Russell Roberts's Blog, page 184

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 344 of the 2016 second edition of Thomas Sowell’s important volume Wealth, Poverty and Politics (footnote excluded; link added; original emphases):

The concentration of power being sought by the redistributionists is usually as completely ignored as the productivity differences behind differences in income and wealth. Indeed, a whole vocabulary of camouflage words obscures the concentration of power involved. Thus, Professor John Rawls, for example, refers repeatedly to how “society” should “arrange” certain economic outcomes, when only the government has the power to force millions of people to accept a third party’s overriding of the transactions terms agreed to by transactors dealing directly with each other.

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Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: “Middle-class stagnation?”

(Don Boudreaux)

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In my column for the November 23rd, 2011, edition of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, I critically examined the claim that America’s middle-class has for decades been stagnating economically. You can read my column in full beneath the fold.

(more…)

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Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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University of Oxford epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta, writing in the Telegraph, explains that it’s time to end Covid self-isolation. A slice:

In order to move fully into “living with the virus”, it is essential to recognise that trying to limit its spread is not only extremely difficult but also undesirable if we are aiming for the sort of relationship we have established with other endemic coronaviruses.

Acknowledging that any attempt to limit the spread of infection is actually retrograde to society is a difficult step to take, and easily lends itself to being characterised as a “let-it-rip” strategy. Yet the implementation of non-pharmaceutical measures such as self-isolation can actually cause more damage to the vulnerable, both by preventing the build-up of herd immunity and because they may be incompletely protected while the virus nonetheless still spreads and herd immunity inevitably accumulates (the “let-it-drip” scenario).

The option of living with the virus, without submitting to the endless cycle of testing and self-isolation, has been tried and tested with the other seasonal coronaviruses and the good news is it seems to work. The alternative is not only pointless but ultimately unworkable within a society that seeks to look after its children, the elderly, the sick and the poor, and would prefer to prevent a widening of the gulf between those who can afford the luxury of self-isolation and those who simply cannot.

Corey Walker reports, in Reason, on some sanity amidst Covid hysteria: “Starbucks Rescinds Employee COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate.” A slice:

Starbucks will no longer require its employees get a COVID-19 vaccine. Chief Operating Officer John Culver informed employees of the decision in a memo sent on January 18.

The announcement follows the Supreme Court’s January 13 decision in National Federation of Independent Businesses v. OSHA. Following a sweeping executive order that would have required private companies with 100 or more employees to make their workers get vaccinated or submit to regular testing, the Court ruled that the Department of Labor, absent congressional authorization, lacks the authority to enforce such a rule.

Starbucks had imposed a vaccine mandate on its 228,000 U.S. employees in order to comply with that executive order.

Starbucks is far from the only company to update its vaccination policies in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling. General Electric (GE) axed its vaccine mandate last week. The company had temporarily suspended the policy after a lower court ordered a stay on the Biden administration’s mandate, and it eliminated it entirely after the ruling came down.

Matt Welch calls for “kids liberation day” from Covid hysteria. A slice:

Two-year-old New Yorkers are still wearing masks in congregate settings by diktat of the governor, and in contravention to global standards and scientific understanding. (I get a real kick out of NYC-based journalists expressing outrage at the alleged heavy-handedness in Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin letting parents decide whether they want to mask their own schoolkids, rather than just issuing a blanket ban, as did the governors of 14 states, all of which voted for Joe Biden in 2020.)

Five-year-olds are not allowed inside most indoor businesses unless they can either show proof of full vaccination (immediately excluding three-quarters of New Yorkersbetween the ages of 5 and 11, and virtually all foreign tourists from that demographic), or a recent negative COVID-19 test. Unvaccinated teens in public schools are barred outright from extracurricular activities like sports and band.

Canadian school teacher Stacey Lance decries the fact that her students “were taught to think of themselves as vectors of disease. This has fundamentally altered their understanding of themselves.” Two slices:

I am proud to be a teacher. I’ve worked in the Canadian public school system for the past 15 years, mostly at the high school level, teaching morals and ethics.

