Russell Roberts's Blog, page 237
August 30, 2021
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 63 of one of F.A. Hayek’s most brilliant public lectures, his December 1945 Finlay Lecture delivered at University College, Dublin; it’s titled “Individualism: True and False”; I quote not from the version linked here but, rather, from the version that appears as the “Prelude” to Hayek’s Studies on the Abuse and Decline of Reason, Bruce Caldwell, ed. (2010), which is volume 13 of the Collected Works of F.A. Hayek (footnote deleted; link added):
It is a serious confusion thus to speak of principle when all that is meant is that no principle but only expediency should rule; when everything depends on what authority decrees to be ‘the interests of society’. Principles are a means to prevent clashes between conflicting aims and not a set of fixed ends. Our submission to general principles is necessary because we cannot be guided in our practical action by full knowledge and evaluation of all the consequences. So long as men are not omniscient, the only way in which freedom can be given to the individual is by such general rules to delimit the sphere in which the decision is his. There can be no freedom if the government is not limited to particular kinds of action but can use its powers in any ways which serve particular ends. As Lord Acton pointed out long ago: “Whenever a single definite object is made the supreme end of the State, be it the advantage of a class, the safety or the power of the country, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, or the support of any speculative idea, the State becomes for the time inevitably absolute”.
August 29, 2021
Hidden Inflation?
I’m sitting in a Peet’s coffee shop in Fairfax, VA – a lovely, neighborhood place that I frequented pre-Covid and that I hope to again frequent.
For breakfast, I ordered a ham and swiss sandwich. When it was heated and then served to me in a take-out bag I asked if I could have the sandwich – as I have countless times in the past – served to me instead on a plate so that I can eat it at the table in Peet’s at which I am now working.
The barista politely replied “We don’t do that any more.”
No more dishes to wash. No more having to stock plastic knives and forks (as, indeed, there are now only spoons available at the kiosk where there was once available spoons, knives, and forks). So I ate the hot, somewhat drippy sandwich with my hands. I didn’t enjoy it as much as I would have had I been able to eat it from a plate.
I don’t remember if the nominal price that I paid in 2019 for this sandwich was lower than is the price that I paid today. If not, then it appears that no inflation has affected this sandwich price. That appearance is likely an illusion. The quality of the product is lower than it was in the past. The real price of the product is, therefore, higher. I strongly suspect that this small instance is evidence of hidden inflation.
Some Non-Covid Links
Pierre Lemieux writes wisely about China. A slice:
When the Chinese political authorities imitate Western governments’ interventions, they imitate precisely what has, over a century or so, most undermined the rule of law: antitrust laws, attacks on industries that the state doesn’t like (or whose executives it doesn’t like), mercantilism, investment and trade controls, government surveillance, etc. The Chinese privacy laws are meant to constrain independent businesses, not government agencies.
China has become a deforming mirror of the West, where the state is using corrupted Western ideals to become a worse Leviathan. It remains to be seen whether the US government and other Western governments, as well as the public, will be repulsed by what they see in the Chinese mirror and will rediscover classical-liberal values, or whether they will be led to look more and more like the deformed image they see in the mirror. Thus far, the latter seems to be happening. Another example: the US government and other governments in the West are expanding industrial policy, which has long been proved inefficient and been gradually (if only formally) abandoned, but is now rekindled for the illusory goal of competing with a planned economy under a tyrannical state.
George Will rightly decries the “gaseous talk” of so many government officials. A slice:
Biden has exhorted congressional progressives, who needed no encouragement, to force the most comprehensive peacetime expansion of government in U.S. history. The grandiosity has two dimensions. One is government’s siphoning away of a hitherto unimaginable portion of society’s current and future fiscal resources. The other is a radical revision of the nation’s civic vocabulary by postulating, as in Oregon, that disparities in social outcomes are prima facie evidence of the nation’s endemic viciousness.
According to research published by the JPMorgan Chase & Co. Institute, because of the supplemental $300 a week, 48% of American workers made at least as much in unemployment benefits during the pandemic as they did while working.
Eric Boehm wonders how many union members it takes to operate a freight train.
Matt Welch reports some happy news: “families are fleeing government-run schools.”
