Russell Roberts's Blog, page 171
February 25, 2022
An Unsavory Profession
David Henderson – in an EconLog post titled “Do These Politicians Hear Themselves?” – expresses his justified suspicion that Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) lies about the financial struggles that his (Kelly’s) family experienced when he was a child. Such lying is no surprise, of course: Politics rewards dishonesty and penalizes honesty. I’m quite sure that Kelly hears himself with perfect clarity; he simply has no scruples about being dishonest.
Here’s a comment (slightly modified) that I left on David’s post:
David,
Excellent, spot-on post.
Sen. Mark Kelly was born in Orange, NJ, in 1964. Therefore, his supposed recollection from his boyhood of times being so tough that his mom couldn’t pay all of the family’s bills is likely a recollection from the early or mid-1970s – precisely the time that, we are told today, was the pinnacle of American middle-class prosperity. Many people advocate policies to restore those imaginary good ol’ days, the days before deregulation, tax cutting, the Reagan-fueled era of ‘greed,’ and the imposition of unfettered dog-eat-dog neoliberalism that has robbed all but the superrich of economic abundance and hope.
And so if Kelly’s recollection is accurate, that’s yet another piece of evidence against the commonplace assertion that the mid-1970s are a time to which Americans should look back with longing.
But of course Kelly is almost certainly lying.
I, being born in 1958, remember the mid-1970s very well. My own family was relatively poor by American standards. My dad, who dropped out of school in 6th grade, worked first as a bus driver in New Orleans and then for most of his life as a pipefitter in a (non-unionized) shipyard. (My dad later earned his GED, but he nevertheless kept working as a pipefitter.) My mom started working in 1973 as a clerk in the shipyard’s secretarial pool. I do not recall that my parents ever did not pay a bill. Perhaps they kept such hardship from their children. But had such hardship been routine, my siblings and I certainly would have known of it and now remember it. And my parents, on their meager income, chose to send their four children to Catholic school – so they paid tuition that most parents didn’t pay.
Kelly is now in a profession that not only tolerates, but encourages, untruthfulness. He should be – but, of course, he won’t be – deeply ashamed.
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Some Covid Links
It does raise the question of why people put up with it. In part, it’s because most people understandably have too little information about any single, complex policy issue. In addition, The New York Times recently reported that the CDC isn’t publishing large portions of available COVID-19 data out of fear that free-thinking readers would draw the wrong conclusions. But even if people demand change, they have little to no power over unelected bureaucrats.
Thousands of these unelected officials control our lives without being held accountable. That, unfortunately, will never change until we shrink government’s size and scope.
The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board opines:
Governments made many mistakes in the pandemic, and shutting down schools was arguably the worst. We’re now discovering the damage as studies calculate the learning loss.
…..
Blame the teachers unions, which blocked a return to normal learning. If Amplify’s findings don’t alarm elected officials, maybe recent numbers from Ballotpedia will. Last year there were 92 school board recall efforts nationwide, up from 20 in 2019. Parents know their kids are falling behind in fundamental skills, and they’re understandably furious.
el gato malo reveals unmistakable evidence of Covid Derangement Syndrome.
The war on Covid is almost won, but the dictators to whom Covid gave absolute power will not relinquish it easily. We are going to have to fight for public service to mean serving the public.
From the earliest days of the pandemic, the [British] Government worked hard on scaring people, irrespective of the risk they faced. Almost two years ago, SPI-B, the Sage subgroup which advises on behavioural science, noted that “a substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened [by Covid]; it could be that they are reassured by the low death rate in their demographic group. The perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased among those who are complacent, using hard-hitting emotional messaging.”
As the medical sociologist Professor Robert Dingwall puts it: “The Government has been terrorising the population for the last couple of years in the face of good psychological evidence that this is not a good thing to be doing.” So having put the population in a box at the beginning of the pandemic, how easy will it be to get them out now?
