Russell Roberts's Blog, page 233
September 9, 2021
In Praise of Laissez Faire
But even many economists whose introduction to economics was as splendid as was my own are nevertheless reluctant to endorse laissez-faire policies. I’m sure that the reasons for this reality are many, including even simple differences in personalities. Yet I suspect that many economists’ reluctance, shall we say, ‘to go full Friedman’ springs ironically from a deep appreciation – an appreciation no less real than my own – of the marvels of self-regulating market processes.
Once you firmly grasp the logic of market processes, and then compare the operation of real-world markets to the operation of real-world government interventions, the case for nearly all government intervention is revealed as dreadfully weak. The appropriate role for government in the economy shrinks to a pinpoint. But for many economists, I think, this conclusion is unacceptable psychologically. Such a conclusion feels too radical. Anyone who embraces it positions himself or herself very far from friends and family members – from the norm in polite society.
Can the vast majority of men and women be so far off in their assessments of markets and in their confidence in government officials? “Surely not” is an understandable answer. “The strong case for allowing markets in almost all cases to self-regulate, rather than displacing such regulation with government-issued commands, must reflect a bias created by immersion in the economic way of thinking.”
Likely also at work is a related factor – namely, the natural desire to fit in. Because the typical non-economist today thinks it lunatic, say, to do away with antitrust statutes, to abolish the Food and Drug Administration, to eliminate occupational-licensing restrictions, to get rid of legislated minimum wages, to repeal all protective tariffs, and to separate school and state, the economist is reluctant to mention in polite company that he or she sees potential merit in such policy moves. The reticence borne from such reluctance too easily is eventually transformed into a conviction that the general public must be correct in its rejection of laissez faire.
Some Covid Links
Better late than never, I suppose, for Bill Gates.
Good for Laura Dodsworth for resisting Covidocratic hysteria.
Alex Starling decries the pathetically poor reporting on Covid-19.
Covid Derangement Syndrome is literally causing starvation in Vietnam. (DBx: But I reckon that that’s okay, for we all now know that no fate is as bad as coming into contact with the Covid monster.)
Here’s an interview Gigi Foster, a co-author of The Great Covid Panic.
Shahar Hameiri and Tom Chodor ask: “What’s the point of Australia?” A slice:
Australia no longer seems to function like a country and Australian citizenship has been largely drained of legal and practical meaning.
Thousands of Australian citizens remain stranded abroad, unable to return due to strict caps on spots in hotel quarantine, which are set by state governments. Frequent domestic border closures — also decided by state governments — have effectively fragmented Australia into eight separate countries. Last month, Australians were treated to the surreal spectacle of the Australian Defence Force patrolling the border between Queensland and New South Wales.
Across the country, citizens have discovered that reserve powers are largely the prerogative of state governments, and are being exercised in ways that routinely exclude other states’ residents, as if they were foreign nationals. For example, Western Australia now requires that people living in New South Wales have at least one shot of the Covid vaccine to enter the state. In one of the most callous examples of exclusionary state politics in practice, last year the Queensland government denied a 14-year-old double-lung transplant patient from NSW access to his specialist doctor, declaring that Queensland hospitals were for Queenslanders.
John Ioannidis writes wisely about Covid and the hysterical and unscientific overreaction to it. (HT Martin Kulldorff) Two slices:
In the past I had often fervently wished that one day everyone would be passionate and excited about scientific research. I should have been more careful about what I had wished for. The crisis caused by the lethal COVID-19 pandemic and by the responses to the crisis have made billions of people worldwide acutely interested and overexcited about science. Decisions pronounced in the name of science have become arbitrators of life, death, and fundamental freedoms. Everything that mattered was affected by science, by scientists interpreting science, and by those who impose measures based on their interpretations of science in the context of political warfare.
One problem with this new mass engagement with science is that most people, including most people in the West, had never been seriously exposed to the fundamental norms of the scientific method. The Mertonian norms of communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism have unfortunately never been mainstream in education, media, or even in science museums and TV documentaries on scientific topics.
…..
