Russell Roberts's Blog, page 195
December 25, 2021
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 464 of F.A. Hayek’s profound and important 1964 article “Kinds of Order in Society” (available without charge on-line here) as it appears in Liberty Fund’s 1981 single-volume collection of New Individualist Review:
[B]ecause it was not dependent on organization but grew as a spontaneous order, the structure of modern society has attained a degree of complexity which far exceeds that which it is possible to achieve by deliberate organization. Even the rules which made the growth of this complex order possible were not designed in anticipation of that result; but those peoples who happened to adopt suitable rules developed a complex civilization which prevailed over others. It is thus a paradox, based on a complete misunderstanding of these connections, when it is sometimes contended that we must deliberately plan modern society because it has grown so complex. The fact is rather that we can preserve an order of such complexity only if we control it not by the method of “planning,” i.e., by direct orders, but on the contrary aim at the formation of a spontaneous order based on general rules.
December 24, 2021
Covid Fear Exhibition (By Those Greedy for Status)
This essay by Freddie deBoer on Progressive elites’ reaction to Covid is very insightful. (HT Arnold Kling) Here are several slices (but do read the whole thing):
Covid is a serious disease that has killed a lot of people, but it does not kill different people at the same rates. Obviously, one of the greatest risk factors is being unvaccinated. But you’d still rather be a child and unvaccinated than be a 50-year-old and vaccinated if you’re trying to avoid Covid. Nor do different adult populations have the same risk profile. The vast majority of those people who have died of Covid have been elderly, immunocompromised, or ill. Those who have been hospitalized by Covid have also been disproportionately obese, to a startling degree. Covid discriminates, and not just against the unvaccinated. I don’t know why our media has decided that reflecting the plain scientific reality that different people have profoundly different Covid risks should be so taboo, but it’s precisely the sort of thing that causes a loss of trust among the skeptical. In any event, I’m not among the highest risk, or particularly close to it – I’m 40 years old, generally healthy, overweight but not obese, and vaccinated. People like me have died from Covid, but they are a very small minority of the deaths. Most who catch it from my demographic profile experience the disease the way I did in April of 2020: as an unpleasant but entirely manageable fever and mild respiratory illness.
…..
Imagine my confusion, then, at the number of vaccinated people, almost all of them educated, liberal, and upwardly mobile, existing in a state of constant anxiety and dread over Covid, despite the fact that these feelings confer no survival advantage at all. While I have no issue with people feeling what they’re naturally feeling, I would argue that those with large platforms have a responsibility not to contribute to panic. Unfortunately many people with huge followings are being remarkably irresponsible, openly spreading fear and engaging in baseless speculation about mass death. This despite the fact that almost all of them fall in demographic slices with low risk. The immense popularity of overstating one’s personal risk from Covid, and of structuring one’s whole life around that exaggerated risk, can’t be explained in logical terms. It can only be understood with the animal logic of the force that dictates the living conditions of our entire elite class: their competition against each other.
…..
Something like 5.3 million people across the world have died of Covid, which is indeed a tragedy. But the 1918 flu pandemic killed ten times that amount, when the world population was about a fourth of what it is now. Yet life went on. Institutions still functioned. There were stock markets, they held parades and fairs, people got married in grand halls. And the flu was very, very bad and it killed a lot of people. But what is the purpose of this kind of serial exaggeration of the impact on day-to-day life for the vast majority of people? 40% of people who catch Covid-19 never develop symptoms, a number that jumps to >60% among young adults. More than 80% of symptomatic cases are mild. We have vaccines that have proven remarkably effective at preventing hospitalization and death, and though Omicron appears to spread more quickly we have no reason to believe it undermines those benefits of vaccination. The vast, vast majority of people are going to survive this pandemic, and the remarkable efficacy of Pfizer’s upcoming antiviral will fundamentally change treatment, dramatically lowering deaths. I write all of this knowing that what I’m saying is responsible and buttressed by evidence. But the environment our media has created is so wildly sensationalistic and addicted to doomsaying that I get anxious just writing this. I’m afraid I’ll be called an antivaxxer for… asserting the power of vaccines.
…..
When this major international crisis arose, they [Progressive elites] felt a lot of legitimate fears and worries, which just makes them human. But when it became clear that the public health response to Covid involved denying ourselves things we wanted and enjoyed, including non-negotiably important things like in-person schooling and face-to-face human contact, they (subconsciously) saw an opening: if denial of human pleasures is virtuous, I can be more virtuous than my peers. If caution is noble, overcaution must be even nobler.
