Russell Roberts's Blog, page 179
February 3, 2022
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
The relative color blindness of the market accounts for much of the hostility towards it. Markets have a notorious lack of respect for privilege, race, and class structures.
Some Covid Links
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau probably didn’t expect much opposition when he imposed a Covid-19 vaccine mandate for cross-border truckers on Jan. 15. The Canadian Trucking Alliance had estimated that 85% of Canada’s 120,000 truckers were vaccinated, and a recent poll found two-thirds of Canadians favor mandatory Covid shots for everyone, including children. Yet it was a significant policy shift. Truck drivers and other “essential” workers had been exempt from Canada’s two-week quarantine for unvaccinated travelers crossing by land from the U.S.
But for people fed up with the federal government’s Covid-19 restrictions, this was the last straw. In a very un-Canadian fashion, they pushed back. Which brings us to the Freedom Convoy.
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Estimates of the convoy’s size ranged from 551 to 1,155 vehicles, most of them cars and not trucks. A significant amount of money was raised, too. A GoFundMe campaign, relying particularly on small donations, raked in more than five million Canadian dollars (around U.S. $4 million) by Jan. 25. Three days later, it was at C$7.5 million. The goal was increased to C$9 million, which was surpassed on Jan. 30—and has now been pushed to C$10 million.
The convoy reached Parliament Hill on Jan. 29. Roads were clogged, and truck horns could be heard from one end of downtown Ottawa to the other. Thousands showed up. Most protesters were peaceful, and seemed to be there simply to let the Trudeau Liberals know why they oppose mandatory vaccination.
Toronto-based writer Laura Rosen Cohen says that “Trudeau is playing with fire.” A slice:
Canadian coronavirus lockdown policies have been, and remain, some of the most stringent and restrictive in the entire Western world. It may be a Commonwealth thing, given that Australia and New Zealand have also descended into unrecognizable islands of cruel and capricious public health tyranny.
In Ontario, citizens are now allowed to eat popcorn at movie theaters that only opened up again earlier this week on Monday at fifty percent capacity, and only because of comprehensive drubbing that the government was subjected to regarding this ridiculous, make-believe public health directive.
Life in Canada has been tedious, tyrannical, and indescribably punitive. That is why for many months throughout the pandemic, ordinary Americans and pundits alike have been looking north from the land of the free (red states at least) and pretty much sneering at Canadians, bereft as they are of the First and Second Amendments. The polite Canadians, they scoffed, without their guns and their freedom of speech, were a lost cause.
And then one day, Prime Minister Trudeau pushed the nice Canadians a rule too far.
Canadian truckers’ protest against Covidocratic tyranny has inspired a similar effort in Europe. (HT Jonathan Fortier)
Government disease doctors and politicians around the world panicked in the face of Covid and began shutting down societies in early 2020. The accounting has hardly begun on the impact of isolating human beings, denying them opportunities, education and experiences—not to mention disrupting non-Covid medical treatments and myriad other valuable services—and then attempting to simulate the benefits of a functioning society by printing fiat money. It will take years to understand the full cost of this man-made catastrophe, But emerging research suggests that on the other side of the ledger, public health benefits were extremely small, if they can be verified at all.
For some seven years, Serbia’s Novak Djokovic has been the No. 1 ranked men’s tennis player in the world. So why did Australian officials just kick him out of the country, where he was supposed to compete in the Australian Open?
It appears they did so because they thought it would look good to their COVID-weary constituents. And the courts let them get away with it.
If this sounds like the behavior of a Third World country, rather than a Western democracy, you’re not far off.
Yet another crisis remains — that of power-hungry governors and mayors who insist upon wielding emergency powers they should have given up two years ago. The crisis is too many state legislatures and city councils that sit on their hands rather than restore political power to its rightful place with the people’s representatives. And this crisis will not end until our leaders tell us what the goals are and when we have met them.
Along every step of the way in COVID response New York’s leadership has selectively chosen information that only supports shutting things down. When then Governor Andrew Cuomo’s own tracing data showed restaurants only accounted for 1.4% of COVID spread in December of 2020, he closed indoor dining anyway.
New York City is ready to fully open, without mask mandates or other restrictions. There is no other solution to the cavalcade of bad trends it has suffered for two years. Empty streets promote crime and vagrancy by the mentally ill. Empty storefronts harm neighborhoods. Kids masked all day at school suffer educational and developmental setbacks. This entire parade of horribles and more all stem from the unwillingness of our leaders to call an end to the madness.
Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger calls on Biden to declare an end to “the Covid panic.” Two slices:
It is manifestly clear that the panic phase of the Covid-19 pandemic has to end. The costs are too high.
I don’t mean end as a state of mind. The pandemic has to end officially, as a matter of stated public policy by the U.S. government.
President Biden needs to declare publicly that the pandemic phase of Covid is over so people can resume living in a reality not dominated by masks, tests or vaccines.
Daily life has been suspended since March 2020. It won’t be the same for years, as the virus and its mutations circulate indefinitely. But the daily routines of life need the freedom to reassemble as what they were pre-pandemic, rather than what people are putting up with now.
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The seemingly unto-eternity extension of the Covid crisis is now doing more nonmedical damage to the country than the virus itself. Masking and testing have turned life into a Rubik’s Cube of detail and wheel-spinning decisions. What matters more, a negative or positive rapid-test result? When is the ideal time to test yourself? How long before you retest? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention explains in arcane detail how test to stay works in its “K-12 Transmission Science Brief.”
