Russell Roberts's Blog, page 216

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 251 an op-ed titled “There’s Only 1 Cause for Inflation” that the late Armen Alchian had in 1979 in the Los Angeles Times, as this op-ed is reprinted in The Collected Works of Armen A. Alchian (2006), Volume 1 (“Choice and Cost Under Uncertainty”; Daniel K. Benjamin, ed.):

To make more respectable their unwillingness to restrain the creation of more new money, the Fed argues (and they even have official committees of economists to lend credibility) that (1) restraint would cause a depression and unemployment, and (2) the inflation is necessary to maintain full employment.

The latter point is simply false, but I won’t explain why here. And the first is a cop-out. Restraint will cause a depression only because the promise of restraint would not be believed by the public, given the past record of the Fed.

Some Non-Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Matt Welch calls out the deplorable media bias for “Progressive” superstitions. A slice:

There is something revealingly incongruous about a news organization [CNN] that in one breath conducts hair-splitting fact-checks deferring to the government’s of view (“In fact, there’s no mention of ‘parents’…at all in the memo, none,” [Anderson] Cooper said triumphantly Wednesday, about the controversial October 4 Justice Department directive to have federal agents be on the lookout for anti–school board violence), then in the next being content to nod along when a colleague accuses citizen participants in democracy and a major political party of being primarily motivated by white supremacy.

Eric Boehm explains that Sen. Josh Hawley’s (R-MO) proposed ‘fixes’ for supply-chain web woes will, if adopted, only make those woes permanent. A slice:

One must assume that if the lights in his home went out due to a storm, Hawley would respond by declaring electricity to be a mistake and demanding that the government require homes to be lit with candles and gas lamps. After all, what is the electrical grid but a complicated supply chain that leaves Americans woefully dependent on production and distribution systems (power plants, substations, and lines) that they do not fully control? Better to produce your own lighting, right? If that means you have to live without television or the internet, well, those are just the trade-offs required to achieve self-sufficiency.

A storm—or a pandemic—can create temporary problems in the highly complex systems that run so much of the modern world. That’s hardly a reason to abandon them. If Hawley is imagining a world in which the United States is wholly self-sufficient, then he’s asking you to accept a scenario in which the United States is significantly poorer than it is today.

Here’s George Leef on Charles Murray and “two truths about race in America.”

In the Wall Street Journal, Tunku Varadarajan profiles Randy Barnett and Evan Bernick and their important new work on the 14th amendment. A slice:

The most significant misinterpretation of the 14th Amendment, as Messrs. Barnett and Bernick see it, is the judicial disregarding of the Privileges or Immunities Clause. Judges see it as an impenetrable “inkblot” (to borrow a metaphor Robert Bork used in a different constitutional context), the recognition of which would serve as a license to judges to invent new rights. In its original conception, Mr. Barnett says, the Privileges or Immunities Clause “protects rights that are fundamental to what we call ‘republican citizenship’—citizenship that’s grounded in natural rights and civil equality.”

Those include rights guaranteed by the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which extended citizenship to all persons born in the U.S. “without distinction of race or color, or previous condition of slavery or involuntary servitude.” They also include rights that are deeply rooted in tradition and history, as evidenced by the laws of the states.

The Cato Institute’s Chris Edwards identifies ten downsides to the Democrats’ spending ‘plan.‘

Speaking of reckless and irresponsible Democratic economic proposals, here’s my intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy, writing at National Review.

Also from Veronique is this clear-eyed appraisal of Comptroller of the Currency nominee, Saule Omarova.

Here’s Peter Van Doren and David Kemp on ‘Big tech and antitrust. A slice:

In the current issue of Regulation, Jonathan Klick argues against the use of antitrust laws against the tech companies because their social networking services are free to consumers. As our colleague Ryan Bourne has argued, Facebook’s market is not social networking but advertising. And in selling advertising space and competing for consumer attention, Facebook faces stiff competition from other tech and non-tech companies, such as radio and television.

