Russell Roberts's Blog, page 178
February 6, 2022
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 143 of my late, great colleague Walter Williams’s superb 1982 book, The State Against Blacks (footnote deleted):
Herein lies the power of the market. People can offset some of their handicaps by offering a higher price for what they buy or a lower price for what they sell. Many well-meaning people are morally outraged by such a necessity. But the fact of the business is that if handicapped people are not permitted to use price as a bargaining tool, they may very well end up with none of what they want as opposed to some [of what they want].
Some Non-Covid Links
George Will rightly criticizes “profligate Democrates and delusional Republicans.” Two slices:
There is an exception to the federal government’s general inability to accomplish anything briskly. It drove the national debt past $30 trillion this past week, which only two years ago it had not been expected to accomplish until 2026.
Defenders of the government’s fiscal performance say: Who could have predicted the pandemic? But that is the point — prudent people expect the unexpected and plan risk management accordingly. Instead, today’s deficit doves are doubling down on their hubris, asserting (in the skeptical words of the Manhattan Institute’s Brian Riedl) “that this time they can predict interest rates decades in advance.” The average interest rate on government borrowing has fallen from 8.4 percent to 1.4 percent since 1990, a decline economists did not forecast but which many now forecast far into the future.
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This past week, as Washington passed the $30 trillion mark, Washington’s National Football League team, formerly the Redskins, renamed itself . It disregarded this column’s suggestion that the team should be called the Continuing Resolutions. This would have proudly embraced the durable bipartisanship that — never mind the surface rancor — defines today’s national government: a bipartisan aversion to budgeting and a plucky refusal to be inhibited by any scarcity of revenues relative to political appetites.
(DBx: I still prefer, as a name for the former Redskins, the one suggested by David Hart: Predators. That name, even more than Continuing Resolutions, conveys the essence of Washington. A second-best name is, alas, already taken by Las Vegas’s NFL franchise. And of course the name of my favorite NFL team would be wholly inappropriate for the DC team.)
Also decrying the U.S. government’s appalling fiscal incontinence is Peter Earle. A slice:
Instead of engaging in unsubstantiated forecasting or policy attitudinizing, a more productive and considered approach would focus on social science, historical precedent, and moral principle. It is precisely because we do not and cannot know where and when national debt levels are “too” high, or what will happen to global interest rates as the slug of US debt lumbers higher, or what the next congressional spending whim will embrace that we should look to the very public record of disastrous fiscal (and monetary) extravagance. We know that rising indebtedness brings colossal opportunity costs, which in turn affect every American citizen and our national security. And clearly, in a world of unlimited desires amid scarce resources, political decisions to trade the future for the present tempts further, possibly more withering assaults upon the already decremented soundness of the US dollar to meet rising obligations.
Still, to those unwilling to learn from history, such controls will always seem sensible. Inflation amounts to rising prices, they say, so locking in prices is a supposed easy fix.
But treating inflation this way is like masking a symptom rather than curing the illness. Inflation can no more be controlled by fixing prices than your body weight can be controlled by programming your bathroom scale not to display pounds above some maximum number.
And just like masking your weight will not improve your diet, the misinformation conveyed by price controls will worsen the economy. Most of the time, prices are not simply set by an all-powerful seller; they’re a measurement of what consumers and sellers agree a product is worth. They tell entrepreneurs and businesses how to move resources from activities consumers want less of to those consumers value more.
David Henderson calls on everyone to wake up and smell the CAFE.
Juliette Sellgren talks with Jonathan Rauch about “the constitution of knowledge.”
Tim Worstall flags an egregiously misleading – no, false – headline.
Ben Zycher isn’t impressed with a recent analysis of policy by Arnold Schwarzenneger.
Some Covid Links
Did you oppose the Iraq war? Good for you. It seems bizarre, 19 years on, that anyone ever thought it a good idea to spend a trillion pounds, kill hundreds of thousands of civilians and turn millions more into refugees, only to end up destroying Western prestige and creating more extremists in the region than before.
I have to ask though – forgive my being so blunt – whether you are quite sure that you were against it at the time. You see, according to YouGov, 66 per cent of us backed the invasion when it was launched. Then the disasters began – the civilian casualties, the Abu Ghraib abuses, the rise of Islamic State – and people started to edit their memories. Asked the same question by the same pollster in 2015, only 37 per cent admitted to having backed military action in 2003.
Something similar, I have no doubt, will happen over the lockdowns. As the dreadful health and economic costs bite, few will recall having supported the closures. Just as most Frenchmen over a certain age remember backing the Resistance, so most Brits will remember being lockdown sceptics. Psychologists call it “hindsight bias”.
We are not there yet. Many cling, with a tinge of desperation, to the notion that their sacrifices were worthwhile. Admitting that the cancelled weddings, the ruined businesses, the lost education, the NHS waiting lists and the national debt were incurred in error, that we narrowed our children’s lives for nothing, is not easy.
