Russell Roberts's Blog, page 203
December 3, 2021
A Note to a Student on the Advisability of a Policy of Unilateral Free Trade
Here’s a letter to a student in my International Economic Policy course (ECON 385) this semester; this student wishes to remain anonymous.
Ms. C__:
Thanks for your e-mail.
You’re correct that I disagree with your global-affairs professor who told you that “a country can gain from free trade with any other country only if the other country does not limit its imports.”
To explain why I and most other economists believe that your global-affairs professor is mistaken, allow me to use a hypothetical example. Suppose that the U.S. is trading with Sweden and the government of neither the U.S. nor Sweden interferes in any way with trade. Your global-affairs professor would then correctly understand that under these conditions we Americans benefit from trading freely with Swedes.
Now suppose that a gigantic, once-in-a-millennium earthquake devastates Sweden, thus greatly reducing for decades the Swedes’ ability to produce outputs. Able to produce fewer outputs, the Swedes can now afford to buy fewer American exports. (It’s just as if you as an individual were to suffer a serious injury that reduces your ability to work and earn income: your spending power would fall.) In short, the earthquake reduces the Swedes’ willingness to import from America.
But should the U.S. government retaliate against this earthquake by now imposing punitive tariffs on Americans who chose to buy goods from Sweden? I suspect that your global-affairs professor will agree with me that any such retaliation would be foolish; it would reduce Americans’ (and the Swedes’) ability to enrich themselves through trade.
Your global-affairs professor presumably, and correctly, understands that we Americans would be made poorer if our government hampers our freedom to trade with the Swedes on the grounds that the Swedes’ ability to buy our exports is obstructed by the earthquake. And so given his correct understanding, why does your professor think that we Americans are not made poorer when our government hampers our freedom to trade with the Swedes (and with other foreigners) on the grounds that their ability to buy our exports is obstructed, not by a natural disaster, but instead by their governments’ protectionist policies?
As I mentioned in class, it’s possible to tell a logically coherent story of how temporary retaliatory tariffs at home, by persuading foreign governments to reduce their tariffs, will over the long run lead to additional net benefits from trade in the home country (and, by the way, also in the foreign country). But as I also explained, as a practical matter retaliatory tariffs are highly unlikely to work in this happy manner. As such, the best practical trade policy is one of unilateral free trade – that is, free trade at home regardless of the trade policies pursued by foreign governments.
But either way – regardless of the advisability of retaliatory tariffs – economics is clear that the people of a country unambiguously gain by trading freely with the people of other countries even when the people of other countries suffer the misfortune of living under governments that obstruct their freedom to trade. The gains from those trades that are not obstructed are made no less real by whatever obstructions prevent the carrying out of other trades.
Good luck on your final exams!
Sincerely,
Don Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
114 James Buchanan Hall
Neil Oliver on Omicron and Modernity’s Plummet Into Dark-Ages Superstition
This video – 9.5 minutes long – by Neil Oliver is powerful. Do watch the whole thing. (HT Jonathan Fortier)
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: “Spent theory”
In my column for the September 9th, 2011, edition of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review I explain why I believe Keynesianism to be simplistic and wrongheaded. You can read my column beneath the fold.
Some Covid Links
Noah Carl interviews Phil Magness. A slice:
You work for the American Institute for Economic Research, which hosted the conference that led to the Great Barrington Declaration – a public statement advocating focused protection. Could you tell us what happened at that conference?
In early October 2020, AIER hosted a small academic conference for the purpose of calling scientific attention to the costs of lockdowns. Up until that point, the media and political figures such as Anthony Fauci had been working to create a false impression of strong scientific consensus behind the lockdown measures – even as they were failing to perform as promised (recall “two weeks to flatten the curve”). This new consensus was an outright falsehood. As recently as 2019, the WHO, leading epidemiology research institutions such as Johns-Hopkins University, and even Fauci himself had gone on record stating that lockdowns would not work in a respiratory pandemic, and should be ruled out as a policy response.