A social coarsening has taken place. People die without funerals or in-person memorials even now because of infection fear. Isolation has become its own pandemic. Untended friendships have eroded. Much of the country is now divided between mask dissenters and mask wardens.
The Telegraph‘s Science Editor Sarah Knapton reports on the new study by Steve Hanke, et al. Two slices:
Lockdowns prevented just 0.2 per cent of deaths in comparison with simply trusting people to do the right thing, a new study suggests.
Researchers from Johns Hopkins University, in the US, Lund University, in Sweden and the Centre for Political Studies, in Denmark, said the costs to society far outweighed the benefits and called for lockdown to be “rejected out of hand” as a future pandemic policy.
The team even found that some lockdown measures may have increased deaths by stopping access to outdoor space, “pushing people to meet at less safe places” while isolating infected people indoors, where they could pass the virus on to family members and housemates.
“We do find some evidence that limiting gatherings was counterproductive and increased Covid-19 mortality,” the authors concluded. “Often, lockdowns have limited people’s access to safe outdoor places such as beaches, parks, and zoos, or included outdoor mask mandates or strict outdoor gathering restrictions, pushing people to meet at less safe indoor places.”
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Jonas Herby, a special adviser at the Centre for Political Studies and one of the study’s authors, told The Telegraph: “When we look at lockdown, we don’t find much of an effect.
“We think that most people don’t want to get sick or infect their neighbours, so if you just give people the proper knowledge they do the right thing to take care of themselves, and others, and so that’s why lockdowns don’t work.
“In general, we should trust that people can make the right decisions, so the key thing is to educate them and tell them when the infection rates are high and when it’s dangerous to go out and how to protect yourself.
“One possible reason that lockdowns seem ineffective is that some measures are counterproductive. There is some evidence that putting limits on gatherings actually increased the number of deaths.”
The authors criticised the original Imperial College London model which suggested that Britain could see 500,000 deaths without a lockdown, saying it did not take into account the real-world behaviour of people during a pandemic.
Millions of people have seen their holidays ruined in the last two years, but a fresh tale of woe might just take the biscuit.
Karl Mohan, 26, from Dublin, has been travelling across Africa and Asia with his girlfriend Aisling since September 2021, and was nearing the end of a month-long stop in Cambodia when he unexpectedly tested positive for Covid in Siem Reap on January 16, just ahead of his scheduled flight to Sri Lanka.
“I had no symptoms, the lateral flow test I’d taken for peace of mind just beforehand had been negative, and so were the two I took after the positive PCR,” Mohan tells Telegraph Travel. With Aisling also testing negative, he asked for the test to be repeated, but to avail.
“In Cambodia they seem to think Covid is a flesh-eating disease,” he adds. “I felt like a leper when they told me I was positive – doctors and nurses literally ran away from me.”
The couple were swiftly taken to a local hospital, where Mohan underwent a chest X-ray in the car park. It was all clear, but the pair were still collected in an ambulance by officials dressed in hazmat suits and taken to the grim ‘Covid camp’ where the real nightmare began.
It was a unisex facility in a repurposed sports field, comprising rows of wooden bed frames, filthy open lavatories, and little else. Mohan gathered from other inmates that he would be required to stay there for at least seven days, and would then only be released after testing negative twice, two days apart. Several occupants said they had been stuck in the camp for weeks.
Panicking, the couple initially managed to escape but were met at their hotel by police and Mohan (but not Aisling) was frog-marched back into the camp, where he accepted he would be stationed for the foreseeable future. Mohan started sharing footage of his bleak surroundings – ant infestations, thousands of spiders, stray dogs and excrement on the floor – to Cambodia’s main Facebook page for travellers.
The Fauci/Collins playbook to create a false impression of scientific consensus on COVID policy (used on lab-leak, lockdowns & early treatment):
1. Call scientists who disagree “fringe”
2. Deploy big tech misinformation hordes to suppress opposing thoughts
3. Deploy press propagandists & scientist allies to smear and takedown opponents
4. Reward allies with large grants
“Crisis-prone individuals don’t just like to live in a state of high alert—they seem to relish being called upon to fix all those problems that are causing the crisis,” Susan Krauss Whitbourne, professor emerita of psychological and brain sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, wrote in a 2014 Psychology Today article. These people, she explained, “seek—if not revel in—drama, become worked up over small problems, and tend to see themselves as the center of their all-too-frenetic universes.”
Whitbourne wrote years before vaccine passports were a twinkle in a bureaucrat’s eye, referring to people hooked on disruptive adrenaline rushes at work or home. But a substantial share of our population seems to get much the same kick from a public health crisis.
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Let’s not forget the public health officials who found themselves thrust into the spotlight and the politicians who assumed unprecedented powers. Newly minted New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) declared a state of emergency in November while scientists were still assessing what, if any, special dangers the omicron variant posed. Stepping back into obscurity and normal power parameters is difficult when you’ve been juiced by a crisis.
Adrenaline junkies, those who can work in pajamas, and empowered politicos don’t entirely explain the lingering crisis. Mask mandates, travel restrictions, and vaccination requirements maintained solid majority support among Americans in a Morning Consult survey conducted after omicron appeared. Those who enjoy disruption may be persuading or shaming others to embrace chaos.
Quotation of the Day…
Utopians might wish it were otherwise, but there is no way to censor lies without censoring the truth. You do only damage by trying.