…..
For some people, it seems, being more freaked out about Covid is quite like an I Voted sticker or a BlackLivesMatter sign in their window. It’s another way to let everyone know that they have the greatest wealth of all, the wealth of superior character, of greater moral standing. They’re fond of pointing out those 5.3 million people who have died, in the midst of their self-aggrandizing diatribes. I would perhaps invoke the dead in a different way: even this, even now, even them, you turn into yet another way to let the rest of us know how advanced you are.
The danger is far from over. But when we got the vaccines case rates decoupled from the rate of hospitalization and death. Therefore if you are breathlessly reporting increases in case rates without reference to those other metrics, you are engaged in, yes, misinformation. For you normal people out there? Get vaccinated. Get boosted. Be smart. Then live your life. Defy the virus. Defy it.
Freedom and Good Health Aren’t the Same Thing
Here’s a note to a hostile correspondent:
“Craig the Realist”
Mr. Realist:
You allege that my opposition to lockdowns and to many other government-imposed Covid restrictions is “inconsistent with [my] valuing freedom because sick or dead people can’t be free.” You conclude that “strict covid restrictions make more freedom in the long run possible.”
I haven’t now the time to rehearse the many sound arguments against the presumption that lockdowns, school closures, and other draconian restrictions are the best means of protecting and prolonging human life. I’ve linked at my blog to many such arguments, including this one by John Tierney.
I here say only that it’s a gross error to confuse freedom with life or good health. Each of these things is good, but they aren’t the same as each other. My point, in a different context (of course), was well-explained by Thomas Sowell on page 117 of his great 1980 book, Knowledge and Decisions – and can be seen especially clearly by substituting for “starvation” the phrase “suffering severely from Covid” (original emphases):
The growth of the decision making powers of government may facilitate various specific forms of material progress – even if at the expense of material progress in general – while reducing freedom. That trade-off needs to be made explicit. It is instead muddied over by those who define freedom as options (freedom to) – and who have many options to promise in exchange for our freedom. The options approach asks, “What freedom does a starving man have?” The answer is that starvation is a tragic human condition – perhaps more tragic than loss of freedom. That does not prevent these from being two different things. No matter what ranking may be given to such disagreeable things as indebtedness and constipation, a laxative will not get you out of debt and a pay raise will not insure “regularity.” Conversely on a list of desirable things, gold may rank higher than peanut butter, but you cannot spread gold on a sandwich and eat it for nourishment. The false issue of ranking things cannot be allowed to confuse questions of distinguishing things.
Happy holidays to you and yours.
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
Jeffrey Singer says that it’s about time that the FDA approved molnupiravir. A slice:
Yesterday the Food and Drug Administration gave emergency use authorization (EUA) to the antiviral drug Paxlovid, more than a month after its manufacturer, Pfizer, submitted its application. This pill, if taken within the first few days of a COVID-19 infection, has been found to be 89 percent effective in preventing progression of the disease to hospitalization. Clinical trials found no patients taking Paxlovid died from the virus.
Seventy‐four days ago, Merck applied for an EUA for its antiviral molnupiravir. If taken in the first few days of COVID infection it is 30 percent effective in preventing hospitalization. As in the Paxlovid clinical trials, none of the patients on molnupiravir died of the virus. An FDA advisory panel recommended molnupiravir be approved on November 30, yet the FDA failed to act. Until today. This morning the FDA finally gave America’s patients access to the second of two antiviral drugs that snuff out COVID-19 infections including those from the omicron variant.
The real contagion at loose in the world—especially among the western nations which noisily congratulate themselves as model liberal democracies to be emulated by the more benighted nations inhabiting the purported darker corners of the planet—is a virulent outbreak of statist authoritarianism.
That is, a definitely not Black Plague virus of the type that has challenged mankind o’er the ages has become a universal excuse for the wholesale cancellation of civil liberties and property rights like never before—even in times of world war.
Aside from the sheer range of unknowable long-term effects of shutdowns on, say, entrepreneurship or educational development, the landscape of near-empty London pubs this past week highlights that people voluntarily stop socialising when Covid cases surge. Chalking up how much any GDP decline owes to this behavioural change, as opposed to government mandates, is tough.
Yet there’s a thornier challenge with these technocratic cost-benefit calculations – accounting for the value of social liberties that go unmeasured in market activity.
