Russell Roberts's Blog, page 198

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 213 of my good friend and former professor Randy Holcombe’s excellent 2019 book, Liberty in Peril: Democracy and Power in American History:

[image error]In markets the situation is just the opposite [from politics]. People cooperate only when they gain from trade on some specific good or service. When a person buys gasoline at a filling station, for example, whether the gas station attendant favors higher or lower taxes is irrelevant to the transaction. Similarly, nobody enters a transaction at a department store contingent on whether the cashier has the same views on abortion as the purchaser. The only relevant issues are whether the purchaser wants to make the particular purchase and whether the seller is willing to sell. Nobody asks, or even cares, about the political views of those with whom they do business. Their interests simply are to complete the transaction as easily as possible. Market exchange, by its very nature, fosters cooperation, even among people who disagree about almost everything.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 1 of Scott Atlas’s gripping 2021 book, A Plague Upon Our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID From Destroying America:

Countless lives will also have been lost due to the missteps of those we entrusted with working for the public good. Directly from the lockdowns; missed medical care; school closures; massive economic strains; incalculable psychological damage, especially to young people; and a worldwide humanitarian crisis will burden us for decades. While inflicting enormous harm, the lockdowns also failed to protect the vulnerable.

Well, Computers ARE Known to Carry Viruses

(Don Boudreaux)

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I’m posting this photo and caption, from this report, and letting the combo speak for itself. (HT Chuck Wright)

I will, I know, receive e-mails from individuals feigning shock and disappointment at my closed-minded failure to understand any of many excellent reasons why this physician in this setting would be masked. “He’s likely got a immunocompromised grandfather sitting nearby!” “He just returned from sitting in his den with his immunocompromised children and has simply not yet removed his mask!” “He’s expecting his immunocompromised wife soon to bring to him a cup of tea!” “The photographer who snapped this photo is either immunocompromised, obese, or 85 years old, and this good doctor doesn’t want to risk infecting that person!”

Perhaps. But given the incessant hysterical overreaction to Covid-19, my guess is that this physician imagines that he must do all he can to keep his patients terrified of the Covid monster.

Some Non-Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Nicolás Cachanosky explains why today’s inflation is not chiefly caused by supply-chain web woes.

Also writing about inflation is my intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy.

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal is unimpressed with the Fed’s current handling of inflation. Here’s the conclusion:

Mr. Powell’s strategy seems to be to steer through his confirmation by talking tougher on inflation while doing little about it anytime soon. The Senators can decide if they feel as confident as the Fed chairman does that he has it all under control.

Also unimpressed with Jerome Powell’s handling of inflation is Robert Barro. A slice:

Powell continues to insist that today’s high inflation is all about temporary bottlenecks and supply-chain problems stemming from the pandemic-induced recession and the subsequent uneven recovery. According to this view, the Fed is merely a passive agent, trying its best to provide enough liquidity so that the supply-side inflation does not disrupt financial markets and the overall economy.

Powell’s interpretation of current events reminds me of the German central bank’s view in 1923, when it was presiding over that country’s post-World War I hyperinflation. According to the Reichsbank, the inflation derived from goods shortages was attributable to foreigners, whose unreasonable reparations payments had caused a sharp depreciation of the German mark. In this scenario, the Reichsbank was a passive agent, trying as hard as possible to print currency to keep up with the rise in prices. As with Powell, the blame for inflation was put elsewhere – in this case on foreigners – rather than on the central bank’s own policies.

GMU Econ alum – and Pepperdine University professor – Julia Norgaard reviews Armen Alchian’s and William R. Allen’s Universal Economics. A slice:

The book starts out by stating its quite cheeky intent. The authors admit that the reader will become brainwashed, but it is in the “desirable” sense. By “desirable” brainwashing they mean that the reader will begin to see their erroneous beliefs about the world for what they are—wrong. Some commonly held beliefs that the economic way of thinking illuminates are “property rights commonly conflict with human rights” and “rent control improves and expands housing.” The authors pose economic challenges to these widespread economically unsound beliefs in an intellectually stimulating and an enjoyable way. The first thirteen chapters lay the foundation for the economic way of thinking and basic price theory. These chapters cover the concepts of costs, marginal thinking, efficiency, and property rights, among many other basic principles. Chapters 14 through 29 use the foundational concepts in the previous chapters to build the economic framework for decision making in organizations like firms. Chapters 30 through 42 apply economic thinking and price theory in the realms of labor markets and money.

