Russell Roberts's Blog, page 183
January 24, 2022
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 185 of the late Paul Heyne’s March 1985 paper “The U.S. Catholic Bishops and the Pursuit of Justice,” as this paper is reprinted in the excellent 2008 collection of Heyne’s writings, “Are Economists Basically Immoral?” and Other Essays on Economics, Ethics, and Religion (Geoffrey Brennan and A.M.C. Waterman, eds.) (original emphasis):
“Limited government” does not mean government that limits itself; all governments limit themselves at some point. Limited government means government limited by rules that citizens know and can count on. It means a government that revises the rules only in accordance with the rules. Many students of government have in recent years begun to see the limitation of government in this sense as the critical problem facing democracies. The processes of democratic government are falling increasingly under the control of special-interest groups, groups that can use their intense interest in single issues to coerce legislatures into an endless series of enactments that sacrifice the public interest.
DBx: Indeed so. And making matters even worse, in the nearly 40 years that have passed since Paul wrote these words, more and more the agencies that are acting arbitrarily (that is, lawlessly) are those of the executive branch.
January 23, 2022
A Gruesome Anniversary
Two years ago today – on January 23rd, 2020 – general lockdown of society was invented, by the Chinese communist government, as a means of fighting a virus. What a terrible day. Here’s Will Jones:
Today, January 23rd, is the day, in 2020, when the world changed as China first implemented in Wuhan the novel public health policy that has come to define the COVID-19 pandemic. Previously regarded as impossible, ineffective and far too harmful to be ethically acceptable, humanity now faces the prospect of lockdowns as a constant threat in the face of future outbreaks of contagious disease.
Initially in 2020 seen as something distinctively Chinese in its authoritarian harshness, within days the World Health Organisation had cast aside its own pandemic rulebook and held the Chinese response up as a model to the world. When Italy and then other countries followed suit in the ensuing weeks it was with the full backing and support of the WHO. Very soon, it became those few countries, like Sweden and the U.K., who refused to implement this novel and unscientific intervention who were regarded as irresponsible outliers. Almost all would fall in line.
Somehow, in the coming months and years, the damage done to humanity through this now accepted but vastly disproportionate and ineffective response to contagious disease needs to be undone and lockdown as a public health intervention consigned to history.
Amen.
Some Non-Covid Links
David Henderson asks if California’s government will raise taxes even more. A slice:
To add insult to injury, the bill’s authors say the tax would be imposed “for the privilege of doing business” in California. And here I thought doing business was a right, not a privilege. Silly me.
A basic principle in the economics of taxation is that a tax rarely sticks where it lands. Translation: whoever pays the tax almost never bears the whole burden. The payer passes on at least some, and often much, of the burden to consumers.
That’s especially true for a state tax. The reason: businesses are free to move to other states and they will do so until the before-tax rate of profit rises in California to compensate businesses for staying. That means higher prices.
Also from David Henderson is this new essay busting myths about, and explaining the dangers of, price controls. Two slices:
“This is a great suppressed topic. It was absolutely mainstream from the start of World War II until the Reagan administration.” This is a quote from “Price Controls Set Off Heated Debate as History Gets a Second Look,” a January 13 New York Times article by Ben Casselman and Jeanne Smialek. The speaker quoted is James (Jamie) K. Galbraith, a left-wing economist at the University of Texas. The “this” in the quote refers price controls, which Galbraith appears to favor. He comes by it honestly. His father, the late John Kenneth Galbraith, was a high-level official in the Office of Price Administration during World War II, and he sometimes reflected fondly on the power that he exerted over the US economy.
I disagree with Galbraith that the topic has been suppressed. We opponents of price controls have been quite willing to discuss why they’re a bad idea. If he were to be more accurate, Galbraith would have to say that the idea has been rejected. Indeed, the heartening point of the Times article is that the vast majority of economists, including left-wing economists such as Paul Krugman, reject the idea of comprehensive government controls on prices. But sometimes it’s hard for people who are losing a debate to admit that they’ve lost, not because the topic has been suppressed but because their idea has been analytically crushed. It’s worthwhile, therefore, to say why they are such a bad idea. Price controls cause shortages, waste people’s time in line, sometimes lead to favoritism by suppliers, and, as in the case of oil and gasoline in the 1970s, can lead to harmful regulation that lasts for decades.