I don’t claim to be a doctor or an expert in virology. There is a lot I don’t know. But I spend my days with our youth and they tell me a lot about their lives. And I want to tell you what I’m hearing and what I’m seeing.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, when our school went fully remote, it was evident to me that the loss of human connection would be detrimental to our students’ development. It also became increasingly clear that the response to the pandemic would have immense consequences for students who were already on the path to long-term disengagement, potentially altering their lives permanently.

The data about learning loss and the mental health crisis is devastating. Overlooked has been the deep shame young people feel: Our students were taught to think of their schools as hubs for infection and themselves as vectors of disease. This has fundamentally altered their understanding of themselves.

…..

They are anxious and depressed. Previously outgoing students are now terrified at the prospect of being singled out to stand in front of the class and speak. And many of my students seem to have found comfort behind their masks. They feel exposed when their peers can see their whole face.

A reporter recently asked Science godhead Anthony Fauci a question about vaccines: “[H]ow can we bridge the divide between believers and non-believers?” Science godhead Fauci began his reply thusly: “Because there are some inherent non-believers that, no matter what you say, they’re going to give you a real problem.”

The above exchange prompted the following from el gato malo:

secular technocratic totalitarianism is, in every meaningful way, a religion. it just happens to have as one of its core commandments that the congregation must deny that its religion is, in fact, a religion and endlessly claim to be on the side of the very science it suppresses in favor of whatever flavor of lysenkoism is currently en vogue.

Well, who’d-a thunk that government’s response to Covid hysteria could possibly lead to this sort of fraudulence?

Britain’s Health Secretary admits that, at least in the U.K., high reported Covid death rates are likely skewed by people who died from other causes. A slice:

Daily reported Covid death figures are too high because people are dying from conditions unrelated to the virus after testing positive, Sajid Javid has admitted.

On Wednesday, there were 359 deaths reported in Britain, but the Health Secretary said that “many” people were being included in the count who “would not have necessarily died of Covid”.

His comments came after death data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show a large discrepancy in weekly death registrations compared to the figures released on the Government dashboard.

For the week ending Jan 7, the UK Health Security Agency reported 1,282 deaths of people who had died within 28 days of testing positive for coronavirus.

However, ONS data show there were just 992 death registrations with Covid mentioned on the death certificate in that week.

For deaths where Covid was the primary cause, the difference is even starker, with just 712 registrations, meaning that 44 per cent of the Government’s daily reported figures in that week may not be true Covid deaths

Writing at City Journal, Joel Zinberg reports on some of the lockdowns’ downsides. A slice:

Despite the media’s insinuation that Republican governors’ lenient policies were akin to murder, red states did not suffer a disproportionate increase in the Covid cases that lockdowns were proposed to prevent. Cases per 100,000 population were within a few percentage points of one another in Utah (23,057), Arizona (22,282), New York (21,806), Michigan (19,866), Texas (19,280), and Idaho (19,074), despite widely divergent public health approaches. Even California’s case rate (17,992), while lower, is within 6 percent to 7 percent of Idaho and Texas.

Some Republican-led states that avoided extended lockdowns still experienced job losses, including Alabama, Alaska, and Kentucky. But in general, high-growth, dynamic red states have resumed their pre-Covid growth—while the likes of California and New York are stuck in reverse.

Unvaccinated Toby Young writes, in the Spectator, about his second bout with Covid.

Prashant Bhushan tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

Stopping unvaccinated people from freely moving around is a gross violation of the fundamental rights of citizens. This DM has no idea of rights of citizens. Unfortunately the pandemic has been used by those in power to flex their muscle & throw their weight around

Jay Bhattacharya, although no vaccine skeptic, sensibly wonders why Pfizer is not being more transparent with the data from its vaccine trials.

Johns Hopkins School of Medicine professor Marty Makary tweets: (HT Martin Kulldorff)

The data are now abundantly clear. Natural imm is more effective than vax imm.

Sadly, tens of thousands Americans lost their job & livelihood because the Ab circulating in their blood are Ab the govt does not recognize. Sci group think ruined their careers.

