Russell Roberts's Blog, page 232

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 262 of 1993 Nobel-laureate economist Douglass North’s October 25th, 1994, lecture, “My Evolution as an Economist,” in Lives of the Laureates, William Breit and Roger W. Spencer, eds. (3rd ed., 1995):

In economic markets there are objective criteria (size, weight, color, etc.) to measure the physical dimensions of goods and services exchanged and legal criteria to measure the property rights dimensions. Enforcement is carried out by the judicial system. Competition is a powerful force to reduce transaction costs but still economic markets are beset by high transaction costs. But political markets are far more prone to inefficiency. What is being exchanged are promises for votes; the voter has little incentive to be informed since the likelihood that his/her vote counts is infinitesimal; there is no comparable enforcement mechanism; and competition is very imperfect. The complexity of the issues (together with the lack of incentives of voters to be informed) leads to ideological stereotyping taking over. In effect, the incentives for efficiency are diluted by the structure of political markets and the complexity of the issues.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Harrison Pitt draws lessons for 2020-2021 from Hayek’s 1944 book, The Road to Serfdom. Two slices:

While the situation varies across the Anglosphere, in all of its countries, from Australia to Britain, the relationship between the individual and the state has fundamentally transformed — and these conditions will likely outlive the pandemic. Sydney remains under a draconian lockdown, as does New Zealand after the discovery of just one case of the coronavirus. The British and Canadian governments intend to make freedom conditional on state-issued vaccine passports, while President Joe Biden, fresh from his Afghanistan debacle, recently called on parents to mask up their children when they leave the house.

These measures can easily be relaxed or intensified by government officials at a moment’s notice. But while restrictions can be tweaked, few in power have renounced the overarching authority they represent. In this sense, they are symbols of an abiding new normal, which, before 2020, was utterly unthinkable in free societies.

Hayek’s defense of liberty was driven by more than a moral revulsion to state force. He also argued that letting individuals take personal responsibility for their lives makes greater practical sense. Hayek’s ingenious arguments against a centrally run economy, therefore, are equally devastating to the idea of a centrally run biosecurity state.

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Hayek also understood that such temporary measures, implemented for a limited purpose, rarely remain that way. In Law, Legislation and Liberty, Hayek accepted that sometimes the liberal order ‘may yet have to be temporarily suspended when the long-run preservation of that order is itself threatened. During such emergencies, be it a war on germs or Germans, protecting civil society itself becomes the ‘overruling common purpose’.

But when defined vaguely enough, that ‘overruling common purpose’ can be invoked to continue denying liberty even after the initial threat has waned or passed. As Hayek wrote, ‘”Emergencies” have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded — and once they are suspended it is not difficult for anyone who has assumed emergency powers to see to it that the emergency will persist.’

If anything, it is harder for governments to relinquish such powers. Once people get attached to the idea of a benevolent, all-caring state, it appears compassionless to return to normal. COVID restrictions were initially put in place to ‘slow the spread’ so that hospitals would not be overwhelmed with patients. Now, public health officials use them for a myriad of different purposes: to minimize ‘long COVID’ or to prevent cases entirely.

Here’s some good news from Britain. (HT Yevdokiya Zagumenova)

Luke Massey reports Australia’s Covid facts – facts that do not even begin to justify the tyranny that has very quickly become normal in that once-free country.

Bella d’Abrera writes from dystopian Australia that “Calvin’s henchmen had nothing on our premiers.” A slice:

Australians are currently being subjected to hitherto unprecedented control over, and incursions into, our lives by the state. We have been subjected to a seemingly inexhaustible and constantly changing supply of confusing, dehumanising and arbitrary edicts which are daily issued by a cabal of unelected health bureaucrats and their politician handlers. Our police forces have successfully cowed the citizenry into unquestioning obedience. Even more remarkable has been the willingness of many to become accessories to this political overreach by ‘ratting out’ our friends, families and neighbours.

