Russell Roberts's Blog, page 209

Nancy MacLean Continues to Baselessly Smear Milton Friedman

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:

Editor:

In pressing her scurrilous charge that Milton Friedman was sympathetic to racial segregation, the fever of Nancy MacLean’s relentlessness is exceeded only by the flimsiness of her argument (Letters, Nov. 19). For example, referring to Phil Magness’s October 19th WSJ essay on “School Choice’s Antiracist History,” she calls “stunning” Magness’s failure to mention that Friedman “published his case for [school] vouchers at the very moment the South’s archsegregationist officials were threatening public education (in 1955).”

What’s so stunning? Brown v. Board of Education was decided the year before, thus prompting racists to peddle schemes to maintain segregation. Friedman and other classical liberals then responded by promoting school choice as a means not only of improving the quality of schools, but also of promoting greater integration – which is what Friedman explicitly predicted, and hoped, would be the result of vouchers.

What is stunning is MacLean’s failure to mention not only this fact about Friedman, but also his statement that “[i]f one must choose between the evils of enforced segregation or enforced integration, I myself would find it impossible not to choose integration.”*

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

* Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), page 117.

Some Non-Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

Nick Gillespie talks with Columbia University’s John McWhorter about the religion that is woke racism.

David Henderson writes about Henry Hazlitt.

“A federal judge on Tuesday struck down some tariffs imposed by former President Donald Trump on imported solar panels, finding that Trump had clearly overstepped his authority by hiking those tariffs last year.” – So reads the opening paragraph of this new report by Reason‘s Eric Boehm.

George Leef eloquently busts the myth of “market fundamentalism.” A slice:

There are religious fundamentalists who believe that something is true just because it is written in the Bible or Koran, for example. And there are economic fundamentalists who believe that if Marx or Mao said something, then it must be correct. Fundamentalists don’t argue logically with people who don’t accept their premises: instead, they usually denounce or even physically attack them.

Libertarians are not like that.

I raise this issue because a recent article in The American Conservative by Declan Leary entitled “We Are Not Pencils” contends that libertarians who embrace the argument made by Leonard Read in his famous essay “I, Pencil” are guilty of fundamentalist thinking.

What prompted him to write his piece is our current “supply chain” problem. He sees deep trouble in our reliance on global trade. Leary writes, “’I, Pencil’ treats supply chains in the language of religion. They are miracles in which we must have faith. They are the product of some inscrutable but benevolent superhuman intelligence. The precision alone of the Invisible Hand demands from us reverence and wonder.”

But Read never said anything like that. He explained how human beings will engage in mutually beneficial production and trade as long as they are free to do so. He advocates leaving all human energy free if we want to achieve the highest standard of living. There is nothing even vaguely religious about it. The spontaneous order generated by humans following their self-interest is not a “miracle” but the entirely predictable result of freedom.

All we have here is another “conservative” attempt at discrediting libertarians for their principled support of freedom.

John Cochrane comments on academic freedom at Stanford University.

GMU Econ alum Erik Matson is a careful and creative scholar of the works of Adam Smith – and of Joseph Butler. A slice:

Observations in Butler and Smith on the limits of our knowledge and the scope of our duties of beneficence enter into their moral authorizations of commerce. Both conceive of commerce as a means of serving the common good. Butler urges diligent commerce and frugal saving to enable liberal and generous charity. Smith, especially in The Wealth of Nations, emphasizes how through honest commerce we cooperate, if only metaphorically, with others in a great social enterprise through the division of labor, an enterprise that increases general opulence. Both illustrate how in tending to our focal spheres, we often further ends beyond our intentions and may be said, in a sense, to “co-operate with the Deity” (TMS III.5.7) in serving human happiness.

Samuel Gregg explains that Wilhelm Röpke’s case for the gold standard “rested on more than economic arguments.”

Jonah Goldberg is correct: “The national conservatism movement is drenched in nostalgia for a past that never was.” A slice:

[Christopher] Demuth ends by noting that “the originalist in me notes that the president is not only CEO of the executive bureaucracies but also, and primarily, head of state, responsible for the nation’s success and all of its citizens’ welfare.” Reading in a favorable light, this is defensible enough. But one of the things I learned from DeMuth himself is that the economy is too complex, America too diverse—both in the modern sense but also in the Madisonian sense—to be managed by any president or by Washington itself. Our most nationalist presidents—Wilson, the Roosevelts, even LBJ—rejected this view, and understandably so. There is no limiting principle within generic nationalism. Turning presidents into nationalist tribunes of “the people” responsible for all of the nation’s successes and the peoples’ welfare, by its own logic means denigrating restraints on his power. I don’t want a St. Michael in the White House with an R or D after his name.

