Russell Roberts's Blog, page 174

February 17, 2022

Tyranny and Its Resistance in Canada

(Don Boudreaux)

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(HT Todd Zywicki)

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Published on February 17, 2022 13:16

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Telegraph Science Editor Sarah Knapton reports on John Ioannidis’s new study that finds that intellectual discussion and debate over Covid-19 lockdowns were skewed, in part, because “because sceptical scientists were shunned on social media.” Two slices:


Anti-lockdown scientists were viewed as having ‘fringe’ ideas because those calling for draconian restrictions had more followers on social media, a study has shown.


Professor John Ioannidis, of Stanford University, an expert in data science and the reliability of research, studied the expertise of authors who signed the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) compared with signatories of the John Snow Memorandum.


The GBD called for vulnerable people to be shielded while allowing immunity to build up in the rest of the public to avoid huge costs to society, education and public health.


In contrast, the John Snow Memorandum (JSM) argued that such a policy of herd immunity was unethical.


…..


“GBD is clearly not a fringe minority report compared with JSM, as many social media and media allude.


“If knowledgeable scientists can have a strong social media presence, massively communicating accurate information to followers, the effect may be highly beneficial.


“Conversely, if scientists themselves are affected by the same problems (misinformation, animosity, loss of decorum and disinhibition, among others) when they communicate in social media, the consequences may be negative.”


Prof Ioannidis also said signatories of the JSM had contributed to the vilification of authors of the GBD through their tweets and op-eds.


Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Marion Smith bemoans the acquiescence to Covidocratic tyranny of so many people in the Anglosphere – and he applauds the now-rising resistance to this tyranny. A slice:


I saw much of this madness while organizing and running events in the U.K. last summer. I also saw cause for hope. Despite the slew of decrees handed down by Westminster, British citizens largely went about their lives. There was a widespread sense that while the government had the authority to issue such edicts, the people had no compulsion to abide by them. They viewed pandemic restrictions as a house of cards, capable of being toppled at any moment.


Which is exactly what happened. Not even the author of the lockdowns, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, could keep up the charade. His office did what everyone else was doing—holding parties, seeing friends, living life. Now the country has all but ended its pandemic restrictions and scrapped plans for vaccine passports. This sudden transformation surely springs from the widespread recognition that such absurd limits on liberty won’t be followed, from the top of society down to the bottom.


The same hope is now evident on the streets of Canada, in the form of truckers who’ve had enough. When Mr. Trudeau banned people from bringing fuel and other supplies to the truckers, many Canadians disobeyed and braved a police crackdown. For the Canadian people, famed for their niceness, this may be the greatest act of civil disobedience in history. Surely it is justified, given the stakes—which Mr. Trudeau has increased by asserting emergency powers similar to those used in wartime.


Freddie Sayers talks to people in Ottawa, including a protesting trucker.

Judson Berger reviews the awfulness of Covid-19 politics. A slice:


This toxicity has consequences. Caroline Downey reports here on how the masking debate has affected Connecticut students all along, as described by an elementary-school teacher who had to remain anonymous in order to speak freely:


“Kids are being taught to call out their peers. I constantly see kids bullying their classmates, yelling things like ‘Johnny, put your mask above your nose!’,” she said.


While the teacher encourages her children to take “mask breaks” outside to get some air, she says she’s noticed that some are afraid to ask for one because they’re worried that they’ll be ridiculed….


“I had a kid throw up in my room. The mask was covered in vomit, and then the student felt like they had to cover their mouth with their hands.”


None of this is to say the masks can’t offer any protection, or that parents must shun them. But the effort to put that decision in the hands of families, as with so much else during this pandemic, never should have become so politicized. The official guidance has changed often enough, and varies enough from country to country, to justify reasoned debate on the departure from it. Instead, we saw hysterical accusations of running a death cult for kids, of promoting the virus for a “warped idea of personal liberty,” and of being “anti public health.”


Aaron Kheriaty, MD, tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

The state and its three-letter agencies do not have a monopoly on facts.

