Russell Roberts's Blog, page 180
February 1, 2022
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 245 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:
The profits of producers are not transfers of wealth from consumers, and the losses of producers are not transfers from producers to consumers. The profits are the economy-wide increases in wealth as a result of more valuable uses of resources.
Profits are the unpredictable, but now discovered, increases in values of the responsible resources. The former lower values underestimated the future use values. No one knew earlier what the value of the resources would prove to be, else their market value would already have been that high.
[image error]
[image error]
[image error]
January 31, 2022
Complexity In Service to Simplicity
In my latest column for AIER I explain some of the reasons why the enormous and unprecedented simplicity of modern life depends upon the enormous and unprecedented complexity of the modern, global market economy. A slice:
As Adam Smith emphasized nearly 250 years ago, the greater the degree of specialization among producers – what Smith called “the division of labour” – the more productive is each producer. And the more productive is each producer, the greater is everyone’s access to goods and services. Lives are made simpler by simply having more stuff such as food, clothing, and shelter. Less time and effort are spent preparing for possible severe deprivations. Also, less time and effort are spent arranging for the reuse of materials and for the repairing of damaged goods. (When was the last time you darned a pair of socks?)
As producers become ever-more specialized, the processes and institutions that connect them constructively to each other – and to consumers – become ever-more complex. A cobbler need only acquire leather from the tanner across town, who in turn acquired rawhides from local farmers. Most of the productive actions that go into a pair of cobbler-made shoes are performed by the cobbler and a handful of other input suppliers. One human being can observe all of these actions and comprehend them.
But cobblers cannot make shoes in the enormous quantities that we today take for granted. Today’s shoes are made (and transported to market) largely by machines, each of which is a complex assortment of material inputs (including electricity, which must be generated and transmitted) and innovative ideas that originated in at least a few dozen different places around the globe. The markets – and market and legal institutions – that connect these many input suppliers to each other are themselves complex, relying as they do on particular contractual provisions, insurance availabilities, transportation options, and organizational arrangements.
The best way to organize some ‘stages’ of the production or distribution process of shoe inputs might be to have each of these stages performed by a single firm. For example, the same firm that stitches together the tongues, eyestays, and toe caps might also fasten the entire upper parts of the shoes to the soles. The optimal means of performing other ‘stages,’ though, might be performed by two or more different firms. Does the firm that fastens together all parts of the shoes also itself transport the finished shoes to wholesalers, or does that firm purchase this transportation service from another company?
Choose one way to carry out the production and distribution of shoes and you get one cost of doing so; choose another way and you get another cost. The challenge is that no one can know in the abstract what is the ‘best’ way to carry out the production and distribution of shoes. The only feasible way to acquire this information is to discover it through competition.
By allowing different suppliers to experiment with different ways of arranging for each segment of the production and distribution process, the arrangements that are relatively best will come to dominate those arrangements that are worse. In addition, if entrepreneurs are allowed to innovate, over time new means of arranging for each segment of the production and distribution process will be thought of and tried. These new means will compete against the existing means. The means that will ‘win’ – at least until yet another innovative idea comes along – will be the means that is the lowest cost.
Human Beings Are Not To Be Trusted With the Power to Lockdown
Here’s a letter to the Telegraph:
Editor:
Zoe Strimpel rightly decries New Zealand’s turn to tyranny in its fight against Covid (“Saint Jacinda has made controlling Covid a myopic moral mission, with no end in sight”, Jan. 29). But she errs in insisting that “lockdowns had their place.”
Accumulating evidence reveals lockdowns’ impotence against Covid’s spread and their brawn at inflicting on society enormous collateral damage. It’s unsurprising, then, that until early 2020 the public-health consensus was to deal with pandemics, not with lockdowns, but with what the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration call “Focused Protection.”
But a more fundamental reality is that no government – as the New Zealand experience reveals – is to be trusted with the power to lockdown. By its nature, such power is highly discretionary and, thus, inconsistent with the rule of law. And once this frenzied genie is let out of its bottle, containing it is extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible.
