Russell Roberts's Blog, page 186
January 17, 2022
Some Non-Covid Links
Pierre Lemieux ably defends his claim that wokism and fascism “are not so different anyway.”
That rationalism went hand-in-hand with another 19th-century phenomenon: that being the steady concentration of state power. Monarchical absolutism may have been on its way out, but Röpke believed that power had in other respects become more centralized, including in countries in which constitutional and democratic forms of government had emerged. This was partly a function of many people wanting governments to do more in the economy, and using their newly acquired voting rights to support politicians who promised to use the state to protect and subsidize industries or deliver welfare programs.
Nor, Röpke argued, had democratic regimes proved resistant to the pressures exercised by well-organized interest-groups intent on acquiring legal and economic privileges at everyone else’s expense. The German economy’s cartelization may have begun in late-Wilhelmine Germany, but Röpke stressed that the advent of the liberal Weimar Republic—“the freest constitution in the world,” as The Social Crisis describes it—had not brought an end to such practices. On the contrary, cartelization and the associated legalized limitation of competition had accelerated. This had made it easier for the National Socialists to bring more and more of the economy under direct state control once they took power in 1933.
The court’s decision has other, broader lessons on agency overreach that should worry the Biden administration in general. From climate change to labor policy and antitrust, Mr. Biden has ambitious plans for transformative regulatory change. Inevitably, that will involve agencies pursuing objectives for which their authorizing statutes weren’t designed—“work-arounds,” as the White House chief of staff characterized the administration’s vaccine mandates.
The problem for Mr. Biden is that placing constraints on the administrative state—including on “work-arounds”—is a defining concern of the Roberts court. All of President Trump’s appointees are arguably more interested than the justices they replaced in articulating a jurisprudence that constrains federal agencies’ ability to assume responsibilities ordinarily performed by Congress, or by the courts.
Gary Galles documents the fact that “even Bastiat’s correspondence shows his love of liberty.”
Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner decry the power enjoyed by teachers unions in Illinois. A slice:
As if all of this weren’t enough, Illinois lawmakers recently voted to add a referendum to the November 2022 ballot that would enshrine and vastly expand the state’s extreme union powers in the Illinois Constitution. That amendment would deny any chance at future labor reforms and create a new, personal constitutional right that would subject even more labor issues to litigation.
The fact that such a referendum even made it onto the ballot highlights the real issue: Illinoisans keep electing legislators who want to perpetuate the system.
The Chicago Teachers Union has proven again how willing it is to trample on the city’s children. If voters don’t kick out the politicians enabling this behavior, Chicagoans will have no one to blame but themselves.
Țara Henley resigns from legacy media. (HT Bari Weiss)
Jacob Sullum explains that gun control is just as racist as is drug control.
Citizens and voters adapt their public policy preferences from the political elite–the people who actually determine public policy. One implication is that citizens and voters have less influence over public policy than a romantic notion of democracy would suggest. The political elite tells voters what to think, and they fall in line behind their leaders.
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Market-Price Adjustments: A Masker of Many Inequalities
Suppose that a Thomas Edison of our era invents a substance that causes each of us to overlook all but the most serious of other people’s defects. This substance – let’s call it “X” – when used by an ugly person cloaks that person’s unattractive appearance. X causes people to ignore its users’ below-average height, above-average weight, below-average intelligence, and above-average laziness. X blinds others to most of the weaknesses of the old no less than it blinds them to the inexperience and unreliability of the young.
We would loudly applaud this invention, for it would ensure more-humane treatment of many of our fellow human beings. And so if someone demanded that this marvelous substance be banned, or at least that government severely restrict its use, we’d all be rightfully horrified.
Well, in fact such a substance already exists. It’s called money. Money works just as does X when there are no government-imposed restrictions on the adjustments of monetary prices and wages.
For example, most of the plywood inventory in Bob’s Lumber Store was damaged by a hurricane. Some of the damage was severe while other of the damage was relatively minor. Most of the damaged pieces will not sell at prices as high as they would have sold before being damaged. But they don’t go unsold. Bob is able, by charging sufficiently low prices, to make even severely damaged sheets of plywood attractive to buyers. And the more severe the damage, the lower the price. By lowering the prices charged for severely damaged sheets enough to make buyers indifferent to the damage, Bob is able to sell, to willing buyers, all of his plywood despite the fact that most of it was in poor condition.
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Now consider minimum-wage legislation. It turns off money’s cloaking role for those workers most in need of this marvelous property. Because no employer will knowingly employ a worker at an hourly wage higher than is the value per hour that the worker produces for the employer, no employer will employ a worker who, for whatever reason, will not produce hourly value at least as high as the minimum wage.
In the absence of a minimum wage, workers whose skills are so low that they cannot produce hourly value as high as, say, $10.00 per hour would cloak their low skills by offering to work at wages low enough to make them profitable to employ. Given that no employer will knowingly fail to employ any worker willing to work at a wage that’s not in excess of the hourly value produced by that worker, workers with very low skills – when they have unimpeded access to money’s cloaking property – will have no trouble finding employment. But because the minimum wage prevents such cloaking, many low-skilled workers remain unemployed and unemployable.
