Russell Roberts's Blog, page 243

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Christian Britschgi understandably decries politicians’ and bureaucrats’ addiction to imposing arbitrary Covid-19 restrictions. A slice:

The power to make people wear masks even when it’s safe not to has been tough for pols and bureaucrats to give up. Consider Brookline, Massachusetts. The city of 60,000 made a point in early May of retaining its outdoor mask mandate, even as Republican Gov. Charlie Baker lifted an identical state-level restriction in response to federal public health guidance saying it was no longer necessary.

Eric Boehm understandably bemoans the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s mission-creep – which now has this agency warning of the potential dangers posed by people who complain about public-health measures.

Barry Brownstein warns of the tyranny lurking in those who abandon the scientific method and mindset in order to impose what they arrogantly believe to be their scientific ‘Truths.’ Two slices:

Dr. Fauci is not a superforecaster. There is little evidence that he works in “perpetual beta,” gathering and synthesizing perspectives. On the contrary, he attacks those he disagrees with, such as the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration. Real leaders listen to others; they don’t dominate others.
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During this pandemic, open-mindedness, self-criticism, and the gathering and synthesizing of perspectives have been actively resisted. The “official” version on lockdowns, masks, and vaccines cannot be questioned. The news and social media actively censor opinions contrary to the “official” version, calling it misinformation. Treating Covid patients with ivermectin has been made very difficult.

And now the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) is setting a policy to keep doctors in line with the “official” versions of health authorities. The FSMB has stated, due “to a dramatic increase in the dissemination of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation and disinformation by physicians and other health care professionals on social media platforms, online and in the media,” strict action is needed. They warn, “Physicians who willfully generate and spread COVID-19 vaccine misinformation or disinformation are risking disciplinary action by state medical boards, including the suspension or revocation of their medical license.”

President and CEO Humayun Chaudhry of the FSMB ominously added, “I hope that physicians and other licensees get the message.”

Paul Collits writes about the “Covid Commonwealth of Australia” – and the hard tyranny there on the loose against even free expression.

Evan Mulholland reports, from Australia, on the media’s addiction to panic porn. Two slices:

COVID-19 in Australia has a survivability rate of over 99%, and it’s hard to justify the same fears now that we experienced at the beginning of the pandemic.

Yet our mainstream media have continued to engage in irresponsible catastrophism.

The people of New South Wales understand this too. According to new Institute of Public Affairs polling of over 1,000 NSW residents undertaken between 24-28 July, 59% of respondents believe the media have been alarmist in its reporting on the COVID-19 situation in Sydney, only 21% disagree.

And yet, the media’s hunger for clicks has driven them to become even more irresponsible and alarmist in their reporting of COVID-19.

Take for example, this article by 7 News from the 20th of July, which featured the headline “AMA President says Sydney could be locked down ‘indefinitely’ as outbreak continues” accompanying the article was an alarmist image of a gloomy Sydney harbour and CBD being swarmed from the air by giant COVID-19 cells, depicting some sort of War of the Worlds scenario.
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But part of the blame must be borne by Australia’s media class, who in the chase for revenue, clicks and attention have absolutely terrified the Australian people into submission.

It’s the encouragement of politicians and endless fearmongering from the media that means a vaccinated mother can’t visit her daughter going through chemotherapy or healthy aunts can’t attend the funeral of their 5-month-old niece.

Madeline Grant – who, although partially vaccinated, recently contracted Covid-19 – wonders why so many people refuse to put this disease into proper perspective. Two slices:

As a hale and hearty 28 year old, I suffered only a few days of flu symptoms. This is overwhelmingly what the young – and older vaccinated people – can expect.
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Pre-Covid, adverts for cold and flu remedies often prided themselves on offering sufferers a swift return to normality. Yet official guidance now warns us to avoid society for long periods, often well after symptoms have passed. Covid fearmongering, such as the cautionary tales of anti-vaxxers who later died of the virus, is still a feature of the media coverage. There is a perverse, almost gloating interest that you would never see with, for example, an obese person dying of heart disease.

Phil Magness:

The CDC traced 86 cases out of 400k attendees to the Sturgis rally last year. Our garbage news media immediately deemed it a superspreader event and blamed it, in part, for the fall 2020 surge nationwide, after a junk epidemiology model speculated that those cases could have spread to hundreds of thousands of people.
This year, some 203 cases out of 385K attendees have been linked to Lollapalooza. The same garbage news media is currently hailing it as a “success” for vaccine passports because the number is so low.

