Russell Roberts's Blog, page 226

October 1, 2021

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 122 of Deirdre McCloskey’s important 1990 volume, If You’re So Smart: The Narrative of Economic Expertise:

The knowledge that would make fine tuning [of the economy by government] possible would make the economists who have it fabulously wealthy.

DBx: Indeed so. And the very same logic that leads McCloskey to this indisputable conclusion about economists who claim to know enough to advise government to ‘fine tune’ the macroeconomy applies with equal force, in very many cases, to economists, and other scholars, who claim to know enough to advise government to ‘fine tune’ particular markets, including labor markets.

I very seldom disagree with David Henderson, and when I do I worry. No hyperbole or false modesty. But I do confidently disagree with David’s insistence that what McCloskey calls “the American question” – “If you’re so smart why ain’t you rich?” – is an inappropriate response to academics, such as Eric Posner, who claim to identify large profit opportunities in the market but who also refuse to act on their claims.

 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on October 01, 2021 09:14

Some Non-Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy identifies the root evil of cronyism. A slice:


My issue, however, is with [Ezra] Klein’s suggestion that changing the status quo requires conservatives and libertarians to stop denouncing Uncle Sam for big fiascoes like Solyndra, the solar company that infamously went under shortly after receiving a $538 million loan guarantee from a green-energy program under the Obama administration. Denouncing such waste, Klein insists, only serves to embarrass the government for its failures, thus prompting it to be more cautious. As such, Klein would like “to somehow quiet these players looking to point out every failure.”


That’s wrong. Klein misunderstands why I and other free-market proponents fight against private companies receiving government-granted privileges—which is called “cronyism.” It’s not the wasteful spending that I mostly focus on; it’s the unfairness.


David Henderson unpacks some of the problems with Eric Posner’s assertion that U.S. labor markets are suffused with monopsony power.

Eric Boehm applauds the fact that Joe Manchin is prompting his fellow Democrats to be more aware of their grotesque fiscal irresponsibility. A slice:


In a lengthy statement, Manchin spelled out the reasons he is unwilling to support the $3.5 trillion reconciliation package his fellow Democrats are hoping to push through Congress within the next few days or weeks. “Spending trillions more on new and expanded government programs,” he said, “when we can’t even pay for the essential social programs, like Social Security and Medicare, is the definition of fiscal insanity.” Manchin went on to say that he worries about how more government spending might drive inflation even higher, how higher taxes necessary to pay for that spending will make it harder for small businesses to compete with big retailers like Amazon, and how an expanded welfare state might slow the ongoing economic recovery.


Manchin’s opinion about these things carries a lot of weight right now. Democrats have the slimmest possible majority in the U.S. Senate, and need all 50 of their members (plus Vice President Kamala Harris) to vote in support of the reconciliation bill or it will not pass. The senator from West Virginia has all the leverage, and he’s using it to force the rest of Congress to take a good, hard look the fiscal mess its made over the past few years (and, more specifically, since the COVID-19 pandemic began.


Arnold Kling is somewhat disappointed by Steven Pinker’s new book. A slice:


I have read most of Steven Pinker’s new book, Rationality, and I came away disappointed. Other books on the topic are better.


One aspect that annoyed me was Pinker’s political positioning. He says, in not so many words:

Conservatives are stupid and anti-scienceThe academy is too much of a left-wing monoculture

But if conservatives are stupid and anti-science, why shouldn’t the academy be a monoculture?


In his earlier book, The Blank Slate, Pinker addressed the stupidity and anti-science beliefs of the academic left. In this recent interview with Richard Hanania, Pinker readily concedes that things have been getting worse, not better (Pinker notes that without tenure, one could not express his views safely in today’s academy). I wish that this interview could have been included in Rationality, in order to give it better balance.


My GMU Econ colleague Bryan Caplan writes insightfully about public goods (and economists’ theorizing about public goods).

And writing insightfully about so-called “externalities” is Pierre Lemieux. A slice:

This sort of [Coasean] bargaining happens in the real world. Outside the externality framework proper, companies often sell themselves to a competitor because the latter, being more efficient, offers shareholders of the former more than they can make from their own company. Even more often, companies poach employees from their competitors because the poachers can use the talents more profitably and thus offer the employees an enticing remuneration. Companies occasionally sell brand names. Pieces of land are purchased by the most efficient users; so are licenses to use frequencies on the electromagnetic spectrum, an idea directly influenced by Coase. More generally, the price of any input — say steel — is bid up on the market (which is a continuous and invisible auction) until only the buyers who value it enough get it.

