Russell Roberts's Blog, page 166

A Recent Covid Roundtable Hosted by Ron DeSantis…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… features, among others, Jay Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta, and Martin Kulldorff (authors of the great Great Barrington Declaration), and Joseph Ladapo and Harvey Risch.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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J.D. Tuccille decries New Zealand’s – and much of the world’s – acceleration toward authoritarianism. Two slices:

Last week, with the world understandably distracted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, New Zealand authorities took advantage of the moment to disperse an inconvenient protest against pandemic mandates. Like Canada’s Freedom Convoy, by which it was inspired, the protest was grounded in grassroots disagreement with authoritarian policies, mixed with a little nuttiness, and had outlived its welcome. Also like its inspiration, the protest in New Zealand was forcibly shut down to the surprise of those with preconceptions about peaceful, tolerant democracies. Governments are most peaceful, it turns out, when there’s little dissent to test that tolerance and, under pandemic stresses, gloves are coming off in an increasingly illiberal world.

…..

Unlike Canada, which imposed a financial police state and is still hunting wrong-thinkers who dared to donate to the Freedom Convoy, New Zealand officials have so far stuck with old-fashioned head-busting. But politicians in both nations seem united in disbelief that anybody could disagree with them.

We in the Land of the Free (so called) need not look as far away as New Zealand to find Covidocratic tyranny: Here’s a tweet yesterday from the U.S. Surgeon General – a tweet that baldly exposes the Covidocracy’s authoritarianism: (HT Martin Kulldorff)

To create a healthier digital environment and safer future, tech companies must share what they know about #HealthMisinformation on their platforms. Only with this information can we work toward preventing harmful misinfo.

gatito bueno is rightly critical of a new variant of Covid hypocrite.

My, how the ACLU has fallen.

Phil Magness on Facebook:

I did a comparison of social media presence between the Great Barrington Declaration and the pro-lockdown John Snow Memorandum. The differences are pronounced.

The GBD’s main signers are mostly not on twitter, and those that are just have a personal account. Only 3% are bluechecks.

By contrasts, the majority of the JSM’s signers are active on twitter and 43% of them are bluechecks.

This aligns with John Ioannidis’s recent paper, showing that JSM signers tend to have higher Kardashian Indexes than GBD signers – which is to say, they have a high ratio of twitter activism to scholarship.

“Professor Mark Woolhouse, who has been advising the government about infectious diseases for 25 years, says ‘plain common sense’ was a ‘casualty of the crisis’.”

Jay Bhattacharya tweets:

Lockdowners now assert that we’ve never had a real lockdown and that there’s no real prospect for another lockdown. I think they badly underestimate the enormous sacrifices people have made chasing the utopian fantasies the lockdowners foisted on us.

Kulvinder Kaur tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

“We inverted precautionary principle of trying to minimize harm by doing the one thing that we knew would cause harm: lockdowns.. What we do see very sadly.. harms unfolded.. We sit watching devastation that we knew these measures would cause 2yrs ago”
—Oxford Prof @SunetraGupta

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 105 of Benjamin Rogge’s 1973 paper “Education in a Free Society,” as this paper is reprinted in A Maverick’s Defense of Freedom, the 2010 collection of Rogge’s essays that is edited by Dwight Lee (original emphasis):

We repeat: the task of educating individuals for freedom, if done at all, will be best done by  private agencies and institutions, manned by individuals deeply committed to that cause. Admittedly, in a free society there will also exist private educational programs dedicated to restricting or eliminating freedom, alike manned by deeply committed individuals. Without being so naive as to believe that the truth must always win in an open contest, we still insist that the risk in this arrangement is far less than the risk run in a system where the agency of coercion (the state) is expected to educate the citizenry in the desirability of limiting the power of the state – a most unlikely act of self-denial!

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 60 of Christopher Snowdon’s excellent 2017 book, Killjoys: A Critique of Paternalism (link added):

In their day-to-day political activities, ‘public health’ paternalists rarely attempt to justify their position on ethical grounds, preferring instead to talk about ‘evidence-based policy’ (see Whyte 2013). This keeps the conversation on the consequentialist turf of ‘does it work?’ rather than opening up the question ‘is it right?’, but their consequentialism is of a narrow sort. If a policy is believed to prolong life or curtail risky behaviour, then it ‘works’ and becomes ‘evidence-based’ per se. Other consequences are largely ignored, including the implications for people’s welfare, unless they directly affect health.

An Unseen Cost of Debt-Financing of Government Expenditures

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:

Editor:

Robert de Porres-Ras dismisses – I think too casually – Jeb Hensarling’s warning of the dangers of growing U.S. government indebtedness (Letters, March 7). But both Messrs. Hensarling and de Porres-Ras overlook the worst feature of debt-financed government spending – namely, it is excessive because it enables today’s politicians and taxpayers to spend other people’s money.

Government projects funded with debt are not paid for by those persons – today’s voters and politicians – who choose to implement these projects. Indeed, these projects are not paid for today by anyone. Instead, debt-financed projects are paid for by future citizens-taxpayers whose taxes must rise (or whose government benefits must fall) to service debt obligations as these come due. Able to use debt financing to stick future generations with the bill for today’s projects, government consumes and wastes more resources than it would were it required to balance its budget.

