Russell Roberts's Blog, page 176
February 11, 2022
Some Covid Links
Neil Oliver decries the Covidocracy’s calamitous attachment to Covid.
Gabrielle Bauer laments the sad reality that, for many people, freedom over the past two years has become a laughingstock. Three slices:
The memes kept coming: “Warning, cliff ahead: keep driving, freedom fighter.” “Personal freedom is the preoccupation of adult children.” And most recently: “Freedom is a two-way street—unless you’re blocking it with your truck.”
It’s astonishing, when you stop and think about it: freedom, for centuries an aspiration of democratic societies, has devolved to a laughingstock. It’s one of Covid-19’s most unfortunate victims.
…..
People have argued that “nobody has the freedom to infect others.” While reasonable at first blush, this statement doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. For one thing, no sane person seeks the “freedom to infect” any more than a vehicle driver seeks the freedom to slam into pedestrians. It’s a disingenuous allegation that warps a simple desire for personal agency into a malevolent impulse. Second, people have always infected each other. They’ve passed along colds, flus and other bugs, creating long ribbons of transmission that occasionally caused someone to die. Before Covid, we ascribed this to the victim’s frailty. We grieved the loss, but didn’t go hunting for a “killer” to blame. It’s only since Covid that viral transmission has mutated into a crime.
People have also said that “with freedom comes responsibility.” Sure, that’s fair. But even responsibility has limits. Society cannot function if each individual bears the full weight of other people’s health. Aaron Schorr, a Yale University student who had to take immune-suppressing medication in the summer of 2021, understood this when he wrote, in a January 2022 issue of Yale News: “I didn’t expect the government to structure its entire response around my personal well-being. Feeling unsafe? By all means take extra precautions, but 4,664 undergraduates should not be forced to adhere to the same standard.”
If we insist on curtailing basic freedoms until the world is scrubbed of all risk, we will curtail them forever. As we step into the endemic phase of Covid, we need to unpack the idea of “acceptable risk” in exchange for more liberty.
…..
Most of us in mainstream Western society have grown up with large doses of freedom. We understand the trade-off—more freedom, more risk—but wouldn’t have it any other way. Then along comes the pandemic, and public sentiment does an about-face. Safety becomes the all-consuming preoccupation and freedom gets branded as right-wing stupidity. Freedom to take a walk on the beach? Stop killing the vulnerable! Freedom to earn a living? The economy will recover! “Your right to get your hair streaked doesn’t trump my grandfather’s right to life,” shout the Twitterati, turning freedom into a caricature.
One of the most deplorable casualties of Covid culture has been freedom of expression, a core principle in the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Experts speaking publicly about the harms of lockdown have faced systematic ostracism from mainstream media, especially left-wing news outlets. Here’s Oxford University epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta, writing in the UK’s Daily Mail in October 2020: “I do have deeply held political ideals—ones that I would describe as inherently left-wing. I would not, it is fair to say, normally align myself with the Daily Mail.” But she had no choice: left-wing media wouldn’t give a lockdown critic the time of day.
Jay Bhattacharya shares, on Twitter, an excellent example of how Covidians are continuing their attempts to distort the narrative, hide truth, and fuel hysteria. (DBx: The typical Covidian is a 21st-century Torquemada – an enemy of truth, enlightenment, and civilization.)
it’s very simple:
if you allow dictatorial powers to be assumed upon the declaration of emergency you have, in effect, dictated that you will forever onward inhabit states of emergency.
this is too temping a prize to place before leviathan.
they will everywhere and always seek to assume and to retain that power.
and they will vilify and demonize any who try to take it back.
Maud Maron and Natalya Murakhver call on New York governor Kathy Hochul to unmask that state’s schoolchildren. Two slices:
We cannot mask our way to COVID zero, and we are harming our children by trying. (Anyone who wants to keep masking, can! )
We need to recognize that children are at exceptionally low risk from COVID. Any schoolchild who wants to be vaccinated can be, and parents should decide whether their child needs the additional protection — if any — afforded by a mask.
…..
Emergency-room visits for suspected suicide attempts among adolescents increased 31% in 2020 from the year before. In February and March 2021, visits for suspected suicide attempts for girls aged 12 to 17 rose 51% compared with the same period pre-pandemic.