If market power in advertising isn’t the problem, what is? Critics argue that tech companies’ size and prominence give them advantages in other markets that they enter. Whatever they touch turns to gold. But relatively unknown Zoom and GoToWebinar have captured about 60 percent of the teleconferencing market during the pandemic while services from tech giants, such as Microsoft Teams, Amazon Chime, and Facebook Messenger, have failed miserably among consumers.

University of Chicago geophysical-sciences professor Dorian Abbot shares, in the Wall Street Journal, the views that managed to get him cancelled at M.I.T. A slice:

I care for all of my students equally. None of them are overrepresented or underrepresented to me: They represent themselves. Their grades are based on a process that I define at the beginning of the quarter. That process treats each student fairly and equally. I hold office hours for students who would like extra help so that everyone has the opportunity to improve his or her grade through hard work and discipline.

Similarly, I believe that admissions and faculty hiring at universities are best focused on academic merit, with the goal of producing intellectual excellence. We should not penalize hard-working students and faculty applicants simply because they have been classified as belonging to the wrong group. It is true that not everyone has had the same educational opportunities. The solution is improving K-12 education, not introducing discrimination at late stages.

Let’s hope that Janet Daley, here talking with Steven Edginton, is correct in her prediction that “[l]ike McCarthyism, America will soon wake up to wokeism.”

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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New Zealand’s Covidocracy vows to arrest those who peacefully gather to protest its tyranny. (The ‘reasoning’ of pro-lockdowners seems to be that there’s no amount of freedom – no amount, really, of anything else – that isn’t worth sacrificing for the flimsiest prospect of even the slightest reduction in the risk of exposure to the Worst Monster Ever to Threaten Humanity, Covid-19.)

Speaking of protesting tyranny, el malo gato shares some videos of recent gatherings of people who are demanding an end to Covidocratic rule.

Writing in the New York Post, Karol Markowicz argues, very sensibly, that Covid in America would have been handled much more humanely and effectively had more ‘leaders’ done what Florida governor Ron DeSantis wisely has done. (Note, for the record, that while I loudly applaud most of DeSantis’s handling of Covid, I oppose his use of government power to restrict the abilities of private entities to choose their own Covid policies.) A slice:

It’s a lesson that we need to quickly learn. Encouraging vaccination is important, but ultimately COVID will be something we need to handle with less hysteria going forward, and DeSantis has been a model for that.

Well, at least the New Yorkers who’ll die unnecessarily in fires or because ambulances have no drivers won’t die of Covid-19 – and Covid-19, as we all now know, is the only cause of suffering and death that really counts.

Christos Makridis reports on his research that reveals that “[p]andemic restrictions were a blow to religious liberty.” A slice:

In a newly released paper of mine, together with new data made available through the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, I quantify the effects of state restrictions on houses of worship on individuals’ subjective well-being. Using data from Gallup between March 2020 and June 2021, I compare measures of well-being among religious adherents and their counterparts before versus after the adoption of restrictions within their states.

I find that pandemic restrictions significantly reduced religious peoples’ well-being. These effects persisted even after controlling for a wide array of demographic features, such as age and education, and other characteristics, such as income and industry. For example, the restrictions led to a 4.1 percentage point rise in self-isolation among the religious, relative to their counterparts. And they reduced life satisfaction by 0.09 standard deviations, an effect nearly twice as large as the male-female difference in the same measure.

“There are no arguments for masks in schools… there are so many harms that are caused by masks.”

Jay Bhattacharya tweets:

The destruction wrought by lockdowns on the poor worldwide is staggering. It was an immoral and heartless policy imposed out of fear without thought of the collateral harms.

Nearly 13 months after the world was told that the great Great Barrington Declaration was aimed at slaying a straw man, that straw man appears to be readying for a visit to Tonga.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 555 of the 1988 collection of Lord Acton’s writings (edited by the late J. Rufus Fears), Essays in Religion, Politics, and Morality; specifically, it’s a note drawn from Acton’s extensive papers at Cambridge University; (I can find no date for this passage):

There should be a law to the People besides its own will.

Exploring Econ Talk: Sam Peltzman (2006)

(Don Boudreaux)

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I continue to catch up on listening to the vast library of EconTalk podcasts. The next one that I recommend is this one from November 2006 with Sam Peltzman.