The conference would call attention to the largely ignored harms of lockdowns, while proposing alternative approaches that were in keeping with the pre-2020 public health science. We hosted three eminently qualified scientists from top research institutions, who presented the case against lockdowns in a filmed discussion panel. This was followed by interviews with journalists who specialize in pandemic coverage. On the last day of the conference, the three scientists then drafted a general statement of principles that (1) summarized the case against lockdowns and (2) called for an alternative “focused protection” strategy. They dubbed this the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), and released it publicly the next morning.
Also from Noah Carl is this assessment of lockdowns. Two slices:
Aside from its effects on health, education and the economy, lockdown represents the greatest infringement on civil liberties in modern history. Here and elsewhere, the state used its monopoly on force to outlaw some of the most basic human interactions, such as having a meal with friends.
…..
Suppose at the start of 2020, the [British] government had said, “In order to prevent mortality falling to the level of Scotland, we’re going to undertake the greatest infringement on civil liberties in modern history. Thanks to our measures, it will only fall to the level of Wales instead.” I suspect that public support for lockdown would have been much lower.
A quarantine isn’t a banishment, but it can become one. Early in the pandemic, Australia imposed rigid entry requirements on citizens—a mandatory two-week quarantine and a tight limit on total arrivals. Many Australians were stranded outside their country for months. Such a situation is no longer a dystopian fantasy for Western countries, so it’s important to draw constitutional lines early.
A suspicionless quarantine requirement, especially as applied to citizens, erodes basic rights. The government could take many lesser steps, from limiting flights from high-risk places to imposing rigid testing requirements. But a universal quarantine is unreasonable. It would burden even vaccinated citizens coming from places with less infection than the U.S.
Restricting citizens’ ability to travel is a hallmark of a police state. Infectious disease will always be with us. It cannot become an excuse to give the federal government carte blanche to control the lives of citizens.
She says Madrid got back on its feet “around the values of freedom, of prosperity. It has been an example. In fact, the May 4 elections are an example for a lot of countries.” Covid-19 devastated the Spanish capital, but several regions have faced more deaths per capita. Critically, the results suggest voters understand that a locked-down economy has public-health implications as well.
“I believe in freedom in all aspects of life. And against everything that tyrannizes and enslaves the person—against addictions, against the identity division between man-woman, left-right, rich-poor. That is what the communist ideology often does, always seeking to collectivize the person and control them from above,” she says. “Responsibility and freedom is what I think there has to be.”
Vinay Prasad is appalled by Anthony Fauci’s unscientific arrogance and hubris.
This overreach has dangerous political implications. “This Court perceives great mischief in allowing a municipality or one of its agencies to exceed its power, even for compelling reasons,” Justice Bagdoian wrote. “In this Court’s view, such expansion of power by a governmental agency, even for compelling reasons, should be unthinkable in a democratic system of governance.”
But that’s the pandemic world we now live in. Boston’s new mayor, Michelle Wu, said Monday the city “will seek a stay of the decision to keep the eviction moratorium in place.” Some politicians love the power the pandemic has provided and won’t give it up easily, which means courts must check their abuses.
Here’s the latest from Lionel Shriver on Covid and Covidocratic tyranny. Two slices:
What a shock: the coronavirus has spun off another variant. Battle stations, everyone. The PM warns that Omicron — evocative of an Arnold Schwarzenegger thriller more than a Bill Murray romcom — ‘can be spread between people who are double vaccinated’, which could seem alarming, save for the fact that the vaccinated communicate all the other variants, too. Omicron ‘might’ evade the protection of vaccines; then again, our planet ‘might’ be blitzed to smithereens by an asteroid tomorrow. Besides, the logic is a bit warped, isn’t it? Our weary public-health superheroes don’t trust the vaccines to protect against this terrifying new kryptonite. Restored restrictions are therefore meant to ‘buy time’ to administer even more of the very vaccines they’ve little faith in.