When Irving Kristol said neoconservatives were liberals mugged by reality, he had in mind the realization that the unconstrained vision of progressivism led to folly. The laws of unintended consequences, the limits of reform, and what Friedrich Hayek called “the knowledge problem” were too powerful to overcome (at least predictably and reliably) with even the most well-intentioned planning from above. This is why he considered the American Revolution a “successful revolution”—because it took human nature into account.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy justifiably continues to decry Washington’s fiscal and monetary incontinence. A slice:

It also doesn’t help that experts have been wrong about inflation. First, they claimed there would be no inflation. Then, when inflation inevitably came, they said it would be short-lived or transitory. When it persisted, the alleged reason was that prices were catching up to their pre-pandemic levels. Once experts finally admitted that some of the administration’s policies may have fueled some of the demand for durable goods and withdrawal of workers from the labor force, which in turn exacerbated the supply-chain issues, we were told either that there was nothing that could be done or that the resulting inflation was the price we must pay for a strong labor market.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

I don’t always agree with National Review‘s Michael Brendan Dougherty, but I agree – wholeheartedly – with his argument that, when it comes to Covid mandates, “you can’t obey your way to normal.” Here’s his conclusion:

The same is seen all over Europe, as acquiescence builds upon acquiescence. Now there are attempts to control the pandemic by just locking in the unvaccinated. It won’t work.

The only way out of this in America is to stop following CDC’s guidelines, just the way we already do in so many other domains of life.

Covid derangement rocks Gibraltar. (HT Phil Magness)

Some physicians in France warn against vaccinating healthy children against Covid-19.

Reason‘s Zach Weissmueller talks with Matt Ridley and Alina Chan about their new book – Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19 – on the origins of SARS-CoV-2.

But thankfully what these people are suffering from – and, in many cases, dying of – isn’t Covid-19. And as we have learned since early last year, that’s the greatest blessing that any human being can obtain; it’s a blessing to be valued above all else.

While I think she underestimates the effectiveness of vaccines at protecting the vaccinated against serious consequences, Laura Perrins quite properly decries how Covid Derangement Syndrome has unleashed not merely the tolerance of, but demand for, tyranny in Britain. A slice:

It was bad enough when the government and members of the public wanted to deprive us of breathing fresh air by forcing us all to wear useless face masks, but the idea that it is morally right to demand your neighbours stay at home because they will not sacrifice their bodily integrity and consent to a vaccine that they have refused in good conscience is outrageous.

The selfishness of these people, people who would like to deprive their neighbours of their liberty, should not at this stage surprise us. The hallmark of the entire lockdown hysteria and fear porn has been selfishness dressed up as moral superiority.

It is also notable that 72 per cent of pensioners would either strongly support or somewhat support locking down their unvaccinated kids and grandchildren. Given how much teenagers have already sacrificed in this Covid mania, it once again is a very sad reflection on the older generation that they seek to jail their own grandchildren who have not consented to a vaccine that’s been around for about two minutes.

We have discussed whether or not the lockdown was a lockdown to save the baby boomers before and I received some pushback from those of the generation who pointed out that they did not support the lockdown. However it is also true that many got in touch with me privately to say that sadly they were indeed a minority and that there was overwhelming support amongst their boomer friends for a national lockdown.

The question is, what is the aim of this sort of medical apartheid? It surely cannot be to save the vaccinated as it would be ludicrous to lockdown the unvaccinated to protect those who have already been vaccinated against the illness they sought a vaccine for. We are on very shaky ground if the aim is to protect the unvaccinated from themselves. We don’t ban the obese from McDonald’s or alcoholics from pubs. It would seem ridiculous to ban those who refuse the vaccine from going about their daily lives. It is also morally indefensible to ban people from going about their daily lives in case they get ill. I didn’t think ‘Our NHS’ discriminated like that.

Writing in Spiked, Liz Cole is rightly critical of today’s revisionism on school closures. A slice:

We closed down children’s lives while simultaneously shutting down the voices of those professionals who raised the alarm about the impact on educational attainment, mental health and safeguarding. We cannot wish the real-life consequences of these things away through acts of revisionism. However, we cantry to face up to them and help children recover.

Here’s a report on the sweeping, tyrannical powers being sought by the government in Victoria, Australia.

Jenin Younes tweets:

You’re beyond naive if you think any of these mandates (mask, vaccine) are about anything other than politics at this point.

Julia Hartley-Brewer talks with Freddie Sayers about his recent visit to dystopian Austria.