The restaurant visits that would have happened but for lockdowns are something we can estimate as a “cost” of shutting “non-essential” businesses. Yet how do we quantify the cost to individuals of being banned from attending a close relative’s funeral? Or missing a friend’s wedding? Or losing a year of dating to find a life partner?
These non-market liberties are obviously crucial to people’s wellbeing, but get ignored in discussion of the costs of this crisis because they are subjective and unobservable. If that makes them difficult to estimate for any activity, then aggregating their value across the whole population is impossible. And yet, it’s clear that just ignoring these losses entirely guarantees getting the trade-offs of policy wrong.
The Telegraph‘s Editors decry the “absurd” Covid restrictions imposed in Wales. A slice:
The government he leads insists on inflicting upon the Welsh more drastic measures against Covid than the rest of the country, even Scotland. Yet there is no evidence that the tougher line limits the spread of the virus. It merely inconveniences people more.
Mr Drakeford has made it unlawful to go to work “without a reasonable excuse” on pain of an on-the-spot fine, but it is OK to go to the pub where a rule of six is to apply once more with social distancing and masks. A limit of 30 is being introduced on numbers in a private home.
The £60 work charge will be imposed from next Monday with companies hit with penalties of £1,000 every time they break the rule. The fine will apply to employees who travel into England to work even though it is not unlawful over the border. Is it now Labour policy to break up the Union? How on earth can the police decide whether someone is working unreasonably?
Douglas Murray writes that our “narrow obsession with Covid has starved our lives of meaning.” A slice:
In the past two years our sights as individuals and as a nation have been singularly restricted. Our movements have been restricted. Our priorities have been restricted. And it is perfectly possible that as a result we have become a servile, cringing, limited people: requesting permission to rejoin our loved ones; desiring beyond all things the right to attend a football match or a cinema again one day.
Yet this cannot be the total of our ambitions or world view. Any more than should be the simple endless search for longevity. After all, what is the value of a life lived long if it is not also lived deep?
Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: “Public health has spent the better part of two years creating the illusion of control … This is a respiratory virus that’s very contagious and it’s not surprising that you catch it. We have no technology to stop the spread of it.”
The Arc of COVID is long but it bends toward the Great Barrington Declaration.
Some Non-Covid Links
Mike Munger and Terry Anderson remember the late Rick Stroup. A slice:
“Rick” Stroup was one of the founders of the environmental economics movement; he was a conservationist of the first rank. “Conserving” resources requires accounting for the opportunity costs of using those resources. But in the 1970s the focus of “environmentalism” was command and control; it fell to economists such as Richard L. Stroup, John A. Baden, Terry L. Anderson, and others to point out that prices embody and enforce a concern for opportunity cost better than any alternative system.
The essence of the environmental economics approach is the need to clarify and protect property rights. If the transaction costs of using tort law and negotiations are low enough, many of the problems of pollution and resource misuse are mitigated. In his book Cutting Green Tape: Toxic Pollutants, Environmental Regulation and the Law (Independent Institute, 2000, co-edited with Roger E. Meiners), Rick makes a powerful and incisive argument for claims that many traditional environmental activists found abhorrent: For one thing, you can be too careful, and that uses a lot of resources. Second, focusing liability on actors with deep pockets fails to reduce pollution, but wastes enormous resources on compliance and distorted incentives. Finally, far and away the greatest violators of environmental prudence and principles of conservation are state and (especially) federal government agencies. But the government immunizes itself from even the most basic accountability, while placing at risk the assets of companies and individuals who create value in the economy.
Reason‘s Nick Gillespie talks with George Will. A slice:
Reason: Let’s talk about this concept of the “unruly torrent.” What do you mean by that, and why is that a kind of controlling image for this passel of interesting columns that you’ve collected?
Will: Well, it’s unruly in the sense that it is a torrent. That is, most of reality is not governed. Most of the time that’s a very good thing. It’s been well said that the essence of the Bible reduced to one sentence is, “God created man and woman and promptly lost control of events.”
Those of us with a libertarian streak—some streaks broader than others, but mine is broad enough—believe that things being out of control is exactly what we want. We want a spontaneous order: up-from-the-bottom creativity rather than down-from-the-top command structures. However, events can be unruly and turbulent and dangerous as well as constructive. And I think we’re seeing the dangerous side in the last period that my book covers.
The Fourth Amendment guarantees, inter alia, the right of the people to be secure in their “persons” from unreasonable “seizures.” The Mohamud and Byrd cases, however, show that a circuit court can decide, without rhyme or reason, that if a person violating that guarantee possesses a federal badge, the person whose rights are violated has no right to a remedy.