The power to lock us down might be safely entrusted to omniscient angels. Unfortunately, we’re governed, not by such seraphs, but by humans – a species whose hubris-prone members have a long history of lusting for power, seizing it, and then rationalizing its inevitable abuse.
Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
[image error]
[image error]
[image error]
Some Covid Links
We may be on the verge of the most consequential U.S. political realignment in almost a century. The cause is Covid—or to be precise, the mishandling of the pandemic response by government, media and the scientific establishment. As the Great Depression destroyed the American electorate’s faith in Wall Street and big business, sweeping in a Democrat-dominated political order, so too has the “Great Confinement”—in the form of lockdowns, shutdowns and mandates—wrecked faith in the basic competence of American government. As in 1932, the party out of power stands to benefit.
The U.S. isn’t alone. For the first time in history the leading industrialized nations decided to close their economies and order citizens to stay home for months at a time. They shuttered schools and businesses, imposed mask and vaccine mandates, and disrupted virtually every institution on which modern life depends.
Unfortunately, the Great Confinement didn’t work. It neither failed to stem the spread of Covid nor prevented large numbers of deaths. In many cases—the New York nursing-home horror being only one of the most extreme examples—it may have made the suffering worse. The governments responsible for the Great Confinement managed to do lasting damage to their nations’ economies. According to the consulting firm McKinsey, the global economy could suffer up to $35 trillion in losses by 2025.
…..
The pandemic tempted governments and their elite allies to treat citizens as passive objects to be dictated to, bullied and coerced en masse—an attitude not unlike that found in China, Cuba and North Korea—instead of as active thinking subjects with whom government is in partnership. With few exceptions (the Nordic countries are the best examples), governments failed to find ways to affirm that despite the pandemic, citizens were still individuals imbued with inalienable rights and independent moral standing. This is, after all, how most people see themselves in modern society—as free autonomous beings rather than as laboratory rats in a series of social science experiments.
…..
What people will remember from this extraordinary episode isn’t the experience of Covid itself, terrible though that’s been. It will be the ineptitude and incompetence of governing institutions that are supposed to protect citizens—and the indifference, as this was happening, of the media and scientific establishment.
In the U.S., the Great Confinement has left scars on the national psyche comparable to the effects of the Great Depression. This loss of faith has been compounded by government failure to deal with spiking violent-crime rates and the shocking dereliction of duty on the part of the nation’s teachers. Children and families feel as if they’ve been left stranded by the school systems they pay for with their tax dollars.
A policy of mass asymptomatic testing, contact tracing, and isolation/home quarantine is lockdown by stealth, one uninfected close contact at a time.
It is not surprising that die-hard lockdowners are claiming that we never really had a lockdown, now that it is clear to everyone the catastrophic failure of the dystopian pandemic plan they forced on the world.
Hours after @NCLAlegal sent our letter to GMU demanding they rescind student booster mandate, they did away with it albeit covertly- no email sent to GMU students yet. Congrats to all GMU students who are now free from medical tyranny, but esp @GrimHogun who fought hard for this!
Michael Betrus grades the governors of U.S. states on their Covid responses. Two slices:
The A’s
Governors Ron DeSantis (FL), Kristi Noem (SD), Pete Ricketts (NE), and Mark Gordon (WY). No governors faced more media pressure than Noem and DeSantis. Noem never locked down her state. She never state-mandated face masks. She held strong during a very difficult surge in November and December 2020. She leads a state populated comparably to a metro Dallas county, and made more headlines for her stance than anyone not named DeSantis. Still, fewer than half the South Dakotan kids were forced out of class in 2020 and local governments were permitted to put up their own restrictions.
DeSantis led the third most populated state with a higher-than-average elderly population. Early on he put in protections in long-term care facilities. He locked down last and reopened in May 2020. He removed state restrictions in September 2020, even as COVID-19 activity rose in the fall. He kept more classes open in Florida than any other large population state. And with that, Florida had no worse results than the national average. The burden was not on DeSantis and Noem to beat the street with their open states. The burden was on the lockdown states to have better results and that did not happen. You could not look at a blank chart of states’ COVID-19 performance and pick out the tightly restricted versus looser states. For that, these bold governors get an A on the curve.