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That Australians are being socially disciplined has been admitted by our state apparatchiks. In May, the Chief Health Officer of Queensland, Jeanette Young said that the decision to close schools was about messaging rather than health. Dan Andrews has said repeatedly that the onus is not on him to prove the efficacy of any one measure, such as curfews or the closing of playgrounds.

The police have also admitted as much. Mick Fuller, Commissioner of the NSW police, a public servant who is currently earing $665,000 per annum, has increased on-the-spot fines for health disobedience to $5,000. ‘We have to shape the behaviour of people’ he said to his subordinates. ‘If you write a ticket and get it wrong,’ Fuller added, ‘I won’t hold you to account for that.’ When the Victorian police opened the official snitching hotline in April 2020, a staggering 21,000 Victorians rang to report on each other. Even the police were surprised by the sheer number of informants. ‘I don’t think we understood the role it would play and how committed Victorians were to ensuring people followed the advice,’ Police Minister Lisa Neville said.

Joel Zinberg reports that “Delta is dying.” Two slices:

Despite media claims that “We Can’t Turn the Corner on Covid,” the numbers of Covid-19 cases, new hospitalizations, and deaths nationwide peaked and started to decline around the beginning of September. The combination of this milestone, new findings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing widespread levels of vaccination and natural immunity, and improved availability of treatments suggests that, outside of isolated pockets, Covid-19 is likely to become a diminishing health risk in the United States.

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Though a few vaccines induce a better immune response than natural infection, experts generally say that “natural infection almost always causes better immunity than vaccines.” This appears to be true with Covid-19.

A new study from Israel confirms that natural immunity to Covid-19 is superior to vaccine-induced immunity, even with the Delta variant. Between June 1 and August 14, when Delta was dominant in Israel, the risk of infections was 13 times higher for vaccinated people than for previously infected, unvaccinated people when either the infection or vaccination had occurred between four and seven months before. The risk for symptomatic breakthrough infections was 27-fold higher. While natural immunity did wane somewhat over time, vaccinated persons still had a six-fold higher risk for infection and a seven-fold higher risk for symptomatic illness than people infected up to ten months before vaccinations started.

James Harrigan decries Biden’s Covid authoritarianism. A slice:

The Biden plan rests on mutually exclusive premises. First, there is the implicit assertion that the vaccines work. Indeed, they work so well that we should force 80 million people to get vaccinated, whether they want to or not. This, of course, flies in the face of the other presupposition: that we need to vaccinate damn near everyone because people are simply not safe otherwise.

Aren’t those who voluntarily took a vaccine already protected? If not, the vaccines are not all that effective, and mandating them will not make them any more so. If that’s not the objective, are we really protecting the anti-vaxxers from themselves? Since when is that an appropriate use of government power? Either way, forcing people to submit to a vaccine they don’t want as a condition of their continued employment doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 287 of Tom Palmer’s December 31st, 1999, Human Events essay titled “The Millennial Struggle for Liberty,” as this essay is reprinted in Tom’s excellent 2009 book, Realizing Freedom:

The most important development of the past thousand years has been the growth of liberty, both because liberty is important in its own right and because it is what has made virtually all of the other achievements of humanity possible, as well, from science to art to material well being.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from Deirdre McCloskey’s June 2021 review of Pete Boettke’s 2021 book The Struggle for a Better World:

Good behavior is achieved, actually, not by rules or catechisms or snappy if self-contradictory 18th-century formulas like the categorical imperative or the greatest happiness or the greatest number, but rather, as the ancients in Greece and China and everywhere else said, by forming one’s character well, and then acting in accordance with it.

DBx: Today – September 11th – is Deirdre’s 79th birthday. Please join me in wishing this remarkable scholar all best wishes for a wonderful 80th year. (Also from Deirdre is this recent interview with Hywel Williams of the Erasmus Forum.)

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Mario Loyola writes that it’s time we reclaim from the Covidocracy our right to choose. (HT Iain Murray) Three slices:

But as the months passed, it became clear that lockdowns were of dubious utility. Comparing measures taken around the world, one Stanford University study found virtually no correlation between severity of lockdowns and rates of infection or death.