And so even if bond markets never push the indebted government into default, and even if large indebtedness never prompts the central bank to further inflate the money supply, debt financing slows economic growth by transferring more resources than otherwise into wasteful government projects and, hence, away from productive private-sector uses.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA  22030

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Vinay Prasad wonders why so many academics “went silent” in the face of Covid lockdowns. A slice:

India faced some of the longest closures, mortgaging the future of tens of millions of kids, leading to catastrophic educational losses.

School closures in the USA were disproportionately in liberal strongholds and attitudes were temporaly linked to Trump’s advocacy. Closing school for more than a year is the greatest domestic policy failure of the last 25 years. As a lifelong Democrat/ progressive, I know with confidence that my team is responsible for this.

Yet, throughout this pandemic, notice how many global health scholars were totally silent on lockdowns. How many global health researchers said nothing as India sacrificed the future of a generation with school closures? How many US based disparity researchers or early childhood advocates were silent on school closure? I believe most were quiet!

Why?

The answer is simple: they are more committed to their career than they are to the cause. It is a professional liability to take a strong stand on a controversial issue. It can lead to professional repercussions. Being silent is safe. At the same time, the single most consequential decision of one’s lifetime was taking place on topics these people supposed care about, but they were silent. Instead, the continued their, by perspective, trivial work.

Tweeting out this photo…

… Karen Vaites makes a reasonable point: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

I would like to know if the people who are fearful of their kids’ risk from COVID have stopped taking them in cars and buses.

David Waugh points out that what changed is the politics, not the science. A slice:

In addition to Fauci and Collins, the CDC consistently demonstrates it is influenced by partisan politics. Throughout the pandemic, the CDC spread misinformation on masking, spun medical studies, disparaged natural immunity, allowed teachers’ unions to influence its school reopening guidance, and used deeply flawed studies to push an unconstitutional eviction moratorium. Trust in the CDC is dropping because Americans see it as a politicized agency.

Karol Markowicz wants apologies from officials who recklessly imposed lockdowns and other mindless Covid mandates. Two slices:

As COVID restrictions end around the country, and Democratic politicians pretend that something about the science has changed instead of their poll numbers being in the dirt, Americans must first demand: apologies.

Here, I’ll even go first. I spent much of 2020 and 2021 writing again and again arguing for the opening of schools throughout the country. But in March 2020, I was one of the leading voices urging schools to close.

It made no sense to me that my husband had stopped going into the office because of the mysterious new virus but my children continued to go to school. People were dying in large numbers in Italy and I was afraid.

I never imagined that “two weeks to slow the spread” would turn into two years, and counting, of pausing the lives of children to accommodate hypochondriac adults.

I was wrong. I’m sorry.

…..

Dr. Anthony Fauci, you fell in love with your own image and could not stay off the TV even as it caused us all harm.

In November 2021, you said that people who were criticizing you were “really criticizing science, because I represent science. That’s dangerous.” What’s dangerous is if you really believe that.

You frequently got things wrong on TV or reversed your previous comments with no explanations. The science hadn’t changed, you made political calculations to support the diktats of the Biden administration.

You actually argued for the passage of the stimulus bill as if you were some kind of lobbyist and not the director of one of our national health agencies.

Worst of all, you shut down dissenting opinions from other scientists because you knew yours could not withstand scrutiny. You have been a disaster for this country in leading us through the pandemic.

Apologize. Then exit stage left and let us never hear from you again.

You fearful, quiet politicians who let extended lockdowns destroy businesses, fray the fabric of our cities and cost us all so much: We saw you maskless, at concerts and parties, while our 2-year-olds stay masked to this day.

We know that you didn’t actually think masking was important like you implored us it was. You loved your power and nothing else mattered. Apologize.

And, you, compliant media, the disaster of the last two years is at your feet. You created heroes out of people like Gov. Andrew Cuomo, whose nursing-home directive cost thousands of lives, while demonizing Gov. Ron DeSantis, who used all of his political capital to correctly force schools open, a decision everyone now pretends was easy but certainly was not.

You ran stories about high case numbers in Florida “as schools open” to project that schools were somehow unsafe. You were incurious and did not ever challenge the corrupt healthcare agencies. You let us down.

Sharyl Attkisson reports on efforts to break the CDC’s silence on the question of why it withholds some relevant data on Covid.

el gato malo wisely warns of the dangers posed by “complicity theorists.” A slice:

such people provide the backbone of domination by demagogue by uncritically accepting, absorbing, and parroting the party line du jour and weaving it into their identities and personae to curry status and signal virtue.

Telegraph columnist Zoe Strimpel – hardly herself a rabid anti-masker – rightly ridicules a New York Times theater critic for the latter’s continuing intense fear of Covid. Here’s her conclusion:

Reading the list of plays ruined by maskless Londoners reminded me of aspects of cosmopolitan American culture I don’t envy: a persnickety need to see everything in a political light, to see all unknowns as massive, panic-inducing existential health risks, and a terror of contagion. Growing up in Massachusetts, my friends were all brought up awash in antibacterial soap.

