Russell Roberts's Blog, page 219

Some Non-Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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David Henderson is appalled at the Biden administration’s assault on economic freedom and prosperity. A slice:

Arguably the most intrusive regulation the Biden administration proposes is the one on people’s accounts in financial institutions. USA Today recently corrected an InfoWars exaggeration of the plan. The InfoWars headline: “Biden’s Treasury Dept. Declares IRS Will Monitor Transactions of ALL U.S. Accounts Over $600.” USA Today pointed out two mistakes. First, the Treasury can’t make such a move without Congress’s authorization. Second, writes Ella Lee of USA Today, “[E]ven if the proposal is adopted banks would not provide access to individual transactions, just the total amount flowing in and out of an account annually.” The correction is important but is it supposed to be comforting? Democrats announced that they would raise the threshold from $600 to $10,000. But you need only have an average of $834 a month flowing out of your account to trigger IRS surveillance. So the IRS would know more about the majority of account holders than they do now.

Recently, Norah O’Donnell of CBS News asked Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen about the proposal. Yellen claimed that it was to catch wealthy people who are massively evading taxes. Yellen gave an example of someone who reports income of $10,000 but has $3 million flowing out of his checking account. Said Yellen: “That tells the IRS that’s an individual you might audit.” And this has exactly what to do with people whose flow out of their bank account is $10,000? Yellen was widely regarded as a first-rate economist. Surely, she’s still enough of an economist to know the difference between $10,000 and $3 million. Her sticking to her guns on the surveillance proposal suggests something more sinister: that she wants to go after, not the just the high-rolling tax cheats, but also, say, the gardener who gets away with paying a few hundred dollars less in taxes in a year.

Phil Magness, in today’s Wall Street Journal, ably defends the history of the school-choice movement against crabbed readings of that history by careless observers. A slice:

When segregationist lawyer John S. Battle Jr. charged that tuition grants would expedite the integration of Virginia’s public-school system, he unintentionally validated the logic behind Milton Friedman’s arguments for school choice. Daniel Kuehn would have us wave away Battle’s commentary, however, declaring it “out of step with most segregationists” (“The Segregationist History of School Choice,” Letters, Oct. 22).

This assessment would have likely surprised James J. Kilpatrick, the arch-segregationist editor of the Richmond News Leader whom Mr. Kuehn enlists as a counterexample to my op-ed “School Choice’s Antiracist History” (Oct. 19). In March 1959, Kilpatrick used his newspaper to bring Battle’s arguments to statewide attention, declaring in a bombastic headline: “Private Schools Are Linked to ‘Engulfment’ by Negroes.”

Philip Hamburger, writing in the Wall Street Journal, asks if government schooling is constitutional. Two slices:

The public school system weighs on parents. It burdens them not simply with poor teaching and discipline, but with political bias, hostility toward religion, and now even sexual and racial indoctrination. Schools often seek openly to shape the very identity of children. What can parents do about it?

“I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic nominee for governor of Virginia, said in a Sept. 28 debate. The National School Boards Association seems to agree: In a Sept. 29 letter to President Biden, its leaders asked for federal intervention to stop “domestic terrorism and hate crimes” against public school officials. Attorney General Merrick Garland obliged, issuing an Oct. 4 memo directing law-enforcement agents and prosecutors to develop “strategies for addressing threats against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff.”
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Education consists mostly in speech to and with children. Parents enjoy freedom of speech in educating their children, whether at home or through private schooling. That is the principle underlying Pierce, and it illuminates our current conundrum.

The public school system, by design, pressures parents to substitute government educational speech for their own. Public education is a benefit tied to an unconstitutional condition. Parents get subsidized education on the condition that they accept government educational speech in lieu of home or private schooling.

There is nothing unconstitutional about taxation in support of government speech. Thus taxpayers have no generic right against public-school messages they find objectionable.

