Russell Roberts's Blog, page 214

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from a January 1775 speech, delivered in Pennsylvania, by James Wilson (who in 1789 became one of the first Associate Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court), as quoted on page 150 of Liberty Fund’s 1998 reissue of Trevor Colbourn’s 1965 volume, The Lamp of Experience:

The British liberties, sir, and the means and the right of defending them, are not the grants of princes; and of what our princes never granted they surely can never deprive us.

Federalism At Work II

(Don Boudreaux)

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Florida governor Ron DeSantis announces his State’s intention to resist Biden’s abominable vaccine mandate. I fervently hope this resistance prevails – and spreads.

Federalism At Work

(Don Boudreaux)

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South Carolina governor Henry McMaster musters all the powers that are lawfully in his office to resist Biden’s abominable vaccine mandate. I fervently hope this resistance prevails – and spreads.

An Open Letter to a Power-Seeker

(Don Boudreaux)

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My latest column for AIER is an open letter to a young woman – one who has experience as an entrepreneur – who’s now seeking a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. Here are my concluding paragraphs:

If you don’t mind, let me offer some advice. Quit your quest for political office and continue to work as a private-sector entrepreneur.

As an entrepreneur, you work honestly and you remain honest. The money that you spend is either your own or that which is voluntarily entrusted to you. And in the private sector you’re driven to spend that money wisely. More importantly, only in the private sector can you know if your efforts to help others are really succeeding. The reason is that your efforts in the private sector are, as the economist Deirdre McCloskey describes them, “market-tested.”

In the market, you will know if you succeed at improving the lives of others if they pay you enough to continue your efforts. If people don’t pay you enough to continue your efforts, you will know that you are not succeeding at improving the lives of others. You’ll then be driven by competition to redirect your efforts such that you do wind up improving the lives of others.

As a politician, in contrast, you work dishonestly and are at high risk of becoming corrupted. If you gain political office you’ll spend, not your own money, but that of other people. And the programs on which you’ll spend these sums will mostly be ones to which Americans are compelled to submit. There is, with almost all government programs, nothing akin to a real market test. In politics the only ‘test’ is superficial popularity – your looks, your glibness, your ability to appear to be expressing substantive thoughts while in fact saying nothing substantive at all – combined with your ability and willingness to serve powerful interest groups. Under such circumstances you cannot long remain a decent human being.

Especially because you seem to be an intelligent, well-meaning, and hard-working woman, quit this undignified and soul-warping quest for political office. Use your drive, talents, and creativity not to compel other people to do as you and a coalition of other politicians command, but, instead, to entrepreneurially discover and deliver alternatives for which people express their approval both by voluntarily buying your goods or services, and by voluntarily working for you and investing in your ventures.

America has a superabundance of people lusting to exercise power over others. But we can always use another genuine entrepreneur. You are rightly proud of being one. Please, stick to being an entrepreneur. Only then will you truly help not only your fellow Californians in the 42nddistrict, but the whole of humanity.

On Non-Compete Contracts

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to a high-school student in Ohio:

Mr. V__:

Thanks for your e-mail.

Your teacher is correct that “competitive labor markets are the best way to be sure that workers’ pay is fair.” Indeed, I’d argue that such markets are the only means of attaining this outcome. But I disagree with your teacher’s claim that, as you word it, “so non-compete clauses should be against the law since it reduces competition.”

A non-compete clause is a contractual term. As with all contracts, each party agrees to sacrifice some consideration (as lawyers call it) in exchange for some other consideration. Because no one is compelled to sign a non-compete clause, if worker Jones agrees to such a contractual clause with Acme Corp., two things must be true. First, in exchange for her agreeing not to compete against Acme if and when she parts ways with that company, she must receive something of value from Acme. What she receives might be higher pay, a promise of specialized worker training, or some other benefit. But we can be certain that she receives something in exchange for her agreeing to the non-compete clause.

Second, whatever she receives in exchange for agreeing to the non-compete clause must be something that she values more highly than she values the prospect of working in that same occupation soon after parting ways with Acme.

It follows that prohibitions on non-compete clauses make workers worse off. Any such prohibition strips workers of a valuable bargaining chip – namely, the right to agree to non-compete clauses – and, thus, denies workers the ability to use that chip to ‘purchase’ from prospective employers better pay or work conditions that they, the workers, value more highly than they value their unrestricted right to compete.

