Russell Roberts's Blog, page 229

What’s To Blame?

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:

Editor:

Daniel Yergin and Matteo Fini blame today’s serious shortage of computer chips on pandemic lockdowns and on a drought in Taiwan, a fire at a Japanese semiconductor factory, and a winter storm in Texas. (“For Auto Makers, the Chip Famine Will Persist,” Sept. 23).

Alas, only one of these four events is to blame: lockdowns.

Factory fires, droughts, and winter storms – along with hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, tornados, and dust storms – happen every year, yet they never cause global supply disruptions of the sort that have become commonplace since Spring 2020. The only events of the past 18 months that are out of the ordinary are lockdowns; these, therefore, are the only genuine cause of today’s supply disruptions.

Blaming inadequate production on weather events (and on other routine mishaps such as factory fires) is akin to the Soviet-era practice of blaming the perpetual shortages of consumer goods in the U.S.S.R. on an uncooperative mother nature rather than on the iron fist of the state that obstructed voluntary commerce.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

Human Intolerance is Never Far Beneath the Surface

(Don Boudreaux)

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The following few paragraphs are from pages 142-143 of Amor Towles’s marvelous 2016 novel, A Gentleman in Moscow; the setting is one of Moscow’s finest hotels in 1924 (ellipses original):

Having followed Andrey across the dining room, through the kitchen, and down a long, winding stair, the Count found himself in a place that even Nina had never been: the wine cellar of the Metropol.With its archways of brick and its cool, dark climate, the Metropol’s wine cellar recalled the somber beauty of a catacomb. Only, instead of sarcophagi bearing the likeness of saints, receding into the far reaches of the chamber were rows of racks laden with bottles of wine. Here was assembled a staggering collection of Cabernets and Chardonnays, Rieslings and Syrahs, ports and Madeira – a century of vintages from across the continent of Europe.

All told, there were almost ten thousand cases. More than a hundred thousand bottles. And every one of them without a label.

“What has happened!” gasped the Count.

Andrey nodded in grim acknowledgement.

“A complaint was filed with comrade Todorov, the Commissar of Food, claiming the existence of our wine list runs counter to the ideals of the Revolution. That it is a monument to the privilege of the nobility, the effeteness of the intelligentsia, and the predatory pricing of speculators.”

“But that’s preposterous.”

For the second time in an hour, the unshrugging Andrey shrugged.

“A meeting was held, a vote was taken, an order was handed down…. Henceforth, the Boyarsky shall sell only red and white wine with every bottle at a single price.”

With a hand that was never meant to serve such a purpose, Andrey gestured to the corner, where beside five barrels of water a confusion of labels lay on the floor. “It took men ten days to complete the task,” he said sadly.

DBx: Although fictional, this account of Bolshevik ignorance, prejudice, arrogance, and thuggery rings true. This account captures an ugly inclination of human nature that arises whenever we are insufficiently civilized by liberal sentiments. Illiberal people mistake their own prejudices for reality and their own beliefs for truth. Illiberal people are thus intolerant of anyone who disagrees, and are prone to condone violence on those who dare to dissent.

Illiberal people also excel at slathering the worst interpretations on the actions and words of anyone suspected of not towing the party line. Not only ignorant of history, but disdainful of it, illiberal people destroy mindlessly. Today chanting diversity, equity, and inclusion, illiberal people are utterly intolerant of anyone who does not willingly chant in their choir. They demonize all who through merit differentiate themselves from the crowd, and insist that anyone who dissents from their party line be outcast. Illiberal people are as allergic to subtlety and trade-offs as they are to humor and fellow-feeling.

Today’s woke legions are people who are as illiberal as people become. They are – let’s not mince words – both stupid and uninformed. And they are motivated overwhelmingly by hatred – hatred of what they do not understand and of the monsters that exist only in their juvenile imaginations. They are comatose to reality.

Today’s woke legions might not have much against labels on bottles of fine wine. But the woke’s self-righteous eagerness to re-write history, to destroy so much of what has come down to us from the past, and to restructure civilization with brute force make the woke very much akin to the Bolsheviks and to so many of the other barbarians throughout history who mistake their fevered passions as being commands from God.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Let’s hope for success for this lawsuit in opposition to NYC strongman Bill de Blasio’s vaccine mandates.

Speaking of vaccine mandates, J.D. Tuccille warns that “We’re on our way to having to ask for permission to go about our daily lives.” (Unsurprisingly, Covid-related restrictions for travel even within the United States are endorsed by the authoritarian Anthony Fauci.) A slice:

Raising concerns about vaccine mandates isn’t the same thing as objecting to vaccination. Control freaks like to conflate the two, as if every good idea should be forced on the unwilling by threats of fines and imprisonment. But it’s perfectly reasonable to endorse vaccination and the near-complete protection it provides against severe illness while accepting that people have the right to decide for themselves; that’s how free societies work. Converting rights (such as making a living and traveling from place to place) into privileges in order to compel compliance is not how free societies work. But officials always find it easy to make excuses for fettering the public, and for throwing roadblocks in the way of travel to make it conditional on bureaucratic approval.