Speaking of Julia Hartley-Brewer, she’s got her QR code ready in case vaccine passports come to Britain:

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 296 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 May 31st, 2015):

The attack on free expression is sinister because it asserts that such freedom is not merely unwise but, in a sense, meaningless. Free speech is more comprehensively and aggressively embattled now than ever before in American history, largely because of two 19th-century ideas. One is that history – actually, History, a proper noun – has a mind of its own. The other is that most people do not really have minds of their own.

Jay Bhattacharya’s Congressional Testimony

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

Stanford University’s Jay Bhattacharya recently testified on Covid-19 before a Congressional subcommittee. Here’s are his prepared remarks (with a preface that Jay added to the Brownstone Institute’s presentation of them):

The following is my testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis. The full video is linked below. My Twitter feed includes refutations of the criticisms made against me, and I welcome readers to examine all relevant documents.

…..

Good afternoon Chairman Clyburn, Ranking Member Scalise, and subcommittee members. I am grateful for the opportunity to speak with you today. My name is Jay Bhattacharya, and I am a Professor of Health Policy at Stanford University. I hold an M.D. and a Ph.D. in Economics, and I have over 20 years of experience working on the epidemiology and economics of infectious diseases. I have published more than 150 peer-reviewed scientific papers, including studies on HIV, H5N1 flu, and six peer-reviewed articles on COVID.

The problem of misinformation during the pandemic is serious. Media and big tech corporations have constructed an edifice of algorithms and fact-checkers to correct misinformation. I like to call this effort the Ministry of Truth. Ironically, the infrastructure that media and big tech corporations have set up to address the problem has, in fact, contributed to and exacerbated the misinformation problem.

The Ministry has made mistakes on some of the most important aspects of COVID science and policy.

Consider the worldwide COVID infection fatality rate. My colleague at Stanford, Prof. John Ioannidis, wrote a scientific paper in which he and his colleague Catherine Axfors painstakingly reviewed the literature on COVID mortality rates worldwide. Facebook commissioned a fact check by someone with no background in meta-analysis, who labeled the paper false based on a misunderstanding of the evidence presented in the paper.

This is not the first time the Ministry of Truth has decided it knows better about the COVID infection fatality rate than the published literature. In June, the Ministry’s fact-checkers cited the WHO to suggest a fatality rate between 0.5% and 1.0% for the unvaccinated but neglected to mention that the WHO itself published an estimate last year by Prof. Ioannidis of 0.2%.

Another recent and notorious example is Instagram’s censorship of posts that link to evidence summaries conducted by the renowned Cochrane Collaborative. For decades, Collaborative has conducted high-quality, evidence-based medicine summaries on every imaginable question in medicine. Directly and indirectly, doctors rely on these summaries to inform their practice and care for their patients. With no explanation provided, Instagram decided this month to censor posts by users who link to studies by the Collaborative with no explanation given, depriving users to access to the most accurate medical information available.

A third example involves the Ministry of Truth censoring me. In March of this year, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida hosted a roundtable discussion with other scientists and me, where we discussed various matters of COVID science. At one point in the discussion, the governor asked me about the evidence on masking children. I made an entirely accurate statement – that there is no randomized evidence that masking children protects them versus the disease or reduces the spread of COVID. The roundtable was televised, with press present, and posted on YouTube by a local Florida channel. Agree or disagree, this was good government – the governor of a state showing the public what advice he is receiving from scientific advisors that inform his decision on COVID policy. The Ministry’s decision prevented the public from hearing facts about the scientific literature on child masking and prevented open access to information about their government.

The Ministry has consistently downplayed or censored the truth about lasting and robust immunity after COVID recovery, despite overwhelming evidence in the scientific literature documenting this fact. The consequence has been discrimination against COVID-recovered patients, who have been forced out of their jobs and prevented from participating in society, despite posing as little risk of spreading the disease as the vaccinated.

Often, the Ministry permits false statements it likes to go unchecked.

In Oct. 2020, I wrote the Great Barrington Declaration, along with Prof. Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University and Prof. Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford. The Declaration, signed now by over 10,000 scientists and 40,000 physicians, called for focused protection of the vulnerable elderly and an end to lockdown policies, including school closures and other measures which have caused enormous collateral damage to the health and well-being of the population.

Several prominent figures, including Anthony Fauci, reacted to the proposal by falsely mischaracterizing it as a herd immunity strategy to let the virus “rip” through society. This was pure propaganda. As I have said, our proposal called for focused protection of the vulnerable, who face a 1000 fold higher risk of mortality if infected than children do. The term “herd immunity strategy” is nonsensical. Herd immunity – sometimes called endemic equilibrium — is the endpoint of this epidemic, no matter what strategy we follow. The goal of policy should be to minimize harm from the virus and collateral damage from interventions until that state is achieved.