Some Covid Links
Go for it, Democrats. Go try to pass a law requiring all Americans to either get vaccinated (and boosted!), or lose their jobs. This is a 50-50 issue at best. (Interestingly, more than half of federal workers in one survey said they opposed the Biden administration’s vaccine requirement for federal workers.) A decent percentage of people who are vaccinated and pro-vaccination do not support firing employees who refuse to get vaccinated. But go ahead, Democrats. Give Republican challengers in this November’s House and Senate elections one more issue to bring up in attack ads.
Jeffrey Tucker looks back on the earliest days of Covid and wonders what might have been. A slice:
It’s not too much of a stretch, and nor does it take a great deal of topical specialization, to imagine the outlines of a good public health response. Inform the public of what is coming or what is already here. Alert vulnerable populations to stay away from environments where infection is likely to occur. Calm down young people and keep their lives functioning as normal. Get to work examining the best possible therapeutics for dealing with the sick, among which would surely include repurposed drugs that have had success in the past in dealing with such infections.
Otherwise, we could have done exactly what Fauci said we should do on February 25: “Do not let the fear of the unknown…distort your evaluation of the risk of the pandemic to you relative to the risks that you face every day…do not yield to unreasonable fear.”
Protect the old. Let the young live their lives. Research on the best means of treatment. Minimizing fatalities on the road to endemicity. In other words, the Great Barrington Declaration.
It’s not rocket science. Nor is it the clarity that only hindsight provides. This kind of response is precisely what prevailing information would have dictated to anyone.
Instead, all hell broke loose with wild and experimental lockdowns that seemed designed for the whole population to avoid the virus – well, not the whole population but the professional Zoom class in particular while “essential workers” exposed themselves to the disease. Other outrages included especially exposing elderly people rather than protecting them. Schools were closed. The medical system locked down. In other words, the policy response was the opposite of what public health would have recommended.
Inspired by this tweet from Amy…
So:
-someone with prior infection has 44% “effectiveness” against omicron
-someone with 2 vaccinations (the requirement for the NHS mandate) has only 32% vaccine effectiveness against omicron
The first gets sacked. The second doesn’t.
We are losing 70,000 staff over this
Covid vax hesitancy is the fruit of arrogant public health grandees resorting to coercion rather than reason, persuasion, and informed consent. No one should be surprised as vax hesitancy extends to essential, non covid vaccines. And public health will only have itself to blame.
If one were to go about trying to design a policy aimed at protecting the laptop class at the expense of the children, the vulnerable, the old, the poor, and the working class, one could not have done better than the lockdowns. We are all essential, no matter what covidians say.
The best way for Boris to turn his polls around is to make a big ‘time of living in fear is over’ speech, immediately end remaining Covid restrictions, require every covid related sign to be removed and announce that England is open for business and back to life.
Unlike focused protection, the lockdown strategy ensured that most vulnerable people would eventually get infected. We should always protect the weakest among us. CDC, NIH and Fauci let them down.
But they swear! This is just for now! Nobody wants this! Let’s just try to be a little more sensitive!
It has long been obvious that all of that is a lie. This isn’t just “for now,” a period of time that has stretched on for nearly two years and counting. They do want this, as they’ve admitted time and time again, because it means they get to micromanage everything you do. And it has nothing to do with being “sensitive” — it’s about being compliant.
For people like Poniewozik, moving on from the pandemic is “unsettling.” For the rest of us, staying there with him and his friends is even worse.
So here is one of the predictable bitter fruits of Covid Derangement Syndrome: “California closes Christian pre-school and bans its director from EVER working with children again after she was unable to get kids aged two to keep masks on in class.” (HT David Henderson) (DBx: I know that I repeat myself, but I repeat: If humanity escapes Covid derangement – if liberalism survives – future generations will look back in horror and disbelief at the wild irrationality and cruelty of humanity in the early 2020s. Our Covid certainties and dogmas will be correctly understood by future generations to be as lunatic as the certainties and dogmas of the Spanish Inquisition are understood by us today. And the Covidocracy’s cruel treatment of dissenters from its religious creed will be regarded by future generations with the same disgust that swells in us when we read of the fate of centuries-ago religious heretics.)
Bari Weiss has had it with Covid. A slice:
But I’m out of step with my city. When I am asked to show my vaccine card at a bar—even though that says nothing about whether or not I’m actively transmitting Covid—I want to laugh. When I eat at a restaurant where the diners are unmasked but the staff are forced to don stormtrooper headgear and gloves, I wonder if people realize what this looks like. Or when friends ask me to swab my nose so we can hang out, well, I’ll do it only because I try to be polite.
Those of you reading this in states like Florida and Texas are probably patting yourself on the backs for your wise life choices. Which, fair enough. But for many of us in America, our lives are still being controlled by the pandemic. And the irrationality of the policies and conversations around Covid—irrationality that comes from our public health authorities, from our schools and our workplaces, from our local governments and our media—is making skeptics out of even the most compliant.
The medical establishment remains singularly focused on this virus, even as life-saving vaccines have been available to every adult in America who wants them for almost a year now. Meanwhile, other problems go ignored. Overdose deaths have soared. People have failed to get timely treatment for cancer. There is a growing mental health crisis, especially among young people. Kids have fallen behind in school. And this is to say nothing of lost time. Two years is not insignificant. Our priorities right now feel off.
Mounting evidence suggests that long Covid is not the great danger it was initially claimed to be. Research by the ONS indicates that, 12 weeks after infection, the percentage of people still reporting symptoms is only 2.5 points higher than the background rate.