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Another effect of price controls is to change the product. Imagine that you own an apartment complex on which the government imposes rent controls that force the rent below what you were planning to charge. For a given apartment, you now have more qualified tenants than you would have had with no rent control. So your incentive to maintain the property and to furnish amenities such as parking decreases. Further pushing you in that direction is the fact that you have less revenue to pay for maintenance and amenities. The product changes.
In “Price Controls,” published in David R. Henderson, ed., The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, Rutgers University economist Hugh Rockoff points out that because of US price controls during World War II, “fat was added to hamburger” and “candy bars were made smaller and of inferior ingredients.”
We saw a major change in the product when the Nixon price controls on oil and gasoline, first imposed on August 15, 1971, collided with the world price of oil, which OPEC raised from about $3 per barrel to about $11 per barrel during the fall of 1973. The Nixon price controls set the price of so-called “old oil” at $4.25 and later $5.25 per barrel. Gasoline prices were allowed to rise to reflect that price increase but not to reflect the world price of $11 per barrel. With the United States importing much of its oil, that was a huge problem. At the artificially low price of gasoline that resulted, there were line-ups for gasoline in the fall of 1973 and the winter and spring of 1974. I’m old enough to remember that when you pulled into a gasoline station, a gasoline station attendant washed your windshield and, if you wanted, you could get a high-quality map inside the station for free. Both of those aspects of the product disappeared over a few months.
Tarnell Brown’s contribution to this month’s Liberty Matters discussion about the work of my late, great colleague Walter Williams is available by scrolling down here.
The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board decries the ever-expanding federal criminal code. Two slices:
How many federal crimes has Congress created? The question seems like it ought to have a straightforward answer that citizens can look up. In fact it’s more like asking, “how many genes are in the human genome?” The answer is in the many thousands, but despite decades of counting, no one knows for sure.
A new project by the Heritage Foundation and George Mason University’s Mercatus Center says it is “the first effort to ‘count the Code’ since 2008.” The researchers created an algorithm with key phrases like “shall be punished” and “shall be fined or imprisoned” to search tens of thousands of pages in the U.S. Code.
In the 2019 Code, they found 1,510 criminal sections. By examining some of those sections at random, they estimated that they encompass 5,199 crimes in total. The Heritage Foundation report notes that “there is no single place where any citizen can go to learn” all federal criminal laws, and even if there were, some “are so vague that . . . no reasonable person could understand what they mean.”
By running their algorithm on past versions of the U.S. Code going back to 1994, the researchers also estimate the rate at which criminal laws are proliferating. There were about 36% more criminal sections in 2019 than 25 years earlier, for an overall growth rate of 1.27% per year. More than half of the growth took place from 1994 through 1996. Since the mid-1990s, the biggest annual increases were in 2005-2006 (2.48%) and 2011-2012 (2.76%).
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But even when it comes to conduct everyone agrees should be criminal, the inexorable expansion of the Code has serious consequences for justice and federalism. The Constitution envisioned that most lawbreaking would be handled by state governments, while the federal government’s jurisdiction would be narrower.
“Liberties Are Only Kept Safe by the Limitation of Government Power” – so explains Gary Galles.
Brian Albrecht asks: Are there low-skilled workers? Two slices:
Let’s think about the demand side for a second. Firms demand workers. Why? We call this type of demand “derived demand” because the firm doesn’t directly want workers. Instead, the firm wants what the worker “produces” in the most general use of that term. Firms want workers that sell goods, fix IT problems, clean up messes at the office, and do all sorts of things that ultimately help the firm make money.