Tim Carney points out that being not-Trump is not sufficient.

Ryan Bourne and Brad Subramaniam reveal some of the damage to low-skilled workers caused by minimum-wage legislation.

My Mercatus Center colleague Tracy Miller warns of an unintended ill-consequence of eviction moratoria.

The great John Tierney explains why we should hold on firmly to the throw-away society. A slice:


Meantime, Moore and his competitors were promoting other advantages of disposable products. The invention of cup lids in the 1920s made it easy for people to carry off their drinks. Restaurants could serve customers more quickly and cheaply by using cups and plates that didn’t need to be washed and dried. Consumers were liberated from chores, as Life illustrated in 1955 with an elaborately staged photo for an article titled “Throwaway Living,” a phrase that wasn’t used in disdain. The photo showed dozens of disposable products—plates, cups, pans, towels, ashtrays, a napkin and tablecloth, a baby’s bib and diaper—apparently flung heavenward by two ecstatic parents and their child. “The objects flying through the air in this picture,” the magazine exulted, “would take 40 hours to clean—except that no housewife need bother.”


Disposability remained a self-evident virtue in the 1960s, when Bethlehem Steel advertised its new soda cans by showing photos of two women. One smiled as she tossed metal cans into the trash; the other looked miserable as she struggled to lug armfuls of empty glass bottles back to the store. The ad posed what, at the time, was a rhetorical question: “Why make hard work out of enjoying soft drinks?”


Chris Edwards writes wisely about the taxation of capital gains.

 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on October 01, 2021 05:27

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, infectious-disease physician Monica Gandhi explains that Covid-19 is becoming endemic – and thus eliminating all of the excuses used so far to upend human existence in the ‘fight’ against it. Here’s her conclusion:

Although SARS-CoV-2 has proved unpredictable, no virus in history has ever continued to evolve to higher pathogenicity. As we learned from HIV, mutations usually incur costs to viral fitness or render the virus weaker. No vaccine-preventable or immunity-inducing infection has ever raged on as a pandemic indefinitely. An endemic virus doesn’t require continuing isolation and other restrictions; defanging SARS-CoV-2 by stripping it of its ability to cause severe disease through immunity will relegate it to the fate of the other four circulating cold-causing coronaviruses. The key to this normalcy is immunity. With a highly transmissible variant driving up immunity in the unvaccinated and bolstering it in the vaccinated, Covid-19 will inevitably make the transition from epidemic to endemic.

Robert Freudenthal, a psychiatrist with Britain’s NHS, decries the damage to mental-health-care services – and to mental health – caused by lockdowns. A slice:


Furthermore, most mental health services, at least in the inpatient setting, have a multidisciplinary model of treatment, with part of the treatment consisting of groups, activities, family work, occupational therapy, and supported trials of periods outside of hospital prior to being discharged.


Yet most of these treatments were removed, and group programmes suspended, during the lockdowns, which placed severe limitations on what mental health treatment could be provided. This meant that psychiatrists and mental health services had to rely more heavily on pharmacology – as the other treatment options were suspended or restricted.


“Masks on planes should be scrapped – but it’s possible they never will be” – so argues Telegraph columnist Annabel Fenwick Elliott. Here’s her conclusion:


David Livermore, Professor of Medical Microbiology at UEA and a member of HART, the Health Advisory & Recovery Team remarks: “I think that the wide use of masks will continue, particularly on aircraft, until the reality of our present situation sinks in more widely; which is that vaccinations are blunting severity but not preventing transmission of the infection, that therefore most of us will catch Covid at some point and that, over a few years, the virus and our immunity will co-evolve to the point where it’s just one more sort of rather nasty common cold.”


He adds, optimistically: “Once that reality does sink in, then the pointlessness of masks will be clear and they’ll be abandoned as the unpleasant items that they are. I, personally, would gravitate to airlines that cease to insist upon them.”


Hear hear. Flying is already riddled with silly rules, despite planes being by far the safest form of public transport. I can’t see any reason why this latest assault on our comfort should persist, though it remains a worry that it might.


