Russell Roberts's Blog, page 194

The Real Pandemic Is Unchecked Government Power

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:

Editor:

David Henderson and Charley Hooper eloquently explain why, as their essay’s title testifies, “Coercion Made the Pandemic Worse” (Dec. 28). They do an especially nice job debunking the lazy assertion that lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and other Covid restrictions are required to avoid what economists call “negative externalities” – unjust inflictions of harm on third parties.

As Messrs. Henderson and Hooper note, those who attempt to justify Covid restrictions by crying “externalities!” consistently fail to consider that the individuals best positioned to take precautions against Covid are not necessarily everyone in the general population but, instead, those relatively few persons who are most vulnerable to the disease or who are especially frightened of it.

But there is one very real externality on the loose today, and it’s one that the pro-lockdown and pro-vaccine-mandate crowd utterly ignore. It’s the unprecedented expansion of discretionary power in the hands of government officials. No negative externality – not even the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus – is as insidious and as inescapable as is the power that so many government officials have recently grasped to unilaterally and indefinitely disrupt familial, social, educational, and commercial interactions.

The real pandemic now is one of unchecked power. Unfortunately, no vaccine is available to control this monster.

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 Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Writing in today’s Wall Street Journal, David Henderson and Charley Hooper explain why coercion, compared to freedom, is generally a much worse means of solving problems. A slice:

Free choice relies on persuasion. It recognizes that you are an important participant with key information, problem-solving abilities and rights. Any solution that is adopted, therefore, must be designed to help you and others. Coercion is used when persuasion has failed or is teetering in that direction—or when you are raw material for someone else’s grand plans, however ill-conceived.

Authoritarian governmental approaches hamper problem-solving abilities. They typically involve one-size-fits-all solutions like travel bans and mask mandates. Once governments adopt coercive policies, power-hungry bureaucrats often spout an official party line and suppress dissent, no matter the evidence, and impose further sanctions to punish those who don’t fall in line. Once coercion is set in motion, it’s hard to backtrack.

Consider Australia, until recently a relatively free country. Its Northern Territory has a Covid quarantine camp in Howard Springs where law-abiding citizens can be forcibly sent if they have been exposed to a SARS-CoV-2-positive person or have traveled internationally or between states, even without evidence of exposure. A 26-year-old Australian citizen, Hayley Hodgson, was detained at the camp after she was exposed to someone later found to be positive. Despite three negative tests and no positive ones, she was held in a small enclosed area for 14 days and fed once a day. Even the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says quarantine can end after seven days with negative tests. Why didn’t the government let her quarantine at home? And why doesn’t it exempt or treat differently people who can prove prior vaccination or natural infection?

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Economists understand how one person can impose a cost on another. But it takes two to tango, and it’s generally more efficient if the person who can change his behavior with the lower cost changes how he behaves. In other words, to perform a proper evaluation of policies to deal with externalities, we must consider the responses available to both parties. Many people, including economists, ignore this insight.

But at least what these people will suffer – and some die – from isn’t Covid-19.

Reason‘s Matt Welch applauds the dawning realization among some high-level folk that being vaccinated does little to reduce the spread of the coronavirus, as well as that vaccine mandates can backfire. A slice:

New York City’s one-shot vaccination rate (of 92 percent for adults, 83 percent for kids between 13 and 17) “rivals any number in the free world,” Politico’s Jack Shafer observed last week, and yet somehow my vaccinated teen and boosted self spent Christmas under quarantine. The fact-checkers over at The Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact generously rated Biden’s “vaccinated…do not spread the disease” claim as only “mostly” false, despite epidemiologist quotes like “[the] statement is not accurate,” and “vaccinated individuals can definitely infect other people.”

But the problems with the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” message pre-date the variant that rendered it factually ludicrous. On September 16, one week after Biden reversed serial administration promises by announcing an employer vaccine mandate (while using language such as “We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us”), science writer Yasmin Tayag penned an Atlantic piece headlined “Stop Calling It a ‘Pandemic of the Unvaccinated.’“

Aaron Hertzberg bust the myth that facemasks are a ‘mere inconvenience.‘

Jacob Sullum reports that “the CDC Director’s slippery response to criticism of school mask mandates further undermines her agency’s credibility.” A slice:

Americans should be able to rely on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for honest and accurate information about communicable illnesses and strategies for dealing with them. But time and again during the COVID-19 pandemic, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky has proven herself untrustworthy. The latest example is Walensky’s slippery response to criticism of a study that she has repeatedly cited to justify the CDC’s controversial recommendation that K–12 schools require students to wear face masks as a safeguard against COVID-19.