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It is not just physical health that has been affected by the pandemic. Covid isolation has taken its toll on mental health too. “Before Covid I struggled with being alone,” says Kaur Dhut. “Now it’s the other extreme and all I want to do is be alone.” Yet as Dingwall points out: “Humans are fundamentally social beings. Interaction is very important to us.” For some the virus has transformed that essential interaction from life-giving joy to potentially fatal threat.
The CDC isn’t the only government agency to withhold Covid-related data.
Allison Schrager calls on us to be more realistic about risks. A slice:
Americans have become intolerant of many risks that people once dealt with on a daily basis, as the Covid-19 pandemic has shown. Even 20 years ago, retreating to our homes for months on end at the government’s urging for a virus with Covid’s risk profile would have been unthinkable. We’ve often heard during the pandemic that we can return to normal “when it is safe.” Indeed, we hear the word “safe” a lot these days, but it’s often an unrealistic standard that no previous generation expected. Certain Covid restrictions can be justified, but extreme risk-aversion from government bureaucrats has caused more harm than good—for example, shutting down in-person teaching for children, who were at low risk from the virus, or imposing draconian economic lockdowns that caused many businesses needlessly to fail.
There are many reasons for our declining risk tolerance. We were raised and live in a richer society, where we need to take fewer risks. The government plays a growing role in removing risk from our lives, from the financial system to the workplace and beyond. We wind up less used to confronting risk—and less prepared for life’s inevitable shocks.
This threatens not only our resilience but also, over time, our prosperity. Risk is critical for a flourishing society and vibrant economy. Investors and entrepreneurs must take chances to find new innovations. Individuals need to do so as well, in order to achieve their personal and economic potential. If well designed, regulation can help us balance risk and reward sensibly. But our goal as a society seems more and more to be reducing risk at all costs.
Monica Gandhi tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
MGH study: “The societal and lifestyle disruptions caused by the pandemic may have triggered inflammation in the brain that can affect mental health, according to the study. The impacts manifest as symptoms including fatigue, brain fog and mental distress”
Insight about respiratory viruses fills this new Spectator essay by Matt Ridley. Two slices:
There are four coronaviruses that cause common colds and all are mild. About half of all colds are caused by rhinoviruses, of which there are around 100 types. None is lethal. That cannot be a coincidence. If mutation can make a disease more dangerous, why have rhinoviruses never turned into killers? As Niall Shanks and Rebecca Pyles put it in a 2007 paper titled ‘Evolution and medicine: the long reach of “Dr Darwin”’: ‘The rhinovirus works its evolutionary mischief by keeping its host mobile — and hence typically in contact with other susceptible persons.’ It achieves this by, for example, staying in the nasal mucosa, and not invading the bloodstream.
…..
Yet here surely there is a worrying lesson about the past two years. In the weird world of lockdown, severe strains of Covid were favoured by selection. If you tested positive but felt fine you were told to stay at home. If you fell badly sick you went to hospital, where you gave your illness to healthcare workers and other patients. So mutants that were more infectious, such as alpha and delta, paid no penalty for being just as virulent, maybe more so. The natural evolution of Covid into just another mild cold was therefore possibly delayed by at least a year.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 43 of the original, 1982 edition of Dominick Armentano’s superb but regrettably neglected volume Antitrust and Monopoly: Anatomy of a Policy Failure:
Business interests, however, have employed the state in an attempt to achieve legal monopoly positions of influence and power within the capitalistic system. Indeed it may have been their inability to achieve free-market monopoly that prompted such interests to seek government regulatory control over entry and restricted competition in many industries.
DBx: Yes. And antitrust itself began as, and has operated as, the suppression of competition camouflaged as the promotion of competition.