Disinterestedness suffered gravely. In the past, conflicted entities mostly tried to hide their agendas. During the pandemic, these same conflicted entities were raised to the status of heroes. For example, Big Pharma companies clearly produced useful drugs, vaccines, and other interventions that saved lives, though it was also known that profit was and is their main motive. Big Tobacco was known to kill many millions of people every year and to continuously mislead when promoting its old and new, equally harmful, products. Yet during the pandemic, requesting better evidence on effectiveness and adverse events was often considered anathema. This dismissive, authoritarian approach “in defense of science” may sadly have enhanced vaccine hesitancy and the anti-vax movement, wasting a unique opportunity that was created by the fantastic rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines. Even the tobacco industry upgraded its reputation: Philip Morris donated ventilators to propel a profile of corporate responsibility and saving lives, a tiny fraction of which were put at risk of death from COVID-19 because of background diseases caused by tobacco products.
Other potentially conflicted entities became the new societal regulators, rather than the ones being regulated. Big Tech companies, which gained trillions of dollars in cumulative market value from the virtual transformation of human life during lockdown, developed powerful censorship machineries that skewed the information available to users on their platforms. Consultants who made millions of dollars from corporate and government consultation were given prestigious positions, power, and public praise, while unconflicted scientists who worked pro bono but dared to question dominant narratives were smeared as being conflicted. Organized skepticism was seen as a threat to public health. There was a clash between two schools of thought, authoritarian public health versus science—and science lost.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from pages 266-267 of Richard W. Duesenberg’s insightful 1962 article “Individualism and Corporations” (available without charge on-line here) as it appears in Liberty Fund’s 1981 single-volume collection of the New Individualist Review:
And yet, the very vastness and complexity of individuality is the strongest support for individualism as a political and economic creed. No single mind can know all of history, all of biology, all of the myriads of desires of a single person in any one of a multitude of circumstances, let alone all of these and more combined. Yet, it is the assumption that this is possible, or nearly possible, which underlies much collectivistic thought.
I regret that this vogue of planners and bureaucratic demagogues includes many college and university professors who seem either to miscomprehend freedom’s heritage or to be obsessed with visions of themselves as administrative princes.
September 8, 2021
Are You a Racist?
John Stossel, in this video featuring John McWhorter, exposes many of the inane presumptions – indeed, the mindless religious fundamentalism – of the intellectually and ethically comatose ‘woke’ crowd.
Some Non-Covid Links
Art Carden writes about incentives, institutions, and intentions. A slice:
Prices are crucial: every price represents a momentary social consensus about a good’s best use. The consensus is momentary because people act on a steady stream of new ideas about how to use what. A quick glance at Amazon suggests I could get organic whole-wheat flour for fourteen cents a pound. Right now, someone, somewhere might be ordering organic whole-wheat flour for fourteen cents a pound because she thinks she can use a bunch of other assets to turn each fourteen-cent pound of flour into twenty cents worth of baked bread. I, on the other hand, am abstaining from buying the flour because at this very moment I think the best use of my time and money is “saving in anticipation of retirement or emergency” rather than baking bread. The price of fourteen cents a pound transmits crucial information, and both the aspiring baker and the economist act on that information with reference to the rest of their knowledge about “the particular circumstances of time and place.”
Writing on Labor Day, John Barry wonders why there is no “Free Enterprise Day.”
“Taxes? What Taxes?” asks my intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy.
Great news! Homeschooling is easier than ever (reports J.D. Tuccille).
Three things are weakening the grid. One is the rush to add renewable energy sources such as wind and solar, which depend on amenable weather to function. Second, over the past few years, numerous coal and nuclear plants that provide baseload power and help keep the grid stable have closed. Third, regional transmission organizations such as Ercot in Texas and Caiso in California are mismanaging the system. They are not providing enough incentives to ensure reliability such as providing payments to generators that have on-site fuel storage.
Renewable energy promoters don’t want to admit that wind and solar are undermining the grid. But the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, a nonprofit trade group, said in a report last month that “changing resource mix” is the most urgent challenge for reliability. The group says America’s electric generation capacity “is increasingly characterized as one that is sensitive to extreme, widespread, and long duration temperatures as well as wind and solar droughts.”