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Here’s where I disagree with Jerusalem [Demsas]: I’m fine calling the thing that firms demand, whatever it is, “skills.” A quick use of the old Google machine tells me that the definition of skill is “the ability to do something well.” Once we’ve fixed the task we are talking about, we can see that more skilled workers will get paid more.
But even more generally, I stick with the language of skills because I don’t think it is confusing/misleading even for non-economists. If I say something mandate like “high skill workers earn more,” no reasonable person will come back with, “That’s false, since I’m very skilled at rapidly translating Ovid into Klingon and yet don’t make any money doing it.”
The list of terms excluded in the name of inclusion often borders on ridiculous. I was amused to picture some millennials, programmed by years of training in diversity, equity and inclusion, sitting around at a sensitivity-training meeting coming up with this list.
.As a “senior citizen,” I was surprised to find that this term isn’t inclusive enough for Google, as is the quaint “80 years young.” Instead, Google says my cohort should be called “older adults.” Apparently the push for inclusion goes beyond people. Google urges developers to replace “older version” when describing computer programs with “earlier version.”
Other terms describing computer programs have also been proscribed. A developer can no longer say that some functionality is “crippled” by a bug or that anomalous data seem “crazy.” And “dummy variable,” a key term in coding, should now be replaced with “placeholder,” which seems no more inclusive to me, and I doubt a dummy variable, even if it could care, would.
My favorite proscription is against the word “smartphone.” Presumably Google assumes other phones will be offended.
This is all rather silly, but there are at least two underlying problems with scrubbing words from language. First, it’s a waste of time. While groups like the Association for Computing Machinery waste time debating whether the term “quantum supremacy”—the threshold where a quantum computer first solves a problem a classical computer cannot solve in any feasible time—should be replaced because it alludes to “crimes against humanity,” computer scientists in China and elsewhere are working to achieve quantum supremacy.
Arnold Kling rightly complains about the careless use of “supply” and “demand.” A slice:
Conventional macroeconomic analysis proceeds as if all economic activity takes place in a single firm. I call this the GDP factory. “Aggregate demand,” meaning the total demand for everything in the economy, can be thought of as demand for the output of this GDP factory. “Aggregate supply” can be thought of as the ability of the GDP factory to supply output.
When there is high unemployment, conventional macro attributes this to a lack of aggregate demand. The GDP factory does not need as many workers, so some workers are told to stay home.
When there is low unemployment and firms have unfilled positions, as has been the case in the United States recently, conventional macro attributes this to a lack of aggregate supply. The GDP factory wants more workers, but the only potential workers are people who prefer to stay home. Conventional economists term this a “supply shock” or a “supply constraint.”
In the macro story, the price mechanism has disappeared. There can be a shortage of jobs. Or there can be a shortage of workers. But nothing that happens to prices, including the price of labor, can change that. So the macroeconomic concept of “supply and demand” utterly disregards the way that supply and demand are supposed to operate.
The conventional view is that instead of prices adjusting to keep aggregate demand and aggregate supply in balance, the task falls on our central bank, the Federal Reserve. The Fed uses its tools to raise aggregate demand to fight unemployment or to lower aggregate demand to fight inflation. Larry Summers, who represents the conventional view, is all over the media these days saying that we have too much demand and the Fed needs to tighten policy in order to bring about balance.
I have a heterodox view that rejects all of this. I consider the GDP factory story misleading, because the actual economy consists of millions of different types of work. To coordinate all of this, markets develop what I call Patterns of Sustainable Specialization and Trade. Individual workers specialize in different productive activities, which means that we need to trade in the market. The patterns of trade that emerge are sustainable only as long as they are efficient relative to overall conditions, including available resources and the state of knowledge in society.
Qualified immunity allows state and local agents to infringe on your rights without fear of civil suits if the precise way in which they violate those rights has not been “clearly established” in a prior court ruling. Buried underneath that legalese are stories that would be comical if they didn’t involve real people who had no recourse after dealing with misbehaving civil servants.