Still, the evidence keeps piling up. A meta-study of 24 surveys, reported in Wednesday’s Telegraph, found that imposing a compulsory lockdown, as opposed to trusting people to use their common sense, reduced the mortality rate by just 0.2 per cent. Think about that. Around 52,000 lives were lost in Britain in the first wave. If these figures are correct – and the researchers from Johns Hopkins and Lund universities have done a thorough job with a huge dataset – then the most extreme curtailment of freedom in modern times saved perhaps 100 lives.
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Back in that sun-drenched, terrified, illiberal spring [of 2020], no dissent was permitted. Even to point out that an alternative approach was possible – and visible in Sweden – was to court vilification. When Toby Young wrote that we habitually did put a value on human life via the recognised formula for calculating quality-adjusted life-years, that we used it whenever medical interventions were proposed, and that we should apply the same test to lockdowns, he became a national hate figure, howled down as some sort of eugenicist.
The odium was overwhelmingly one-way. Lockdown sceptics did not respond by accusing their opponents of aiming to destroy children’s education, or of being indifferent to mental illness, or of wanting others to die of cancer. Nor did they accuse them of being “anti-science”.
Yet it soon became clear that the science on which the lockdowns were predicated was incorrect. Supporters of the closures had predicted a catastrophe in Sweden. By imposing only mild restrictions, the authorities had, according to most international observers, condemned their people to mass fatalities.
In fact, cases peaked and declined in Sweden more or less in line with everywhere else. In other words, the original justification for the lockdowns had been falsified as early as April 2020. But by then people were invested in their sense of sacrifice. The closures were maintained, but the justification kept having to be amended. “Flatten the curve” became “wait for a vaccine”. When the vaccine arrived, it became “keep the pressure off the NHS”, then “stop new variants”.
GMU Econ alum Byron Carson offers some Hayekian lessons for public health.
Bret Swanson explains “how a war on ‘misinformation’ led to a coronavirus tragedy.” Four slices:
Spectacular falsehoods, deep truths, and Canadian truckers are finally piercing the long-impervious Covid storyline.
When a justice of the Supreme Court on January 7 asserted that 100,000 children were hospitalized with Covid-19 “in serious condition, and many on ventilators,” it reflected the ill-informed panic that’s driven policy the last two years. In fact, CDC data showed just around 3,200 children were hospitalized while Covid-positive, few were in serious condition, and almost none were on ventilators.
The episode was just the latest false droplet in a flood of erroneous Covid-speak. We’ve known since near the beginning that young people are not at serious risk; lockdowns don’t halt the spread and do far more harm than good; and an array of cheap, safe, long-approved generic drugs often stop the virus dead in its tracks when taken early. Yet each of these central facts was suppressed by a sprawling array of old and new media, digital platforms, captured medical journals, non-profit scolds, and public health spokespeople claiming omniscience.
It turns out Canadian truckers listening to Joe Rogan know more than many “experts.” Had the truckers been in charge the last two years, the world would probably be healthier, and freer.
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The total bamboozlement of the nation’s policymakers, journalists, and, sadly, too many health professionals, reveals something far more systematically askew. The war on misinformation has achieved the exact opposite of its stated goal. Clamping down on unapproved outside voices has exacerbated groupthink, concentrated risk, and amplified mistakes to epic proportion.
Nowhere has the insulation from reality been more hermetically complete, and more devastating, than the non-discussion over vaccines. On Twitter last week, a smart, thoughtful economist showed just how behind the curve much of the intelligentsia is. Stanford’s Jay Battacharya had been arguing against vaccine mandates and travel requirements because “the covid vaccine does not stop disease spread.” “I don’t follow your logic,” the economist replied. “If the vaccine keeps us from getting infected, why wouldn’t it reduce spread, too? The CDC disagrees with you: ‘COVID 19-vaccines are effective and can lower your risk of getting and spreading the virus that causes COVID-19.’” This was January 22, at least seven months after we realized – first in Israel, then the UK, then everywhere – the extremely short durability of the vaccines, especially against infection.
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Even enthusiastic vaccine backers now acknowledge the substantial risk of myocarditis, especially though not exclusively among young men (see Chua, et al.; Patone, et al.; and Sharff, et al.). Heart inflammation, which often leads to longterm heart failure, however, is just the tip of the vaccine injury iceberg. We now know the Spike protein, which the vaccines instruct our cells to produce in variable and unknown but often large quantities, is toxic. And that it doesn’t stay in our shoulders but may travel and express in organs around the body. Here is a non-exhaustive list of hundreds of scientific papers explaining the pathophysiology, and case-studies documenting specific instances, of a wide array of Covid-19 vaccine injuries – cardiovascular, neurologic, autoimmune, reproductive, oncologic.