Regarding the variant’s transmissibility or virulence, our overlords have virtually no information, which hasn’t stopped them from acting on it. (South African doctors’ reports of Omicron’s unusually mild symptoms — fatigue and headache — seem to have made no impression.) Here we go again. Yet another ‘variant of concern’. Yet another return of restrictions. Yet another promise to ‘review’ these impositions in three weeks, which if history serves will mean increasing restrictions in three weeks and maintaining them almost indefinitely. Yet another promise that Christmas is safe, and nothing makes my heart sink like this administration’s reassurances. Yet another collective call from journalists in the audience for still more oppressive measures — for vaccine passports, renewed hospitality check-ins and working from home: You’re sorely remiss, sir, for not making life crap enough! Yet another synchronous plummet in international stock markets, from fear not of the variant itself, but of governmental overreaction to the variant.
…..
For containing the spread of Sars-CoV-2, non-pharmaceutical interventions do not work. This point risks becoming tiresome, but given the near-universal failure to digest the lesson, it’s worth reiterating: all over the world, you would struggle to find correlation between the severity of government restrictions and Covid infections, hospitalisations and deaths. Countries and American states with mask mandates have averaged no lower rates of infection than those without. Even vaccines don’t stop the spread of the virus. Some of the world’s most highly vaccinated populations — in Iceland, in Gibraltar — are now having some of the worst outbreaks.
I’m not the only one who’s been wondering for months: how will we ever get out of this terrible movie? Ours is an anthropocentric era, prone to presentism. We like to think our time is exceptional, and we like to think we control everything (like the climate, but we won’t get into that now). Yet humanity has suffered pandemics before. Globally, we may only escape these repeated hysterias over ‘fifth waves’, if not ‘85th waves’, the old-fashioned way: loads of people get infected and recover and acquire natural immunity. It’s not fancy, but that’s how we’ve weathered pandemics of respiratory viruses before. Despite the feeble efforts of America’s Centers for Disease Control to claim otherwise, natural immunity to Covid is proving at least as robust as vaccine-induced immunity and appears longer lasting. But natural immunity seems to annoy public health authorities, because it isn’t within their control, and they can’t take credit for it.
It is not just for politicians that there is an upside from the omicron-induced shift in the national agenda. It suits big companies and incompetent managers who made the most of Covid to downgrade their customer service. They used to blame Brexit; now they blame omicron. It is convenient for disruptive trade unions and lazy employees on the look-out for an excuse to work less. It will embolden some to seek a hugely extended festive period working from home, regardless of the needs of employers or the extra burden imposed on colleagues. It suits the public sector, and its determination to put the interests of producers above those of consumers. Shut schools and cancelled nativity plays are a hideous, immoral blow to children, but are grist to militant unions’ mill.
The arrival of booster jabs makes the idea of compulsion harder still: if top-ups are needed every three to six months, how will this affect vaccine passports? Will people have to receive every top-up for the ongoing right to enjoy their liberty? Otto Schily, a minister in Gerhard Schröder’s government, yesterday pointed out that even Communist China isn’t considering mandatory vaccines. So where, he asked, will Merkel’s idea lead? Will Mr Scholz now yield to the activist lawyers advocating prison sentences for vaccine refuseniks?
The politics of all this is just as divisive in Italy, now in its 19th consecutive week of anti-restriction protests. Next week, it will bring in a “super green pass” where a negative test is no longer enough. Austria will start issuing fines for the unvaccinated from February, as Greece will do next month (but only for pensioners). Even Sweden, having defied the world for so long by rejecting mask-wearing and lockdowns, has now succumbed to vaccine passports. Britain is starting to look like the new Sweden: keeping calm and carrying on.
Joel Kotkin warns of the tyranny lurking in ‘nudging.’ A slice:
The pandemic has rained manna for nudgers. Across the high-income world, we now see a form of hygiene authoritarianism, promoted and enforced by nudgers in government and media. This goes beyond debunking clearly unhinged and unsupported claims. It also includes purging anyone opposed to particular government Covid policies, including recognised professionals. The most egregious example was the cancelling and marginalisation of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, written by leading epidemiologists from Harvard, Oxford and Stanford – all for the ‘thoughtcrime’ of opposing lockdowns.