Chris Edwards explains that “federal finances are still badly broken.” A slice:
For years, both parties have increased spending and debt with little regard for the long‐term costs. Accumulated federal borrowing (“debt held by the public”) increased $3.0 trillion under eight years of George W. Bush, $8.1 trillion under eight years of Barack Obama, $7.2 trillion under four years of Donald Trump, and it will about $2.9 trillion under the first two years of Joe Biden. One reason the Republican Party should move beyond Trump is that he was a big spender and the country needs new leadership that takes the debt threat seriously.
Federal debt now stands at almost $24 trillion—the same size as gross domestic product (GDP)—and it amounts to about $187,000 for every household in the nation. Without budget reforms, rising debt will precipitate an economic crisis. Statistical studies show that government debt is likely already slowing our economic growth. Borrowing from the future to spend today also undermines democracy because it ties the hands of future generations and imposes costs on them without their consent.
Some Covid Links
Have you begun to suspect that at least some of the people who have been responsible for seeing us through, or reporting on, the Covid crisis are unwilling to let it go? Not the virus itself, of course. It would be quite wicked to suggest that anyone in a position of power or influence wanted the illness to continue as a real threat.
So no, it is not the existence of Covid-19 as a disease that is begging to be prolonged but the state of emergency that accompanied it. And it is not just those actually in charge of the policy who seem to be touched by this reluctance to accept its end: the sense that public discipline and social control were being imposed on justifiable grounds had an appeal not only to those who were doing the enforcing but, it is now clear, to an alarmingly large percentage of the population.
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The motives of those self-interested lobbies who would love to prolong these indulgences are perfectly rational. They are not the people who should worry us. Nor are the actual engineers of these restrictions who may (or may not) always have acted in good conscience, seeking to impose and maintain whatever limitations on normal behaviour they could plausibly defend as necessary to reduce the risk. Presumably they would say that so many of those restrictions which we now understand to have been pointless, contradictory and even absurd could be defended on the grounds that they helped create an atmosphere of fear and anxiety which was conducive to compliance with the rules that actually did have some point.
This is the heart of the matter, the truth which must not be allowed to slip away in the moment of euphoria that comes with the return of our liberties. Fear and anxiety were deliberately induced in order to create what amounted to a national neurosis. (Or something worse – many of the habits we were forced to adopt in avoiding personal contact or physical proximity were nothing less than a simulacrum of psychosis.)
What is becoming alarmingly clear is how many people welcomed this assumption of unprecedented state power. This might have been understandable at the most extreme point of the epidemic, especially before the arrival of a clutch of effective vaccines. But why, as the risk has demonstrably declined to a level that is comparable with commonplace respiratory diseases, is there still a significant section of the population longing to keep such unnatural limits and restrictions on their own – and everybody else’s – lives?
The inescapable conclusion is that there is, at the deepest level of human consciousness, a totalitarian impulse which is beyond the reach of rational argument or moral conscience. The desire to be taken care of, to have decisions taken out of one’s hands, to be relieved of the responsibility for making choices is an ineradicable feature of our condition which has been exploited by every dictatorship in history.
Jeffrey Tucker asks if knowledge of natural immunity is “lost knowledge.”
New Zealand seems still to be pursuing the impossible goal of zero Covid. A slice:
New Zealand will make household contacts of Covid cases isolate for 24 days under harsh new rules brought in to combat an impending Omicron outbreak.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has brought in the strict measures as the country battles to stay Covid Zero despite the threat of the highly contagious mutant strain.
But critics say the lengthy quarantine period is ‘unworkable’ and will lead people to avoid getting tested.
Also still in pursuit of the impossible goal of zero Covid are the authoritarians in China.
Last week, a group of scientists, doctors, and academics published an open letter calling on Spotify “to take action against the mass-misinformation events which continue to occur on its platform”. Specifically, they were objecting to two recent episodes of Joe Rogan’s podcast, in which he interviewed the prominent vaccine sceptics Dr. Peter McCullough and Dr. Robert Malone. “By allowing the propagation of false and societally harmful assertions,” the letter claimed, “Spotify is enabling its hosted media to damage public trust in scientific research.”