Nate Hochman, writing at National Review, decries Progressives’ hypocritical attacks on the protesting Canadian truckers. Here’s Hochman’s conclusion:

The Ottawa truckers, on the other hand, aren’t looking for garment-rending statements, crisis lines, or parliamentary flags at half mast. They just want their freedoms back. Apparently, that’s too much to ask for.

A top L.A. Democrat calls for an end to mask mandates. (HT Rich Lowry) A slice:


The Democrat in question is Janice Hahn, a former Democratic House rep who’s been a member of the L.A. County Board of Supervisors since 2016. It’s rare that a member of Congress will leave that body to run for a position in local government but the Board of Supervisors isn’t any ol’ municipal board. It’s a panel of five people that sets policy for L.A. County, a jurisdiction of 10 million and the biggest county in the United States.


Hahn couldn’t help noticing that the county’s mask mandate was ignored by, uh, pretty much everyone at the Super Bowl held in L.A. this Sunday. So she’s been thinking.


And where her thoughts have led her is to the thankless position below. The COVID hawks to her left will spaz out and call her the Grim Reaper for “surrendering” to the Trumpist demand to drop precautions while the COVID doves to her right are destined to sneer, “Beginning to lose the trust of the people?”


Laura Rosen Cohen is rightly critical of Covidians’ cruel treatment of children. A slice:


Cruelty to children has been rebranded and normalized by the credentialled “public health” masses in lockstep with an increasingly corrupted medical and educational establishment. Cruelty to children is fashionable and positioned as virtuous. And while adults now dine and conduct their daily business in regular fashion, go to the Super Bowl (70,000 fans), and live the good life, a hard core of despicable humans still insists that children must remain masked, seemingly indefinitely. And the proponents of masking children deliver their imperatives with such stubborn, sneering insistence and such glee, that one can only wonder if this obsession has crossed the rubric into sociopathic fetish territory. Follow the (political) science, they said.


Sadism toward children – there is no other way to describe it, unfortunately – is being expressed in the mandatory masking of their young faces no matter what evidence there is – scientific, anecdotal or personal –that it is harmful to children. The face mask is one of (if not the) the most critical devotional principal pillars of the Cult of Covid and heresy will not be tolerated, your children’s physical and mental health be damned.


TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.)

James Lim, MD tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

When universities have dining policies more restrictive than senior living facilities something is horribly wrong.

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Published on February 17, 2022 02:53

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 162 of the 2009 Revised Edition of Thomas Sowell’s Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One:

However much we may agree with sweeping rhetoric about safety, or even vote for  those who use such rhetoric, nevertheless when faced with choices in our own lives we weigh incremental safety against incremental costs. We may consider it worthwhile to avoid one chance in six of getting killed from playing Russian roulette, but not worth it to pay a thousand dollars to avoid one chance in six million of getting killed by some fluke occurrence. Indeed, if the cost of avoiding one chance in six million is merely an inconvenience, some may still refuse to pay for it. In short, even those who talk about safety in categorical terms – “if it saves just one life, it is worth whatever it costs” – actually behave in their own lives as if safety is an incremental decision, based on weighing costs against benefits, not a categorical decision.

DBx: Yes.

Yet this wisdom was ignored by so very many people over the past two years. Every reduction in the risk of exposure the the SARS-CoV-2 virus was regarded as worth whatever might be the cost of that reduction. It is this mindless attitude toward the risks pose by Covid-19 that I call “Covid Derangement Syndrome,” for to truly act in such a way is deranged. No normal person does so – and no normal person can be coerced to do so without being driven mad.

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Published on February 17, 2022 01:15

February 16, 2022

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from my late, great colleague Walter Williams’s May 6th, 2010, column in the Washington Examiner, titled “Black Americans and liberty“:

If the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan wanted to sabotage black academic excellence, he could not find a more effective means to do so than the government school system in most cities.

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Published on February 16, 2022 10:30

A Fiery Speech for Freedom

(Don Boudreaux)

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I only learned about Tricia Lindsay about 30 minutes ago (from this essay by Max Borders). I applaud her passion in calling on all Americans to resist Covidocratic tyranny.