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Now, instead of apologizing for its early lockdown advocacy, Johns Hopkins’ Center for Health Security is doubling down, launching a new “Environment of Misinformation” project. NewsGuard just signed a big contract with the American Federation of Teachers to ensure our schools only access approved “news.”
The war on misinformation is a conceit. The illiberal fantasy class, which happens to be in charge, is crippling America as an idea and a nation. It is frustrating pluralistic entrepreneurship, speech, and discovery worldwide.
University of Calgary professor Jaana Woiceshyn explains the importance of freedom. A slice:
While it is true that we can survive physically (if spared serious disease) even when locked up in our homes and barred from working, such incarceration is not living a life. Living a life consists of pursuing and achieving values: productive work; health; meaningful relationships; wealth and all the material values it affords, from food and shelter to tools and technologies that make life more enjoyable; and art and recreation.
The end is not nigh for China’s zero-Covid experiment, however much some hope for a change after next autumn’s party congress. Australia is the nearest parallel, having shifted from zero Covid to “living with” the virus. Australia has a political system that allows for regime change; its voters can select scapegoats for the surging cases and deaths now challenging its health care system. The Communist Party has no such mechanism. Disease surveillance is rapidly mutating into dissent surveillance. China’s economy, which helped keep the world supplied with manufactured goods during its Covid fight, is now becoming a drag on the global recovery because of domestic lockdowns. Look for China’s propaganda to become even more militant in trying to portray Covid as a foreign conspiracy.
Robert Higgs will not be surprised by this report in the New York Post:
There’s good news, and then there’s great news: COVID cases are down more than 90% from the first week of January. Hospitalization rates are down, too. The trendlines are all excellent, with New York state’s overall test positivity rate down to 4.4% from its recent high of 23%.
Omicron is plainly on the way out, as fast as we said it would go. [New York] Gov. Kathy Hochul agrees: “Just like the snow is melting,” she said Tuesday, “hopefully these numbers will continue to melt away.”
Will the increased restrictions she and Mayor Eric Adams put in place also melt away? Omicron prompted or accelerated policy shifts on the way “up the curve” — the mask-or-vax mandate, for example, from Hochul, and then-Mayor Bill de Blasio’s private-sector-employee vaccine mandate. It has not yet prompted a similar rethink on the way down.
City and state policy on COVID has been, mostly, a one-way ratchet.
The Telegraph‘s Science Editor Sarah Knapton reports on a new paper by ‘scientists’ in Britain – a paper in which the authors reveal, with their policy recommendation, their Covidocratic authoritarianism. A slice from Knapton’s report:
Vaccine passports will do little to stop coronavirus transmission at festivals, but should still be considered anyway to increase uptake in young people, scientists advising the Government have said.
A newly released paper by the Environmental Modelling Group (EMG) shows that researchers admit that vaccine passes have a “limited impact” on the spread of the virus because even vaccinated people can have breakthrough infections, and immunity wanes over time.
However, they argue that they could be used as a “policy lever” to improve the number of young people being vaccinated.
Noah Rothman criticizes Progressives’ good-news hesitancy. (DBx: This affliction is much worse and more inexplicable than vaccine hesitancy.)
The risk to healthy children of severe disease from covid infection is small. It is unethical for public health to obscure this fact, to scare parents, with an aim of manipulating their decisions. Informed consent requires telling the truth.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 23 of Bruce Caldwell’s excellent Introduction to the 2007 Definitive Edition (Bruce Caldwell, ed.) of F.A. Hayek’s classic 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom:
As Hayek frequently repeated, many intelligent and informed people of his day had been taken in by the claim that National Socialism was the next logical and historical phase of a collapsing capitalism. His point, one that most would accept today as evident, was that fascism and communism both represent totalitarian systems that have much more in common with each other than either does with the sorts of governments and economic systems that exist under liberal free market democracies. The Nazis demonized and persecuted the communists, to be sure, but it was not because they themselves were capitalists.
DBx: Fascism, communism, and socialism (whether “National,” “democratic,” “market,” “Fabian,” or whatever) are all isms the adherents of which demand the use of the state’s coercive power to engineer economic outcomes. Adherents of each of these isms either deny the existence of, or reject the results of, the free-market’s spontaneous-ordering forces.
There is much disagreement among adherents of these isms as to which particular outcomes the state should strive to engineer into existence, and also disagreement about the specific ‘tools’ the state should use to carry out its engineering. But all of these disagreements pale beside the fundamental disagreement that separates all adherents of these isms from advocates of a liberal market order. Only the latter believe that the operation and ever-evolving ‘results’ of the liberal market order are fair as well as superior – ethically and economically – to the operation and ‘results’ of any of these isms.
