Russell Roberts's Blog, page 200

Some Non-Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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My colleague Bryan Caplan is here his usual very insightful self.

Eric Boehm exposes the expensive truth about Biden’s Build Back Better budget buster…

… and Casey Mulligan, writing in the Wall Street Journal, explains that provisions in Build Back Better will also make day care more expensive. Two slices:

The bill’s latest draft proposes to reinvent child care with a trifecta of cost-increasing forces. First, it would remove much of the incentive to offer lower-cost care. Millions of families would have their child-care expenses capped by statute, which means they’d pay the same at an expensive facility as at a cheaper one.

Providers would quickly discover that lower prices no longer are much of a competitive advantage. Moreover, the providers would be reimbursed extra for what Congress calls “quality,” which is a euphemism for having more staff per child. The history of rate regulation is that cost-plus schemes result in needless waste and higher prices for consumers without quality improvements.

…..

Second, providers would need extra staff to comprehend and comply with all the new statutes, certifications and agency rules. Just as physicians complain about paperwork eating up time that could be spent with patients, child-care providers will lose time they could be spending with kids.

Third, the bill imposes “living wage” regulations on staff pay. In a study for the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, I estimate these regulations alone would add 80% to child-care costs.

My Mercatus Center colleagues Liya Palagashvili and Christopher Kaiser argue that inflation is a much larger worry than is immigration.

Ryan Bourne and Brad Subramaniam explain that statutory prohibitions of so-called “price gouging” make shortages worse…

… and the price control called “rent control” won’t, as Christian Britschgi explains, work as promised.

Dan Pearson reveals some of the “nasty realities of steel protectionism.” (HT Bryan Riley) A slice:

First, U.S. mills produce about 80% of the steel needed in this country; the remainder is imported. Import restrictions cause the price for all steel to rise, not just steel from overseas. Steel mills enjoy higher prices on the 80% of the market they serve; users must pay the higher costs on 100% of domestic consumption. Since costs to users are substantially greater than benefits to producers, the economy as a whole loses. America ends up poorer because of steel protection.

Second, steel producers constitute a much smaller portion of the economy than do steel consumers. As of 2019, there were 144,000 workers in steel mills. They added $31 billion of value to the economy, which is equivalent to 0.15% of GDP. Companies that buy steel and make useful things out of it, however, have a much bigger footprint. They employ 6.7 million workers and produce an economic value-add of $1.1 trillion (5.4% of GDP). So steel users employ 46 times more people and add 35 times more to GDP than do steel producers.

Although it may not be well understood by the Biden team, U.S. manufacturers of finished goods can find it exceedingly difficult to compete with imported products made with world-price steel. The reality is steel tariffs are a highly effective mechanism for decreasing the international competitiveness of the manufacturing sector. Imported finished goods made with world-price steel often can handily undersell U.S. products. It’s not easy to succeed in manufacturing when the government is going out of its way to raise your costs.

Do Pro-Lockdowners Accost Neil Ferguson with this Same Question?

(Don Boudreaux)

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This past Thursday I Zoomed in to a lunchtime talk that Jay Bhattacharya gave for Stanford’s Classical Liberal Society. (For the invitation, I’m grateful to Ivan Marinovic.)

During the Q&A session, someone in the in-person audience asked Jay why he – Jay – allowed a byline for one of his appearances on television to describe him as an epidemiologist. This morning I sent the following note to Jay. (Recall that Neil Ferguson is the Imperial College reckless scare-monger whose wildly inaccurate predictions played a leading role in frightening governments in the U.K. and in the U.S. into Covid lockdowns.)

………….

Jay,

From my Zoom vantage point on Thursday I couldn’t tell if the guy from USC who asked you about “epidemiologist” in your byline on a tv show was hostile or not. Either way, your answer was quite good, and only further strengthened by Sunetra Gupta, in the chat, affirming that you are indeed an epidemiologist, “and a very good one.”

From my economist vantage point, I don’t know what the norms are for titling people who work in the health sciences. But I noticed that in this piece in yesterday’s Guardian, Neil Ferguson is described as an “epidemiologist.” (“In an interview with the Guardian, the epidemiologist Prof Neil Ferguson said the total could be double that number.”)

Of course, Ferguson’s degrees are in no such thing. Yet it might well be that the work he’s done during much of his career genuinely qualifies him as an epidemiologist. If so, then your work surely qualifies you as an epidemiologist.

I’m likely here offering a suggestion that by now is old hat to you, but when you next get push back on the question of whether or not you’re qualified to pronounce on issues that are in the domain of epidemiology, tell your interlocutors about Ferguson being described as an epidemiologist.

