. But it is my experience that when the people ask questions that are not in their own best interest, they should simply be told to keep their minds on their labor and leave matters of the State to the State. We seal off the city. No one leaves. And cut the phone lines. Contain the spread of misinformation. That is how we keep the people from undermining the fruits of their own labor.”

Tell me that doesn’t sound just like Justin Trudeau, Jacinda Ardern, or Joe Biden.

Jacob Sullum is rightly critical of the TSA’s recently announced extension of mask mandates for commercial air passengers. Two slices:

The federal rule that requires air travelers to wear face masks, which the Transportation Security Administration first imposed more than a year ago, was scheduled to expire this Friday. But the TSA extended the requirement for at least another month, for reasons even harder to understand than the original rationale for the mask mandate.

That is saying a lot, because the scientific justification for the TSA’s rule has always been weak, given that the conditions on airplanes are not conducive to COVID-19 transmission. The ventilation systems on commercial aircraft, which mix outdoor air with air recycled through HEPA filters and limit airflow between rows, help explain why there were few outbreaks associated with commercial flights even before vaccines were available.

“The risk of contracting COVID-19 during air travel is low,” an October 2020 article in The Journal of the American Medical Association noted. “Despite substantial numbers of travelers, the number of suspected and confirmed cases of in-flight COVID-19 transmission between passengers around the world appears small.”

…..

The Association of Flight Attendants nevertheless urged the TSA to retain the mask rule. The AFA’s enthusiasm for hygiene theater is of a piece with its enthusiasm for security theater: Back in 2005, when the TSA began letting passengers carry small scissors and short screwdrivers, the union warned that “the aisles will be running with blood.”

In that case, calmer heads prevailed. But more than two decades after 9/11, US travelers are still saddled with myriad nonsensical restrictions. The mask rule is just the latest example.

This bill, unfortunately, won’t find its way into the U.S. statute books, but still: “Senate votes to overturn mask mandate on airplanes, transit.”

Jeffrey Tucker writes of the vindication of the late Donald Henderson. A slice:

We should remember the man who called out this crazed ideology back in 2006. He is Donald H. Henderson, the world’s most important epidemiologist at the time. He had worked with the World Health Organization and is given primary credit for the eradication of smallpox. His book on the topic is a tour de force and a model of how a genuine public health official goes about his work.

His 2006 article provided a comprehensive critique of lockdown ideology. The title is “Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza.” He notes the new interest “in a range of disease mitigation measures. Possible measures that have been proposed include: isolation of sick people in hospital or at home, use of antiviral medications, hand-washing and respiratory etiquette, large-scale or home quarantine of people believed to have been exposed, travel restrictions, prohibition of social gatherings, school closures, maintaining personal distance, and the use of masks.”

“We must ask,” he writes, “whether any or all of the proposed measures are epidemiologically sound, logistically feasible, and politically viable. It is also critically important to consider possible secondary social and economic impacts of various mitigation measures.” Coming under special scrutiny here was the neologism “social distancing.” He points out that it has been deployed to describe everything from simple actions to avoid exposure to covering full-scale closures and stay-at-home orders.

He approves of course of hand-washing and using tissues but points out that while these practices have individual value, there is no evidence that making the practices widespread will somehow end a pandemic or even stop the spread of a virus. As for the other measures – travel restrictions, closures, stay-at-home orders, prohibition of gatherings, masking – he shoots them down one by one using logic, experience, and citations from literature. While it is good to be prepared for a pandemic, we must remember that they do come and go. Wrecking society and rights achieves nothing.

Not that more evidence of Anthony Fauci’s carelessness, incompetence, arrogance, and propensity to slander those who dissent from his assessments is needed, but here nevertheless is more such evidence.

Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson insists that we remember the victims of Covidocratic tyranny. A slice:

Already, it seems clear that the Government would prefer to focus on Covid deaths and the Covid “bereaved”, and avoid painful contemplation of the lockdown victims – that is, those whose mental and physical health, livelihoods and education were damaged by actions taken by ministers, scientists, civil servants and the NHS.

It is far too easy for “the pandemic” to become a catch-all scapegoat for human error. Like those infuriating recorded messages you still get whenever you try to see a GP: “Due to the Coronavirus pandemic, we are planning on stringing out working from home for as long as possible, because, well, it really suits us, actually, so please try to avoid illness or death where possible. If you must see a doctor, make yourself available in a 4.5-hour window (yes, even if you’ve got a job!), when a GP will eventually call you and tell you there are no appointments until April. But do call 111 instead! Alternatively, you may try the surgery again at 8am tomorrow when you can dial our number 73 times and finally be told all appointments for the day are taken. Due to the Coronavirus pandemic, we are experiencing high call volumes. To lose the will to live, please press 1…”

Let’s be clear: the virus is not to blame for GPs failing to see their patients. (Doctors in most other countries never stopped face-to-face appointments.) The virus is not responsible for this week’s devastating news that mental health services received a record 4.3 million referrals last year. The Royal College of Psychiatrists calls it “the biggest hit to mental health in generations”.

The virus is not to blame for the fact that a frantic mum I know, whose 10-year-old says he wants to die, has been told the first appointment that CAMHS (Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services) can offer her son is in three years’ time. That’s three years, not months.

Lockdown caused, and continues to cause, all of the above. We are now living with the tragic consequences and any inquiry worth its salt must ask some hard questions of the people who did this to us. How dare they?

Here’s more on the very large and thoroughly deranged straw man who is now terrorizing millions of people in China. A slice:

Thirty million people in 13 cities across China have been put back into a Covid-19 lockdown with hazmat-wearing officials back on the streets on a scale not seen since the pandemic began.

China reported 5,280 new Covid-19 cases on Tuesday, more than double the previous day’s tally, as the highly transmissible Omicron variant spread across a country that has stuck tightly to a zero-Covid strategy.

That approach, which pivots on hard localised lockdowns and has left China virtually cut off from the outside world for two years, appears stretched to the limit as Omicron finds its way into communities.

At least 13 cities nationwide were fully locked down as of Tuesday, and several others had partial lockdowns, with some 15,000 infections reported nationwide in March.

Here’s Phil Magness’s latest defense of the great Great Barrington Declaration against those who continue to smear it.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 70 of Christopher Snowdon’s excellent 2017 book, Killjoys: A Critique of Paternalism:

The focus on aggregate statistics from large populations serves to distance the paternalist from the realities of individuals’ lives. Millions of complex personal tradeoffs are reduced to a scary-sounding number of preventable deaths. Risk at the personal level becomes certainty at the population level.