Phil Magness on Facebook:

At this point, mask requirements = the externalization of the costs of hypochondria onto other people.

The ranks of Covidocrats continue to feature large numbers of Covid hypocrites.

James Allan, writing from Australia, wonders why self-styled “human rights” advocates were overwhelmingly silent – and even, in many cases, supportive – as governments over the past 18 months violated human rights in unprecedented and calamitous ways.


And then ask yourself where it has been these past 18 months as government in this country (and to be fair in Britain, Canada, the US, but not Sweden) have made more inroads on citizens’ freedoms and civil liberties than at any other time in this country’s history. The retired top judge in Britain, Lord Sumption, has called these Covid lockdowns et al. ‘the most significant interference with personal freedom in the history of [Britain]’ – it being at least as bad here, I’d say, if not worse. Lord Sumption made clear that he was referring to the state’s ‘cavalier use of coercive powers’, and the way ‘the British state exercised coercive powers over its citizens on a scale never previously attempted’. Again, I’d say it has been even worse here. Sumption summed it up in terms of ‘the ease with which people could be terrorised [by government and its handmaidens in the public health caste] into surrendering basic freedoms which are fundamental to our existence’. That seems like a pretty fair summary to me.


But notice whom you aren’t hearing pushing back against any of this despotism that’s been imposed in the name of a disease that has at least a 99.7 per cent survival rate (before vaccination) and one where the average age of victims is higher than the country’s life expectancy for both men and women. Who is it you aren’t hearing from?


On Twitter, BristolBlues shares a video that vividly reveals the nauseating hypocrisy and terrible cruelty of Australia’s Covidocracy. (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

Mikko Packalen on Twitter (referencing this item):


Stanford students on bicycles: 41% masked, 17% wear a helmet.


“There is an ironic logic to their decision: there’s no point in protecting your brain if you don’t plan on using it. At Stanford, nobody expects you to do either.”


Jay Bhattacharya on Twitter:


The long tail of the Canadian lockdown — higher heart disease and colon cancer deaths for years to come.


Some harm can be mitigated with appropriate intervention (end lockdown, speed up cancer screening). But vax mandate-induced staff shortages will increase queues for care.


 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on October 01, 2021 03:15

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 228 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 22nd, 2017):

This is a profound truth: The interacting processes that propel the world produce outcomes that no one intends. The fatal conceit – fatal to the fecundity of spontaneous order – is the belief that anyone, or any group of savants, is clever and farsighted enough to forecast the outcomes of complex systems. Who really wants to live in a society where outcomes are “meant,” meaning planned and unsurprising?

 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on October 01, 2021 01:45

September 30, 2021

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 253 of the 2016 second edition of Thomas Sowell’s excellent volume Wealth, Poverty and Politics (original emphasis):

Governments can readily do things which depend on force, such as fighting wars, punishing criminals or confiscating wealth. However, power is limited in its effects not only by opposing power but also by knowledge – or, rather, by the limits of knowledge available to a given power holder.

DBx: No truth is more ignored – and ignored to dangerous effects – than is the one here identified by Sowell.

 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on September 30, 2021 10:16

Some Non-Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

Neal McCluskey exposes the fictions and fallacies that fill a recent fable about the school-choice movement told by “historian” Nancy MacLean. A slice:


First, a quick response to the implication that Friedman supported segregation in calling for choice around the same time as Brown. Actually, “implication” is too generous a gloss on MacLean’s piece. While she leaves some doubt where Friedman stood, she nonetheless writes that Friedman and other major libertarians and conservatives “backed the White southern cause.” And even if Friedman’s desire truly was freedom, it was really only “White freedom.”


This accusation has been repeatedly debunked, but just as a quick recap, yes, Friedman wrote that he believed in freedom over force in his seminal 1955 book chapter, “The Role of Government in Education.” As a result, he condemned government‐​forced segregation but also opposed government‐​imposed “nonsegregation.” That said, he also wrote that if he had to choose between forced segregation and forced integration he would select the latter.


Not only did Friedman oppose forced segregation, he explicitly argued for choice as an integrator. That, of course, indicated a desire for integration. It was also consistent with burgeoning research on intergroup contact, which showed divisive effects when putting groups into competition with one another. Forced integration, well‐​intended and morally compelling though it was, created just such competition.