Martin Kulldorff:

On natural immunity, @NIHDirector Francis Collins is misleading the public. Kentucky study shows less reinfections after COVID disease plus vaccine than COVID only (both very low). He falsely claims less reinfections after vaccine than after COVID disease.

David Henderson explains that eviction moratoria are both unfair and unproductive. A slice:

The main economic problem, in short, is that the government gets in the way of the landlord/tenant relationship. That’s bad in itself, but it also has bad economic consequences: (1) landlords receive less rent than they had planned on; (2) some tenants whose pay has fallen only a little will still take advantage of the new power the government has given them; and (3) if potential landlords come to expect that there will be more such moratoria in the future, their incentive to build rental housing is lessened. This latter factor will cause the supply of rental housing to be less than otherwise and will, therefore, drive up rental prices, hurting tenants in general.

My George Mason University colleague Todd Zywicki – who has recovered from Covid – appeared on CNN to explain and defend his quest to prevent GMU officials from requiring him to be vaccinated.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 326 of Richard Epstein’s magnificent 1995 volume, Simple Rules for a Complex World:

To envision a society driven solely by legal and formal sanctions is to envision a society where bone is always rubbing against bone. We need to have some cartilage to soften the blow, and that can only come if the legal order is not so inclusive and intrusive as to destroy all informal systems of social control.

Unmasking GMU Officials’ Covid Hypocrisy

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to Todd Zywicki, a long-time friend, sometimes co-author, and colleague over in GMU’s Antonin Scalia School of Law:

Todd:

Good luck in your lawsuit against GMU officials who wish to compel you – despite your earlier case of Covid-19 having given you much natural immunity against the disease – nevertheless to be vaccinated.

Your case has been strengthened by GMU’s newly announced requirement of indoor masking of all people including the fully vaccinated. One necessary condition for this masking requirement to pass any reasonable cost-benefit test is that vaccination be not very effective. So you can infer from this new masking policy that GMU officials are not confident in the vaccines’ effectiveness. These officials’ skepticism of the vaccines’ effectiveness has, as it were, been unmasked by their own new masking policy. And if these officials themselves doubt the vaccines’ effectiveness, they have even less business than before in insisting that you subject yourself to whatever risk might be posed to you by receiving the vaccination.

You (and Jenin and Jay) have likely already thought of this point that identifies the actions of GMU officials themselves as further tilting the balance of the case in your favor. But I mention it in the off-chance that you haven’t.

Again, much good luck!

Sincerely,
Don

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Let me be clear: I do not doubt that the vaccines are largely effective. But GMU officials cannot reasonably have matters both ways: insisting on indoor masking even of the fully vaccinated and insisting that the vaccines are sufficiently effective to justify even the small risk that vaccines pose.

Some Non-Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Scott Lincicome describes the lamentable return of green industrial policy. A slice:

Finally, there are the substantial costs—seen and unseen—associated with green industrial policies. Those projects cited in the Technology Pork Barrel, for example, uniformly exhibited “cost overruns” that far exceeded their budgets. Years later, DOE got busted for using—ahem—creative accounting to claim that its ARRA green energy lending programs were “making money” (they ignored borrowing costs, which—per Brookings’ Donald Marron—turned an alleged $810 million “profit” into a $780 million loss). In fact, DOE often loses money on a portfolio-wide or long-term basis. Today, for example, only one of the 10 carbon capture demonstration projects—a relatively small one in Texas—is still active, resulting in billions of losses overall. And cellulosic biofuels projects that DOE once celebrated are today on the ropes (or worse).

Well over a year ago, while still under lockdown, I was honored to be a guest of Keith Knight. (I just realized that I haven’t, until this moment, posted a link to our discussion.)

George Will rightly calls on Congress to do what’s right: let the Equal Rights Amendment languish. Here’s his conclusion:

ERA advocates argue that Congress has, and courts enforce, such a cramped notion of congressional power that the ERA is necessary to protect women. Actually, what the advocates want, aside from applause, is to disempower Congress. They hope to clutter the Constitution with vague language that courts will use to impose unspecified social policies (concerning “equal pay,” abortion and other matters) that Congress will not pass.

A Venn diagram probably would show an almost complete overlap of today’s victory-at-any-price ERA advocates and the most vociferous progressive critics of the previous president’s disdain for constitutional norms.

Arnold Kling recommends Bridget Phetasy’s podcast with Jonathan Haidt.

Richard Nixon’s “gold treachery” made Jim Bovard a cynic realist.