That study, which the CDC published on September 24, looked at “school-associated COVID-19 outbreaks”—defined as two or more confirmed cases among students or staff members within a 14-day period—in two Arizona counties from July 15 through August 31. “After adjusting for potential described confounders,” the researchers reported, “the odds of a school-associated COVID-19 outbreak in schools without a mask requirement were 3.5 times higher than those in schools with an early mask requirement.”

As I noted at the time, the study did not take into account local vaccination rates or COVID-19 safeguards that schools adopted in addition to mask mandates. The failure to consider those variables by itself makes it impossible to draw any firm conclusions about the explanation for the difference described by the researchers.

It is plausible that schools with “early mask requirements” tended to be located in neighborhoods with relatively high vaccination rates. It is also plausible that they were especially likely to take other precautions, such as improved ventilation and physical distancing. Those factors could help explain why the schools with mask mandates were less likely to report outbreaks. Since the researchers did not control for those variables, their study cannot tell us what role mask requirements played.

In a December 16 article published by The Atlantic, David Zweig noted those issues and several other potential problems with the study, including the choice of outbreaks rather than infection rates as the outcome variable, a bias in testing of “close contacts,” and the fact that some schools were open twice as long as others during the study period. More generally, the scientists Zweig interviewed said the magnitude of the purported effect was highly implausible and inconsistent with other research on the benefits of masking. Noah Haber, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University’s Meta-Research Innovation Center who co-authored a recent systematic review of research on COVID-19 mitigation measures, described the Arizona study as “so unreliable that it probably should not have been entered into the public discourse.”

Walensky nevertheless latched on to the study as validation of the CDC’s support for “universal masking” in K–12 schools.

Noah Carl investigates the relationship between case numbers and mobility.

This essay at City Journal – by Benedict Beckeld – on political alignments, Christianity, and Covid is interesting.

“Follow the science” sometimes means, in practice, “Follow the teachers’ unions!”

Joakim Book writes insightfully about science and its role in humanity’s struggle to better understand reality. Two slices:

Prestigious journals are fraught with office politics, citation circles, and a surprising amount of naval gazing. And consensus, while cozy and comfortable, is always and everywhere the wrong metric – sometimes it is flat out wrong, as it was on evolution, on relativity, on plate tectonics and on the 1980s AIDS epidemic.

Science is not established by a show of hands. Many fringe ideas may very well be wrong, but like Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein say in defense of the intellectual outcast, “It is exactly from the fringe that progress is made.” To quote the late Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck, “If you are never controversial, you have probably never said anything genuinely new or interesting.”

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To overthrow an argument or evidence or a consensus we must still show that said argument is wrong, regardless of the motives that fueled its proponents.

By constantly invoking funding, or peddling money as a potential reason for scientific outcomes or political beliefs, we denigrate the intellectual capacity of one another. We pretend that, cheapily, everyone’s for sale and anyone’s morals – scientific or political – are available to the highest bidder. If that’s the case, we have much bigger problems than unbalanced funding for politically convenient topics.

We fool ourselves that our arguments follow ethnic, sex, or demographic lines in what amounts to a wholly unscientific collapse into untethered subjectivity. By concerning ourselves with financial or structural bias, we chip away at the idea of objective reality. There is no reality but the one that a payroll or demographically predetermined story demands.

Dystopian Covid theater continues in France.

David Martin Jones and Michael Rainsborough explain that John Stuart Mill would likely not approve of mandated vaccination against Covid-19.

The private sector strikes back against an especially obnoxious Covidocrat!

Great Barrington Declaration co-author Martin Kulldorff tweets:

Infectious disease epidemiology can be counter intuitive. If you trusted the media “experts” but now realize the devastating impact of ineffective Covid restrictions, we welcome you with open arms. Let’s make sure this ends and never happens again.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 191 of the 2011 revised and enlarged edition of Thomas Sowell’s 2009 book Intellectuals and Society:

The preservation of the vision of the anointed has led many among the intelligentsia to vigorous and even desperate expedients, including the filtering out of facts, the redefinition of words and – for some intellectuals – challenging the very idea of truth itself. Many among the intelligentsia create their own reality – whether deliberately or not – by filtering out information contrary to their conception of how the world is or ought to be.