School mask mandates create tension and division at a time children most need a sense of normalcy in their lives.
To the media, Florida was “reckless” in abandoning the rules. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman called the state the “poster child for red-state Covid disaster” and said that DeSantis was operating a “death cult.” But it turns out the vilified DeSantis made the right decisions. The lockdowns Newsom has desperately clung to appear to have been an exercise in pandemic theater: a recent meta-study from the Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise found that they “had little to no effect on COVID-19 mortality.” But they did impose “enormous economic and social costs where they have been adopted. In consequence, lockdown policies are ill-founded and should be rejected as a pandemic policy instrument.” These findings back up John Tierney’s analysis, published a year ago in City Journal, that lockdowns resulted in “more deaths from other causes, especially among the young and middle-aged, minorities, and the less affluent,” and were a “failed experiment” that “must end.”
Lockdowns — which the World Health Organization disavows except in very narrow, short-term circumstances and which are unsupported by science — have dragged on and on. Teachers unions kept schools closed month after month in blue states, and even children as young as 2 are being forced to mask despite no scientific support for doing so.
Indeed, masking has become a political statement, to the point that Democrats routinely report wearing masks outdoors simply to ensure they won’t be mistaken for Republicans.
Anyone who disagreed with this approach was accused of “spreading misinformation,” engaging in “conspiracy theories” and generally wanting everyone’s grandma to die.
Mandatory vaccination became an article of faith, even for those with natural immunity, which evidence suggests is at least as good as that produced by the vaccines. Many Democrats supported rules designed to punish the unvaccinated, to exclude them from restaurants, stores, schools — pretty much everywhere outside their own homes.
It was like a return to the Middle Ages, with the modern equivalent of shouts of “Leper! Outcast! Unclean!” aimed at the unvaxxed. And the definition of “fully vaccinated” kept changing to require more and more shots.
Through it all, the Freedom Convoy’s central theme has always been clear. Protesters were frustrated with the never-ending amount of government restrictions during Covid-19. They opposed mandatory vaccinations, wanted lockdown measures to be tossed aside and prayed that things would go back to normal.
These are the sort of basic human freedoms that classical liberal philosophers such as John Stuart Mill, John Locke and Adam Smith would have supported. Cherished concepts like limited government and individual rights and freedoms must always take priority in a liberal democratic society. Anything less than these basic human rights would have been classified as either totalitarian or tyrannical in nature.
Mr. Trudeau may be a Liberal by political persuasion, but he’s obviously not a classical liberal in his political philosophy. He’s what we might describe as a modern liberal, or someone who is rather Left-leaning, supportive of more government intervention – and, oftentimes, presenting himself as an opponent of freedom, liberty and democracy.
Interestingly, Covid-19 has turned modern liberals like Mr Trudeau and New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern into something slightly more sinister in nature, illiberal liberals. They’ve become quite authoritarian, more than happy to propose and pass layers and layers of government restrictions. This includes everything from extreme lockdown measures to the emergency relief funding for individuals and businesses that have shattered the global economy.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 500 of the 1988 collection of Lord Acton’s writings and notes to himself (edited by the late J. Rufus Fears), Essays in Religion, Politics, and Morality; specifically, it’s a note drawn from Acton’s extensive papers at Cambridge University:
Liberty has not only enemies which it conquers, but perfidious friends, who rob the fruits of its victories: Absolute democracy, socialism.
February 10, 2022
Some Non-Covid Links
GMU Econ alum Dan Sutter argues for liberalizing the market in transplantable human body organs.
John Stossel is correct: “China Brings Out the Hypocrisy in Corporate Social Justice Warriors.”
Eric Boehm reports that Trump’s trade deal with China failed. A slice:
Managed trade has failed once again.
The so-called “phase one” trade deal inked in December 2019 by former President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping might have put an end to the spiraling trade war between the two countries, but the agreement did not result in China buying more American goods, as both leaders promised it would. In fact, during the two years covered by the deal, China imported fewer American goods than before the trade war began—meaning that the deal did not even succeed at patching up the damage caused by Trump’s bellicose trade policies.