Scott Lincicome and Alfredo Carrillo Obregon report some unhappy news. Two slices:
According to numerous reports, skyrocketing global shipping prices and related transportation bottlenecks are hindering the U.S. economic recovery. Indeed, this “shipping crisis” is one of the summer’s most‐covered financial phenomena. Yet barely mentioned outside of a few industry publications is how brand new U.S. tariffs of more than 200 percent(!) are contributing to the problem. And U.S. trade law all but ensures that there’s little we – even the White House itself – can do about it.
…..
However, U.S. trade policy is also likely contributing to the current shipping crunch. In particular, the United States earlier this year imposed extremely high “trade remedy” duties on imports of truck chassis (which are used to haul containerized merchandise around the country) originating in China – by far the largest producer of such products. The duties resulted from antidumping (AD) and countervailing duty (CVD) investigations launched last year by the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) and Department of Commerce (DOC), the latter of which calculated for chassis produced by China International Marine Chassis (CIMC), the world’s largest chassis manufacturer, combined final duty of 221.37 percent (177.05 percent AD and 44.32 percent CVD). These estimated AD/CVD measures now apply to any Chinese chassis imports that have entered the from March 4 on. And they apply on top of the 25 percent tariffs that President Trump imposed on a wide range of Chinese imports in a separate “Section 301” case back in 2018.
Matt Ridley writes about “rewilding.”
Some Covid Links
Paul Alexander, et al., warn against overreaction to the Delta variant. Here’s their conclusion:
We are hearing discussions now about renewed lockdowns and masking etc. due to the Delta variant which has emerged as one of the weakest in terms of lethality while being very transmissible. This greatly concerns us. We are horrified by this prospect and we have shown you the actual data as it relates to Delta, and not the contrived drivel and unscientific nonsense spouted by the mainstream media and the public health experts. There is absolutely no good reason to reenter lockdowns and school closures or masking in response to the Delta variant. We find no evidence that this variant warrants masks in children. We leave you with the words of Donald Henderson:
“Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted. Strong political and public health leadership to provide reassurance and to ensure that needed medical care services are provided are critical elements. If either is seen to be less than optimal, a manageable epidemic could move toward catastrophe.”
Sherelle Jacobs identifies an ominous parallel between the ‘war on terror’ and the ‘war on Covid.’ Here’s her conclusion:
The failure of the war [in Afghanistan] was not just logistical but also intellectual. The neo-conservatism that inspired Bush and Blair was based on decent but vague Enlightenment ideals about human rights and democracy. Though the academic school had spent years advocating America’s unique role in advancing these ideals across the world prior to 9/11, it had made few attempts to interrogate the specific conditions in which they flourish.
Perhaps that is because the neo-con movement was as visceral as it was intellectual – its faith in America’s heroic purpose was partly a revolt against modern liberal society with its vapid nihilism and refusal to take sides. While there was nothing wrong with that impulse, the camp struggled to move beyond a self-confidence that bordered on spiritual. It remains in denial about how catastrophically its lofty theories collided with gritty reality in Afghanistan.
And so it goes that the West shifts from one war to another – or, rather, one simulation to another. The war on terror may be drawing to a close but there is no end in sight to the war on coronavirus. There are differences: this new unfolding epic has a sci-fi flavour and a fresh heroic quest – absolute Safety has relegated absolute Freedom from cause to victim. Still, much is familiar – the Manichean rhetoric, peddled by world leaders and amplified by broadcast media. The open-ended war on a global phenomenon which risks doing more harm than good. An ever-mutating threat that must be not merely minimised, but eliminated.
One can only hope that we are not here again in 20 years once the Covid era has passed, too afraid to ask ourselves what it was all for.
In a recent post in The Beacon, I contemplated whether I should wear a mask to class. Throughout campus, there are signs that say Face Coverings are Expected, but as I noted, not mandated. Classes are now back in session, and that decision was easier than I contemplated.
When I got to campus, few people were wearing masks outside, and many were maskless inside the building. In my classes, only about half of the students wore masks. With half the class unmasked, there seemed to be little point in my wearing one, so I didn’t.
Here’s wisdom shared on Facebook by Phil Magness:
Good reasons to oppose vaccine passports:
– They invite massive government overreach
– They’re likely to be bureaucratic nightmares with TSA levels of effectiveness and incompetence
– They create a medical privacy risk
– Their burdens are inequitable and fall most heavily on poor people and minorities
– They promote and incentivize disease ostracism, which has a long history of atrocities.
– They contain no exceptions for the millions of people who have proven antibody immunity from covid recovery.