February 24, 2022
Some Non-Covid Links
In this just-released paper, my intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy, writing with Jack Salmon, warns against the explosion of U.S. government indebtedness. Here’s the abstract:
This study reviews the applicability of new definitions of fiscal sustainability that place greater emphasis on the historical trend of falling nominal interest rates. We explore how these now-broadly applied definitions are misleading and potentially dangerous. In addition, it is important to assess the underlying reasons why economists and policymakers have shied away from using the debt ratio as a measure of fiscal sustainability in recent years. Public choice theory informs us that new definitions of fiscal sustainability may be largely politically motivated, with policymakers operating within a myopic framework that benefits special interests in the short term while burdening wider society in the long term. The idea that the debt ratio “does not matter” or that the measure is not useful for measuring sustainability tends to overlook the preponderance of economic literature on fiscal sustainability, debt risk premia, and the debt-growth nexus.
Eric Boehm adds his clear voice to those who warn against U.S. government indebtedness.
What could the administration do to provide some relief from the symptoms, if not the sources, of the inflationary menace?
President Biden, by executive order, should immediately direct Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to raise the annual cap on Series I savings bonds from $10,000 to $100,000. I-bonds, established by President Clinton in 1996, are guaranteed, inflation-linked securities issued directly by the Treasury to people and companies. Today, I-bonds pay a healthy 7.12% annual return. The interest rate is adjusted every six months to reflect changes in consumer price inflation. It’s hard to find a better, safer investment in this environment.
Currently, however, individual investors are limited to purchasing $10,000 in I-Bonds a year. (An arcane rule also permits taxpayers eligible for a federal tax refund to buy an additional $5,000 of I-bonds.) Investor interest has ramped up with the rise in inflation. Over the past three months alone, I-bond purchases soared to $7.1 billion, compared with an average of $700 million a year during the decade before.
Raising the cap would enable more Americans to receive some inflation protection on their hard-earned savings. The executive order should also make clear that the higher purchase cap would fall when price stability is re-established, as certified by the Fed.
Actually, capitalism offers solutions to all of those challenges. The largest reductions in carbon emissions have come from natural gas, thanks to the market innovation of shale fracking. Competitive labor markets have helped minorities rise despite residual racism because bigotry is too expensive. The wealth created by free markets and innovation, along with global trade, has lifted billions out of poverty. Extreme global poverty has plunged to less than 10% from 45% in 1980 while world GDP has more than tripled.
We now have fast broadband and smartphones that connect with others anywhere, anytime; 24-hour home delivery of almost anything we want; breakthrough medical treatments and vaccines; genetically engineered crops that have increased farm yields and global nutrition; cheap energy thanks to an oil and gas shale boom; and a rising standard of living for most of the world. Socialism didn’t build that.
Yet as Schumpeter predicted, people in the comfortable West, including many tech entrepreneurs, now take this prosperity for granted. “Neoliberalism’s anti-government, free-market fundamentalism is simply not suited for today’s economy and society,” says Larry Kramer, president of the Hewlett Foundation.
By “reimagining capitalism,” as the press release advertises, what these foundations really mean is putting politicians and the administrative state in charge of redistributing more of its proceeds. Yet if they had been paying attention in recent years, they might have noticed that “free-market fundamentalism” could have spared the U.S. from some terrible mistakes.
Alberto Mingardi continues to expose the fallacies peddled by Mariana Mazzucato.
Nick Gillespie talks with Stephanie Slade about libertarianism.
Asra Q. Nomani explains why we should resist “anti-racism” (so called). Two slices:
Bigotry, meanwhile, is back on the curriculum, thanks partly to a “Black Lives Matter at School” campaign, which last week recommended the book Not My Idea: A Book about Whiteness to children as young as six in Evanston/Skokie School District 65, outside Chicago. “Whiteness is a bad deal”, the book argues; it amounts to signing a “contract” with the devil, who is illustrated with an indelicate pointy tail. Meanwhile, in an English lesson in Fairfax County, Virginia, students played a game of “Privilege Bingo”; even “Military Kid” has been shamed as having “privilege”.
It’s a tragedy that today’s schools are more segregated than mine was. I arrived in the United States in the summer of 1969, a four-year-old who knew not a word of English. Born in Bombay, I was part of the first generation of post-colonial Indians. My parents had survived the “white supremacy” of British rule, and witnessed Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent movement, which was an inspiration for the American civil rights movement.