Marty Makary Is Not Impressed with the White House’s Covid-Policy Advisors

(Don Boudreaux)

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In response to Anthony Fauci’s latest recommended Covidocratic diktat, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine professor Marty Makary expresses this belief: “I don’t think the White House is getting the right medical advice.” (My apologies for my inability to rid this video of the intro ad.)

Watch the latest video at foxnews.com

A strong case can be made that the three persons, at least among those who aren’t elected to political office, who through their recommendations over the past two years have caused the greatest amount of harm to Americans is Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx, and Neil Ferguson. And these recommendations have been calamitous. I wish that I believed in life-after-death and in an omniscient and benevolent god, That way, I could at least take some satisfaction in knowing that these three officious, arrogant, and ignorant persons are destined eventually to suffer appropriate punishment for their reckless recommendations and predictions.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 211 of David Mamet’s 2011 book, The Secret Knowledge:

I look back on my Liberal political beliefs with a sort of wonder – as another exercise in self-involvement – rewarding myself for some superiority I could not logically describe.

DBx: Of course, by “Liberal,” Mamet here means “Progressive.”

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Jay Bhattacharya tweets:

In an alternate universe, responsible scientists spoke up forthrightly against cruel and useless lockdowns, rather than canceling the scientists who did, or equivocating to keep in the good graces of the lockdowners.

Brendan O’Neill explains that a very real source of danger is Covid fear-mongering. A slice:

The scaremongers have overplayed their hand. Omicron could prove disastrous, they warned. They scoffed at the early indicators from South Africa suggesting it was milder than Delta. ‘MYTH BUSTER’, declared the Sun when Chris Whitty poured cold water on the idea that Omicron might be milder than Delta. ‘Deaths could hit 6,000 a day [in Britain]’, screamed the Guardian, turning Sage’s worst-case scenario into a chilling headline. The news was full of it: we’re doomed.

Yet now it seems pretty clear that these fearful prophecies were way off. Just a week after we were being bombarded with these visions of the Biblical horrors Omicron would visit upon our nation, it’s being reported that this variant really is milder than the Delta one. This raises some really serious questions for the expert classes who are meant to be guiding us through this health crisis. Have they lost the plot? And now, will they lose the trust of the people?

Gavin Mortimer decries France’s Covidocratic authoritarianism. A slice:

My daughter’s Christmas won’t quite be the same this year. She and I are in England but her French mother has been prevented from making the trip by her president. It’s a funny world when hundreds of people can quite easily cross illegally from France to England in small boats – 1,200 in four days last week – but a mother isn’t allowed to take a train to be with her daughter at Christmas.

But that is France for you in what Macron’s opponents call his ‘Covid Dictatorship’. Even so his authoritarian measures are doing him and his country a fat lot of good. Yesterday France recorded 91,000 new cases of Covid, around the same as England, this contaminated little island that Macron so hates. One might have hoped such vertiginous figures would prompt a rethink in the Élysée. Has it occurred to Macron that perhaps Covid passports aren’t the answer? They were introduced in July and what have they achieved, other than to segregate France?

So Macron’s solution is to tighten restrictions still further. Dependent on parliamentary ratification (a foregone conclusion) as of January 2022 people in France will require not just proof of three vaccinations to enter most public places but also to show a negative PCR test.

“Something went very haywire in March 2020.”

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

el gato malo asks “at what point will the world wake up to the fact that we are currently inhabiting far more of a testdemic than a pandemic?” A slice:

data from the UK is showing that only 1 in 3 recent “covid hospitalizations” is actually in the hospital for covid. the vast majority were there for something else and tested positive after admission. this is literally tripling the reported count of new patients.

Margery Smelkinson tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

Study shows Omicron less virulent than other variants in preclinical model. Better at spreading but less viral entry into lung tissue, less lung damage, and less morbidity in animal model. Cases becoming very much uncoupled from disease. Covid policies need updating.

As Neil Ferguson and other ‘modelers’ yet again recklessly fuel Covid hysteria, Daniel Hannan continues to write wisely on Covid policy. Two slices:

‘If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you…” Rarely have Kipling’s words been more apt. Last month, news that a new variant of Covid had been detected in South Africa caused many to lose their heads. The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine predicted that there could be more than 7,000 daily Covid hospitalisations by January. Neil Ferguson and his team at Imperial College forecast that, without more restrictions, deaths could rise to 5,000 a day.