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But even conceding Fauci’s point that the unvaccinated are “part of the problem,” the principle at stake is one that progressives ignore all the time. How many progressives accuse people on welfare of being “part of the problem” of budget deficits and crime because of the choices they make? Reducing the speed limit to 5 mph on the highway would save perhaps 40,000 lives every year, but how many progressives support that? Prohibiting alcohol could save about as many, but how many progressives would support that?

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The bottom line is this. Given how unevenly the risk of severe disease is distributed in the population, and how unevenly the risk of infecting others is distributed even among the unvaccinated, it makes much more sense for at-risk people to focus on protecting themselves than for everyone else to adjust their behavior. There are things we can reasonably do to reduce the risks to others, but with a virus that has now gone from pandemic to endemic, and which will always be with us, the time has come to learn to live with it.

Reason‘s Nick Gillespie eloquently protests Biden’s vaccine mandate. Two slices:

There is every reason to believe that President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate for COVID-19 will not survive legal scrutiny even as compulsory vaccination for the disease enjoys broad popularity among the public. As former Rep. Justin Amash (L–Mich.)—like me, a pro-vaccine, anti-mandate libertarian—has bluntly noted, “There is no authority for this. This is a legislative action that bypasses the legislative branch.”

The courts will almost certainly strike down this executive branch overreach and the sweeping new rules that wave away longstanding distinctions between public and private spheres of activity. This is what happened to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s eviction moratorium. It’s foundational to American life that the president is not a king who can subject citizens to his whims.

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As Jeffrey A. Singer, a surgeon and senior fellow for the Cato Institute, has noted, COVID-19 has a “0.2 percent fatality rate among people not living in institutions.” Fully 80 percent of deaths have occurred among people over 65 and just 358 children under the age of 17 had died of the disease as of July 29, 2021. We are not talking about smallpox, which affected all populations and had a fatality rate of 30 percent. COVID, argues Singer, “will not be eradicated” and will become a small-scale, endemic problem that should be minimized by targeted interventions to protect the most vulnerable. From a public health perspective, it should not become the casus belli for a radical restructuring of society and a massive expansion of presidential (or governmental) powers.

The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board is right to be harshly critical of what it calls “Biden’s vaccine command.” Two slices:

The President blamed unvaccinated Americans for clogging up “emergency rooms and intensive care units, leaving no room for someone with a heart attack, or pancreatitis, or cancer.” This is false. Some hospitals have cancelled elective surgeries, but they’ve done so to ensure that people who need urgent care can get it—whether for Covid or something else.

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These columns have supported the vaccine effort from the start, but we also believe in free choice and persuasion. Mr. Biden’s polarizing commands may stiffen the resistance of many on the political right, and they are certain to cost many people their jobs. They aren’t necessary, and they show again that the progressive policy default is always brute political force.

“Lumping 75 million unvaccinated Americans into one category is wedge partisanship, not science” – so correctly writes Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins. Two slices:

Mr. Biden plays on the trained willingness of Democratic media consumers to believe Trump voters are the vaccine resisters, however oddly this sits with public-service ads in blue states trying to coax minority voters and unionized healthcare workers to accept vaccination.

He plays on the lingering “zero Covid” delusions of the left, which hugged “herd immunity” once vaccines became available and Trump voters could be portrayed as the last obstacle to Covid’s elimination from the earth.

He hopes you will embrace false assumptions: Our vaccines, alas, are not sterilizing—they do not prevent infection, though they reduce the risk of severe illness and death. This attenuates the argument that others’ failure to be vaccinated is a threat to you, and, of course, it negates the zero Covid dream.

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His approach is wedge politics. It will provoke confrontations with red-state governors and old-school civil libertarians. It will rile up anti-vax nuts, who will be portrayed as ordinary GOPers. It does not faintly resemble any strategy you would adopt if your goal was to improve Covid outcomes quickly and efficiently.

David Henderson applauds a government official who has the courage to change his mind regarding Covid restrictions.