The Civil Rights Act was passed the year before my birth, and I learned the alphabet at Martin Luther King Elementary School in Piscataway, New Jersey. My class photo from 1975 shows 25 diverse, smiling children lined up shoulder-to-shoulder in three rows — organised by height, not skin colour.
…..
Across the country, “diversity” officers and “equity” consultants are spinning a tale that segregation is virtuous. The historically progressive Southern Poverty Law Center, established in 1971 to fight racism, now provides schools with an online “Toolkit” to create “affinity groups”, through lesson plans it calls “Learning for Justice”. It argues that “affinity groups help marginalized students to be seen and heard”. It even shows schools how to “troubleshoot questions”, like the obvious: “Aren’t affinity groups exclusionary?”
Bryan Caplan is moving from EconLog to a new blog.
Some Covid Links
Joel Zinberg explains that “[w]ithout mandates or lockdowns, Florida better managed COVID than New York.” Three slices:
When the final history of the COVID-19 pandemic is written it will likely conclude that most of the non-pharmaceutical public health measures taken to combat the disease — that is, mask mandates and lockdowns — were largely ineffective.
The unimportance of public mitigation measures can be illustrated by comparing outcomes in states that imposed strict mitigation measures versus states, such as Florida, that adopted a minimalist approach.
Florida, New York, California and Illinois are all large states with multiple urban areas. But while Florida has been the poster child for a hands-off approach by government, the latter three states imposed multiple intrusive measures over long periods of time.
Florida, for example, recommended but did not require face coverings. While several large counties imposed their own mandates, Governor Ron DeSantis issued an executive order barring governments and school districts from imposing them last May.
…..
Far and away the most important factor in determining the severity of COVID-19 illness is age. There is an exponential relationship between age and COVID-19’s infection fatality rate. The estimated IFR is very low for children and younger adults (0.002% at age 10; 0.01% at age 25), increases to 0.4% by age 55, and then soars with advanced age (1.4% at age 65; 4.6% at age 75; and 15% at age 85).
Florida has the second-highest percentage of population 65 and older (21.3%) in the nation. In contrast, New York ranks 25th among the states in the percentage of population 65 and older (17.4%), Illinois is 35th (16.6%), and California is 45th (15.2%).
Remarkably, despite its elderly population and laissez-faire approach, Florida has only the 33rd highest age-adjusted COVID-19 death rate per 100,000 population (251) among the states. That puts it in the same ballpark as mandate heavy Illinois (ranked 32 with 255 deaths/100,000) and California (ranked 38; 234) and well below New York (ranked 7th highest; 334).
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From early in the pandemic the media vilified Florida Governor DeSantis as irresponsible and dangerous. Some labeled him “DeathSantis.” But DeSantis’s approach proved to be right. The mitigation measures imposed in other, largely blue, states did little to improve health outcomes. And Florida was better able to preserve its economic health than most other states.
As COVID cases, hospitalizations and deaths continue to plummet around the country, hold-out public health officials and politicians should strongly consider mimicking the COVID policies of that “Florida Man.”
Here’s a headline to a report in the Wall Street Journal:
Rise in Non-Covid-19 Deaths Hits Life Insurers
Companies believe lack of medical treatment during pandemic has contributed to deaths from other causes
And here are the report’s opening lines:
U.S. life insurers, as expected, made a large number of Covid-19 death-benefit payouts last year. More surprisingly, many saw a jump in other death claims, too.
Industry executives and actuaries believe many of these other fatalities are tied to delays in medical care as a result of lockdowns in 2020, and then, later, people’s fears of seeking out treatment and trouble lining up appointments.
Wall Street Journal columnist James Freeman follows up on the above. Two slices:
Today brings still more evidence of what any reasonable person should have guessed in early March 2020. Imposing wrenching changes on a society without calm consideration of costs and benefits is bound to end in catastrophe. Unfortunately since 2020 not many reasonable people have been running America’s public health bureaucracies. And so the coronavirus panic led to fear-inducing measures targeting just one of the many threats to human health, with hardly a thought for the collateral damage or even the unlikelihood that business lockdowns and school closures could somehow manage to stop the virus. (They didn’t.)