But parents are in a different situation. They aren’t merely subsidizing speech they find objectionable. They are being pushed into accepting government speech for their children in place of their own. Government requires parents to educate their children and offers education free of charge. For most parents, the economic pressure to accept this educational speech in place of their own is nearly irresistible.

Sheldon Richman understands the dangers that lurk in deficit financing. A slice:

The government’s attraction to borrowing is hardly a mystery. If the politicians had to extract every dollar they wanted to spend directly from the taxpayers, they might have a revolt on their hands–a bad career move for sure. Borrowing tends to make people more tolerant of bigger government than they would have been otherwise. After all, much of it looks free. They might scrutinize spending programs more closely if they paid the full price out of pocket. Thus forbidding borrowing and related central-bank inflation would put a lid on spending. That’s why that program won’t fly.

As Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the finance minister under Louis XIV, notoriously put it, “The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing.” You can see the advantage to politicians if they can cut way down on the hissing by borrowing what they’d otherwise have to obtain by plucking. This is what the admired art of governing comes down to.

Of course the government’s ability to borrow depends crucially on its power to tax. Avoiding present taxes implies offsetting future taxes when interest or principal is due. (More borrowing can finance those payments, but eventually…) Who would lend to a “government” that could not tax its subjects? (No true government lacks the power to tax.) Let’s face it: the state without taxation does not have a promising business plan to present to investors. But the “legitimate” power to steal changes everything; it makes for comparatively safe investments for bond buyers, one that unfairly competes with private alternatives. (Legitimate in this case means “in the eyes of most people”; it’s a subjective, not an objective, feature.)

Robert Samuelson is right: Inflation is back.

Alvaro Vargas Llosa ponders democracy.

Art Carden reviews Daniel Mandell’s The Lost Tradition of Economic Equality in America, 1600-1870. A slice:

The parts of the egalitarian tradition that fundamentally misunderstood what prices do, why inflation happens, and the consequences of price controls are interesting and important history. I hope they stay just that: history and not guides to policy. Deirdre McCloskey has called economics the social science of the post-magical worldview. Still, pretty much everyone in the late 18th century was fully ensconced in flat-Earth versions of economic theory and economic history. We should no more trust their prescriptions of price controls to fight inflation than we should trust their medical contemporaries’ prescriptions of mercury or leeches to fight disease.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 202 of my favorite of all of Richard Epstein’s many superb books, his 1995 volume, Simple Rules for a Complex World:

One advantage of markets is that they allow uniform solutions to spread quickly if appropriate, while allowing diverse solutions to emerge (somewhat more slowly) when required. A range of contractual solutions may be tailored not to the generic relationship, but to the particulars in  each case.

Exploring EconTalk: Thomas Sowell (2008)

(Don Boudreaux)

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I’m late to the podcast parade. Although Russ Roberts is my dear friend – and despite Russ starting the immensely popular EconTalk 15 years ago – I listened to only a tiny fraction of the EconTalk podcasts. I didn’t even listen to the ones in which I appear as a guest. My preference is to absorb knowledge by reading (and even then by reading ink pressed into paper).

But Juliette Sellgren’s excellent Great Antidote podcast, which hit the scene at the height of Covid lockdowns, got me hooked on this medium. For the past few months, therefore, I’ve dived into the deep EconTalk library to listen to episodes featuring guests or topics that most caught my fancy. Happily, I still have many, many more to go!

And so, arrogantly pretending that readers of this blog give a hoot about which podcast blasts-from-the-past I happen to find especially enjoyable and enlightening, I’ll here occasionally link to ones that I find to be just that, as well as still relevant.

Note that the order in which I’ll mention these EconTalk episodes is determined chiefly by the rather random order in which I choose to listen to them.