Bad reasons to oppose vaccine passports:
– You read somewhere on the internet that vaccines don’t work and/or have high risks of harmful side effects, and therefore don’t want to take the vaccine.
And for more wisdom read this new essay by Karen Harradine. Two slices:
Humans are sociable animals. We are not meant to be locked away in solitary confinement and denied the sight of each other’s faces. To be forcibly separated from our loved ones damages our mental health. Masks dehumanise us and feed fear. Yet lockdowns, social isolation and masks are the weapons of choice for politicians in their lunatic ‘war’ on a virus, despite being detrimental to our health, economy and society.
…..
Politicians have turned Covid-19 into a moral crusade, quasi-religious in nature, creating a doomsday cult. Masks generate fear and help keep the cultish behaviour going. Lockdowns demoralise us, reducing our capacity to resist dangerous authoritarian rule. Defeating the virus is the impossible aim that keeps the cult leaders in business.
Wearing a mask and cheering on lockdowns makes people feel as if they are doing their duty, even if their actions are causing untold damage to themselves and others. All too easily they relinquish their sense of responsibility by saying that they are following government orders. They may not be entirely immune to the gross suffering caused by this but, as cult members are prone to do, they ignore it for the ‘greater good’.
History is littered with the calamitous antics of doomsday cults. Yet we must be the only civilisation in history which thinks we can cheat death on a mass scale, destroying ourselves in the process.
Our political class won’t help us. They are leading this delusion, described by one psychiatrist elsewhere on these pages today as a mass ‘delusional psychosis’. We need, as he also says, to break free from cultish thinking, stop following orders and save ourselves.
TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.)
The singular – and, hence, out-of-context – focus on Covid figures creates mistaken impressions.
“The medical journals are now suppressing and refusing to publish very, very high-quality studies that do not comport with the narrative that they want to push, which is indiscriminate mass vaccinations,” Zywicki argued. “The medical societies and establishment are now threatening to take away the licenses of doctors who they deem to be spreading misinformation about vaccines. … We’re talking about a system of control and censorship that all of these institutions have just fallen in line with.”
The Biden administration is also in on it. U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy recently released a report encouraging Facebook, Twitter, and others to penalize, censor, and surveil COVID dissidents who promote commentary that the establishment deems to be “misinformation.”
Quotation of the Day…
… is from pages 492-493 of the 2011 revised and enlarged edition of Thomas Sowell’s 2009 book Intellectuals and Society (footnote deleted; link added):
The vast disparity in knowledge and understanding between intellectuals and the population at large assumed by the intelligentsia is crucial to the vision of the anointed, whether in discussions of law, economics, race, war or innumerable other issues. But, if the knowledge that is consequential includes a range of mundane information too vast to be known to any given individual – whether among the intellectuals or the masses – then top-down decision-making processes like economic central planning, directed by an intellectual elite, are less promising than market competition, where millions of individual decisions and mutual accommodations bring into play a vastly larger range of consequential knowledge, even if this knowledge is available to each individual in unimpressively small fragments of the total knowledge in society. As Robert L. Bartley of the Wall Street Journal expressed this point of view: “In general, ‘the market’ is smarter than the smartest of its individual participants.”
August 28, 2021
Some Covid Links
Reason‘s Billy Binion reports on an instance of petty Covidocratic tyranny in Washington State.
Our fight today is with different means in a different time, but the threat we face is no less existential. We are fighting for our future and our liberties; and the risks to our personal and professional relations, to our livelihoods, families and children, are very real.
Phil Magness defends Martin Kulldorff:
Kulldorff: “We’re engaged in historically unprecedented ostracism of people over Covid. Ostracizing disease victims is a dangerous ideology.”
Lockdowners: “Nuh uh! We also ostracized gay people over AIDS, immigrants over typhoid, black people over syphilis, Jews over the Black Death, and even people with leprosy during biblical times! There’s nothing new about what we’re doing with Covid, and you just proved that you’re historically ignorant!”
Kulldorff: “Thank you for illustrating my point.”
Perspective – and wisdom that derives from perspective – from James Delingpole in Britain. Two slices:
BRITAIN has just passed the ‘grim milestone’ (copyright the BBC, Channel 4 and every newspaper) of 100,000 Covid deaths.
But I really wouldn’t worry if I were you. The technical term for this fake statisticoid begins with ‘b’ and ends with ‘ollocks’.