Accounting for the costs of turning American society upside down continues today. Along comes a series of reports from companies that have been paying for some of the collateral damage. The Journal’s Leslie Scism reports:
U.S. life insurers, as expected, made a large number of Covid-19 death-benefit payouts last year. More surprisingly, many saw a jump in other death claims, too.Industry executives and actuaries believe many of these other fatalities are tied to delays in medical care as a result of lockdowns in 2020, and then, later, people’s fears of seeking out treatment and trouble lining up appointments.Some insurers see continued high levels of these deaths for some time, even if Covid-19 deaths decline this year.
…..
Stanford School of Medicine professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya tweets today about the [New York] Times report:
This @nytimes story on @FLSurgeonGen is premised on statistical misinformation. Any comparison of covid death rates by state needs to be adjusted at least for age.
On that basis, Florida’s Covid mortality results look even better. And what about an accounting of lockdown harms in the heavily-regulated jurisdictions? Don’t expect to find one in the Times account.
The rationale for the mask mandate was never very strong, since the conditions on airplanes are not conducive to virus transmission. The ventilation systems on commercial aircraft, which mix outdoor air with air recycled through HEPA filters and limit air flow 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.” Sebastian Hoehl, a researcher at the Institute for Medical Virology at Goethe University Frankfurt in Germany, concurred in an interview with Scientific American the following month, saying “an airplane cabin is probably one of the most secure conditions you can be in.”
Southwest Airlines CEO Gary Kelly reiterated this point during a Senate hearing in December. “I think the case is very strong that masks don’t add much, if anything, in the air cabin environment,” he said. “It is very safe and very high quality compared to any other indoor setting.” American Airlines CEO Doug Parker agreed. “An aircraft is the safest place you can be,” he said. “It’s true of all of our aircraft—they all have the same HEPA filters and air flow.”
Given the availability of vaccines that dramatically reduce the risk of severe disease and N95 masks that protect people who wear them, the TSA rule is blatantly paternalistic. The people most at risk from COVID-19 are adults who decline to be vaccinated. The risk to children is infinitesimal even if they are not vaccinated—smaller than the risk of dying in a car crash if their parents decide to avoid mask hassles by driving instead of flying.
The CDC’s mask mandate for travelers using public transportation services or facilities was first issued in January 2021, in the form of an order from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the CDC. The order remains in effect indefinitely, until “modified or rescinded,” and is enforceable by fines and criminal penalties. The CDC declined to adopt the mask mandate as an administrative regulation, subject to public notice and comment, on the ground that “emergency action” was justified by the need to prevent the transmission and spread of COVID-19.
Douglas Murray decries “the tyranny of Trudeau.” (HT Jon Fortier) A slice:
Early in the corona era the historian David Starkey gave some thoughts on Covid. ‘We’ve got a Chinese virus,’ he said, ‘and we’ll finish up with a Chinese society.’ I remember at the time thinking the phrase neat, but doubtful. Fast forward a couple of years and the doubts have eroded. Although Britain seems to have avoided becoming a permanent Covid state (and is indeed one of the first societies to try leaping out of the Covid age), other parts of the West certainly do seem to be trying to meet the CCP more than halfway. Foremost among them is Justin Trudeau’s Canada.
There is no shortage of things going on in the world at the moment. But you know that the world is in an especially perilous place when even Canada has become interesting. The country that launched a thousand gags has never been known for its political earthquakes. But in recent weeks something has happened that deserves attention, however distracted we might otherwise be.
Over the past few months Trudeau has tried to bring in vaccine mandates for Canadian citizens. In a country where people have been deprived of free movement for the best part of two years, Trudeau did not see the arrival of the mildest variant to date as a way out of this misery. Rather, he thought it a moment to double-down and make all Canadians do 100 per cent of what he wanted.