William Walker recalls Nixon’s calamitous wage-price freezes. A slice:

Then, on June 13, 1973, in a show of defiance as the Watergate hearings unfolded, Nixon decreed a second nationwide price freeze and follow-on control program. This time, the measures were deeply unpopular. The novelty had worn off for consumers, and farmers and business owners disliked the new round of bureaucratic rules. Then the economic fundamentals of the program were upended by two dramatic and unforeseen events. In October 1973, the Saudis doubled the price of crude-oil exports, leading to a rapid escalation of gasoline price. Then, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries declared an embargo on all shipments of oil to the U.S. and other Western nations. By the first quarter of 1974, imports dried up. American motorists endured long lines at the pump in the greatest supply disruption the nation has ever experienced.

Joakim Book writes wisely about civility.

“Work, not dependency, was what lifted many people up out of poverty” – so writes Reason‘s Peter Suderman.

Eric Boehm continues his excellent reporting on protectionism’s ugly reality.

Brad Thompson wants the Olympics to be made great again. A slice:

Worst of all, much of the bad at this year’s Games has come from American athletes, who have turned the Olympic Village into an American college campus, where (self-promoting) wokeness has replaced pride in competing for one’s country. After watching and listening to American soccer player Megan Rapinoe and shot putter Raven Saunders beclown themselves as they lectured the world about various forms of American oppression and tyranny, it was time to turn the TV channel and watch the people of Cuba get beaten by their government for their peaceful protests in the name of freedom.

Pierre Lemieux asks an important, but too-seldom-asked, question: Is ‘governing’ good for the governed?

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Randy Holcombe asks a question, about his teaching at Florida State University, identical to a question that I’m now asking about my teaching at George Mason University: Should a professor obey his or her school’s mask mandate? (DBx: Officials at both universities have ordered universal mask-wearing indoors even for the fully vaccinated – and I, like Randy, am fully vaccinated, in good health, and interact in my classrooms with people who are in an age group the members of which are at very little risk from Covid. Further, unlike at FSU, GMU has made vaccination mandatory for students, staff, and faculty . I cannot teach effectively while wearing a mask, and I’m sure that students’ ability to learn is only further reduced by themselves being masked. This ‘policy’ is not science; it’s petty tyranny that does virtually nothing to achieve its stated goal.)

Kerry McDonald reports that “school mask wars are heating up.”

“The Vulnerable Pay the Price for Covid Eviction Moratoriums” – so reports, in the Wall Street Journal, Jillian Kay Melchior. A slice:

Alvin Blount, 56, bought a rental property with pre-existing occupants in May 2020 in Naugatuck, Conn. His upstairs tenant, Mary Rodriguez, has accumulated more than $7,000 in past-due rent and refuses to leave. She has also caused at least $15,000 in property damage, says Mr. Blount’s lawyer, Dana Guiliano. Mr. Blount says Ms. Rodriguez flooded the apartment, blew out the electrical system, and piled up trash on the porch and yard. The squalor has attracted roaches, rats and complaints from neighbors, he says, and it has also made the vacant first-floor apartment unrentable.

Glenn Greenwald:

I live in a place where there’s an outbreak occurring and where people are suffering severe mental health problems and economic suffering because of lockdowns. Depression, anxiety disorders, suicide, drug addiction, and social isolation also kill.

And Martin Kulldorff:

There is, as always, an enormous gap between the people who use elite media and political platforms to demand lockdowns and the people and families who actually bear the burden of those lockdowns.

That’s what makes lockdown advocacy for elites so cheap & easy.

My GMU colleague Todd Zywicki:

Here’s one interesting observation from the week since I filed my case: some vaccinated people lecture me that Covid-recovered should get forced vax despite the fact that there is no trial data on safety (Covid-recovered were purposely excluded from the trial)…

Lionel Shriver rightly argues that “[t]he state should hand back the calculation of risk to the people.” A slice:

This summer, I’ve relished merrily wending my double-vaccinated way about my local supermarket wearing a smile that my neighbours can actually see. This being right-on Brooklyn, I’m reliably the only customer not wrapping a low-flow panty-liner across my gob. (The sole other exception? The local firefighters — with whom, for five minutes a go, I always fall in love. These broad, brawny icons of hypermasculinity tromp the aisles strapped with axes, and they never wear masks. They’re consistently buying family packs of red meat, and no one dares give them grief.) Is my halcyon reprieve from soaring levels of carbon dioxide summarily over? If these vaccines don’t really work, are we all doomed? Will this hell never end?