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Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 157 of the late, great Harold Demsetz’s richly rewarding 2008 book, From Economic Man to Economic System:

A tax levied on corporate profits reduces the care and effort owners will put into its operation, since part of the return that would have been received by owners will go to the state. De facto, private owners of the corporation are saddled with a shirking partner, the state, which takes part of the revenue and provides none of the effort to improve the firm’s return. Consequently, the greater the corporate tax rate, the greater the incentive for corporate owners and managers to pursue the “quiet life.”

DBx: Someone might pick a nit by insisting that, if some of the tax revenues extracted from the corporation are used to build infrastructure, to subsidize genuine education, to supply an honest court system and effective law enforcement, or even to pay customs officers who shield a corporation from foreign rivals, then the state does indeed provide effort to improve the firm’s return. Yes.

But almost none of the tax revenues are so earmarked. Many of these revenues are used in ways that are either not at all helpful to the firm from which they are extracted, or are positively harmful to the firm – such as, for example, when the tax revenues are used to fund customs officials who obstruct the firm’s access to lower-cost or higher-quality inputs supplied by foreign sellers. Realistically – and even if the state were to use every cent of the tax revenues in socially valuable ways – the value that the firm derives from the use of tax revenues extracted from it is generally much less than is the value that those funds would have produced for the firm had they not been taxed away.

Suppose that a thief each month steals $1,000 from the mom’n’pop store that you own and operate. Suppose further that this thief then, each month, spends $100 in ways that produce some positive value for your firm, and spends the remaining $900 doing magnificently wonderful charitable works all across the town, but works that yield to your firm no value. Under these circumstances, the thief is effectively a shirking partner – a partner who gets from your firm more in value than he or she contributes to it.

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What Employers Buy

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to a high-school student in Nevada:

Mr. D__:

Thanks very much for your e-mail and for reading my blog. I’m delighted that you find it useful.

You write that you think your economics teacher is “wrong when she teaches us that very low wages paid manufacturing workers in poor countries don’t give unfair advantages to our foreign competitors over in those countries.”

In fact your teacher is correct. But can you tell me the argument she used to justify that correct conclusion? I’m curious.

Here’s my way of explaining this reality. It’s best to think of employers not as buying workers, or workers’ time, but instead as buying the outputs that workers produce. Thinking of the employment of workers in this way makes clear that if Jones can produce (say) two automobile tires per hour while Smith can produce 20 tires per hour, a tire producer would be willing to pay Smith ten times more per hour than it’s willing to pay Jones.

Looked at a bit differently, suppose Jones’s employer pays him $2 per hour and that Smith’s employer pays her $20 per hour. While superficially it appears that Jones employer is paying less for labor than is Smith’s employer, this conclusion is very misleading. The reason is that each employer is paying $1 per tire (and tires are ultimately what tire manufacturers buy when employing workers). That is say, to produce each tire costs Jones’ employer $1, and to produce each tire costs Smith’s employer the identical amount: $1.

Let me quote from page 210 of the 2018 edition of one of the best introductory economics textbooks ever written, Universal Economics, by Armen Alchian and William Allen (my emphasis):

Cost is the value of output given up per unit of product. American wages of $20 per hour reflect the productivity of labor; they do not measure cost, which involves labor productivity per unit of output. At 10 units of output per hour, cost is $2.00 per unit of output. Foreign labor with wages of $5 per hour may produce only 1 unit of output per hour. In this case, higher-wage, more productive American labor is a lower-cost producer than the low-wage, less productive foreign labor.

In other words, in this example, American factories paying workers an hourly wage of $20 are paying less for labor per unit of output than is being paid for labor per unit of output by the foreign manufacturer that pays its workers an hourly wage of $5. What looks like a bargain for the foreign manufacturer is, in fact, no such thing.

Don’t feel bad about not seeing this economic reality immediately. It’s not the most obvious thing in the world. And be thankful that you have what seems to be an excellent economics teacher.

Keep me posted!

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

Some Non-Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy continues her on-going effort to expose the shenanigans and power-lust of that great geyser of cronyism, the U.S. Export-Import Bank.

