Russell Roberts's Blog, page 249

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Phil Magness reports on how government officials were duped by a psychic healer into funding research on so-called “Long Covid.” A slice:

So what is Long Covid, and why is it drawing so much attention and funding out of the federal government? As with any respiratory illness, Covid-19 does appear to have long-term sufferers who do not follow the normal recovery pattern and continue to demonstrate symptoms for weeks or months after an infection. At the same time however, the push to make “Long Covid” a distinctive medical classification onto itself appears to be a political phenomenon, wrapped up in clear signs of pseudoscience and linked back to a fringe “alternative wellness” blog that originally coined the term in March 2020.

Here’s Reason‘s Robby Soave on the CDC’s newly announced mask guidelines:

Unsurprisingly, this new recommendation is excessively cautious to the point of absurdity. Note that the vaccines still hold up remarkably well against the delta variant in terms of preventing severe disease and death. They also substantially reduce infection rates and transmissibility. But what the CDC has found is that when rare, breakthrough infections do occur, delta’s viral load is high enough that a vaccinated person could potentially transmit the virus—probably not to another vaccinated person (who is extremely protected, in any case), but to an unvaccinated person.

The government is essentially saying that vaccinated people must resume indoor mask-wearing, not because the delta variant poses any danger to them or their vaccinated friends and family members, but because the minority of the country that stubbornly refuses to get vaccinated is at risk. (Note as well that the most at-risk group, senior citizens, have extremely high vaccination rates; the least vaccinated group, young children, are exceedingly unlikely to suffer death from COVID-19.)

It is hard to see how this new guidance is fair to the vaccinated, who have thus far done everything that was asked of them. Masks and other social distancing requirements were supposed to be temporary measures—remember “two weeks to slow the spread”?—until the vaccines were available. Federal health bureaucrats cannot perpetually deprive people of their rights in the name of public health.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis continues to stand tall and stalwart on the most pressing issue of the day: resisting Covid Derangement Syndrome and its vile spawn, Covidocratic tyranny.

Joakim Book writes on the race to win Covidfinity. Two slices:

Shifting the goalposts is the patented approach of all totalitarians. Snatch away a little bit of freedom – harmless, right? Relax, it’s for a good cause. Temporarily hand some of that freedom back, but never all of it, reminding everyone that we’re still withholding freedoms for a good cause (even if the targets, methods, and reasons have all shifted). Then repeat, forever.
…..
Never mind that we have about zero indication anywhere that hospitals ran out of capacity, or that they have the ability to prioritize even if they did or expand capacity in an emergency should they need to. The military hospital ship that was sent into New York City with grandeur at the height of its outbreak last year mostly remained empty before it was unceremoniously removed. The privately-funded and express-raised field hospital in Milan, Italy, during its worst moments last year, mostly sat unused before it was dismantled. Same in Stockholm, Sweden, and across many U.S. states.

What’s worse, the “full hospital” fear was one of the contributing factors for New York’s infamous killing policy last year – to force nursing homes full of old, susceptible, and highly Covid-vulnerable people to receive those recently discharged, so that we could free up space in hospitals. This mistake spread infections to the worst possible places. That was the fault of trigger-happy and panic-ridden policies, not teenagers who wanted to party on the beach.

But even if the argument did make sense,let me just get this straight: in order to prevent innocent people suffering from ordinary ills – like cancer or diabetes or car accidents – being refused hospital care, we front-run that chimera by cancelling such treatments and dissuading people from coming to hospitals so that we can free up space for potential Covid patients? We guaranteed collateral damage, for very mysterious benefits. The price for this mistake is slowly revealing itself – homicides, overdoses, suicides, delayed surgeries and treatments leading to thousands of additional deaths from cancer alone.

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

Remy Chadwick explains why he protested – and will continue to protest – the lockdowns in Sydney. A slice:

Here’s a thought: COVID can crush your body, but it cannot crush your spirit. And another thought: our premiers cannot eliminate COVID-19, but they can eliminate society in the trying. They might even succeed in doing just that before the next election. This is why I feel a great urgency to use whatever few means left to us as citizens to oppose their vision for life under COVID. They , not me and the thousands of others who took to the streets yesterday in state capitals, are the true enemies of the state, enemies of the community, enemies of individuals. They want to protect us from a disease that is out of their control, peddling lies and doling out shame while refusing point blank to release the “expert advice” that tells them their strategy is “working”.

Martin Kulldorff on Twitter:

Vaccine passports/mandates are wrong. It is unscientific to demand people with prior COVID disease to be vaccinated. They already have excellent immunity.

