Russell Roberts's Blog, page 211

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page viii of Gigi Foster’s, Paul Frijters’s, and Michael Baker’s 2021 book, The Great Covid Panic:

All those months of obsession crowded out attention, care, and concern for so much else. The fearful were the perfect victims for those with cooler heads who recognised that this was a unique opportunity to seize power and wealth for themselves. The paralysis of the fearful led in the end to heartless neglect, social disintegration, widespread theft, and totalitarian control.

I Do Not Understand How Some People Think

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to a new correspondent:

Mr. S__:

I’m sorry that you were “sickened and revolted” by what you encountered in the recording of Saturday’s Brownstone Institute event featuring Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, Jeffrey Tucker, and me. The chief cause of your intense negative reaction is the express opposition of my fellow panelists and me to vaccine mandates. In your view, “all unvaccinated people are like mass shooters on the loose [and] should be treated accordingly unless they disarm themselves or are forcibly disarmed.”

I’ll not here bother to repeat what was said during that event or what has been said and written elsewhere, in many places, by individuals far more articulate than I am. Instead, I’ll quote this accurate passage from an otherwise largely confused report that appeared in the November 12, 2021, edition of the Los Angeles Times:

Vaccines have been quite effective at preventing cases of COVID-19 that lead to severe illness and death, but none has proved reliable at blocking transmission of the virus, [Jefferson] Jones [a medical officer on the CDC’s COVID-19 Epidemiology Task Force] noted.

So I ask you, Mr. S__: Because vaccines are indeed quite effective at protecting the vaccinated from any of Covid’s serious consequences, why should anyone be compelled to be vaccinated? Why should vaccinated you care if Smith and Jones are unvaccinated given that their choice inflicts no significant harm on you or on any other vaccinated person? Why not allow each individual the freedom to choose whether or not to use the vaccine to reduce his or her risk of suffering severely from Covid?

As a practical matter, the effectiveness of vaccines at protecting the vaccinated is sufficient (although not necessary) to destroy the case for vaccine mandates. But if impractical folks are still unpersuaded, the case against vaccine mandates is further pulverized by the additional fact that no vaccine – again quoting the L.A. Times – “has proved reliable at blocking transmission of the virus.”

To use your analogy, while vaccines don’t disarm shooters, they do protect each vaccinated person against gunshot wounds.

I cannot close without observing that your analogizing the unvaccinated to mass murderers is grotesque. Such demonization of those who choose – many for excellent reasons – not to get vaccinated is not only inaccurate, it’s also dark-ages dystopian. I hope that from here on in you’ll refrain from using this analogy that is so monstrously mistaken.

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)

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People too frequently (meaning often insincerely) say “I’m honored.” But I am genuinely sincere to say that I’m honored to have been invited by Jeffrey Tucker to participate in a Brownstone Institute event the past Saturday, in Hartford, along with two men who I’ve come greatly to admire over the past 21 months: Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff.

The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board applauds the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals for smacking down Biden’s abominable vaccine mandate. Two slices:

President Biden was warned that he lacked the power to mandate vaccines for private workers, but he ordered the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to do it anyway. Late Friday came a sharp rebuke by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that marks an important check on the runaway administrative state.

“The Mandate’s true purpose is not to enhance workplace safety, but instead to ramp up vaccine uptake by any means necessary,” Judge Kurt Engelhardt wrote for the unanimous panel in a withering opinion that extends the court’s earlier stay on the OSHA mandate, which had been challenged by GOP states, numerous employers and individuals.

With his approval numbers sagging, Mr. Biden in early September ordered OSHA to require private employers with 100 or more workers to mandate that their employees be vaccinated or tested weekly. “Our patience is wearing thin,” he declared. The mandate at the time polled well among most Americans.

After the announcement, White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain retweeted MSNBC anchor Stephanie Ruhle’s tweet that stated, “OSHA doing this vaxx mandate as an emergency workplace safety rule is the ultimate work-around for the Federal govt to require vaccinations.” For “work-around,” read illegal.

…..

This judicial smackdown is so overwhelming that it’s fair to conclude the Administration gave only passing thought to the law. It acted for political reasons, but even that has proven to be a mistake. The White House panicked amid the Afghanistan fiasco and Delta variant breakout, but it missed how resistant millions of people are to government orders regarding their health.

The mandates have increased political polarization, and they are becoming less popular as people see that the vaccines, while effective, do not prevent infection as well as we might have hoped. They are still worth getting, but it ought to be a personal choice. Mr. Biden chose the progressive default of coercion.

