Russell Roberts's Blog, page 250
July 25, 2021
Some Covid Links
From Emory University: “COVID-19 survivors may possess wide-ranging resistance to the disease.” (HT Martin Kulldorff)
Daniel Hannan continues to write insightfully, wisely, and humanely about Covid-19 restrictions. A slice:
A nightclub should have the right to insist on vaccine certificates; but it should be under no legal obligation to do so. The default assumption for an open society should be that each club (and each cruise ship and each church and so on) can decide what, if any, measures to put in place. The state needs an overwhelming reason to override ownership rights. A vague sense of “better safe than sorry” does not constitute such a reason.
Also continuing to write insightfully, wisely, and humanely about Covid restrictions is Janet Daley. A slice:
On the face of it, this looks like another chapter in the modern struggle of totalitarianism versus liberty. But it is more than a constitutional argument between free political systems and despotism. Those of us who are determined to be free – and believe that this is a rational choice – must be aware that even in mature, stable democracies, there is a deep and probably inextinguishable longing to have one’s choices controlled and limited by authority, to be absolved from responsibility, to be protected from the consequences of individual actions. A successful public messaging campaign turned that ambivalence into a degree of compliance over Covid rules which has shocked many British commentators but what is most remarkable is how unsophisticated the basic appeal remains: how easy it is to persuade people that they have unleashed vengeful dark forces which must be appeased.
This fear is at the heart of every form of neurotic anxiety and those who are prey to it as individuals (often the most intelligent and sensitive) can incorporate it into belief systems and public policies with the best of motives and little self-awareness: the urge to control others is as much a product of fear as the desire to be controlled. Put in political terms, an authoritarianism that presents itself as benign can be more invidious than a murderous tyranny because the case for overthrowing it seems so much less urgent and the pretext for maintaining it so apparently virtuous. What this version of it rules out is the possibility of constructive, reasonable discussion about how terrible consequences might be averted through innovation, discovery, experiment and cooperative effort – all the things that free people engage in when they are not scared out of their wits, or depressed beyond the point of reason.
Toby Green and Jay Bhattacharya explain that “lockdowns are killers in the global south.” Here’s their conclusion:
If lockdowns are the cause of this terrible carnage, as we maintain, and they are ineffective in preventing the direct harm from the virus, then we should eschew them as a pandemic tactic.
Martin Kulldorff says that the deranged lockdown in Sydney should end now.
Here’s Annabel Fenwick Elliott:
Many times during this pandemic, I’ve wondered why people aren’t panicking enough. Not about Covid (there’s more than enough of that hysteria to go around); rather the alarming level of control we still find ourselves under in the face of such a disproportionate threat. Caught in a cycle of abuse, each time the public is awarded even a sliver of freedom, they are too giddy with gratitude to look up and see the larger storm clouds gather.
She also reports this appalling result of Covid Derangement Syndrome: “Australia has already announced that even after its entire population is inoculated, it won’t be opening its borders to international travel.”
Some Non-Covid Links
Deirdre McCloskey shares the history of her political opinions. A slice:
When in 1964 I shifted from Harvard College to Harvard graduate school in economics I was still supposing that my classmates and I would go down to Washington and, as the contemporary if daft phrase had it, “fine tune” the U.S. economy, or with still greater ease the Indian economy. The radio dial for tuning would be input-output analysis, which I had used to write my college fourth–year thesis. The thesis, which I have patented as a sleep aid, was not a good piece of work. I learned how to do economic research correctly by doing it at first incorrectly, and then having at least the minimally good taste to correct it. Input-output analysis is the businessperson’s metaphor of a “supply chain” generalized to the whole economy. That a supply chain is called a “chain,” as though there are no substitutes for making iron or ice cream this way, is what is wrong with it, and therefore with the input-output analysis that I applied for deciding on trucking vs. railroads in far India.
My GMU Econ colleague Dan Klein offers ten reasons for refraining from calling leftists “liberals.” A slice:
Our defense of “liberal society” collides with our domestic discourse if we call leftists “liberal.” Calling leftists “liberal” makes one lose touch with the centuries-long arc of liberal civilization and the rest of the world. To call leftists “liberal” is to fail to advance Western liberalism as aspiration for illiberal societies.