…..
Complete Fails
Governors Andrew Cuomo (NY), Phil Murphy (NJ), Gavin Newsom (CA), Gretchen Whitmer (MI), J.B. Pritzker (IL), and Tom Wolf (PA). There’s a special place for governors that locked kids out of classrooms for a year and a half, ordered sick COVID-19 patients back into nursing homes, did not practice their own orders, shut down tens of thousands of businesses and still couldn’t beat the U.S average in COVID-19 deaths or excess all-cause deaths.
Glenn Reynolds shares an interesting thread that applies Timur Kuran’s notion of “preference falsification” to Covid and Covid policies. (HT David Henderson)
Here’s the latest from Jon Sanders. A slice:
Politics, not the pursuit of public health, has dominated the government’s reaction to Covid-19, and the fallout from the current surge and its implications are perceived to threaten influence on the critical midterm elections. In consequence, we have witnessed some key changes in recent days. Some of it has been a welcome admission of fallibility, though mostly without the applied lesson of such humility, which would be a wholesale repeal of their ineffective mandates and a willingness to rethink failed strategies.
For example, a Jan. 19 report from the Centers for Disease Control showed, among other things, that natural immunity from a prior infection of Covid-19 provided significantly stronger protection against the Delta variant than that offered by the current vaccines. The finding alone isn’t unusual; the research literature is suffused with studies (146 and counting as of this writing) attesting to the superior strength of natural immunity to Covid-19. What makes this finding significant is that it is from the CDC, which had previously recognized natural immunity only to cast doubt upon it in comparison with vaccine-induced immunity.
Dr. Steve James talks with UnHerd‘s Freddie Sayers about his opposition to vaccine mandates.
TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.)
Here’s a new song – “We the People” – by Kid Rock that includes criticism of Covid restrictions. (Warning: the lyrics are quite explicit.)
Peter Gregory reflects on the calamitous Covid policies pursued in Victoria, Australia. Two slices:
The first cultural issue that exacerbated the crisis is our tendency to value gesture over action. In a society that frequently punishes having the wrong opinion more severely than actually doing the wrong thing, it’s little wonder that political leaders resort to empty symbolism instead of actually governing. Governing is difficult, unglamorous, often thankless if you get it right and hell to pay if you don’t. Gesture is costless and easy – an alluring combination.
…..
The next reality Victorians (and others) have to acknowledge is that government spending doesn’t magically solve problems. Take a quick glance at the premier’s website if you can stomach it. It comprises announcement after announcement of millions of dollars for this program and that initiative. As if assigning a random dollar figure to the top of a media release will make up for all the pain this government has inflicted on people.
The most pathetic example of this was the motion in the Victorian upper house in November calling for the creation of a Minister for Loneliness. It’s hard to imagine a more bitterly ironic development. The latest report from the Victorian Agency for Health Information reveals that the number of children and teenagers being hospitalised with a mental health emergency is up 37 per cent on 2019 levels.
Aaron Sibarium reveals the terrible extent to which colleges and universities have embraced tyranny-seeded insanity in the name of fighting Covid. (HT Phil Magness, who accurately describes higher ed as being “a Faucist dystopia”) A slice:
COVID has normalized such surveillance throughout higher education. Many institutions, including Northwestern University, Carnegie Mellon University, Johns Hopkins University, Brown University, and Harvard University, have set up online forms and hotlines for students to anonymously report COVID “safety” violations.
Yale is a microcosm of the culture these policies are creating. For some students, it is also an ominous preview of what will happen when their peers graduate, as the norms of the ivory tower diffuse into the wider world.
“Like it or not, Yale generates the future leaders of this country,” said Trevor MacKay, a freshman at the university. “Making warrantless surveillance a normal and acceptable part of their lives is dangerous.”
At first, some students said they accepted Yale’s surveillance system out of genuine fear and uncertainty. But what were pitched as temporary stop gaps soon ossified into a seemingly permanent regime—one with very little transparency or due process.
Readers with a delicate constitution may want to avoid the government website at around 4pm on Monday afternoon.