In fact, the horrified Ms Collins-Hughes might have drawn different conclusions: a society as slapdash about masks as ours is surely bound to have good immunity; actors must feel safe or they wouldn’t work, and so on. Above all, she might have relaxed. Yes, masks have a role in reducing Covid risk, but at this point in the pandemic it is a fairly manageable risk – and it is one that we can finally afford, by and large, to take.

Good news from Sweden.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 183 of George Stigler‘s 1971 essay “Can Regulatory Agencies Protect the Consumer?” as this essay is reprinted as Chapter 11 of Stigler’s 1975 collection, The Citizen and the State: Essays on Regulation:

Regulation and competition are rhetorical friends and deadly enemies….

DBx: Indeed they are.

In practice, the only way for private firms to secure monopoly power is first to secure special privileges from the state. All such privileges, of course, are camouflaged as public-spirited restraints upon market activities.

Jonathan Sumption on Covidocratic Tyranny

(Don Boudreaux)

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Starting just before the three-minute mark in this video, Jonathan Sumption – whose voice from the start of Covid hysteria has been one of the relatively few sane ones – discusses Covid policy.

Some Non-Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Colin Grabow explains how U.S. protectionism boosts Americans’ imports of energy from Russia. A slice:

As outrage mounts over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Americans may be chagrined to learn that despite being the world’s largest oil producer and a net exporter of petroleum products, the United States turns to Russia to help meet its energy needs. Indeed, imports of Russian petroleum products have averaged over 370,000 barrels per day over the last decade, and in 2020 Russia was the third‐​largest source of U.S. petroleum imports. But why? While a number of factors explain this phenomenon, part of the answer lies in protectionist U.S. policy. More specifically, the Jones Act.

Passed in 1920, the Jones Act restricts the domestic waterborne transport of goods to vessels that are U.S.-flagged, U.S.-built and mostly U.S.-crewed and owned. But such vessels are several times more expensive to build and operate than foreign ships, resulting in very high shipping rates. So high, in fact, that after factoring in the cost of Jones Act shipping it can often make more sense to buy products from distant countries rather than other parts of the United States—including petroleum.

Dorothy Chan explains why solar tariffs are a mistake. A slice:

In January 2018, President Trump imposed the solar tariffs, or Section 201 tariffs, at the behest of a few domestic solar manufacturers to “defend American workers…and businesses.” US solar manufacturers Suniva and SolarWorld filed a petition with the International Trade Commission (ITC), claiming that solar dumping was destroying the domestic solar industry. Following the ITC’s recommendation, Trump approved safeguard tariffs on solar modules and cells starting at 30%, decreasing annually by 5% for the next four years.

These tariffs targeted Asian manufacturers, specifically China. China dominates global solar cell and module supply chains in part because the Chinese government heavily subsidizes the industry, allowing Chinese firms to offer lower prices. American solar manufacturers claim that China’s predatory prices justify tariffs to level the playing field.

Four years later, as President Biden enters his second year in office, the argument for tariffs remains unchanged. In fact, the administration is following the ITC’s recommendation to extend tariffs as alleviatory measures because “domestic industry is making a positive adjustment to import competition.”

Neither domestic industry nor consumers have made a so-called “positive adjustment.” Rather, punitive solar tariffs are distorting company decision-making, harming consumers, and stunting the industry that it was intended to guard.

George Will documents the decline in Donald Trump’s influence within the GOP. A slice:

Trump failed in his attempt to boost his preferred Senate candidate in North Carolina, Rep. Ted Budd, by pressuring a rival out of the race. As of mid-January, Budd was trailing in the polls. Trump reportedly might endorse a second Senate candidate in Alabama, his first endorsement, of Rep. Mo Brooks, having been less than earthshaking. Trump has endorsed Idaho Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin in the gubernatorial primary against Gov. Brad Little. A poll published in January: Little 59 percent, McGeachin 18 percent. During Trump’s presidency, a majority of Republicans said they were more supporters of Trump than of the GOP. That has now reversed.

Nate Hochman reports on “the constitutional law professor who endorsed the deplatforming of Ilya Shapiro.”

Clifford Thies reflects on Newsweek‘s discovery of black conservatives.

Jeffrey Singer offers some bloody good advice.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 789 of the late Fred McChesney’s superb Winter 1991 Cato Journal paper, “Antitrust and Regulation: Chicago’s Contradictory Views” (original emphasis):

The available evidence indicates that antitrust reduces output and wealth.

DBx: Yes. And nothing that has happened over the past 31 years supplies any reason to alter Fred’s assessment.

Later this week I’m giving a talk, in Destin, for GMU’s Law & Economics Center; the question I will ask and answer is this: “Is Antitrust Consistent with the Rule of Law?” My answer is ‘no.’ What is called “antitrust law” is but a regulatory regime for transferring wealth from the relatively politically impotent to – and creating unjust advantages for – parties with disproportionate political power, including members of Congress.