“After two years of escalating tariffs and rhetoric about economic decoupling, the deal did little to reduce the uncertainty discouraging the business investment needed to restart U.S. exports,” writes Chad Bown, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a pro-trade think tank.
For two years, Bown has been tracking the promises made by both countries in what Trump called the “phase one” deal—there never was a phase two—as it has become increasingly apparent that those goals would not be met. In his final analysis of the two-year agreement, which expired on December 31, Bown concludes that “China bought only 57 percent” of what it had promised, not even enough to reach pre-trade-war levels.
Michael Strain finds that – shocking! – Biden’s ‘stimulus’ contributed to inflation.
Juliette Sellgren talks about Social Security with Jason Fichtner.
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from Alexandra Marshall’s February 9th, 2022, Spectator-Australia essay titled “The greater good – or a grander evil?“:
When civilisation gives up on moral principle and decides to try out ‘moral outcomes’ it leads the government to view individuals as subservient to the collective.
Some Covid Links
In government, every serious mistake is, at bottom, a matter of disproportion. Furthermore, risk assessment is a basic test of rationality, as is weighing the trade-offs when responding to risks. For example:
Anthony S. Fauci, who rarely gives what would be the proper response to many questions he is asked (“That’s none of my business”), has said vaccination requirements for domestic airline passengers should not be imposed “right now” but should be “seriously” considered. Is he aware that burdening the exercise of what the Supreme Court terms a fundamental right of national citizenship — travel — is not a mere public health measure?
The sound you hear today is the clicking of progressivism’s ratchet: X (having a carbon footprint, taking a shower, eating cheeseburgers, whatever) “affects others,” so X should be regulated. When Fauci was asked whether we could ever return to unmasked air travel, he answered, “I don’t think so,” because even in a closed space with excellent air filtration, it is “prudent” to “go that extra step.” Click goes the ratchet.
The phrase “zero tolerance” (of a virus, or violence, or something) is favored by people who are allergic to making judgments and distinctions: i.e., thinking.
…..
Putting masks on 5-year-olds — teaching them that life is more hazardous than it really is, and to regard other human beings as vectors of disease, like biting insects — is not an optional arrow that public health officialdom should feel free to pluck from its quiver. Besides, the idea that health and longevity are values superior to all others is crude biological materialism. Jeffrey H. Anderson of the American Main Street Initiative, writing in the Claremont Review of Books, says doctors naturally “focus on the body in lieu of higher concerns.”
This, however, is transforming risk aversion into a supreme virtue. Anderson says an “impoverished understanding of human existence” is imbedded in the celebration of masking as social solidarity. For progressive celebrators, “the risk of stifling, enervating, or devitalizing human society is not even part of their calculation.”
For some public health obsessives, a virus serves the purpose that carbon serves for the most excitable environmentalists: It is an excuse for the minute supervision of life’s quotidian activities — progressivism’s constant impulse. Remember the jest: Progressives do not care what people do as long as it is mandatory.
There must, however, be limits to prophylactic measures against even clear and present dangers. Otherwise, public health officials will meet no resistance to the primal urge of all government agencies: the urge to maximize their missions.
The time has come for states and the federal government to end their Covid declarations of emergency and the accompanying closures, restrictions, propaganda, distancing requirements, forced masking and vaccine mandates. Covid may circulate at some level forever, but Americans can now protect those vulnerable to it with standard medical procedures. They can treat it as they would the flu. Emergency measures need continuous justification and there isn’t one anymore.
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Omicron is mild enough that most people, even many in high-risk categories, can adequately cope with the infection. Omicron infection is no more severe than seasonal flu, and generally less so. In America, many of those vulnerable to Covid are already vaccinated and protected against severe disease.
…..
There is no longer any justification for the federal government and states to maintain their declarations of emergency. The lockdowns, personnel firings, shortages and school disruptions are doing at least as much damage to the population’s health and welfare as the virus. The state of emergency is unjustified now, and it can’t be justified by fears of a hypothetical recurrence of a more severe infection at some unknown point in the future. If the government can grant itself such power, then the limits imposed by the federal and state Constitutions are effectively meaningless.