I begin with Russ’s early 2008 conversation with the great Thomas Sowell. (This podcast was released on February 25, 2008.) Thomas Sowell’s many important insights haven’t been refuted by “Progressives”; these insights have simply been ignored. The political left largely behaves as if Sowell doesn’t exist. If we classical liberals and libertarians were afflicted with the same annoying tic that is so prominent in “Progressives,” we’d explain the left’s habit of ignoring Sowell as being the result of racism. In fact, though, I’m quite sure that racism has nothing to do with the matter. “Progressives” simply have no good responses to Sowell’s core arguments.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from my late, great colleague Walter Williams’s December 22nd, 2010, column, “Black Education Disaster“:

The charter school and the educational vouchers movement will help prevent parents and children who care about education from being held hostage in an environment hostile to the learning process. And there’s plenty of evidence that children do better and parents are more pleased when they have a measure of school choice.

DBx: Two of today’s most anti-black, pro-racist institutions are K-12 government schooling (and the “teachers” unions in whose interests these so-called ‘schools’ are primarily operated) and minimum-wage legislation. The former is a major obstacle to the genuine education of poor inner-city minority youth, while the latter is a major obstacle to the lowest-skilled of workers getting employment. Most supporters today of these malignant institutions are, I’m sure, not motivated by racism. But in their ignorance these supporters are nevertheless treasured allies of racists.

Peter Robinson Talks with Jay Bhattacharya

(Don Boudreaux)

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Don’t miss this uncommonly excellent interview of Jay Bhattacharya.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Jacob Sullum wonders when encouraging trends in Covid test results will be reflected in CDC advice. A slice:

So far these positive trends have had no discernible impact on federal COVID-19 advice or on the policies of jurisdictions inclined to follow it. Vaccination is authorized for all Americans 12 or older and will soon be extended to younger children. Minors face a tiny risk of dying from COVID-19 in any case. Yet the CDC still says everyone, from toddlers to vaccinated adults, should “wear a mask indoors in public.” Officially, that advice applies to vaccinated people only if they live in “an area of substantial or high transmission,” but that description still covers nearly the entire country.

The CDC is likewise sticking with its recommendation that everyone in schools, regardless of age or vaccination status, wear a mask throughout the day, despite the lack of evidence that the benefits of that precaution outweigh the substantial burdens it imposes. Yesterday Florida’s new surgeon general, Joseph Ladapo, who opposes school mask mandates, called the evidence in their favor “very weak,” saying “there is a substantial gap between the quality of the data” and “what we’re hearing from some of our public health leadership.”

That’s a fair assessment. At the point when the CDC issued its current recommendations for schools, it was not able to cite any research showing a statistically significant relationship between mask mandates and reduced virus transmission among students. Nearly all of the studies on which it relied did not even compare schools with mandates to otherwise similar schools without them.

Ron Bailey reports that “more evidence emerges that the NIH funded coronavirus gain-of-function research in China.”

Jon Sanders rightly insists that decisions made by humans are ultimately the cause of Covid lockdowns, mandates, and other restrictions. A slice:

Believing Covid shuts down businesses, closes schools, causes substance abuse, requires emergency orders, and so forth requires the unstated presumption that individuals are not the ones choosing to shut businesses, close schools, overindulge in alcohol and drugs, overindulge in emergency orders, and so forth. It’s a signature fallacy in the Covid era, and one that I had thought people would have given up by now.

To be blunt: Covid-19 cannot do those things. They are results of individuals’ choices. Yes, some individuals make choices out of fear of exposure to the virus, and so they avoid certain businesses and choose to stay and even work from home (or not work). Some business owners voluntarily close their doors. Some parents voluntarily choose homeschooling or online education over in-person schools.

But what media reports miss so consistently, to the point of deliberate ignorance, are the choices of certain other individuals and their effects. They include governors, public health bureaucrats, local officials, and even mayors who decided to order closures of certain businesses as “nonessential” or “too dangerous” and who decided to cripple the business models of many others with capacity limits, restricted hours, mask requirements, and whatever other arbitrary and capricious measures they willfully decided to impose. These individuals used real or asserted authority to coerce business owners into shutting their doors, putting their employees out of work, and taking other steps they might otherwise have not made on their own.