Richard Epstein weighs in on my GMU colleague Todd Zywicki’s heroic resistance to GMU’s Covidocratic irrationality.

David Paton asks why so many experts, including the consistently mistaken Neil Ferguson, were so very wrong about the reopening of Britain. A slice:

Those of us who are sceptical about the use of lockdowns, mask mandates and other restrictions in dealing with Covid-19 have no reason to be afraid of data. We know cases can go up and down, and that these movements may coincide with both the imposition and lifting of restrictions. We can even accept that some restrictions may have a causal impact on cases in some instances.

Our contention, supported by the evidence, is that lockdowns do not have enough of an impact on deaths or hospitalisations that would come close to justifying the huge costs they impose on society.

Proponents of lockdown measures have no such luxury. Unless restrictions have a large impact on hospitalisations and deaths that can be clearly observed in the data, the whole basis for lockdown disappears.

Martin Kulldorff suggests, quite sensibly, that Neil Ferguson is less a serious scientist and more like a silly character from Monty Python.

Tim Stanley is correct: Vaccine passports are indeed a step on the road to hell.

Phil Magness shares a photo of one of the very few benefits that emerged from Covid Derangement Syndrome:

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 201 of Thomas Sowell’s superb 1981 volume, Ethnic America: A History (footnotes deleted):

In the post-Civil War era, southern white employers and landowners sought to band together to restrict the money and discretion they had to give to blacks. Yet, despite the economic strength, political power, and organizational advantages of the whites, these restrictive agreements failed repeatedly in the face of competition for laborers and sharecroppers. Black income grew at a higher percentage rate than white income during the last third of the nineteenth century.

DBx: The three footnotes not shown in the above quotation are all to Robert Higgs’s remarkable 1977 book, Competition and Coercion: Blacks in the American Economy, 1865-1914.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 83 of José Ortega y Gasset’s classic 1932 slim volume, The Revolt of the Masses:

Liberalism – it is well to recall today – is the supreme form of generosity; it is the right which the majority concedes to minorities and hence is the noblest cry that has ever resounded on this planet. It announces the determination to share existence with the enemy; more than that, with an enemy which is weak. It was incredible that the human species should have arrived at so noble an attitude, so paradoxical, so refined, so anti-natural. Hence it is not to be wondered that this same humanity should soon appear anxious to get rid of it. It is a discipline too difficult and complex to take firm root on earth.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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The opening paragraph of James Morrow’s essay in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal reads: “It’s hard to know exactly when Australia’s pandemic response crossed the line from tragedy into farce. But future historians could do worse than pinpoint the moment when Sydney’s chief health supremo told the city’s residents to stop being friendly to one another when they ventured out to buy essentials, lest they get themselves and others killed.” Here are two more slices:

Given this level of official hysteria, an outsider might imagine that Australia is a Covid charnel house. In fact, all of Australia is recording around 150 coronavirus cases a day. The current outbreak of 2,000 or so cases total over the past month has been associated with eight deaths so far, almost all of them people over 70.

This in a nation that records, on average, about 460 deaths a day from all causes. Cancer kills nearly 50,000 Australians a year. Shark attacks killed eight in 2020.

…..

So how did Australia become a hermit kingdom? Geography plays a large part. By mistaking their good luck for brilliance in being able to pull up the drawbridge to the world at the start of the pandemic, Australians quickly became trapped in an “elimination” mindset that is now officially referred to as Covid Zero.

Politics, too, conspired to create this outcome. Labor state premiers (the equivalent of U.S. governors) quickly learned to play Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s center-right government like a fiddle, forcing the commonwealth to bail states out for the economic wreckage created every time they locked down their cities or shut their borders.

Those of you who still doubt the reality of Covid Derangement Syndrome, or doubt that Covidocrats have the mindsets of tyrants, might wish to read this report out of Australia. A slice:

Victoria Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton scolded the public. “Let’s not pretend that ‘marching for freedom’ will actually deliver the precious freedom that we all need and desire,” he lectured — a bit rich since he is the one responsible for delivering the precious freedom that we all need and desire but has no plan beyond a succession of never-ending lockdowns.

What astonishes me is not so much that people protested, but that our cultural betters seem genuinely clueless as to why the patience of citizens has finally run out.

And Charles Oliver reports this bit of you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up Australian Covid hysteria.

For still more on the Covidocratic dystopia that is now Australia, here’s Louis Ashworth. A slice:

Facing little option but to wait and see what happens, Morrison’s government has begun to look for ways to shift the blame – with the scientists who helped guide the zero Covid strategy coming under increasing criticism from officials.