Michael Simmons examines the record of Covid modelers in Britain. It ain’t pretty; they ain’t sages.
Second, many restrictions defied common sense at the time, and anyone with a brain in their head, let alone a first in PPE from Oxford, could see it. Why did the police ask people to stop swimming in the sea?!
Third, we now realise that policymakers themselves weren’t obeying all the measures they set for us, despite insisting that the situation was deadly serious. More than that: they slapped down anyone who suggested the rules were illogical, or who argued in favour of a focused protection strategy (the Great Barrington Declaration) or pointed to countries that relied on voluntarism rather than solely edicts (Sweden, which emerged from 2020 with a smaller increase in its overall mortality rate than most European countries).
The paranoid style of the lockdown, with its demonisation of dissent and fear of “fake news”, fuels my suspicion that this was the establishment’s sub-conscious version of Take Back Control.
But the truth is that the state governments scared the public witless. There was Australia, the free-spirited land of the rugged individualist ready to take on all the world throws at it, reduced to quivering in fear behind closed borders. The State Premiers talked up the risks of Covid to such an extent that the public came to believe that it was as dangerous as the Black Death.
A year or so ago, an opinion poll showed that Australians on average thought they had a 33 per cent chance of dying from Covid if they contracted it. No effort was made to put this into perspective and explain that the majority who lost their lives typically had comorbidities or were the frail elderly.
So frightened were the public that they demanded increasingly severe measures. The state governments started off by introducing mandatory mask wearing and social distancing. But then they decided to go further; closing borders between the states and whenever one or two cases of Covid appeared, the whole state was then locked down.
Despite this, from the outside it seemed to many that life here was continuing as normal. But the reality was very different.
Schools were shut for the best part of a year: it varied from state to state, but my grandchildren were away from their classrooms for over 200 days. All shops, except those which sold essential goods, were shuttered. Pubs, restaurants and other community outlets were closed. Curfews were introduced and police patrolled the streets to make sure a cowered public were sticking to the rules.
Then there were the quarantine hotels. This time last year, even Australian citizens who wished to return to their own country had to spend 14 days in quarantine after their arrival. For the privilege, they had to pay $3,000 (£1,590). In fact, when Djokovic came to Australia to play in the 2021 Open – which he eventually won – he had to endure the same two-week wait.
I can speak from my own experience. After travelling from London to Perth in December, I was obliged to book into the Pan-Pacific hotel in Perth. My crime? To return for Christmas to my own country.
There was no escape. You couldn’t stretch your legs in the corridor, let alone go outside. My hotel didn’t have windows that opened, so I lived in air-conditioned isolation accompanied only by my laptop, books and a television set for a fortnight. I had plenty of time on my hands so looked up the Western Australian regulations for prisoners in solitary confinement. They must be given, by law, one hour of exercise outside their cell every day.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 109 of the late, great Harold Demsetz’s richly rewarding 2008 book, From Economic Man to Economic System:
[E]fficiency itself requires foregoing fine-tuning of the sort that would be appropriate ( efficient) in a world in which transaction costs were zero. This point, made some time ago, has not penetrated discussions of externalities.
DBx: Yep.
Perfection in a world of scarcity is affordable only by gods – meaning, in other words, that achieving perfection in a world of scarcity is impossible for us humans. And to spend resources and effort in pursuit of the impossible is to reject the good in the futile quest for the perfect. This reality is why efforts to realize utopian dreams produce dystopian nightmares.
And so whenever you hear professors, pundits, or politicians endorse anything “zero” – for example, net-zero carbon emissions, zero Covid, or zero tolerance – beware. You are hearing persons who believe either that their desired ‘goods’ are, or can be, made as superabundant as is breathable air on the earth’s surface, or that there is no additional quantum, no matter how minuscule, of their desired ‘good’ that fails to yield benefits in excess of the costs, no matter how gargantuan, of achieving that quantum.
One further thought: Among the ‘transaction costs’ that must be reckoned when pondering how much power to give to government to deal with “externalities” is the reality not only that government officials are not omniscient, but that power is addictive to its possessors (and can come to be mistaken as necessary even by those persons on whom it is wielded). Power cannot be created today to deal with today’s problem X without this power being given momentum to stick around far longer than is justified by any reasonable cost-benefit calculus.
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January 16, 2022
Some Covid Links
The challenge of learning to live with Covid was always going to be that many ordinary people don’t want to feel the sacrifices they made—and supported at the time—were in vain. Arguing that lockdowns or school closures or masking were less effective than advertised may be correct, but to act on that recognition would require politicians and many voters to admit they were wrong.
Scapegoating is more likely and is one of the risks you sign up for when you go into politics. [British P.M.] Mr. Johnson may survive partygate, but the effect of this scandal will be to weaken permanently his ability to impose further Covid restrictions. Expect him or any successor to embrace with new enthusiasm advice from scientists suggesting we now approach Covid much as we do the common cold.
This phenomenon won’t be confined to Britain. President Biden’s job is safe, but medical adviser Anthony Fauci’s is not. Rolling revelations about the extent to which he may have been involved in funding gain-of-function research in China undermine the moral authority of America’s chief lockdown advocate without having to wade directly into the partisan bogs of lockdown policy. Such a scandal also would open an opportunity for erstwhile lockdown supporters to vent their personal frustrations with Dr. Fauci’s preferred draconian policies.