Some Covid Links
Peter Earle writes wisely about plausible long-run consequences of the 2020-2021 gargantuan disruption of society. Here’s his conclusion:
If not merely a cathartic response to the cessation of what has been a confusing, stressful, and financially challenging year-and-a-half for tens of millions, the Great Reconsideration of work, life, and self-actualization is likely to resonate vastly beyond the coming months. The net of the costs and benefits, as well as the minutiae of such changes in views towards work, will have to be assessed over time. And among other contexts, one within which it must be scrutinized is the weighty impact of unintended, while clearly foreseeable, consequences of stay-at-home orders, lockdowns, and other pandemic countermeasures.
gatito bueno draws from history a lesson about today.
Here’s yet another excerpt from Gigi Foster’s, Michael Baker’s, and Paul Frijters’s new book, The Great Covid Panic. A slice from this excerpt:
What made matters worse is that both scientific journals and the general public are more interested in spectacular claims than in mundane ones. Journals have a strong incentive to publish papers claiming there is a big problem, as long as those papers are based on verifiable data and can therefore be defended. Whether those initial data are representative, or whether the conclusions others are likely to draw from a paper’s headline result are reasonable, are simply not questions that journals normally have to worry about. On the contrary, the more controversy the better, as long as a defence is at hand for any spectacular published claim.
The teams of scientists running journals simply don’t care that mere mortals, which is to say the rest of humanity, use the words in their papers differently. They dismiss others as ignorant if they do not make the effort to absorb all the subtleties about what particular words mean when used in that particular journal. Yet truly understanding those subtleties would involve years of study, which is not reasonable to demand of others. Their disinterest in assigning to words the same meaning as others assign to them leads to the rest of the population, including other scientists, being misled.
Hubris and a taste of power during the Great Fear led to a further perversion of truth, inflicted by scientists themselves. The epidemiologists asked to advise governments almost invariably admitted that what they were advocating was only based on their projections of Covid cases and Covid deaths, devoid of any analysis of the effects these actions would have on public health, the economy, education and other important aspects of life. They nonetheless had no problem advocating lockdowns and other draconian measures. Some hedged their bets by saying it was the government’s job to generate advice on the broader costs and benefits of these measures to society, while some failed to even mention the likely existence of such other costs and benefits.
The editors of The Lancet, the journal that published the earliest studies on Covid, were particularly guilty of jumping the gun. They simply assumed that copying the Chinese lockdowns was useful and worth the costs. In an editorial of March 3rd 2020, the editors boldly wrote ‘High-income countries, now facing their own outbreaks, must take reasoned risks and act more decisively. They must abandon their fears of the negative short-term public and economic consequences that may follow from restricting public freedoms as part of more assertive infection control measures.’
Matt Ridley dismantles the theory peddled by many environmentalists of Covid’s origins. A slice:
Climate scientists are nothing if not flexible, so a study by Cambridge University earlier this year purported to blame the pandemic not on the usual suspect of a decrease in vegetation-stressing bats, but on the opposite: an increase in vegetation leading to a greater diversity of bats in southern China. This is because the data shows that the climate there is very slightly warmer in winter (though not in summer) and wetter in summer than it was a century ago. The only problem with this study, I was astonished to find when I read it carefully, was that it used models to estimate the impact both of climate change on vegetation, and of vegetation changes on bat diversity, rather than actual data. It was models all the way down. This did not stop the media reporting the results as if they were facts. But note that the argument was the very opposite of the green grandees’ one: industrial emissions have made southern China more hospitable to bats.
“Young adults’ lung function is not affected by Covid, researchers find“.
Allison Pearson decries the irrational passion to vaccinate children against Covid. A slice:
Throughout the pandemic, the Government has justified its actions by claiming to be following “the science”. When the science turned out to be too cautious to give its consent to a pre-agreed course of action, they had to hastily come up with a different sort of evidence. Funny that closing schools and the damage it causes to children’s mental health never seemed to bother Professor Whitty when he was endorsing lockdowns and, er, closing schools. It brings to mind Groucho Marx’s slippery assertion: “Those are my principles and, if you don’t like them… well, I have others.”