Concurring, reluctantly, in the decision by his 5th Circuit colleagues, Judge Don Willett wrote that the implication of this circuit’s precedent is that “redress for a federal officer’s unconstitutional acts is either extremely limited or wholly nonexistent, allowing federal officials to operate in something resembling a Constitution-free zone.”
Willett said “middle-management circuit judges” such as him must follow precedent, but he hoped that “as the chorus” deploring “today’s rights-without-remedies regime” becomes “louder, change comes sooner.” Sooner could begin as soon as Jan. 7.
Richard McKenzie remembers, with great fondness, Christmastime in the orphanage in which he lived. A slice:
Christmas at my orphanage began the week before Thanksgiving. All 225 girls and boys, ranging in age from 2 to 18, gathered in our cottages to write to Santa Claus. There were rules for those letters. We could list three (and only three) suggestions for a gift that Santa would leave under our cottage tree on Christmas. Each gift could cost no more than $10 (or about $105 today), which we considered generous.
The letters were distributed among benefactors and Presbyterian church circles in North Carolina. Recipients were asked to provide one gift, but who could resist sending all three? After all, it was probable many donors had read Dickens and wanted to brighten an orphan’s Christmas.
In eight years at the orphanage, none of my suggestions went unfilled. My orphanage pals and I gamed the system with our rule, “Always ask for a wallet.” Why? Who could buy a wallet for an orphan and not slip in some cash? By the time I graduated from high school, I had a drawer full of nice wallets that had barely been used.
Tomas Philipson explains that Biden’s ‘progress’ against child poverty is a mirage. A slice:
The advance payments to alleviate child poverty were partly or fully eroded by the higher prices caused by President Biden’s policy trifecta of increased demand, crimped supply and an accommodative monetary policy. This year’s resulting 6.8% rise in the consumer-price index isn’t likely to slow down, particularly since 40% of core CPI is shelter, composed of rent and owners’ equivalent rent. This measure lags behind housing prices, which are booming. The 9.6% gain in producer prices will also eventually will be pushed on to consumers.
My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy recommends three books.
GMU Econ alum Nikolai Wenzel applauds the insights of the late economist Paul Heyne.
“Thanks to technological progress, cars are much safer than one-horse open sleighs” – so explains Chelsea Follett. Here’s her conclusion:
So rather than romanticizing horse-drawn transportation, the next time you hear the line, “Oh what fun it is to ride in a one-horse open sleigh!” remember that the lyric is somewhat sarcastic—and with good reason. And as you travel to see loved ones for the holidays, take a moment to appreciate the technological advances in transportation safety.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 25 of Randy Barnett’s and Evan Bernick’s 2021 book, The Original Meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment: Its Letter and Spirit:
The polity has no preexisting obligation to provide a particular good such as common schools – or roads, sidewalks, or parks – in the first instance. Only once a polity has chosen to create such a good does a fundamental right of access to it preclude a policy from arbitrarily denying access to any of its members. In contrast, the duty of the polity to refrain from violating the civil rights protecting one’s pre-political natural rights is never optional. Such access must be afforded equally to every citizen, indeed to every person within its jurisdiction.
As a result, while a state is free to deny to the citizenry as a whole a post-political right not designed to protect natural rights, it may never arbitrarily deprive any citizen, or the citizenry as a whole, of the civil rights that serve to protect the natural rights of its members.
December 23, 2021
Some Covid Links
Karol Markowicz, writing in the Wall Street Journal, describes the “media variant.” A slice:
But when the virus was surging in the South this summer, media figures took a different tone. Covid could be stopped, they insisted, if only those rubes would behave correctly. Florida was a particular target because its governor had ended lockdowns and mandates early and was pushing for schools to stop requiring masks. A typical piece, by CNN’s Chris Cillizza, was titled “ Ron DeSantis ’ priorities on Covid-19 are all screwed up.” A chastened Mr. Cillizza tweeted last Friday that he had learned the vaccine “can never do what I had hoped: Ensure no one I loved will become infected,” and that “I realize I am way behind lots of other people in doing that.”
That’s for sure. A lot of the information that media types finally seem ready to accept has been available for some time. The World Health Organization said in September that the virus will continue to mutate like the flu. “People have said we’re going to eliminate or eradicate the virus,” said Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO’s emergencies program. “No we’re not—very, very unlikely.”
Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins continues to write insightfully about Covid (and Covid hysteria). Two slices:
The U.S. continues to fight a phantom version of Covid-19—the Covid of superstition, not science. Example: The Los Angeles Times last week insisted on a “1% to 2% death rate that’s prevailed across much of the pandemic.” An Associated Press columnist claimed the “virus still has a death rate of 1.6% in the U.S.—roughly 16 times greater than the flu.”
If so, in a pandemic the CDC says has infected nearly half of Americans, then 2.5 million have died, which obviously they haven’t.
Now, in a kind of pandemic bookend, the canaries of our collective self-gaslighting are again the professional sports leagues, which were central two years ago to our initial response to the then-new coronavirus. The leagues are canceling games, forcing teams to play with absurdly shrunken rosters, all because of positive Covid tests by players who are vaccinated and boosted, who in many cases also have natural immunity, and who have no symptoms— i.e., who feel fine.
…..
Does this make any sense? No. But then, in two years, many of us have learned nothing except virus=bad, vaccine=good and how to virtue-signal reflexively around things like masks. Witness the coverage this week of Southwest Airlines CEO Gary Kelly, who tested positive one day after testifying that mask-wearing did little to stop spread aboard an aircraft. No, his case isn’t punishment for mask blasphemy but a predictable consequence of being human and participating in the world.
When you see your preferred press outlet still citing 50 million “confirmed” infections as the measure of the pandemic that has likely reached four times as many Americans, you aren’t in the presence of intelligence.
The U.S. government is pushing Covid-19 vaccine boosters for 16- and 17-year-olds without supporting clinical data. A large Israeli population study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine earlier this month, found that the risk of Covid death in people under 30 with two vaccine shots was zero.
Booster mandates for healthy young people, which some colleges are imposing, will cause medical harm for the sake of transient reductions in mild and asymptomatic infections. In a study of 438,511 males 16 to 24, 56 developed myocarditis after their second Pfizer dose (or 1 in 7,830, at least seven times the usual rate). True, most cases were mild, but in the broader group of 136 people (including older and female patients) who developed myocarditis after the vaccine, seven had a “complicated course,” and one 22-year-old died. Moderna’s vaccine carries an even higher rate of heart complications, which is why some European countries have restricted it for people under 30. But in the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indiscriminately push for boosters for all young people.
…..
We’ve seen medical bandwagon thinking hurt the country before. The false assumption that Covid spreads by surface transmission still has Americans engaging in futile disinfection rituals. We’ve suffered from barbaric policies that prohibited people from saying goodbye to, or holding hands with, loved ones who were dying. Children were shut out of school for a less contagious variant. Our public health leaders are making critical mistakes and affirming each other with groupthink, while journalists forfeit their duty to ask key questions.
“Omicron Hospitalization Risk Two-Thirds Lower than Delta Infection, Says Scottish Study” – so reports Ron Bailey.
John Stossel talks with Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) about Fauci. A slice:
I ask Paul what he thought about Fauci’s flat dismissal of anyone who criticizes him.
“That’s an incredibly arrogant attitude,” replied Paul. “Reminiscent of the medieval church [where] the government representative decided what was science….Any time you have government dogma saying they are science, or government bureaucrats who claim that ‘this is the one and perfect truth’…we should run headlong away.”
Today our government wants to mandate vaccines in private workplaces. The administration claims that’s necessary because not enough people are vaccinated.
Paul calls that a “big lie.”
What concerns me about the NIH director’s email and his interview on television is that he appeared unwilling to have this dialogue. Collins’s day job does not make him arbiter of scientific truth, the Pope for all scientists. On questions of unprecedented pandemic policy, he is surely entitled to his opinion — as we all are — but his is just one opinion of many.
The Covid modellers at Imperial College have begun to back down. About time too. Over the past few weeks, they have made extreme claims about the omicron variant that cannot be fully justified by fundamental science, let alone by clinical observation.
Academic etiquette restrains direct criticism, but immunologists say privately that Professor Neil Ferguson and his team breached a cardinal rule by inferring rates of hospitalisation, severe disease, and death from waning antibodies, and by extrapolating from infections that break through the first line of vaccine defence.
The rest are entitled to question whether they can legitimately do this. And we may certainly question whether they should be putting out terrifying claims of up to 5,000 deaths a day based on antibody counts.