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Published on February 16, 2022 09:58

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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The Wall Street Journal‘s Elliot Kaufman decries the instincts and tactics of Canadian strongman Justin Trudeau. Two slices:


For Justin Trudeau, emergency powers are too often a policy of first resort. In March 2020, at the start of the pandemic, the Canadian prime minister sought arbitrary power to tax, spend and borrow for 21 months. He had already negotiated a Covid-relief package with the opposition, but he wanted a blank check. Now, as the pandemic seems to wind down, he has returned to the well.


Mr. Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act on Monday for the first time in Canadian history. (The law’s predecessor, the War Measures Act, was used only three times: World War I, World War II and the 1970 FLQ crisis involving Quebecois terrorists.) Now, in response to protests and blockades started by truckers against vaccine mandates, the prime minister has granted his government extraordinary temporary powers “to make orders or regulations that are believed, on reasonable grounds, to be necessary to respond to the issues at hand,” the Canadian government explains on its website.


This broad authority doesn’t junk the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It does, however, include the power to prohibit travel, public assemblies and use of any specified property, to force people or companies to render essential services, to impose fines and imprisonment for violating any of the emergency rules, and to use the military as police, though Mr. Trudeau suggests he won’t do that last one. He says the powers will be used for 30 days, strengthening the federal police, beefing up penalties, dragooning private tow-truck companies and, incredibly, directing financial institutions, without court orders, to freeze personal and corporate bank accounts connected to the protests. Without due process, and used against despised and often caricatured protesters, these powers invite further abuse.


“This is not a peaceful protest,” Mr. Trudeau says, though in more than two weeks, there has been no violence.


…..


Backlash from the unvaccinated—vilified, excluded, pushed out of work, barred from Walmart in Quebec’s case—shouldn’t have been unexpected. This is true even in Canada, which was hailed prematurely during the Trump years by the New York Times and the Atlantic as possessing the “secret” to avoiding populist politics. If there is such a secret, it probably has to do with maintaining public order and not marginalizing substantial segments of the population. Mr. Trudeau and other Canadian authorities could have done both with the powers they already had.


Further analysis of Canadian strongman Justin Trudeau’s most recent power grab is offered by Reason‘s Liz Wolfe. Here’s her conclusion:


People ought to have as much freedom as possible to make donations to nonviolent anti-government political causes that are aligned with their beliefs, without government insinuation that they’re supporting terrorism.


Whether it’s government officials sending in muscle or private companies deeming activists to be in violation of terms of service, the liberatory promise of crypto lies in the fact that it can bypass these intermediaries and make transactions more discreet—something Trudeau’s lackeys surely know, and seem a bit threatened by.


Jim Bovard also has an opinion about Canadian strongman Trudeau. Two slices:


To save Canadian democracy, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau must first destroy it.


Since the start of the pandemic, Trudeau has acted like COVID entitled him to unlimited power in the name of public safety — sort of like Gov. Andrew Cuomo on amphetamines. Now he claims he is entitled to use an iron fist to crush the trucker protest movement against a vaccine mandate.


Many of the protesters believe the risks of the vaccine outweigh the benefit and, more important, that they have the right to control their own bodies. Trudeau responded by vilifying the peaceful protesters: “There is no place in our country for threats, violence or hatred.”


…..


Of course, Trudeau is not opposed to all protests: He recently boasted of his support for Black Lives Matter. Though he invoked martial law to respond to truckers honking horns, Trudeau had no problem with BLM protests that spun out of control into looting, arson and shootings. In Seattle, rioters allegedly sought to trap cops inside a police building they had set on fire; protesters also set up an “autonomous zone” that became the site of numerous murders. GoFundMe still allows you to donate to that group.


Trudeau claims that his crackdown on truckers is “about restoring confidence in our institutions.” But truckers have already gloriously succeeded in demonstrating the tyrannical nature of Trudeau’s regime. As Canadian columnist Andrew Lawton quipped Tuesday, “If you have to tell people you’re not trampling on their civil liberties, you’re trampling on their civil liberties.”


And here also on Canadian strongman Trudeau is the Editorial Board of the New York Post. A slice:


Fine: Send in law-enforcement — the Mounties, if need be — to clear out trucks snarling traffic. On Sunday, police told drivers on the Ambassador Bridge, a key link between Detroit and Canada, they’d be arrested and their vehicles subject to seizure if they refused to move. Many did, a few were arrested and the bridge soon reopened.


