Russell Roberts's Blog, page 246
August 7, 2021
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 19 of Bernard Bailyn’s profound 1967 book, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution:
For the primary goal of the American Revolution, which transformed American life and introduced a new era in human history, was not the overthrow or even the alteration of the existing social order but the preservation of political liberty threatened by the apparent corruption of the constitution, and the establishment in principle of the existing conditions of liberty….
What was essentially involved in the American Revolution was not the disruption of society, with all the fear, despair, and hatred that that entails, but the realization, the comprehension and fulfillment, of the inheritance of liberty and of what was taken to be America’s destiny in the context of world history.
DBx: Bailyn died one year ago today (on August 7th, 2020).
August 6, 2021
Some Covid Links
The New Civil Liberties Alliance is suing George Mason University officials over their refusal to recognize Prof. Todd Zywicki’s naturally acquired Covid immunity. Go Todd! (UPDATE: For some reason unknown to me, this page cannot now be found. I suspect it’s a simple technical issue that will soon be fixed. So for now I’ll keep the link up.)
As reported here, a fact key to the above-mentioned lawsuit is strongly in favor of the plaintiff. A slice:
A new study has found that individuals that have previously contracted COVID-19 show a more potent antibody response than those who were solely vaccinated for the respiratory virus.
Conducted by a research team at Rockefeller University in New York, the analysis found “that between a first (prime) and second (booster) shot of either the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccine, the memory B cells of infection-naïve individuals produced antibodies that evolved increased neutralizing activity against SARS-CoV-2,” but also that “no additional increase in the potency or breadth of this activity was observed thereafter.”
Meanwhile, researchers determined that not only do recovered COVID-19 patients possess neutralizing antibodies up to a year after infection, but that such infection simultaneously assists in offering protection against developing variants.
And see also this tweet, from Martin Kulldorff.
Requiring the vaccine in people who are already immune with natural immunity has no scientific support. While vaccinating those people may be beneficial – and it’s a reasonable hypothesis that vaccination may bolster the longevity of their immunity – to argue dogmatically that they must get vaccinated has zero clinical outcome data to back it. As a matter of fact, we have data to the contrary: A Cleveland Clinic study found that vaccinating people with natural immunity did not add to their level of protection.
Additionally, mask orders have the effect of keeping the public in a state of emergency. As Stanford Professor of Medicine Dr. Jay Bhattacharya recently told FEE, there seems to be a reluctance on the part of many to admit the pandemic is all but over.
“We should be declaring a great and resounding success,” Bhattacharya told FEE’s Brad Polumbo. “The COVID emergency is over. We still need to take COVID seriously, and there are still vulnerable people here and abroad left to vaccinate. But we can start to treat it as one disease among many that afflict people rather than an all-consuming threat.”
Sarah Knapton reveals yet another instance of poorly understood statistics surrounding Covid.
Wall Street Journal columnist James Freeman senses impending doom. A slice:
Until the Supreme Court slaps down this latest assault on the property rights of landlords, Dr. Walensky’s order asserts that Americans who violate her directive [against evictions] may be subject to criminal penalties including up to a year in jail. Imprisoning people on such dubious grounds is bound to give Americans a sense of impending doom about due process. And for the record, the alleged emergency is a sham, and not just because daily Covid deaths are fortunately far below their levels of early January.
The American consumer is not in crisis. Someday the fiscal and monetary excesses of this era will be borne by America’s children. But for now, the vast government assistance programs have left U.S. households brimming with cash.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 218 of the American jurist James Coolidge Carter’s brilliant yet unfortunately neglected (posthumous) 1907 book, Law: Its Origin, Growth and Function:
Prof. [Henry Sumner] Maine was, apparently, a thorough believer in [John] Austin’s theories when he began his inquiries. He soon learned that when the actual facts of the origin of law are studied the notion that they are in any sense the creation of the sovereign must be relinquished.
DBx: Pictured here is Carter.
August 5, 2021
Three ‘Small’ But Important Points
Charley Hooper is on a small listserv on which I also am sometimes active. I share here (with his kind permission) a note that he sent out earlier today in a thread discussing naturally acquired immunity to that which is gotten through vaccination.
Three small points that might help:
The normal goal of vaccines is to replicate natural infections without the actual infection. In other words, natural infections are the gold standard and good vaccines equal or come close to the immunity provided by natural infections.
No one wants a natural infection with SARS-CoV-2. But now that some have had it, they have a level of immunity. Based on the evidence I’ve seen, their immunity is probably better than that from the vaccines.
See the attached graph. [Available here: COVID Timeline.] It shows how antibodies wane over time (they are expensive to keep around) while T cells (cheap to keep around) remember the infection for much longer, often decades. Our immunity to some diseases lasts longer than our lifespans. By the way, humans have the best immune system among living beings. Our immune systems can remember some astronomical number of contagions—something on the order of 100 billion different types of germs. It’s really pretty amazing.
A Brilliant and Important Speech in Australia
I thank George Leef for alerting me to this splendid speech by an Australian elected official by the name of Malcolm Roberts. The speech is just under five-minutes long.