Among those who did not take this well were thousands of Canadian truckers. Many of these people have spent the past two years working away to keep Canada’s supply chains running. For a good while they were among the nation’s heroes. But then Justin insisted that even people in this most isolated of professions had to get double-jabbed, and if they didn’t they would be out of a job. Many of the nation’s truckers took umbrage. They descended on Ottawa in their thousands, protesting that the Prime Minister did not have the right to take away their livelihoods.
A grown-up leader could have used the opportunity to negotiate or ameliorate the public concerns. But Justin is not a grown-up leader. He is an obscenely over-promoted princeling man-child who decided he would deploy the weapon he has always used on his political enemies.
As far back as September he was dismissing anyone opposed to vaccine mandates as not merely anti-science but also racist and misogynist. He mulled in an interview: ‘They are a small group that occupy a loud space and a decision needs to be made — do we tolerate these people?’ It’s an interesting question to pose. Ordinarily in a democracy, you have to tolerate your fellow citizens. What are the alternatives? In recent weeks Justin has tried to show us.
As the convoy descended on Ottawa, the dauphin first fled the city, pretending that he had recently met somebody who had Covid and therefore must isolate. He then pretended that the peaceful protestors constituted a threat to his life. He made Richard II look like Hyperion. When a Jewish Conservative MP questioned his slander of the protestors, he retaliated that while the honourable lady and her party might be happy to stand with swastikas and confederate flags, he was not. The fact that this came from a man who spent most of his recent youth wearing blackface is a detail that should not detain us.
Unable to make any compromises with people he had decided were all Nazis, Justin decided to punish these ‘fascists’ by demonstrating the awesome force of the state. Despite having plenty of laws on the books to deal with peaceful protests, Trudeau brought in the nation’s emergency laws, intended only for use in wartime.
The WHO is a friend of tyrants everywhere. (HT Dan Klein)
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 260 of the 2016 second edition of Thomas Sowell’s important volume Wealth, Poverty and Politics:
In short, when a governmental institution is given a categorical mandate – whether to deal with pollutants, discrimination, crime, homelessness or other problems – the incentives are not the same as when private individuals or private organizations face an incremental problem requiring an expenditure of their own money, as distinguished from spending taxpayers’s money. Private individuals and organizations have financial incentives to act incrementally, pursuing a given activity so long as the incremental benefits exceed the incremental costs – but not beyond that point. A government agency, however, has incentives to pursue activities so long as those activities produce any benefit, or even the appearance of a benefit, since appearances matter in politics. The fact that government is essentially a categorical institution, and political issues tend to be discussed in categorical terms, facilitates such mismatches of incremental benefits and incremental costs.
DBx: It’s never been difficult to point to evidence of the sad truth of Tom Sowell’s description of the logic of government activity. But in the past two years, such evidence has been overwhelming. Avoiding Covid was largely treated as a categorical good, one that is not to be traded off against any other good.
Humanity will pay a heavy price for this folly for years, likely decades.
February 23, 2022
Why Not “There Should be No Minimum Wage”?
I suspect that there was no intention to build bias into this survey, but – as I teach my students – intentions are not results.
February 23, 2022
Prof. L__ C__
Prof. C__:
Thanks for the invitation to participate in the survey of economists on proposals to raise the federal minimum wage. I’d like to participate in the survey, but its first question prevents me from doing so. That question reads:
The debate over raising the federal minimum wage continues in Congress. Proponents say a wage mandate will fill more open jobs, and opponents say a wage mandate so will reduce the number of jobs available for less-skilled workers and close businesses. Based on your knowledge of the economic literature, what do you think represents an appropriate rate for the federal minimum wage?
Missing from all of the 24 options that you offer as possible answers to this question is the only answer that I believe to be correct – namely, that there be no federal minimum wage. Were I to choose what for me is the least-objectionable answer (“Less than $7.25/hour”) among the answers that you offer as possibilities, I would still – in choosing this answer – mistakenly imply that I favor a federal minimum wage.