Speaking of China: Zero-Covid is failing so abjectly there now that it can’t be covered up by the sort of improbable official data that has insisted the virus was not widespread in China earlier. Can an authoritarian regime pivot from zero-Covid without democracy’s means for mediating popular frustrations with the old policies?
Oh my! What a surprise to discover yet another instance of Covidocratic hypocrisy.
K. Lloyd Billingsley finds Fauci-like creatures in film, including 2001: A Space Odessey‘s HAL. A slice:
Fauci earned a medical degree in 1966 but his bio shows no advanced degrees in molecular biology or biochemistry. Despite his many reversals, Fauci claims “I represent science,” as though his record, like HAL’s, is without error. It isn’t, but despite costly mistakes, Fauci’s power kept expanding.
As he lays down public health policy, the NIAID boss commands a budget of more than $6 billion, which gives him huge leverage. If medical scientists fail to follow the party line, say, on the origin of the COVID virus, Fauci can make their funding disappear. The NIAID boss also boasts a strategic ally.
Fauci’s wife Christine Grady is head of bioethics for the National Institutes of Health, of which NIAID is part. Whatever Fauci wants to do, from dangerous drug experiments on foster children to the torture of beagle puppies, his main squeeze Christine will tell him it’s all right. It is as though President Richard Nixon’s wife Pat headed the Federal Election Commission, and told her husband the Watergate operation was perfectly fine.
Phil Magness offers, on Facebook, this wise observation:
Faucism is antithetical to science precisely because it is primarily motivated by political objectives. Those political objectives also happen to be insane.
I’m not yet sure just what the full reach and consequences of Virginia Gov. Youngkin’s executive order will be, but I’m pleased that this order has been issued. (I was, however, emphatically not pleased to hear Youngkin, in his inaugural address, promise to defend qualified immunity for police officers.)
Economist Mikko Packalen tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
2 years without school. Rich countries’ experts devastated the world’s most vulnerable lives by their school closure advocacy. All without evidence or reason, but with unfounded fears & catastrophic one-sided misapplication of the precautionary principle.
Commenter MarkW understands the reason David Henderson posted about Australia’s decision to cancel the visa of tennis star Novak Djokovic. Here’s MarkW’s comment:
The point isn’t sympathy for Djokovic — he’s arguably the greatest tennis player of all time. He’ll be fine. The point is that Australia is excluding Djokovic not because he presents a health risk but because he represents a risk to the government’s imposition of its preferred messaging and a risk to successful suppression of opposing views. THAT is what is chilling. Even more chilling to me are the large numbers of people who appear to support his deportation for those reasons — to ‘send a message’ (the official government message, that is). We’re having quite the authoritarian moment.
And here’s another good comment on David’s post, this one from my student Jon Murphy:
He [Djokovic] did comply with the rules. He got a valid exemption and was issued a visa. The visa was revoked not because he violated any rule, but because this one minister believed he threatened the narrative.
Eastern Michigan University historian Jesse Kauffman writes insightfully about humanity’s calamitous overreaction to Covid-19. Three slices:
While many historical analogies have been offered for our present moment, from the campaign to combat polio to the National Socialist dictatorship of Germany, it is perhaps this wholly unnecessary self-destruction of a civilization that our own era most readily resembles. The campaign by our government to prevent every possible infection of the SARS-CoV-2 virus regardless of the cost has unleashed a hollowing of once trusted institutions and ideas.
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Our medical and scientific institutions have also undermined their credibility over the past two years. Few authority figures were once as trusted as physicians. But our collective view of them will never be the same.
This is due in part to the emergence of the phenomenon known as “medtwitter.” The pandemic created a class of doctors who spent a great deal of time on that social media platform, amassing huge followings to whom they dispensed advice and insights. Many seem to enjoy spreading panic and fear. A representative example of the medtwiter world is Tatiana Prowell, an oncologist with over 50,000 Twitter followers, who claimed that it was “guaranteed” that every New Year’s Eve party would result in at least one person dying from COVID.
Medtwitter doctors relentlessly exaggerate bad news and dismiss any grounds for hope, while simultaneously heaping abuse and scorn on anyone, including other doctors, whose views do not align with theirs. Even the best-intentioned evince a strangely shallow conception of the human condition and an inability to balance benefits and harms in their policy thinking.
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Finally, our mainstream media has self-immolated on a pyre of Trump derangement syndrome and an attempt to chase ratings and clicks by sowing fear. For two years, CNN has relentlessly broadcast an unhinged message of terror and despair, noting every “grim milestone” when deaths or cases passed a certain point. Like the doctors of MedTwitter, it has amplified bad news and rare complications.
In the world of CNN, every human interaction brings the risk of a miserable death from Covid, with Republicans in general, and the Trump administration, in particular, to blame. The Washington Post and the New York Times (and especially the latter) were just as bad, deliberately stirring up fear and breathlessly chasing poorly-sourced stories of overflowing emergency rooms. Few Americans would say that the media has done a good job during these times of making sense of what was happening in the world.
(DBx: Just FYI, unlike Prof. Kauffman I regard the disrespect that the government K-12 ‘education’ establishment has brought upon itself over the past two years to be a positive development – to be a revelation of this establishment’s long-festering corruption and incompetence.)