Liz Wolfe reports on Elizabeth Warren’s charge that, because of the tax code, Elon Musk doesn’t “actually pay taxes.” A slice:

Time had just named Musk its Person of the Year, so Warren tweeted: “Let’s change the rigged tax code so The Person of the Year will actually pay taxes and stop freeloading off everyone else.” Musk tried a few different responses on for size, including “You remind me of when I was a kid and my friend’s angry Mom would just randomly yell at everyone for no reason,” “Please don’t call the manager on me, Senator Karen,” and then “Don’t spend it all at once … oh wait you did already.”

Musk’s best response was to counter the claim that he won’t pay taxes this year—a common talking point from those who won’t acknowledge that many ultra-rich founders and CEOs accrue such high net worths not via traditional salaries alone (or in some cases at all) but via a mix of stock options, capital gains, interests, dividends, and business income. Though Musk did not pay federal income taxes back in 2018 (because he took out loans against Tesla shares), he will be on the hook to pay an extreme amount this year: potentially between $9 billion and $10 billion, if he exercises soon-to-expire stock options.

Sen. Warren might want to read GMU Econ grad student Dominic Pino’s explanation, at National Review, that the U.S. income-tax code is indeed very progressive.

Also from Dominic Pino is this report of Elizabeth Warren’s truly comical take on inflation. (DBx: How can anyone encounter pronouncements from the likes of Warren, or of almost any other successful politician, and not conclude that these politicians are either dangerously stupid or demonically dishonest?)

Cato’s Colin Grabow reports that Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) “proposes paring back protectionism to address port woes.”

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Alberto Mingardi questions the value of fear-mongering as public policy. A slice:

Whatever we think of the merit of their decisions and the measures they took, experts and governments just assumed that scaring people was the thing to do. Even today, with the Omicron variant, more and more European governments are doing just that. The problem, [Adam] Grant suggests, is that fear-based communication is not sustainable; what happens with the passing of time is that we end up in “the boring apocalypse”….

The impossible has happened: Covid derangement has gotten even worse on college campuses.

Here’s an excellent letter in the Wall Street Journal:

The Biden administration’s illegal vaccine mandate has already had real consequences. At the clinic where I work, our laboratory lost half our phlebotomists because they refused to be vaccinated. Never mind they had already been working for a year and a half of the pandemic, with personal protective equipment and other safeguards, without adverse effects.

It is not easy to replace them in this economy. With the loss of these essential people and the excessively prolonged wait to get labs, how many people did not follow through with essential lab tests? How many lives were lost as a result?

Ted E. Barber, M.D.
Toledo, Ohio

John Stossel rightly complains about FDA delays in approving new Covid treatments.

Matt Welch reports on intensifying Covidocratic tyranny – and some resistance to this evil – in New York. A slice:

When will New Yorkers ever be vaccinated enough to have their pre-COVID freedoms back?

That’s the unasked question lingering over several new government mandates that went into effect this week. Beginning Monday, at the order of Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul, every business in the state was required by law to have every employee and customer show proof of full COVID-19 vaccination, or make everyone inside their doors over the age of 2 wear a mask.

Violators face fines of up to $1,000. Enforcement is being left to county governments, of which an estimated one-quarter—almost all run by Republicans—have indicated they will not participate in.

Paul Alexander summarizes some evidence of vaccination doing little to prevent the vaccinated from becoming infected with, and (hence) spreading, the Covid virus. Here’s his opening:

Governments around the world have encouraged and enforced a new form of segregation based on vaccine status. This is not only dangerously inhumane; there is no scientific basis for this.