DBx: Pictured here is Joe Rogan, some of whose podcasts contain content that offends Neil Young and Joni Mitchell.
Rogan deserves applause for airing ideas about Covid and vaccines that challenge the official “Science.” And Young and Mitchell discredit themselves by reacting as they did to Rogan’s podcasts. But I think it’s noteworthy that, at least as far as I know, neither Young nor Mitchell demanded censorship by government. Further, and to their genuine credit, each of these individuals put their money where their mouths are.
Just as Joe Rogan and his guests have a right to free speech, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell have a right to object in whatever peaceful ways they wish to what other people say or don’t say.
February 2, 2022
“We Have for Two Years Endured a Pandemic of Coercion and Compliance”
Julie Ponesse speaks in Ottawa at the Canadian truckers’ rally against Covidocratic tyranny.
Some Non-Covid Links
My former GMU colleague Tom Hazlett corrects today’s revisionist misunderstanding of price controls. A slice:
Much is being made of the fact that prominent economists, following World War II, urged the continuation of wartime price controls in the U.S. to combat inflation. While President Harry Truman rejected this advice, abolishing such regulations in June 1946, some pundits now lament his decision. A recent essayin the Guardian, for example, argues that controls—once endorsed by such leading economic experts as Paul Samuelson and John Kenneth Galbraith—would have contained costs for consumers, as they did during wartime. This conjecture is then advanced to support the imposition of wage and price controls today.
That factual case involves a sleight of hand. Nominal price increases were limited in the U.S. during the Second World War, but widespread shortages and inefficiencies imposed large real costs on consumers and business omitted in the statistics. While the U.S. Office of Price Administration ostensibly limited charges to March 1942 levels, writes historian Meg Jacobs, “it was not uncommon for local stores to charge exorbitant under-the-counter prices, to sell shoddy merchandise at regular prices, or simply close down and reopen with new higher prices.” Evasion was not difficult: “candy makers reduced the weight of each bar.” Black markets flourished, while legitimate retailers adopted “tie-ins,” selling a desired product only with the additional purchase of something unwanted.
Oddly, today’s recommendation for World War II–style wage and price controls ignores the most serious test. That occurred in postwar Europe, where West Germany’s devastated economy—having lost two-thirds of industrial production and 20 percent of its housing units—was subject to strict price regulations by the U.S., U.K., and French occupation authorities.
Hunger and homelessness were everywhere; the average caloric intake in 1948 was just 1,300 per day.
Also doing sound economics on prices and inflation are John Stossel and David Henderson.
I’m always honored to be a guest on the Bob Zadek Show on radio – as I was a few weeks ago.
A closer look at the grocery industry actually reveals a highly competitive market. It’s true that the industry is dominated by large chains, with the top four firms — Walmart, Kroger, Albertson’s and Target — constituting about 35% of U.S. food sales in 2019, but it is equally true that the industry has thin profit margins (in the range of 1-3%). Indeed, one 2020 report noted that “despite rising incomes, the heightened competitive landscape has forced many operators to compete based on price.” So while grocery profits have risen slightly during the pandemic thanks to increased consumer demand, the industry still maintains some of the lowest margins of any economic sector. One can hardly call that anti-competitive.
Warren’s mistake is that she confuses having a greater number of small firms in an industry with competitiveness (and therefore lower prices). This ignores how easy it is for companies to enter or exit the market. In a market with relatively low barriers to entry, such as the grocery industry, a company’s actions are constrained by the threat of new competitors. The possibility of taking market share from incumbents incentivizes new companies to dip a toe in the water, limiting the ability of even large companies to take advantage of consumers.
Despite the industry’s relatively low profit margins, over the past few years there have been no shortage of newcomers, so much so that traditional brick-and-mortar chains increasingly seek to compete over the quality of the grocery shopping experience itself. Companies like Walmart, for example, now offer online ordering and same-day pick up to compete with non-traditional newcomers like Instacart and Blue Apron. The adoption of these new services exploded during the pandemic and is likely here to stay, meaning the industry will likely grow even more competitive in the future.
Eric Boehm wisely warns of the danger of America’s $30 trillion in national-government debt. A slice:
Yesterday, data released by the U.S. Treasury confirmed that the national debt reached a new milestone: $30 trillion.
The speed with which the federal government has piled up the third mountain of 10 trillion I-O-U notes is truly remarkable. Yes, the response to the COVID-19 pandemic drove government borrowing and spending to stratospheric heights—but even before COVID appeared on the horizon, the operative question about the national debt was when not if the country would hit $30 trillion. The drivers of the debt are an unbalanced entitlement system and a persistent gap between government spending and tax revenue—the result of more than two decades of poor decision making in Washington, where politicians from both parties have carelessly borrowed to pay for everything from foreign wars to $1,200 checks for most Americans (even those earning six-figures) during the pandemic.
Even if the growing debt doesn’t trigger a default or other crisis, it will have a material impact on Americans’ futures. Higher levels of debt are correlated with lower levels of future economic growth in no small part because the amount of money that must be siphoned out of the economy to pay the interest on the debt will keep getting larger. Every dollar used to service the debt is a dollar that can’t be used to invest in new technology, pay workers, or save for the next rainy day.
Charles Cooke is always insightful. CNN – not so much so.