Here’s one of the many lessons you’ll learn by listening to this podcast: All people who love to hate “Big Pharma” should join the ranks of those of us who wish to abolish, or at least to severely curtail the powers of, the Food and Drug Administration. (I myself would completely abolish the FDA and its powers.)

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Simon Evans rightly praises the courage and eloquence of Jonathan Sumption, who steadfastly defended freedom in face of Covid hysteria. A slice:

[Sumption] was an extraordinarily important figure to those who were alarmed by the speed with which the Maginot Line of traditional Britannic liberty collapsed in spring of 2020, yet were equally aware that the resistance seemed to be comprised chiefly of a motley, often dispiriting assembly of professional provocateurs, recidivist attention junkies and outright cranks. I had a number of friends who shared my serious concern as ‘three weeks to flatten the curve’ became an ever-more comprehensive constraint of ancient individual rights. Yet we felt little inclination to join forces with Piers Corbyn, David Icke nor even to be honest Desmond Swayne, even to do battle with an elected government which had literally stood on the issues of independence and sovereignty at almost any cost.

Sumption was able to articulate our concerns without recourse to words like ‘plandemic’ and ‘pre-conditioning’. He eschewed talk of the New World Order, of 6uild 6ack 6etter, and as comedian Rich Hall put it, of the idea that the vaccine was a ‘liquid sim card’ developed by Bill Gates to track your every move. The vocabulary of conspiracy in other words – and a scenario our digital Cassandras shared urgently on their location-enabled smartphones behind the enemy lines of Facebook and Twitter whenever they could get a signal.

Instead, he reminded us forcefully of the stickiness of authoritarian measures, and the illusion that a bath plug can and will be pulled when the emergency has passed and the filthy waters of the state will simply drain away. He reminded us that, as well as corrupting, power ratchets, and measures once granted in extremis are rarely shrugged off in tranquillity.

He was one of a few, if not a happy few – among the others I would include Peter Hitchens, whom no one would accuse of being happy nor indeed activated by any thought of banding with brothers. But Sumption and Hitchens seemed to see something distinctly unwelcome in the clouds that were massing on our horizon. Massing over our rights to freedom of assembly, freedom of association, freedom of passage. All these have seemed at one time or another, to many millions of people, natural laws, too big and too fundamental to repeal even should the state deem it necessary. Until one day, suddenly, they weren’t.

Quoting extensively from Yasmeen Abutaleb’s and Damian Paletta’s 2021 book, Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History, Jeffrey Tucker describes Deborah Birx’s reckless role in persuading Trump to lockdown. (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

About this new study from the CDC, Martin Kulldorff tweets:

This @CDCgov study in @CDCMMWR has a major statistical flaw, and the 5x conclusion is wrong. It implicitly assumes that hospitalized respiratory patients are representative of the population, which they are not. Trying to connect with authors.

Writing in Reason, Robert Jackman reports that Britain is finally (hopefully) ending its mandatory hotel quarantines. Two slices:

Having originally criminalized all “non-essential” foreign travel in January, the U.K. government hoped that hotel quarantine would form part of a traffic light system intended to ease the borders open. Countries would be designed either green (quarantine-free), amber (home quarantine required), or red (hotel quarantine). In practice, the scheme was confusing, with changes often announced at short notice—leaving travelers scrambling to get back to avoid quarantine restrictions.

The government was unapologetic about any disruption or confusion. As Britain entered its summer vacation season, Boris Johnson was warning that he would not hesitate to move a country from green to red. Anyone who lied about visiting a red list country after traveling back indirectly could face 10 years in prison.

Through late September, about 200,000 people were forced to endure hotel quarantines.

What were the quarantines like? Within weeks of coming online, the system faced routine complaints from residents who blasted the poor quality of food, the lack of fresh air, and the uncomfortable rooms. In August, the BBC broadcast footage recorded by quarantine residents showing slugs and mold in their room.

…..

The end of this miserable policy will be welcomed by many critics of COVID authoritarianism. But don’t breathe a sigh of relief just yet: Even as he announced the change, Transport Secretary Shapps stressed that the scheme would remain on ice, ready to be reenacted if another COVID variant of concern emerges.