The best and easiest way to understand why it’s nonsense is to look at it in the context of overall annual mortality rates. This enables you to find the answer to the only question that really matters: ‘Is the Covid-19 “pandemic” so uniquely, unprecedentedly deadly that it justifies the suspension of civil liberties, the destruction of the world’s sixth largest economy, the crushing of children’s education, the needless deaths of thousands of people with problems other than Covid and the suppression of free speech by the state and its agencies?’
Looking at, say, the ONS figures for ‘Age-standardised mortality rates, deaths per 100,000 of population, England and Wales, 1942-2020’, that answer becomes painfully obvious. Last year, 2020, saw about the same number of deaths per 100,000 people as 2008. But there’s one key difference between those two years. Can you guess what it is?
To help jog your memory, 2008 was the year Britney Spears was stretchered to rehab, Prince Harry was pulled out early from Afghanistan, Beijing hosted the summer Olympics, Wall Street crashed and Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, Barack Obama was elected US president, and terrorists launched that hideous attack on a hotel in Mumbai.
In none of that year’s stories, however, was anyone wearing a face mask (except possibly the terrorists); nor were they held under house arrest known as ‘lockdown’; nor were they forced to quarantine for a fortnight when travelling on holiday; nor were they denied routine surgery, treatment for cancer, or, indeed, their school or university education; nor was the entire media utterly obsessed with any of the viral respiratory bugs going round, killing off old people, as viral respiratory bugs tend to do.
This wasn’t just true of the year 2008, by the way. It was also the case with every year preceding it right back to 1942, which is the earliest one in that particular dataset.
…..
The bigger picture is this: Covid-19 is not a deadly and unprecedented threat to our civilisation. But the overreaction to it is, most definitely.
TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.)
Personally, I find the plandemic theory deeply implausible, indeed ridiculous. For one thing, I don’t believe that a conspiracy on this grand scale, involving so many officials and politicians in so many countries, would have been possible without someone leaking the news, whether before or during the pandemic. I also don’t think the coronapanic debacle has looked anything like a Great Reset. As economies have reopened, they’ve carried on more or less exactly as before, from an environmental perspective. And some governments didn’t shut their economies down in the first place, or they shut them down and then admitted it was a mistake. Plandemic theorists often say “it’s been the same the world over”, but this is simply not true. There have been similarities the world over, but every country has reacted differently to the coronapanic. The one thing every country has in common is that there was a global panic. A global panic about Covid 19 was bound to have some similar effects across nations, especially when governments were under so much pressure from their own citizens. With a few exceptions, governments didn’t want to be the odd one out. They didn’t want to be seen to be allowing millions of their citizens to die. They copied China’s lockdown because public demand for lockdown spread as the panic spread.
…..
It’s also worth noting that the atmosphere among socialists generally in early March 2020 was febrile, certainly if social media is anything to go by. On Twitter, I was defending the government’s efforts to keep the country open. I received an almighty backlash from socialists. They were calling me a selfish murderer, and worse. This backlash is relevant because socialists dominate Britain’s public sector and its unions, as well as academia and the media. And the whole principle behind the lockdown was inherently socialist. Socialists told us we should all be forced by the government to pull together in the collective interest to protect the NHS. The idea that individuals should freely take responsibility – whether for their own health, or for supporting each other – has been taboo throughout the coronapanic debacle, because personal responsibility is always taboo on the left. And what a calamity that taboo always is! Without personal responsibility, society falls apart. During the Covid 19 pandemic, the right thing to do – and the government knew it – was for young and healthy people to take personal responsibility, to go out and face the music, to continue working, to keep the country open, and protect the vulnerable. On March 12, the government started advising vulnerable people not to venture out. Boris made this announcement almost apologetically, as though it was a massive imposition on people’s lives. Of course, much much worse was to come.
On March 16, Professor Neil Ferguson published his ridiculous prediction that 500,000 people could die from Covid 19. The media went ballistic, and the panic shifted up a gear.
Bloomberg now reports that (as this headline reveals) “Previous Covid Prevents Delta Infection Better Than Pfizer Shot.” (DBx: Phil Magness justifiably asked last night on Facebook, in response to this Bloomberg report: “Remember that time, oh, about a week ago when even the slightest suggestion of this was enough for the Covidian crowd to accuse you of being an anti-vaxxer?”)