Newspapers and the BBC passed these claims on uncritically, sometimes exaggerating them in the telling. Their voices joined together in a general hubbub of panic. And who was to blame? Why, Boris Johnson, of course! Even as the country faced an apocalyptic plague, the PM was supposedly idling around like some bloated, wise-cracking Falstaff, more interested in indulging his libertarian backbenchers than in saving lives.

As his critics grew shriller, Boris kept his head, pushing boosters, but refusing to shut Britain down pre-emptively. Across Europe, countries decreed bans and prohibitions. But the PM stuck to what should have been a basic principle throughout, refusing to reverse the burden of proof. The onus was on those who wanted illiberal measures to show that they were necessary, not on defenders of the status quo to show that they were not.

Lockdowners tried all their old tricks. Sage produced models that left almost no room for the possibility that omicron might be relatively mild. Worst-case scenarios were selectively leaked and reported as central forecasts. Downing Street press conferences became a series of ritualistic demands for crackdowns. Labour insisted that Boris do something; and, while it was vague about what that something should be, it was very clear that any uptick in deaths would be entirely his fault. Again and again, we were told that, by refusing to act in time, the PM had condemned us to a longer and harder lockdown later.

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Still – and I must apologise for my indelicacy in repeatedly bringing this up – there was a control in the experiment all along. Sweden annoyed the world’s media by refusing to join the rush to house arrest. As a Swedish MP told me at the time: “We didn’t really have a contingency plan of our own, we borrowed Britain’s – and we were quite surprised when you guys dropped it.”

Sweden banned big meetings, made some classes online and introduced table-only service in bars, but otherwise trusted people to use their nous. The result, in medical terms, was not out of the ordinary. Sweden did slightly worse than the European average in terms of overall deaths, though its rating may now improve: last week, data published by The Economist showed that Sweden’s overall excess mortality in 2021 was the lowest in Europe.

By any other measure, Sweden’s performance was enviable. It did not suffer anything like the hit to education, employment or mental health that the rest of us did, and faces 2022 without the mountains of debt we have taken on.

David Hart calls the tyranny that ravaged humanity for the past two years “hygiene socialism.” Others call this tyranny the “biosecurity state.” Telegraph columnist Tim Stanley calls it “the medical-socialist state.” Two slices:

If 2020 was the heroic year of the pandemic, a year of “save the NHS” and Operation Moonshot, 2021 was when it sank in that the virus wasn’t going away, it was just going to evolve and the restrictions along with it. No, we are not locked down – yet – but if we do venture out, it’s masks, passports and in some parts of Britain rules so silly that they seem as irrational as avoiding ladders and black cats. The broadcast media is obsessed with case numbers; you can’t ride a train without being lectured by the guards on etiquette. To save the NHS, we turned the entire country into an outpatients ward.

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Any drumbeat compelling us to care, like the constant advice on masks and handwashing, undermines the voluntary instinct to do the right thing. I paraphrase Caroline Lucas, the Green MP, on the ethical quagmire of mandatory vaccines: it transforms medicine from something done for the community to something done to the community.

This year has crystallised for me one of the things that most defines the conservative personality: a hatred of being told what to do. It’s not crude individualism; most conservatives happily juggle loyalties, including family and faith, and carry obligations as comfortably as a tortoise does its shell. But they don’t like being swept up in utopian dreams, or taking orders from people who want to change them to suit their design for life. The themes of lockdown and climate change are conservative: self-sacrifice, conservation. The methods have been anything but. The idea that we must never go back to a pre-2020 normal, that this is a wake-up call to change everything, is frightening.

The British take a small step toward recognizing that there’s more to life than avoiding death by Covid.

But at least what these people are suffering from isn’t Covid-19.

Who would-a thunk it?! A government official – a public servant! – pressed for more draconian Covid restrictions by misrepresenting the data.

Phil Magness has been unsparing in his just criticisms of those persons – including Sam Bowman and many others with pro-liberty proclivities – who express admiration for the draconian zero-Covid authoritarianism of governments in places such as Australia and China. Here’s an image recently shared on Facebook by Phil:

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 139 of the late Nobel laureate Douglass North‘s 2005 book, Understanding the Process of Economic Change:

This liberty to come and go, to buy and sell as they saw fit was as essential to economic growth as some security of property.