Walter Block explains why non-compete clauses are legitimate. A slice:
Second, … these stipulations are accused of artificially restricting competition. This is indeed correct, if by “competition” we mean, literally, numbers of competitors. Each such agreement reduces that number by exactly one. But these contracts are part and parcel of the competitive system. They were reached because of competition among employers for employees, and of the latter for the former. Mergers, too, as well as bankruptcies, decrease the number of firms still in operation. Shall we prevent them by law also? Hardly.
Deficit spending will eventually result in higher taxes for future generations. That’s a profoundly unfair burden. Debt is also expansive in and of itself, as interest payments on an enormous amount of debt—even when interest rates are low—will result in a larger and expanding deficit. According to Brian Riedl at the Manhattan Institute, Congressional Budget Office data reveal that by 2049, “Interest payments on the national debt would be the federal government’s largest annual expenditure, consuming 42% of all projected tax revenues.”
GMU Econ alum Dave Hebert decries the Biden administration’s effort to create a tax-collecting cartel among governments. (DBx: Unlike Dave, however, I find nothing justifiable in the use of antitrust to prevent private firms from attempting to cartelize.)
Jonathan Rauch asks “Who gets to decide the truth?”
Art Carden observes that Cuba has now been demoted, predictably, to “not real socialism.” A slice:
I think the embargo is a terrible idea that should be lifted immediately, as it has given Cuban communists a convenient scapegoat for their country’s problems. The embargo, however, is not what causes Cuba’s woes, and people blaming the embargo overlook the fact that Cuba trades pretty extensively with the rest of the world–how else do you think Canadian and Mexican merchants get the Cuban cigars they hawk to American tourists? It’s not because a Cuban Rhett Butler is smuggling them past a blockade. It’s because Cuba trades freely with the entire world. I suspect the US embargo hasn’t really hurt Cuba that much more than the “transgender bathroom” boycott hurt Target.
Juliette Sellgren talks with Samuel Gregg about Christianity and liberalism.
The Federal Reserve Board and some of its regional banks are wading waist-deep into politics. Disregard the Fed’s embarrassing policy that its employees should avoid using “biased terms” such as “Founding Fathers.” And never mind that the Fed already had enough to do fulfilling its three statutory mandates (to promote “maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates”) before it unilaterally adopted a fourth: to produce properly “inclusive” growth, as measured by criteria of the Fed’s choosing. So, monetary policy must have distributional effects that satisfy particular political standards.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 135 of the 2016 second edition of Thomas Sowell’s Wealth, Poverty and Politics:
Economic and social progress, whether among individuals, groups or nations, depends on both tangible and intangible factors. The tangible factors would include geography and existing physical wealth as a foundation for economic growth. The key intangible is human capital, and among the varieties of human capital is what has been aptly called “the radius of trust” within which individuals and groups cooperate in economic and social endeavors. Attitudes toward work and attitudes toward progress itself are also among the intangibles. What is tangible may make a stronger visible impression but it is by no means certain that its economic effect is greater than the economic effect of intangibles included in the concept of culture.
July 24, 2021
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from pages 353-354 of the 2014 collection, The Market and Other Orders (Bruce Caldwell, ed.), of some of F.A. Hayek’s essays on spontaneous-ordering forces; this particular quotation is from Hayek’s January 1970 lecture at the University of Salzburg, “The Errors of Constructivism” (original emphases):
The social scientist who endeavors to understand how society functions, and to discover where it can be improved, must claim the right critically to examine, and even to judge, every single value of our society. The consequence of what I have said is merely that we can never at one and the same time question all of its values….
The process of the evolution of a system of values passed on by cultural transmission must implicitly rest on criticism of individual values in the light of their consistency, or compatibility, with all other values of society, which for this purpose must be taken as given and undoubted. The only standard by which we can judge particular values of our society is the entire body of other values of that same society.
DBx: Hayek here speaks as a true liberal (and not as the conservative that many people mistakenly suppose him to have been). Note, though, that the true liberal understands that wisdom counsels humility in assessing the rules by which we live.
The Essential UCLA School of Economics
Marvelous news! David Henderson’s and Steven Globerman’s The Essential UCLA School of Economics has just been published by the Fraser Institute. Having read the manuscript, I can attest that it’s excellent. You can download it free of charge here.
And here’s the introductory video to accompany the book.