As a mum, I understand why parents would be tempted to give consent for their teen to get jabbed. After 16 months of doing the Covid Hokey Cokey – in out, in out – and watching happy, confident offspring grow anxious and despondent, it’s such a relief to see kids get back to normal at school this week. Anything, literally anything, to avoid having your child’s education disrupted again, you might think.
But you’d be wrong. Parents and children are being bribed, almost threatened, to agree to a treatment which Professor Adam Finn of the JCVI says the latest data, from paediatric cardiologists in the States, suggests may have long-term side effects. It’s outrageous. “If you don’t let your 13-year-old have the vaccine, and cases spike, we may have to shut the schools again.” That’s what they’re basically saying, but it’s simply not true. Other European countries didn’t close schools for as long as we did; some barely shut them at all.
“Vietnam man jailed for five years for spreading coronavirus“. (DBx: When I use the term “Covid Derangement Syndrome,” I have in mind consequences of Covid hysteria such as this one – consequences explicable only if protection against Covid is the only goal worth pursuing until we’ve reached zero Covid.)
TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.)
Also on Fauci is Jay Bhattacharya, at Twitter:
Dr. Fauci’s support for gain-of-function research represented enormously poor judgment. The same is true for his blindness to the harms of lockdowns.
At Facebook, Phil Magness offers this important reminder of a plausible reality:
The CDC/NIH/Fauci-backed pause of the J&J vaccine did more to invigorate vaccine hesitancy in the US than any other factor.
Autor, Boudreaux, and Henderson Converging
David Autor responded in a comment at EconLog to this recent letter of mine in which I was critical of a point that he made in his September 4th, 2021, New York Times essay on labor supply and wages. I posted that letter both here at Cafe Hayek and in the comments section at EconLog.
Prof. Autor’s response is fair and welcome. Some welfare payments – most notably, the earned income-tax credit – can actually increase the labor supply and, thus, lower the wages that employers of low-skilled workers pay to these workers. In my letter I ignored this possibility. What especially caught my eye in Prof. Autor’s New York Times piece was his mention of “Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps” – each of which decreases the supply of labor (at least in a non-literally-subsistence economy such as ours). While it’s true that Prof. Autor also mentioned refundable tax credits as among the means-tested sources of income available to poor Americans, he included it in a longer list of these other sources – other sources that, again, decrease the supply of labor.
Earlier in his NYT essay Prof. Autor expressed skepticism that very generous unemployment benefits reduce people’s willingness to work. This skepticism suggests a belief that the supply of low-skilled labor is rather unresponsive to changes in government welfare. After all, if the amount of labor that people supply remains largely unchanged when government payments for not working rise, the amount of labor that people supply should remain largely unchanged when government payments for working rise. (For the record, I believe that availability of such government payments has a substantial impact on the labor supply.)
When Prof. Autor wrote, in his NYT essay, that “one reason companies can pay such low wages is that you’re [the taxpayer is] paying for the things their low-wage workers can’t afford,” I assumed that he believes that the source of these artificially low wages is workers’ willingness to settle for lower wages because taxpayers are paying for much of what these workers consume. My assumption here makes sense given that Prof. Autor seemed to rule out welfare payments affecting wages by shifting the supply curve of labor. Put aside Prof. Autor’s expressed skepticism that the recent surge in unemployment benefits reduce the labor supply. Even with that, I would have been less likely to misconstrue him as believing that the labor supply is unresponsive to government welfare had he pointed out that, while programs such as the EITC might increase the labor supply, programs such as Medicare and food stamps decrease it. Yet again, as his NYT piece reads, there’s no indication that Prof. Autor attributes changes in workers’ wages to changes in the supply of labor brought about by government welfare payments. He mentioned only an impact on wages.