Silkie Carlo warns that “‘public health need’ shouldn’t be allowed to become the basis on which freedom is meted out by the state.” A slice:

However, the “public health need” is becoming more faith-based than fact. Given the inevitability of new variants, and the minority of people who will always refuse vaccination, the public health need will be cast immortal. At the same time, the performance of public health policies and institutions has become the basis on which freedom is meted out by the state.

The nearly impossible happens: Australia’s Covidocratic tyranny intensifies.

Marty Makary on Twitter (HT Martin Kulldorff):

The 'natural immunity is unreliable' theory has done a lot of damage. It's OK to have a wrong hypothesis but public health leaders have pushed their theory way too long after data became overwhelmingly clear,yet remarkably clinging to their outdated theory https://t.co/L6lfPiUg5R

— Marty Makary MD, MPH (@MartyMakary) September 11, 2021

“What fear does to our freedom.”

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 61 of the late M. Stanton Evans’s 1976 Hillsdale College address, “The Liberal Twilight,” as it appears in Champions of Freedom (Vol. 3, 1976):

If one adopts the authoritarian premises, ultimately one is going to emerge with the authoritarian conclusions. The libertarian shell has fallen away, and we’re left with the bedrock principles of compulsion and the subjection of human beings to a planning elite.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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On Twitter, Martin Kulldorff defends Sunetra Gupta from an unfair attack.

Writing in the New York Times, Robby Soave of Reason explains that “Biden’s vaccine mandate is a big mistake.” Two slices:

The president should not — and most likely does not — have the power to unilaterally compel millions of private-sector workers to get vaccinated or risk losing their jobs: Mr. Biden is presiding over a vast expansion of federal authority, one that Democrats will certainly come to regret the next time a Republican takes power. Moreover, the mechanism of enforcement — a presidential decree smuggled into law by the Department of Labor and its Occupational Safety and Health Administration — is fundamentally undemocratic. Congress is supposed to make new laws, not an unaccountable bureaucratic agency.

While more than 70 percent of American adults have received a shot, a smaller but sizable group of people, for various reasons, are unvaccinated. Some members of this group have antibodies from a previous Covid case and are reasonably protected from future illness, according to recent data. There is little benefit to forcing vaccination on such people, and Mr. Biden’s decision to not exempt them is a significant misstep.
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It’s worth repeating that the federal vaccine mandate represents a broad expansion of the executive branch’s power. And Mr. Biden will not be the chief executive forever. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a plausible 2024 Republican presidential candidate, has used his current authority to prohibit private vaccine mandates in his state. Is this really the time to solidify the idea that the president is the ultimate authority on whether such things should be required or forbidden?

Also from Robby Soave is this justified criticism of the appalling, tyrannical, innumerate, and shockingly uninformed Washington Post columnist, and CNN “analyst,” Leana Wen. A slice:

“We need to start looking at the choice to remain unvaccinated the same as we look at driving while intoxicated,” she told CNN’s Chris Cuomo Thursday night. “You have the option to not get vaccinated if you want, but then you can’t go out in public.”

Wen elaborated that society has an “obligation to prevent” the unvaccinated from leaving their homes and infecting others, in the same way that society has an obligation to deter drunk drivers.

“The vaccinated should not have to pay the price for the so-called choices of the unvaccinated anymore,” she continued.

This is a tortured analogy, since the unvaccinated do not actually pose much of a risk to the vaccinated. In recent weeks, the unvaccinated have constituted 99 percent of hospitalizations and deaths. The unvaccinated aren’t drunk drivers—they’re more like drivers who won’t buckle their seat belts, and are only likely to crash into other unbelted drivers. They are the victims of their own bad choices, and the government shouldn’t force them to make better ones.

National Review‘s Editors decry the “desperate overreach” that is Biden’s vaccination mandate.

Also decrying Biden’s vaccine mandate is Jeffrey Tucker.