Robby Soave documents yet another outbreak on campus of Covid Derangement Syndrome.

Dan Wooton rightly criticizes mask-theater.

Michael Tomlinson decries the disregard – and, hence, the weakening – of human rights in the age of Covid. A slice:

In the Australian State of Victoria, one of the most repressive jurisdictions outside the People’s Republic of China, local legislation (including the Charter of Human Rights) has not prevented the government from putting the entire population in home detention for months on end, allowing them out only for 5 reasons specified by the government. At the time of writing, Victoria was in the sixth of its lockdowns, which have extended over 200 days. No public protests against these repressive measures are allowed in Victoria or New South Wales, and attempts to protest are vigorously broken up by police. The State Parliament has not been allowed to sit for long periods of time – democracy has been suspended. In these circumstances the head of government becomes essentially an elected dictator, accountable to no one.

Thousands of Australian citizens are stranded overseas, not allowed to return home in their time of need, and the Australian government has even prevented its own citizens who normally live overseas from leaving the country, for reasons that are not clear.

As is the practice of all totalitarian regimes, Australia’s Covidocracy restricts media coverage of people’s reactions to its tyranny – reactions such as this. (HT Phil Magness)

Auckland under lockdown.

Zeb Jamrozik of the University of Oxford talks with Anish Koka about the ethics of the (over)reaction to Covid, and the recklessness of so much fallacy-filled Covid modeling. (HT Jay Bhattacharya.)

Jay Bhattacharya makes a prediction that I fervently hope proves to be correct:

I think the push for vaccine mandates / passports will end soon enough because it is not rational. And the many people who supported it out of fear and prejudice will come to be ashamed of their support of it.

Martin Kulldorff on Twitter:

By mandating vaccines for those who have had COVID, @NIAIDNews director Anthony Fauci questions natural immunity after COVID disease. That’s like having the nations lead astronomer question whether the earth is round or flat.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 227 of George Will’s hot-off-the-press 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 September 22nd, 2017):

In the accelerated churning of today’s capitalism, changing tastes and expanding choices destroy some jobs and create others, with net gains in price and quality. But disruption is never restful, and America now faces a decision unique in its history: Is it tired – tired of the turmoil of creative destruction? If so, it had better be ready to do without creativity. And ready to stop being what it has always been: restless.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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My GMU Econ colleague Dan Klein finds inspiration in the writings of Hugo Grotius. A slice:

Grotius taught European rulers their accountability to their subjects, to God, and to nature. He taught that the individual human being, as such, has natural rights. He taught rulers, through conscience and justice, to moderate their rule and their conflicts. There is a direct line from Grotius to Adam Smith’s “liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice” and to what Deirdre McCloskey calls The Great Enrichment.

Grotius was a great liberal because he saw that everyone has moral agency, as an individual: Rulers are to be judged by the ruled. Everyone has the capacity and the responsibility to judge. Even in war, he suggested that all declarations of war be “accompanied by a declaration of the cause of the war; that the whole human race, as it were, might judge of its justice.” Citing Aristotle, he insisted, “Justice is a virtue which belongs to man as man.”

We are not slavish tools of autocrats or government agencies. “Stratocles was laughed at in Athens for proposing a law that whatever was thought good by Demetrius, should be reckoned right and pious.” We laugh at Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook for shutting down discourse that challenges whatever they pretend to regard as the Mount Olympus of Covid wisdom.

David Henderson says to the many Covidocratic hypocrites: “preach what you practice.”

“College campuses have the craziest COVID-19 restrictions of all” – so reports Reason‘s Robby Soave. Two slices:

In an effort to completely disrupt illicit socializing, Columbia reprogrammed key cards so that they would only grant access to students’ individual residence halls. The campus is currently in the midst of a “temporary” two-week ban on hanging out with other people.

…..

This is madness. Few people are safer from COVID-19 than vaccinated 18- to 22-year-olds, yet campus administrators (and sometimes students) are acting like any amount of non-masking or basic socializing is likely to get people killed.

I’ve written quite a bit about cultural trends in higher education, and how the illiberal values of campus activists have come to dominate all professional spaces where elite opinion holds sway. Progressive young people who view basic free speech principles with antipathy or even disdain are in the process of fundamentally changing the workplace. “We should look to the campus activist culture of the present to discover what our broader culture might resemble a few years from now,” I wrote in a recent article for the Deseret News.