Some Covid Links
I offer heartfelt applause for, and support to, my long-time friend, occasional co-author, and George Mason University colleague over in the law school, Todd Zywicki, for resisting the Covidocrats in GMU’s higher administration. Here’s part of a statement released by the New Civil Liberties Alliance:
George Mason University (GMU) in Fairfax, Virginia, is doubling down on its flawed reopening policy for the Fall 2021 semester, which tramples on the civil liberties of students, faculty, and employees alike. The New Civil Liberties Alliance, a nonpartisan, nonprofit civil rights group, sent GMU a letter on Wednesday on behalf of NCLA’s client, Scalia Law School Professor Todd Zywicki, along with affidavits from Drs. Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, and Hooman Noorchashm, explaining that the school’s policy is irrational from a scientific perspective and violates fundamental tenets of medical ethics.
Today’s Wall Street Journal features a profile of the great Matt Ridley. Two slices:
In the U.K., he has also noted “a tendency to admire authoritarian China among scientists that surprised some people.” It didn’t surprise Mr. Ridley. “I’ve noticed for years,” he says, “that scientists take a somewhat top-down view of the political world, which is odd if you think about how beautifully bottom-up the evolutionary view of the natural world is.”
He asks: “If you think biological complexity can come about through unplanned emergence and not need an intelligent designer, then why would you think human society needs an ‘intelligent government’?” Science as an institution has “a naive belief that if only scientists were in charge, they would run the world well.” Perhaps that’s what politicians mean when they declare that they “believe in science.” As we’ve seen during the pandemic, science can be a source of power.
But there’s a “tension between scientists wanting to present a unified and authoritative voice,” on the one hand, and science-as-philosophy, which is obligated to “remain open-minded and be prepared to change its mind.” Mr. Ridley fears “that the pandemic has, for the first time, seriously politicized epidemiology.” It’s partly “the fault of outside commentators” who hustle scientists in political directions. “I think it’s also the fault of epidemiologists themselves, deliberately publishing things that fit with their political prejudices or ignoring things that don’t.”
Epidemiologists are divided between those who want more lockdowns and those who think that approach wasn’t effective and might have been counterproductive. Mr. Ridley sides with the latter camp, and he’s dismissive of the alarmist modeling that led to lockdowns in the first place. “The modeling of where the pandemic might go,” he says, “presents itself as an entirely apolitical project. But there have been too many cases of epidemiologists presenting models based on rather extreme assumption.”
…..
In Mr. Ridley’s view, the scientific establishment has always had a tendency “to turn into a church, enforcing obedience to the latest dogma and expelling heretics and blasphemers.” This tendency was previously kept in check by the fragmented nature of the scientific enterprise: Prof. A at one university built his career by saying that Prof. B’s ideas somewhere else were wrong. In the age of social media, however, “the space for heterodoxy is evaporating.” So those who believe in science as philosophy are increasingly estranged from science as an institution. It’s sure to be a costly divorce.
One lesson from this pandemic is that heads of research funding agencies, such as Anthony Fauci and @JeremyFarrar, should not set public health policy. It stifles critically important scientific discourse, as scientists do not want to contradict the funders they depend on.
In my estimation Florida governor Ron DeSantis doesn’t get everything correct, but he is excellent and stalwart on the most pressing issue of today: Covid restrictions. As reported by Reason‘s Christian Britschgi, DeSantis refuses to inflict this tyranny on Floridians. Two slices:
While other jurisdictions toy with reinstituting public health restrictions in response to rising COVID-19 cases, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) says that his state won’t go in for another round of lockdowns and mask mandates.
“If anyone is calling for lockdowns, you’re not getting that done in Florida. I’m going to protect people’s livelihoods. I’m going to protect kids’ right to go to school. I’m going to protect people’s right to run their small businesses,” DeSantis said at a press conference in Fort Pierce, Florida, yesterday. “We have three vaccines that have been widely available for months and months now. People need to make decisions what’s right for them.”
…..
Florida has essentially been free of Covid restrictions since May. That month, DeSantis issued an executive order suspending all local states of emergency. He also signed a bill that requires local emergency orders to be “narrowly tailored” to serve a “compelling public health or safety purpose.” That bill also capped the number of days a local emergency order could be extended for, and it made it easier for the state legislature to overturn the governor’s state-level emergency policies.
DeSantis has also pardoned people convicted of violating Covid restrictions and canceled any fines they’d have to pay.