Philip Klein asks: “If COVID-19 will be here forever, is this what you want the rest of your life to look like?” (HT Ian Fillmore) Two slices:

In March of 2020, the outside estimates were that this coronavirus period would come to an end when safe and effective vaccines became widely available. Even the infamous Imperial College London report, viewed as draconian at the time for its estimate of up to 2.2 million deaths in the U.S. absent sustained intervention, predicted that its mitigation strategies “will need to be maintained until a vaccine becomes available.” Yet vaccines have been available for anybody who wants one for nearly six months, and our leaders have ignored the obvious off-ramp. The CDC backtracked on guidance and said that vaccinated people must wear masks in public, and many people and jurisdictions have listened. For example, Montgomery County, Md., has an extraordinarily high vaccination rate — with 96 percent of the eligible over-twelve population having received at least one dose and 87 percent of them being fully vaccinated. By its own metrics, the county has “low utilization” of hospital beds. Yet the county requires masks indoors — including in schools. In Oregon, vaccinated people are required to wear masks even outdoors. And it isn’t just liberal enclaves. A new Economist/YouGov poll found that eight in ten Americans report having worn a mask in the past week at least “some of the time” when outside their homes, with 58 percent masking “always” or “most of the time.” If masking has remained so widespread among adults months after vaccines became widely available, why will it end in schools after vaccines become available for children?

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Whatever arguments were made to justify interventions early on in the pandemic, post-vaccine, we are in a much different universe. There is a negligible statistical difference in the likelihood of severe health consequences between vaccinated people who go about their business without taking extra precautions, and those who take additional precautions. Yet having to observe various protocols in perpetuity translates into a reduced quality of life. Put another way, the sort of question we need to start asking ourselves is not whether we can tolerate masking for one trip to the grocery store, but whether we want to live in a society in which we can never again go shopping without a mask.

And here’s a follow-up from Philip Klein on Biden’s vaccine mandate. A slice:

And others have suggested that the founders supported such mandates and that the Supreme Court has ruled on this. Charlie had a smart post on this earlier today, but the fact that George Washington supported inoculation of troops in the Continental Army and the fact that the Supreme Court has upheld vaccination mandates in the past has zero bearing on the current discussion. The 1905 Supreme Court case, Jacobson v Massachusetts, concerned a small-pox vaccination requirement in Cambridge, Mass. The court concluded that, “It is within the police power of a State to enact a compulsory vaccination law…” The federal government does not have police power. OSHA, the entity through which Biden is going to issue this mandate, wasn’t even created until 65 years after the Jacobson decision. Though we do not yet have a formal order, the Biden administration has indicated that it would have OSHA issue an Emergency Temporary Standard. Legal challenges will likely hinge on whether OSHA exceeded its authority by leaning on this rarely deployed mechanism for such sweeping ends. The fact that Pfeiffer and others point to state level requirements and requirements for the military (who are government employees), again, has no relevance at all to the debate over whether what OSHA is about to do is legally permissible. Regardless of whether one believes that this is within Biden’s power, let’s be clear that what OSHA is about to do would be without precedent.

Kyle Smith is understandably unimpressed with Washington Post writer Amber Phillips’s grasp of the legality of Biden’s vaccine mandate. A slice:

Jacobson was a state case, not a federal one. Phillips (or CNN’s Chris Cillizza, who used to write The Fix and retweeted Phillips’s mistaken analysis) might have guessed that from the v. Massachusettspart of the case’s name. It established that state governments can require vaccinations (in this case through municipalities). The reason it came before the Supreme Court was to decide whether Massachusetts vaccine mandates were in violation of the 14th Amendment. (Another case, from 1944, which is mentioned in passing by Phillips, considered a religion-based objection to vaccines and also came down on the pro-vaccine mandate side, but that was also a state matter: Prince v. Massachusetts.)

Several governors have announced opposition to Biden’s vaccine mandate. They obviously will not argue that states are forbidden to mandate vaccines.  The issue is whether the federal government has the enumerated power to force businesses of more than 100 employees to mandate vaccination (or do weekly testing). Phillips suggests she does not understand the distinction between state and federal power when she writes that the Supreme Court “decided that jurisdictions do have the right to require people to get vaccinated.” Does she consider the entire country a federal “jurisdiction”?