February 5, 2022
Some Covid Links
So, the blame game is in full swing. At a recent Senate hearing, Dr. Anthony Fauci did not even attempt to defend his policies. Instead, he insisted that: “Everything that I have said has been in support of the CDC guidelines.”
Dr. Fauci, as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), has worked closely with the two CDC directors, Drs. Robert Redfield and Rochelle Walensky, throughout the pandemic, but he is now laying the responsibility on them. He did the same with his former boss, shortly after Dr. Francis Collins resigned as director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Dr. Collins fiercely defended Fauci throughout the pandemic. In October 2020, the Great Barrington Declaration criticized Fauci’s lockdown strategy, calling for focused protection of high-risk older people while letting children go to school and young adults live near-normal lives. A few days later, Collins—a geneticist with little public health experience—wrote an email to Fauci suggesting a “take down” of the declaration, and characterizing its Harvard, Oxford and Stanford authors as “fringe epidemiologists.” Fauci agreed with his boss, but when asked about the incident at the recent Senate hearing, he responded that it “was an email from Dr. Collins to me.” In other words, Fauci himself was just following orders.
As public health scientists and coauthors of the Great Barrington Declaration, we have been critical of the pandemic strategy championed by Drs. Collins, Redfield and Walensky. As human beings, we can only feel sympathy for the trio as Dr. Fauci seeks to deflect blame onto them. At the Senate hearing, Dr. Fauci did not engage in a substantive public health discussion to defend the pandemic strategy—as one might have expected from its principal architect and salesman. Understandably, politicians, journalists, academics and the public trusted Dr. Fauci. Why should they now shoulder the blame?
Hyperlinks are often forced to do much of the argumentative work in Vermeule’s polemics. In this instance, Vermeule, naturally, cited himself: an Atlantic essay published in March 2020, before there were even vaccines to mandate. In this essay, which purported to explain a “common-good originalism” ostensibly superior to its counterpart that has “outlived its utility,” Vermeule vaunted “a powerful presidency ruling over a powerful bureaucracy, the latter acting through principles of administrative law’s inner morality with a view to promoting solidarity and subsidiarity.”
(DBx: Vermeule’s language – e.g., “administrative law’s inner morality” (!!) – should frighten the bejeezus out of anyone possessing even a modicum of common sense.)
There’s a lesson here, though it’s not just about the ineffectiveness of the most intrusive efforts to address the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s a caution that any benefits the political class promises in return for disrupting our lives may be illusory. We’ll have to fight to regain our liberty and prosperity, and we may never fully regain what we had.
Wall Street Journal columnist James Freeman:
The scientific case for masking children has collapsed. It’s time for the people entrusted with their education to put down the legal weapons and allow what’s left of a normal childhood to resume.
Jeffrey Tucker applauds the power of protests. A slice:
All in less than one week, Israel has repealed restrictions and is backing off vaccine mandates, even as cases and deaths are hitting new highs, and implausibly so in the most vaccinated and boosted country in the world. The UK has backed off too. Same in Denmark, Ireland, Finland, and Norway. Switzerland has joined in, and Sweden has rolled back its plans for an extended vaccine passport in has decided to get rid of them completely. Saskatchewan is ending all restrictions.
We are seeing local governments and universities in the US gradually stepping back. No new cities have joined the brigade for vaccine passports and Denver, CO, is stopping theirs. Poor suffering New York City, assaulted by a new segregation mandate, is reeling from the mandates, and surely a rethinking is coming. How many states now wish they had taken the path of Florida, which is experiencing a remarkable economic boom?
Monmouth University tracks attitudes in the US toward government and media as it pertains to the pandemic response. At this point, every arrow over time slants down to the right. The number of people opposing vaccine passports outnumbers those supporting them by 10 points. A polled 70% say it is time we accept Covid as normal.
It’s beginning to feel like a long-overdue crumbling.
It is surely not a coincidence that all of this accelerated the same week as the trucker convoy formed in Vancouver and made the trek across the entire US/Canada border, in the snow, ending up in Ottawa and gathering many tens of thousands of citizens to protest. The Prime Minister fled the city and went to his bunker, making what looked like hostage videos that denounced the truckers with all the usual epithets.
What’s even more striking is that the media in the US and Europe did not cover the convoy, probably the largest in history and certainly the most important protest in modern times in Canada. The topic never ended up on the front page of either the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. And yet: the effect was hugely powerful. Public opinion in Canada swung 15% to create a solid majority against all restrictions and mandates.
Absolutely amazing.
And other governments around the world are paying attention. There is fear in the air. They are backing down, more already in Europe than the US. But even in US blue states, you can see evidence that the basis for restrictions and mandates is falling apart.