In support of this essay by Joy Pullmann, Scott Atlas tweets:
Again, it’s not newly learned, just finally admitted. We knew it and said it in spring-summer 2020. The lockdowns destroyed families and kids and have a sinful legacy of harm to our children.
– Fifty-eight percent (58%) of voters would oppose a proposal for federal or state governments to fine Americans who choose not to get a COVID-19 vaccine. However, 55% of Democratic voters would support such a proposal, compared to just 19% of Republicans and 25% of unaffiliated voters.
– Fifty-nine percent (59%) of Democratic voters would favor a government policy requiring that citizens remain confined to their homes at all times, except for emergencies, if they refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccine. Such a proposal is opposed by 61% of all likely voters, including 79% of Republicans and 71% of unaffiliated voters.
– Nearly half (48%) of Democratic voters think federal and state governments should be able to fine or imprison individuals who publicly question the efficacy of the existing COVID-19 vaccines on social media, television, radio, or in online or digital publications. Only 27% of all voters – including just 14% of Republicans and 18% of unaffiliated voters – favor criminal punishment of vaccine critics.
– Forty-five percent (45%) of Democrats would favor governments requiring citizens to temporarily live in designated facilities or locations if they refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccine. Such a policy would be opposed by a strong majority (71%) of all voters, with 78% of Republicans and 64% of unaffiliated voters saying they would Strongly Oppose putting the unvaccinated in “designated facilities.”
– While about two-thirds (66%) of likely voters would be against governments using digital devices to track unvaccinated people to ensure that they are quarantined or socially distancing from others, 47% of Democrats favor a government tracking program for those who won’t get the COVID-19 vaccine.
The data was used to justify a second national lockdown on November 5, but Oxford University quickly pointed out that the numbers were crunched before new tier restrictions had come into effect and were vastly wide of the mark.
Under the model, daily deaths should have reached 1,000 by the day of the press conference, but the rolling seven-day average was 265. The projections used an R rate of 1.3 to 1.5m, when it had fallen to between 1.1 and 1.3.
Bob Seely, the MP for the Isle of Wight, described the estimates as “hysterical” while Penny Mordaunt, the former paymaster general, warned the data were “in need of improvement”.
Within days, Sir Patrick and Sir Chris Whitty, the Government’s chief medical adviser, were forced to admit that the 4,000-a-day figure was unlikely, and the episode was later criticised by the official statistics watchdog.
Even at the height of the winter wave, the daily death count had only peaked at 1,359, far lower than the 4,000 projection. In fact, by the beginning of December 2020, many of the major modelling groups were a little more optimistic about the pandemic.
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Modellers argue it is better to know something about a situation than nothing, even if the whole picture is unclear. Whitty has previously said: “An 80 per cent right paper before a policy decision is made is worth ten 95 per cent right papers afterwards.”
But, given the experience of the pandemic, other experts now think models too unreliable to be driving public health policy.
Hunter says: “I think we have put too much emphasis on modelling, and that has failed us, to a certain extent. The way omicron is panning out is nowhere near as grim as many were predicting.”
Certainly, it is time for the models to come with a health warning, with some calling for a move to interactive graphs that could be updated in real-time.
Telegraph columnist Janet Daley is correct: “Our acceptance of a mass lock-in is more dangerous than any party” of the sort that PM Boris Johnson attended in violation of his own lockdown diktats. Three slices:
We need to ask the question that must, given what has prevailed in our lives for the past two years, be most serious. How on earth did we get to a point where events and decisions which would once have been regarded as commonplace, even virtuous – an employer expressing good wishes to staff at a party, a child embracing elderly grandparents, a relative making regular visits to a dying hospital patient – became illegal?
In fact, worse than illegal – immoral and irresponsible. How did the most natural, admirable and generous behaviour come to be not only technically criminal but anathematised as selfish and anti-social? And, further, how did this extraordinary transformation of traditional values occur so swiftly and with so little examination of its ramifications? Why was the public acceptance of it so crushingly unanimous that even raising doubts about its soundness or logic was seen as a kind of sedition?
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At the beginning of this story, the scientific experts (and the government authorities who were so religiously following their advice) were telling us explicitly that most people who contracted Covid-19 would not become seriously ill. That, in fact, they would very possibly not even know they had the virus. (I recall Sir Chris Whitty among others, stating this clearly at one of the early Downing Street briefings.) And this was being said before the arrival of the vaccines or even any reliable treatments.
Yet somehow, this virus which had been described as a threat largely limited (as it was then, and still is) to those with other comorbidities, transmogrified into a national emergency justifying measures that were, in the literal sense of the word, inhuman: restrictions that, if rigorously followed, would dismantle many of the most fundamental, instinctive forms of social and emotional life. Yes there was some resistance. But the general assent to all of this in principle was overwhelming.
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The public discourse was dominated by the dissemination of constantly escalating terror. The broadcast news became a relentless succession of the most pessimistic possible analysis and statistical prediction, much of which we now know to have been mistaken and which, even at the time, was more contentious than the official messaging (relayed unchallenged by the broadcast coverage) acknowledged. But what was worse – much worse – was what happened when government and NHS authorities discovered that instead of legally prohibiting the behaviour they wished to suppress, they could use psychologically coercive techniques to manipulate public attitudes.