Mask mandates, on the other hand, largely function as a form of signaling. Vaccinated people who wear masks are communicating that they take the pandemic seriously, and policy makers who insist on mask requirements are associating themselves with a specific political tribe. If you’ve had your COVID shots, the mask is basically Team Blue’s version of the Make America Great Again hat.
Robert Jackman reports, in Reason, that the straw man might well pay a return visit to Great Britain. A slice:
With 70 percent of Britain’s adult population fully vaccinated (and vaccination rates among seniors over 90 percent) daily COVID-19 deaths have slowed to a trickle. Even with a spike in cases thanks to the Delta variant, deaths have hardly budged. Having reopened the indoor economy back in May, we’re seen only a small rise in hospitalizations, even if cases have soared.
In short, the vaccines worked.
If you’d have shown these numbers to Prime Minister Boris Johnson six months ago, he would have jumped for joy. But that hasn’t been the case. Instead, he and Britain’s other political elites find themselves locked in a cycle of hyper-caution. The last COVID-19 rules were finally scrapped on July 19, only to be replaced by guidelines telling us to keep upholding them. Here are your freedoms back, but please don’t exercise them.
Meanwhile, in Sweden – as reported by John Miltimore – daily Covid deaths hit zero. A slice:
Sweden, of course, was maligned in 2020 for foregoing a strict lockdown. The Guardian called its approach “a catastrophe” in the making, while CBS News said Sweden had become “an example of how not to handle COVID-19.”
Despite these criticisms, Sweden’s laissez-faire approach to the pandemic continues today. In contrast to its European neighbors, Sweden is welcoming tourists. Businesses and schools are open with almost no restrictions. And as far as masks are concerned, not only is there no mandate in place, Swedish health officials are not even recommending them.
What are the results of Sweden’s much-derided laissez-faire policy? Data show the 7-day rolling average for COVID deaths yesterday [July 21st] was zero…. As in nada. And it’s been at zero for about a week now.
And meanwhile in Australia – as reported by Camilla Tominey – Covid Derangement Syndrome rages and ravages. Two slices:
Cast your eyes over to Australia, where this “model” for controlling the pandemic is stuck in a lunatic cycle of self-harm. The state of South Australia has just gone into another lockdown following just five positive Covid “cases” – even though it is unclear if any of the patients are actually ill, let alone at serious risk of dying.
People have been told to stay at home with schools, shops and everything else shut. All because of a handful of positive test results.
…..
Due to a suspected outbreak of the Delta variant, half of Australia’s population, around 13 million people, are now in some form of lockdown despite pursuing a policy of splendid isolation involving closed borders and quarantine hotels. Having halved its cap on international arrivals to 3,000 per week, there are now 34,000 Australians stranded in a foreign country and unable to come home.
Quotation of the Day…
Our default assumption should instead be that people who make choices different from what we make or would have made must have their reasons, even if we do not know what they are. Our default principle should be, therefore, to respect their choices and recognize them as reflective of their equal moral agency. That does not mean that others are infallible or that we should regard them as such, or that others should be immune from criticism. But it does mean that we should exhibit humility when we judge others, because we only infrequently know the whole story.
DBx: Such humility today is especially lacking. It’s almost as if success at expressing short, barbed thoughts on Twitter works as a hallucinogen to create the sensation of possessing god-like powers, with an accompanying duty, to lord it over fellow human beings.
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I was pleased, but not surprised, to see in the Wall Street Journal a favorable review by Barton Swaim of Jim’s book. A slice:
James R. Otteson’s “Seven Deadly Economic Sins” (Cambridge, 305 pages, $27.95) is a fine effort to introduce readers to the basic principles of market economics. The hamartiological framing—the “sins” are bad assumptions about how markets work—is part of the author’s effort to make the subject more engaging than a typical treatise on economics. It works. Mr. Otteson, a professor of business ethics at Notre Dame, writes with an apt combination of casual wit and rigorous logic.
July 23, 2021
Dan Sutter Interviews David Henderson on Covid-19
George Mason University Econ alum – and Troy State University economist – Dan Sutter interviews David Henderson on Covid-19 and the lockdowns – specifically, on David’s piece in the June 2021 edition of Reason titled “Economic Lessons from COVID-19.” Both the interview and David’s essay are excellent.
Some Covid Links
Karen Harradine explains that lockdowns are the reverse of disease control. A slice:
As a direct consequence, malaria mortality in Africa will exceed that of Covid-19. Children are at far greater risk of dying from malaria than Covid-19, and an additional 100,000 people are expected to die from this disease.