There seems to be an underlying presumption here that the unvaccinated are unclean (regardless of natural immunity) and their presence will spread disease. What if, however, existing studies reveal that there is little to no difference between the COVID vaccinated and unvaccinated in terms of becoming infected, harboring the virus (viral load in the oral and nasopharynx), and transmitting it?

Toby Green tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

WHO, 1st guiding principe of the Constitution: “Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”. https://who.int/governance/eb/who_constitution_en.pdf…

Is anyone in government listening?

Jay Bhattacharya tweets:

Vaccine passports in the UK will fail to stop COVID spread or protect the vulnerable. They will succeed in fuelling social division, NHS over-crowding, and distrust in public health.

Writing in the Telegraph, Sunetra Gupta decries the likely return to Britain of the straw man: “The costs of restrictions have been devastating, as everyone can see. Yet we are poised once more to add to the collateral damage.” Another slice:

The catalogue of collateral damage of these potential mitigations has now become too immense for anybody to ignore, but somehow they were justified in the face of the threat that the spread of the new virus posed. Any simple calculation would indicate otherwise, particularly as their ability to bound the spread of the virus hangs in doubt on the basis of comparisons between regions with very different policies.

Allister Heath warns that Boris Johnson (with a big assist from Britain’s government-run health-care system) “is dooming Britain to a dismal cycle of never-ending lockdowns.” Three slices:

When will this nightmare end? Next year? The year after? Are ruined Christmases the new normal? Britain, in common with much of the West, failed to learn the lessons from the first phases of the pandemic, and now faces a crippling, debilitating and ruinous cycle of never-ending lockdowns as each new variant overwhelms us.
…..

The usual groupthink-addled technocrats – the very same ones who panicked about the cost of Brexit – are staggeringly complacent about the impact of recurring lockdowns and restrictions, and of the borrowing, tax increases and money-printing deployed to pay for them.

…..

We used to think that the biggest threat to our way of life was terrorism or nuclear war or invasion. It turns out that our greatest Achilles’ heel is our health system’s lack of capacity. Even a relatively mild disease that has already largely been tamed by vaccines and antivirals can bring us repeatedly to our knees, making us shut our societies to “protect our NHS”, crippling our confidence, economies and children’s education.

Lionel Shriver praises those courageous few who have helped to keep her sane during Covid hysteria. Three slices:

Keen to keep our Christmas issue nominally upbeat — not Shriver’s strong suit — I’m pleased to discover that these days I admire a host of folks who aren’t dead. Some are colleagues or acquaintances; others I’ve never met. While they don’t all embrace the same catechism, they’ve one thing in common: they depart from establishment orthodoxy on Covid-19. What they share, then, is an anti-catechism.

I’ve been vocal about my dismay over unquestioning public capitulation to wholesale rescindment of civil liberties during this pandemic. I’ve raised the alarm over the irrationality of divisive but bizarrely popular vaccine mandates and passports, when the inoculated also catch and spread this disease. I’ve decried the collusion of government, Big Tech and the mainstream media, all singing in such perfect harmony that they could go on tour as a Motown revival band. But the Covid story has not altogether been one of unrelenting conformity. Often at some cost to themselves, a range of British journalists, academics, doctors and, yes, even politicians have sung piercingly off-key.

I’m therefore taking this seasonal opportunity to thank these perverse if not downright self-destructive outliers, upon whom for the past 20 months I’ve personally relied to maintain my sanity and my faith in humanity.
…..
Former Supreme Court Justice Jonathan Sumption has tirelessly advanced the case that subjugating democracy to public–health tyranny puts the West in a grave political danger bound to persist beyond the pandemic. Ever temperate, articulate and urbane, Sumption bears a faint resemblance to my husband, who never twigs that I mean the comparison as a big compliment.