Don

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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David Henderson defends Scott Atlas.

Samantha Godwin tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

Pandemic response showed an ideology sanctifying mere biological life as its sole value, degrading the value of that which makes lives worth living, of potential for flourishing.

Those considerations were set outside the bounds of polite discourse. Now they are unintelligible.

Jeffrey Tucker asks: Who will be responsible for the damage done by lockdowns and other Covid diktats? A slice:

It is precisely because so much about life (and science) is uncertain that civilized societies operate on the presumption of the freedom to choose. That’s a policy of humility: no one possesses enough expertise to presume the right to restrict other people’s peaceful actions.

But with lockdowns and the successor policy of vaccine mandates, we’ve seen not humility but astounding arrogance. The people who did this to us and to billions of people around the world were so darn sure of themselves that they would take recourse to police-state tactics to realize their goals, none of which came to be realized at all, despite every promise that this would be good for us.

Fauci – further revealing his inhumanity – actually said this:

[L]et’s take the holiday setting. You’re with your family. You have grandparents and parents and children. When you get vaccinated and you have a vaccinated group and you are in an indoor setting, you can enjoy, as we have traditionally over the years, dinners and gatherings within the home with people who are vaccinated.

And that’s the reason why people should, if they invite people over their home, essentially ask and maybe require that people show evidence that they are vaccinated, or give their honest and good faith word that they have been vaccinated.

… and el gato malo is justifiably horrified:

this is how you turn a society against itself and families members against one another.

it’s how you take the reach of the state into every corner of every home.

it is intentional and it is calculated.

they will get you used to this.

they will get you agitated and scared enough to think that this is righteous.

they will vilify and other and seek to describe those who do not submit as unfit, immoral, and unclean.

it has happened before.

it’s happening again.

“Lockdowns Produced a New Generation of Child Soldiers.” (HT Phil Magness)

Emilie Dye decries the tightening in Australia of arbitrary Covid restrictions. Two slices:

In Western Australia, life seems to go on as normal in a lovely zero-COVID bubble, but like The Truman Show, no matter how hard they try, Western Australians can never leave. Their premier has refused to even provide a date for when the borders will open.

The health department for Queensland has confirmed that those seeking organ transplants will be denied surgery if they refuse to get the vaccine. The rules do not make exceptions for those who choose not to get the vaccine for legitimate health concerns.

…..

The people of Melbourne, Victoria, spent 262 days combined under one of the world’s strictest lockdowns, and they are struggling as a result. The state government recognizes the harm lockdowns have had on people’s mental health, but state leaders refuse to give individuals the certainty they need by ending lockdowns for good. Instead, the government is simply building dedicated mental health hospitals.

And Covid tyranny intensifies also in Austria… as it does in New York state.

The New York Post‘s Editorial Board is understandably unimpressed with NY state strongwoman Hochul’s excuse for tyrannizing New Yorkers. A slice:

Gov. Kathy Hochul seems determined to be every bit the dictator the last guy was, with a new order requiring universal indoor masking in “public places” — including private offices as well as restaurants, theaters etc. — unless everyone’s proven vaccinated.

It’s supposedly a response to the Omicron variant, but it’s clearly more of a pander to Omicron hysteria: The new strain has barely hit these shores and by all accounts is markedly less deadly than prior ones.

Steve Cuozzo decries “omicron paranoia.”

If you live in Britain, say no – please say no – to Plan B. (Remember, your leaders are Covidocrits.)

Freddie Sayers explains that Plan B is, not least because it’s pointless, a mistake. A slice:

Most gravely of all, it sets a precedent that will now take years to roll back. Last winter’s lockdown was justified in order to get us to the first vaccines; vaccines have now been offered to everyone. With this second winter intervention, the principle is being established that lockdowns or lockdowns-light — centralised diktats about the movements of every citizen — are the proper response to new variants or potential pressures on the health service. And we all know there will be new variants that escape vaccines better than Omicron in the future; and new viruses after that.

We had a chance, this winter, to show Europe and the world that the UK could achieve a better outcome by avoiding pointless and divisive vaccine passports and further lockdown-style measures. That chance was squandered yesterday, and this cynical, superficial Government will eventually pay the price.

Here’s a list of some sane members of Parliament who will vote against the latest round of Covid tyranny in Britain… MPs who are aptly described by Julia Hartley-Brewer as “defenders of freedom.”

Sadly, some in Britain are calling for measures more oppressive than Plan B – they’re calling for something very much like the straw man. (Oh, and what a surprise! Among those offering worst-case scenarios is Neil Ferguson.)