For the first time since the start of the pandemic, coronavirus reinfections in England will be included on the daily Covid dashboard, in a revision that is likely to add hundreds of thousands of new cases to Britain’s cumulative total.
The wince-inducing rise will undoubtedly lead to hand-wringing from the usual quarters, and it will be remarkable if we get through this update without renewed calls to mask up and lock down.
But it is actually fairly good news. It means that we have significantly underestimated the mildness of omicron.
The biggest upside to the change is that the percentage of people dying from each positive test – the case fatality rate (CFR) – will fall.
Currently, the number of people dying after testing positive for coronavirus is hovering at around 0.95 per cent, after peaking at 10 per cent in April 2020 when testing was minimal.
But adding hundreds of thousands of cases to the figures will send the CFR towards something approaching flu fatalities.
Data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggest that around 0.1 to 0.2 per cent of symptomatic flu cases result in death. Adding such a large number of new cases will certainly take coronavirus towards that figure in Britain.
And here’s more excellent satire from the Babylon Bee.
[image error]
[image error]
[image error]
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 220 of Thomas Sowell’s magnificent 1995 work, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy:
When Bertrand de Jouvenel said that law had lost its soul, he meant that the grand concept of law was being eroded away, or prostituted, until it became nothing more than an ensemble of rules and rulings, changeable without notice, and reflecting little more than an arbitrary exercise of power – the very antithesis of law.
DBx: Pictured here is Bertrand de Jouvenel.
[image error]
[image error]
[image error]
January 30, 2022
Well, At Least They’re Reducing Their Children’s Prospects of Being Exposed to Covid-19
One of my very dearest friends lives in a northern Virginia neighborhood with lots of children in elementary school. My very dear friend is also a singularly wonderful cook and a thoughtful neighbor. A few days ago, she offered to cook crepes this weekend for the neighborhood children.
But then my friend received a request from some of the parents: ‘Please serve the crepes outdoors.’
What? asked my friend.
‘Please serve the crepes outdoors,’ the parents repeated. The parents elaborated: ‘We aren’t so much afraid of our kids catching Covid from you, or from each other, and suffering illness from it. But we want to reduce the chances of our kids becoming infected with Covid. Any student who tests positive for Covid must then stay home – that is, away from school and out of physical classrooms – for ten days. And we don’t want our kids missing any more school.’
(The school district for this northern Virginia neighborhood does not follow the CDC recommendation of keeping unvaccinated Covid-positive schoolchildren home for a ‘mere’ five days. Being hyper-Progressive – and thus ridiculously theatrical about all things Covid – this school district demands that Covid-positive schoolchildren stay home for ten days.)
My friend – who is a paragon of good sense – refused to prepare and serve the crepes outdoors. The reason for her refusal is that it is bitterly cold this weekend in northern Virginia, with actual daytime high temperatures consistently below freezing, and with snow and ice from Friday still on the ground.
Ponder the absurdity of parents being incited by Covid-hysterical school policies to be willing to subject their young children to the discomforts and dangers of socializing and dining outdoors in below-freezing temperatures in order to avoid any increase in the chances that their children will be exposed to a pathogen that is virtually harmless to these children. It’s utter madness.
Everyone who joined so mindlessly in the Covid hysteria – everyone who refused to put Covid’s dangers in perspective – everyone who treated Covid as a danger categorically worse for everyone, regardless of age, than many of the countless other dangers that we humans incessantly confront (usually without a second, or even a first, thought) – every one of these people played a role in creating and fueling this sort of madness, as harmful as it is irrational.
Some Non-Covid Links
The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal ably defends the unjustly embattled Ilya Shapiro. A slice:
The hilarious part is that, after she [Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus] lambastes Mr. Shapiro (and us), Ms. Marcus ends up agreeing with most of our point. “Would I be more comfortable if Biden hadn’t been quite so explicit? Yes. Partly because it carries an aura of unfairness to announce that no one will be considered who does not meet an announced racial test,” she writes.