Here’s more by Jacob Sullum on Friday’s court ruling against Biden’s abominable vaccine mandate. A slice:

Does COVID-19 pose a “grave danger” in all those settings? “The Mandate itself concedes that the effects of COVID-19 may range from ‘mild’ to ‘critical,'” the court notes. It adds that the threat from COVID-19 depends on transmission trends, which have “varied since the President announced the general parameters of the Mandate in September,” and the vaccination rate among employees. “For the more than seventy-eight percent of Americans aged 12 and older [who are] either fully or partially inoculated against it,” Engelhardt writes, “the virus poses—the Administration assures us—little risk at all.”

In Austria, the straw man is now jailer of the untouchables.

In the Netherlands, the return of the straw man is being protested. A slice:

Nearly 85 per cent of the Dutch adult population is fully vaccinated, but on Thursday the country’s public health institute recorded 16,364 new positive tests in 24 hours –  the highest number of any time during the pandemic that has killed more than 18,600 people in the Netherlands.

Caretaker Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte announced the partial lockdown on Friday and said it would run for at least three weeks, saying his government wants to “deliver a hard blow to the virus.”

[DBx: Note that the seven-day average death count from Covid on November 14th was 25, a whopping 0.0001 percent of the population of that country. But we must also take account of the reality that the percentage of Dutch citizens taken away by Covid since SARS-CoV-2 first arrived nearly two years ago is 0.1. Can’t be too safe!]

This study prompted this tweet by Jay Bhattacharya:

Big French study finds most long COVID symptoms (except loss of sense of smell) not associated with prior SARS-CoV-2 infection. There are more pressing health needs for the $1.1 billion that the NIH will spend on long-COVID.

This report in the Times of London prompted this tweet by Freddie Sayers:

This account in @thesundaytimes of life inside ZeroCovid China is chilling.

Let’s hope all those people who were arguing for ZeroCovid for the past year (and have now gone quiet) read it and find it suitably chastening.

From – of all places – the Los Angeles Times:

Vaccines have been quite effective at preventing cases of COVID-19 that lead to severe illness and death, but none has proved reliable at blocking transmission of the virus, [Jefferson] Jones [a medical officer on the CDC’s COVID-19 Epidemiology Task ForceJones] noted.

Here’s sound advice – offered alongside the accompanying photo – from el gato malo on resisting the Covidocracy:

you cannot comply your way out of tyranny

but you CAN non-comply your way to freedom.

in 2020, governments and bureaucrats shut down the world to bring us into submission.

it is LONG past time we returned the favor.

become ungovernable.

As if we need further evidence that hysterical fear of Covid causes mental derangement, here’s an ad for a “mask for singers.“

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 352 of the 2007 collection of some of Joseph Epstein’s essays, In a Cardboard Belt!; specifically, it’s from Epstein’s March 2004 essay titled “The Perpetual Adolescent” (emphasis added):

Political correctness and so many of the political fashions of our day – from academic feminism to cultural studies to queer theory – could only be perpetrated on adolescent minds: minds, that is, that are trained to search out one thing and one thing only: Is my teacher, or this politician, or that public spokesman, saying something that is likely to be offensive to me or members of any other victim group? Only an adolescent would find it worthwhile to devote his or her attention chiefly to the hunting of offenses, the possibility of slights, real and imagined.

DBx: Yep. And so it follows that much of today’s so-called “education” – primary, secondary, post-secondary, and post-graduate – is about ensuring that minds remain forever adolescent.

It is no sign of enlightenment, liberalism, or intelligence to accord, because you fear that some people might mistake you as being insufficiently opposed to the alt-right, intellectual credibility to the nonsense being “taught” today by “teachers” of the humanities and the social sciences.

Yesterday’s Left vs. Today’s Left

(Don Boudreaux)

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Mark Perry shared, on Facebook, this accurate cartoon.

Some Non-Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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John McWhorter explains that what’s being taught in many K-12 government ‘schools’ is indeed a version of critical race theory. Two slices:

It’s reasonable, yes, to note the partisan divide on some of these questions, but less reasonable to suggest that there’s a consensus against any discussion of slavery and racism in schools. Let’s give that suggestion its weight, however: If critical race theory isn’t being taught to children — and in a technical sense, it isn’t — then it’s hardly illogical to suppose that some other concern may be afoot.