Americans have sacrificed their rights and livelihoods for two years to protect the general public health. Government officials must now do their part and give Americans their lives back.
The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board spells out key lessons of the Canadian truckers’ protest. A slice:
The truckers should be prosecuted if they break the law, as we argued for Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matters protesters on the left. But as the Omicron virus shows itself to be less lethal and positive test rates fall, the truckers are sending a message to democratic governments that it’s time for the pandemic emergency orders to end.
For two years the truckers were classified as “essential” workers and therefore exempt from vaccine mandates. An estimated 85% of them are vaccinated. Yet Liberal Party Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who heads a minority government, has chosen this moment to order that truckers be vaccinated if they want to cross back into the country from the U.S.
The Canadian left is sneering at the truckers and their supporters, suggesting they’re nothing more than right-wing Trumpians. Mr. Trudeau has smeared them as “a few people shouting and waving swastikas.” But the push-back against Covid-19 overreach has gone global. In January police fired water cannons at an estimated 50,000 European protesters in Brussels registering their exhaustion with restrictions and mandates. Since December protesters have gone to the streets elsewhere in Europe and in New Zealand and Australia.
That awareness extends to Northern Virginia, an area where support for COVID-19 mitigation measures has been especially strong. In a letter he sent to the superintendent of Fairfax County Public Schools on Monday, state Sen. J. Chapman Petersen (D–Fairfax), one of the legislators who supported the amendment approved yesterday, expresses his dismay at the district’s continued obeisance to the CDC.
“To the best of my knowledge,” Petersen writes, “no scientific basis has ever been offered for Forced Masking; rather parents are asked to assume that this policy ‘saves lives.’ After a year the data on student masking is easily found and it is overwhelming: the forced masking of school children has no correlation with community health.”
Petersen questions the school district’s argument that the mask mandate should be maintained because it is “popular” with parents. “By wearing a mask in a public setting,” he writes, “the wearer is able to communicate a political message, e.g. ‘I Care About Others’ or ‘I Voted for Biden’ or even ‘I’m Vaccinated.’ The ability to communicate a political message is the essence of our First Amendment, but coercing others into adopting that statement, especially a student in a public school, is the exact opposite.”
For two years, Petersen says, “we have seen the lives of our children disrupted and destroyed by a pandemic that posed little, or no, threat to them physically. Too many decisions involving children have been dictated by political expediency. As a parent, I’ve had enough.”
Gov. Kathy Hochul dropping the mask mandates for businesses makes her continued refusal to do the same for schoolchildren all the more outrageous.
Especially when she made a big deal of consulting with teacher unions and other groups the unions largely control before announcing she’s not budging.
The other blue-state govs who’ve had the common sense to announce expiration dates for school-mask mandates must not fear their teacher unions quite as much.
Nope: Hochul insists on making New York children suffer for no good reason. She hides behind Centers for Disease Control recommendations on school masking (which is also dictated by teacher unions via the Biden White House) but ignores the similar CDC cautions on adult masking.
She claims she needs more data, when all the data show kids are safe and masks make no appreciable difference.
Reason‘s Matt Welch calls Randi Weingarten “COVID’s most evil official.” Two slices:
There will very soon come a time in this miserably long pandemic where the only sizable group left wearing masks by order of the government will be the cohort threatened the least by COVID-19 — school-aged kids. And for this anti-science, anti-education, anti-childhood-development outrage we have one person above all to blame: American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten.
…..
Weingarten’s influence may be on the wane, but it’s still evident in two places that matter: big-city school districts (which may well continue masking even after the state mandates go away) and the CDC itself. Director Rochelle Walensky, who has been successfully bullied by Weingarten in the past, insisted yet again this week that “now is not the moment” to remove mask mandates on kids as young as 2.
K. Lloyd Billingsley is understandably unimpressed with ScienceMan Fauci.
Carla Sands tweets (HT Jay Bhattacharya):
Vaccine passports don’t belong in a free country.