“It is bad science and I think they’re being irresponsible. They have a duty to reflect the true risks but this is just headline grabbing,” said Dr Clive Dix, former chairman of the UK Vaccine Task Force.
Also rightly critical of reckless modelers such as Neil Ferguson is Ross Clark. A slice:
How the left loves trying to establish the narrative that we have a Government of charlatans pitched against the collected wisdom of scientists. Yet the real schism lies within science, between the modellers and those who prefer to read real world evidence. With hospitalisations failing to rise at anything like the rate feared a few days ago, and with the UK Health Security Agency poised to announce that yes, omicron does indeed cause milder disease than earlier variants, it feels as if we are heading for the denouement, the gunfight at the OK Corrall, at which one side will win the decisive battle and the other side be humbled.
When omicron first emerged in South Africa a month ago two things seemed immediately apparent: firstly that this variant was a lot more transmissible than earlier variants, and secondly, that it was causing milder illness. Indeed, it was the unexpected mildness of the symptoms which first drew doctors’ attention to the possibility that this could be a new variant – something which was then rapidly confirmed by the country’s excellent facilities for sequencing the virus.
el gato malo reveals how Covidocratic authoritarianism announces itself in Chicago.
On second thought, I would rather be ruled by people who think the earth is flat than by people who are blind to trade offs in pandemic policy. The latter are likely to do far harm. Spherical earthers with a wise approach to tradeoffs would be best, of course.
Quotation of the Day…
The lockdown advocates, led by Drs. Fauci and Birx, were disregarding concerns about total health in pushing unprecedented, severe societal lockdowns to stop COVID-19 at all costs, policies implemented by states that inflicted incalculable damage and death.
December 22, 2021
Todd Zywicki Talks With Joe Donlon
My great GMU colleague – and long-time friend – from over in the law school, Todd Zywicki, talks with Joe Donlon about Covid and vaccinations.
Still Speculating on the Silence
It seems that starting in Spring 2020 hordes of people, many of whom would otherwise have protested the horrifying expansion of government powers and the tasering of civilization, either vocally or silently supported Covid restrictions, convinced that these restrictions were wise and justified, or at least tolerable, because these were thought to be opposed by Trump and his base.
Whatever were (and are) the dangers to civilization posed by Trump and his supporters, these dangers are less extreme than are the dangers posed to civilization by supporters of lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and many other Covid restrictions. Covidocratic tyranny is no more justified by science than are any of the wrongheaded notions peddled by Trumpians, yet the consequences of Covidocratic tyranny are far more ominous than are the likely consequences of any policies that can reasonably be supposed to come to pass from Trump & Co.
On the science front, one of the differences between supporters of Covidocratic rule and Trumpians is that the former have stronger footholds in institutions traditionally associated with science and a more virulent will to control, or even to “recreate,” society with social-engineering schemes. Much progressive talk today of ‘transforming’ society into a safe, equitable, and inclusive heaven on earth is as detached from reality as are many Trumpian follies, but even more threatening. Yet because progressives, unlike Trumpians, are presumed by the intelligentsia to be well-intentioned, highly informed, and objective – and because social-engineering schemes conform with sacred superstitions – progressives’ policy demands are widely perceived as appropriate. These sacred superstitions hold that society is either inert or destructively chaotic to the extent that ordinary men, women, and children aren’t coercively prescribed and proscribed in fine detail by the progressive state. Opposition to these anti-liberal demands is regarded by progressive intellectuals as anti-progress, anti-science, and, of course, anti-intellectual.
Starting even before Trump’s presidency, readers of my blog, Café Hayek, found harsh criticisms of Trump, especially on the two policy issues about which he seems to care the most: trade and immigration. Trump’s demeanor is appalling, his ignorance formidable, his megalomania insufferable, and his venality vast. And because, as Scott Atlas reports, Trump foolishly acquiesced to Fauci’s and Birx’s “crime against humanity,” Trump bears much of the blame for America’s overreaction to Covid.
Yet as much as I fear Trump and the nationalist-right’s assault on liberal values, I now fear even more the rising authoritarianism in response to Covid. The fact that most supporters of today’s Covid authoritarianism are also opponents of Trump does not render this authoritarianism acceptable. Today’s situation is all the more dangerous precisely because those now running the show, compared to Trump (who, let’s not forget, is no longer in power), seem to many people to be well-intentioned and guided by “the science.”
Observing the expansion over the past two years of the biosecurity state, I detect enormous evil in what the vanguard of progressives incessantly works to do to liberal civilization.
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