Did the events of the last century teach us nothing about the terrible consequences of using fear to control a population, and about the peculiarly sinister force of a fear that cannot be questioned or debated? Whatever disquiet there may have been in governing circles about this flight into totalitarian technique, it was clearly outweighed by the appalling consequences that NHS leaders, and their unions, predicted were imminent.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 207 of Cass Sunstein’s superb 2005 book, Laws of Fear:
But if the restriction is imposed on an identifiable subgroup, the political check is absent. Liberty-reducing intrusions can be imposed even if they are difficult to justify.
DBx: The ‘othering’ and shaming of the unvaccinated (and, soon, also of the ‘unboosted’) is already resulting in these individuals being treated either as second-class citizens or as not citizens – or even persons – at all. Future generations, should humanity regain some modicum of enlightenment, will look back on today’s treatment of the unvaccinated as we today look back on the centuries-ago treatment of religious heretics. Disbelief will mix with disgust and mortification as the realization dawns that members of our species can be so stupid and cruel.
January 15, 2022
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 170 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:
In any case, scarcity implies competition to resolve who gets how much of which goods. If monetary competition is suppressed, other forms of competition must occur.
DBx: Remember this inescapable reality when you next hear proposals to use government to prevent prices and wages from adjusting. Persons offering such proposals might sincerely intend to help their fellow human beings by urging that government obstruct the ability of prices or wages expressed in money to move up or down in response to prevailing willingness-to-buy confronting prevailing willingness-to-sell. But such persons are also be sincerely economically ignorant. Such persons are identical in all essential respects to a newspaper editor who proposes to reduce the murder rate in the city by ordering his reporters intentionally to undercount the number of murder victims. The superficial reports in the papers would look splendid, but the underlying reality would get even uglier as people become less informed.
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William Allen (pictured above) died, at the age of 96, one year ago today.
Challenging the Covid Leviathan
Several weeks ago, Bill Walton had as guests New Civil Liberties Alliance attorneys Mark Chenoweth and Jenin Younes. The NCLA represented my GMU colleague Todd Zywicki in his successful effort to escape GMU’s Covid-vaccine mandate.
Some Covid Links
Wall Street Journal editorial features editor James Taranto writes about gloriously sane Florida and its Surgeon General, Joseph Ladapo. Three slices:
Joseph Ladapo reached the same conclusion almost two years earlier. “Please don’t believe politicians who say we can control this with a few weeks of shutdown,” Dr. Ladapo, then a professor at UCLA’s medical school and a clinician on Covid’s frontline, wrote in USA Today on March 24, 2020. “To contain a virus with shutdowns, you must either go big, which is what China did, or you don’t go at all…. Here is my prescription for local and state leaders: Keep shutdowns short, keep the economy going, keep schools in session, keep jobs intact, and focus single-mindedly on building the capacity we need to survive this into our health care system.”
“That was before it became political,” Dr. Ladapo, 43, says in an interview conducted in person, indoors and unmasked. An orthodoxy soon hardened in the medical establishment and most of the media. He says his UCLA faculty colleagues’ reactions to his commentaries went from “Thanks, Joe, for providing us another perspective” to “How can we make Joe stop writing?” He believes USA Today “would never have published anything along that vein later in the pandemic.” But the Journal would: Since April 2020, I have accepted a dozen of Dr. Ladapo’s articles for these pages. One of them, in September 2020, was headlined “How to Live With Covid, Not for It.”
As policy makers’ views began to converge with Dr. Ladapo’s, he became a policy maker. His writings caught the attention of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who in September 2021 appointed him surgeon general, the state’s top health official. “It’s fun that I’m sitting here because of you,” Dr. Ladapo tells me—though he’s also sitting here because Mr. DeSantis had been quicker than most politicians to see the folly of lockdowns and the necessity of living with Covid.
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He’s also uncomfortable with the call for ever more shots. “The CEO of Moderna is already talking about the next booster,” because the effect of the third shot begins waning within weeks. “I think that if someone wants to take the booster every few months,” Dr. Ladapo says, “that’s their decision.” But “the cycle of boosters that wear off after a few months … not even as a scientist but just as a human being, that doesn’t feel right to me.” This week an official of the European Medicines Agency confirmed Dr. Ladapo’s intuition by warning that repeated boosters could eventually weaken the immune system.
The justification for mandatory vaccination is that the unvaccinated put others at risk of infection. Dr. Ladapo maintains that rationale doesn’t apply to Covid, especially given Omicron’s infectiousness. So many people have been vaccinated that “if the vaccines stopped spread, this pandemic would be over,” he says. “The argument for the negative externalities does not hold water.”
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For the benefit of readers who wonder how the other half lives, I ask him to compare California with Florida. “In Los Angeles during the pandemic, it felt like you lived under a blanket,” he says. “People who didn’t feel that they needed to take certain precautions, but there was—they would feel like they needed to be seen as taking certain precautions, because that was the atmosphere, the expectation. It was a very heavy air, sort of an oppressive atmosphere there….
“Here, in contrast, the thing that you feel you’re under is the sun. . . . Do you have a mask on you, are you ready to put it on when you go outside or go to a store—that whole sort of ambiance is completely absent here.”