Matthew Lynn, writing in the Telegraph, warns of the dangers of “long lockdown.” A slice:
The “bubble-isolation mentality”, in short, is very much still here. It has blended into an already egocentric “me culture” that insists that life should revolve around the individual employee and their personal needs, rather than the needs of the customer, the company or the public. It has been hijacked by overmighty HR departments, and resurgent trade unions, to engineer a permanent cut in working hours under the cover of “well-being”. And it has been used by oligopolistic corporations as a way of reducing services and fobbing customers off with wretched service with the catch-all “because of Covid” excuse.
Long Lockdown is taking an increasing toll on the economy. We have only just struggled back to our 2019 level of output, except with far higher inflation (5.4 per cent compared with 1.79 per cent), far higher levels of public debt (97 per cent of GDP against 85 per cent) and far higher levels of state spending (52 per cent of GDP compared with 38 per cent). We have lower productivity, declining standards of service, and poorer education. For as long as we remain in this semi-Lockdown purgatory, we cannot truly say that we have defeated the virus.
My surprise may surprise you by now, but as historians such as Niall Ferguson have noted, major epidemics had swept the country in 1918, 1957, and 1968 without evoking anything like the same anxieties; without producing anything like the same lockdowns, social distancing, or mask mandates; and without costing anything like the same amounts of public money. A survivor of the 1950s epidemic told Niall Ferguson, “We took the Asian flu in our stride.” (And without accusations of racism among epidemiologists either.) The Covid pandemic was taking us in its stride, concentrating all our anxieties on a single risk, persuading us that we could sensibly forget all other medical treatments, neglect all non-medical matters, and remain sedated and jobless at home.
Not everyone enjoyed that. Half the nation at the time wanted to take Covid-19 in its stride and get past it. My visit to Fort Worth introduced me to crowds of tourists, unmasked and forgetful of social distancing, roaming the old Stockyard district, eating, drinking, rubbernecking, and avidly reading its historical plaques that boasted of where “famous gamblers like Luke Short, Bat Masterson, and Wyatt Earp, and outlaws Sam Bass, Eugene Bunch, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are known to have stayed.” Not the usual civic boosterism, and a far cry from the deserted silent cities of the East Coast, New York and Washington, but oddly evocative of an earlier America that did not stay home and shrink from risks.
There were, as so often, two Americas: one embraced Covid as a lifestyle, the other resisted it as a lifestyle. But both were governed by forces that had a professional interest in painting the bleakest picture of what Covid might do: the media and public-health officials. Until the good news of the vaccines arrived, their joint power was largely employed to exaggerate risks and downplay benefits, feeding the public’s risk-aversion still further. America’s mainstream and social media then took a national mood of panic and shaped it along partisan lines so that Democratic politicians, like New York’s governor Andrew Cuomo, became prudent stewards of public health, while Republicans, like Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis, were depicted as little better than reckless mass murderers. In the pages of the very best newspapers, medical and economic disputes about how best to respond to the overall Covid crisis were forcibly merged with partisan divisions between red and blue states to produce an artificial ideological narrative: conservatives were the party of death, progressives of life — which didn’t seem to be reflected in the vacationing crowds of Fort Worth or the silent streets of Washington.
…..
Its last skirmishes have been over mask-wearing and mask mandates, and they illustrate the oddly deep attachment that sections of American society have developed to the symbols and methods of “the war on Covid.” Even now partisans of mandating masks are resisting the instructions of those mayors and governors who have decided, either from principle or electoral self-interest, that its time is up. Some visibly lust to bring masks back when Covid statistics get worse. Neither Democrats nor the media seem to have entirely abandoned their desire to mask America permanently. Yet as a method for combating Covid the mask is the one least justified by scientific evidence — as the distinguished statistician, Jeffrey H. Anderson, laid out persuasively in a recent issue of the Claremont Review of Books (from which I have drawn much of what follows). At the same time, the case for the mask is passionately asserted — and asserted on some grounds that ignore its possible usefulness against Covid transition.
…..