Tom Harris asks: If vaccination works, why is the British government “behaving as if it doesn’t”? A slice:

The latest Covid variant is causing politicians and bureaucrats much unease, and yet they and we know that omicron is just the latest in a long and probably inexhaustible sequence of variants that will be released into the world in our lifetimes. That’s how viruses evolve.

So is this now a permanent state of affairs? Is this just how human life developed in the early 21st century? Will memories of the time when we could meet whoever we liked in any social circumstances we favoured, when we could walk anywhere without half-suffocating ourselves with a piece of cloth over the bottom half of our faces, be no more than that – memories, to be recounted to amazed grandchildren who think ol’ grandad’s exaggerating again?

Daniel Hadas, writing at UnHerd, offers the lament of an “anti-lockdown centrist.” Two slices:

There is an agonising sense of bewilderment among the small tribe of educated, anti-lockdown centrists to which I belong. I use “centrists” broadly, to refer to those who lived in a circumspect peace with the existing order. We voted for the big political parties, without particularly liking them. We sent our children to normal schools, even if we worried they were over-tested and under-stimulated. We owned smartphones and bought from Amazon, but were not pining for driverless cars or VR headsets. We could hold a friendly conversation with those on the other side of the Brexit or Trump divides. We saw the necessity of big government, but weren’t in love with it. We thought the liberal, Western project was showing wear and tear, but remained optimists.

We now are well into the second year of Covid’s new and ever-evolving bio-politics. Its measures are intrusive, ineffective and/or nonsensical, and dehumanising. They have been traumatic for almost everyone. But there is an additional trauma for anti-lockdown centrists. The public voices whom we trusted, and the institutions to which we belonged or with whom we identified, have almost uniformly embraced this brave new Covid world. So we suddenly find ourselves in the strange company of libertarians, Marxists, and unaffiliated oddballs. And yet, to us, our anti-lockdown position still seems natural and sensible.

In the Covid response, scientists and science have gained an unprecedented social prominence and authority. We must, we are told, “follow the science”. The result has largely been a case of blind scientists leading equally blind governments and citizens into a ditch.

…..

Clearly the Covid paradigm shift is taking place not just in science, but in this wider world of moral and social norms. The field of public health necessarily takes us into that world: as its name implies, public health is inevitably a political matter. We are changing our society and our morality when we consider viral spread to be a moral failing, and prioritise its prevention over such basic needs as freedom of movement or physical contact.

It is first and foremost these moral and social changes that have horrified us anti-lockdown centrists. Most of us, probably, are not scientists, although many of us have done a great deal of scientific reading since March 2020. But our core position must be that the proposed new normal of indefinite intrusions on our freedom and our flourishing is unacceptable regardless of these policies’ effectiveness against Covid. In our paradigm, the old normative paradigm that we are bewildered to find is not shared by so many of our peers, social distancing in the long run threatens the death of society, to be replaced by a grotesque ballet of the masked and vaxxed, interacting only at the whim of governments and experts.

Although from two months ago, this impassioned speech in Parliament by Desmond Swayne contains much relevant wisdom especially for, but not only for, Brits:

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 288 of George Will’s 2021 book, American Happiness and Discontents: The Unruly Torrent, 2008-2020 – a collection of many of Will’s columns over these years; (the column from which the quotation below is drawn originally appeared in the Washington Post on September 14th, 2017):

Life is exhausting – and daily choices are unbearably burdensome – for some Americans who are so comfortably situated that they have the time and means to make themselves morally uncomfortable. They think constantly about what they believe are the global ripples, and hence the moral-cum-political ramifications, of their quotidian decisions. And they are making themselves nervous wrecks.

A Sour Deal

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a note to the excellent Pepperdine University economist Gary Galles:

Gary:

Thanks for eloquently and effectively demolishing the claim that the U.S. sugar program, because it gets no federal budget subsidy, “doesn’t cost Americans anything” (“‘Free’ Sugar Protectionism Is Not As Sweet As It Sounds,” Dec. 10). As you explain, the higher prices we Americans are compelled by this program to pay for food stuffs containing sugar (and corn-based sweeteners) is a cost that is made no less real because we Americans pay this cost to protected sugar and corn producers directly, rather than indirectly through government.

But there’s one additional cost of this program that warrants mention – namely, the vast amount of resources used by sugar and corn producers to lobby for this program. All the time and talent of those persons employed to plead for this special privilege are time and talent that could be, but aren’t, instead used productively – to produce goods and services that would enhance our living standard. This time and talent are spent convincing politicians to plunder all Americans in order to unjustly enrich a few. The output forgone because so many scarce resources are spent, not producing, but pleading for special privileges is a huge cost on top of the higher food prices that we must pay.