Every week, professional curmudgeon Peter Hitchens has given grumpy, disgusted and deliciously disdainful interviews on Talkradio. He’s even appeared in legacy media, in the rare instances a discouraging word about illiberal, epidemiologically inane government policy is allowed on mainstream shows. Hitchens’s primary shortcoming is a belligerent conviction that he’s the only person standing up to the new authoritarianism. Look around you, Peter. You may spurn the helping hand, but you have confederates.

The crew at Spiked, among them Brendan O’Neill, Fraser Myers and Tom Slater, have remorselessly produced Covid content against the grain; ditto the faux-naïf self-styled nerds at Triggernometry. True to its name, UnHerd has consistently run pieces that contest received coronavirus wisdom, and I’d particularly commend terrific recent essays by Paul Kingsnorth (‘How Fear Fuels the Vaccine Wars’) and Matthew Crawford (‘The New Public Health Despotism’). Along with many other freelancers, Ross Clark, Matt Ridley and Douglas Murray have swum against an exhausting tide of ideological uniformity. The oncologist Karol Sikora has warned about the dire consequences of blinkered obsession with Covid for cancer patients. Epidemiologists such as Sunetra Gupta and Carl Heneghan have put reputations on the line to interrogate ‘known facts’ in their profession. Shockers, even a handful of British politicians have stuck up for their constituencies’ civil rights, including MPs Steve Baker and Sir Desmond Swayne (‘Masks are about sending a message — well I don’t like the message!’).
…..
For the most part, I’ve found the pandemic’s lessons on human nature to be depressing. Lo, most people are easily manipulated through fear, so that citizens in seemingly stable, storied democracies can be persuaded to trammel their constitutions over the course of a few days. Most people contain a kernel of authoritarianism that only requires the right circumstances to germinate. Most people can be enticed to gleefully rat on their neighbours. Most people delight in viciously demonising an outgroup.

Fraser Myers applauds the growing opposition to Britain’s “corona authoritarianism“. A slice:

Secondly, vaccine passports are illiberal and discriminatory. They turn liberty from an unconditional right into a privilege tied to your health status. They could also take us down a worrying path towards a two-tier society of vaxxed and unvaxxed, where the latter are excluded from much of public life.

This dismaying development is almost inevitable once vaccine passports come to be regarded as acceptable.

The great Daniel Hannan speaks wisely in the House of Lords:

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from pages 1-2 of the 2016 second edition of Thomas Sowell’s excellent volume Wealth, Poverty and Politics (footnote excluded; link added):

Even in a country long recognized as one of the most prosperous on earth, the United States of America, at the beginning of the twentieth century only ten percent of American homes had flush toilets and only 3 percent had electric lights. There is nothing automatic about prosperity. Standards of living that we take for granted today have been achieved only within a very minute fraction of the history of the human race, and are by no means the norm among most of the people of the world today. Standards of living far below what we would consider to be poverty have been the norm for untold thousands of years. It is not the origins of poverty which need to be explained, since the human species began in poverty. What requires explaining are the things that created and sustained higher standards of living.

DBx: Yes. A million times yes. Yet this point is as incessantly ignored as it is undeniably correct.

I emphasize to all of my students that the full title of Adam Smith’s 1776 book is An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Adam Smith understood that wealth, not poverty, has causes.

Hung Up on Individual Rights

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:

Editor:

Defending Pres. Biden’s vaccine mandates, Dr. Curtis Krock carps that “As a nation, we are hung up on individual rights rather than our responsibilities to our fellow citizens” (Letters, Dec. 16).

Well.

I, for one, am eternally grateful that Thomas Jefferson and the 55 other signers of the Declaration of Independence were so “hung up on individual rights” that, to defend these rights, they risked their lives and sacred honor. I’m grateful also that the philosophy of classical liberalism – which birthed the American nation – warned that tyranny often gains admission with sweet promises to better ensure that citizens meet their responsibilities to each other.

Finally, as we approach the end of the second year of arbitrary Covid diktats, I’m grateful to the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal for consistently giving voice to those who are both “hung up on individual rights” and wisely fearful of the authoritarianism lurking in arbitrary exercises of power.