My own conclusion is tentative but gloomy: Mask wearing for reasons unconnected with protection against Covid is something of a paradox: the mark of an identity that seeks to conceal its individual self within a comforting collective anonymity. It shows hostility, even aggression, towards those who insist on revealing the face on the grounds that they are selfish, indifferent to others’ welfare, and proud. And it is self-righteously happy to impose its tastes on everyone else. In short, masks are emblematic, literally so, of the politicization of everything, including identity itself, that is the Left’s main instinctual drive today.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 125 of Thomas Sowell’s monumental 1980 volume, Knowledge and Decisions (original emphasis):
Property rights mean self-interested monitors. No owned creatures are in danger of extinction. No owned forests are in danger of being leveled. No one kills the goose that lays the golden eggs when it is his goose.
February 9, 2022
Beware the Mad Dogs of Antitrust
Other problems infect Lonsdale’s call for siccing the dogs of antitrust on Amazon, but this letter to the Wall Street Journal is already too long.
Editor:
Calling on antitrust authorities to separate Amazon’s web-service division (AWS) from Amazon’s other divisions (“The Case for Splitting Amazon in Two,” Feb. 8), Joe Lonsdale exhibits a flawed understanding of antitrust doctrine, of economics, and of economic history.
Mr. Lonsdale commits a subtle but telling error by claiming that the consumer-welfare standard “holds that certain anticompetitive behaviors may be permissible if they provide value to consumers.” In fact, the consumer-welfare standard holds that all practices that provide value to consumers, regardless of their impact on rival firms, are competitive. The great benefit of the consumer-welfare standard is precisely that it recognizes both that real-world competition takes many forms, and that the only appropriate standard under antitrust for judging the merits of any business practice is whether or not it promotes consumer welfare. If the practice does, it’s competitive and lawful.
So how are consumers faring? Quite well! That the low prices enjoyed today by Amazon’s customers perhaps result from Amazon’s shareholders spending some of their wealth to make these low prices possible is no antitrust offense.
Mr. Lonsdale will reply that these low prices become an offense if they are “predatory.” But assertions of predatory pricing are like assertions of sightings of Big Foot: Proof is never found. The profit motive is too powerful, entrepreneurs too creative, and markets too dynamic to make predatory pricing a viable monopolizing strategy in reality. History knows of no unambiguous instance of a private firm, operating in the market, that sold at allegedly predatory prices only to later gain monopoly power used to harm consumers for any length of time. History, however, does know of many instances of government officials and courts – especially before the consumer-welfare standard became dominant – mistakenly identifying competitive prices and practices as “predatory” and then using antitrust to deny to consumers the benefits of competition.
Antitrust doctrine, economic theory, and economic history combine to counsel strongly against unleashing on Amazon the dogs of antitrust.
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 Non-Covid Links
Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley asks why there aren’t more black coaches in the NFL. Three slices:
One reason is that teams don’t want to hire someone they can’t fire without being labeled racist.
…..
Not long after Barack Obama became president, he made an appearance on the “Late Show With David Letterman. ” It was September 2009, and the administration’s plans to overhaul the U.S. healthcare system had not been going over well in the polls. Some people, including former President Jimmy Carter, were insisting that criticism of Mr. Obama was racially motivated. Asked about it, Mr. Obama demurred. “It’s important to remember,” he said to Mr. Letterman, “that I was actually black before the election.”
Mr. Obama’s response was not only classy and amusing, but it was based on a certain logic that seems lost on those who are quick to reach for the race card. Last week, Brian Flores, who was recently fired as head coach of the Miami Dolphins, filed a lawsuit against the National Football League alleging that the league discriminates against black coaches. But Mr. Flores was also black when he was hired.
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We also shouldn’t ignore other plausible explanations for this racial imbalance that may have nothing to do with racial bias. Progressive icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg spent 27 years on the Supreme Court while hiring only one black law clerk. Was she guilty of discrimination, or was she simply choosing from a pool of candidates that, for whatever reason, included relatively few blacks?
Susan Love Brown asks what liberty has to say to black history. A slice:
Carter G. Woodson, who became the second African American to receive a Ph.D. (Harvard, 1912), was the son of former slaves and the father of Negro History Week, which eventually became Black History Month. He was unable to find a major university position after receiving his doctorate, and he and other Black historians were sometimes prohibited from attending sessions of the American History Association (AHA) when it met in the South (Hine 1986:406). Consequently, he founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLF), as well as a journal, The Journal of Negro History. Like Du Bois, Woodson was also a prolific writer and continually pressed for more research into Black history, which he felt had been neglected.