Nevertheless, the good news is that David Autor and I – and David Henderson, for that matter – are converging. Prof. Autor agrees that increased government welfare paid to people for not working reduces the amount of labor supplied at each wage. That’s what I take from his statement that “other forms of non-contingent benefits may shift it [the supply curve] the other way.” I’m genuinely happy to be corrected in my understanding of Prof. Autor’s meaning. I apologize for this misunderstanding. My defense is that I’d have been less likely to slip into this misunderstanding had he, early in his NYT piece, not suggested that labor supply is largely unresponsive to government welfare payments, and, later in his piece, indicated his awareness that programs such as the EITC can increase the supply of labor and that other government programs, such as food stamps, can decrease it. Again, as his NYT piece reads, the most we learn about Prof. Autor’s belief about the effect of government welfare payment on the supply of labor is that that effect is negligible. It’s good to see that Prof. Autor thinks this effect could be substantial and that his reason for not pointing this effect out was space limitations.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from pages 144-145 of the late Shirley Robin Letwin’s 1976 Hillsdale College address, “The Morality of the Free Man,” as it appears in Champions of Freedom (Vol. 3, 1976); here, Letwin means by “gentleman” anyone who is guided in his or her personal conduct and outlook by what Deirdre McCloskey describes as the bourgeois virtues:
The second, and to some the most surprising, of the gentleman’s virtues is his diffidence. It is not like the more traditional virtue of humility because it carries no connotation of unworthiness or inferiority. Diffidence is rather an unfailing, pervasive awareness of the limitations of all human reason, of even any number of human minds, and especially of one’s own. The gentleman’s diffidence follows from recognizing that he can never see all around his constantly changing world.
DBx: Beautifully said.
The world could use a great deal more such gentlemanliness and gentlewomanliness.
September 7, 2021
Eradication of Covid Is a Dangerous and Expensive Fantasy
Here’s the full text of Jay Bhattacharya’s and my August 5th, 2021, Wall Street Journal op-ed on the dangerous folly of a policy of zero Covid:
Eradication of Covid Is a Dangerous and Expensive Fantasy
It seemed to work in New Zealand and Australia, but now ruinous, oppressive lockdowns are back.
By Jay Bhattacharya and Donald J. Boudreaux
Aug. 4, 2021 6:16 pm ET
Much of the pathology underlying Covid policy arises from the fantasy that it is possible to eradicate the virus. Capitalizing on pandemic panic, governments and compliant media have used the lure of zero-Covid to induce obedience to harsh and arbitrary lockdown policies and associated violations of civil liberties.
Among all countries, New Zealand, Australia and especially China have most zealously embraced zero-Covid. China’s initial lockdown in Wuhan was the most tyrannical. It infamously locked people into their homes, forced patients to take untested medications, and imposed 40-day quarantines at gunpoint.
On March 24, 2020, New Zealand imposed one of the most onerous lockdowns in the free world, with sharp restrictions on international travel, business closures, a prohibition on going outside, and official encouragement of citizens to snitch on neighbors. In May 2020, having hit zero-Covid, New Zealand lifted lockdown restrictions, except quarantines for international travelers and warrantless house searches to enforce lockdown.
Australia also took the zero-Covid route. While the initial steps focused on banning international travel, the lockdowns there also involved closed schools, occasional separation of mothers from premature newborns, brutal suppression of protests, and arrests for wandering more than 3 miles from home.
New Zealand’s and Australia’s temporary achievement of zero-Covid and China’s claimed success were greeted with fanfare by the media and scientific journals. China’s authoritarian response seemed so successful—despite the country’s record of lying about the virus—that panicked democratic governments around the world copied it. The three countries lifted their lockdowns and celebrated.
Then, when Covid came back, so did the lockdowns. Each government has had multiple opportunities to glory in achieving zero-Covid by hairshirt. Australia’s current lockdowns in Sydney are now enforced by military patrols alongside strict warnings from health officials against speaking with neighbors. After Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that the U.K. must “learn to live with” the virus, New Zealand’s minister for Covid-19 response, Chris Hipkins, imperiously responded, “That’s not something that we have been willing to accept in New Zealand.”