If recent history is any guide, we should be terrified that the current crop of college students might leave campus possessed of the notion that the most insane version of pandemic oppression is perfectly normal and desirable.

Matt Welch exposes the sloppy ‘reporting’ of the New York Times‘s Apoorva Mandavilli. Two slices:

If you got your pediatric COVID news from New York Times science and public health correspondent Apoorva Mandavilli, you might be under the mistaken impression that (as Mandavilla asserted Monday) “the reopening of schools has fueled the [recent] surge,” and that “children are as likely as adults to transmit the virus to others, and more likely to do so than adults older than 60.”

Neither of these claims are supported by the evidence.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the rise in U.S. COVID hospitalizations began on June 28 (when the rate was at 0.56 per 100,000 residents), or precisely when most schools were closed for the summer. The rate then steadily climbed to 3.73 per 100,000 on August 27, at which point three-quarters of K-12 schools had flung open their doors. Now that the remaining 25 percent of schools have started the 2021-22 school year, hospitalizations are steadily sinking, down to 2.94/100,000.

…..

Mandavilli’s shoddy article, dissected at hyperlinked length in this Twitter thread, deployed such pediatric scaremongering in the service of adding outside pressure to the Food and Drug Administration process of approving under-12 vaccinations. But a more accurate depiction of COVID and schools could be used to fix a policy error that’s negatively affecting families right now: excessive school quarantine policies.

Jay Bhattacharya on Twitter:

The COVID vax mandates & zealous advocates have turned the anti-vax movement from a tiny minority into a much larger group.

The naivete stuns me.

Coercion & disdain breeds distrust and resistance. Data / respect / persuasion is the better path.

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

Augusto Zimmermann decries the destruction of the rule of law in Australia. A slice:

This institutionalisation of fear allows the political establishment to control and immobilise civil society. In this context, the label “anti-vax” becomes an efficient means of silencing any opposition to the narrative of the status quo, thus undermining one of the primary pillars of democracy: freedom of speech. The anti-vax slur operates via a form of “contagion theory” whereby calling anyone a “conspiracy theorist”, or implying that they oppose all forms vaccination, are Machiavellian attempts to silence rational debate and democratic dialogue.

Allison Pearson decries the never-ending scaremongering in Britain. A slice:

As the Prime Minister said, we go into this winter in much better shape than the last. Unfortunately, there are coronaholics in the media who are loathe to spread comfort and joy. Their work will not be done until Christmas is cancelled and Santa is distributing lateral flow tests instead of presents.

Last week, the BBC got off to a flying start with a report featuring a doctor in a Nottingham Intensive Care Unit. The doctor reported that his unit was already under severe Covid pressure and things were going to get worse. Really? Even though the number of Covid patients in hospital has been flat for the past two months and cases are falling?

So annoyed was I by this first wave of winter scaremongering that I texted “George”, Planet Normal’s senior source in NHS England with access to the very latest data. “Is Nottingham ITU really under pressure?” I asked.

Within minutes, a reply came back. “One of Nottingham’s hospitals is reporting a high level of Covid pressure,” George said, “but the other two hospitals in Nottingham are both green so clearly they are load balancing very well across their three sites. There really isn’t an issue. It is so irresponsible of the BBC to pick out the exceptions and present them as the rule.”

It really is. Totally irresponsible. I’m afraid this is what we have come to expect of the BBC and other broadcasters during the pandemic. One of their favourite tricks is to film in hospitals on a Monday when wards are fullest, because there are no discharges over the weekend. By the time the camera crew has packed up, a large number of fully recovered Covid patients will have been sent home, but you can bet Chief Pallbearer Hugh Pym won’t mention that.

The toll that Pym’s sepulchral mien and shroud-waving reports have taken on the mental health of this country is incalculable. We can expect more of the same over the coming weeks. NHS managers, who have done shamefully little to prepare for respiratory virus season plus Covid, will be keen to scare people away from hospitals by exaggerating the crisis.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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…. is from page 134 of the late Deepak Lal’s 2013 book, Poverty and Progress; this passage appears in that part of Lal’s book in which he exposes some of the many flaws in the case for industrial policy (references omitted; link added):

This so-called coordination of investment plans is of course nothing but the planning syndrome – the search for a centrally determined investment plan which takes into account not merely current but all future changes in the demand and supply of a myriad of goods. It is well known that no market economy can attain the intertemporal Nirvana promised by the utopian theoretical construct of Arrow and Debreu. But neither can the planners, as pointed out by Hayek and Mises in the interwar debate about the efficiency of Soviet-type central planning. The collapse of this system is a conclusive empirical confirmation of the validity of the Austrian insight that, in the real world, imperfect markets are superior to imperfect planning.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Those of you who doubt the reality of Covidocratic tyranny should ponder this brief report from Reason‘s Charles Oliver:

Residents of Durham, Ontario, Canada, will have to keep records of anyone who comes into their home for a “social gathering,” no matter how small, and turn them over to the local health department if requested. Dr. Robert Kyle, Durham’s chief medical officer, has mandated that homeowners keep a list of the full names and contact information of anyone attending a social gathering in their home for one month. They must turn that information over within 24 hours if requested. Kyle said the order is aimed at stemming the spread of COVID-19. Those who do not comply face a fine of up to $5,000 ($3,925 U.S.).