They, not Covid, are also responsible for closing the schools — if not executive officials, then the school board members or leaders. For families leaving public schools, it’s not the virus that’s making them seek alternatives. Many of them are seeking educators with a demonstrated commitment to education and values more closely aligned with their own, unlike public school leaders who could very well choose to close schools again and meanwhile continue to force ineffective masks on children.

The Coronavirus does not take people’s jobs, nor does it make individuals choose against retaining their jobs or seeking employment. There is a human being, not an insensate virus, responsible for each individual who leaves a job not to return.

Joshua Grundleger explains how Covid hysteria further fueled the on-going demise of federalism in the United States. A slice:

A “let no crisis go to waste” attitude drives the intrusion of federal dollars into state budgets. The ratio of federal dollars to state spending tends to rise in fits and starts, with large increases occurring during or shortly after recessions. Accelerated growth in federal dollars offsets recessionary weakness in state revenue, pushing the overall share of federal dollars upward. The ratio tends to fall as the recession fades but never declines to its previous level, maintaining a new plateau that tends to be slightly lower than the recessionary peak but higher than the previous plateau.

This time, the federal role may not shrink at all. In contrast to previous recessions, state revenue remained relatively stable throughout the coronavirus recession. In previous downturns, the spike in the ratio owed to both weakness in state revenue and an increase in federal support; this time, it owed almost exclusively to the latter.

Writing in Spiked, David Livermore argues that there is no case for more Covid restrictions in Britain. Two slices:

Scotland and Wales, unlike England, have kept their mask mandates in place and have introduced vaccine passports. Yet their Covid rates are just as high as in England.
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My objections to vaccine passports are even stronger. They are illiberal and discriminatory. Plus, they are largely futile, given the extent of Covid infections among the vaccinated. Data from Public Health England show that most adult Covid cases (though not deaths) are now among the vaccinated. Excluding the unvaccinated minority from large events is therefore unlikely to bring cases down by much.

“Vaccinated people dying of Covid have average age of 85 and five underlying illnesses” – so reports the Telegraph‘s Science Editor, Sarah Knapton.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 4 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 June 14th, 2015):

The rule of law – as opposed to rule by the untrammeled will of the strong – requires effective checks on the strong. In a democracy, the strongest force is the majority, whose power will be unlimited unless an independent judiciary enforces written restraints, such as those stipulated in the Constitution. It is “the supreme law” because it is superior to what majorities produce in statutes.

JP Sears Continues – Thankfully – to Speak Out

(Don Boudreaux)

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Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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GMU Econ grad student Dominic Pino, writing for National Review, rightly criticizes the irrationality of the Covid restrictions still in place on college campuses. A slice:

This state of affairs has persisted for months now, and administrators haven’t seemed to connect the dots. Students are living their off-campus lives largely unmasked, and they aren’t, for the most part, getting COVID. (To repeat: They’re vaccinated, and the vaccines work.) There’s nothing special about classrooms that makes them more susceptible to virus transmission than, say, restaurants or grocery stores. So having the same masking standards as restaurants or grocery stores should yield the same result: an extremely low risk of contracting a serious COVID case. If anything, unmasked classrooms should be much safer than unmasked restaurants or grocery stores, since everyone in classrooms is required to be vaccinated.

What we have here is the mind of the bureaucrat at work: Administrators want to believe that the stringent COVID policies they designed for their schools, rather than the arrival of effective vaccines, deserve credit for achieving the intended result. So the policies persist long past the point when they should have been eased.

As Matt Welch reports, Covid Derangement Syndrome still reigns at the CDC. A slice:

[CDC Director Rochelle] Walensky and the CDC have serially misrepresented the data on which they base their global outlier of a recommendation that kids aged 2 and older wear masks in indoor group settings. But what makes the director’s comments today particularly distressing for some parents is that it offers zero off ramp; no numerical set of targets to hit; not even a distant glimmer of light when it comes to the increasingly grim and questionably scientific practice of concealing children’s faces at a developmentally critical age.