Much the same can be said about the discussion of the pandemic’s origins, notes Jonathan Chait, a left-of-centre writer for New York magazine. For months anyone mentioning the possibility that Covid escaped from a Chinese lab was denounced as racist and sent to the digital gulag. Only recently, as the case for it became credible, has the lab-leak theory been deemed acceptable.
But reversing positions does not bother the nudgers, who, like apparatchiks under Stalin or bishops of the medieval church, follow each shift of policy assiduously. This has led to a dizzying confusion as health officials switch official positions on the duration and severity of the disease, and on the usefulness of masks, while their projections on infections, deaths and hospitalisations have often been too high. Anyone who dares to dissent, for example, from the views of US chief medical adviser Dr Anthony Fauci is cast as an antediluvian ignoramus. ‘They’re really criticising science because I represent science’, Fauci said recently of those questioning him. ‘That’s dangerous.’
With lockdowns and mandates, the professional class is attacking workers and poor countries, and most professionals are not even smart enough to realize it.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 26 of Bruce Caldwell’s superb Introduction to the 2007 Definitive Edition (Bruce Caldwell, ed.) of F.A. Hayek’s classic 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom:
Hayek was trying to show his readers that planning, everyone’s favorite remedy for the ills of the world, might sound good in theory, but would not work out in practice (or, at least, not unless the western democracies were prepared to accept severe constraints on personal liberty of the sort on display in the systems against which they currently [in 1944] were fighting).
December 2, 2021
The Precautionary Principle Is Poison
Here’s a letter to the Washington Post:
Editor:
Attempting to justify renewed travel restrictions in response to the omicron variant, Kathleen Parker writes that “[t]he relative risk of widespread infection from travelers may be statistically insignificant, but why take a chance?” (“Are we overreacting to omicron? I sure hope so.” December 1).
Parker’s conclusion, seemingly so sensible, is in fact self-contradictory. It cannot really be the case that the mere possibility that some activity will cause harm is sufficient to justify measures to restrict that activity. The reason is that there’s also a possibility that the restrictive measures themselves will cause different – and perhaps even worse – harms. In the case of international travel, after all, it’s possible that restrictions would prevent in-person collaboration among scientists – collaboration that would have resulted in a cure for Covid, or even for cancer. Yet surely no one would reject travel restrictions simply because this unfortunate outcome of such restrictions is merely possible.
Asking rhetorically “Why take a chance?” sparks fear that prevents a reasonable comparison of the benefits of some policy to the costs of that policy. Too often the results are policies more destructive than are the problems those policies are meant to solve.
For almost two years now humankind has been panicked into overreacting to Covid – panicked into locking down, into blocking borders, into closing schools, into mandating vaccination, into disrupting ages-old patterns of human interaction – without much, if any, consideration of the long-run costs of these unprecedented measures. It’s dispiriting that a usually sensible person such as Kathleen Parker joins the panic-stricken in not only excusing, but advocating, such overreaction.
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
“Dr Angelique Coetzee, the doctor who alerted the world to the Omicron Covid variant, says we are over-reacting to the threat.” A slice from Dr. Coetzee’s essay:
As chair of the South African Medical Association and a GP of 33 years’ standing, I have seen a lot over my medical career.
But nothing has prepared me for the extraordinary global reaction that met my announcement this week that I had seen a young man in my surgery who had a case of Covid that turned out to be the Omicron variant.
This version of the virus had been circulating in southern Africa for some time, having been previously identified in Botswana.
But given my public-facing role, by announcing its presence in my own patient, I unwittingly brought it to global attention.
Quite simply, I have been stunned at the response – and especially from Britain.
And let me be clear: nothing I have seen about this new variant warrants the extreme action the UK government has taken in response to it.
No one here in South Africa is known to have been hospitalised with the Omicron variant, nor is anyone here believed to have fallen seriously ill with it.
Yet Britain and other European nations have reacted with heavy travel restrictions on flights from across southern Africa, as well as imposing tighter rules at home on mask-wearing, fines and extended quarantines.