Both Du Bois and Woodson faced similar circumstances – that of being Black scholars who were themselves subject to the same struggles for equality as other African Americans, and who were at the same time trying to bring the history of those struggles into general knowledge. This alone often affected the way in which Black history was interpreted. In the 1960s, a fertile period following the civil rights movement, the reclaiming of that history and its instantiation in university courses, popular television shows, and books brought recognition of the roles African Americans had played in the U.S. military (the Buffalo soldiers and the Tuskegee Airmen), sports (the fact that Black jockeys were the early winners of the Kentucky Derby but later banned on the basis of race, and the existence of the Negro leagues in baseball), literature (the work of Phillis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, William Wells Brown, the slave narratives of Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs, and the Harlem Renaissance poets), and the arts (the Black Arts Movement), and music (for example, the creation of new American forms, such as jazz and the blues). The push for the recognition of achievement is the push for the recognition of a common humanity. The long list of “firsts” among African Americans speaks to progress being made and to past attempts to block achievements.
I asked the author and economist George Gilder about wealth creation. “Wealth is most essentially knowledge,” Mr. Gilder says. “Let’s face it, the caveman had access to all the materials we have today. Therefore, economic growth is learning, manifested in ‘learning curves’ of collapsing costs driven by markets.” Yet these learning curves get waved away by economists. Mr. Gilder says information, not materials, drives growth: “Crash a car and all its value disappears, though every molecule remains.”
Another paradox is the belief that entrepreneurs like Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg are driven by greed despite capitalism’s charitable characteristics. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, showing her misunderstanding of economics, said in 2020, “No one ever makes a billion dollars. You take a billion dollars.” Have you ever noticed that those who criticize capitalists the most are too lazy to be capitalists?
Mr. Gilder counters, “Capitalism is not chiefly an incentive system, where entrepreneurs act in rote response to rewards and punishments like in a Skinner Box. It’s an information system governed by the unveiling of surprising truths, innovation. If the creativity of entrepreneurs wasn’t a surprise, socialist planning would work.” Karl Marx didn’t—and Bernie Sanders doesn’t—understand productivity! Some recent surprising truths: mRNA, neural networks, Crispr, quantum computing.
Craig Eyermann details and decries the U.S. government’s growing indebtedness.
Scott Lincicome argues that the steel deal is getting continually worse. Here’s his opening paragraph:
Yesterday, the Biden administration announced an agreement with Japan to lift some of the U.S. “national security” tariffs on Japanese steel products that the Trump administration imposed in 2018 pursuant to Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962. As with a similar European deal announced last Fall (see our writeup here) and implemented in January, the U.S.-Japan deal has been lauded as “ending” Trump’s steel tariffs and “mending ties with a major ally,” but a closer examination reveals it to share many, if not more, of the EU agreement’s shortcomings and to continue President Trump’s misguided and ineffectual approach to tariffs, international trade law, and geopolitics.
My GMU Econ colleague Bryan Caplan thanks regulators for less than nothing.
Lenore Skenazy continues her important reporting on the Karen-like tyranny imposed on parents.
Those numbers are remarkable compared with past levels of investment, as the report says, but they are also remarkable compared with what politicians want to take credit for. President Biden likes to tout the $17 billion for ports in the bipartisan infrastructure law as helping supply chains. But remember, spending numbers from that legislation are totals over ten years, and there’s an arduous grant process through the Department of Transportation to apply for and get the money. Private investors, with no central direction, spent $7 billion more in three quarters of one year than the federal government will spend over the next ten.
The money from private investors will almost certainly be better spent as well. It doesn’t come with strings attached by the federal government that make the money virtually useless. The Freightos report highlights investments in software, e-commerce, and last-mile solutions that aren’t touched by government spending at all.
Government spending also suffers from focusing on things that already exist instead of spurring new technologies. Private investors, on the other hand, are creating new unicorns, or start-ups with valuations over $1 billion, all across the supply-chain space.
Russ Roberts talks with John Taylor about inflation, the Fed, and the Taylor Rule.
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