Because I believe that all minimum wages – local, state, and federal – should be immediately abolished and never again imposed, I cannot participate in the survey without conveying a mistaken impression of my judgment on this policy question. I’m sure that I’m not the only economist who shares my position.
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
“Explain” Isn’t a Synonym for “Endorse”
I’m getting a surprising amount of push-back on my blog post that prompted Mr. S__ to e-mail me.
Mr. S__:
You charge me with being “irresponsible [and] even treacherous” for posting the video in which Konstantin Kisin offers explanations for why many people are skeptical of the Covid vaccines.
I plead not guilty.
Explanation is not endorsement. For example, in my teaching and writing I often explain how governments’ ability to borrow money combines with perverse political incentives to cause governments to spend excessively. But my explanation is emphatically no endorsement either of deficit financing or of profligate government spending.
The same logic applies to explanations of vaccine hesitancy. This hesitancy, being real, warrants rational explanation. And the reasons that Kisin offers for this hesitancy strike me as being far more plausible than the mainstream media’s lazy ‘explanation’ that vaccine hesitancy is rooted overwhelmingly in the stupidity and selfishness of knuckle-draggers prone to support Trump.
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
Harvard University senior Julie Hartman, writing in the Wall Street Journal, laments her classmates’ sheeplike obedience to authorities. Here’s her conclusion:
There is a smaller group at Harvard that apparently find pleasure in these restrictions. These students will chastise you for not wearing a mask correctly and called one of my brave peers who publicly denounced Harvard’s Covid restrictions a “eugenicist” because he supposedly showed insufficient sensitivity to immunocompromised people. They love Covid for the moral high ground it gives them to condescend to and control others.
My peers and I are often told that we are the future leaders of America. We may be the future decision makers, but most of us aren’t leaders. Our principal concern is becoming members of the American elite, with whatever compromises, concessions and conformity that requires. The inability of Harvard students to question or oppose these irrational bureaucratic excesses bodes ill for our ability to meet future challenges.
Speaking of New Zealand strongwoman Ardern, Tom Chodor concludes that
In short, New Zealand’s once oh-so-cohesive Covid policy is falling apart. And as disenchantment grows, its government could soon find itself overwhelmed by a crisis of a very different order.
Also in the Wall Street Journal is this letter-to-the-editor:
Joel Zinberg’s op-ed “Covid Patients Suffer as Bureaucrats Try to Practice Medicine” (Feb. 8) eloquently points out how the Food and Drug Administration has exceeded its reach and is meddling in medical treatments.
Facing the pandemic, the medical profession took a back seat to the government task forces, which have made flagrant missteps. While physicians treated patients, the directions of care were outlined largely by government. How can we possibly think government agencies would be more adept than the clinicians, the “foot soldiers” in the field? Physicians have been disrespected—taken out of the equation and largely ignored or silenced in policy-making.
It is imperative that the medical profession steps up and assumes a larger role in directing future decision-making. It is time for a policy of laissez-faire from Washington that allows the doctors to be doctors.
Ronald G. Frank, M.D.
West Orange, N.J.
Mary Dawood Catlin writes that February 14th, 2022, was a very dark day in Canada.
The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board decries the tyranny unleashed by Canadian strongman Justin Trudeau. Two slices:
Modern liberals [DBx: Progressives] can hurtle from extravagant tolerance to suppression without batting an eye. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau dramatizes the tendency.
Every trucker blockade in Canada has been cleared, yet Mr. Trudeau’s Liberal government isn’t giving up the emergency powers it claimed to criminalize the protest movement against vaccine mandates. “This state of emergency is not over,” Mr. Trudeau said, citing the risk of future blockades. This isn’t how a nation of laws is supposed to function.
Mr. Trudeau’s new powers rely on defining the disruptive but peaceful truckers as a security threat akin to violent terrorists. His emergency law, a broad prohibition on public assemblies and even indirect support for them, ensnares tens of thousands of Canadians as “designated persons” whose assets must, per another of his new laws, be found and frozen by any financial institution, without due process or court supervision. There isn’t an appeals process in case of error, and so far 200 accounts are frozen.