Phil Magness, in a piece that originally appeared in National Review, eviscerates the take of practitioners of the so-called “New History of Capitalism” on the connection between slavery and capitalism. Two slices:

The NHC came under intense fire from other experts, and not only for its anti-capitalist politicking. As with most theories that attempt to reduce economic development to a single product or industry, its empirical claims about the U.S. cotton sector fell flat. [Edward] Baptist, for example, employed novel accounting practices of his own invention to suggest that slave-produced cotton and its derivatives amounted to a full half of the United States’ gross domestic product before the Civil War. In a typical year, the actual number hovered around 5 or 6 percent. Economic historians made quick work of several core NHC books, finding evidence of seemingly deliberate misquotations, misrepresented sources, and above all else a general unfamiliarity with the previous half century of academic literature on the subject.

But a casual reader of the New York Times’ 1619 Project would find no indication of how poorly the NHC literature has fared in the last decade. To the contrary, contributor Matthew Desmond—a sociologist with no expertise in the history of slavery—adopts the NHC literature as his own in a blistering essay that faults a slavery-infused American capitalism for rising inequality, environmental destruction, failures to expand the welfare state, insufficiently progressive federal income taxes, and a long list of related 21st-century progressive discontents about economic policy. The overarching message: Capitalism is brutal, that brutality derives from slavery, and our national reckoning with slavery’s legacy must therefore alter the very nature of our economic system to allow expansive government interference in the economy. The New History of Capitalism’s case for linking capitalism to slavery is intended as a case against capitalism itself.

…..

In practice, American slavery benefited from immense government support. Federal appropriations sustained the Fugitive Slave Act and subsidized slave patrols to return escapees to the South. Although an extraordinary example, the rendition of escaped slave Anthony Burns from Boston in 1854 cost the federal government an estimated $40,000 (over $1 million today when adjusted for inflation)—most of it spent on a massive military escort after a group of abolitionists attempted to free Burns from a federal courthouse. Antebellum federal statutes not only prioritized fortifications and armories to deter the threat of slave revolts. They also included provisions to censor abolitionist literature from the mail; to fund “internal improvements” in the ports, canals, and railroads used to ship slave-produced cotton; to subsidize a domestic textile industry built around the South’s raw materials; and even to create government credit and monetary policies that favored large plantation owners. Indeed, several of the Confederate secession proclamations of 1860–61 aired common grievances about the threatened loss of these and other tax-dollar-subsidized federal obligations to slavery.

Policies of this type are hallmarks of what is commonly referred to as “mercantilism”—an economic system in which government policy aims to cultivate a symbiosis between public expenditures and strategically selected beneficiary sectors of production. In shirking long-standing definitions, the NHC literature simply rebrands the same policies as extensions of “capitalism.” The final sleight of hand in this semantic game is to equate the relabeled slave-based economic system with something resembling a noninterventionist laissez-faire economic theory, thereby saddling 21st-century free-market economic policy—tax cuts, budget balancing, even opposition to the Green New Deal—with the moral baggage of plantation slavery.

There’s a problem with the NHC’s genealogical lesson, though—it’s almost entirely false, the product of a willfully negligent intellectual history.

David Simon counsels that we reject the left’s climate alarmism. A slice:

The Green Left has recklessly claimed that global warming will increase the number of people killed by natural disasters. Instead, since 1920, the number of people killed by natural disasters has declined by over 80 percent, as the planet’s average temperature has risen by 1.12 degrees Celsius and world population has quadrupled from less than two billion to almost eight billion.

Robby Soave reports on the mainstream media’s continuing efforts to discredit itself.

Jim Bacchus and GMU Econ alum Gabby Beaumont‐​Smith call for the abolition of tariffs on solar panels.

GMU Econ student Dominic Pino, writing at National Review, reports on how private enterprise is entrepreneurially helping to reduce the damage done by supply chain web obstructions. Two slices:

This move by FedEx is just one example of how a market system allows businesses to mitigate problems. FedEx didn’t have to be ordered to do this. The company saw a need and found an original way to meet that need with capacity it already had.

…..