I emphasize that non-compete clauses are simply contracts. And every contract results in some voluntarily agreed to restrictions on each party’s freedom of action. For example, your parents likely borrowed money to buy their home. In exchange for receiving cash from the bank to purchase the home, your parents voluntarily agreed to make regular monthly mortgage payments. Now ask yourself if homebuyers would be made better off if government were to prohibit people from agreeing to bind themselves contractually to repay funds borrowed to buy homes. It’s easy to see, right?, that your parents would have been made worse off were they prohibited from binding themselves contractually to repay their mortgage. Such a prohibition would have resulted in an unwillingness of any bank to lend them money to buy their home.

Non-compete clauses are no more “anti-worker” than mortgage-loan contracts are “anti-homeowner.”

Good luck with your college applications!

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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Raymond March argues that “gain of function controversy demands greater scrutiny for government-funded science.” A slice:

In his underappreciated book, The Organization of Inquiry, economist Gordon Tullock explains how funding scientists can distort the scientific method. When scientists make a discovery, they rely heavily on the review and approval of their scientific peers to verify whether they are correct and how their discovery advances knowledge in other fields or helps benefit the public. Tullock likens this process to “the perfect laissez faire.”

However, when scientists receive research funds from the government, distortions in the process occur. First, scientists are encouraged to pursue research tied to political agendas rather than those encouraged within the scientific community or by private actors in the market. Second, feedback provided by the scientific community on the validity and implications of discovery becomes less important. Consequently, erroneous scientific discoveries stemming from public funding take longer to falsify and to remove from public use.

Jacob Sullum identifies several potential legal vulnerabilities of Biden’s abominable vaccine mandate. A slice:

The vaccination exceptions allowed by OSHA do not include people who are resistant to COVID-19 because they were previously infected. While there is considerable debate about how the protection offered by naturally acquired immunity compares to the protection offered by vaccination, the lack of an exception for people who have recovered from COVID-19 could be another basis for questioning the necessity of OSHA’s requirements.

Also writing about Biden’s abominable vaccine mandate is Reason‘s Christian Britschgi. A slice:

The National Federation of Independent Businesses, which represents small businesses, said in a September letter that the administration was forcing its members to “serve as the government’s instruments of coercion against its own employees.” Those are fighting words.

George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin, writing at The Volokh Conspiracy (which is hosted at Reason), has argued that the federal government is on its firmest legal ground when mandating vaccines for its own employees. A mandate that the employees of private companies get the shot as well, and the emergency rule-making process that the Biden administration is using to implement that mandate, “are legally dubious and would set a dangerous precedent, if upheld,” writes Somin.

The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board describes Biden’s abominable vaccine mandate as “unnecessary and needlessly divisive.” A slice:

The mandate comes amid a historically tight labor market and could impel some workers to quit. According to a Kaiser Family Foundation survey last week, 37% of unvaccinated workers said they would leave if their employer required them to get a vaccine or be tested weekly. A quarter of all adults said they knew someone who has left a job because of a vaccine mandate.

OSHA acknowledges “that a vaccine mandate may result in increased employee turnover,” though it says “the net effect” will “be relatively small” given the testing option. But even if only 1% to 3% of workers leave because of the mandate, as OSHA projects, employers will struggle to replace them.

OSHA says employer benefits like lower worker absenteeism will offset their costs. Perhaps, but then why not let employers set their own policies rather than impose a one-size-fits-all rule that doesn’t account for different business considerations?

As for the rule’s public-health justification, increases in infections among the vaccinated make singling out the unvaccinated less supportable. Weekly testing is also no guarantee of contagion at workplaces since a worker can test negative one day and be positive the next.

The OSHA rule is also a dubious reach of federal power. As 24 GOP state Attorneys General explained in a September letter to Mr. Biden, OSHA is stretching its authority under the law because “emergency temporary standards” are supposed to be limited to “grave danger from exposure to substances or agents determined to be toxic or physically harmful or from new hazards.” The law “deals with work-related hazards, not all hazards one might encounter anywhere in the world,” they note.

Joel Zinberg makes the case that New York City mayor Bill de Blasio’s insistence that all city workers be vaccinated against Covid-19 “will endanger New York.” Here’s his conclusion:

Experts generally say that natural infection almost always causes better immunity than vaccines. While the evidence is mixed, it seems clear that both natural and vaccine-provided Covid-19 immunity provide effective protection.

A new CDC review shows that infection with SARS-CoV-2 and vaccination each result in a low risk of subsequent infection for six months or more. This finding holds true for both the Delta and pre-Delta variants. In addition, both prior infection and vaccination confer high levels of protection against symptomatic Covid-19 illness.