Andrew Orlowski reports on the enormous cost, impracticality, and (shock!) failure of Britain’s “test and trace” effort.

Andrew Lilico is correct: “Lockdown fanatics should be ashamed of themselves.” Here’s his conclusion:

Maybe other things might threaten our health soon. A new flu epidemic is a possibility. Covid will become endemic, after a bumpy transition over the next year or so. Tens of thousands of people will catch it every day, for ever. All of us will get it many times. But the epidemic is over and it’s time for those whose predictions have been so wrong to lick their intellectual wounds and learn some badly needed lessons in humility.

But the important thing – the only thing of any importance, as we now know – is that these people will not die of Covid-19. That’s all that matters!

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from pages 129-130 of Ludwig von Mises’s 1952 essay “Economic Teaching at the Universities,” as reprinted in the 2008 Liberty Fund edition of Mises’s 1952 collection, Planning for Freedom:

Many “progressive” professors have for some time served in one of the various alphabetical government agencies. The tasks entrusted to them in the bureaus were as a rule ancillary only. They compiled statistics and wrote memoranda which their superiors, either politicians or former managers of corporations, filed without reading. The professors did not instill a scientific spirit into the bureaus. But the bureaus gave them the mentality of authoritarianism. They distrust the populace and consider the State (with a capital S) as the God-sent guardian of the wretched underlings. Only the government is impartial and unbiased. Whoever opposes any expansion of governmental powers is by this token unmasked as an enemy of the commonweal.

Yes, Sometimes the Reductio IS an Appropriate Response

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a note – shared with his permission – to my friend Mark LeBar, who teaches philosophy at Florida State:

Mark:

It’s always great to hear from you.

You’re correct. Despite my insistence that the reductio ad absurdum makes a poor case against the minimum wage, many arguments in support of the minimum wage are indeed appropriately countered with a question such as “If it’s truly good to raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour, surely it’s even better to raise it to $50 per hour! Why not do so?!”

As you say, many (most?) people who support the minimum wage

are incapable of thinking in terms of tradeoffs at all. In other words, they are moved by the thought that somebody getting $12/hour today would be better off getting $15/hour tomorrow. And that’s it! QED.

The depth of economic ignorance is indeed vast. And so in reply to those many minimum-wage supporters who seem genuinely to believe that which is absurd – such as that employers can pay ever-higher wages out of idle or frivolously used limitless stores of wealth, or that minimum-wage hikes ‘pay for themselves’ by raising workers’ purchasing power or productivity, or simply that economic reality can be altered in whatever ways legislators fancy – it is indeed appropriate, as you note, to ask them a question such as “If it’s truly good to raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour, surely it’s even better to raise it to $50 per hour! Given your assumptions about the way economies work, why not do so?!”

Don

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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For those of you who doubt the reality of Covid Derangement Syndrome, please read, in Slate, this exchange, which is simultaneously sickening and infuriating. (HT Iain Murray)

Emily Oster argues that school quarantines should end. (HT Jay Bhattacharya) A slice:

Relative to the past school year, the picture of school reopening this year is dramatically improved. Virtually all children in the U.S. have access to full-time, in-person school, and, while we’ve seen some closures, cases of entire schools closing have been fairly limited.

However: we are still seeing significant and, in some cases, confusing quarantines. For example, last week a father wrote to me with the following story. His child had been in contact with another child, and the other child had a positive rapid test for COVID-19. His child was, therefore, home as a close contact. Shortly after, the other child had a negative PCR test, suggesting that, as can happen, the rapid test was a false positive. But his child still had to quarantine for the full period. There was no way to test out of it, and no way to adjust for the reality that the other child did not have COVID.

This is a particularly bizarre example, but the fact is, we are doing a huge amount of quarantining based on contact tracing in school. In L.A., over this current school year, more than 30,000 students and staff have been in quarantine. School-based quarantines are a problem for students, who miss school, and for their parents, who may have to miss work. There is speculation that some parents have been unwilling to re-enter the labor force as a result of the unpredictability of school.

The Telegraph‘s Science Editor, Sarah Knapton, reports that in Britain “Covid cases in children fall as ‘most have already had the virus’.”