The Ministry failed to check these falsehoods. Instead, it parroted the narrative that there was no middle option between “let it rip” and lockdown. Many states adopted lockdowns, closing businesses, churches, and schools for extended periods, with little to show in terms of infection control. The lockdown policies successfully advocated by Dr. Fauci have amounted to a ‘let it drip’ strategy, with over 750,000 dead from the virus and catastrophic collateral harm to the physical and mental health of the population, including extended closures of schools that harmed children.

Even when the fact-checkers happen to be right, they call attention to crackpot ideas that aren’t worth seriously rebutting. Consider the debunking attention that the preposterous statement that “COVID vaccines make you magnetic at the point of injection” has received. It is possible that the statement has considerably more debunkers than believers. By combatting laughably false statements, The Ministry gives them undeserved extra publicity while ignoring more important issues.

The causes for the failures of the Ministry are overdetermined. The Ministry of Truth is not all-knowing, and they are often checking items where the science itself is unsettled. Fact check organizations commonly employ people with no relevant background to conduct checks of scientific claims made by reputable scientists and scientific papers. They typically have limited expertise, relying instead on appeals to authority but without a capacity to sift between competing authorities.

The ultimate ironic effect of the fact-checking enterprise – the Ministry of Truth — has been the promotion of misinformation. By boosting the demand for lockdown and COVID-restrictions, these errors have proven disastrous.

Correcting a Misperception Created by a Mythbuster

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

Here’s a letter that I sent on November 6th to the Washington Post:

Editor:

Labeling as a “myth” the claim that “[c]hild care is so expensive because it is over-regulated,” Elliott Haspel correctly points out that even with no government-imposed regulations child-care costs would be high (“Five myths about child care,” Nov. 5). But he slays a strawman by incorrectly concluding from this reality that government regulation doesn’t meaningfully further raise child-care costs.

The argument of the Mercatus Center study that he criticizes is not that the sole, or even chief, source of high child-care costs is government regulation; rather, it’s that such regulation unnecessarily further raises the costs of child care. And further raising the cost of an already costly service makes that service even less accessible than it would otherwise be, especially to low-income parents. As the authors of the study conclude, “[e]liminating regulatory standards that do not affect the quality of care … will improve the quality of child care while making it more affordable to low-income families.”

Contrary to Haspel’s supposition, “more affordable” isn’t a synonym for “inexpensive.” And “more affordable” is indeed a desirable outcome.

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

Making Visible the Invisible Damage Done by Minimum Wages

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

This new video from Just Facts is quite good; it’s about 11-minutes long.

The Culprit Is Likely a Combination of Covid Hysteria and Covid Restrictions

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:

Editor:

Reporting on the 29-percent spike in drug-overdose deaths from May 2020 through April 2021, Jon Kamp and Julie Wernau make only a single vague allusion to lockdowns (“Drug Overdose Deaths, Fueled by Fentanyl, Hit Record High in U.S.,” November 17). The headline and much of the content of their report create the impression that this spike was caused chiefly by fentanyl.

Yet during this 12-month period fentanyl and opioids were no more able under their own volition to enter human bodies than they were pre-Covid. An unbiased report on this spike in overdose deaths would explicitly emphasize the high probability that major contributing factors were the 24/7/365 fear-mongering which blew Covid’s dangers utterly out of proportion, combined with governments’ unprecedented disruption of human life – disruption that suddenly destroyed jobs, hid our distinctive individualities behind masks, and thwarted the personal and intimate interactions of neighbors, friends, and families.

These government-imposed obstructions, along with unwarranted hysteria, turned reality dystopian. It’s no wonder that many more people sought escape through the use of drugs.

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

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

Reason‘s Robby Soave reports that OHSA has decided to obey the courts, at least for now, and halt its enforcement of Biden’s abominable vaccine mandate…

… and as Jonathan Adler reports, the Buckeye Institute has requested that the Sixth Circuit hear the challenge to Biden’s abominable vaccine mandate en banc.

Novak Djokovic is now one of my favorite sports stars. The reason is that he insists that, on the question of Covid vaccines, freedom of choice is essential.