So it’s okay to use a racial test for judges as long as it’s not explicit, but anyone other than Ruth Marcus who criticizes the explicit racial test is “racially tinged.” What she’s really saying is that conservatives are right in their criticism but only liberals can say so.
Now the phrase “lesser black woman” is a bad way of putting this, but it seems to me pretty clear that it was just a poorly chosen way of saying “less qualified black woman.” And that strikes me as an eminently legitimate criticism of Biden’s position, though as it happens one I don’t share. I think we should be having more debate about this subject, especially in law schools, rather than less; and I certainly don’t think professors or center directors should be fired for expressing such views (as some having been saying should happen to Shapiro).
President Biden had pledged that he’d select a black woman for this seat (he said he’d appoint a black woman to the Court, and this is likely the one vacancy that he’ll be able to fill in this presidential term). This is to say that he has limited himself to roughly 7% of the population. That makes it highly unlikely that whoever he picks would “objectively”—I take it Shapiro means based on professional qualifications apart from race and sex—be the best of the progressive picks for the spot.
To be sure, it’s of course possible that a black woman would be the most qualified candidate. It just isn’t very likely, the same way that it’s unlikely that you’re unlikely to get the objectively best person for any position if you announced that you would choose someone whose first name starts with D (also apparently about 7% of the population). Indeed, a common argument in favor of nondiscrimination in employment—and in favor of taking affirmative steps to broaden the pool of potential applicants—is that by artificially narrowing the pool of applicants (or even by failing to correct for existing narrowness of the pool) you’d be missing out on some of the best candidates.
(DBx: I describe the “rage” of the left against Shapiro as faux because it is abundantly clear from the context what Shapiro meant by his choice of words. To interpret his words as reflecting racist sentiments is to willfully misinterpret him – it is greedily and opportunistically to slander and libel Shapiro in order to score political points. Shapiro owed and owes no one an apology; the apology is owed to Shapiro. While we can all look back on nearly every phrase we’ve uttered or written and, pondering further, discover better ways to word our thoughts, there is no justification for holding anyone to a standard of perfection in communication. Again, an apology is owed to Shapiro by those who willfully and recklessly slander and libel him.)
Juliette Sellgren talks with Todd Zywicki about the 17th amendment.
But for all the talk of protecting consumers, antitrust cases are rarely about that. Long before becoming famous for his failed nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, Robert Bork won plaudits for his 1978 book, The Antitrust Paradox. Bork demonstrated that during the first 80 years of its existence, antitrust was used to stifle competition and protect powerful incumbent firms from innovative and often smaller rivals.
Research done since then reveals that the original goal of the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act (and subsequent statutes) wasn’t competition in the first place. The real goal was to protect politically powerful producers from market competition.
If Sen. John Sherman—after whom Congress’s first antitrust act is named—were really a friend of competition, he wouldn’t have staunchly supported the McKinley Tariff, which Congress passed a mere three months later. It was one of the largest tariff hikes in U.S. history and was meant to insulate powerful businesses from their rivals.
And so it goes today. Those who demand a revival of antitrust regulation to “promote competition” may not realize that they’re inciting a revival of cronyism to suppress competition.
David Henderson is reading the Lord Acton – Mandell Creighton correspondence.
Eric Boehm explains that today’s supply-chain web woes will not be solved with massive subsidies. A slice:
The White House’s solution to this “crisis” is, no surprise, to throw a lot of money around. In addition to the $52 billion in direct subsidies for chipmakers, the bill would spend another $45 billion on grants and loans meant to address vague supply chain issues and another $7 billion to help develop 10 “technology hubs” around the United States. (Read Adam Thierer, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center, on why top-down investment meant to create “a Silicon Valley in every state” is folly.)
But the semiconductors are central to the whole thing. And before lawmakers vote to hurl $52 billion at chipmakers, they ought to ask two important questions. The first is: Do they need it?
They clearly don’t. Last year, when Intel announced plans to build a new $20 billion fabrication facility in Arizona, CEO Pat Gelsinger said the project “would not depend on a penny of government support or state support.” (Though he immediately followed that comment by saying that “of course … we want incentives” and it appears that Congress is prepared to dutifully provide them.)