But freezing bank accounts? Blocking donations under an anti-terror law?


Trudeau had countless other options — starting with easing restrictions, now that the virus is petering out. (On Monday, Ontario premier Doug Ford announced that, with COVID waning, he’ll lift his requirement for people to show proof of vaccination to enter indoor spaces as of March 1.)


Yet the PM didn’t even try to talk with the protesters; he simply dismissed them as racists. And now he’s all-but-gone to DEFCON 1.


Trudeau, a Liberal, fancies himself a human-rights champion. Yet now rights groups are blasting him.


“The Emergencies Act can only be invoked when a situation ‘seriously threatens the ability of the Government of Canada to preserve the sovereignty, security and territorial integrity of Canada’ & when the situation ‘cannot be effectively dealt with under any other law of Canada,’” tweeted the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.


“Governments regularly deal with difficult situations, and do so using powers granted to them by democratically elected representatives. Emergency legislation should not be normalized. It threatens our democracy and our civil liberties,” the group added.


The just criticisms of strongman Trudeau keep pouring in, such as this one – in the Telegraph – from Eric Kaufmann. A slice:


Contrast his combative posture towards the truckers with his gentle approach to protesters who would seem to share his philosophy. When Left-wing arsonists burned some 30 Catholic churches over a false claim that mass graves had been discovered near a former residential school for indigenous Canadians, Trudeau called the violence “understandable”. When indigenous protesters and their allies blocked rail lines and pipelines over a longer period than the trucker convoy, Trudeau patiently called for “dialogue and mutual respect”.


These double standards are rooted in ideology. Cultural liberalism upholds freedom of speech, due process, equal treatment for all and the scientific method. Cultural socialism, which Trudeau promotes, believes that the speech and heritage of historically dominant groups must be restricted so as not to offend minorities.


Wokeness is Trudeau’s moral compass, and that of an important section of the 60 per cent of English Canadians who vote for Left-wing parties like Trudeau’s Liberals or Jagmeet Singh’s New Democratic Party (NDP).


I’m always happy to be a guest of Amy Jacobson and Dan Proft.

Eric Boehm is looking forward to the mid-term elections. A slice:


It takes a lot to make a libertarian look forward to the next election.


Like, say, two years of miserable government mandates ignored by some of the very people imposing them. Like watching over 70,000 maskless adults (and many celebrities) partying at a major sporting event in a city where children are required to wear medical-grade masks to school and keep them on while playing sports. Like imposing border controls on immigration and travel meant to stop the spread of COVID-19, and then keeping them in place (with no off-ramp) long after the virus is spreading here.


For once, we can be thankful that another election season is already upon us since politics is the last realm where the pandemic is dominating decision-making. The economy emerged from the omicron wave in better shape than expected. Sunday’s Super Bowl was the latest signal that lots of Americans are done with the health theatrics of the past two years. But even the political class’ commitment to COVID policy is wavering. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and President Joe Biden might be refusing to offer much hope that COVID-related mandates should be lifted soon, but they are increasingly being undone by rank-and-file Democrats who are looking at favorability ratings that are falling nearly as fast as COVID case counts.


Jeffrey Tucker asks: ‘Are they finally admitting natural immunity?’

Madeleine Kearns applauds Novak Djokovic’s principles. A slice:

The reporter then asked whether he would be willing to forgo the opportunity to be the greatest player that ever picked up a racket (statistically) for this belief. Whether he would sacrifice participation in the French Open and Wimbledon, for instance. “Yes,” Djokovic said. “Because the principles of decision making on my body are more important than any title.”

Jay Bhattacharya tweets:

One piece of advice for the @CDCDirector: never lie. Since there is evidence that covid recovery provides strong immunity and that the vax does not stop transmission, say so. Don’t support executive orders for vax mandates premised on lies.

Lou Saverio-Eastman celebrates Norway. A slice:


Now the Norwegian government has added a new reason to visit this region of the Scandinavian Peninsula. On February 12, 2022 Norway has completely opened their borders to all tourists and lifted all travel restrictions, face masking, social distancing, quarantining, and vaccination requirements throughout the country (with the exception of Svalbard.)