DBx: Economic prosperity for the masses requires security of private property rights. Of course it does. But such prosperity requires also the freedom of people – as consumers, as producers, and simply as human beings – from being bound against their will to existing arrangements and places. And this prosperity further requires a widespread acceptance of what Deirdre McCloskey and Art Carden call “the bourgeois deal.“

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Vinay Prasad exposes the madness – and the inevitable results – of what colleges are doing to their students in the name of fighting Covid-19. Two slices:

Category 3 (useless, virtue signaling theater) is the most common. Wearing your mask when you enter a restaurant and walk to your table, but not when you sit there for two hours laughing and drinking is one example. The fact this policy exists reflects serious impairment in thinking and total failure of policy makers.

Making a 2-4 year old wear a cloth mask in day care (which the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends against the advice of the World Health Organization), but, of course, kids take the cloth mask off to nap next to each other for 4 hours in the same room! Theater.

Closing beaches and other outdoor activities. Wearing a mask outside. The list goes on and on, and most things we did fit in this category. On a side note: Here we review all data on masking.
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Truly, I can’t even understand how anyone thinks these policies are justified. I am also surprised college students have accepted them with scant protest. I can only surmise that many have been mislead into thinking this sacrifice serves a broader interest (i.e. believe they are being altruistic), or that the incentives on their lives and career for conformity are so great they are afraid to speak up.

I suspect the strong link between restrictions and political party may also affect them. After all, the youth most strongly leans left (full disclosure: as do it!), and thus adheres to the identify badges of the left (but in my case, sadly, I spent too many years studying & publishing on scientific evidence to turn my brain off).

In short, draconian restrictions on vaccinated young people or those with natural immunity living in tiny pockets of college campus makes no sense, and is a policy that contributes to a harm in societal well-being. The policy is unethical and illogical.

To young people: I am personally sorry that those of us who recognized the futility and harm of these policies could not have done more to shield you from the anxieties and risk aversion of the irrational.

David Marcus, writing in the New York Post, decries the continuing Covid hysteria. Two slices:

Five hundred and eighty one days ago, I wrote a column that appeared in these pages with a headline on the cover that read “It Needs To End. NOW.” In May 2020 there were no COVID vaccines, and limited treatments, and yet already, many voices had begun to call out the excessive illiberal measures enacted by gubernatorial despots in our bluest states. A year and a half later, the results are in. The critics of lockdowns were right.

Take a look at Sweden. Remember when it refused to lock down and liberal news anchors gravely warned that half the country would be dead by next Tuesday? You don’t hear much about Sweden these days because, in fact, the Scandinavian naysayers had the lowest excess mortality of any European country this year — approximately 785 per 1million people. By comparison, the United Kingdom had 1,657 per million in excess deaths.

Sweden decided to do what other countries refused to: focus on protecting the most vulnerable while letting the vast majority who were not in mortal danger live as normal a life as possible and trust their sense of personal responsibility.
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The hard truth is that a sprawling bureaucracy has attempted to minutely control the lives of everyone, yet dropped the ball on properly protecting the minority most at risk. An army of officials tasked with drawing up myriad rules for justifying masking children could have spent time more constructively studying how to keep nursing-home patients free from infection.

At least some hospital overcrowding is being caused, not by the need for medical treatment of Covid, but by Covid hysteria. (HT Phil Magness) A slice:

Some Vermonters who are able to find antigen tests and then test positive are clogging up emergency rooms.

The emergency department at the Rutland Regional Medical Center has been overwhelmed with asymptomatic folks.

Dr. Rick Hildebrant is RRMC’s medical director. He says some people who test positive with a rapid test go to the emergency room looking for a PCR test.

The Vermont Hospital Association says it’s hearing similar stories from other parts of the state.

el gato malo observes about the omicron variant:

“a pandemic so deadly you need a test to be sure you don’t just have a cold instead” seems a little histrionic, no?

Phil Magness:

China gets another outbreak prompting a strawman, despite being touted now as the last remaining example of a ZeroCovid “success story”

Harry Hodges observes wisely that “[f]or those of us lucky enough to be free this Christmas, it is a timely reminder that there is far more to life than simply avoiding death.” A slice:

There is at last some semblance of acknowledgment not only of the suffering of those who have fared worst from lockdown measures – children, the isolated, those struggling with mental health conditions – but of the fact that it is bad for us all to live in a state of semi-permanent paranoia and social restriction. At times, scientists gave every impression of believing that human interaction was something troublesome and irritating, that could and should be manipulated in the pursuit of public health.