Jeremy Black encourages the British to take pride in the fact that their country birthed the industrial revolution. A slice:

Yet making Britain a villain for the crime of kick-starting a period of rapid technological advancement which laid the foundations of the modern world as we know it could hardly be more short-sighted. In the narrowest sense, perhaps, one might say the industrial revolution was “bad for the planet”: it was built on burning fossil fuels, after all, which is far from perfect. But, in a much broader sense, the industrial revolution is something about which Britain should be inordinately proud. It lifted our country – and eventually much of the world – out of poverty, saving billions from a life that was miserable, brutish and short.

George Will draws lessons from history. A slice:


Today, Democrats are ignoring Thomas Jefferson’s warning against large undertakings based on “slender majorities.” They seem entirely committed to progressivism’s equality aspiration. This is not equality of opportunity, which produces disparate outcomes that are intolerable because they are presumptively results of systemic racism. Rather, the up-to-date equality aspiration is equal dependence of an ever-larger majority on federal guarantees of material well-being.


President Biden insists that Americans want the social programs in which he is proposing to “invest” (“spend” has been purged from progressivism’s lexicon) with trillion-dollar tranches. He does not, however, think that 98.2 percent of Americans want these programs enough to ask them to pay even a penny for them. He insists that Americans with annual incomes less than $400,000 will not pay any of the new taxes that he favors to (partially) fund the spending.


This is preposterous (e.g., corporations do not pay taxes, they collect them from employees, shareholders and customers) but indicative of progressivism’s failure of nerve: Government blessings for almost everyone shall be paid for by an unpopular minority (the top 1.8 percent and corporations).


Hadley Arkes, writing in the Wall Street Journal, calls on conservative American jurists to lose their aversion to being guided by the principles that fueled America’s founding. A slice:

The Supreme Court opens its new term Monday with six nominal conservatives appointed by Republican presidents. But conservatives have been shaken in their confidence that those six will yield majorities on issues that deeply matter. That declining confidence comes along with a serious argument within the conservative family over the nature of “conservative jurisprudence.” Conservatives are united in taking as our coordinates the original meaning of the text of the Constitution. But some of us have argued for “a better originalism,” as opposed what we call the “truncated originalism” that has predominated. We see the latter as detached from the understanding that the American Founders, the true originalists, had of the moral ground of the Constitution and laws they were shaping.

Richard Ebeling decries Biden’s demagoguery. A slice:

In a new study, economists Daniel Mitchell and Robert P. O’Quinn estimated that the business tax effects of Biden’s plan would shift about 2 percent of the economy’s output into the hands of the government over several years, with an appreciable negative impact on private sector economic growth looking to the years ahead. They estimate a $3 trillion shortfall in national income from what it otherwise might have been over the next decade if Biden’s policies were not implemented.

Also writing on the utterly detached-from-reality Democrats’ economic ‘policies’ is Reason‘s Peter Suderman. A slice:


Just this week, for example, White House press secretary Jen Psaki responded to a question about the tax impact of the $3.5 trillion spending plan now working its way through Congress by declaring that “there are some…who argue that in the past companies have passed on these costs to consumers…we feel that that’s unfair and absurd and the American people would not stand for that.”


When taxes are raised on corporations—the “companies” in Psaki’s response—corporations often respond by passing that tax on to others. In some cases, they pass costs to consumers. In others, as the Cato Institute’s Scott Lincicome wryly notes on Twitter, they reduce the amount they would have otherwise spent on wages. They have to pay more to do business, and so they make adjustments accordingly. Costs create consequences and tradeoffs.


Empirical research has consistently shown that a large portion of corporate tax increases is actually paid by labor down the line. There are some reasonable academic debates about the precise percentage of the tax paid by labor, and how that might change under certain circumstances. But there is little real debate about whether or not some of the costs are passed on. The point is that it happens. Workers, not owners, pay at least some share of higher corporate taxes.


Yet Psaki’s position—the Biden White House’s position—is that this sort of thing is “absurd and unfair.”


One may feel that the omnipresence of gravity is unfair and absurd. Nevertheless, few people plan their lives around the ability to leap into the air and fly whenever they would like. We accept reality and make plans around its constraints, however absurd or unfair they may seem. To do otherwise would be foolish.