James Allan, in the once-free country of Australia, asks: “Are our journalists just lazy? Or dumb?” Two slices:
Take one of the Gladys Berejiklian press conferences I watched last week. The questions the journalists asked were all along the lines of ‘why didn’t you lock down harder, sooner, more despotically, with more checks on citizens’ freedoms, more heavy-handed policing than you did?’. All of the journos – every one of them – asked questions along those lines, even the Sky News reporter. There was not a single, solitary question that came from the vantage of ‘hey, maybe you politicians are being a bit heavy-handed about all this; maybe after a half-dozen brutal lockdowns in Victoria this is starting to look like the triumph of hope over experience’. In short, not a note of scepticism of our lockdownista political and chief medical officer caste. Not a fragment of a scintilla of a soupçon! So to say there is something of a market opening here for good old-fashioned hard-nosed, sceptical journalism would not be over-stepping the bounds of the plausible, would it?
…..
Remember, the vaccine helps you ward off death. It does little to stop you catching and spreading it. So why do you care if other people have the vaccine? That’s not a rhetorical question either. What, exactly, is it you as a vaccinated person are missing out on when Joe Blow across the street does not get vaccinated. You can spread Covid as much as he can. You can catch it too. Your odds are better of not dying. So I don’t understand the compulsion to tell Joe he has to vaccinate. Or given what’s come out of Britain and Israel, why the government wants to ban the unvaccinated from events, bars, what have you. You can cut down your chances of dying if you get it (mostly for the elderly, obese and otherwise ill). Make that message clear to people and then leave them to make choices. Isn’t that what a John Stuart Mill liberal government is supposed to be committed to?
And why are our journalists so sheep-like, pro-lockdown, and wholly insouciant about the worst erosions of our civil liberties in this country’s entire existence? The universities churning out these journalists have a lot to answer for.
(DBx: In this last sentence – which is the conclusion of his essay – Mr. Allan hints at what I believe to be the best answer to the question of what explains nearly all the media’s utter failure, and not just in Australia, to report and opine reasonably on Covid: ideology. Most people in the media today are collectivists. Reporters, columnists, and editors simply assume that a society of free and responsible individuals is chaotic and dangerous and can be – and should be – controlled from on-high by experts in the government. Most people in the media today worship the state as a higher power, capable of working miracles. These miracles will be wondrously beneficial if the superhuman powers at the helm of the state are angels, but calamitously detrimental if the superhuman powers at the helm of the state are devils. But that superhuman powers are at the helm of the state, and that social and economic order must be designed and created by the state, are propositions that, to most people today in the media, are as obvious as is the fact that night follows day.)
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 620 of the 1988 collection of Lord Acton’s writings (edited by the late J. Rufus Fears), Essays in Religion, Politics, and Morality; specifically, it’s a note drawn from Acton’s extensive papers at Cambridge University; (I can find no date for this passage):
To be governed not by the Past, but by knowledge of the Past – Different things.
August 27, 2021
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 20 of Deirdre N. McCloskey’s insight-filled 1994 collection, Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics:
The truth about Nazism and the Holocaust is that they came from Western civilization, from its best as from its worst, from academic positivism itself as much as from irrationalism.
DBx: Science is a stupendous monument to human intelligence. It is also an indispensable tool for countless of the tasks that make possible modernity’s marvels. Science is indeed real. But neither human society in general, nor the economy in particular, are machines or processes subject to being improved, or even to be well understood, by the application to them of the methods that have proven so useful in the natural and physical sciences.
Put differently, social and economic problems are not scientific problems. There are two chief, related reasons why these problems aren’t scientific ones. The first reason is that the knowledge necessary for modern society to operate is necessarily dispersed across millions of different minds. For example, no central economic planner can know just how scarce is iron ore relative to bauxite relative to cotton relative to balsa wood relative to human labor relative to….
The second reason is that social and economic problems unavoidably involve individuals’ subjective preferences, including preferences for the bearing of risks. There is no ‘correct’ allocation of resources – no scientifically determinable ‘right’ amount of production of sofas, soap, steel, skyscrapers, supermarkets, and on and on – that is independent of the subjective preferences of millions, even billions, of individuals. Social and economic ‘problems’ have no solutions; they have – as Thomas Sowell frequently reminds us – only tradeoffs.
Put another way, because individual preferences are subjective (and often changing), there is no objectively correct allocation of resources that can be determined and engineered scientifically in the same way that there is an objectively correct ‘solution,’ say, for scientifically determining how to engineer six ounces of clay into a vessel such that the vessel is made to hold the maximum possible amount of liquid that can be held with a vessel engineered out of six ounces of clay.