Also from Charles Cooke is this criticism of ABC’s suspension of Whoopi Goldberg. A slice:
This isn’t just illiberal, it’s irrational. What Goldberg said was factually incorrect, yes. But so what? Figures on political TV shows say stupid and historically illiterate things every day — including about the Nazis — and nothing much happens to them as a result. What, exactly, was different about this one? Is warmed-over critical theory prohibited now?
And why does anyone care? ABC’s president explained that the suspension was a product of Goldberg’s “hurtful comments.” But who, specifically, was “hurt”? The View is a talk show, and a particularly stupid one to boot. Is there anyone in the world who takes it as gospel? I simply do not understand the mechanism by which viewers are supposed to be damaged in some way by watching an actress make mistakes on live TV. Where is this “hurt”? What does it look like? How long does it last? And how is it assuaged by barring Goldberg from the program for a fortnight? Goldberg isn’t the CEO of American Airlines, or the president of the Historical Society. She’s a participant on a chat show. No one in America is affected by her errors.
Also coming to Whoopi Goldberg’s defense is Arnold Kling. A slice:
First, the snark: By Joe Biden’s criteria, Whoopi Goldberg is more qualified than Laurence Tribe—to pick a name on the left—to fill the pending Supreme Court vacancy. End of snark.
Her comments on the Holocaust were erroneous and in bad taste. But as a free-speech absolutist, I defend her right to say things that are erroneous and in bad taste. And as a Jew, I am ashamed of the Jewish establishment leaders who pounced on her remarks and helped cause her employer to “suspend” her for two weeks.
The charge that was immediately made against Goldberg, and to which she later pleaded guilty, is that the remarks were “hurtful.” This is a red flag that the critics are crybullies. Whenever the criticism of speech is that it is “hurtful” to some group, I say that it is time to defend the speaker and criticize those who find it “hurtful.”
Nicholas Wade rightly criticizes Biden’s criteria for choosing nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Recent research has documented a rise in income and wealth inequality to levels not observed since the Gilded Age. This paper argues that focusing on income inequality trends masks gains in relative welfare over time. For a given a distribution of income, welfare differences among different social classes converge if the relative price of manufactured goods declines over time. Using a simplified version of Matsuyama (2002)’s Flying Geese model this paper shows that, if initial productivity levels are low, the distribution of income may need to be very unequal to obtain welfare convergence.
George Will ponders Boris Johnson.
Nathan Goodman reviews Chris Coyne’s and Abby Hall’s book, Manufacturing Militarism.
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from pages 109-110 of Arthur Diamond, Jr.’s, excellent 2019 book, Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism:
Tolerance is celebrated in a system of innovative dynamism partly because it is usually the outsider and the cognitively diverse who bring us the breakthrough innovations that improve our lives, and partly because most of humanity are our potential customers or our potential collaborators. Tolerance is also celebrated in a system of innovative dynamism because tolerance allows people to have the freedom to choose how to pursue happiness, respecting the rights and dignity of each individual. Those who are immersed in their own projects do not have the time or energy to nurse grudges or plot revenge. So most fundamentally, tolerance is practiced in a system of innovative dynamism because we do not have time for intolerance.
Some Covid Links
The idea that exposure to some infectious agents is protective against immune-related disorders isn’t new and comes with significant scientific heft. The so-called hygiene hypothesis is constructed from epidemiologic evidence, laboratory studies and clinical trials that, put together, support the notion that an excessive emphasis on antisepsis is implicated in misalignments of the immune system that risk disease.
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The extreme concern for hygiene at the onset of Covid-19 was intuitive and understandable. The virus was spreading fast, information on routes of transmission was limited, and we as a society tried to protect one another from infection. But policies that were easy to support two years ago need re-evaluation. Distancing, deep-cleaning and masking aren’t “more is better” kinds of goods.
On the other side of the balance, health risks from extended intensive hygiene are credible. As Omicron recedes and we internalize the paucity of Covid-19 benefits from some hygiene practices, we should balance those against the benefits we lose by shielding our immune systems from normal exposures—and the ones we withhold from children by preventing the exchange of microbes through play and smiles.
el gato malo: “those who cannot convince, censor.”
Daniel Nuccio, a graduate student in biology, warns against the cult of “The Science.” A slice:
Nevertheless, when scientific institutions and scientists acting as the de facto figureheads of “Science” once more began to appear to be in conflict with their old foes on the Right of pandemic policy, this time led by President Donald Trump, political battle lines were drawn in a way where either you were on the side of Democrats and “The Science” or on the side of Republicans and Trump.
Henceforth, if being a Democrat, an anti-Trumper, or someone who believed in science was part of your core identity, you now found yourself in a position where you would defend “The Science” and all its related leaders, beliefs, and policies and do so on a very core level. It didn’t matter if you had followed “The Science” to a psychological Twilight Zone where a commitment to science was characterized not by critical thought and a careful assessment of data and evidence, but obedience to authority and a defense of symbolic representations of an institution.
Hence, many once seemingly reasonable biologists and biologists in training I knew in the Before Times came to exhibit a profound lack of curiosity, or express hostility and condescension toward the suggestion that one might want evidence for that which had been proclaimed by Pope Fauci, the Church of the CDC, or “The Science.” To some, questioning that which had been proclaimed by “The Science” had become like questioning that which had been revealed to Marian Keech.
Doctors and commentators in the media like amateur UFO-watchers from 1954 defended long-term Doomsday predictions of various epidemiological models even after some of them, although not quite unequivocally disproved, were shown to perform rather poorly in their predictions of things like daily deaths from Covid-19 and ICU bed utilizations.