Yet that is essentially what Democrats are doing as they work to pass the Biden agenda.


Bjorn Lomborg warns that today’s climate activists are as unrealistic as are Covid activists. A slice:

Cutting fossil fuels as quickly as some environmentalists want will be tremendously difficult. In 2020 pandemic lockdowns forced the world to cut carbon emissions significantly. But to fulfill the Paris climate accords completely, the United Nations says that global emissions would have to plunge even further every year for the rest of the decade. In 2021 emissions would have to drop by more than double the lockdown-induced decline. By the end of 2030, they’d have to have fallen by 11 times what they did in 2020. Not exactly realistic.

Scott Lincicome explains that other countries’ industrial policies do not justify the U.S. following suit. A slice:


Cato today published my new White Paper on the perils of American industrial policy, and the timing couldn’t be better. The Senate, for example, has passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill) and the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, each of which contain numerous subsidies and other measures intended to boost American manufacturing and compete with China. Those bills now sit with the House, which is also considering a bunch of industrial policy proposals, such as special tax credits for union‐​made electric vehicles, in President Biden’s $3.5 trillion “reconciliation package.”


As explained in my new paper, U.S. industrial policies have a long history of high costs (for the federal budget and U.S. economy), failed objectives, political dysfunction, and empty justifications. Prominent among those justifications, especially today, is that industrial policies have worked well in countries like South Korea, which has a long history of economic interventionism. I cite oodles of research showing why such claims are misguided (for Korea and others), but a brand new National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper provides some excellent additional support – and some broader lessons along the way.


 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on September 30, 2021 09:55

Bryan Caplan Pens an Open Letter to University Presidents

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

My only disagreement with this letter by my treasured colleague Bryan Caplan is with his endorsement of Covid-19 vaccine mandates on campus. Here are two slices from this splendid missive:


Dear University Presidents:


We all know that higher education falls far short of its promise.  I’ve spent a large part of my twenty five years as a research professor documenting the shortcomings of our system. Perhaps you’re even familiar with my The Case Against Education (Princeton University Press, 2018). In recent years, however, we’ve begun failing our students in new and improved ways.  In the past, we failed to transform our students into thoughtful and knowledgeable adults, but at least most of them had a great four-year party (or often a five- or six-year party). Now we’re making the college experience itself actively dehumanizing.


This is most obvious when we look at our forever war on Covid. Virtually every college in America has a vaccine mandate – a wise move, in my view. Yet instead of using these amazing vaccines to return to normalcy, virtually every college in America continues to aggressively “fight Covid.” Our policies would have been unthinkable two years ago: Indoor mask mandates. 50% seating in dining halls. Excluding guests from live performances.  Social distancing.  All combined with sporadic yet self-righteous enforcement.


These policies aren’t merely “inconvenient.” They are dehumanizing. Showing other people how we feel – and seeing how they feel in turn – is a basic part of being a human being.  A basic part of making friends. A basic part of connecting with a community. True, most students in the Covid era continue to make friends – and even smile on occasion. As Jurassic Park teaches us, “Life finds a way.” But this is still a stunted and twisted way for young people to live.


Sometimes, sadly, dehumanization is the price we pay to survive. But this is not one of those times. Even pre-vaccine, universities absurdly overreacted to Covid. Now that virtually everyone on campus has the vaccine, the overreaction is absurdly absurd. A conservative estimate of Covid’s Infection Fatality Rate is .6%. For the college-age, divide that risk by 30. For the vaccinated, divide by 10 again. That means we’re talking 1-in-50,000, assuming a student even gets infected. And of course, vaccines also greatly reduce infection and hence contagion.


I beg you, don’t reply with the fashionable preamble, “Out of an abundance of caution…”  Life is full of trade-offs. Americans’ annual risk of dying in a car accident is roughly 1-in-9000, yet I doubt you would ban students from driving. Similarly, please don’t start telling me about high-risk students and older members of our campus community. I am an “older member of our campus community,” and I know the risks. That’s why I got vaccinated as soon as possible. That’s enough to put my mind at ease; I face dozens of more serious risks every day. But if that’s not safe enough for me, then I, not an entire generation of students, should bear the burden of isolation.


…..