Humanity’s unimpressive track record of deliberately eradicating contagious diseases warns us that lockdown measures, however draconian, can’t work. Thus far, the number of such diseases so eliminated stands at two—and one of these, rinderpest, affected only even-toed ungulates. The lone human infectious disease we’ve deliberately eradicated is smallpox. The bacterium responsible for the Black Death, the 14th-century outbreak of bubonic plague, is still with us, causing infections even in the U.S.
While the eradication of smallpox—a virus 100 times as deadly as Covid—was an impressive feat, it shouldn’t be used as a precedent for Covid. For one thing, unlike smallpox, which was carried only by humans, SARS-CoV-2 is also carried by animals, which some hypothesize can spread the disease to humans. We will need to rid ourselves of dogs, cats, mink, bats and more to get to zero.
For another, the smallpox vaccine is incredibly effective at preventing infection and severe disease, even after exposure to disease, with protection lasting five to 10 years. The Covid vaccines are far less effective at preventing spread.
And smallpox eradication required a concerted global effort lasting decades and unprecedented cooperation among nations. Nothing like this is possible today, especially if it requires a perpetual lockdown in every country on earth. That’s simply too much to ask, especially of poor countries, where lockdowns have proved devastatingly harmful to public health. If even one nonhuman reservoir or a single country or region that fails to adopt the program, zero-Covid would fail.
The costs of any eradication program are immense and must be justified before the government pursues such a goal. These costs include a sacrifice of non-health-related goods and services and other health priorities—forgone prevention and treatment of other diseases. The consistent failure of government officials to recognize the harms of lockdowns—often citing the precautionary principle—disqualifies Covid as a candidate for eradication.
The only practical course is to live with the virus in the same way that we have learned to live over millennia with countless other pathogens. A focused protection policy can help us cope with the risk. There is a thousand-fold difference in the mortality and hospitalization risk posed by virus to the old relative to the young. We now have good vaccines that have helped protect vulnerable people from the ravages of Covid wherever they have been deployed. Offering the vaccine to the vulnerable everywhere, not the failed lockdowns, should be the priority to save lives.
We live with countless hazards, each of which we could but sensibly choose not to eradicate. Automobile fatalities could be eradicated by outlawing motor vehicles. Drowning could be eradicated by outlawing swimming and bathing. Electrocution could be eradicated by outlawing electricity. We live with these risks not because we’re indifferent to suffering but because we understand that the costs of zero-drowning or zero-electrocution would be far too great. The same is true of zero-Covid.
Dr. Bhattacharya is a professor of medicine at Stanford and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Mr. Boudreaux is a professor of economics at George Mason University.
Some Covid Links
The story ran under the headline: “Patients overdosing on ivermectin backing up rural Oklahoma hospitals, ambulances.” It was quickly picked up by national news outlets, such as Rolling Stone, Newsweek, and the New York Daily News. Numerous high-profile media figures, including MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, tweeted about ivermectin overdoses straining Oklahoma hospitals—the implication being that the right-wing embrace of a crank COVID-19 cure was dangerous not only for the people who consumed it but for the stability of the entire medical system.
It was a story that appeared to confirm many of the mainstream media’s biases about the recklessness of the rubes. But it’s extremely misleading. There is, in fact, little reason to believe a purported strain on Oklahoma hospitals is caused by ivermectin overdoses; one hospital served by the doctor quoted in the KFOR article released a statement saying it has not treated any ivermectin overdoses, nor has it been forced to turn away patients.
This is yet another example of the mainstream media lazily circulating a narrative that flatters the worldview of the liberal audience, without bothering to check on any of the details. Additional reporting was sorely needed here, and has now completely undermined the central point of the story.
In 2008 the ACLU issued a study whose authors warned against responding to pandemics with measures that “trade liberty for security.” (HT David Shane) A slice:
American history contains vivid reminders that grafting the values of law enforcement and national security onto public health is both ineffective and dangerous. Too often, fears aroused by disease and epidemics have justified abuses of state power. Highly discriminatory and forcible vaccination and quarantine measures adopted in response to outbreaks of the plague and smallpox over the past century have consistently accelerated rather than slowed the spread of disease, while fomenting public distrust and, in some cases, riots.