As we now enter year three of the Pandemic Era, true believers continue to hold that the actions of those who “followed The Science” saved the world through their actions, no matter how destructive those actions are ultimately revealed to be.
And, even after the most cataclysmic events predicted by “The Science” have not come to pass, there remains a core group of true believers who are convinced “The Science” had simply gotten the date or the variant wrong and that the End of Days are still to come unless we all remain vigilant by forever being ready to mask up and lock down when “The Science” says it’s time.
Peter Suderman explains that “‘Public Health’ has become a catchall excuse for bad ideas.” A slice:
Everywhere you look these days, you can see versions of this tendency, in large and small ways: Teachers unions have spent the last two years using public health fears as an excuse to stay out of classrooms. Biden and congressional Democrats have used the pandemic as an excuse for massive expansions of social spending that have little to do with responding to the coronavirus.
Let’s loudly applaud Brady, Texas!
Max Borders describes what happens when “mass formation psychosis” (MFP) meets “Irish democracy.” (HT George Leef) A slice:
Elsewhere, I have described a process of undermining authority by unleashing uncontainable social forces: “underthrow.” Irish Democracy is proving to be a vector of underthrow against vaccine authoritarianism. As each wave of withdrawal and truculence crashes against authoritarian policies and then recedes, those policies unravel, as President Biden has discovered. The vaccine mandates lay in state at the White House, even before the Supreme Court struck the coffin’s final nail.
Likewise, parents are pulling their children out of the public schools in droves. Weary of unjustifiable closures, parents are finding private alternatives that are affordable and of higher quality. Thus, teachers’ unions and their paymasters are learning about underthrow, too. Indeed, despite the MFP accusation that ‘racism’ motivates everything, up to and including defections from schools and the Party of Rectitude, voters are simply fed up with keeping their kids at home based on paranoia and flimsy justification.
Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) made an appearance at Big Board, a bar in the H Street neighborhood of Washington D.C., after the city revoked its liquor license and then shut it down for refusing to enforce COVID-19 mask and vaccine mandates. Paul and his staff visited the restaurant on Tuesday night, shortly after D.C. Health posted a closure notice on its front door.
“I’m proud of the owner for not submitting,” said Paul.
Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) attended as well. Both thanked the owner, Eric Flannery, for protesting the idea that the government could force restaurant servers to inspect customers’ medical records.
Another study published the same day found that COVID-19 outbreaks were more common in Arizona schools that did not require masks. Again, that study did not control for vaccination rates or other mitigation measures, and critics pointed out various other weaknesses.
“You can’t learn anything about the effects of school mask mandates from this study,” Arizona State public health economist Jonathan Ketcham told science writer David Zweig. Noah Haber, a Stanford postdoctoral fellow who had co-authored a systematic review of research on COVID-19 mitigation measures, described the study as “so unreliable that it probably should not have been entered into the public discourse.”
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky nevertheless repeatedly cited the Arizona study as proof that her agency’s advice was well-grounded, and her slippery response to the criticism was revealing. During a Fox News appearance in December, she said “study after study” has “demonstrated that our layered prevention strategies, including masks in schools, are able to keep our schools safely open.”
While those studies show that schools with mask mandates can operate “safely,” they do not show that mask mandates are necessary to achieve that goal. Data from Florida, Tennessee, North Dakota, Texas, the U.K., and Spain suggest they are not.
David Zweig tweets about a recent New York state mask mandate: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
Genuine question: How can a mask mandate be credited for the current decline in cases when it was in effect before and during the preceding rise in cases?
There is no ethical dilemma about denying essential treatment to a toddler based on the vaccination status of his parents. It is an unmixed evil.
Meghan Murphy explains why Canadians should be proud of the truckers’ protest against vaccine mandates. Two slices:
After the government announced that Canadian truckers must be vaccinated in order to cross the border from the United States or face a 14-day quarantine, the truckers organised. On January 23, thousands set off across Canada in protest, moving from British Columbia towards Ottawa, where the Canadian parliament meets.
Despite the fact that this is a working-class movement fighting for rights and freedoms, the left has almost universally condemned the Freedom Convoy, attempting to slander the protesters as ‘far right,’ ‘white nationalists,’ and ‘fascists.’ The media has attempted to paint the protesters as dangerous, violent extremists, despite the fact the truckers and their supporters have only been peaceful.
The left was once focused on class, fighting corporate power and government overreach. Today, they seem to have lost the plot.
A leftist activist named Taylor McNallie, with numerous assault charges to her name, published a widely shared post on Instagram labelling the convoy a ‘white nationalist movement’ and the ‘Ku Klux Konvoy’ (her account has since been deleted). Michael de Adder, a political cartoonist for the Washington Post, published a cartoon referencing the convoy with the word ‘Fascism’ written across the trucks.
It’s almost as though elite progressives are losing control of the narrative and desperately clinging to old tactics. Problem is, anyone with a brain knows that a worker-led protest against tyranny is not fascism.
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Despite their insistence that these mandates and restrictions exist to protect society, progressives in Canada don’t seem to care that it is the poor who have been hit the hardest by these measures. They claim to care about public health and smear those questioning or challenging the restrictions as ‘selfish,’ yet they are in fact the most selfish of all — destroying the lives of hundreds of thousands of people because they want to remain comfortable, because they want to live in fear.