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

Some Non-Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Mike Munger writes with good sense, in the Wall Street Journal, about inflation and Biden’s Build Back Better beast.

Whatever you think of Congress’s bipartisan infrastructure initiative, its timing is unfortunate. It will be sharply expansionary on the fiscal front, with new demands on labor markets straining to find workers. All that cash from Fed monetary expansion is out there ready to be spent. Mr. Biden’s Build Back Better plan would make these problems worse by injecting trillions into the economy.

Things aren’t yet so bad that a plan can’t make them worse. In a recent paper for the Law and Economics Center at George Mason University, I evaluated one policy for managing prices—a top-down approach directed from Washington. I found that such plans are thwarted by information problems (officials don’t know enough to direct resources or decide prices) and incentive problems (the power to decide which prices will be allowed to increase, and which will be held down, will be corrupted by politics).

We’re already stuck with supply-chain bottlenecks and too much cash. A government price plan can only make things worse. Ain’t that a punch in the mouth?

Also writing on Build Back Better is George Will. Two slices:

It is a sow’s ear made from the silk purse of his election, which was the nation’s plea for temperateness. The everything-including-the-kitchen-sink process that has produced BBB has completed the collapse of Biden’s credibility, and his party’s. The process has resembled Winston Churchill’s description of an intragovernmental negotiation: Britain’s Admiralty favored building six battleships, and the economists favored four, so they compromised on eight.

BBB treats all Democratic constituencies like baby birds with their beaks wide open. Including journalists: There is a $1.7 billion payroll tax credit of up to $25,000 for each local journalist an organization employs in the first year and $15,000 for the next four — with the usual make-believe that this dependency of media on government will then end. The media will always proclaim their independence, but progressives’ politics is always about multiplying dependent constituencies.

The promise of no tax increase for the 98.2 percent of Americans earning less than $400,000 came with an unarticulated caveat and an invisible asterisk. It meant no “direct” increases: Employees, shareholders and customers of corporations will pay all corporate tax increases.

Congressional Democrats’ bookkeeping trickery — pretending to assume the quick expiration of entitlement programs that they say are moral imperatives forever — misstates by almost $3 trillion what Democrats actually hope to make BBB cost over a decade. BBB would add entitlements to Medicare while the 2021 Medicare Trustees Report announces that the Hospital Insurance Trust Fund will be insolvent by 2026.
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Biden’s banal response to rising gasoline prices has included directing the Federal Trade Commission to investigate “anti-consumer behavior” by oil companies and ordering 50 million barrels — less than Americans use every three days — released from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. His indifference to his cognitive dissonance is hilarious: He says fossil fuels are an “existential” threat to the planet, and please, OPEC, pump more, quickly, because cranky U.S. drivers are an existential threat to something even more important than the planet: Democratic control of Congress.

“4 Years After the FCC Repealed Net Neutrality, the Internet Is Better Than Ever” – so reads a headline on a new report by Robby Soave.

James Pethokoukis reports on interesting research into America’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Inu Manak and Alfredo Carrillo Obregon report some good news: 67 “WTO members agree to cut red tape in global services trade.” A slice:

The benefits of this agreement could be significant. A recent joint study by the Organisation for Economic Co‐​operation and Development (OECD) and the WTO estimates that the annual savings in costs to services trade would be approximately $150 billion USD. Breaking this down between participants and non‐​participants shows that the potential cost savings to the deal’s signatories would be around $135 billion, while non‐​signatories would still see a $17 billion reduction in costs. The study goes on to say that “Substantial benefits accrue in a number of sectors, including financial services sector with USD 47 billion, business services with USD 36 billion, as well as communications and transport services, with both around USD 20 billion.” This is a win‐​win.

Several scholars assess Randy Barnett’s and Evan Bernick’s new book, The Original Meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment.