To insist that society in general, or the economy in particular, should be engineered for the better according to science is not only to reveal a failure to understand the role of science, but also to reveal a failure to understand society and the economy. Humanity is not a science project (and pointing out that humanity is not a science project is not, by any means, to deny or denigrate science). But by mistaking humanity or society or the economy as being a science project, one risks creating hell on earth.
Who’s (Ir)Responsible?
Here’s a letter to a new correspondent:
Dr. L___:
You interpret my opposition to lockdowns and other government-imposed restrictions designed to combat Covid-19 as evidence that I’m “blind to responsibilities which we have to one another.”
Your interpretation is mistaken. Opposition to panic-driven, heavy-handed, one-size-and-style-fits-all, unprecedented government measures meant to protect people from Covid – measures imposed top-down and in contradiction to what was regarded until as recently as 2019 as the best advice of public-health officials – is opposition to this method, not the goal, of promoting public health. My opposition to lockdowns and government-imposed mask and vaccine mandates no more means that I am, as you accuse, “hostile to Covid victims” than does my opposition to minimum-wage legislation mean that I am hostile to low-wage workers.
Just as I believe that minimum wages are a counterproductive means, unleashing a host of unintended ill-consequences, of raising low-skilled workers’ incomes, I believe that lockdowns and other Covid mandates are counterproductive means, unleashing a host of unintended ill-consequences, of promoting public health. Perhaps I’m mistaken in one or both of these cases. But I assure you that my position in neither case signals any indifference on my part to human suffering, or any belief that each of us should be allowed to act irresponsibly toward the rest of us.
The truly irresponsible actors, in my view, are government officials who imposed lockdowns and other mandates. Anthony Fauci, for example, no doubt sincerely pursues the goal of minimizing the spread of SARS-CoV-2. But he does so irresponsibly – by which I mean that he does not, because he cannot with any accuracy, weigh the costs to you, to me, and to each of the hundreds of millions of other of our fellow citizens of being restricted according to his counsel. Dr. Fauci advises tirelessly, but he’s immune to most of the resulting consequences of his advice. Individuals who because of his advice lost their jobs, or who died because of delayed cancer diagnoses, or who watched their children sink into depression suffered directly from Dr. Fauci’s advice, yet he personally suffers from these consequences not at all.
My criticism isn’t so much of Dr. Fauci and other such government officials personally as it is of a system in which responsibility for decision-making is so easily seized from individual men and women, each with his or her own unique knowledge and circumstances, and replaced by commands issued by these officials. I understand – as do most people – that the coronavirus is a dangerous pathogen that’s contagious. But I also understand – as too many people seem to have forgotten – that government power is not only also dangerous, but also in its own manner highly contagious. As the economist Robert Higgs persuasively argues, each expansion of government power – especially when fueled by panic – nourishes itself. And as the state grows, individuals’ abilities truly to act responsibly toward each other withers. And thus is paved a path to hell.
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
Some Covid Links
James Bovard explains that government power weaves no effective safety net that protects well against Covid. Three slices:
There is no “science” to justify prohibiting Australians from going more than 2 miles from their home. But New Zealand and Australia presume that no one will be safe unless government officials have jurisdiction over every breath that citizens take.
In the United States, many of the same pundits and activists who howled about the evils of “microaggressions” are now cheering for the government to forcibly inject everyone with a Covid vaccine. Biden publicly declared that he is checking to see if he has the power to force everyone to get injected.
…..
Politicians’ anti-Covid recommendations increasingly resemble frightened soldiers shooting at any noise they hear in the dark. NIH Director Francis Collins recently condemned the “epidemic of misinformation, disinformation, distrust that is tearing us apart.” But much of the misinformation has stemmed directly from the Biden administration’s flip-flops and fearmongering. On August 3, Collins announced during a CNN interview that “parents of unvaccinated kids should… wear masks” in their own homes. He conceded: “I know that’s uncomfortable, I know it seems weird, but it is the best way to protect your kids.” A few hours later, Collins recanted on Twitter, perhaps after other political appointees persuaded him to stop sounding like a blithering idiot.
…..
Faith in absolute power is not “science” – regardless of how many scientists pledge allegiance to Washington in return for federal funding. As historian John M. Barry, author of The Great Influenza, observed, “When you mix politics and science, you get politics.” There is no safety in submission to damn fools, regardless of their pompous titles.