I don’t think we’re doomed. But only if we start acting like grown-ups. On masks, it’s past time we de-politicise them and assemble proper real-life — not modelled — evidence for whether they make a damned bit of difference. From the blizzard of studies and charts I’ve examined, they don’t. But if we’re going to keep making ourselves miserable and turning every trip for milk into a wander on to the set of a dystopian sci-fi flick, that sacrifice has to be based on better science than ‘masks might help, so why not?’ I’m willing to change my mind, but only in the face of hard, convincing data I’ve never seen.

Here’s more mature and wise thinking from James Allan. A slice:

Take vaccines for those under 25 (and given the current climate I had best come straight out and say that yes, I have had my first AZ jab and the second is soon to come). The evidence out of the United States is that for those under 25 who catch Covid and are not vaccinated their chances of dying are a bit less than 1 in a million. That’s less than the odds of dying from the seasonal flu for them. It’s less than the chances of dying from being hit by lightning. And it is way, way less than the chances of dying in a car.

In most of the democratic world, and certainly here in Australia, the public health class and the politicians suppress that fact at all costs. Because if it got out we might ask ‘why should the young be vaccinated?’. No matter how politically incorrect or unacceptable in nature, surely that’s a fair question. The answer would appear to be ‘they are being asked to vaccinate not for their own benefits (these are next to zero, if honesty means anything) but for the benefits of the very old and otherwise already sick or obese’.

Now that might be a persuasive answer for you; certainly it is for the Peter Singers of the world, all the utilitarians. I just note here that I spent seven years when working in New Zealand on a university ethics committee. If anyone tried to advance that sort of utilitarian claim – that person X must be massively incentivized to take a treatment in order to help person Y not X – it would have been rejected on the spot. Rightly or wrongly, and I have some sympathy for the utilitarian outlook at times, there is no chance at all it would get through.

Ramesh Thakur correctly declares that ‘vaccine passports’ are the result of “an idea whose time must never come.” Here’s his conclusion:

In other words, having tried lockdowns and vaccinations, some of the most highly vaccinated countries are coming round to the view of the Great Barrington Declaration of October 2020 – which itself was a restatement of the official WHO position of October 2019 – of focussing protection efforts on the most vulnerable. The Declaration has been signed by 58,000 medical practitioners and health scientists. Maybe instead of targeting Christensen, our media, public health experts and political leaders should rethink their entire approach? Because vaccinations do not prevent infection or transmission, they cannot stop the spread of the virus. Because they do reduce the severity of the illness and mortality rates, they remain important. Putting the two together, vaccines should be made available to all, strongly recommended for all vulnerable groups but not made mandatory for anyone. Embrace personal choice and individual responsibility as the core elements of Covid risk management as we all learn to live with it as individuals and a nation. This too shall pass.

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

Matthew Lynn writes about the poverty-bound “hermit economies” of Australia and New Zealand. Here’s his conclusion:

Countries can cut themselves off from the world if they want to. They can remain in permanent lockdown and prioritise public health over every other form of endeavour. In effect they are creating “hermit economies”, isolated from the rest of the world – and they are condemning themselves to eventual poverty.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 173 of the American jurist James Coolidge Carter’s remarkably profound, yet unfortunately neglected, (posthumous) 1907 book, Law: Its Origin, Growth and Function (original emphasis):

The necessary operation and therefore the function of law thus defined we found to be the marking out of the largest area within which each individual could freely move and act without invading the like freedom of every other – that is, to insure the largest possible liberty.

DBx: Pictured here is Sir Edward Coke.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 431 of Art Carden’s and Deirdre McCloskey’s 2018 paper “The Bourgeois Deal: Leave Me Alone, and I’ll Make You Rich” (which is Chapter 10 of this excellent 2018 book edited by Steven Globerman and Jason Clemens):

We also bring good tidings about our bourgeois lives. The innovative bourgeois world we inhabit requires lives of virtue; it also reinforces lives of virtue by providing us with greater scope for family and friends, art, and literature. The Great Enrichment has made us better, not just richer.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Jay Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta, and Martin Kulldorff explore “the strange neglect of natural immunity.” A slice:

The COVID vaccines are a fantastic technology that, if used properly, can end the epidemic around the world. Among all medical inventions, vaccines have saved more lives than any other – except perhaps basic hygiene measures like proper sewage systems and clean drinking water. Vaccines themselves do not protect us; it is our immune system’s reaction to the vaccine that protects us. The beauty of vaccines is that we can activate our immune system against serious diseases without becoming seriously ill.