The simple truth is: we don’t know yet anywhere near enough about Omicron to make such judgments or to impose such policies.
Irresponsible epidemiologists, journalists, and public health officials have worked to scare parents about the risk to children from covid, despite the data.
Our kids have not even begun to pay the harms of the resulting school closures and destruction of their childhoods.
(Very) Long Lockdown seems to be real: Robby Soave reports that “Pandemic Restrictions May Harm Infants’ Cognitive Development, New [but not-yet-peer-reviewed] Study Finds.” Two slices:
COVID-19 mitigation policies like masks, social distancing, lockdowns, and school closures may have harmed the cognitive development of infants: Verbal, non-verbal, and early learning scores dropped among babies born during the pandemic, according to a new study from Brown University.
“We find that children born during the pandemic have significantly reduced verbal, motor, and overall cognitive performance compared to children born pre-pandemic,” wrote the study’s authors. “Results highlight that even in the absence of direct SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 illness, the environmental changes associated with the COVID-19 pandemic is significantly and negatively affecting infant and child development.”
Outcomes were worse for males than females, and children in lower socioeconomic households were worst off.
…..
Still, this pandemic-era drop in cognitive outcomes is notable. And even if the harms end up being smaller than they appear in this study, it’s worth keeping in mind that the benefits of COVID-19 restrictions are extremely limited for this age cohort. Due to the virus’s age discrimination, young people were almost entirely spared from negative health outcomes relating to the disease itself. Only about 500 children in the U.S. have died of COVID-19, and it is likely that a significant number of those victims had other health problems or compromised immune systems. For the overwhelming majority of healthy kids, there is no good evidence that they should have to wear masks, practice social distancing, and frequently miss school.
Yet in much of the country, the restrictions on young people are currently more stringent than the restrictions on adults and the elderly. In large Democratic cities like New York City and Washington, D.C., schoolchildren are generally masked. And when it’s time to eat lunch, they do so outdoors—even as the weather grows colder.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is threatening to withhold payments to healthcare facilities unless they require the Covid-19 vaccine for their workers. This action is misguided. I am vaccinated and support the goal of increasing vaccination rates. But the CMS policy has the potential to backfire and jeopardize patient access, safety and the quality of care for millions of Americans.
…..
Many facilities are limiting the number of patients they see because they lack staff. Rick Pollack, president of the American Hospital Association, said the new CMS policy may end up “exacerbating the severe workforce shortage problems that currently exist.” Forcing the resignation of unvaccinated healthcare workers could lead to the closing of hospitals and nursing homes, especially in rural areas where even losing a few staff could be catastrophic to operations.
And here’s Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger on Covid-19. Two slices:
Public officials cite “science,” but they’ve been flying mostly by the seat of their pants since the pandemic went public in early 2020.
“Misinformation” has become an everyday word, with social-media companies like Google, Twitter and Facebook censoring posts about issues such as climate, race and gender. By that standard, they should take down the accounts of every government in the world for how they have often mishandled informing their citizens about Covid-19.
Governments are the institutions to which people cede authority so they can live their lives in predictable ways. Governments don’t exist to cause disorder, though that looks to be their most notable product now.
…..
The supply chain, normally a daily miracle of flexibility, is mired in sluggishness and gridlock. Workers are scarce because government’s Covid shutdowns kept people away from daily work habits too long and because the Biden administration’s emergency transfer payments suppressed work-response patterns across labor markets. We may assume that Anthony Fauci, an architect of the long lockdowns, would dismiss such criticism as an attack on science.
Responding to a ridiculous recent assertion by Ronald Klain that “stronger Covid measures produce stronger economic outcomes,” Jay Bhattacharya tweets:
This is economic ignorance on display. Lockdowns kill economic activity. That is their primary purpose. The economic harm falls especially on the poor and working class. Without stopping covid.
It’s not a coincidence that red state unemployment is so much lower than blue state.