You, of course, know about these “rent-seeking” costs, as they’re called. I here mention these costs explicitly as a means of further strengthening your excellent argument.

The fact that our ‘leaders’ (so-called) in Washington have the gall to insist that the sugar program is costless is prime evidence of the contempt in which these ‘leaders’ hold the American people. Thanks again for calling them out.

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

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 161 of the 2009 Revised Edition of Thomas Sowell’s Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One:

Safety might seem to be something that you cannot get too much of. Yet everything we do in our everyday lives belies that conclusion. Often what we do makes more sense than what we say.

Reducing risks has costs – some of which we are willing to pay and some of which we are not willing to pay. Moreover, not all costs are money costs. For many people, the costs of reducing risks would be giving up the enjoyment they get from skiing, boating, rock climbing, skateboarding, and other risky activities. In fact, ultimately there are only risky activities, since nothing is 100 percent safe. Yet no one suggests that we retire into passive inactivity – which has its own risks….

DBx: Well, not until Covid-19 did anyone suggest that we retire into passive inactivity. Starting in early 2020, much of humanity has cowered in passive inactivity, having concluded that the greatest risk of all is exposure to SARS-CoV-2, and that every additional reduction in this risk, no matter how lilliputian, is worth whatever such reduction costs, no matter how gargantuan.

And the public officials who promote this particular risk-avoidance calculus proclaim themselves to be – and are widely praised by the mainstream media as being – unquestionable purveyors of “the Science.”

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Jay Bhattacharya talks straight about the precautionary principle. A slice:

Had policymakers assumed the worst about lockdowns as the precautionary principle dictated, they would have concluded that the principle is not particularly useful to help decide on the wisdom of lockdown.  There was the potential for catastrophic harm on both sides of the lockdown policy and no way to compare the risks and consequences provided by the precautionary principle. Instead, policymakers might have looked to other, wiser risk management practices that have helped the world cope with previous epidemics much more successfully than we have with this one.

Influential scientists, journalists, and public health officials compounded the problem by militarizing the precautionary principle.  On inappropriate moral grounds, they viciously attacked scientists who called for more investigation about epidemiological facts about the virus and economists who raised the possibility of economic collateral harm.

To their great shame, some scientists called for the censorship of scientific discussion about COVID and the de-platforming of prominent scientists who had reservations about the rush to lockdown or dared to question the assumptions underlying lockdown policies. This call to end scientific debate has helped undermine people’s trust in scientific institutions, scientific journalism, and public health agencies.

The damage will take years to repair.

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

Joakim Book reviews David Spiegelhalter’s and Anthony Masters’s Covid by the Numbers. A slice:

The duo carefully explains the many issues in testing, how cycle thresholds, false positives, and testing regimes might distort the interpretation of case numbers and positive results. Britain didn’t suffer from a “case-demic” and another oft-repeated scare, that of hospital capacity, doesn’t hold much water either. They illustrate how as large numbers of non-Covid treatments (surgeries, cancer screenings, minor injuries) were cancelled, resources freed up for other areas of the hospital. Like so many stories from Sweden, Italy or New York City, many of the express hospital facilities erected were superfluous….

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal is justifiably pleased that the courts are ruling against Biden’s unlawful (and abominable) vaccine mandates. A slice:

What legal sage advised President Biden to impose vaccine mandates? The adviser needs to have his law licence pulled because the courts are repudiating the Administration’s mandates at an astonishing pace. A federal judge in Georgia was the latest on Tuesday when he blocked its vaccine requirement for employees of federal contractors—the fifth judicial rebuke in less than a month.

Also writing on the growing legal troubles for Biden’s abominable vaccine mandates is Reason‘s Eric Boehm.

The Covid caste system takes firmer root in Canada.

About Britain’s latest round of Covid diktats, Andrew Lilico argues that “[t]here is no rationale for imposing these restrictions. The Government simply wants to be seen to be doing something”. A slice:

The Government wants to say imposing restrictions is legitimate just in case hospitalisations ended up being very high (and just in case Plan B made any difference to that). But “just in case” is not a legitimate basis for restricting people’s lives. There needs to be a high likelihood that some disaster will follow if restrictions are not imposed and a good chance that the restrictions would avert or at least mitigate that disaster.

The Government does not appear to believe it needs such a rationale. It seems to think that it’s legitimate to restrict millions of people’s lives on bases such as “on balance, that’s wise” or “to reduce pressure on the NHS” (not to avoid its collapse – just to make life a bit easier). That is a serious departure that MPs of good conscience should vote against. Otherwise it would be legitimate to introduce a curfew every evening to “reduce pressure on the police” or restrictions every time a new flu strain is identified “just in case” it might lead to a pandemic.