The problem lies in the name “critical race theory.” It’s a no-brainer that the legal doctrine developed decades ago by scholars such as the Harvard Law professor Derrick Bell and the Columbia University and U.C.L.A. law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw is not being taught to tots. (Even one of critical race theory’s principal critics, the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo, has acknowledged that he’s tried to make “critical race theory” a catchall term.) But today, this isn’t what most voters mean when they object to critical race theory, and to participate in this debate as if otherwise is quibbling at best, and a smoke screen at worst.
…..
It’s difficult, certainly, to imagine a grade-school teacher in front of a classroom teaching this kind of thing. However, this “critical” approach has trickled down, in broad outline, into the philosophy of education-school pedagogy and administration — call it C.R.T.-lite or, if you prefer, C.R.T. Jr. — and from there migrated into the methods used by graduates of those education programs into the way they wind up running schools.

Under this approach, what alarms many parents and other observers is that kids will absorb the idea that it is enlightened to see white people as potential oppressors and Black people as perpetual victims of an inherently oppressive system. That it is therefore appropriate to ascribe certain traits to races, rather than individuals, and that education must “center” the battle against power differentials between groups and the subtle perceptions that they condition.

George Will writes rationally about the irrationality that chews like a cancer at San Francisco. A slice:

An “advocate” says: “We can’t end overdoses until we end poverty, until we end racism.” So, in 2020, the city put up two billboards promoting the safe use of hard drugs (heroin, fentanyl): “Change it up. Injecting drugs has the highest risk of overdose, so consider snorting or smoking instead.” “Try not to use alone. Do it with friends. Use with people and take turns.” Last year, however, San Francisco did ban smoking in apartments.

What [Michael] Shellenberger calls San Francisco’s “pathological altruism” — e.g., spending $61,000 per tent for homeless campers — involves the “sacralization of victims” and abandonment of equal treatment under law. Progressive victimology preaches that behaviors that are destructive of individuals and urban civilization are definitionally caused by “systemic” this or that — racism, oppression, etc. So, progressivism strips victims of agency but also, Shellenberger says, defines them as “inherently good because they have been victimized.”

“Biden Administration, School Board Association Colluded To Direct FBI Scrutiny at Parents Who Were Critical of School Boards” – is the headline of a recent piece by Reason‘s Brian Doherty. A slice:

The panic, which we now know arose from NSBA and administration collaboration, further misrepresents angry responses from meeting attendees to school policies on matters such as COVID-19 mitigation measures and how race is dealt with in public education as violence and threats, when they are almost always nothing of the sort. Such public aiming of FBI attention at what is overwhelmingly just parents exercising their rights within the public school system, even if loudly, seems more meant to intimidate than to actually quash real crimes.

Randy Holcombe writes on inflation.

Here’s the abstract of a new paper by Kevin Grier, Robin Grier, and Gor Mkrtchian:

The US sugar program has long delivered significant subsidies to a concentrated group of sugar growers at the expense of American consumers. In 2013, however, an amendment in the House of Representatives attempted to seriously reduce those subsidies. The amendment narrowly lost. A similar amendment was proposed in 2018. It was voted down as well, but much more handily. In this paper, we show that “Big Sugar” increased real contributions to House incumbents in the interim by more than 50%. Using a district fixed effects logit model, we also show that these contributions significantly raised the probability that the targeted representative would vote against reforming the sugar subsidies. While many argue that money does not directly affect roll-call voting, we believe that in cases where the economic interest is clear and sizeable, and the researcher can use repeat votes to account for district level unobservables, the evidence shows a significant influence of money on votes.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff detail key reasons why vaccine mandates are unethical. A slice:

Fourth, unlike the polio and measles vaccines, the covid vaccines do not stop the transmission of infection. They are excellent at reducing the risk of severe disease and death, but their ability to prevent infection wanes after a few months. Therefore, even if you are vaccinated, you will eventually be infected.

With milder symptoms, it could even be that the vaccinated are more likely to spread it to others, compared to the unvaccinated, who are more likely to be bedridden at home. Hence, when we urge people to get vaccinated, we do it mainly for their own sake, not for protecting others.

National Review‘s Charles Cooke reports on yesterday’s scathing smack-down by the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals of Biden’s appalling vaccine mandate. A slice:

Summing up, the court savaged the move in every possible way. “The Mandate,” it wrote, “likely exceeds the federal government’s authority under the Commerce Clause because it regulates noneconomic inactivity that falls squarely within the States’ police power,” because “a person’s choice to remain unvaccinated and forgo regular testing is noneconomic inactivity.” “To mandate that a person receive a vaccine or undergo testing,” it added, “falls squarely within the States’ police power.” In addition, “concerns over separation of powers principles cast doubt over the Mandate’s assertion of virtually unlimited power to control individual conduct under the guise of a workplace regulation.”