“Please find a parameter to unmask children,” responded infectious disease specialist Monica Gandhi of UC San Francisco. Or as Johns Hopkins epidemiologist Jennifer Nuzzo wrote yesterday, “Masks in schools were meant to be a temporary measure. It is good policy and practice to establish off-ramps for interventions that aren’t meant to be permanent….We should be able to answer what conditions would enable an end.”

My 6-year-old, who has spent nearly one-quarter of her life wearing masks in group indoor settings, attends a school where all the adults are vaccinated, kids and adults alike get tested once a week, and (per state requirement, as directly influenced by the CDC) everyone over age 2 wears masks, even outdoors. We live in a moderately high vaccination zip code (68 percent of all residents with at least one shot, 64 percent fully vaxxed), in a city with a lower case rate than all but six states, whose positive rate among regularly tested, unvaccinated public school students since mid-September is a minuscule 0.23 percent. I would like to know what any of those numbers need to look like in order for my daughter to see her teachers’ mouths again.

“Pandemic Disagreements Fuel Exodus From Public Schools” – This happy news is reported by J.D. Tuccille.

Laura Dodsworth understandably worries that she and her fellow Brits will soon enough again be subject to home arrest by the Covidocracy. A slice:

On Tuesday, Professor Neil Ferguson, the Imperial College epidemiologist whose modelling was used as the basis for the UK’s lockdown policy, made an illuminating comment on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “Nobody likes having their freedoms curtailed by measures but it’s prudent to be cautious, in everyday interactions certainly,” he told presenter Sarah Smith, “and wearing masks certainly helps that: it reminds people we’re not completely out of the woods yet.”

It was a startling admission, if we needed one, that masks are as much about psychology as they are about preventing infection. They act as a social cue, to use the language of behavioural scientists, nudging us into vigilance.

Speaking of Britain, “is the NHS at risk of being overwhelmed by Covid?” A slice:

Rather than being inundated, there are more empty beds in the NHS then there are patients with Covid. And even the latter figure contains patients who are in hospital for reasons other than Covid but either happen to have (or acquired) the virus. Back in January, one in three occupied NHS beds was taken up by a patient with Covid; now the figure is closer to one in twenty.

Thomas Harrington analyzes “the frightened class.”

Unlike those who bleat most loudly about “following the science,” Florida’s Surgeon General actually follows the science. (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

Some Non-Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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James Bovard explains why so-called “fair trade” is still a fraud. A slice:

When politicians call for fair trade with foreigners, they use a concept of fairness diametrically opposed to the word’s normal usage. In exchanges between individuals – in contract law – the test of fairness is the voluntary consent of each party to the bargain: “the free will which constitutes fair exchanges,” as Sen. John Taylor wrote in 1822. When politicians speak of unfair trade, they do not mean that buyers and sellers did not voluntarily agree, but that federal officials disapprove of bargains American citizens made. Fair trade means government intervention to direct, control, or restrict trade.

Fair trade often consists of some politician or bureaucrat picking a number out of thin air and forcibly imposing it on foreign businesses and American consumers. Fair trade meant that Jamaica was allowed to sell the U.S. only 970 gallons of ice cream a year, that Mexico could sell Americans only 35,292 bras a year, and that Poland could ship us only 51,752 pounds of barbed wire. Fair trade meant permitting each American citizen to consume the equivalent of only one teaspoon of foreign ice cream per year, two foreign peanuts per year, and one pound of imported cheese per year.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Lawrence Krauss explains “how ‘diversity’ turned tyrannical.” Two slices:

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was supposed to host Thursday’s John Carlson Lecture on climate. MIT’s department of earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences canceled the event because the speaker turned out to have expressed a dissenting opinion—though not about climate science. University of Chicago geophysicist Dorian Abbot argued in a Newsweek piece that universities’ obsession with “diversity, equity and inclusion,” or DEI, “threatens to derail their primary mission: the production and dissemination of knowledge.” If MIT wanted to prove Mr. Abbot’s point, it could hardly have done better. (His lecture will be hosted instead by Princeton’s conservative redoubt, the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.)