Nor is Covid the only issue where you are teaching paranoia. Many schools – and probably most of the top ones – now kick off the academic year with a long series of mandatory brainwashing sessions. You gather students together, then have your most fanatical employees preach against the evils of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and much more. As with Covid, you show near-zero interest in measuring (a) the on-campus prevalence of these ills, or (b) the effectiveness of your inhumane remedies. Instead, the brainwashing sessions just try to sow as much pessimism as possible.


I doubt that most of this matters much; preaching against “racism” at college is like preaching against “sin” at church. The people who need to hear the message are rarely in the audience. Nevertheless, there is one kind of brainwashing that probably does make a difference. For the worse.


I’m talking about your training in sexual harassment and sexual assault.


How can I say such a thing? Because most young adults are naturally shy around the opposite sex. Many if not most female students are so shy that they will never ask out a male student. Many if not most male students are so shy that they have to spend weeks or months “working up their courage” to propose a date. Social anxiety toward the opposite sex is a human universal, visible around the world and throughout history. And what does your training in sexual harassment and sexual assault do? Strive to maximize students’ anxiety. You try to convince female students that virtually any male is a plausible sexual predator. And along the way, you make male students wonder if any social interaction with their female peers will be labelled “harassment” or even “assault.”


None of this means that higher education should take sexual violence lightly. The wise path, however, is to define sexual violence narrowly – and punish it harshly. To treat it as an easily-identifiable aberration, a clear-cut crime, not something that an unbrainwashed person might do by accident.


Instead, you’ve taken the opposite path, of sowing paranoia. And, though your brainwashing is only one small part of a sad Zeitgeist, the patterns are what you’d expect: High gender segregation, loneliness, and lovelessness. Yes, extraverts land on their feet, but when I look at college campuses today, I feel sorry for the silent majority of shy kids. In the past, they only had to worry about being ignored and rejected. Now they have the added burden of paranoid fears of being victimized and demonized. And if you protest, “Such problems are unlikely,” you’re telling the wrong person. The people who need to hear that “Such problems are unlikely” are the students that you’re scaring to death.


…..


Sincerely,


Bryan Caplan


Department of Economics


George Mason University


 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on September 30, 2021 08:27

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

Dr. Vinay Prasad, writing in U.S. News & World Report, explains that school boards that mandate that school children be vaccinated against Covid-19 are not ‘following the science.‘ Here’s his conclusion:


Some argue that mandating the coronavirus vaccine is the same as requiring other childhood vaccinations to attend school. In my view, it isn’t. There is more uncertainty around its benefits and harms at school age and could factor into why some peer nations are making different policy choices. And, this decision comes after nearly a year without in-person schooling, making the punishment even worse.


LA is making a bold public statement, and the move will be cheered by many. Other school districts may even take similar steps. But the reality is they are overstepping the certainty of the science, and they are taking out our collective rage and frustration – that this pandemic has not yet ended – on children. It is a shameful policy, and I condemn it.


Also writing wisely about vaccination of school children is Reason‘s Matt Welch. A slice:


But the argument over mandates is anything but settled. COVID-19, even since the triumph of the delta variant and the advent of vaccination, has remained overwhelmingly an older-person disease: Just 478 people under the age of 18 have died of it through Sept. 29, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). That’s less than the 643 minors that the CDC estimates died during the 2017-18 winter flu season. Rare is the state that mandates flu shots; though in fairness, their effectiveness rate lags far behind those of the three COVID-19 vaccines approved in the U.S.


The second main reason to favor the physical removal of unvaccinated students is to keep kids from spreading the virus to teachers and staff. But school employees have had priority access to vaccines for more than half a year by now. Given the microscopic infection results revealed by school testing—0.27 percent among the unvaccinated in New York City, around 0.6 percent in Los Angeles—it’s reasonable to continue concluding that school buildings are among the safest places for humans to gather in groups.


Jeffrey Tucker decries the purges fueled by Covid hysteria.

Jon Sanders rightly criticize Biden’s lawlessness. A slice:


Consider, for example, Biden’s eviction moratorium, which he inherited from his predecessor but somehow made his own. In early August, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) promulgated its 60-day emergency eviction moratorium, it did so even as Biden openly doubted the move was legal and said scholars had advised him it was likely unconstitutional. That followed a Biden administration spokesperson saying outright that the president lacked authority for the move, that “the president has not only kicked the tires; he has double, triple, quadruple checked.”