There’s also a ton of private sector investment flowing into semiconductor manufacturers right now—equity markets, it turns out, are much more efficient at identifying and fulfilling a need than government subsidies are—and the big chipmakers are not short on cash. The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world’s largest chipmaker, reported record profits last year. As of September, Intel’s net profit margin for the past decade was more than 15 percent.
In fact, Intel announced plans just this week for at least two new manufacturing facilities in Ohio. Samsung and the TSMC have also announced plans for U.S.-based factories. That’s not the sort of thing that industries and companies in desperate need of government aid tend to do—though they will surely be happy to receive taxpayer funds if Congress makes the offer.
David Bier makes a strong case for increasing H-2B guest-worker visas.
Part of what made the Trump boom unique, however, is who benefited the most. The economy grew in ways that mostly benefited low-income and middle-class households, categories that cover a disproportionate number of blacks. In 2016 the percentage of blacks who hadn’t completed high school was nearly double that of whites—15% vs. 8%—and the percentage of adults with a bachelor’s degree was 35% for whites and only 21% for blacks.
These education gaps are reflected in work patterns. Blacks are overrepresented in the retail, healthcare and transportation industries, which provide tens of millions of working- and middle-class jobs. In 2019, 54% of black households earned less than $50,000 a year, versus 33% of white households. At the other end of the income distribution, slightly more than half of all white households (50.7%) earned at least $75,000, compared with less than a third (29.4%) of black households. What this means is that reductions in income inequality can translate into reductions in racial inequality, which is what the country experienced in the pre-pandemic Trump economy.
Between 2017 and 2019, median household incomes grew by 15.4% among blacks and only 11.5% among whites. The investment bank Goldman Sachs released a paper in March 2019 that showed pay for those at the lower end of the wage distribution rising at nearly double the rate of pay for those at the upper end. Average hourly earnings were growing at rates that hadn’t been seen in almost a decade, but what “has set this rise apart is that it’s the first time during the economic recovery that began in mid-2009 that the bottom half of earners are benefiting more than the top half—in fact, about twice as much,” CNBC reported.
Some Covid Links
Nate Hochman, writing at National Review, decries Covid mission creep. Two slices:
The terms and conditions of the biomedical security state continue to shift under our feet. In a November 30 press conference, CDC director Rochelle Walensky assured the public that “we are not changing the definition of ‘fully vaccinated’ right now,” with the asterisk that “as that science evolves, we will look at whether we need to update our definition.” It’s not clear what part of “the science” has evolved since then, but less than two months later, Walensky told CBS that the CDC was introducing the term “up to date”: “Right now we’re pivoting our language. If you are eligible for a booster and you haven’t gotten it, you’re not ‘up to date,’ and you need to get your booster in order to be up to date.”
These public-health proclamations, with their carefully ambiguous language, seem designed to wave off criticisms as wild-eyed conspiracy theories. Until, of course, they aren’t. In early November, Ron DeSantis was “fact-checked” by the Independent for “falsely claim[ing] vaccinated citizens without boosters could be declared unvaccinated and lose their jobs.” Today, the British paper’s assurances that “the director of the CDC says the Biden administration has no plans to reclassify vaccinated people as unvaccinated if they don’t get boosters” seem a little less sure-footed.
…..
The pandemic mission creep doesn’t stop there. My home state of Oregon has opted to extend its mask mandate indefinitely. And recent months have seen the masking regime expand beyond Covid, as public-health officials, including Walensky herself, begin to suggest masks as a response to the flu. Citing numerous experts, Yale Medicine informed its readers last week that “COVID-19 is not the only reason to reconsider your mask. After a 2020–21 flu season that has been described as one of the mildest ones in memory, some experts were concerned about this flu season.” The article explains that a Yale Medicine emergency specialist also urges adults to consider wearing masks during flu season if they are at risk for or interact with people who are vulnerable to complications from the flu. “Because the flu hits you all of a sudden — you may feel fine even though you are potentially contagious,” the doctor said, “then all of a sudden you have a fever of 102.”