Ian Liu, Vinay Prasad, and Jonathan J. Darrow – in their new paper published by the Cato Institute – find little evidence that the wearing of cloth face masks significantly reduces the spread of SARS-CoV-2. A slice:

The available clinical evidence of facemask efficacy is of low quality and the best available clinical evidence has mostly failed to show efficacy, with fourteen of sixteen identified randomized controlled trials comparing face masks to no mask controls failing to find statistically significant benefit in the intent‐​to‐​treat populations. Of sixteen quantitative meta‐​analyses, eight were equivocal or critical as to whether evidence supports a public recommendation of masks, and the remaining eight supported a public mask intervention on limited evidence primarily on the basis of the precautionary principle.

Here’s more from Vinay Prasad on masks. (HT Jay Bhattacharya). A slice:

Faith outpaced evidence when it comes to masks.

Freddie Sayers visited now-dystopian Austria, where an especially vile version of the straw man is stomping. A slice:

Since Monday, unvaccinated Austrians are not allowed to leave their homes except to go to work, to buy essential supplies, or to take exercise: it’s the world’s first “lockdown for the unvaccinated”. It was introduced in response to rapidly rising cases and a lack of excess capacity in Austrian hospitals. “It is not a recommendation, but an order,” announced the Interior Minister Karl Nehammer at a press conference. “Every citizen should know that they will be checked by the police.”

It is, essentially, a ratcheting up of the regime of vaccine passports that exists already in many countries across Europe, whereby unvaccinated people are already excluded from restaurants, museums and theatres. But to place a minority of the population under partial house arrest does seem to cross a new line.

Italy is considering inviting the same vile straw man now on the loose in Austria.

The University of Oxford’s Alberto Giubilini decries the deranged Covid measures adopted by universities and colleges. A slice:

There may be limited utility at this point in blaming those in charge of the public health decisions that completely disregarded this potential (and foreseeable) damage to students. It also might be pointless to assign culpability to the academics who kept (and continue to keep) supporting tight restrictions and advocating for online teaching from the comfort of their homes while relegating students to social isolation. But what is undoubtedly useful, in light of this week’s report, is to look ahead as winter in the Northern Hemisphere approaches and more people begin putting restrictions back on the table.

Before making any decisions, we must acknowledge that we don’t need to run social and public health experiments on students anymore. We have data now about the harm we have caused to them. And we now know the threat that closing campuses and moving the whole student experience online can pose.

“Latvia bans unvaccinated MPs from voting and suspends pay.”

This Wall Street Journal headline is misleading: “Drug Overdose Deaths, Fueled by Fentanyl, Hit Record High in U.S.” (DBx: Fentanyl was no more able, from May 2020 through April 2021, to enter, on its own, human bodies than it was in earlier years. The ‘report’ only fleetingly alludes to the role likely played by lockdowns and the associated Covid hysteria.)

In response to a similar ‘report’ from the AP on the surge in overdose fatalities, Sylvia Fogel tweeted (HT Jay Bhattacharya):

Additional reasons: profound disruption of social relationships, access to healthcare & negative economic consequences related to lockdowns & pandemic mitigation measures.

In this Twitter thread, Jay Bhattacharya describes the appalling – but, sadly, predictable – treatment he received while testifying before Congress. (DBx: To all of you who were content to allow politicians to exercise unprecedented powers over humanity to control Covid-19, please recognize this reality: The powers that you were willing to see exercised were inevitably exercised by individuals such as the atrocious member of Congress who, in his discussion with Bhattacharya, resorted to red-baiting and what can reasonably only be supposed to be intentional misrepresentation.)

In response to this politician’s disgusting behavior, Martin Kulldorff tweets:

Why is a US congressman, @CongressmanRaja, attacking public health scientists rather than listening and learning from scientists?

(DBx: Alas, the answer to Kulldorff’s appropriate question is that politicians behave politically. The typical politician will listen and learn from scientists – both natural and social – only if and when that politician believes that such knowledge will further his or her political career. But if and when that politician concludes that his or her political career is better served by listening to, and ‘learning’ from, the likes of shamans, crystal healers, and other peddlers of irrationality, dogmas, and fraudulence, that politician will be all ears for such charlatans.)

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from pages 425-426 of the late University of Washington economist Paul Heyne’s insightful 2000 paper “The Morality of Labor Unions,” as this paper is reprinted in the 2008 collection of Heyne’s writings, “Are Economists Basically Immoral?” and Other Essays on Economics, Ethics, and Religion (Geoffrey Brennan and A.M.C. Waterman, eds.):

Wage rates are lower in Indonesia than in the United States because workers in Indonesia are willing to accept less; they are willing to accept less because their alternative opportunities are so much poorer; their alternatives are poorer than the alternative opportunities available to American workers because the marginal productivity of workers in the United States is far higher than the corresponding productivity of Indonesian workers; and the differences in productivity at the relevant margins reflect the much greater productivity of the economic system in the United States.