The president issued the order anyway, on this basis: “But at a minimum, by the time it gets litigated, it will probably give some additional time while we’re getting that $45 billion out to people who are in fact behind in the rent and don’t have the money.” As Aaron Blake characterized it for The Washington Post: “In other words: It might not be legal, but even if it’s not, we’ll get some good done in the meantime.” The U.S. Supreme Court blocked the moratorium in late August, decrying the administration’s attempt to give the federal agency “a breathtaking amount of power.”


Phil Magness speaks out against vaccine IDs.

James Bolt decries the authoritarianism unleashed in Australia by the conversion of so many people in that country to the fundamentalist religion of zero Covid. Two slices:


Time was when, even in Melbourne, we could chuckle at the absurdity of our Covid rules. We were told we could remove our face masks – still mandatory indoors and outdoors – in order to drink a coffee, but not to drink a beer. We were also told that if we lived with five other adults, we were not allowed to all leave the house in one group. Indoors, we were no risk to each other, but outside we were apparently a viral petri dish.


Laughter has since turned into anger. After over 230 days of hard lockdown, whatever was left of Melbourne’s social fabric has gone. And the city has been rocked by weeks of protests and violence.


…..


This is the price of our ‘victory’ against Covid. Yes, our Covid deaths are low – far lower than the rest of the world. But how much longer can we live like this?


Well, Melbournians have been ordered to live like this until 26 October at the earliest. That’s when Melbourne’s sixth lockdown is scheduled to end – though you would be lucky to find a single person who thinks it will actually end on that day. By then, Melbourne will have been locked down for longer than any other city on the planet.


We got to this point because our leaders have been chasing the goal of Zero Covid. The successes of 2020 went to their heads and they believed they could do what no other country has done: eliminate the virus.


Jay Bhattacharya on Twitter:

Zero-COVID is a zombie policy. Though brain-dead, it will not die.

 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on September 30, 2021 03:56

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 417 of F.A. Hayek’s Spring 1949 University of Chicago Law Review paper titled “The Intellectuals and Socialism“:

Socialism has never and nowhere been at first a working-class movement. It is by no means an obvious remedy for the obvious evil which the interests of that class will necessarily demand. It is a construction of theorists, deriving from certain tendencies of abstract thought with which for a long time only the intellectuals were familiar; and it required long efforts by the intellectuals before the working classes could be persuaded to adopt it as their program.

 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on September 30, 2021 01:45

September 29, 2021

Choice In Markets and Choice Under Government Compulsion

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

In my latest column for AIER I wonder why so many people who are quick to (mis)identify choice in markets as being unreal (and therefore the results of choices in markets as being illegitimate) are also quick to describe the ‘choice’ to obey government commands as real (and therefore the results of those ‘choices’ as being legitimate). A slice:


One accusation commonly hurled at those of us who advocate for free markets is that we mistake the mere formal availability of choice for the real availability of choice. A worker, it is said, of course has the formal right to quit his job, but this right is alleged to be meaningless in practice because the worker will suffer grievously if he chooses to quit. The worker, in other words, is alleged to be in extremis and, therefore, is being exploited by his employer who knows that this worker has no real option but to keep the job. Market outcomes are thereby alleged to be unjust and deserving of no deference because they are the result not of real choices but of choices made in extremis.


But if this reason for denouncing market outcomes is valid, then it applies with at least equal force to outcomes engineered by government. By putting individuals in extremis, government denies to them real choice. And if the possibility of finding another job is, as is said by market opponents, to be only an illusion of real choice and control over one’s fate, then so too, surely, is the possibility of a citizen affecting government policy by voting also an illusion of real choice and control over one’s fate.


I don’t have to explain to readers of this column that I reject the notion that market choices are made in extremis. These choices are, I believe, very real and meaningful. But it’s flabbergasting that many of the market opponents who denounce the market on the grounds that the choices it leaves open to individuals are not real – that these choices are largely made by people in extremis – look upon the outcomes of government coercion with such fondness and favor.


 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on September 29, 2021 09:47

Russell Roberts's Blog

Russell Roberts
Russell Roberts isn't a Goodreads Author (yet), but they do have a blog, so here are some recent posts imported from their feed.
Follow Russell Roberts's blog with rss.