I am an associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics, as well as a practising physician, and I firmly believe that it would be a mistake to censor Rogan under the guise of combating “misinformation”.
Rogan is not a scientist, and, like everyone else, he has his biases. But he is open-minded, sceptical, and his podcast is an important forum for debate and dialogue. It is not enough, moreover, to simply dismiss Malone and McCullough as conspiracy theorists. They are controversial and polarising figures, but they do have real credentials. Malone is a physician who has worked in molecular biology and drug development for decades, while McCullough was, until recently, an academic cardiologist and researcher.
Both speakers made accurate and useful points on Rogan’s podcast — as well as unsupported, speculative, alarmist, and false ones. The correct way to deal with incorrect ideas in biomedicine, if they rise to a level of prominence that warrants rebuttal, is to rebut them.
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At times, Malone refers to accurate studies, but I worry the audience draws the wrong inference. Malone, for instance, claims that natural immunity is six to 13 times more effective than the vaccine at preventing hospitalisation and 27 times more effective against developing symptomatic disease. I assume he is referring to this August 2021 study from Israel. This study does indeed suggest that natural immunity is more protective than vaccines against the Delta variant, though it also suggests that natural immunity plus a single vaccine dose is more protective than natural immunity alone.
While this has implications for the number of doses a Covid-19 survivor might consider getting, it should not be misconstrued to mean that infection is preferable to vaccination for an adult who has yet to experience either. Vaccination is almost surely preferable for most un-immune adults.
TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.) (HT Martin Kulldorff)
That the powers-that-be in the developed world did not declare the pandemic over after a sufficiently large fraction of the vulnerable population was vaccinated has mystified me for almost a year. Unfortunately, zero covid fanatics and immunity deniers got their disastrous way.
If they want to encourage people to get vaccinated because they think [vaccination] protect[s] against serious illness, then fine. But continuing to make false assertions about transmission that not even the companies themselves will make… well, I just don’t get it. It is just plain weird.
In Britain, the vaccine mandate for National Health Service personnel has been delayed.
The Biden Administration said Friday it will appeal a federal judge’s injunction against its vaccine mandate for federal employees. But why bother? The White House says 98% of federal workers have complied. Increasingly the Biden mandates seem more about punishing than protecting people.
President Biden would seem to have stronger legal grounds for a mandate on federal workers than on private ones. The Administration argued that civil-service laws give the President carte blanche authority over the federal workforce, especially when to protect the public.
But as Judge Jeffrey Brown explained in his ruling, Congress granted the President limited authority to regulate “the conduct” of executive branch employees. Getting vaccinated isn’t workplace “conduct.” The judge also noted that the public harm from firing unvaccinated workers who provide vital government services exceeds the negligible public-health benefit.
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While protecting against severe disease, vaccines don’t prevent infection and transmission. Why won’t the Administration back down even following legal defeat?
Perhaps because vaccine mandates and coercion are popular with progressive voters. A Rasmussen poll last week reported that 59% of Democratic voters would support a government policy confining the unvaccinated to their homes, except for emergencies. Nearly half (48%) of Democratic voters also thought the governments should be able to fine or imprison individuals who publicly question the efficacy of vaccines on social media.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 29 of the 2006 Liberty Fund edition of Ludwig von Mises’s 1956 volume, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality (available free-of-charge on-line here):
Capitalism provides many with the opportunity to display initiative. While the rigidity of a status society enjoins on everybody the unvarying performance of routine and does not tolerate any deviation from traditional patterns of conduct, capitalism encourages the innovator. Profit is the prize of successful deviation from customary types of procedure; loss is the penalty of those who sluggishly cling to obsolete methods. The individual is free to show what he can do in a better way than other people.
DBx: Indeed.