Helen Andrews is someone with whom I often disagree, but here she’s spot-on correct in laying out reasons to oppose vaccine passports. (HT Iain Murray) A slice:
I had Covid over Christmas break, after my triple-vaxxed husband brought it home from a conference, which means two things: I now have natural immunity, and you will never persuade me that vaccinated people don’t spread the virus to others.
That was supposed to be the rationale for vaccine passports. If vaccines prevented the spread of Covid, then there might be value in giving people the peace of mind of knowing their local cafe or museum or office building was a safe space where nobody would infect them.
Now that vaccines turn out to be better at protecting yourself than protecting others, the rationale for making them mandatory is dissolving. And yet this is the exact moment when cities across the country are launching their own vaccine passports.
The cities of Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., all have vaccine passport systems coming into effect this month, covering restaurants, gyms, entertainment venues, and other indoor locations. Los Angeles launched SafePassLA in November, following the lead of San Francisco and New York City, which launched their vaccine passports last fall.
The mayors of these cities don’t even pretend to have a good rationale for launching vaccine passports now. Reading their public remarks, the reasoning seems to be that the more they harass the unvaccinated, the higher their city’s vax rate will go. Invocations of “protecting others” are rote, with no explicit suggestion that vaccinated individuals don’t spread the new, highly contagious Omicron variant.
Megan Mansell looks back over the past two years. A slice:
Though expected to distance and quarantine at the whim of local dictators, a few things gave us a clue that our pandemic response was not about health. Vices were deemed essential, as liquor stores and non-medical marijuana dispensaries remained open, while playgrounds were barricaded, beaches, and gyms, and houses of worship suddenly inaccessible.
There was no guidance on health-seeking behavior to bolster the first line of defense against the onset of ailments, just a band-aid for a bullet wound grade of national mitigation strategy that left many dying alone, surrounded by strangers. We willfully sacrificed our most fundamental duty of keeping grace in the handling of human disease humanely.
We antisocialized ourselves, fully withdrew from random commingling, and in a way filtered ourselves from society. Life lost its luster when expected to test or inoculate oneself with something with no longitudinal safety assessments in order to live a life anything close to what we once took for granted.
Here’s a video, from early November 2021, of Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody speaking about Biden’s abominable vaccine mandates. (HT Frayda Levy)
Marc Siegel, MD, bemoans the half-truths that the Covidocracy continues to spread about omicron. A slice:
Not only that, but multiple studies have shown that the Omicron variant itself affects the upper airways far more than the lungs, even as it’s much more transmissible than any other variant. This is exactly what happened in the later stages of 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, according to John M. Barry, author of “The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History,” who spoke to me about it on SiriusXM’s Doctor Radio this week.
There is no guarantee that the same will happen now, but it would behoove our public-health leaders to make the comparison, as opposed to the constant fearmongering.
The obsession with testing and isolation is counterproductive not only because we lack readily available home tests, but also because the virus is now almost everywhere, and isolating yourself if you aren’t sick does little to decrease the amount of virus circulating in the community.
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One reason President Joe Biden’s poll numbers are dropping is most Americans recognize that he overpromised on the vaccine. Vaccines have two essential purposes: to prevent spread and to decrease severity. And though the mRNA vaccines clearly decrease severity of infection, especially with a recent booster, they clearly are doing little to prevent spread. This makes the mandate argument even more unconvincing — why mandate a vaccine that doesn’t prevent spread of the pathogen?
Adams campaigned on getting the city moving again. Killing a mandate that clearly no longer makes any sense is the best single step he can to take to making that a reality.
Thomas Harrington writes about the changing ‘official’ Covid narrative. A slice:
Events in recent days seem to suggest that the managers of the Covid narrative are attempting to effect a back-door climbdown of numerous of its longstanding articles of faith.
They are suddenly admitting that the PCR tests were deeply flawed and that huge numbers of the Covid hospitalized were admitted primarily for reasons other than the virus, from which we can deduce that many died often or even mostly because of other maladies.
They are handing out directives that say that diagnoses for Covid should be derived (who knew!) primarily from symptomology and not from testing. They also are now admitting that we are suffering a massive mental health crisis, especially among our young.
They are even—albeit in a weaselly way—admitting the reality of natural immunity when, as is happening in many places, they welcome the previously-infected to come back to work in hospitals and home care facilities with few questions asked shortly after their bouts of illness.
University of Delaware professor David Blacker explains why “[m]asking is harming our work to educate.” (HT Jay Bhattacharya) Two slices:
I’ve been a full-time professor at University of Delaware since 1998 and I’ve seen a thing or two. We have now reached a crisis point for students and it is necessary to speak out. Following Gov. Carney’s panicky mask mandate, UD has directed everyone to wear N95 or surgical masks indoors. This includes students and also professors even while they are teaching. In my opinion, this policy is misguided and, worse, it will drastically erode an already deteriorating situation for UD students. They can step across Main Street into a crowded and maskless bar, but when they go back on campus supposedly to learn, they still have to cover up and isolate.
During the pandemic, UD has pursued a somewhat middle path vis-à-vis other universities. It has not been as draconian as some. But our campus has seen its share of COVID-19 safety theatrics, including pointless measures such as the hand sanitizing stations still dotting the hallways.