Pressed for details, Justice Minister David Lametti initially explained that “pro-Trump” big donors “ought to be worried.” Now the government says it is targeting only the truckers, but its power has no limiting principle.
…..
In December 2020 Mr. Trudeau chided India for its police response to farmers’ blockades of Delhi. “Let me remind you,” he said, “Canada will always be there to defend the right of peaceful protest.” Mr. Trudeau prattles on about rights half a world away but won’t respect them half a block from Parliament.
Also decrying the tyranny exercised by strongman Trudeau is Aaron Wudrick. (HT Dominic Pino) A slice:
It is hard to overstate how draconian this is. There is of course nothing unusual or improper about a government seeking to have specific assets funding specific illegal activity frozen or confiscated. But in the normal course of things, governments are required to gather intelligence and appear in court to produce evidence before a judge to secure a court order. This has the obvious purpose of preventing abuse and arbitrary action.
But under the Emergencies Act order, the government has ordered banks to freeze assets and report personal information on the vaguest of criteria: any “designated person” for whom there are “reasonable grounds to suspect” of an offense. No minimum financial threshold is outlined, meaning that individuals whose sole connection to the protest is sending, say, $50 to an online fundraiser, could be swept up in this unprecedented crackdown.
And since fundraising for the protest had raised millions of dollars before the order issued on February 14, the language of the order is ambiguous about whether the order also applies retroactively, thereby affecting those who donated to a legal protest in good faith. (As of this writing, the Trudeau government confirmed that at least 76 accounts worth $3.2 million had been frozen. By comparison, the United States froze only 50 accounts worth $6 million in the three weeks following 9/11.)
That the institutions compelled to identify these accounts on the government’s behalf are shielded from liability only makes the problem worse. It incentivizes them to err on the side of aggression, and leaves no legal recourse for, say, a John Smith from Toronto who had his accounts frozen after being mistaken for another donor with the same name.
It does not take a particularly active imagination to see the obvious problem with a government’s enlisting banks, without court oversight, to freeze the assets of protesters hostile to the government and ordering the disclosure of their information to the police and intelligence agencies, especially when the justice minister himself publicly states that donors who are “members of a pro-Trump movement” should be worried. One need not sympathize with the protesters themselves to spot the obvious and disturbing precedent set by this unjustifiable overreach. And since there is no indication that this information will be destroyed upon the expiry of the current Emergencies Act declaration, the government of the day has the potential to acquire and retain a list of hundreds — possibly thousands — of Canadians identified as “unfriendly.”
Noah Carl explains that “the Netherlands’ Omicron lockdown was a complete failure.” Here’s his conclusion:
Unfortunately for the pro-lockdown scientists, the virus simply doesn’t behave in the manner their models suggest. This was evident as early as April of 2020, when Sweden’s first wave began to retreat. Yet almost two years later, they still haven’t learned their lesson.
Physically, I was fine; mentally, it’s a different matter. At the beginning of isolation, I couldn’t tell if I was feeling tired because of the virus, or the inability to leave the house for fresh air and – crucially – perspective. Within days, I’d started feeling anxious. After a week, my OCD had reappeared, torturing me with its awful intrusive thoughts. It frightened me how quickly my head turned on me, even after years of recovery and therapy, and a fantastic support network in place.
As I write this column today, I’m still feeling a little shaky and unwell, even though it’s been almost a fortnight since I was allowed back out. Friends with a history of mental health issues have related similar experiences: the Covid was fine, but the isolation was the really scary part.
Writing at UnHerd, Amy Jones advises that we ignore the “doomerists” and learn to live with Covid.
Covidian tyranny looks as though it will soon become intense in Uganda: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
Uganda plans to impose fines on people who refuse to be vaccinated against COVID-19 and those who fail to pay could be sent to prison under a new public health law which lawmakers are scrutinising, parliament said on Tuesday.
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