Loss, though, in market economies can be suffered also by those who do try new uses of resources. More specifically, in market economies loss also arises from using resources in ways the final results of which are worth less than would be the final results of using those same resources in at least one different and better way (where “better” is determined by the voluntary and unobstructed spending by people of their own money).
January 22, 2022
The Irresponsibility of Intellectuals
Here’s a letter to Spiked:
Editor:
Christopher Snowdon rightly criticizes the modellers whose “projections” of Covid calamity spread panic throughout society and state, but who refuse accountability for their errors (“The catastrophe of the Covid models,” Jan. 21). Equally deserving of such criticism are the many pundits and professors who – well-equipped with laptops, Zoom accounts, and DoorDash apps – effectively collaborated with these modellers by electronically spitting venom at anyone who proposed alternatives to lockdowns or who insisted that there’s more to life than avoidance of one particular pathogen. These savants and sages will never acknowledge, and much less apologize for, their recklessness and blunders.
Such behavior is par for the course for too many intellectuals. As Joseph Epstein astutely observed, “[o]ne of the delights of being an intellectual is that one is expected to have opinions about everything while incurring responsibility for nothing.”*
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
* Joseph Epstein, Narcissus Leaves the Pool (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), page 25.
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Some Covid Links
Everything the [British] government has got right on Covid-19 in the past 12 months has happened when it ignored ‘the science’. If the modellers hadn’t made such fools of themselves in the summer and autumn of 2021 they might have been taken more seriously by the government in the winter. As it was, their incompetence had seeded enough doubt in Johnson’s mind for him to resist going beyond ‘Plan B’ despite almost every ‘scenario’ modelled telling him that hospitalisations and deaths from the virus would exceed anything England had ever seen before.
Nevertheless, it was a close call. On 21 December, Johnson delayed making a decision on whether Christmas would be allowed to go ahead as normal while he awaited a report from Imperial College about the severity of Omicron. When this was published the following day it showed a 40 to 45 per cent reduction in the risk of hospitalisation compared to Delta, and a 50 per cent reduction in risk for people who had a prior infection.
This belated admission of Omicron’s ‘mildness’ changed the game. Less than a week earlier, the same team at Imperial College, led by Professor Neil Ferguson, had said they could find ‘no evidence… of Omicron having different severity from Delta’. On the day before that, the chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, had appeared on television telling the nation that ‘there are several things [about Omicron] we don’t know but all the things we do know are bad’.
This was wilful blindness. By mid-December, everything we needed to know about Omicron had been explained to us by doctors in South Africa over and over again. They told us that it was much less severe. They told us to expect a large number of ‘incidental’ cases involving people who were in hospital with Covid but were not in hospital because of Covid. They told us to expect more children to be affected but with only very mild symptoms. They told us that Omicron patients rarely needed to be put on ventilation. They told us that there were relatively few deaths despite high levels of infection. All of this is now apparent in the UK’s healthcare data.
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Some understanding of human behaviour would seem to be the minimum requirement if you are going to try to chart the course of a virus that spreads from human to human. If you ignore this and you ignore all the data coming out of a country that has direct experience of the virus you are studying, your model will be worse than useless.
The hysterical reaction of so many people to Covid-19 revealed to Jon Sanders that he’s quite the daredevil – except when it comes to state power. Here’s his conclusion:
What I don’t want is a life ruled by “zero risk” strictures. It’s impossible. The only way we’ve seen it tried is by central planners in police states, but all they really wind up accomplishing is outlawing people from telling the truth about zero chance of producing zero risk. As I said, I tend to be risk averse, and the risk of “zero risk” tyranny is far, far too great for me.
Patrick Henry declared under a much greater risk environment, “Give me liberty, or give me death!” My request is not so audacious. I seek the liberty we had even if it comes with a slight uptick in risk.
“I find it phenomenally disappointing that people are willing to play politics with children’s lives,” Gov. Kathy Hochul preened Friday of resistance to her masking mandate for New York schoolchildren — thereby playing a disgraceful bit of politics herself.