In 2019, 450,000 died of TB in Africa, far more than the 160,112 who have died from Covid-19 there. Why did the WHO withdraw treatment for this curable disease, especially from children? Despite Covid Cultists claiming that Covid-19 is the worst plague since the Black Death, TB is the leading infectious disease in the world, killing 1.4million per year prior to 2020. Last year, after lockdowns, the death toll for TB rose to more than 1.66million, including 230,000 children.
(DBx: Deaths from familiar causes make no news. To gather gruesome footage for airing on CNN, NBC, and the BBC, no one films the victims of flu, cancer, and automobile accidents. About the very real victims of these and other familiar causes of death, no headline news stories are written and few pundits pontificate. These deaths, no matter how painful and dismaying, are normal; they’re not news; they’re therefore invisible to the general public. But Covid-19, a disease caused by a novel coronavirus and that emerged just after social media had become a dominant means of communication, is focused on obsessively. Not only is every death from Covid counted, reported, and treated as a uniquely sad and avoidable event, so too is every death with Covid – and so too is every Covid case. Many otherwise-intelligent people lose all perspective. Many otherwise wise people, usually – and sensibly – among the first to loudly protest politicians and bureaucrats who dare to presume to claim the power to regulate the likes of financial markets, the Internet, and entry into the market for hair-braiders, utter not a peep when these same politicians and bureaucrats exercise unprecedented powers of lockdown and mask-mandates in the name of fighting Covid. The world goes mad. Freedom shrivels and decays. What David Hart calls “hygiene socialism” advances. Civilization teeters.)
Canadians won’t be able to enter the U.S. until Aug. 21, though Canada recently said it will allow Americans to go north on Aug. 9. This isn’t neighborly American behavior, and it’s not consistent with what the Biden Administration likes to call “the science.”
Canada had a rocky start to its Covid vaccination program, largely due to supply problems. But it has rapidly picked up the pace and is now doing better than the U.S. at getting people to roll up their sleeves. Health Canada reported this week that nearly 70% of its population has received at least one Covid-19 vaccine dose. More than 50% of Canadians are now fully vaccinated, while the U.S. rate is 48.6%.
If the vaccines provide protection from severe Covid, as the Biden Administration avers, then why continue the blockade against vaccinated Canadians entering the U.S.? And if Canadians can’t come here, why should Canada allow Americans to enter since there’s more vaccine resistance in the U.S.?
Wall Street Journal columnist James Freeman writes:
How devastating was the 2020 pandemic and how devastating was government’s reaction to the pandemic? It will likely take years to reach definitive conclusions, but the latest annual federal report on U.S. mortality is a start in discovering the answers. Along with the well-documented ravages of Covid, the government is reporting a stunning increase, especially among young people, in a broad category called “unintentional injuries” that demands further investigation.
Sally Beck reports from a recent Lockdown Summit. Two slices:
Analysing measures that the government has used to keep us ‘free from fear’, Frank Furedi, professor of sociology from the University of Kent, said they had had the opposite effect. He asked: ‘Are people walking around saying “we feel safer”? We feel far more insecure and anxious than ever. Every time we give up our freedom for safety, the less safe we feel.’
Children and women vulnerable to domestic violence were on the agenda because during the first three weeks of lockdown, 14 women and two children were killed in their homes, while 400,000 children have sought help with their mental health.
Child and adolescent clinical psychologist Dr Zenobia Storah was unequivocal. She said: ‘We have totally failed children this year. It is totally obvious if you close schools it is going to cause a crisis. Children become invisible.
‘Special needs schools closed, respite closed, social workers stopped home visits. Child membership to criminal gangs has increased. It is like watching a slow car crash.’
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One country came in for praise – Sweden. They have been our control group since March 2020, focusing on building herd immunity in their population rather than locking down their population and removing their liberties.
Doom-mongers predicted that this ‘reckless’ action would end with 90,000 excess deaths. PANDA’s Nick Hudson explained: ‘By the end of the year, they had suffered no more than between zero and 7,000 excess deaths, depending on how you run the numbers. Sweden had an abnormally low death rate in 2019 so 2020’s figures included the build-up.’