“Free speech dies in quarantine.”

Eric Boehm reports on the likely coming surge in renewed mask mandates throughout the United States – and on Fauci’s continuing political performance. A slice:

But if this is becoming [as Fauci says] a “pandemic among the unvaccinated,” then mask mandates make little sense.

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

Here’s the latest from Ross Clark. A slice:

I can understand how gratifying it is to quote Professor Neil Ferguson’s words back at him – words he said just a week ago when he told Andrew Marr it was “almost inevitable” that daily covid cases would reach 100,000 a day as a result of the last stage of the government’s roadmap out of lockdown. “The real question”, he added, “is do we get to double that – or even higher?”

Almost from the moment he uttered those words, new Covid infections began to plummet. Between Sunday 18 and Sunday 25 July, they fell from 48,161 to 29,173. Naturally, this will be rocket fuel for anyone who blames Ferguson’s modelling for plunging us into weeks of lockdown last spring. Not only does it show that his modelling is, to put it kindly, not all it is cracked up to be – it also indicates that you don’t necessarily need a lockdown to provoke a sudden change in direction followed by a steep decline in covid infections.

Robert Dingwall wisely warns against Covid Derangement Syndrome. A slice:

Hospitals also make good television. Our images of Covid patients are shaped by intrepid journalists creeping into intensive care units and whispering into their microphones, like David Attenborough with his gorillas. They do dangerous things so the rest of us do not have to. But there is a reason why social scientists are suspicious of this kind of data unless it is anchored in a broader framework of comparison and contrast. Dramatic images may make us sit up and think. They may move our emotions. But they are a dangerous basis for public policy.

Sherelle Jacobs decries the “digital dystopianism” proposed by some in the name of fighting Covid. A slice:

It is bad enough that No 10’s commitment to dumb technology is paralysing the country, and will soon divide it. Chillingly, a lucrative techno-surveillance industry is waiting in the wings to feed off the mayhem.

It has somehow slipped under the radar that the UK track and trace app functions via Google and Apple technology, which in future they may be able to monetise. If they do, they will join a boom in “snooper startups” – apps that promise to make the new normal run more smoothly, but which, in exchange, hoover up and then potentially sell on our information. While employers turn to HR apps that track which members of staff have been vaccinated, pubs have found that customers order more booze when they can skip the bar queue and use apps to order to their table.

Here’s a video of Jay Bhattacharya’s recent conversation with Nebraska governor Pete Ricketts about Covid and lockdowns.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 348 of H.L. Mencken’s September 12, 1926, Chicago Tribune essay titled “Another Long-Awaited Book” as this essay is reprinted in A Second Mencken Chrestomathy (1995):

The savage is preëminently his brother’s keeper. He knows precisely what his brother ought to do in every situation and is full of indignation when it is not done. But the civilized man has doubts….

Jason Riley on Thomas Sowell

(Don Boudreaux)

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Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley narrates this just-released short video on the life and legacy of the great Thomas Sowell.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 151 of H.L. Mencken’s August 1927 American Mercury essay titled “Aubade” as this essay is reprinted in A Second Mencken Chrestomathy (1995):

The name of the man who first made a slave of fire … is unknown to historians: burrow and sweat as they will, their efforts to unearth it are always baffled. And no wonder. For isn’t it easy to imagine how infamous that name must have been while it was still remembered, and how diligent and impassioned the endeavor to erase it from the tablets of the race? One pictures the indignation of the clergy when so vast an improvement upon their immemorial magic confronted them, and their herculean and unanimous struggle, first to put it down as unlawful and against God, and then to collar it for themselves. Bonfires were surely not unknown in the morning of the Pleistocene, for there were lightnings then as now, but the first one kindled by mortal hands must have shocked humanity. One pictures news flashing from cave to cave and from tribe to tribe – out of Central Asia and then across the grasslands, and they around the feet of the glaciers into the gloomy, spook-haunted wilderness that is now Western Europe, and so across in Africa. Something new and dreadful was upon the human race, and by the time the Ur-Mississippians of the Neander Valley heard of it, you may be sure, the discoverer has sprouted horns and was in the pay of the Devil.

DBx: And so were innovations and innovators generally thought of throughout almost all of human history, until the past two or three centuries. Things changed for the better only when bourgeois virtues and pursuits conferred dignity.