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Above all there has been masking, the great symbol of the pandemic. We have been told incessantly — with great sanctimony and an air of expert certainty — that cloth masks are crucial to stopping the spread. Yet despite the informational fog, comparison after comparison of masking mandates among countries and U.S. states and localities, and also the only two randomized control trials thus far, from Denmark and Bangladesh, show that cloth and surgical masks do little or nothing nothing to stop COVID-19. And that was before Omicron. Now, among many others, even CNN’s medical advisor has recently admitted that the cloth masks most people wear are little more than “facial decorations.”
And now we face a choice: recognize reality and ditch this cosmetic farce or double down with N95 masks. N95 masks are appropriate for medical settings where they are worn properly and disposed of immediately after use. But take a step back and consider the logic: cloth and surgical masks that allow proper breathing and speaking seem not work with viruses, particularly Omicron. The masks that may, at best, work a little bit are those that do not allow proper breathing or speaking. It is simply not possible to conduct meaningful education with N95s. It would be better to go back online to Zoom as bad as that was. Every semester I have a lecture class with 100 students. Yes, 100 students packed tightly into a classroom for 3 hours with windows sealed shut where everyone pretends cloth masks are protecting us. How are we supposed even to hear one another in a large space with N95-smothered faces? Conversational seminars will be even worse.
It cannot be said any longer that there are no educational costs. I rarely have students stay to chat with me — or one another — after class any longer. Everyone interacts less and everything is made a notch or two more boring. People can’t wait to get out of the building and away from the dull oppressive atmosphere.
Worse, masks render us faceless drones to one another. Over time they dehumanize and reduce human interactions to mere transactions to be gotten over as quickly as possible. They destroy the lifeblood of teaching and learning. It is dishonest not to admit this.
Michael P Senger tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
As the COVID narrative crumbles, these are the establishment’s terms of truce:
•Excuse lockdowns
•Pretend they saved tons of lives
•No talk of CCP influence
•Accept masks and vaccine mandates in some places forever
Not happening. Accept no less than unconditional surrender.
The future will view our time as being backwards.
Mike Smelt tweets: (HT Martin Kulldorff)
I’ve said it before that if the World recovers it’s sanity, students in medicine, economics, sociology, psychology and just about every other discipline, will be studying the madness of the last 2 years a 100 years from now in total disbelief!
Unfortunately for the global poor, the vulnerable, and the working class, the pandemic ends when the laptop class decides it ends, and not a moment sooner.
At this point, covidian policies — the mandates, the school closures, the propaganda & fear-mongering, etc. — are like zombies. Brain-dead, but still eating the minds of too many good people.
Phil Magness offers, at Facebook, sound counsel:
Simple Covid advice for you:
1. Watch what higher ed does in response to covid.
2. Assume by default that it is going to be ineffectual and/or crazy.
3. Do the opposite.
‘We failed’. An editorial in Ekstra Bladet, Denmark’s leading tabloid, berates the Fourth Estate – including itself – for failing to hold ministers to account during the pandemic. Worn down by repeated warnings of ‘the dormant corona monster under our beds’, Ekstra Bladet claims Danish journalists mostly took the government line.
‘We have not been vigilant enough at the garden gate when the authorities were required to answer what it actually meant that people are hospitalised with coronavirus and not because of coronavirus,’ the paper told its readers.
Ekstra Bladet‘s accusation is that the Danish media did not properly question hospital admissions data, which appears to show that many of the country’s Covid hospitalisations might have been incidental (patients ‘with Covid’ but admitted to hospital for something else). The same self-criticism could, of course, equally be applied in the UK, where hospitalisation data has been similarly opaque. Two weeks ago, Chris Hopson, chief executive of NHS Providers, clarified that ‘incidental’ Covid cases made up approximately 25 to 30 per cent of admissions, similar to the Danish experience.
The public are rightly apoplectic with rage that Boris broke the inhumane and frankly ludicrous rules that he inflicted on all of us with far too much zeal so he could cheer on his very social staff (and wife) while downing Tesco rose wine and gin.
But once again, the political, scientific and media establishment are using that outrage to obscure the reality that the rules were never workable, or even necessary.
The people who made them and voted them through time and again – from Cummings to Hancock to Starmer to Drakeford – have never followed them to the letter.
They weren’t living in mortal dread of the virus themselves. They were all prepared to take calculated risks to improve the quality of their lives.
They simply wanted all of us mere mortals to be terrified and so it was easier to enact disturbingly dystopian levels of control and deny us the right to make our own decisions.
Lockdown laws are an ass that should be ruled out as an option from the public health playbook forever.
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History will show that those who backed shutting schools, discouraged cancer patients from attending hospital and allowed helpless souls like little Arthur Labinjo-Hughes be brutally abused for days on end – locked in a house without the usual protection of teachers and extended family – have blood on their hands.
It’s only now, with BoJo’s political life on the line, that the penny is starting to drop for his allies.
His Cabinet pal Jacob Rees-Mogg, who has been valiantly sent into the enemy territory of the BBC’s Newsnight and liberal LBC to defend his boss, is starting to ponder, 22 months too late, that maybe the rules were too tough, after all.
He must have known that at the time, given he admits to being lobbied by a friend who was cruelly banned from attending the funeral of his two-year-old granddaughter – the sort of moral outrage that the government brushed off as acceptable collateral damage.
On January 23rd, a protest against vaccine mandates will be held in DC.
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