Such an outlook comes with the territory, but the reality is that social mixing is not something we can take or leave, it is what makes life worth living. It puts bread on our tables, smiles on our faces and presents under our trees. Without it, our economy withers, but so do our souls. There was a time when such a view seemed heretical, or at least some mix of callous and unpatriotic. This Christmas, it is on its way to becoming the orthodoxy.

Linking to this Wall Street Journal op-ed, from a few months ago, on the insanity of pursuing a policy of zero Covid, Jay Bhattacharya tweets:

The zero covid ideology and the lockdowns it pushed have joined the sad list of the most destructive utopian ideologies in history.

The late Vermont Royster’s In Hoc Anno Domini – run every year at Christmastime since 1949 in the Wall Street Journal – is especially appropriate in 2021. A slice:

There was the persecution of men who dared think differently, who heard strange voices or read strange manuscripts. There was enslavement of men whose tribes came not from Rome, disdain for those who did not have the familiar visage. And most of all, there was everywhere a contempt for human life. What, to the strong, was one man more or less in a crowded world?

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from pages 62-63 of Thomas Sowell’s monumental 1980 book, Knowledge and Decisions (original emphasis):

No single individual, nor any collection of individuals, could have in their heads all the complex technical information on production processes and the nuances of personal feeling involved in matching millions of investment sources and users. The most efficient and imposing bank, corporation, or government bureau has only scratched the surface. The astronomical amount of knowledge in the whole system is sorted and coordinated in fragments by the simple process of each transactor seeking the best deal from his own subjective viewpoint and not necessarily (or even usually) by knowing why the deal that suits him best emerged as it did from the millions of other possibilities in the market.

Some Non-Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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George Will is correct: “National conservatives and racial identitarians have a common enemy: Individualism.” A slice:

[Michael] Oakeshott understood in 1961 that modernity’s emancipation of the individual from the “warmth of communal pressures” did not exhilarate everyone. Indeed, in 2021, U.S. “national conservatives,” who are collectivists on the right, recoil against modernity in the name of communitarian values, strongly tinged with a nativist nationalism and with a trace of the European blood-and-soil right.

These “national conservatives” have an unacknowledged kinship with their collectivist cousins on the left, the race identitarians. Their critical race theory subsumes individualism, dissolving it in a group membership — racial solidarity, which supposedly has been forged in the furnace of racist oppression.

Today’s progressives, who fancy themselves the vanguard of modernity, are actually modernity’s enemies. In progressivism’s jargon, History is a proper noun designating something autonomous. People “on the right side of history” propel History toward a knowable destination. It is known by theorists whose special insight makes them society’s rightful rulers.

Nobel-laureate economist James Heckman explains why Progressives are wrong to long for a welfare state in the Danish style. A slice:

In making the case for these programs, progressives often draw on the Danish welfare state for inspiration, with its low levels of income inequality and high levels of mobility in income across generations. They attribute these features to the many generous social policies Denmark has in place; Denmark for example offers tuition-free education from pre-K to PhD with substantial support. And Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), a staunch supporter of Build Back Better, regularly points to Denmark as the model welfare state.

But Sanders and other progressive admirers of the Danish welfare state should note that despite generous policies, there is substantial inequality in child outcomes across social and economic classes in Denmark. Contrary to the views of progressives, despite the striking policy differences between Denmark and the U.S., these differences are not reflected in intergenerational educational mobility.

For example, family influence in Denmark is comparable to what it is the United States; children of college-educated women do substantially better than children of high school dropouts in both countries.

David Henderson remembers a paper from the late 1990s by Daron Acemoglou and Joshua Angrist – a paper that finds that the Americans with Disabilities Act might be yet another disability for Americans with disabilities.

Richard Ebeling looks back on the late and not-in-the-least lamented Soviet Union.

David Boaz looks at some history of politicians switching parties.

Sam Staley reviews the new Peter Jackson Beatles documentary, Get Back.

Sam Staley also reviews the new Spielberg movie, West Side Story.

Robby Soave reviews the t.v. show White Lotus.

James Harrigan and Antony Davies remind us of the first warriors – at least, in British North America – against Christmas: Puritans.