The truckers’ convoy is the most inspiring thing I’ve seen come out of Canada in my life. I am, for once, proud of Canadians, and I hope their numbers force the truth out of Trudeau and the Canadian media, which is that the country’s handling of Covid has been unconstitutional, cruel, destructive, and an economic disaster. Time to get back to reality, whether the powers that be like it or not.
Seerut K. Chawla tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
The trucker protest has clarified the contempt middle class liberals have for the working class.
It’s fine when they’re delivering your Amazon packages while you work from home- but as soon as they want their rights back they’re branded racists.
It has become common to criticise restrictions for children on the grounds that they harm mental health and social development. These concerns are valid, but it is important to emphasise that a more laissez-faire approach to kids and Covid makes public health sense, too. Dropping masks, quarantines, distancing, and all other mitigations will allow children to develop the kind of broad immunity gained by living a normal life.
Shielding kids from exposure only increases their future risk. This is partly why the UK does not vaccinate against chickenpox. Serious complications from the disease are rare among children, and the circulating virus allows adults to be naturally boosted against reactivation-driven shingles. By rebuilding population immunity among the least at-risk, moreover, we help buffer risk for those most vulnerable.
With Covid, the nadir of risk is between 5–11 years old — an age where children develop more robust and durable immunity from infection than adults, even with asymptomatic silent infections.
Some parents may think this sounds like a call to put their children at risk of serious illness or death. But it is important to remember that exposure to Covid-19 is inevitable. Vaccines protect against severe disease and side-effects such as MIS-C, but they cannot stop breakthrough infections, and the rapidity of Omicron’s spread suggests that no matter what we do, we cannot avoid the virus. In January, Anthony Fauci admitted as much, saying that Omicron will eventually “find just about everybody”.
Vaccination policies have shifted dramatically during COVID-19 with the rapid emergence of population-wide vaccine mandates, domestic vaccine passports, and differential restrictions based on vaccination status. These policies have prompted ethical, scientific, practical, and political controversy; however, there has been limited evaluation of their potential unintended consequences. Here, we outline a comprehensive set of hypotheses for why these policies may be counter-productive and harmful.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 74 of the late, great Harold Demsetz’s richly rewarding 2008 book, From Economic Man to Economic System:
Industrialization, even more than farming, involved production in quantities greatly in excess of the needs of those whose work produced this production. The consequences of this are profound. If gains from specialization are to be won, people need to become comfortable and secure in their dealings with others who, for the most part, are strangers.
DBx: This Adam Smithian point perhaps sounds trite when stated so straightforwardly. But in reality people resist its implications. Prominent among those people who resist this point’s implications are ‘nationalist conservatives’ in the United States who advocate protectionist policies as a means of ‘bringing back’ manufacturing jobs. By stoking skepticism of dealing with strangers – by causing fellow citizens who buy imports to feel uncomfortable when doing so – ‘nationalist conservatives’ weaken a cornerstone for the flourishing of manufacturing.
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February 1, 2022
Some Non-Covid Links
Few things have undermined minorities over the past 40 years more than inner-city public-school systems. Rich and middle-class Americans already have school choice. They can move. Neighborhoods with high-performing systems have far higher homes values, shutting poorer people out. Teachers’ unions use tax dollars, often through compelled dues, to help elect politicians who preserve the status quo — which, functionally, is the racial segregation of schools.
One of the most popular arguments against school choice is that granting parents the freedom to pick better schools would only weaken traditional ones. Well, imagine making this argument about any other area of life: “Hey, you can’t leave this supermarket because we’re going to suck even more.” No one would accept that logic. Yet they do for their kids’ education. Maybe when 77 percent of high-school graduates can’t make it through Goodnight Moon, someone will do something. We’re not that far off.
Reason‘s Nick Gillespie interviews John McWhorter. A slice:
When you look at American culture in 1960 and 1970 on the issue of race, there was a massive transformation. Can you talk a little bit about that?
The two-parent family is still a norm [back in 1960], even with poor black people. Welfare is a mean-spirited little program where you’ve always got the social worker knocking on the door and you’re encouraged not to stay on it for very long. There’s a general idea that how Martin Luther King looked at things was the standard and reasonable way of thinking about race: “Let’s get rid of segregation, view people by the content of their character.”
You go to 1970 and there’s this whole new mood—the black power mood. The new idea is, “We can’t do our best because you won’t let us. And therefore you have to accept that we won’t do our best, and that sometimes we’ll do our worst.” Gradually the notion settles in that doing your worst or not doing your best is almost what black authenticity is, because you stand as a totemic demonstration of white racism. 1960s racism is about segregation. By 1970, it’s standard in certain circles that racism is still present and indestructable because it’s structural.
Because of the welfare revolution in 1966, it starts to become regular for people to just stay on welfare, with no one concerned about whether they get job training. The knocking on the door dwindles in the early ’70s, and it becomes this multigenerational program. It’s not anybody’s fault. Black America turned upside down between ’60 and ’70.
I think that civil rights up to about 1966 and [black activist] Stokely Carmichael and people yelling “black power” and not knowing what it meant—that’s where it went wrong. And we’re still stuck talking about these things the way those people did.
Pierre Lemieux writes wisely about the justification for government.
GMU Econ alum Will Luther wisely advises that we all soundly reject price controls.
Eric Boehm reports on Pennsylvania infrastructure.
Bruce Yandle offers – as he always does – wise counsel.