Vaccination remains the best protection against Covid-19; everyone, especially essential workers, should be encouraged to get the shots. Nevertheless, heavy-handed mandates that reject workable accommodations risk endangering the public far more than unvaccinated workers.

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

Martin Kulldorff tweets about this report:

The catastrophe that never came: “Sweden’s low death toll is an uncomfortable truth for the media and politicians in many countries. It proves that millions of peoples lived unfree to no avail.” – @johananderberg

Writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, Chirag Asaravala – hardly an anti-lockdowner – explains that many public-health officials in California have gone off the scientific rails. (HT Jay Bhattacharya) A slice:

Now, nearly nine months after mass vaccination implementation, it is not only reasonable to expect, but mandatory from a risk analysis principle, to recalculate the risk of disease to individuals. We know that vaccines almost completely eliminate the chance of dying or being hospitalized from COVID-19. We also know that transmission of the virus is greatly reduced in vaccinated individuals who do become infected. More importantly, we know over 80% of Californians age 12 and over have been vaccinated with at least one dose. The number of individuals with natural immunity brings the percent immunized even higher.

Most California counties, especially Contra Costa, San Francisco and Alameda, have achieved the trifecta of risk reduction scenarios: probability of infection has been reduced, severity of disease has been reduced and a highly effective mitigation is in place — vaccination. Each county’s own COVID-19 data prove this to be true; San Francisco, with nearly 900,000 residents, has a seven-day rolling average of 53 positive cases per day and no deaths as of Oct. 20.

Yet public health officials in these and other counties have abandoned scientific reasoning, layering mitigation upon mitigation for no justifiable reason. The prevailing logic appears to be that it is unacceptable for even a single person to contract the virus — an unrealistic and untenable position.

Risk mitigations incur real costs and often have unintended consequence. The cost of shuttering restaurants like In-N-Out are immense — from lost jobs and revenue to the business and the state. Perhaps a greater consequence is the loss of public confidence in California’s public health institutions.

Covidocratic tyranny reigns in Germany.

“Thousands of women told they have ‘long Covid’ may just be suffering the menopause, experts say” – so reports the Daily Mail.

Andrew Lilico is justifiably critical of media reporting on Covid. A slice:

On Covid the good news just keeps coming. Relative to seven days before, official cases have fallen for 11 straight days and the seven day average is now down about 18 per cent from its peak. Cases in kids started falling at about October 18th (a full week before half-term started) as now confirmed not only in the official cases data but in the REACT survey just out – which tests people at random and hence is unaffected by any changes in testing with schools out). And a new treatment, molnupiravir, has been approved, which, if given soon enough after symptoms start, cuts the risk of being hospitalised by about half. The SAGE epidemiological modellers now expect cases and hospitalisations to fall this winter. Indeed, in some of their models cases fall as low as 5,000 per day. Those who, even just a couple of weeks ago, were demanding an immediate shift to plan B have been proved demonstrably wrong.

Yet if you watched the main television channels you would have precisely the opposite impression. Yesterday, CNN released an interview with the Prime Minister in which he was challenged on why plan B had not been implemented given that, as CNN’s Chief International Anchor Christiane Amanpour tweeted: “Case numbers are spiking”. On Sky News, Economic Secretary to the Treasury John Glenn was interviewed on the basis that, Sky tweeted: “With the UK’s coronavirus epidemic escalating by the day, it’s no longer a case of if Plan B will be triggered but when, say experts” and since Plan B was inevitable, didn’t the government owe the public some indication as to when it would be coming in?

On BBC Breakfast, England’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer Jonathan Van-Tam was asked “Why are schools not putting masks in place, with cases rising in school age children?” The fact that cases in school-aged children are not in fact rising – indeed, on a seven day average basis they are currently down 39 percent from their peak – is apparently of no relevance.

On Tuesday I shared here the video of a recent talk given by Julie Ponesse. The Brownstone Institute has now made available a transcript of this powerful talk.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 420 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.):

When greater competence means higher costs, greater competence will not always be preferable. We should not send a boy to do a man’s job, as the old saying has it; neither should we send a man to do a boy’s job. A system that guarantees competence can easily become a system that forces people to pay for more than they really want or require. A pretended dedication to public safety or consumer protection, by business firms even more than craft unions, has often functioned as the justification for government-enforced restrictions on competition.