Scott Shackford reports on an effort to repeal Los Angeles’s vaccine mandate. A slice:
“We just think the vaccination mandate is a gross violation of our constitutional rights and our bodily autonomy,” Angela McArdle, chair of the Libertarian Party of Los Angeles County, tells Reason. She says she has heard support for the petition across the political spectrum. Some don’t want to be vaccinated or have had bad medical reactions to vaccinations. Others are voluntarily vaccinated but oppose the city forcing mandates and vaccination checks on citizens and businesses.
L.A. residents have been living under heavy COVID restrictions throughout the pandemic. Indoor masking mandates were lifted briefly in the summer of 2021, only to be restored when the delta variant caused infection rates to spike in the fall. They currently remain in place. The county announced Thursday that masking rules might be eased soon if infection numbers continue to drop.
At the time the city instituted the vaccination mandates, nearly 70 percent of L.A.County residents had been fully vaccinated. L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti said when he was supporting the vaccination mandate that the ordinance would encourage more people to get their shots in order to comply.
David McGrogan asks: “Should we welcome the Johnny-come-latelies to the sceptical fold?” A slice:
At the end of March 2020, I saw an opinion poll result (I wish I could remember where) which indicated 93% of population of the U.K. were in favour of the lockdown that had just been introduced.
I was in the other 7%. In future years, I’ll have to find some way to convey to my kids the nature of that feeling – the strange combination of befuddlement and disappointment that results from watching everybody you know not only going completely mad, but convincing themselves they are being virtuous in doing so. It was like being a lemming, watching its thousands of brethren suddenly getting together and flinging themselves off the nearest cliff into the broiling sea as though it was the most natural and sensible thing to do in all the world. I just couldn’t fathom that anybody might think this bizarre experiment would work – and yet it seemed everybody did. In retrospect, of course, the very unanimity and certainty with which people approached lockdown was itself indicative that something very strange was going on in those heady days of spring 2020. What complex public policy decision in a liberal democracy ever achieves 93% approval in an opinion poll? The truth is, this had nothing to do with reasoned ‘opinion’. It was mass panic.
Thankfully, the national mood is now very different. I don’t believe that things have swung, or ever will swing, to near unanimity against lockdown. But it is now ever more common to encounter the sentiment, ‘Never again.’ People who were zealously in favour of Lockdown 1, Lockdown 2, and Lockdown 3 are now repenting in their droves. The question for us hardened sceptics – the Spartans, the Immortals, the Originals, the Old Guard – is what to do with these prodigal sons and daughters. Do we welcome them with open arms, fatted calf at the ready? Or do we churlishly dismiss them from our doors as accomplices in what will inevitably come to be seen as one of the worst public policy mistakes in history?
The truth of the matter is, we have to think strategically. There must never be another lockdown, in any circumstance. The consequences for our society, our children, our communities, would be too severe. This foolish, inhumane policy must forever be consigned to oblivion. And in order to ensure that it is, we need as broad a coalition of the public as possible. At the time of the first lockdown, I remember thinking that all political differences – left and right, Labour and Conservative, Leave and Remain – were completely irrelevant when set against the division between pro- and anti-lockdown. If you were against lockdowns, you were one of the good guys, whether you were Giorgio Agamben or James Delingpole. And this mode of thinking, I believe, still has to apply, and apply in perpetuity. Whatever one’s background, and whatever one thought in 2020-21, if you would be against the reintroduction of Covid restrictions in the future, you are in the right tent. You can be in the gang and you can sit at the table. We need you.
This will require some gritting of teeth, no doubt. If you, like me, were always against lockdowns, it is galling to say the least to now be told things (“Not all Covid deaths are deaths ‘from’ Covid”, “Not everybody who is hospitalised ‘with’ Covid is being primarily treated for Covid”, etc.) that one has known about since March 2020. It is profoundly irritating to be told “We just have to live with it now” when all you ever wanted was for that to be the case.
Here’s the latest from Sebastian Rushworth. A slice:
The Swedish government has decided to end all covid related restrictions from the 9th of February. Additionally, venues and events will no longer be able to demand proof of vaccination. To top it off, the public health agency is recommending that covid no longer officially be classed as a “threat to public health”. Sweden is the third Nordic country to end covid restrictions, following on the heels of Denmark and Norway.
The decision represents an acceptance of the fact that covid has gone from being a pandemic to an endemic disease. The public health agency estimates that 500,000 Swedes were infected with covid-19 last week (which is twice the number of confirmed cases). At the same time, only 181 people died of/with the disease (possibly more “with” than “of”). That puts the present lethality of covid in the same ballpark as the common cold. As many people have long predicted, covid-19 has become the fifth “common cold” coronavirus disease.
Stefanos Kales, a professor at the Harvard Medical School, says that it’s time to move on from the pandemic. (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
In response to White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki simultaneously blame U.S. lockdowns on Trump while she denies that Biden was ever pro-lockdown, Martin Kulldorff tweets:
Those of us who opposed school closures and other lockdowns in 2020 were falsely accused of being Trumpian. Good that nobody wants to own those policies anymore. Fascinating to watch lockdowners blame each other.