At every turn of this story, we as a nation move away from our centuries-old traditions of liberty and respect for the rights of people to make decisions over our own lives. An authoritarian habit of imposing binding restrictions doesn’t just take away our freedom to do as we please but also takes away our responsibility towards other people. In essence, it makes us all lose some humanity.
The restrictions have also knocked hell out of some of our most important industries, with our world-leading aviation sector possibly suffering the most.
Even when the Soviet-style ban on leaving the country was scrapped, a complex, expensive and ever-changing list of other requirements was put in place to deter people from travelling. Thousands of jobs have been destroyed, families have been kept apart and less affluent people have been largely excluded from international travel. Meanwhile the evidence has mounted that closing borders has not stopped variants of coronavirus from spreading around the world.
When Australia and New Zealand exercised a policy of almost entirely shutting their borders, the delta variant still became the predominant variant there too. The only benefit of the millions of PCR tests taken by Brits returning from green and amber list countries in the summer was to prove that they were actually less likely to have coronavirus than people who had stayed at home.
Tim Black is correct: “Mask obsessives just want to signal their superiority over the selfish, germ-spreading others.” Here’s his conclusion:
This kind of derogatory stereotyping isn’t accidental. For mask-wearing to work as a symbol of virtue, those who choose not to wear masks have to be demonised. And that’s why the Great Covid Mask Debate is so angry and divisive. Because mask obsessives are not only saying something positive about themselves – they’re also saying something very negative about the unmasked. Face coverings may not have a huge impact on the spread of Covid — but they certainly impact on social solidarity.
Austria becomes yet more dystopian:
Early rumours, that unvaccinated Austrians would face substantial fines or incarceration, have been confirmed by draft legislation leaked to the Austrian press.
The plan is for local authorities to summon the recalcitrant to vaccination appointments. Those who don’t accept these binding invitations will receive a second summons, and further refusal will result in a fine of 3,600 Euros, or four weeks of incarceration. Repeated refusals could result in a doubling of the fine, to 7,200 Euros. Higher fines can also be imposed if the refusal to accept vaccination is deemed to cause “a serious danger to someone’s life or health.”
The law is envisioned to remain in force for at least three years.
Here’s a report of an especially horrifying consequence of lockdowns.
Tom Chodor, writing at UnHerd, wonders if New Zealand will ever escape the hell of Zero Covid.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 93 of my late, great colleague Walter Williams’s 2011 book, Race & Economics: How much can be blamed on discrimination? (footnote deleted):
New Deal legislation was clearly devastating for the black worker. In 1930, the national total unemployment rate was 6.13 percent. However, in that year, unemployment for blacks stood at 5.17 percent, almost a full percentage point below that for whites. 1930 was to be the last year a larger percentage of whites than blacks would be unemployed.
DBx: Walter died suddenly one year ago today, soon after teaching the final session of his Fall 2020 Microeconomic Theory course for first-year GMU Econ PhD students. The pain of his passing remains sharp.
December 1, 2021
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: “Clear eyes on government”
In my column for the August 26th, 2011, edition of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review I applauded public-choice scholars and scholarship. You can read my column beneath the fold.
Some Covid Links
Reason’s Charles Oliver reports on Covidocratic tyranny in Santa Cruz County, CA:
The Santa Cruz County, California, health officer has announced that masks will be required indoors indefinitely as part of its efforts to reduce the spread of COVID-19. Private homes are exempt from the order if only members of the household are present. But if there are people who live elsewhere inside the home, everyone must wear a mask. The order does not exempt those who are fully vaccinated.
The latest variant of concern may be indeed that most expected of evolutionary developments, a virus resistant to existing vaccines. This is what follows from putting our vaccines into 4.5 billion arms. Early readings suggest Omicron may also be that other expected thing, a variant producing milder symptoms. Evolutionarily, the virus wants you to remain active, energetic and meeting lots of people and sneezing on them.
To someone in my age group and health, encountering Covid-19 unvaccinated would be like putting a gun to my head with 150 empty chambers and one bullet. I could further lower these odds and did, some 90%, by being vaccinated. By now facing Covid for the vast majority of Americans is like facing one bullet for many thousands of empty chambers, thanks to vaccines and natural immunity plus youth and general good health.