On David French on Structural Racism

(Don Boudreaux)

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David French writes much with which I agree. And I agree with many particular points that he makes in his recent essay titled “Structural Racism Isn’t Wokeness, It’s Reality.” But I disagree with some other particular points, as well as with his overall theme and conclusion.

Not the least of French’s errors here is his using Biblical text to justify intergenerational guilt. Immediately after quoting some Old Testament passages that justify intergenerational guilt, French writes

The reason for this obligation [of charging later generations with the responsibility of making amends for the sins of earlier ones] of repentance and atonement is obvious. The death of the offending party does not remove the consequences of their sin. Those who’ve been victimized still suffer loss, and if the loss isn’t ameliorated in their lifetimes, that loss can linger for generations.

This statement by French is both ethically dubious and factually questionable.

The notion of intergenerational guilt – the unatoned sins of the parents are rightly passed on to the children who become responsible for atoning for these sins – is profoundly at odds with liberalism. That the collectivism implied by the concept of intergenerational guilt is part of the Bible does not salvage its validity.

Also, French should read more of the works of Thomas Sowell, for at least two reasons. One of these reasons is Sowell’s wise warning against what he calls “the quest for cosmic justice.” The attempt to atone for all sins, especially ones committed long ago, is itself a source of a far larger quantity of what Christians would surely identify a sins – and what liberals identify as tyranny.

The other reason to read Sowell is for his documentation of many historical instances of ethnic groups overcoming, often surprisingly quickly, past injustices, including enslavement. Especially relevant here is Sowell’s 1981 book Ethnic America. Also on point is another of his 1981 books, Markets and Minorities.

The notion that blacks’ continuing failure in the 21st century, as a group, to progress in the U.S. as much as other groups have progressed, and are progressing, (for example, various Asian groups, and even now my people, the Irish) is attributable to slavery and to Jim Crow simply won’t wash. Sowell documents that, along many dimensions in the late 19th and early and mid-20th centuries, blacks were progressing in the U.S. – progress that was slowed, and in some dimensions reversed, starting only 100 years after the guns of the U.S. Civil War fell silent.

David French is, of course, correct that there are in place today many government-erected obstacles to black progress. Some of these were originally instituted with racist motives; others not. By all means, let’s get rid of these. But almost none of these obstacles, even the ones originally motivated by racial bigotry, remain in place today because of racism.

The most obvious example of a legislatively created obstacle to black progress is minimum-wage legislation. With racism at its roots, minimum-wage legislation continues to have a disproportionately negative impact on blacks. Yet most blacks – including most black politicians and other “leaders” – support not only the maintenance of, but also increases in, minimum wages. Thus, despite minimum-wages’ disproportionate negative effect on blacks, widespread support among blacks – as well as among many non-blacks who are emphatically not racists – alone would render as inaccurate the identification of minimum-wage legislation as an instance of “structural racism.”

The word “racism” implies motives. And the term “structural racism” implies an invidious and insidious intent to harm members of one racial group – or, at least, to treat members of that group less favorably than another group or groups. If such a motive is no longer operative in maintaining the ‘structure’ that has disproportionate racial impact, the root of the problem is misdiagnosed. Proposed ‘solutions’ thus are less likely to work and might well backfire.

What’s true of minimum-wage legislation is true also of many other regulations and interventions the impacts of which would certainly delight racists who understood the full impact of these policies. (In point of fact, however, I’m sure that most racists are too stupid to trace out the full impact of these policies.) I have in mind here such policies as occupational licensing, mandated paid leave, government “schooling,” the so-called “war on drugs,” and many land-use restrictions. No doubt there is a tiny handful of self-consciously racist Americans who support such policies because of the resulting negative impact on blacks. But because all such policies find great support today among blacks and Progressives – who cannot legitimately be accused of harboring racist hatred of blacks – identifying such policies as evidence of “structural racism” is simply inaccurate.

The real problem is structural hubris and structural economic ignorance.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 113 of the profound 1976 Vol. II (“The Mirage of Social Justice”) of F.A. Hayek’s trilogy, Law, Legislation, and Liberty:

There are, in the last resort, no economic ends. The economic efforts of the individuals as well as the services which the market order renders to them, consist in an allocation of means for the competing ultimate purposes which are always non-economic. The task of all economic activity is to reconcile the competing ends by deciding for which of them the limited means are to be used. The market order reconciles the claims of the different non-economic ends by the only know process that benefits all – without, however, assuring that the more important comes before the less important, for the simple reason that there can exist in such a system no single ordering of needs.

The UCLA School and Property Rights

(Don Boudreaux)

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