Quotation of the Day…
Free markets and the profit motive, far from being enemies to blacks have been friends. The reason is quite simple: Customers prefer lower prices to higher prices, and businessmen prefer higher profits to lower profits. The most effective tools for a seller to gain a customer are to offer a lower price and better services than his competitor. Similarly, the most effective tool for a worker to get an employer to hire him is to offer to accept a lower wage (with wages being a form of pricing). Many employers will find higher profits a more attractive alternative to indulging personal preferences or maintaining racial loyalty.
DBx: Indeed so.
In-depth evidence of the truth of Walter’s claim is found throughout much of Walter’s own work, in the work of Thomas Sowell, and in a good deal of the work of Robert Higgs, especially Higgs’s brilliant 1977 book, Competition and Coercion: Blacks in the American Economy, 1865-1914.
And the following point cannot be emphasized too often: Minimum-wage legislation is the ideal tool for racists. Such legislation effectively declares illegal the single most effective means available to low-skilled or disfavored workers to compete for jobs, while allowing racist supporters of the legislation to camouflage their vile intentions as good.
When 2002 Nobel-laureate Vernon Smith was still on George Mason University’s economics faculty, I would ask my students if they think I, out of pure self-interest, would support minimum-economist-pay legislation – specifically, legislation that would require all employers of economists to pay economists at least what is paid to Nobel laureates in economics. I’d ask my students this question before covering the topic of minimum wages. More than half of my students would raise their hand to express their belief that my self-interest would lead me to support such legislation.
After covering minimum-wage legislation, all – or nearly all – of my students understood why, out of pure self-interest, I would oppose such legislation: Such legislation would price me out of any job as an economist. Nobel-laureate economists, of course, would not only keep their jobs, they would get higher pay because most of their competitors would be prevented by legislation from competing with them.
February 4, 2022
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 242 of the late, great UCLA economists Armen A. Alchian’s and William R. Allen’s Universal Economics (2018; Jerry L. Jordan, ed.); this volume is an updated version of Alchian’s and Allen’s magnificent and pioneering earlier textbook, University Economics:
Competition in the market is competition to create goods worth more than the costs.
DBx: Yep.
It’s important here to understand also a point famously and brilliantly made by Joseph Schumpeter: In modern market economies, the most productive form of competition is not that which drives existing competitors simply to keep their output prices as low as possible. Such competition – which still looms overly large in most economics textbooks – is in reality indeed real and not unimportant. But such competition cannot explain modernity’s enormous riches; it is not the essence of capitalism.
Modernity’s enormous riches are the result of innovations competitively tested in markets. Innovations include, of course, new goods and services for final consumers. Innovations, however, also include ‘non-price’ means of competition such as new structures of business management, new means of output distribution, new means of acquiring inputs, new contractual arrangements to share risks, and new ways of marketing. Every successful such innovation will, for a time, yield profits higher than ‘normal.’ And the higher above ‘normal’ are such profits, the greater is the contribution that the innovation makes to humanity.
These innovations are creative, and by the nature of any creative act, it and many of its manifestations will be unfamiliar. It is, therefore, folly to entrust government officials, judges, and juries with power under antitrust legislation to sit in judgment of the merits of these innovations. All innovations that are peaceful and that violate no one’s conventional property rights should be permitted. As long as consumers – and input suppliers – are free to patronize these innovations as they choose with their own money and efforts, the market process over time will weed out commercial and industrial practices that harm consumers and direct resources to those practices that improve consumer well-being.
There is no need whatsoever for any antitrust legislation or regulation.
Peacefully Protesting Covid Hysteria
These high-school students in Washington State deserve loud applause. (HT David Henderson)
Some Covid Links
L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti is the latest California politician to hammer home the point that the state’s pandemic rules are just for the little people. What Gov. Gavin Newsom started, and San Francisco Mayor London Breed continued, Garcetti has perfected. He even developed the ideal face-saving line: When a photo surfaced Wednesday of Garcetti, maskless, with Lakers legend Magic Johnson at a Rams game, the mayor reassured concerned citizens that he held his breath to take the photo. (Los Angeles County has a mask mandate in place both indoors and at crowded outdoor events. SoFi Stadium also requires event attendees to wear masks when not actively imbibing.)
Garcetti’s comically absurd response betrays either a misunderstanding of how COVID is spread or the extent to which the rules he’s imposed, but doesn’t feel the need to follow, are largely hygiene theater.