Oh, and the whole thing relies upon “authority from an old statute employed in a novel manner, imposes nearly $3 billion in compliance costs, involves broad medical considerations that lie outside of OSHA’s core competencies, and purports to definitively resolve one of today’s most hotly debated political issues.”

I’m eager to read Scott Atlas’s new book, which will be released on November 23rd.

Writing in the Telegraph, Daniel Hannan laments the fact that “[i]t will take more than the retreat of Covid to cure our society’s lockdown obsession.” A slice:

What is going on? Why are so many people – including journalists, politicians and, not least, health officials – determined to cling to their pessimism? I have been cudgelling by brains for an explanation, and I have managed to come up with six possibilities.

First, human beings are drawn to ugly and frightening stories. They stick in our minds in a way that happy stories do not. For example, if someone is scrupulously truthful for many years, and then tells us a lie, it is the lie that we remember. Psychologists call the phenomenon “negativity bias”, and it explains why, when infection rates fluctuate, we tend to dwell on the upswings and ignore the downswings.

Second, this tendency has always been recognised by news editors. As the old Fleet Street adage goes, “if it bleeds, it leads”. You’ll never hear a news anchor announce that there have been a couple of weeks of steadily falling infections; but a couple of days the other way and it’s a big story. The casual viewer, hearing only the rising numbers, naturally assumes that they must by now have added up to a tsunami of cases.

Also from the Telegraph is this essay, by Camilla Tominey, on the damage done by lockdowns. A slice:

It came as an Oxford University study showed a 17 per cent fall in diagnoses of childhood cancers in the months following the first lockdown. Meanwhile, the latest NHS statistics show that the number of children waiting for treatment for eating disorders has doubled in the past year from 860 to more than 2,000. These are just a few examples of how repeatedly locking down for one vulnerable group – the elderly – has harmed another – the young.

Sadly, the full “non-Covid” consequences of the pandemic remain incalculable because the Government and health bosses continue to be fixated with Covid infections, hospitalisations and deaths – rather than all of the other far more important statistics.

Writing at UnHerd, the playwright David Mamet decries “[t]he horror of the last year’s slide into despotism” – and the associated abandonment of reason. A slice:

But just as the techniques of stage magic are identical with those of the confidence game, the understanding of the dramatist — that the mass can be suggested, and, so controlled —is the same as that of the Dictator. Here fear replaces happy anticipation; and, as we see, outrage at the indicted masks an unavowable fear.

At least some Australians are protesting Covidocratic tyranny.

The Spectator-Australia‘s editors rightly criticize Australian P.M. Scott Morrison’s ‘understanding’ of freedom. A slice:

And as such – and this is the disturbing bit – freedom [in Morrison’s view] is actually something the government manufactures, that the government owns and that the government will give you if you’ve been a good boy or a good girl. Indeed, in the Prime Minister’s mind, freedom is very much and very explicitly a bargaining chip. A token in a game of viral tiddlywinks. Freedom in exchange for being vaccinated.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from Lord Bolingbroke’s 1717 letter to Sir William Windham, as quoted on page 248 of David Boaz’s important 2015 volume, The Libertarian Mind:

I am afraid that we came to Court in the same dispositions as all parties have done; that the principal spring of our actions was to have the government of the state in our hands; that our principal views were the conservation of this power, great employments to ourselves, and great opportunities of rewarding those who had helped to raise us and of hurting those who stood in opposition to us.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 418 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.) (original emphasis):

Advocates of increased minimum legal wages often say that they would be perfectly willing to pay more for a burger or a cotton shirt in order to provide a living wage to the workers who produce burgers and cotton shirts. But would they go on purchasing as many burgers or cotton shirts as they formerly purchased? Even if they would, would everyone else do the same? A market system is a social system in which it is rarely possible to alter one variable without affecting others. Actions have unintended and unanticipated consequences.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 24 of Benn Steil’s excellent 2013 book, The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order:

[N]o one had actually “created” the gold standard. It had emerged in Britain in the early nineteenth century by dint of trial and error over centuries, and  governments around the world signed on much later only when it became clear that the system served to boost both local and global commerce.