An Austrian Crown Prince once got advice from Carl Menger. A slice:

What Menger conveyed to Rudolf was both the place and the limits of the state within the society over which he would one day rule. That is, Menger emphasized the broad institutional order in the context of which the ruler’s subjects were to be allowed to act on their own behalves, respectively, out of which general economic and social improvement becomes possible. As Menger said, “Given the complexities of the social circumstances, only the individual’s (sic) themselves can judge correctly the relative importance of their needs.” The government could never know what was good for the individual better than the individual himself.

Bryan Caplan shares penetrating insights from the philosopher Christoper Freiman.

AIER’s new president is Will Ruger. Congrats Will – and AIER!

“Kinds of Order in Society” Part II

(Don Boudreaux)

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My latest column for AIER is the second of a two-part series on F.A. Hayek’s insightful 1964 New Individualist Review paper, “Kinds of Order in Society.” A slice from my column:

But the distinguishing feature of an organization is not found in the kinds of goals (such as profit) that it is consciously established to pursue. Rather, the distinguishing feature of an organization is simply that it is consciously designed and established to pursue some particular goal or goals, whatever it or these might be. And so the actions of every person in an organization can and will be judged by how well those actions contribute to the achievement of the organization’s goals.

Spontaneous Orders

Spontaneous orders differ categorically from organizations. Spontaneous orders, like organizations, are highly useful to individuals. But unlike organizations, spontaneous orders are not designed and created. They emerge as unintended consequences of the actions of persons, each of whom is pursuing his or her own individual goals with no awareness that those actions will give rise to a larger order. While a spontaneous order assists each individual in the pursuit of his or her goals, such an order, unlike an organization, itself has no goal towards which it aims. And because a spontaneous order as such has no goals, the actions of the individuals whose choices give rise to the spontaneous order cannot be judged by how well or poorly they promote the goal of the spontaneous order – for, again, the spontaneous order has no goals.

The most obvious example of a useful spontaneous order is language. Language is clearly (to use a phrase much-favored by Hayek) the result of human action but not of human design. Languages emerged from human beings attempting to communicate with each other. Yet no one consciously decided what specific words and sounds refer to, or mean, in any language. The word “chair” emerged over time to mean the particular thing that it today means to those who speak English.

Being undesigned, it follows that language was not designed to serve any purpose or to achieve some particular goal. It would be silly to talk about the goal of the English language or of the Korean language. And yet language does indeed enable each of us as individuals to better pursue our own goals. The shopper uses language to explain to the store clerk just what items he wishes to buy, and the store clerk, at the end of her work day, uses language to inform the cab driver of her destination. But the shopper and the store clerk, by using the same language, are not together acting to achieve some higher goal. Further, it would be mistaken to describe language as having among its goals the service of the shopper and of the store clerk.

Another example of a spontaneous order is the global market. No one designed today’s division of labor – with some of us working as plumbers, others of us as web designers, yet others of us as butchers, brewers, bakers, or baseball players. And no one designed the indescribably complex pattern of exchange relationships that enables each of us to enjoy the fabulous prosperity that each of us enjoys. And yet these phenomena are real. They are the result of human action but not of human design. The market, like language, provides enormous assistance to each of us as we each pursue our own individual goals. But the market, also like language, has no overarching goal toward which it aims.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins continues to be dismayed by how poorly informed many people are about Covid-19. Two slices:

Unfortunately, the picture sold to the public continues to be badly distorted, with consequences that someday will have to be honestly assessed. While the U.S. government now quietly estimates that 146 million Americans had been infected with Covid as of Oct. 2, media outlets are currently trumpeting America’s 50 millionth “confirmed” case as the latest milestone. This cockamamie measure can only appeal to editors because it makes it sound like the virus can still be stopped before it reaches most people.

Its bastard offspring, the case fatality rate, also continues to pop up in the media, with Bloomberg News last week bizarrely trying to outdo China’s Covid chief by forcing on its readers a claim that “the global death rate stands at over 1.9%.”