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Critics have likened DEI statements to the loyalty oaths of the Red Scare. In 1950 the University of California fired 31 faculty members for refusing to sign a statement disavowing any party advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government. That violated their freedom of speech and conscience, but this is worse. Whereas a loyalty oath compels assent to authority, a DEI statement demands active ideological engagement. It’s less like the excesses of anticommunism than like communism itself.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy applauds efforts to fight the illiberalism that now cancerously infects higher education. A slice:

Recognizing the threat of rising illiberalism, five alumni groups from Cornell University, Davidson College, Princeton University, the University of Virginia and Washington and Lee University just created the Alumni Free Speech Alliance to fight for open inquiry on campus. Also, as of now, 82 institutions or faculty bodies have adopted or endorsed the Chicago Statement or a substantially similar statement to show their commitment to free speech on campus. Also, Princeton university is stepping up to host a conference by the University of Chicago’s Dorian Abbot, whose lecture at MIT was canceled under pressure from activists who objected to his political views.

And writing again in the Wall Street Journal is Bjorn Lomborg, who argues that the appropriate response to climate change is adaptation, not panic. A slice:

Nonetheless, many in the media push unrealistic projections of climate catastrophes, while ignoring adaptation. A new study documents how the biggest bias in studies on the rise of sea levels is their tendency to ignore human adaptation, exaggerating flood risks in 2100 by as much as 1,300 times. It is also evident in the breathless tone of most reporting: The Washington Post frets that sea level rise could “make 187 million people homeless,” CNN fears an “underwater future,” and USA Today agonizes over tens of trillions of dollars in projected annual flood damage. All three rely on studies that implausibly assume no society across the world will make any adaptation whatever for the rest of the century. This isn’t reporting but scaremongering.

GMU Econ grad student Dominic Pino, writing at National Review, defends “I, Pencil” against a recent, uninformed criticism that appeared in The American Conservative. Here’s Dominic’s conclusion:

Instead of suggesting constructive reforms to improve our global supply chains, [Declan] Leary advocates that we should “withdraw from dependence on the global system and reconnect ourselves to local, tangible, human networks of production and consumption.” He has in mind shopping at farmer’s markets and growing your own food. “We can reject the miracle, as fully as we’re able,” he writes.

“Reject the miracle” is not a conservative impulse. Libertarians are often derided as hyper-individualistic, and sometimes that criticism is fair. But who are the hyper-individualistic ones: the people who appreciate the complex interactions of humans all over the world that are necessary to make a pencil, or the people who think they are better off withdrawing from dependence on others, as fully as they’re able?

People who make “I, Pencil” into a religion are wrong to do so, but [Leonard] Read’s insight is fundamentally empirical, anti-individualistic, and pro-humanity. Lots of people all around the world had to do plenty of hard work to provide you with your pencil. That’s a cause for the fundamental conservative sentiment: gratitude.

“DC Metro Overpays for Defective Cars Thanks to Buy American Protectionism” – so reports Colin Grabow.

Reason‘s Eric Boehm is always worth reading.

George Will rightly decries the abuse of language in public discourse. Here’s his conclusion:

In June, when Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra testified to a Senate committee about “birthing people,” a.k.a. mothers, he was already falling behind the swift evolution of progressive nomenclature. The Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine’s revised “lactation-related language” respects mothers by identifying them as “human milk-feeding individuals.”

Almost nothing infuriates people as much as inflation — government’s failure to preserve the currency as a store of value. Even more infuriating, however, is a pervasive sense of arrogance and disorder, which now includes public officials and others propounding aggressively, insultingly strange vocabularies. Next November, there might be a cymbal-crash response to all this.

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