David Paton, Professor of industrial economics at Nottingham University Business School, praised Sweden’s anti-lockdown strategy for saving their economy. He said: ‘The UK took a 10 per cent hit to its gross domestic product (GDP), while Sweden only suffered a 2.1 per cent hit.’
The last word should go to actuary and PANDA co-founder Peter Castleden who described the measures that increase your risk of a poor outcome if you contract Covid. He said: ‘Obesity and anxiety were the top predictors. So what did we do? We stopped people exercising and filled them with fear.’
South Australia, the state in which I reside, has gone into lockdown following five positive Covid-19 tests. The reports do not suggest that anybody is ill, let alone that that anyone has died. On the contrary, it would seem that the individuals in question would not even know that they are “cases” but for the results of their tests.
Chief Public Health Officer Nicola Spurrier has explained the rationale: “The virus doesn’t have legs: it moves around when people move around, so if people stay put we will be able to get on top of it.”
This is analysis more suitable for a preschool classroom than a serious public health response. Save for a few exceptions, people here now have to stay at home. Most shops are shut. Schools are shut. Construction sites are shut. Even Professor Spurrier’s husband has been required to stay home; she has told him that he can use the time to tidy up his sock drawer. The hospitals (where a good deal of the virus spreading has been going on) remain open, albeit that elective surgery has been banned, so that the legless virus will be able to continue to hop around in that environment
As I write, New South Wales has seen cases increase by roughly 100 per day. Victoria recently announced 22 positive Covid tests; South Australia, just six. And yet the 16.5 million people who reside in these States, including myself, are locked indoors, with no guessing when restrictions will be lifted (Australia’s leaders make Boris Johnson look like the freedom-touting Churchillian he pretends to be). To put the issue into proportion: 1,400 people out of 25 million currently test positive for the virus.
This begs the question: why are so many people in lockdown when there are so few ‘cases’ and even fewer deaths? The answer is too complicated to be responded to with anything less than a book, but we can see clues littered throughout the pandemic.
Victoria’s first lockdown granted Premier Dan Andrews with a panic-stricken mandate. Much of the Victorian electorate quickly turned to the Premier to find comfort (as do so many people do when panicked), calling for hard and fast lockdowns and an elimination strategy. But even this was deemed controversial by the Federal Government at the time, which branded the elimination of Covid a ‘false hope’.
So you can imagine the bafflement of many when Victoria entered another strict lockdown, this time to nullify the virus after a week or two.
But what was intended to be a short lockdown lasted months, and what was meant to be a flattening of the infection curve did indeed turn into an elimination strategy. Victorians have been in five separate lockdowns since the start of this pandemic.
Gary Oliver decries Boris Johnson’s descent into Covid derangement. A slice:
Despite his apparent reservations, at the end of October 2020 Johnson did of course succumb to the siren calls and issued a further stay-at-home order – again enraging sceptics for whom lockdowns have been a dementedly disproportionate response and an unconscionable violation of our freedoms.
From the lockdown addicts, there is much confected shock and outrage that last autumn Johnson did not concentrate solely on the coronavirus casualties, but instead wanted to weigh the titanic trade-offs between lives, livelihoods and liberty. From those of us who deplore him being a stooge for scheming scientists and mendacious modellers, there is surprise that the Johnson of October 2020 seemingly was still capable of rational and independent thought, albeit he soon surrendered to the scaremongers.
Nine months on, this week’s pusillanimous performance by Johnson confirms that he has been completely captured by the public health partisans. On what was bogusly billed as ‘freedom day’, it was horrifying to hear the UK Prime Minister announce: ‘I would remind everybody that some of life’s most important pleasures and opportunities are likely to be increasingly dependent on vaccination.’
A chilling prospect, and a dystopia which Johnson warns might only be two months away: ‘By the end of September . . . we’re planning to make full vaccination a condition of entry to nightclubs and other venues where large crowds gather. Proof of a negative test will no longer be enough.’
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 106 of the profound 1976 Vol. II (“The Mirage of Social Justice”) of F.A. Hayek’s trilogy, Law, Legislation, and Liberty:
If we wish everybody to be well off, we shall get closer to our goal, not by commanding by law that this should be achieved, or giving everybody a legal claim to what we think he ought to have, but by providing inducements for all to do as much as they can that will benefit others.
DBx: Indeed so. And maximum possible such inducements for each person to be as great as possible a help to as large as possible a number of strangers is provided by undistorted market prices, along with the corresponding profits and losses.
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