…..
Omicron’s arrival is an appropriate moment, in fact, for a new memoir from Trump Covid adviser Scott Atlas. His book has been rightly likened to “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” in the sense of rediscovering that Washington’s real job isn’t policy, it’s politics.
Dr. Atlas repeatedly pulls his hair over an early Covid response in which hundreds of thousands of elderly and highly vulnerable people died while politicians focused inordinately on isolating and protecting those at little risk.
But this approach actually solved a real problem. It just happened to be the problem of how politicians could negotiate the Covid moment with the least damage to their own careers.
Their intuitive weathervaning was on the money. For older voters, lockdowns were barely an inconvenience and showed politicians pleasingly devoted to their health at any cost. For many affluent voters, lockdowns were a work-at-home lark, and their 401(k)s went up thanks to the Federal Reserve.
Less affluent and younger voters were more of a mixed bag, but some could be bought off with government checks. And of course, America’s schoolchildren, who suffered most and benefited least from lockdowns, don’t vote.
Voilà. Many of the prescriptions imposed by Washington and the state capitals may have inflicted needless damage while doing little real good against the virus, but they proved shockingly successful at reproducing (to use a verb favored by political scientists) their own political power.
…..
The stock market, which is never as dumb as people think, recognizes as much. It continues to tremble not from fear of a new variant but from fear of what political incentive might again do to the economy and business.
Everything else that politicians are currently doing, from masking to porous travel bans, feels like so much political theater. It’s a well-worn script that officials are apparently committed to following every time a new COVID variant pops into existence.
Harvey Risch and Gerard Bradley explain that “Covid-19 vaccine mandates fail the Jacobson test.” A slice:
Similarly, Covid-19 vaccine mandates for children are unwarranted because children almost entirely get infected from their parents or other adults in the household, and infrequently transmit the infection to their classmates, teachers or uninfected household adults.
Normal healthy children do not die from Covid-19, and the 33 children aged 5-11 years estimated by the CDC to have died from Covid-19 between October 3, 2020 and October 2, 2021 all had chronic conditions like diabetes, obesity, being immunocompromised (e.g., after cancer treatment) that put them at high risk, and even these numbers are much lower than childhood deaths from traffic and pedestrian accidents, or even being hit by lightning. Covid-19 in children is almost entirely an asymptomatic or mild disease typified by fever and tiredness and resolves on its own in 2-3 days of rest. Thus, vaccine mandates for children are unwarranted.
Ron Bailey rightly complains, about the FDA, that “[t]he same agency that stymied COVID-19 testing is now dawdling over approving new antiviral pills.” (DBx: Focus on realities such as this one, dear readers – and especially those of you who insist that Covid justifies trusting government officials with more power.)
el gato malo decries the absurdities about omicron.
Silkie Carlo writes, in the Telegraph, that “[g]overnment by diktat is becoming the new normal. We must resist it before it’s too late.” Two other slices:
We are clearly in a period of prolonged exceptionalism — the kind that redefines a country and its values. The muscle memory we have acquired from repeated executive-imposed lockdowns is impossible to unlearn. The Government’s continued avoidance of parliamentary scrutiny — unless forced by backbench pressure — treats democracy as part-time, debate as futile, and opposition as something to be squashed.
Let’s be honest, this is exactly how politicians intoxicated with power want it to be.
…..
Magna Carta enshrined the ancient democratic principle that the law is above the word of the King. But the word of Covid authoritarians has emerged as its own supreme authority that increasingly we are scolded for questioning.
In which case, we must question it more.
Well, David, this week I am not angry. I am raging. Since that lovely lunch, they have come up with a new variant which has pleased a lot of people no end. “We now interrupt this normal life to bring you something you didn’t know you needed to be scared about (which, probably, you don’t actually need to be scared of) but we’re going to scare you anyway because there are some concerns you seem to be enjoying your freedom rather too much so we are here to remind you that freedom is conditional on not enjoying yourself and remaining suitably scared.”