Some Non-Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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GMU Econ grad student Dominic Pino, writing at National Review, accurately describes Sen. Josh Hawley’s (R-MO) new supply-chain web bill as “unserious.” A slice:

Two things stand out. First, measuring goods by percentage of value doesn’t make very much sense. The value of a manufactured good is as a completed product, and it’s not just the sum of its parts. For example, if a pair of shoes costs $60, you wouldn’t pay $30 for only one of them. The shoes are only valuable to you as a pair; nobody walks around with one shoe. Producers face a similar dynamic. If it’s prohibitively expensive to make half of a manufactured good, there’s often no use making the good at all.

Second, for a senator who is skeptical of “the deep state,” Hawley seems to put great trust in the career bureaucrats at the Department of Commerce and the Department of Defense. He apparently believes they have the knowledge and authority to decide for everyone which goods and inputs are essential and which ones are not.

Arnold Kling reviews Bret Weinstein’s and Heather Heying’s new book.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy is unimpressed with Meghan Markle’s attempt to defend state-mandated paid leave. Here’s Vero’s conclusion:

I would love the duchess to call me (she shouldn’t have a hard time finding my number, since she can find the private number of a U.S. senator). If she calls, I will explain why some of us fervently oppose a federal paid-leave program. The reason isn’t that we don’t understand the benefit of paid leave. It has to do with 1) the unintended consequences of the federal provision on its beneficiaries, and, 2) the inability of government programs to deliver the benefit to those who do not have it currently.

Also from Vero is this criticism of the global tax cartel. A slice:

Corporations may not be popular, but if we squeeze them too hard, how many raises can we expect them to hand out to American workers? What happens to the prices we pay for their products? Even corporations need accountable government, and that means having options in case taxes become too punishing.

I’m glad that someone – in this case, Charles Cooke – is pushing back against the absurd assertion that the reason for the Democrats’ terrible performance in Tuesday’s elections is that the Democrats on Capitol Hill haven’t yet succeeded in enacting all the hyper-Progressive legislation supported by Biden.

For more insight about Tuesday’s election read Reason‘s Matt Welch.

Tim Carney exposes the mainstream-media’s error in asserting that parental furor at public “schools” was largely a right-wing hoax. A slice:

Having the news media as a yes man is dangerous.

I’m old enough to remember when the Washington Post decided that the main story in the 2009 gubernatorial election was that Bob McDonnell had written a master’s thesis about how women leaving the home for work might affect family life. The Post was literally obsessed with this and covered this as the central campaign issue for two months.

The Post convinced Creigh Deeds to start campaigning on the issue, which of course did him no good.

Having the whole news media on your side is often helpful — such as when Joe Biden enjoyed a media blackout on his son’s influence-peddling. But when it convinces you that issues matter that don’t, or that issues don’t matter that do, it’s a handicap.

Writing in today’s Wall Street Journal, Bjorn Lomborg argues persuasively that “we’re safer from climate disasters than ever before.” A slice:

As the world has gotten richer and its population has grown, the number and quality of structures in the path of floods, fires, and hurricanes have risen. If you remove this variable by looking at damage as a percent of gross domestic product, it actually paints an optimistic picture. The trend of weather-related damages from 1990 to 2020 declined from 0.26% of global GDP to 0.18%. A landmark study shows this has been the trend for poor and rich countries alike, regardless of the types of disaster. Economic growth and innovation have insulated all sorts of people from floods, droughts, wind, heat and cold.

Yet on an Age-Adjusted Basis….

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:

Editor:

Rebecca Howard criticizes Dave Seminara’s praise of Florida governor Ron DeSantis for rejecting harsh Covid restrictions (Letters, Nov. 4). In Ms. Howard’s opinion, evidence for why the “trade-off” of more freedom for lives was not “worth it” is the fact that “Florida has the seventh-most deaths per 100,000 residents, whereas California ranks 35th among the states.”

Well.

First, the acceptability of unprecedented restrictions on freedom is not established by such a fact. By Ms. Howard’s logic, if government could substantially reduce annual deaths in the U.S., say by 1 million, by forcing each of us to live forever alone in an antiseptic bubble, such a mandate is appropriate. But surely even Ms. Howard would reject her logic long before it leads her to embrace this monstrous conclusion.

Second, because the influences on Covid death rates are numerous and complex, Ms. Howard’s simple fact is misleading, as is made clear by merely adjusting for age. On an age-adjusted basis, Florida’s Covid death toll is 22nd in the country – a death toll far lower than that of New Jersey, New York, DC, and other jurisdictions whose citizens suffered harsher lockdowns. On this same age-adjusted basis, California’s Covid death toll ranks 28th – that is, along with Florida, in the middle of the pack.

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

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 109 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 at National Review on March 16th, 2017):

Government breeds advocacy groups that lobby it to do what it wants to do anyway – expand what it is doing.

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