It wasn’t a market failure that led to the port congestion in San Pedro Bay. Over the past few decades, different levels of government have stood in the way of modernizing America’s most important ports. Shippers shouldn’t be forced to choose between sending freight from Asia through the Panama Canal to the East Coast, sending it on FedEx’s imported containers to a small port, or waiting in a line of more than 100 ships waiting for a berth at Los Angeles/Long Beach. But that’s where we’re at right now, and FedEx is demonstrating one way that market participants can make the best of a bad situation.

Chris Edwards busts a myth about the financial condition of state and local governments throughout the U.S.

Bryan Caplan endorses the creation, in large bureaucratic organizations, of an Office of Unreasonable Rules.

Reason‘s Peter Suderman looks back at the first year of Biden’s presidency.

John O. McGinnis explores the implications for the administrative state of NFIB v. OSHA.

Jonah Goldberg exposes “the dangers of the voter turnout myth.” A slice:

Historically, the practical case is that it’s the wrong solution chasing a nonexistent problem. Proponents of mandatory voting think that low voter turnout is a sign of civic decay and democratic entropy. This view, no doubt accurate or at least plausible for some people, misses the fact that for many other Americans not voting is a sign of general satisfaction. We had record-breaking turnout in 2020. Raise your hand if think that was proof that America’s civic and democratic commitments are stronger than ever.

More importantly, if voting is virtuous, its virtue—like all virtue—derives from it being voluntary. Compelled virtue is an oxymoron.

Juliette Sellgren begins the third season of her superb podcast, The Great Antidote, with a conversation with Reason magazine editor Katherine Mangu-Ward.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Writing in today’s Wall Street Journal, University of Chicago economist Tomas Philipson reports about Covid-19 that “[t]he costs of prevention efforts have outweighed those from the direct effects of the virus itself.” Two slices:

As President Biden’s first year of handling the pandemic comes to a close, many of his most ardent critics are pointing to the ugly numbers: More Americans have died from Covid-19 under the current president than under the previous one, despite the prevalence of vaccines and the development of other medical innovations. But as the pandemic’s progression has made clear, public-health officials should aim to do more than merely minimize the spread of disease. They should seek to reduce the total harm caused by both infection and heavy-handed attempts to prevent it.

Reducing the incidence of disease isn’t necessarily desirable if excessive prevention, in the form of lockdowns or school closures, is more costly to society than the damage done by an illness. We don’t close highways to minimize accidental deaths, despite the existence of dangerous drivers. Yet this is exactly what we’re doing when the government intervenes to limit the spread of communicable diseases by, for instance, mandating vaccines that don’t prevent transmission.

…..

Joe Biden accused President Trump during the campaign of getting Americans killed by refusing to clamp down completely on all economic activity. But the evidence shows that the U.S. experienced lower total harm in 2020 than did the nations of the European Union. Now that he’s been president for a year and presided over so many Covid deaths himself, Mr. Biden surely understands how difficult it is to contain the spread of a highly contagious respiratory disease. He should make the reduction in total harm his administration’s objective now—and that includes the harm done by lockdowns, school closings and unproductive restrictions on economic activity.

For those of you who still think that Covid hysteria poses no great threat to open, civilized society, check out this short video. (HT Jon Fortier)

For those of you who still think that government officials can and ought to be trusted to act sensibly and in the public interest during pandemic emergencies, check out this report from Eric Boehm.

Jim Geraghty decries the continuing hysteria over Omicron, which poses to vaccinated people less peril than does the flu.

Boris Johnson, testing the limits of a credulous public’s credulity, claims that he was unaware that his May 2020 garden party at Number 10 Downing Street during lockdown was in violation of any rules. (HT Phil Magness)

A beautiful headline: “England Ends All COVID Passports, Mask Mandates, Work Restrictions.” (HT Jon Fortier)

(DBx: I wonder if the previous two links are in some way connected with each other….)

And on England see also here.

David Henderson blogs on a podcast with Cyrille Cohen, Israel’s UnFauci. A slice:

My favorite line comes at about the 14:35 point in response to Sayers’s question about whether it was strange to see the tremendous attacks on people who talked positively about mainstream concepts like herd immunity.

Cohen replied, “If you mix politics and immunology or health sciences, at the end of the day you get politics.”

“it’s all just cunning witchdoctors” – so explains el gato malo.