Spiked‘s Tom Slater argues that Boris Johnson has become “a menace to liberty” as the P.M. “is stuck in a cycle of Covid panic and authoritarianism”.

Fergus Butler-Gallie says that “[i]t’s time to confront the immorality of lockdowns.” A slice:

We have a duty to contemplate the effect of repeated lockdowns on the young, particularly on the development and the nutrition of the poorest children. They have carried an extraordinary burden.

And while restrictions may be tolerable for the comfortable middle classes, our leaders seem to have forgotten those for whom staying at home is a type of hell, and those for whom work, which tends to be essential, cannot be conducted from the spare bedroom.

el gato malo describes the mainstream media as a source of “explanatory antibodies that cling to the truth and neutralize it, preventing it from binding to the perception receptors of the society as a whole.” And thus is the reality of the harms of lockdowns kept hidden from public view.

Hillsdale College opens a new Academy for Science and Freedom – about which Martin Kulldorff tweets:

To repair, invigorate and restore science after a disastrous pandemic response partly caused by the silencing and censoring of scientists, we have founded the Academy for Science and Freedom. Together with @ScottWAtlas, @DrJBhattacharya and @Hillsdale.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 311 of Deirdre McCloskey’s excellent 2019 book, Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All:

Protectionism in foreign trade has regularly damaged a great many poor people and helped a few rich people. Protectionism in domestic trade, as in the US farm program and the EU’s agricultural policy, has done the same.

Some Non-Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Sally Pipes reveals the true costs of “Medicare for All.”

I’m always honored to be a guest of Amy Jacobson and Dan Proft.

My GMU Econ colleague Dan Klein is one of the world’s leading scholars of the works of Adam Smith.

The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board shares EQT Corp. CEO Toby Rice’s response to Elizabeth Warren’s idiotic assertions about energy prices. (DBx: If Sen. Warren really believes what she wrote in her letters to various energy-company CEOs, her ignorance is appalling. If she doesn’t really believe what she wrote, her unscrupulousness is frightening.)

Missouri farmer Blake Hurst is justifiably angry at the higher prices inflicted on him by asinine government policies. A slice:

The reasons for this price shock are as numerous as Twitter experts, but all our inputs have one thing in common: They are imported. Legislation introduced by Sen. Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) would require 50% of the value of a product to be produced in the U.S. to be sold commercially in America. Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) and others have also jumped on the industrial-policy bandwagon.

Requiring U.S. production seems like a smart policy. Wouldn’t a secure domestic supply protect my business from shocks like these? Maybe not. There is more to the story.

Anhydrous ammonia, the main source of nitrogen for our farm, is a natural-gas product, and much anhydrous production in the U.S. occurs near the Gulf of Mexico. Hurricane Ida caused many of those plants to halt production, at least for a time. Foreign plants helped make up the shortfall. As bad as the situation has been, imports have kept it from getting worse.

Jane Shaw offers some history of higher education in the U.S.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy is not impressed with Alan Blinder’s favorable take on Build Back Better.

Here’s the latest from the ever-insightful John Stossel.

Star Parker is correct: “America Should Be Shining the Light of Liberty, Not Government.”

Here’s Ilya Somin on the Final Report of Biden’s Supreme Court Commission.

My Mercatus Center colleague Adam Thierer warns of the danger lurking in the left’s and the right’s attack on tech companies. A slice:

Without admitting it, both sides are really at war against the First Amendment, which protects the editorial decisions made by private companies. To be sure, there is problematic content to be found on digital media platforms, and there are some legitimate complaints about overzealous takedown policies and lack of transparent standards. That does not mean there is an easy policy fix to those problems, however. But courts have held repeatedly that the First Amendment protects efforts by private media firms to devise their own approaches. Just last week, a Texas judge blocked a law that sought to limit social media platforms’ editorial freedoms. That followed a court in Florida enjoining a similar law this summer.

Critics like to paint large tech companies as nefarious overlords out to destroy civilization. In reality, the problems we see and hear on modern platforms reflect deeper problems in our society. If these companies are to be blamed for anything, it’s making human communication so frictionless that every person now has a soapbox to speak to the world. That’s both a blessing and a curse. With unbounded speech comes many wonders but also many problems.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 30 of Bruce Caldwell’s superb Introduction to the 1997 collection of some of F.A. Hayek’s essays and papers (Bruce Caldwell, ed.), Socialism and War:

Indeed, as the decade [of the 1930s] came to an end, Hayek began to believe that countering the statist views of progressive intellectuals, many of whom had claimed the authority of ‘science’ for their arguments, was the most important contribution that he could make.