Could this be the beginning of a domino effect across the globe? One would certainly hope so.


Charles Oliver reports what has become an almost daily occurrence – namely, the unmasking of instances of Covidocratic hypocrisy.

Covidocratic tyranny continues in France.

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Published on February 16, 2022 03:23

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from pages 130-131 of Arthur Diamond, Jr.’s, superb 2019 book, Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism:

The norms of tolerance and individualism are based on all individuals possessing a core humanity that entitles them to be treated with respect and to be allowed to make free choices about their lives.

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Published on February 16, 2022 01:30

February 15, 2022

In Respectful Disagreement With Alex Salter

(Don Boudreaux)

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In my latest column for AIER, I respectfully disagree with GMU Econ alum Alex Salter’s case for U.S. commercial disengagement from China. A slice:


First: A US government that tomorrow will rashly wage war to protect commercial interests is a US government that today likely lacks the wisdom necessary to surgically sever, without unleashing significant unintended consequences, the economic ties that bind Americans to the Chinese. It’s difficult to understand why the same government that would wage war to prevent a harmful severing of productive commercial ties with foreign countries outside of China should be summoned to calmly engineer a severing of productive commercial ties with China – a severing that would also inflict significant economic harm on US households and businesses.


Second: How, exactly, could Beijing “use its power to build a commercial bloc that rewards vassal states and muscles out the US?” While he’s unclear, Alex doesn’t seem to have in mind any military takeover or oppression by China of these vassal states.


So short of military oppression, what might China do? One possibility is that Beijing will subsidize Chinese exports to these vassal states, thereby squeezing out some US exporters. But all such subsidies will simultaneously make China (and Beijing) poorer as they enrich the vassal states. As the vassal states grow richer, their denizens’ demands for US-made goods and services will grow, as will their ability to supply global markets – including the American – with their own exports of inputs as well as of consumer goods.


And the more Beijing subsidizes Chinese exports to vassal states, the richer these countries become at China’s expense.


Alternatively, or in addition, Beijing might subsidize purchases by Chinese households and businesses of imports from these vassal states. By causing the prices of these goods to rise, such subsidies will artificially raise Americans’ costs of importing some goods from these countries, thus obliging us Americans either to produce these goods ourselves or to import them from elsewhere. The consequences for us will certainly be costly, but they’re unlikely to be any more “devastating” than are the tariffs that we often impose on ourselves. Nor would these consequences be more devastating than those that we’d suffer now if the economic disengagement from China that Alex advocates is achieved.


Further, as with subsidized Chinese exports to vassal states, Beijing’s subsidized purchases of imports from vassal states will make China poorer as they enrich the vassal states. Vassal-state industries that artificially expand because of such subsidies might well increase their demands for American-made inputs. More generally, the additional resources that Beijing pumps into the vassal states in the form of these subsidies will, by enriching the denizens of the vassal states, enable them over time to increase both their imports from, and exports to, America.


In summary, nothing short of military oppression by China against the “vassal states” would artificially “muscle out” us Americans from trading extensively with these other countries.


Nothing is guaranteed. Easily imagined are scenarios in which prudent and far-sighted action by the US government today thwarts Beijing’s dastardly plans and, at reasonable cost, avoids a shooting war that would have otherwise erupted. But the language used to describe such scenarios usually hides more than it reveals. It’s easy to write a frightening phrase such as “If China achieves regional hegemony, it could use its power to build a commercial bloc that rewards vassal states and muscles out the US.” Much more difficult is the task of tracing out all the detailed actions and reactions that must occur in order for this fright to be justified.


Despite the gaudy pomp with which they surround themselves, Chinese rulers are just as economically ignorant, politically motivated, and error-prone as are American officials. Indeed, because Chinese society is more closed than ours and its government more autocratic, Beijing officials are likely even worse on these fronts than are American officials. President Xi and his henchmen have no miracle recipe for achieving the impossible – here, using centralized power to create wealth and to economically tie other countries to China in ways destined to harm Americans while simultaneously enriching the denizens of China and of these other countries. Taking due account of these realities preserves, I think, the presumption in favor of free trade.


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Published on February 15, 2022 09:46

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