Gone is the sunny talk of a post-Covid America. On July 4, Biden declared “independence” from the virus before a crowd of more than a thousand attendees on the White House’s South Lawn. But as I pointed out earlier this month, “universities across the country are pushing forward with draconian restrictions, locking down campuses and quarantining students — all of whom are fully vaccinated and boosted, in compliance with the universities’ own requirements — in their rooms.” We’re not done with virtual school yet. We’re not done with mask mandates.
On top of that, vaccine passports aredebuting in cities across the country. Instead of “independence” from Covid, we are now facing perpetual subjugation.
New York Tough? New York traumatized is more like it.
Far from showing post-9/11 resiliency, Big Apple residents have curled up fetal-style to protect themselves from nearly nonexistent COVID-19. Not the foolish unvaccinated, mind you, but my fully, triple-vaxxed friends, neighbors and everyone else.
New cases, hospitalizations and deaths have been in free fall for weeks, according to the city’s Department of Health. The seven-day average of cases, for example, plummeted from more than 43,000 on Jan. 3 to under 7,000 this week.
For the fully vaccinated, the death risk is near-zero: currently it is 1.54 deaths per 100,000 people, or .00154%. You’ll more likely be carried off by Q: The Winged Serpent of 1980s New York schlock-movie lore.
No lectures, please about how easily the Omicron variant spreads. We’ve only read about it since early December. Although my wife and I have somehow dodged it so far, it’s infected my brother, my cousin, and seemingly every other person I know on earth. But none was truly sick beyond a day or two of fatigue and head colds. At least half who tested positive never had symptoms.
But lots of liberal-leaning New Yorkers take their guidance from politicians, lockdown-nostalgic media such as The New York Times and “experts” who have not once been right. These mostly Democratic believers in big government have embraced office- and crowd- avoidance — make that life-avoidance — like a security blanket.
For them, nothing beats sitting home with Netflix and munchies, packing on pounds and waiting for the next high school friend’s Instagram shots of kids and cats to provide a mirage of normal human connection.
The “sheltering in place” spirit seems to take deeper hold every week.
“Covid theater” includes such idiocy as requiring restaurant-goers to mask up during the ten seconds it takes to walk from an entrance to a table. And the even worse rule that makes staff, but not customers, wear the damn things all the time. Is anyone surprised that help’s so hard to find when employees are treated like lepers?
Carrie Lukas calls on Fairfax County Public Schools to let schoolchildren ditch masks.
But now, as Omicron gently settles there, Ardern’s New Zealand has lost any remaining halo of Covid superiority. It looks neither ‘compassionate’, nor even ‘tough’ or ‘hardline’ but completely pathological. Mad. Bonkers. Pitiable. And not without a whiff of totalitarianism.
You might think that a lefty as vocally committed to social justice and human rights as Ardern would shy away from draconian curbs based on a chimaera (zero covid). In the absence of a credible threat, it is a strategy whose main effect would be to destroy people’s livelihoods and will to live.
In fact, those who purport, like [Jacinda] Ardern, to be the most virtuous and “inclusive”, the keenest on helping the marginalised, are often all too comfortable playing fast and loose with the little people’s lives: and the keenest on controlling everyone. They love power – so long as it’s in their hands – and Covid has provided a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for grabbing it.
…..
But the most chilling aspect of Ardern’s monomaniacal leadership is the complete lack of respect for borders – not their inviolability (she has shown that aspect of them to be firmly intact) but their prison-like oppressiveness.
Previously, it was possible to enter New Zealand, by winning a coveted slot in a quarantine hotel, where you would be watched over by military personnel throughout. But since the Omicron Nine, the country has now closed itself to all travellers. Tourism was once New Zealand’s biggest export, but too bad: the Dear Leader’s obsession with total control comes first.
Speaking of the once-free country of New Zealand, consider this news: “A pregnant New Zealand journalist says she has had to turn to the Taliban for help after being prevented from returning to her home country due to quarantine rules.” (HT Matthew Saywell). Here’s more:
In a column published in the New Zealand Herald on Saturday, Charlotte Bellis said it was “brutally ironic” that she had once questioned the Taliban about their treatment of women and she was now asking the same questions of her own government.