Such Numbers Without Context Are Misleading
Content Director, News4 Jacksonville
Sir or Madam:
Travis Gibson reports rises in the absolute numbers of hospitalized patients in Florida – rises due principally to the Delta variant afflicting unvaccinated Floridians (“Florida hospital CEOs tell DeSantis what they are seeing during latest COVID-19 spike,” August 4). Without context, these numbers might be alarming.
But a competent reporter gives context, which Mr. Gibson doesn’t here do. So let me help.
According to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services’ Project Public Data Hub, as of today (August 5th) 15.85 percent of all hospital beds in Florida for inpatients remain unoccupied, and 11.32 percent of ICU beds remain unoccupied. While these numbers tell us little about the future – or about the situation at any particular medical-care facility – they do help to calm fears created by the possible misimpression that the Delta variant is now causing Florida’s hospitals to be generally overrun with patients.
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
6. Public health should focus on high-risk populations. For Covid-19, many standard public health measures were never used to protect high-risk older people, leading to unnecessary deaths. More.
7. While contact tracing and isolation are critically important for some infectious diseases, it is futile and counterproductive for common infections such as influenza and Covid-19. More.
8. A case is only a case if a person is sick. Mass testing asymptomatic individuals is harmful to public health. More.
By ordering yet another extension, as he did on Tuesday, Biden — who is more terrified of progressives than he is impressed by the Supreme Court — has decided to dare the court to make good on its signaled intent to defend the separation of powers. Whenever this lawless moratorium seems about to end, there will be another wave of media stories, like last week’s, anticipating a tsunami of evictions, thereby triggering calls for what would be a sixth extension. Eventually, the memory of normality having faded, the moratorium would seem normal and warranted as “social justice” because evictions might have a “disparate impact” on minorities, and hence be evidence of “systemic racism,” even absent evidence of disparate treatment.
Meanwhile, because of the moratorium, surely many tenants who could pay their rent are choosing not to: $99,000 earners are among the top 17 percent; $198,000 households are in the top 11 percent. Also, the moratorium is, like excessive unemployment benefits, an incentive for some to remain out of the workforce. Such are the ricochets of government, unbridled and gargantuan.
Writing also on the lawless eviction ban is the Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board. A slice:
Too often ignored are the costs on the other side of the evictions ledger. Renters are facing hardships, but so are landlords. There are about 48 million rental housing units in the U.S., according to a 2018 federal survey. For 42% of them, day-to-day management of the property was performed by either the owner or an unpaid agent. Another 25% had a paid manager who was still “directly employed” by the owner.
There are millions of mom-and-pop landlords who own a house here, a duplex there, a small apartment building two streets down. Some of them are going on a year, or more, without rental income, yet they’re responsible for paying the taxes and the upkeep. A few nightmare stories are trickling out, say, of a woman living in a house with a basement apartment, occupied by abusive tenants who apparently saw the moratorium as impunity.
Richard Rahn rightly complains about the face-mask authoritarians in our midst. A slice:
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought out the face-mask Nazis. Most people do not like wearing masks, but those with a tyrannical bent like Dr. Anthony Fauci and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seem to gain great pleasure from making millions of others miserable for no good reason. Do the flimsy cotton masks that most of us own and wear when forced to save lives? The overwhelming evidence (both empirical and theoretical) is no. It is nothing more than an attempt by people with power in government to get the herd (us) to obey them.
A sophisticated mask (such as medical personnel wear) can reduce the spread of influenza and pneumonia. Still, masks of all sorts tend to reduce the amount of oxygen and increase the amount of CO2 we breathe, thus making them more dangerous for those with heart and respiratory diseases. There is also evidence that masks do more harm than good for children. If the folks at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention and other government agencies who are trying to control our lives really cared, they would provide detailed cost-benefit studies for people of different ages and health conditions as to who and when should wear a mask, if ever, – but the fact they have failed to do so is telling.
Even the BBC reports that “long-lasting Covid-19 symptoms are rare in children.”
Laura Dodsworth takes aim at those who wage “a political war on breathing.” A slice:
Morality has been generally topsy-turvy in a time riven by fear. We have no tolerance for Covid deaths but seemingly little interest in deaths from other causes. We were told we must protect the elderly, yet they were transferred from hospitals to care homes and last week we discover that 50,000 dementia cases have been missed. The government showed a worrying enthusiasm for the furtive use of shaming, bullying and fear-mongering to make the nation comply with lockdown rules. Culturally and economically, lockdown was easier for the middle classes and elite, rather than the working classes and front line workers who serviced them. Feminists tie themselves in knots explaining why ‘my body, my choice’ does not extend to vaccine mandates. Schools closed. People died alone at home. Focussing on one virus was never a simple moral equation.
Is NYC mayor Bill De Blasio a racist in disguise? Here’s a slice from a piece by John Fund:
[Tilman] Fertitta can be dismissed by progressives as a self-interested rich guy. But what will happen when it dawns on them that de Blasio’s policy will disproportionately lock Hispanics and blacks out of indoor venues? Almost half of whites in New York City are fully vaccinated, compared to a third of blacks and just under 45 per cent of Hispanics.