Well, being killed because roads are left in treacherous condition is, after all, acceptable in comparison to becoming infected with the coronavirus – or so the post-2019 ‘public-health’ and elite narrative implies.

Inspired by the work of Jonathan Haidt, Gabrielle Bauer asks about Covid: “What the hell happened and why?” A slice:

People with strong freedom tastebuds took an especially hard beating during the pandemic, having to dodge mud slings like “selfish idiot” and “freedumb lover” from both the press and online social justice warriors. But seen through the lens of moral foundations, freedom carries no less value than any other moral inclinations. It’s just one of several moral aptitudes. It’s like a craving for the open sea or for craggy mountain peaks: only those who share it can fully understand its appeal.

The salience of freedom on my own moral palate took me by surprise. Like UK journalist Laura Dodsworth, author of the Covid-themed book A State of Fear, I discovered that “I was more frightened of authoritarianism than death”. I recoiled against the moral universe that pervaded the lockdowns, a universe that reduced freedom to getting a haircut or a sandwich at Arby’s. I also saw my passion for freedom as a form of caring – namely, caring about preserving the liberal democratic values that the human family took so many centuries to cultivate.

Christian Britschgi writes about new research that finds that the part of Australia that suffered the harshest Covid restrictions – that part of Australia, which includes Melbourne, inside of what Australian officials themselves call the “Ring of Steel” – experienced relatively steep declines in real-estate values. A slice:

In a paper uploaded to SSRN last week, Deakin University professors Chyi Lin Lee and Jian Liang, and Qiang Li of New South Wales University exploit the policy differences on either side of the Ring of Steel to tease out the monetary value people placed on not living under a COVID security state.

These researchers used a database of home sales and rental transactions to measures changes in home values and rents in suburban communities located within a few kilometers of the Ring of Steel boundary during the successive stages of Victoria’s lockdowns.

Focusing on home sales and rents in suburban communities just a few kilometers from the Ring of Steel, researchers said, helps them filter out price declines that would have come from a general fall in demand for dense urban living within municipal Melbourne during the pandemic.

During Victoria’s first March-to-June lockdown—when the whole state was subject to the same restrictions—these researchers found no statistically difference in the change in home prices and rents within 2.5 kilometers of the Ring of Steel boundary.

But during the second lockdown between July and November 2020—when the Ring of Steel was established—home sale prices within the boundary dropped by 1.8-3.1 percent when compared to home sales outside of it. Researchers found a similar divergence in rents.

This divergence in home sale values and rents grew to 6.3-7 percent from November 2020 to January 2021, when the Ring of Steel was lifted and public health restrictions were eased in both areas.

Liang, Lee, and Li argue that this reflects peoples’ continued worry that a harsh lockdown would be reimposed in the metropolitan Melbourne area.

“These findings indicate that the residents perceive that the area within the Ring of Steel faces a higher risk of lockdown restrictions,” they write. “The perception of lockdown risk drives demand from the area with a high lockdown risk to that with a low lockdown risk.”

Their paper notes that government officials repeatedly stressed the importance of Ring of Steel as a pandemic fighting measure, which they say contributed to the perceived fear that more lockdowns would be on the horizon.

Using this decline in rents, Liang, Lee, and Li estimate a weekly cost of public health restrictions within the Ring of Steel at $14 to $34 million. That figure, researchers note, is likely an underestimate given that areas outside Metropolitan Melbourne were not totally free of public health restrictions.

(DBx: This fact – similar to patterns of migration within the United States – is strong evidence against the notion that Covid tyranny serves the public welfare by controlling a negative externality.)

TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.)

The suffocating grip of Covid superstition loosens a bit at Harvard University.

Corey DeAngelis and Christos Makridis argue convincingly that “[s]chool closures have been made with politics in mind — not science.” A slice:

The long-term closing of schools, and the harm it did to children nationwide, was a decision based not on health, but on politics — thanks to teachers unions and the Democratic politicians they fund.

A study by researchers at Michigan State University found that when governors left it up to districts whether to have in-person education in the fall of 2020, the “decisions were more tied to local political partisanship and union strength than to COVID-19 severity.”