The lessons from history should be kept in mind whenever we are told by government officials that “tough,” liberty-limiting actions are needed to protect us from dangerous diseases.
Freddie Sayers decries the reckless reaction to Covid. A slice:
A dangerous new wisdom is forming, which views action as always better than inaction. It is reinforced by a popular narrative about the pandemic, that our errors were mostly in acting too slowly and deliberating too much. In this view, long-standing rules and institutions of liberal democracies have been demoted to fussy obstacles that prevent us from replicating the successes of the command-and-control governments of Asia.
But action can be every bit as damaging as inaction. Ask Matt Hancock, whose action-hero emptying [in Britain] of hospitals at the start of the pandemic certainly made things worse; or the Indians whose lives were upturned by their government’s pointless and draconian early lockdown.
Joanna Williams wonders where is the outrage over vaccine passports.
Also from Joanna Williams is this lament of the push to vaccinate children against Covid. A slice:
But one distinction between children and adults has, until now, held tight: adults, collectively, are supposed to protect children, and not the other way around. Sadly, coronavirus seems to have put paid even to this most basic moral certainty. It has become acceptable for adults to demand that children act to protect them. This shameful state of affairs turns traditional moral values on their head.
The latest example of this role reversal can be seen in the pressure to vaccinate healthy children against Covid despite almost complete agreement that the vaccine is of little medical benefit to them. As vaccinated children will still be able to transmit the virus, the sole purpose of the proposed roll-out seems to be to make teenagers provide psychological reassurance to fretful adults.
Peter Gregory is appalled by the “madness” of Australia’s Covid restrictions. A slice:
Now let’s look at sunny Queensland. In January, the state’s health authorities made it compulsory to wear a mask while driving alone. Health minister Yvette D’Ath explained the reasoning as follows: ‘We want clear, concise instructions for everyone to follow… So if you put on your mask as soon as you leave the front door – no questions, no exceptions – then that’s much easier to follow.’ This certainly reveals the health authorities’ low view of people’s intelligence. If they don’t trust Queenslanders to operate a mask, why trust Queenslanders to operate a car?
Australia’s most populous state, New South Wales, is not immune to such absurdity, either. In July, chief health officer Dr Kerry Chant provided the ultimate excuse, in the name of tackling Covid, for ignoring people you don’t want to talk to: ‘If you run into your nextdoor neighbour, in the shopping centre, at Coles or Aldi or any other grocery shop, don’t start up a conversation.’
TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.) (HT Martin Kulldorff)
Here’s another excerpt from Gigi Foster’s, Michael Baker’s, and Paul Frijters’s new book, The Great Covid Panic: A slice from this excerpt:
In 1841, the poet Charles Mackay authored the book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds in which he describes what he learned from watching cities, villages and countries in times of war, illness, religious and ideological fanaticism. His key message to the future is embodied in this quote: ‘Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.’ Earlier and later writers said similar things. We take Mackay’s pronouncement to be an empirical claim that once a crowd has lasted for a while, it will not dissolve in a bang, but slowly.
Jeffrey Tucker is understandably distressed by the fall of intellectual heroism . A slice:
The lockdown upheaval has affected every aspect of life, including intellectual life. People we did not know have become some of the most passionate and informative voices against government measures. People who otherwise would never have entered public life on this topic felt a moral conviction to stand up and speak. Martin Kulldorff and Lord Sumption come to mind – serious men who could easily have sat this one out. Some prominent voices have shown themselves willing to rethink in real time. Matt Ridley, after an initial bout of alarmism, gradually came around.
Other trusted voices such as Michael Lewis stumbled very badly. He and Chomsky are hardly alone. The topic of public health in the presence of a pathogen has disoriented many intellectuals I’ve followed for years. Some are silent either out of fear or confusion, and others have faltered. They have allowed panic to overcome rationality, been overly glued to the television screen, demonstrated overreliance on some “experts” while lacking curiosity to look further, and otherwise downplayed the carnage that has come from lockdowns and mandates.
Some of these people have found themselves thoroughly confused about what government should and should not do in times of pandemic, while completely ignoring the dangers of granting so many new powers to a ruling class.
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