“When the Taliban offers you – a pregnant, unmarried woman – safe haven, you know your situation is messed up,” Bellis wrote in her column.
New Zealand’s Covid-19 response minister, Chris Hipkins, told the Herald his office had asked officials to check whether they had followed the proper procedures in Bellis’s case, “which appeared at first sight to warrant further explanation”.
New Zealand has managed to keep the spread of the virus to a minimum during the pandemic and has reported just 52 virus deaths among its population of 5 million.
But the country’s requirement that even returning citizens spend 10 days isolating in quarantine hotels run by the military has led to a backlog of thousands of people wanting to return home vying for spots.
Stories of citizens stranded abroad in dire circumstances have caused embarrassment for prime minister Jacinda Ardern and her government.
Kathy Gyngell asks if we are witnessing the rise of resistance to the Covidocracy.
About yesterday’s protest in Ottawa by truckers against vaccine mandates, Martin Kulldorff tweets:
Truckers understand public health better than some public health officials.
The movement received an endorsement Thursday from Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who tweeted, ‘Canadian truckers rule’ and the movement has become a cause celebre for many on the right of politics in the United States.
Flying the Canadian flag, waving banners demanding “Freedom” and chanting slogans against Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the truckers were joined by thousands of other protesters angered not only by Covid-19 restrictions but by broader discontent with the government.
There was an enormous clamor as hundreds of big trucks, their engines rumbling, sounded their air horns non-stop. Estimates of the number of truckers range from 10-20,000.
Closer to Parliament, families calmly marched on a bitterly cold day, while young people chanted and older people in the crowd banged pots and pans in protest under Trudeau’s office windows.
Margery Smelkinson, Leslie Bienen, and Jeanne Noble make the case, in the Atlantic, against masks in schools. (HT my intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy) Two slices:
Therefore, the overall takeaway from these studies—that schools with mask mandates have lower COVID-19 transmission rates than schools without mask mandates—is not justified by the data that have been gathered. In two of these studies, this conclusion is undercut by the fact that background vaccination rates, both of staff and of the surrounding community, were not controlled for or taken into consideration. At the time these studies were conducted, when breakthrough infections were much less common, this was a hugely important confounding variable undermining the CDC’s conclusions that masks in schools provide a concrete benefit in controlling COVID-19 spread: Communities with higher vaccination rates had less COVID-19 transmission everywhere, including in schools, and those same communities were more likely to have mask mandates.
…..
Over the past 21 months, slowly and with much resistance, the layers of mythology around COVID-19 mitigation in schools have been peeled away, each time without producing the much-ballyhooed increases in COVID-19. Schools did not become hot spots when they reopened, nor when they reduced physical distancing, nor when they eliminated deep-cleaning protocols. These layers were peeled away because the evidence supporting them was weak, and they all had substantial downsides for children’s education and health.
Roger Watson’s sympathies are rightly with those who are crushed beneath the Covid jackboot.
Fauci continues to prove that he is a political monster, wedded in no way to any real science. (DBx: If humanity regains its good senses, Fauci will be remembered by history as the quintessential arrogant, myopic, power-lusting, and socially destructive bureaucrat. Fauci alone is a powerful argument against the administrative state.)
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 31 of William Easterly’s superb 2013 book, The Tyranny of Experts:
Hayek was blunt that a “national goal” just covered up the fact that some goals for some groups were attained at the expense of other goals for other groups.
DBx: Experts at most can explain how best to achieve an agreed-upon goal. Experts cannot, however, choose which goals should be pursued. Nor can experts – this fact follows from the previous one – tell us whether or not additional ‘units’ of desirable goal A are worth the corresponding necessary sacrifice of some ‘units’ of desirable goals B, C, …, N.
Not surprisingly, of course, many ‘experts’ – especially those with political power or influence – ignore this inescapable reality. They speak and act as if there is widespread-enough agreement on ‘social’ goals. Thus is the way cleared for ‘experts’ to treat the masses as pieces on a chessboard.
Russell Roberts's Blog
- Russell Roberts's profile
- 39 followers