This needlessly terrorizing estimate is biased twice over, because it ignores infected people who aren’t tested, and because those who seek testing tend to be the sickest and oldest. Oxford University’s Our World in Data, perhaps because its website is frequently consulted by media types, takes pains for the especially thick of head: “There is a straightforward question that most people would like answered. If someone is infected with COVID-19, how likely is that person to die? The key point is that the case fatality rate (CFR)—the most commonly discussed measure—is not the answer to the question.”

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What also remains discouraging is the public sector’s perhaps unavoidable but never-ending policy chaos. From the virus’s arrival on our shores, politicians decided it wouldn’t be good for their careers to be seen conceding that it would eventually infect most of the population, even though all understood perfectly well (don’t kid yourself about Dr. Fauci and company) that it was almost inevitable.

A large and continuing exercise in hand waving has been needed to pretend that we were striving to suppress case numbers indiscriminately, though no evidence has suggested that such suppression is achievable except in the very short term at an unsustainable cost.

Vinay Prasad: “I think it is clear: many pandemic experts hurt children.” A slice:

The experts in the USA pushed this issue further. Against the advice of the World Health Organization and UNICEF, our expert bodies (AAP & CDC) advocated for cloth masking (an ineffective mask per Bangladesh RCT) in kids as young as 2. This decision defied all pre-pandemic guidance, all available evidence, and basic common sense. To date, this recommendation continues, and this policy has led to mandatory masking of toddlers in many daycare settings for hours on end.

Reason‘s Robby Soave pleads with government schools to “stop threatening unvaccinated kids.” Two slices:

But the mere fact that punishing thousands of teenagers for not being vaccinated was even on the table is disconcerting. Indeed, throughout the pandemic, the enforcers of COVID-19 restrictions have had few qualms about making children miserable—even though the under-18 crowd has little to fear from the disease. Young people are the cohort safest from COVID-19, whether or not they are vaccinated; vaccinated seniors are at significantly greater risk than unvaccinated teenagers. Despite this reality, children and teenagers in the U.S. face the most stringent and brutally uncompromising pandemic prevention policies of all, especially at public schools.

…..

It’s one thing to encourage teenagers to get vaccinated: It’s quite another to threaten them with further setbacks to their social lives and educational careers if they do not comply. Healthy young people have very little to fear from COVID-19, but two years of social isolation, school closures, and virtual learning are undoubtedly having a profoundly negative effect. Elementary and middle school test scores—particularly among minority students—are plummeting; and according to the surgeon general, more young people are experiencing depressive episodes than ever before.

Also from Robby Soave:

Despite no new public information that would suggest there is anything novel to fear from the omicron variant of COVID-19—which seems to be producing mild cases in vaccinated individuals—many municipalities are regressing into full-blown panic and reimposing mitigation measures. Case in point: Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom reinstated California’s mask mandate, beginning December 15 and lasting until January 15.

Jon Sanders decries Covidocratic tyranny. Two slices:

Government leaders have tipped their hands. Covid-19 has given them access to powers that they are loath to lose. Alarmingly, people in the world’s freest societies (using the prepandemic 2019 “Freedom in the World” report by Freedom House) — notably in North America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand — have allowed totalitarian restrictions so long as they were euphemized as safety measures. Without the gloss, they include house arrest, dehumanizing dress codes, movement papers for work, shopping, and travel, and apartheid.

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Just the knowledge of the Omicron variant prompted the European Commission to urge for the European Union to impose mandatory vaccination. Many European nations have announced new crackdowns on the unvaccinated, from lockdowns to fines, excused by fears of the Omicron variant.

The free press, a quaint term in the U.S. that now applies to organizations openly promoting a police state, welcomes these developments. A recent CNN headline declared “Making Covid-19 vaccines mandatory was once unthinkable. But European countries are showing it can work.” Which is like saying China is showing that making human-rights activists “disappear” can work to bring about near-universal acclamation for communism. It’s amazing what “can work” when a government can erase your livelihood if you don’t comply.

Alexander Adams will resist Covidocratic tyranny.