Some Covid Links
Asked by MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski about the alleged misinformation spread by the popular “Joe Rogan Experience” podcast and Facebook users, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy responded with a homily about how “we” must “root out” misleading speech.
“We” don’t have to do any such thing. Government officials have no role in dictating appropriate speech or lecturing us on what we can or can’t say. In fact, they have a duty not to.
Murthy’s comments wouldn’t be as grating if it weren’t so obvious that the Biden administration has been pressuring Big Tech companies, who oversee huge swaths of our daily digital interactions, to limit speech and set acceptable standards.
You might remember that last summer, Press Secretary Jen Psaki causally informed the media that the White House was “flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.” Can you imagine the explosive reaction from the establishment media if it had learned that the Trump White House was keeping a list of speech crimes?
Writing in Canada’s National Post, Rex Murphy argues that it’s not Justin Trudeau’s place to decide which views are ‘acceptable’ and which aren’t. (HT Jonathan Fortier) Two slices:
He [Trudeau] described them [the truckers protesting vaccine mandates] as “a small fringe minority.” A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian, someone once said. But this “small fringe minority” can’t be Canadians. They have “unacceptable views.”
“Unacceptable views?” Are we in China now?
Trudeau isn’t Plato. He may even be a few steps down from that high intellect. But even if he were, I’d hold off on the prime minister of a democracy ruling on what is or is not acceptable.
That statement of his made me genuinely wonder: have those who rule us forgotten the basis of their rule? The leaders of a democracy do not have “excommunicatory” competence. They do not get to declare what is a “fringe minority.” Nor do they have their vassals — I think of Trudeau’s former adviser and close personal friend Gerry Butts — sprinkling Twitter with slurs regarding the integrity and purpose of a large-scale, grassroots reaction to this government’s extended and flawed response to the COVID pandemic, pumping vitriol on its behalf.
…..
There is a voice within this protest, a voice beyond the owner of the hands on the wheel, beyond the cheers coming from the side of the road or from the highway overpasses. A voice coming from the less comfortable in society, the perennially less seen or regarded. It’s the voice of dutiful, working citizens whom the past two years of shutdowns, loss of work or severe reduction of income, all kinds of pressures and anxieties, have worn them down. The truckers are emblems, stand-ins for these Canadians.
And because they usually make no noise, usually just go about their business, hardly ever stage even a small demonstration — until now — to the professional classes, these Canadians are just simply not there. That’s the real gap here. The political and commentating clerisy really don’t know, and have made no effort to know or appreciate, the lives and livelihoods of those on the lower end of the economic scale. How the other, less fortunate, half lives.
Jim Geraghty, writing at National Review, deplores that “global assault on freedom.” A slice:
Perhaps conservatives are rallying around Joe Rogan because they don’t need a figure to agree with 100 percent of their worldview in order to conclude that he is worth defending from an angry mob that desires censorship of differing views.
It’s very clear that the people who are the most determined to “deplatform” Rogan — to force Spotify to cancel his show, and likely with that, get his videos off of YouTube as well — are battling a cartoon-like caricature that they’ve drawn in their heads.
If you listen to Rogan defend his choices in a recently taped video, you’ll see that he’s not a lunkhead, and seems the opposite of a wide-eyed extremist ideologue, hungry to hammer a twisted narrative into brainwashed followers….
Glenn Greenwald weighs in on the dust-up sparked by Joe Rogan. A slice:
American liberals are obsessed with finding ways to silence and censor their adversaries. Every week, if not every day, they have new targets they want de-platformed, banned, silenced, and otherwise prevented from speaking or being heard (by “liberals,” I mean the term of self-description used by the dominant wing of the Democratic Party).
For years, their preferred censorship tactic was to expand and distort the concept of “hate speech” to mean “views that make us uncomfortable,” and then demand that such “hateful” views be prohibited on that basis. For that reason, it is now common to hear Democrats assert, falsely, that the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech does not protect “hate speech.” Their political culture has long inculcated them to believe that they can comfortably silence whatever views they arbitrarily place into this category without being guilty of censorship.
Constitutional illiteracy to the side, the “hate speech” framework for justifying censorship is now insufficient because liberals are eager to silence a much broader range of voices than those they can credibly accuse of being hateful. That is why the newest, and now most popular, censorship framework is to claim that their targets are guilty of spreading “misinformation” or “disinformation.” These terms, by design, have no clear or concise meaning. Like the term “terrorism,” it is their elasticity that makes them so useful.
When a crisis is over, authorities may relinquish some of the powers they assumed during the emergency, but you can be sure that the government’s writ will run permanently larger than before. Wars, depressions, public-health emergencies lead to bigger government, more rules, more-onerous regulations.
You can see the pattern again as we approach the second anniversary of the pandemic: officials musing publicly about permanent mask mandates, blue-state leaders who evidently have no intention of lifting restrictions, public-health professionals seeking to extend their ambit even as the crisis wanes. Leading Democratic politicians continue to insist on their “Build Back Better” proposition—that what we have learned these past two years has been the essential role of new trillion-dollar government programs to cushion society from its ills.
Worst of all, the authoritarian instinct this time has reached deeper into the once-sacred field of free speech, and we have the marginalizing and even outright ostracizing of heretics who dare challenge the authorities’ narrative. When elderly rockers who once thought of themselves as rebels believe it’s their responsibility to banish “misinformation” from major entertainment platforms, you know the controlling impulse has burrowed its way deeply—perhaps permanently—into the culture.