Ross Clark asks why Covid cases are falling in Britain. Two slices:

Imagine if the government had taken notice of the assorted scientists who, a couple of weeks ago, were imploring them to immediately enact ‘Plan B’ and reintroduce measures such as compulsory mask-wearing, working from home and limits on gatherings. The current dip in new Covid cases would be heralded as a sign of the success of the policy, and there would be calls for new lockdowns, or semi-lockdowns to control Covid infection numbers in the winter.

Something similar happened back in July when some scientific opinion was in favour of delaying the full reopening of the economy and society. At the time, professor Neil Ferguson warned that infection numbers would certainly hit 100,000 a day and could even reach 200,000. The government went ahead and reopened society anyway – and infection numbers began to fall almost immediately. It is perfectly reasonable to wonder whether the fall in infections which followed the lockdowns was also the result of government policy, or if it would have happened spontaneously. The Covid modelling always suggested there would be a number of sharp spikes, where infections would peak and then fall equally quickly. We will never know for sure the exact role played by lockdowns because we don’t have a control scenario: a parallel universe where lockdowns were not introduced.
…..

The MRU’s latest estimate for Covid’s Infection Fatality Rate – across all age groups – is 0.19 per cent. Only among the over-75s – who have an IFR of 3 per cent – does it exceed 1 per cent. By contrast, the Imperial College modelling of March, which suggested that up to 500,000 people could die of Covid in an unvaccinated Britain, assumed an IFR of 0.9 per cent. It seems we are finally learning to live with this virus.

el gato malo asks an excellent question about those medical researchers who would rule us in the name of medical science.

Emily Burns argues that vaccine mandates are the new prohibition.

A good doctor is suspended without pay for legally challenging a vaccine mandate.

Jon Hersey argues against vaccine mandates.

Also arguing against vaccine mandates is Michael Tomlinson. A slice:

Now that vaccines have become available, governments are pivoting from mass suppression of mobility to mass vaccination. Both strategies assumed that only universal methods would succeed. Both are driven by a wildly exaggerated and disproportionate view of the risks posed by Covid-19. Over one in five US adults believe that the risk of hospitalisation is 50% according to a Gallup survey, whereas it is actually less than 1% for most of the population. Governments should know better but they don’t.

And one of the most prominent distinguishing features of this pandemic is that risk (of severe illness and death) is heavily concentrated in the top two quartiles by age. Covid risk increases exponentially by age, as David Spiegelhalter has explained. Levin et al came to the same conclusion, and calculated infection fatality rates (IFR) for the different ages:

The estimated age-specific IFR is very low for children and younger adults (e.g., 0.002% at age 10 and 0.01% at age 25) but increases progressively to 0.4% at age 55, 1.4% at age 65, 4.6% at age 75, and 15% at age 85.

Here’s yet another report on Australia’s continuing descent into dystopia. A slice:

Now, however, there is a new phase. Victoria is allegedly opening up. But in doing so the Premier is introducing new legislation that will give him, the Premier, the ability to declare a new state of emergency at any time. The image of all-powerful Zeus becomes stronger.

The new law would provide for two-year jail terms for breaching health orders. This is on top of mandated vaccinations for huge numbers of workers that has pushed many into joblessness. This ‘safe’ theme includes fines in excess of $100,000 for shopkeepers and restaurants that have (knowingly or unknowingly) unvaccinated people on their premises. This is supposed to be administered through vaccine passports.

See also, on Australia, here. (HT Phil Magness)

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 162 of the 2015 Matthew Dale translation of Weiying Zhang’s excellent 2010 book, The Logic of the Market:

Over time, when more entrepreneurial people switch to government jobs, economic growth slows down and even stagnates. Thus, we may conclude that the allocation of entrepreneurial talents between governments and businesses is one of the most important determinants – even if not the only determinant – of developing an economy. The reason some countries are undeveloped is not because they lack entrepreneurial resources; it is because their entrepreneurial talents have been allocated to the government or to other nonproductive sectors.

DBx: Indeed.

This truth should be kept in mind whenever you hear some politician or government bureaucrat described as a “public servant.”