Aaron Kheriaty applauds Japan’s humane policy on Covid vaccination – and he criticizes the inhumane policies of other governments, including many of those in the United States.

el gato malo is appalled that some people are now urging the continued wearing of masks and practicing of “social distancing” as means of ensuring the effectiveness of vaccines.

Jon Miltimore reports on more studies that find that lockdowns do little or nothing to save lives.

Here’s insight from the Telegraph‘s Kate Andrews. A slice:

Plan B supporters will be quick to say that the Government didn’t have a week to wait it out. With the Omicron variant estimated to be doubling every two to three days, action needed to be taken immediately. These are clashes that are bound to arise but made more difficult to weigh up when no formal assessment has been done.

Made more difficult, too, by Johnson’s decision to usher in rules such as vaccine passports that have no proven track-record of success. Scotland’s experiment with showing your health status to access parts of public life didn’t stop the spread of the virus. It did, however, create more burdens on business and rules for consumers.

The return of restrictions – and Johnson’s refusal to rule out more – does not bode well for future economic recovery. But treating the economy as an after-thought is making the situation far worse.

And the Telegraph‘s Allison Pearson applauds those Tory MPs who voted against vaccine passports. Two slices:

Please don’t call the MPs who voted against vaccine passports ‘Tory rebels’. In my book, those upstanding men and women are the true Conservatives. Rather, it is those who pushed through this repellently un-British measure, with the help of the Labour Party, who are the traitors to our philosophy.

That stirring creed of liberty that trusts grown-ups to make the best decisions for their own families and does not seek to ostracise people for refusing to provide proof of a medical treatment to go to the theatre or the footie. All I can say is, thank God there are people in Parliament who are prepared to take arms against this sea of senselessness, this tsunami of pseudo-scientific scaremongering.

From head boy of the old school, Sir Graham Brady, to 28-year-old blonde bombshell of the Red Wall Dehenna Davison, via former Royal Air Force engineer Steve Baker (more sense than the entire Cabinet combined) through that lioness Esther McVey, keenly compassionate Sir Charles Walker and Miriam Cates (both rightly devastated by the collateral damage of lockdown) to fearless, principled Nus Ghani and the swashbuckling Sir Desmond Swayne… These are my heroes – and all the rest who dug in their heels on the slippery slope to authoritarianism.

…..

Last night, I went to London for dinner. Was I worried about omicron swarming through the capital? No, I was worried about the freedom to make my own risk assessment being taken away. I was worried that my children’s hopeful young adult lives are about to be blighted again after a reader, friendly with the wife of a boffin who sits on Sage, emailed to warn me that lockdown is “pencilled in for January 5”, once we get through “this politically sensitive period”. (How unbearably grim if so.)

I was fretting that yet more children would be murdered or abused in their homes during the Work From Home order. I have been heart-flutteringly, not-sleeping anxious that we would see a repeat of this time last year, with that deadening sadness millions of us experienced when we knew for sure that we would not be reunited with mothers, fathers, grandparents, children and siblings. The season of Ho! Ho! Ho! turns into Oh No! NO!, should hospitals happen to run short of beds. Is this perpetual, sickening uncertainty really how it’s going to be every winter – the Ghost of Christmas Lost rattling its lonely chains?

“The pandemicists must be stopped.” A slice:

No realistic public health goal underpins this diagnostic mania, of course. People who test positive for Corona are sent home to suffer in untreated silence by themselves. Endlessly testing, tracing, sequencing, panicking and closing is, however, a goal in itself for people like Emily Gurley and all the other pandemicists [Emily] Anthes gleefully quotes, from Eric Topol to Trevor Bedford to Ezekiel J. Emanuel. All of them want the Corona Circus to play on, and after it ends they hope for a sequel sometime soon. Never before have they enjoyed such personal and professional prominence.

Jay Bhattacharya tweets:

Depression has many causes. The lockdowns, by promoting loneliness, isolation, and fear, have intensified those causes, harming the lives of so many.