It’s now beyond doubt that masking kids, especially tots, does nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Most coronavirus variants barely touch children under 12; kids don’t spread it, either. And absolutely nothing stops Omicron (which thankfully has proved far less deadly).
More, masking adults has proved a false security: Cloth masks do nothing; the blue medical masks are about 10% effective. N95 masks are better, but even doctors rarely wear them for more than an hour or so because it’s so hard to breathe through them.
And masks impose a big cost on many kids, especially those with breathing issues or more serious disabilities. And they can compromise key development of 5-and-unders, who rely heavily on facial cues.
Mask mandates for schoolchildren are just harmful anti-COVID theater, a sop to misinformed adults — especially teacher-union members, who wield great political power.
Telegraph columnist Camilla Tominey calls for toppling “the failed lockdown elites.” Three slices:
Yet in yet another sign of how some in the Left-wing teaching establishment have spent the pandemic prioritising themselves over pupils, we now read that dozens of headteachers are defying the Government over face-coverings in the classroom by insisting that children continue to wear them despite the official guidance being changed.
More than 100 schools have written to parents to say that pupils must carry on wearing masks in lessons, despite the Prime Minister’s announcement that they are no longer necessary.
Boris Johnson has decreed that, from January 26, they will no longer need to be worn in corridors or communal areas, either.
Naturally, the teaching unions have accused him of flouting his “duty of care” to teachers – once again demonstrating their total disregard for the wellbeing of the children in their care.
The truth is that mask-wearing in schools has never made any sense to me. Notwithstanding the lack of clarity over the efficacy of wearing non-surgical face coverings – children are arguably the least hygienic, most ineffective mask-wearers of all.
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Yet the continued hysteria in the teaching profession unfortunately speaks to a wider societal malaise. Despite the triumph of the vaccination programme, and the clear evidence that the UK is finally getting on top of the Covid-19 pandemic, too much of Britain is still in the grip of virus terror.
Even though the vast majority of omicron sufferers only have a very mild illness, you’ve still got a unique cabal of lockdown fanatics clinging to masks and other measures for dear life.
Yet anyone with any sense – and frankly, the faintest respect for civil liberties – knows that it is not just time to end Plan B restrictions but all Covid measures.
That’s what learning to live with coronavirus actually is.
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We’ve spent two years being dictated to by the sort of insufferable jobsworths who delight in telling others how to live their lives. This pandemic has been a gift to the invisible high-vis jacket wearers of the world. Now we finally have a chance to unmask them.
TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.)
Here’s some good news out of Ireland.
The West’s Covid-19 strategy of lockdowns, mass vaccinations and extreme curbs is losing credibility by the moment, even if various wannabe-despots are slow to realise it.
Despite vaccination levels running at 70 per cent and above in many Western nations, Covid cases are at record levels across the UK, Europe, Australia, the US, Israel and more, nearly two years after the virus first escaped China. The variants are outrunning the scientists’ vaccines, vaccine efficacy is waning, and multiple health authorities such as the WHO and the European Medicines Agency (EMA) have come out warning against repeated boosters, not only because they were designed for previous variants, but because they may have adverse health effects. ‘We should be careful in not overloading the immune system with repeated immunizations,’ warned Marco Cavaleri, the EMA head of vaccines strategy. Former UK vaccine agency boss Dr Clive Dix says vaccinations have now become a ‘waste of time’. And finally, early treatments are in focus – new drugs, antivirals and more.
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Here, Australian Bureau of Statistics figures up to October 2021 put the median age of Covid deaths at 83, (which is also our life expectancy), of whom 70 per cent had chronic pre-existing conditions, commonly heart disease. By mid-January, as cases and testing raged, Covid’s death tally had climbed to nearly 2,600 over nearly two years. In contrast, flu and pneumonia killed 4,124 Australians in 2019, around 11 people a day, and somehow, we didn’t panic, mask or lock down. Our Covid case fatality rate is one per cent, barely affecting those under 60 (0.1 per cent) but far deadlier for the elderly. Relatives who’ve had it recently say it’s just a bad cold. So, if you’re ill, old, or obese, take your shots, but normal life should return for everyone else.