And those of you who still trust Covidocrats to act with competence, seriousness, and good faith should ponder this report, by Reason‘s Liz Wolfe, of San Francisco’s mayor London Breed. A slice:

When another reporter brought up that the mayor had been dancing maskless, not actively eating or drinking, the excuse that followed was a bit strange: “I was feeling the spirit. I wasn’t thinking about a mask; I was thinking about having a good time.”

Martin Kulldorff on Twitter:

Spoke to a nurse today: Risked her life caring for Covid patients, got Covid, survived, has stronger longer lasting immunity than her vaccinated stay-at-home hospital administrators who are now going to fire her because of their #VaccineMandates.

Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy? (HT David Henderson)

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

Wisdom from Barry Brownstein. A slice:

In his bookThe Fatal Conceit, Friedrich Hayek explored the extended order, an order that is the product of voluntary, human cooperation and not a designed order based on coercion. Hayek wrote, “Our civilization depends, not only for its origin but also for its preservation, on what can be precisely described only as the extended order of human cooperation, an order more commonly, if somewhat misleadingly, known as capitalism.”

Jonah Goldberg has observed, “The market system is so good at getting people—from all over the world—to work together that we barely notice how much we’re cooperating.”

The residents of Upstate New York now have fewer medical options. They are noticing the impact of less human cooperation, as controls undermine the rights of individuals to make personal medical decisions.

Most of us would perish without the extended order; the few survivors would revert to a primitive existence. Today, notice how much you depend on human cooperation for fully stocked supermarkets, UPS and FedEx deliveries, the internet, electricity, and on and on.

Totalitarians reduce human cooperation. Don’t be a cheerleader for their illiberal schemes. Cultivate your psychological freedom to be less susceptible to totalitarian propaganda. As human cooperation decreases and hatred increases, you too, not just the people the mandates are directed against, will suffer. The oxygen of capitalism is cooperation. The oxygen of totalitarians is hatred for differences.

Sofia van der Vegt laments the consequences in Europe of “Covid chaos.”

Australia continues in tyranny. (HT Phil Magness) See also this item. And here’s Australian Mikayla Novak commenting at Facebook:

Beyond pathetic that governmental authorities elected to shut down public transport into Melbourne CBD in an attempt (futile, as it transpired) to prevent protest, which in my view is a fundamental, inviolate liberal-democratic right. Collateral economic damage was also apparent, in that the need, of what labourers remain in the stagnating CBD economy, to transit to work were effectively discounted.

Allison Schrager writes about the different ways that blue-state and red-state folk make trade-off involving risks.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 231 of George Will’s hot-off-the-press 2021 book, American Happiness and Discontents: The Unruly Torrent, 2008-2020 – a collection of many of his columns over these years; (the column from which the quotation below is drawn was originally published in the Washington Post on September 18th, 2015):

[Pope] Francis deplores “compulsive consumerism,” a sin to which the 1.3 billion persons without even electricity can only aspire. He leaves the Vatican to jet around praising subsistence farming, a romance best enjoyed from 30,000 feet above the realities that such farmers yearn to escape.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 83 of George Will’s hot-off-the-press 2021 book, American Happiness and Discontents: The Unruly Torrent, 2008-2020 – a collection of many of his columns over these years; (the column from which the quotation below is drawn was originally published in the Washington Post on August 9th, 2019) (original emphasis):

What socialists are so fond of saying, national conservatives are now saying: This time will be different. It never is, because government’s economic planning always involves the fatal conceit that government can aggregate, and act on, information more intelligently and nimbly than markets can.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 3 of Richard Epstein’s 2020 book, The Dubious Morality of Modern Administrative Law:

The key explanation for why such a high level of discretion is applied by courts [to the decisions of administrative agencies] is an uncritical belief that administrative agencies will act in the public interest and resist pleas for partisan outcomes. In all too many cases, that optimistic assumption is false.

DBx: Yep. Politicians – even those duly elected by majorities – never have the motivation (or the knowledge) of gods. Ditto for appointed administrative officials and all other government employees. The reason for why this reality escapes so many people escapes me.