While I dislike el gato malo’s refusal to capitalize, he more than makes up for this distracting tic by consistently offering excellent insights. (HT Dan Klein) A slice:
sweden did very little to try to stop covid. they did not lock down, they did not wear masks, they closed few businesses, they left most schools open, undistanced, in person, and unmaksed.
many have endlessly screamed that “well look at the covid deaths! it was a disaster!” but here’s the thing: it wasn’t.
sweden has one of the most aggressive covid counting methodologies in the world. they tested a lot and then called any death for any reason within 30 days of a positive covid test a covid death.
get sick, recover, get hit by a bus? covid death
test positive, have no symptoms, die of a drug overdose? covid death.
die of cancer in hospital, test positive for trace covid? covid death.
you get the picture.
this definitional issue has made it very hard to compare to other places.
but even with this huge definitional issue, they outperformed the US, especially since last summer.
Meanwhile, in the once-free country but now dystopian Gehenna that is Australia…. (HT Todd Zywicki)
Guy de la Bédoyère decries the disaster now unfolding in Australia. A slice:
The individual states are asserting their autonomy and doing so with ever more strident bio-authoritarian measures, some buying deeper into zero-Covid. The destruction of individual freedoms in Australia and the epic speed with which that has happened has no parallel in the modern world in a modern democratic state. Yes, I know these have been hitherto widely welcomed by Australians, but you’d have to be spectacularly naïve to think that such support will necessarily be sustained. In 1943, Germany was full of people who fanatically supported the Nazis. Two years later the country was full of people shaking their heads and wondering what on Earth they’d been thinking.
Reporting from the Covidocracy-run Australia is the Institute of Public Afffairs’s Gideon Rozner. Three slices:
Yes, everything you’ve heard about Australia and coronavirus is true.
Yes, the entire city of Greater Sydney has been in full lockdown since late June, at which time there were 82 cases in the entire state of New South Wales. Not 82 deaths, not 82 hospitalisations – 82 cases. At the time the latest lockdown was announced here in Melbourne, the total active case count was six. And no, the lockdowns aren’t working – cases are rising steadily in both states.
Yes, the premier of Victoria used a press conference to admonish people for watching the sunset on the beach and has put rules in place that mean you can take your mask off to sip your coffee but not your beer.
…..
Yes, police in Melbourne forced a hunger relief charity to shut its doors three hours early because they thought the traffic into the warehouse was creating a “risk to public safety”. Yes, this week a rural town council decided that a planned transfer of dogs from its animal shelter to another town wasn’t worth the potential health hazard and had the dogs shot instead.
Yes, we Australians know you don’t understand it. We don’t either, if we’re being honest with ourselves. But collectively, we can’t quite bring ourselves to say out loud what a growing number of us are thinking – that our de facto national goal of zero Covid is not only impossible, but that it is also destroying us.
…..
When Australia – thank goodness – made it through 2020 with the lowest per capita Covid deaths of almost any country in the developed world, our opportunistic political class took all the credit, and confected a kind of Australian Covid exceptionalism. For all the pain, inconvenience and misery of lockdowns, we had succeeded in keeping coronavirus out of the country. That’s how our leaders can keep a straight face as they persist with the political fiction that Australia is “the envy of the world” at a time when those overseas are increasingly looking to us as a cautionary tale.
Well, let’s take the data most frequently used on vaccination rates at the county level, which has been heavily publicized in outlets such as the New York Times and Washington Post. For the sake of comparison, let’s use the dataset of Tom Pepinsky at Cornell University which has been assembled from multiple sources to properly match county vaccination rates with demographic data for these counties (his analysis is here). That data does indeed show that counties with larger Trump margins have lower vaccination rates. However, not all counties are the same. For example, Loving County (TX) voted 90% for Trump. It also has 64 people as of the 2020 census. Meanwhile, Los Angeles County (the most populous in America) voted 75% for Biden. Would we be crazy enough to say the vaccination rate in both places speak to the same thing? Few would!
A report by the National Children’s Bureau previously said that families of children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) felt they were “forgotten” in the response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Many therapies and essential services they relied on were withdrawn and have not fully returned.
The NICCY report draws attention to the widespread suspension of services and their effect on children.
Many face-to-face services in early years, for children aged 0-3 and their families, were suspended.
Russell Roberts's Blog
- Russell Roberts's profile
- 39 followers