Also writing on Mayor Garcetti’s hypocrisy is Douglas Murray. A slice:
As it happens I was in Los Angeles last weekend, taking an elderly friend out for dinner. As we threatened to walk the few feet between the reception desk and our table the staff intervened to insist that we mask up for the journey. So we eventually got masks, donned them, walked the short distance to the table and took them off. Had I only known what the mayor knows we could have just promised to hold our breath between the desk and the table. Or I could have waved a mask in front of me to ward off the evil COVID spirits.
But it’s not just the hypocrisy that grates. In California, like New York, it’s the senselessness of it all.
All the evidence shows that cloth masks do nothing to ward off the virus. Yet our officials seem wedded to their outdated narrative. We have now had two years of them telling us to mask, double-mask, triple-mask. And most of the time the people telling us to do this clearly knew that it was making little or no difference. If it did make a difference then all these officials would not keep being caught maskless. They know it is a charade, as do most of the public.
Which would be bad enough, were it not for the people most affected. Which is this nation’s children. In California, as in New York, school children are still mandated to wear masks at school in lessons and even during physical exercise. The superintendent of one small district has promised that if COVID cases keep falling then later this week children might be allowed to do physical exercise outside without their masks on. And this is regarded as some great liberation.
Arnold Kling rightly criticizes “public health midwits.” A slice:
The institutions that have committed the worst offenses against rationality in their COVID policy have been colleges and public schools. We should not be surprised by this, given that Midwits dominate the administrations of these institutions.
Public health officials, college administrators, and teachers’ union leaders are not experts within their narrow field. They are Midwits who exercised way more power than usual the past two years. We should have dismissed them as impostors then, and we need to do so now.
Also applauding the Canadians who are protesting Covidocratic tyranny is Glenn Reynolds. Two slices:
So we’re finally seeing a genuine, bottom-up, working-class revolution. In Canada, and increasingly in the United States, truckers and others are refusing to follow government orders, telling the powerful that, in a popular lefty formulation, if there’s no justice, there’s no peace.
Naturally, the left hates it.
For more than a century, lefties have talked about such a revolt. But if you really paid attention, the actual role of the working class in their working-class revolution was not to call the shots — it was to do what it was told by the “intellectual vanguard” of the left.
A working-class revolution led by the working class is the left’s worst nightmare because the working class doesn’t want what the left wants. The working class wants jobs, a stable economy, safe streets, low inflation, schools that teach things and a conservative, non-adventurous foreign policy that won’t get a lot of working-class people killed. It’s not excited about gender fluidity, critical race theory, “modern monetary theory,” foreign adventures and defunding police.
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Now that truckers and other working-class people are pushing back against the laptop class’ nonsensical COVID restrictions, they’re a fringe, a minority, a bunch of white supremacists.
But they’re none of these things.
The “white supremacist” bit we can write right off. If white supremacy were a serious thing, leftists — like hate-crime hoaxer Jussie Smollett — wouldn’t have to invent it.
As for a “fringe minority,” as Trudeau called them, well, as Elon Musk noted in a tweet, if the Canadian government’s positions had substantial support, the truckers would have faced significant numbers of counterprotesters. But they did not. The government itself is the fringe minority, with its only support coming from the loyal sycophants of the media.
In Canada, people have by and large accepted the most recent regulations and mandates willingly — even enthusiastically. On the left — Trudeau’s base — there has been an audible public clamouring for more and stricter rules. I personally know of several small business owners who have enacted their own vaccine mandate programmes without being legally required to do so, and I also have a number of good friends who have kept their children out of school voluntarily post-lockdown because they are frightened for their kids’ safety, in spite of the fact their kids are vaccinated. Even if they weren’t, the health risks would be negligible. But try telling them that.
From where I sit, here in the Crazy land of Britain, the outraged truckers have an obvious point. Canadians have every right to be angry at the current regulations, for the simple reason that they don’t make sense when weighed against the risks. But in Canada, the Kingdom of Reason, stating this obvious fact out loud is tantamount to committing a hate crime. It’s not unlike calling a New Canadian an immigrant or a foreigner, even if technically that’s what they are. Saying the truckers have a point is different from saying anti-vaxxers are rational. They aren’t. But neither are progressives who clamour for more stringent rules when none are needed. Both groups are acting out of baseless fear, refusing to accept the facts. Right-wing extremists don’t have a patent on magical thinking. Wingnut libertarians come in all shapes and sizes. The difference with the progressive kind is that in Canada, they’re Trudeau’s core voters.
As the truckers and their supporters converged on the capitol late last month, Trudeau dismissed them as ‘a small fringe group’ who did not represent the majority of Canadians. He condemned their views as ‘unacceptable’ and refused to meet with them — but by dismissing the truckers as racist nutjobs, the PM is stoking division. By any reasonable measure, Canada’s Covid regulations are now hugely disproportionate to the risk. That’s what many of the truckers are saying — and they’re right. Yet to hear Trudeau talk, you’d think an American-style insurgency was brewing on Parliament Hill.