‘That means that black New Yorkers will be barred from public accommodations at a far higher rate than will white New Yorkers. This is kind of an awkward policy,’ notes columnist Tim Carney in the Washington Examiner. ‘There is no doubt that the impact of de Blasio’s rule is discriminatory.’
Brendan O’Neill points out a double-standard used by Covid warriors. A slice:
Pointing out the errors made by lockdown sceptics has become the favoured sport of the chattering classes. It sometimes has the whiff of a bloodsport. Every time Sunetra Gupta or Karol Sikora pops up on Radio 4 or makes a comment in a national newspaper, an army of Little Stalins goes wild. ‘These people got things wrong about the virus!’, they cry. ‘Stop platforming them!’ These experts will never escape the mistakes and misjudgements they made about Covid-19. There will always be a shrill finger-pointer there to remind them. And to accuse them of killing people with their ‘disinformation’.
And yet the same thing hasn’t been done to the experts who were catastrophically wrong about Freedom Day. To the SAGE and Indie SAGE types who told us that opening up on 19 July would cause mayhem and death on a terrible scale. To those epidemiologists who are never off Channel 4 and the BBC and who branded Freedom Day a dangerous, unethical experiment that posed a threat to the entire world, no less. There are no demands for these people to be cast out, kept off the airwaves, asphyxiated of the oxygen of publicity. Funny that. It’s almost as if the hysterical war of words on lockdown sceptics wasn’t about standing up for truth and reality at all, but rather was an intemperate, censorious assault on those who had the temerity to criticise a political course of action – lockdown – that had the backing of the elites.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 3 of volume III (“The Political Order of a Free People,” 1979) of Hayek’s Law, Legislation, and Liberty:
The tragic illusion was that the adoption of democratic procedures made it possible to dispense with all other limitations on governmental power.
August 4, 2021
On the Dangers of the Impossible Quest for Zero Covid
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.
…..
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.
Some Non-Covid Links
Juliette Sellgren talks with Tim Sandefur about privacy.
The great Bruce Yandle offers lessons about a Frankenstein economy. Here’s his wise conclusion:
Life’s lessons and deep history show that as smart as people may think we are, and as large as their laboratory of digital gadgetry may appear to be, they cannot rely on the governmentally determined economic actions of empowered political agents to outperform the independent actions of billions of decisionmakers who, in less regulated times, do their best to find prosperity and happiness in a complex and sometimes uncaring world.
People should know that they cannot create enduring prosperity with more printing-press money, growing deficits, and more command-and-control sutures. A Frankenstein monster is not a good substitute for a market economy. Let’s hope that America sees more “normal” times soon.
Here’s how Mark Perry celebrated Milton Friedman’s birthday.
Arnold Kling reviews Noise – the new book by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein.
What’s even worse is that there’s very little in the way of objectivity or due process afforded to companies that had their exclusion requests denied. Soon after the tariffs were imposed, members of Congress warned that the exclusion process lacked “basic due process and procedural fairness” and that it could be “abused for anticompetitive purposes.” As Reason previously reported, business owners have complained that simply getting a decision one way or the other can take months. And there is no way to appeal the rulings.
The new GAO report confirms some of those concerns.
My GMU Econ colleague Dan Klein ponders Alexis de Tocqueville’s dystopias.
Jane Shaw decries academia’s intellectual silos. (HT Dan Klein) A slice:
In 1994, Joseph Stiglitz wrote the book Whither Socialism? At the time, Stiglitz chaired President Clinton‘s Council of Economic Advisors; in 2001 he received the Nobel Prize. In other words, he was (and is) a leading economist.
In Whither Socialism? Stiglitz challenged the assumptions of mainstream or neo-classical economics. He argued that economists have ignored how costly information can be and how important prices are in providing information to buyers and sellers. And because there is no single, reliable source of information, centralized control of market decisions is inefficient. Without this understanding, he said, many economists have been misled into favoring socialism.
Economist P. J. Hill reviewed Stiglitz’s book. After acknowledging its value, he said, “However, the book is also somewhat maddening to read in that it ignores so much of the recent developments in economics that shed light on the very issues that Stiglitz is concerned with.”
In particular, Stiglitz had dismissed Austrian economics, including Friedrich von Hayek’s article “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” published in 1945 in the American Economic Review. It was exactly about the difficulty of centralization due to the cost of information. And that was in 1945! Austrians have been exploring thE subject ever since.
Stiglitz failed to mention Hayek’s article or even George Stigler’s more mainstream article on “The Economics of Information.” Both Hayek and Stigler received Nobel prizes in economics. But their views were outside Stiglitz’s Keynesian perspective.
Stiglitz came upon some of the insights himself, but wouldn’t it have been better if he had built on their analyses rather than belatedly discovering them on his own? How could he have known so little about his own discipline?
That’s what I mean by intellectual silos.
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