Natural infection typically confers better and broader protection, but this comes at a cost to those who are vulnerable to severe illness and death. For those in the vulnerable group, including the elderly and those with chronic disease, it is safer to acquire future protection against the disease via vaccination than by recovering from the disease. At the same time, it makes little sense to ignore the scientific fact that infection does confer long-lasting future protection for the millions of people who have had COVID.

Paul Dolan and Sunetra Gupta argue that lockdowns are based on “faith, not evidence.” Here’s their conclusion:

The uncertainty surrounding Covid means that many of us will be shown to be wrong about many things. For our part, we’re quite happy to be wrong, if it then leads us in the right direction. Sadly, we suspect that we are going to be proved right that the cure of lockdown has been much more harmful than the disease of Covid.

“The continued obsession with infection figures encourages paranoia when vaccines have severely weakened the link between cases and deaths.”

Here’s wisdom from John Tamny about freedom.

Scott McKay is correct: “Our Politicians And Bureaucrats Are Failing At Virology.” A slice:

Smallpox and polio are not coronaviruses. Thus they can be eradicated with vaccination.

This matters, because if we’re ever going to return to normal it’s going to have to be with the understanding that it’s not possible to have zero COVID cases. There will be COVID cases among the people who don’t have immunity, and it’s quite likely that as the virus continues to mutate its variants might continue to produce symptoms among people who have been vaccinated. We’re seeing a bit of that with the Delta variant, though it’s true that more than 90 percent of those currently hospitalized with COVID are unvaccinated.

Returning to normal is going to mean that future strains of COVID, which are overwhelmingly likely to be infectious but less serious or deadly, will infect people regularly like colds or influenza do.

Jeffrey Tucker tells the tale of two Americas. A slice:

Covid unleashed a version of tyranny in the United States. Through a surreptitious and circuitous route, many public officials somehow managed to gain enormous power for themselves and demonstrate that all our vaunted limits on government are easily transgressed under the right conditions. Now they want to use that power to enact permanent change in this country. Right now, people, capital, and institutions are fleeing from them to safe and freer places, which only drives the people in power to madness. They are right now plotting to shut down the free states through any means possible.

A good example is this vaccine mandate. The Biden administration is scouring around for every means to force them on resisting states by denying federal subsidies. Citizens are caught in the middle, with those who resist the mandates feeling increasingly exhausted and demoralized. Meanwhile, the political class is also in upheaval, with the Republican Party now divided between an increasingly radical branch of anti-lockdowners and a more establishment sector that is willing to go along to get along, while fearing the anger of voters.

James Newburrie writes from the once-free country of Australia. Two slices:

Public health experts saw COVID-19 and convinced our politicians to close the borders and lock down. They ignored cancer, depression, heart disease, domestic violence, the impact of excessive alcohol (the assimilated, routine risks in our society) and focused exclusively on COVID-19.

The Australian Standard for Risk Management obliged our governments to consider the impact of intervention. Our leaders refuse to release any evidence that they did this. In the first four months of 2021 we enjoyed a “COVID normal” life. Not one Australian died of COVID-19. But according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) death in Australia has increased 5.6 percent over our pre-pandemic, seasonally adjusted average.

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And what about the elderly? The people we’re told we’re protecting. We’ve denied them the comfort of their loved ones as they lie dying. We insist that only a handful of their loved ones maintain a distance of 1.5 meters, wrapped in a head-to-toe encounter suit, covered in a mask so that they can’t see each other’s faces. That is assuming we let their loved ones into their presence at all. Can’t be too careful—we might give that old man with late-stage organ failure and hours to live COVID-19 and we wouldn’t want that.

Also writing about the cruel tyranny now in full force in Australia is Shahar Hameiri. A slice:

[Elites] have become lockdown’s biggest cheerleaders and portray their own compliance with lockdown rules as an expression of individual moral superiority, conveniently forgetting that the privileges afforded by their income and lifestyle are not shared by all. They have dismissed resistance to lockdowns as extremism, although evidence from recent rallies in Australia suggests that a number of participants were not fringe-dwelling conspiracists, but ordinary people struggling with long lockdowns.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 542 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):

The partition is between friends of freedom and others. In principle that is permanent, fundamental, decisive.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 3 of the 1991 Liberty Press edition of Bruno Leoni’s magnificent 1961 volume, Freedom and the Law:

Political scientists, on the other hand, often appear to be inclined to think of politics as a sort of  technique, comparable, say, to engineering, which involves the idea that people should be dealt with by political scientists approximately in the same way as machines or factories are dealt with by engineers.

DBx: Pictured here is Bruno Leoni (1913-1967). For more on Leoni, see this essay by Todd Zywicki.