This matters because there will, soon, be a new Covid variant. Genomic sequencing means we’ll start to detect new pathogens that might have gone unnoticed even a decade ago. If so, we’ll face the same questions: what to do? Can the healthcare system cope? The risk is that, having cried wolf so many times, Sage would not be believed even if its models were right. Track record matters. A recent Swedish book about the country’s refusal to lock down uncovered emails from health officials saying – in effect – that since Imperial’s Professor Neil Ferguson and his team got swine flu so badly wrong, their figures for Sweden’s Covid deaths would probably be incorrect too. (So it was to prove.)
Given Ferguson’s record, it was never clear why so much store was placed on his original suggestion that lockdown could potentially reduce Covid deaths by up to 98 per cent. At the time, even Sir Patrick and Sir Chris Whitty didn’t buy it. Both rejected lockdown – then realised, to their horror, that they risked being accused of causing an extra 20,000 deaths by failing to do so a week earlier. Even this figure came from Ferguson, and has since been debunked.
Reacting to this report in the Guardian, Phil Magness says, on Facebook:
Surprising nobody, the Olympics have become a Faucist nightmare.
The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board writes about “the twilight of Covid mandates in Europe.” A slice:
United Kingdom Health Secretary Sajid Javid on Monday scrapped a requirement for employees of the National Health Service (NHS) to be vaccinated by April. Doctors, nurses and other staff would have had to receive their first shots this week to be fully vaccinated in time and it became clear tens of thousands were holding out, amounting to more than 5% of the NHS work force. This amid chronic staff shortages.
A separate mandate for nursing-home staff took effect in November and the havoc it wreaked no doubt contributed to Mr. Javid’s decision to avoid the same chaos in the NHS. Estimates vary, but thousands of staff seem to have left their jobs owing to the mandate as a staffing shortage sets into that industry. A major concern is that those workers will have found other jobs in Britain’s tight labor market and might never return to their old posts.
Denmark’s government Tuesday lifted all remaining Covid-related restrictions, and officials suggested they’ll now focus more on hospitalizations from Covid rather than total cases. Norway and Ireland also have lifted many restrictions.
This enlightenment isn’t universal, but other governments seem to be paying a political price for tougher pandemic measures. Italy recently imposed a vaccine mandate for people over age 50, but the move stirred vigorous opposition within Prime Minister Mario Draghi’s fragile coalition government. Austria has imposed the Continent’s most stringent mandate, applying to all adults, while also lifting lockdown rules that had applied to the unvaccinated. Street protests are becoming a regular occurrence.
Jeffrey Anderson, writing at City Journal, decries “the insanity of masking children.” Two slices:
But, of course, there has been a huge difference in mask policies toward kids—and others—across the several states. Under Governor Ron DeSantis, Florida’s children have lived freely, except in particular localities that have imposed their own mandates. Under Governor Gavin Newsom, by contrast, California’s kids have lived a masked existence, with partial exceptions in counties (such as Orange) where Newsom’s decrees have been only loosely enforced.
Children’s lives have been radically different in these two states. As long as they haven’t ventured into Walt Disney World—which apparently thinks that required mask-wearing is compatible with being the most magical place on earth—kids in Florida have been free to live like kids. In California, however, unless they’ve been raised in a liberty-loving place like Huntington Beach and been home-schooled, children have been forced to live like minimum-security prisoners.
The result? From January 1, 2020, to January 15, 2022, 99.999 percent of kids in California didn’t die of Covid—either because they didn’t get it, or because they recovered from it. Over that same span of time, 99.999 percent of kids in Florida didn’t die of Covid. Both states’ numbers matched the national average. So, where would you rather be growing up?
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One has to have an extremely impoverished view of human social interaction not to realize what is lost when people cannot see each other’s faces or facial expressions, or even hear each other’s voices unfiltered through a foreign object. The richness and importance of facial expressions was obvious across the centuries—to poets, scientists, and laymen alike—for generations of people not overly influenced by the narrow perspectives and myopic agendas of public-health officials. William Shakespeare’s Juliet confides to Romeo, “Thou know’st the mask of night is on my face; Else would a maiden blush bepaint my cheek.” Charles Darwin wrote a whole book called The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Darwin observes that the face is “the chief seat of expression” and that we immediately perceive its importance “when we converse on an important subject with any person whose face is concealed.”
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 85 of Thomas Sowell’s excellent 1984 book, Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality?:
Why should discussion of positive achievements by blacks ever be a source of embarrassment, much less resentment, on the part of black leaders? Because many of these positive achievements occurred in ways that completely undermine the civil rights vision. If crime is a product of poverty and discrimination as they say endlessly, why was there so much less of it when poverty and discrimination were much worse than today? If massive programs are the only hope to reduce violence in the ghetto, why was there so much less violence long before anyone ever thought of these programs?
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