This despite the fact that politicians already knew children were less at risk for COVID.

Follow the science? More like follow the political science.

Australian Tom Forrester-Paton predicts this:

As the genuinely terrified emerge from their trance, and register the chasm that lies between the catastrophe they were duped into believing in, and in whose name their liberties have been trampled on and their society spavined, and as the really rather modest threat the Covid virus actually posed becomes retrospectively clearer, they will allow themselves to start asking questions they should have asked in March 2020. And as the faux-terrified (who were responsible for terrifying the genuinely terrified, and revelled in the sense of importance and power it gave them) begin to realise that the jig is up, and that the finger of blame for the immense damage they have caused is beginning to veer towards them, we will see a similar repudiation of everything that has been most dear to the Covidistas – the pointless lockdowns, the fatuous, performative mask-wearing, the compulsory vaccinations.

(DBx: To anticipate likely negative reaction to the above description of Covid-19 as posing a “really rather modest threat,” I remind you that everything is relative. I do not believe that the threat posed by the SARS-CoV-2 virus was really rather modest relative to the pathogens that ‘normally’ circulate through the human population; the threat posed by this coronavirus was substantially higher. But this threat was highly concentrated on the very old and ill. For most human beings this threat was indeed, while real, really rather modest. Furthermore, the actual threat posed by Covid really was, and remains, modest relative to the predictions of Covid suffering and death – predictions recklessly issued by ‘modelers’ such as Neil Ferguson, and tragically swallowed by gullible people, including many government officials.)

Michael P Senger tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

In March 2020, the narrative of the western world suddenly shifted to pathologically pursuing the futile goal of controlling a respiratory virus as China claims they’d done. Reversing that shift, and properly diagnosing its cause, is crucial to the survival of freedom.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 231 of the 2011 revised and enlarged edition of Thomas Sowell’s 2009 book Intellectuals and Society:

The vision of the anointed lends itself to dramatic categorical decisions – a proliferation of “rights,” for example – rather than to incremental trade-offs. Whatever the benefits and losses to the general public from each of these decision-making approaches in particular instances, the benefits to the anointed come from making categorical decisions which ringingly and dramatically affirm their loftier vision, while trade-offs reduce issues to undramatic quibbling over more or less – with all of this being done on a plane of moral equality with their adversaries, at that, this itself being a violation of the vision of the anointed.

DBx: Yes.

No one in America today regards himself or herself as being more surely anointed by the fates to lord it over the masses – to snarl with dripping contempt at those who dare to question his proclamations – to dismiss with the casual wave of a hand the concerns of those who speak of the downsides of his preferred policies – than does the man pictured above.

More Panic Porn

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to Stars and Stripes:

Editor:

To support their panicked conclusion that omicron is so very dangerous that we cannot hope to live with it as we live with the flu, Emily DeRuy and Harriet Blair Rowan offer only one piece of evidence related to omicron (“Think COVID is becoming like the flu? Here’s how much worse it still is,” Jan. 19). That evidence is a statement from UC-Berkeley emeritus professor John Swartzberg, who told them that “Omicron is more deadly than the flu,” and an assurance from another professor that this statement is correct.

Perhaps omicron is indeed more deadly than the flu (although other scientists believe otherwise). But is omicron so much more deadly that we cannot live with it as we live with the flu? Neither of the professors say.

The rest of these reporters’ alleged evidence that omicron is scarily more dangerous than the flu is of the dangers of Covid generally and not of omicron. An example is this passage, which they present as their key piece of empirical evidence:

More than 5,000 people across the U.S. died of COVID the last week of 2021. That’s more than three times the number of people – 1,626 – who succumbed to influenza during the deadliest week of the alarming 2017-18 flu season.

Yet as CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said last week, most people who are dying from Covid-19 in the U.S. are still dying from the delta variant, not from omicron. This reality was even more stark in late December. So to cite a Covid death count from late December in support of the assertion that omicron is significantly more dangerous than the flu – so much more dangerous that we cannot return to normal existence – is journalistic malfeasance.

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

Gloriously Sane Florida

(Don Boudreaux)

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In his latest video, John Stossel rightly praises Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s light-touch Covid policies.