But let’s indulge a radical thought for a moment. What if the opposite is true this time? What if the ratchet slips, and rising popular hostility to arbitrary, petty, overbearing and ineffective rules induces a popular backlash? Isn’t it possible that the inconsistency, arrogance and mendacity of the people attempting to order our lives will produce the opposite of their desired outcome?
Jeffrey Tucker says that it’s high time that many global ‘leaders’ (so-called) resign. Two slices:
If there is a historical precedent for the truckers’ revolt in Canada, and the populist protests in so many other parts of the world, I would like to know what it is. It surely sets the record for convoy size, and it is historic for Canada. But there is much more going on here, something more fundamental. The two-year imposition of bio-fascist rule by diktat seems ever less tenable – the consent of the governed is being withdrawn – but what comes next seems unclear.
We now have two of the most restrictive “leaders” in the developed world (Justin Trudeau of Canada and Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand) hiding in undisclosed locations, citing the need to quarantine following Covid exposure. Streets globally have filled up with people demanding an end to mandates and lockdowns, calling for accountability, pushing for resignations, denouncing privileged corporations, and crying out for a recognition of basic freedoms and rights.
…..
Lockdowns and mandates gave them full power, not only over the one or two sectors they previously ruled but the whole of society and all of its functioning. They even controlled how many people we could have in our homes, whether our businesses could be open, whether we could worship with others, and dictate what precisely we are supposed to do with our own bodies.
Whatever happened to limits on power? The people who put together the systems of government in the 18th century that led to the most prosperous societies in the history of the world knew that restricting government was the key to a stable social order and growing economy. They gave us Constitutions and the lists of rights and the courts enforced them.
When 15-year-old Ellah Nahum and a few other unvaccinated students showed up at Los Angeles’ New West Charter School on Tuesday, January 18, after winter break, they brought lunches, backpacks, and negative COVID-19 tests, hoping to be allowed in. They’d been negotiating with school administrators since early October, when the school had announced that a vaccine mandate would go into effect in January. Prior to returning to school from winter break, they’d requested a hearing, attempting to find alternative options to getting vaccinated.
When they showed up at school around 7:30 a.m., they sailed through the first checkpoint, run by two newly hired security guards who were satisfied with the girls’ proof of negative test conducted in the last 24 hours. It was the second checkpoint, run by school administrators demanding proof of vaccination, that created trouble for the teens. Several hours later, after tense negotiations between administrators, teens, and their parents, the school called Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) to the scene, and cordoned the teens off, denying them chairs and bathroom breaks, according to the girls.
(DBx: I do not understand how anyone can learn of events such as this one and not realize that Covid Derangement Syndrome is real and horrifying.)
Katie Pavlich reports on John Hopkins School of Medicine professor Dr. Marty Makary calling for the rehiring of workers who were fired because they are unvaccinated. (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
“Remember that California children are forced to wear masks in schools all day and that California extended their indoor mask mandate through February,” radio host Ari Hoffman tweeted, posting a picture of California Gov. Gavin Newsom, maskless with Magic Johnson Sunday at the Los Angeles Rams’ home playoff game.
Newsom, of course, is no stranger to COVID hypocrisy — remember his trip to the French Laundry? — but, like so many politicians, is seemingly without shame. So we have AOC dancing maskless with drag queens in Florida, Nancy Pelosi getting her hair done when shops are closed, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson partying during lockdown.
Rules are for little people.
This time, literally. Officials have cruelly forced children to wear masks for six to eight hours a day, every day, with no regard for short- and long-term consequences. Parents who voice any concern about masking are ignored, or worse, slandered as “wanting people to die,” which is willful ignorance of the scientific facts.
Here’s some potentially excellent news out of Finland.
Julien Yvon is correct: “The rules themselves were worse than the rule-breaking.” A slice:
If we look back at media coverage during the month of May 2020, we find that our journalists had become obsessed with ordinary people breaking the rules. Worse yet, we were being publicly vilified for activities, such as a day out at the beach, which did fall within the remit of the rules. Any criticism from the mainstream media towards these absurd measures, however, were certainly few and far between.
Jacob Howland exposes tyranny masquerading in America as the following of ‘the science.’ A slice:
The United States remains a constitutional republic, but technocratic progressivism threatens its future as a representative democracy. It is telling that, in the mouths of the governing elites, the word “democracy” no longer refers to government of, by, and for the people, but to progressive policies that are endorsed by credentialed experts yet have little popular support. And now we must contend with a monstrous union of science and politics that lames and deforms both.
Consider government responses to Covid. At the outset of the pandemic, a handful of unelected public health officials immediately began to advise and direct policy decisions of enormous consequence. Our elected officials in the US, trembling before these scientific experts, have followed their recommendations with little consideration of the cost that lockdowns, school closures, vaccine mandates, and the like exact on the economic and political well-being of the country and the mental and physical health of its citizens. Similar measures were adopted across the globe.
Americans have from the beginning been told to follow the science, but the science has mostly followed politics. In June 2020, for example, over 1,200 medical and health professionals signed a letter arguing that, despite the high risk of viral transmission, prohibitions then in force on small gatherings like church services should not apply to large (and frequently destructive and violent) demonstrations protesting what the authors called “the pervasive lethal force of white supremacy”. And when the science pointed toward the likely origin of Covid in a Wuhan lab, top health officials conspired — for political reasons — to smother that news.
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