This sounds remarkably like the strategy outlined in the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), authored by eminent scientists from Oxford, Harvard, and Stanford, and signed by 60,000 physicians, which argued for focussed protection, herd immunity and early treatments – not mass vaccination, lockdowns and masking. The US health establishment colluded to bury this push, an email recently emerging in which the National Institutes of Health boss, Francis Collins, asked National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases head honcho Anthony Fauci for ‘a quick and devastating take down’ of these ‘fringe epidemiologists’.
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Finally, there’s the issue of deaths with Covid vs deaths from Covid, which will be clarified over time. An early CDC report said a mere 6 per cent of the US Covid death toll could be blamed solely on Covid.
The West has paid a hideous price in social upheaval, fracturing and loss of freedom, and the dispute over whether the GBD approach would have delivered similar or better outcomes at lower human cost will rage on. Many power-happy politicians are clinging to new controls (hi, Dan, Mark), and vaccine mandates, masking and virus restrictions remain global battle zones. Meanwhile Mexico has abandoned all travel restrictions relating to Covid, and even in risk-averse Australia the walls are coming down. Let the reckoning begin.
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Quotation of the Day…
… is from pages 429-430 of Michael Oakeshott’s 1956 essay “On Being Conservative” as this essay is reprinted the 1991 Liberty Fund collection of some of Oakeshott’s work, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays:
To govern, then, as the conservative understands it, is to provide a vinculum juris for those manners of conduct which, in the circumstances, are least likely to result in a frustrating collision of interests; to provide redress and means of compensation for those who suffer from others behaving in a contrary manner; sometimes to provide punishment for those who pursue their own interests regardless of the rules; and, of course, to provide a sufficient force to maintain the authority of an arbiter of this kind. Thus, governing is recognized as a specific and limited activity; not the management of an enterprise, but the rule of those engaged in a great diversity of self-chosen enterprises. It is not concerned with concrete persons, but with activities; and with activities only in respect of their propensity to collide with one another. It is not concerned with moral right and wrong, it is not designed to make men good or even better; it is not indispensable on account of the “natural depravity of mankind” but merely because of their current disposition to be extravagant; its business is to keep its subjects at peace with one another in the activities in which they have chosen to seek their happiness. And if there is any general idea entailed in this view, it is, perhaps, that a government which does not sustain the loyalty of its subjects is worthless; and that while one which (in the old puritan phrase) “commands for truth” is incapable of doing so (because some of its subjects will believe its “truth” to be error), one which is indifferent to “truth” and “error” alike, and merely pursues peace, presents no obstacle to the necessary loyalty.
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January 21, 2022
Let’s Separate School and State
Virginia’s new governor, Glenn Youngkin (R), recently issued an executive order that prohibits K-12 government schools in Virginia from requiring that students wear masks. Masks are optional; the decision is up to the student or his or her parents (or both).
But, lo!, at least three school districts, so far, in Virginia have decided to ignore the governor’s executive order and continue to require that the face of each and every child who attends their so-called “schools” be confined behind a mask.
While these school-board actions are maddening, all people of good will and good sense should squeeze these lemons into lemonade. We can do so by trumpeting the fact that such actions as these by these school boards unambiguously reveal at least two detestable facts about the administrators of K-12 government ‘schools’: The people who run these ‘schools’ (1) are either incapable of, or unwilling to, understand factual reality, including about risks; and (2) have little or no interest in the well-being of children, or even in ensuring that children are able to learn while in school.
Either one of these facts should be sufficient to cause parents to keep their children away from these so-called “educators.”
No time within my (now-long) lifetime has been as propitious as now for dealing serious blows to government schooling – for taking a major step toward the noble goal of the late Marshall Fritz, namely, a total separation of school and state.
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