How else are we to interpret the impertinent statement by Dr Jenny Harries, current head of NHS Test and Trace, that “being careful, not socialising when we don’t particularly need to” is the way people can “do their bit” to reduce the spread of the new omicron variant? “And, of course, our behaviours, particularly around Christmas we tend to socialise more, so I think all of those will need to be taken into account,” averred Harries. Let me take a wild guess that Jenny has never downed three of Uncle Des’s Snowball cocktails and been Mariah Carey with a Santa hat in the family karaoke contest.
It is a golden rule of mine that anyone who uses “behaviour” in the plural is a nerd with a very limited understanding of what makes humans happy. Unfortunately, the geeks have inherited the Earth. In the past year and a half, narrow scientific minds have come to exercise undue influence on the Government and now they are upset that their control over the rest of us is, like Covid, waning fast. What do you suppose Harries has in mind when she says “not socialising when we don’t particularly need to”?
I object to masks not because my reading glasses steam up or my breathing is impaired but because they are dehumanising devices that should be obligatory only in extremis, not as a go-to expedient for a panicky Cabinet.
…..
Mass mask wearing is the most visible sign of public willingness to go along with this madness every time there is a variant, which is why the scientific case for doing so either needs to be unambiguous or I must be made to wear one by law.
Writing at UnHerd, Paul Kingsnorth decries vaccine mandates and Covidocratic repression. A slice:
Perhaps it’s my age, or perhaps it’s just blind prejudice, but when I wake to the news that the Austrian government has interned an entire third of its national population as a danger to public health, a chill runs down my spine.
I look at the news photos of armed, masked, black-clad police stopping people in the streets to ask for their digital papers, and I read stories of others arrested for leaving their own house more than the permitted once a day, and I hear Austrian politicians intoning that those who refuse to accede to the injection are to be shunned and scapegoated until they acquiesce.
Then I watch interviews with “ordinary people”, and they say that the “unvaxxed” had it coming. Some of them say that they should all be jailed, these enemies of the people. At best, the “anti-vaxxers” are paranoid and misinformed. At worst they are malicious, and should be punished.
Then I look across the border at Germany. I see that in Germany, politicians are also considering interning the “vaccine hesitant”, and are also discussing enforcing vaccination upon every citizen. By the end of the winter, says Germany’s refreshingly honest health minister, Germans will be “vaccinated, cured or dead”. There is apparently no fourth option.
In Australia, the Covidocracy doubles down on its tyrannical ways.
Much of it was sparked by the deja vu of a dreaded 5pm emergency Saturday evening press conference – like the one that saw the government unfathomably ‘cancel Christmas’ for millions of us last year thanks to Delta – where the fear and hysteria of a new Covid scariant was expertly whipped up.
But this time Boris Johnson, Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance were not the Three Wise Men, they were the Three Clueless Blokes.
None of them has any idea if the Omicron variant is more transmissible or – crucially – if it evades the vaccines.
In fact, so far there is no evidence of pretty much anything at all.
The South African scientists who had discovered the thing in the first place warned we were chronically overreacting, rather than waiting for evidence.
But who cares!
In the hysterical new world where only Covid matters, it was full steam ahead with a raft of new restrictions.
Travel bans are back (including for South Africa as some sort of bizarre punishment for using their brilliant science to warn the world).
So too are mask mandates on public transport and in retail settings, ten day self-isolation for Omicron contacts and compulsory day two PCR testing for all travellers, including home isolation while awaiting results.
Even then, the BBC, ITV and Sky News didn’t think Boris and the doomsday duo had gone anywhere near far enough.
Such a hysterical overreaction to a scariant before waiting for the facts has been my worst nightmare come true.
All the warnings folk like me have been making for the past 20 months are coming to fruition: The mad scientists are in control and, if we continue to allow them to act like this, a return to normal is no longer achievable.
In fact, I’m beginning to doubt if the normality I so desperately crave – a world where we make sensible decisions for ourselves, weighing up all the usual risk factors like we do every single day – will ever return.
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