Also from Kyle Smith is this criticism of Biden’s authoritarianism. A slice:

Do I exaggerate? Like Presidents Obama and Trump before him, Biden has repeatedly expressed the idea that should Congress not act the way he prefers, he thereby gains special license to legislate via executive order. Today he baldly stated state governments were a hindrance to the executive branch’s ability to work its will on the American people.

“If they’ll not help, if these governors won’t help us beat the pandemic, I’ll use my power as president to get them out of the way,” Biden said, shredding the concept of federalism.

Charles Cooke explains that advocates of Covid-19 vaccine mandates “are twisting American history.“

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 370 of Michael Oakeshott’s 1961 essay “The Masses in Representative Democracy,” as this essay is reprinted the 1991 Liberty Fund collection of some of Oakeshott’s work, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays:

Human individuality is an historical emergence, as ‘artificial’ and as ‘natural’ as the landscape. In modern Europe this emergence was gradual, and the specific character of the individual who emerged was determined by the manner of his generation. He became unmistakable when the habit appeared of engaging in activities identified as ‘private’; indeed, the appearance of ‘privacy’ in human conduct is the obverse of the desuetude of the communal arrangements from which modern individuality sprang. This appearance of individuality provoked a disposition to explore its own limitations, to place the highest value upon it, and to seek security in its enjoyment. To enjoy it came to be recognized as the main ingredient of ‘happiness’. The experience was magnified into an ethical theory; it was reflected in manners of governing and being governed, in newly acquired rights and duties and in a whole pattern of living. The emergence of this disposition to be an individual is the pre-eminent event in modern European history.

DBx: Note that the emergence of individuality is not the emergence of venality, greed, or a narrow concern of each person with only his or her own material possessions. It is, instead, the emergence of each person’s awareness of, interest in, and insistence upon choosing his or her own goals – whatever these might be, and consistent with the same desire and right of every other person – rather than being an organism whose chief purpose and justification is to serve collective ends.

The March of Covidocratic Tyranny

(Don Boudreaux)

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The Biden administration will use OSHA to impose vaccine mandates or requirements of weekly testing on employees of large firms.

This unprecedented government intervention isn’t the first piece of bitter fruit of Covid Derangement Syndrome, and it won’t be the last. While we Americans aren’t (yet), as a group, as lunatic as are Australians, during the past 18 months we have (1) allowed ourselves to be deceived into believing that a pathogen that poses unusual dangers only to a relatively small minority of us (namely, the very old or ill) is a categorically monstrous threat to all of us; (2) used this disproportionate – and, hence, unwarranted degree of – fear of Covid to excuse not only the exercise by government of unprecedented powers to restrict ordinary familial, social, and economic affairs, but also the unleashing and enforcement of these powers by executive-branch agencies at all levels of government; and (3) as a result, have freed a terrifying genie from a bottle into which it will not return voluntarily and will likely escape all efforts to be stuffed back in.

I have never denied that Covid-19 poses unusually grave dangers for certain people. But I am more convinced now than ever before that the dangers posed by the reaction to Covid are magnitudes larger – and magnitudes more lethal to person, property, and civilization – than not only is Covid in reality, but than Covid would have been even had the absurd predictions of reckless modelers such as Neil Ferguson proven to be accurate.

I’m very glad that tomorrow I’ll turn 63 – meaning that I fortunately won’t live long enough to witness full extent of the damage that civilization will likely suffer as a result of the awful cultural and institutional transformation that’s occurred over the past 18 months.

Exhortations to “Keep Calm” Imply a Reason Not to Keep Calm

(Don Boudreaux)

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This sign – bearing the imprimatur of the CDC – is posted in men’s rooms at Dulles airport (and, I’m confident, also in women’s rooms at that airport). (I took this photo this morning at Dulles.)

So sad… and so annoying. Is it any wonder that so many people continue to behave as if Covid’s dangers are greater than those dangers really are when, in public restrooms, signs exhort individuals to “Keep calm”? The implication of this message is that a terrible danger lurks, ready to strike at any moment – a danger that warrants fear. But, brave traveller, in the face of this monster you must keep calm.