Russell Roberts's Blog, page 253

Neil Oliver the Covidocracy’s Inhumanity

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

I thank my Mercatus Center colleague Jack Salmon for alerting me to this powerful video.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

Ethan Yang wisely warns us lockdown opponents not to suppose that the easing of lockdowns signals an intellectual victory. A slice:

Opponents of lockdowns raised their voices, we protested, we published viral content, we had our spotlights in the media, we stood behind what few leaders we had in government, we put out cutting-edge research, we even mobilized some of the top medical experts in the world to support our cause. Perhaps things would have been worse without our efforts, I don’t doubt that for a second, but at the end of the day, the lockdowners dragged society through the mud.

From Nature: “Deaths from COVID ‘incredibly rare’ among children.” (DBx: And so why does almost no one call out Washington Post columnist Leana Wen when she describes Covid as “now one of the leading causes of death among children”?)

Speaking of Leana Wen – who wants to make vaccines “the easy choice” by having government make ordinary life impossible for the unvaccinated – Jay Bhattacharya pushes back in this interview.

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

Here’s yet another study – this one from the CDC – showing that Covid-19 does not strike randomly. (DBx: Given this information – which was known almost from the start of Covid-19 – why was the the advice of Focused Protection offered by the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration dismissed as impractical and even dangerous? Why was Covid treated as a disease that strikes and inflicts its harms randomly across all ages and regardless of underlying health conditions? And why were the many politicians and pundits who endorsed – and who still endorse – this mistaken approach to Covid regarded as “following the science” while those, such as the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, regarded as rejecting the science? What is responsible for this madness?)

The straw man announces that he might very well pay return visits to Great Britain. He really does.

Well, at least these children won’t suffer from Covid!

Fraser Nelson reports on Boris Johnson’s inexcusable retreat from liberalism. A slice:

Now, as a Prime Minister with a 83-strong majority, he is forcing through an even more expansive, illiberal and intrusive version of the scheme he pledged to scrap. We’re told that he’s curtailing liberty with a heavy heart, but no one has explained why he is pressing ahead with it. Blair, at least, had an open debate in parliament so MPs such as Johnson could make their case, ask questions and vote against the plan. Johnson’s government prefers to avoid debate and instead have the private sector do its dirty work. Voluntary systems are being established, but with the clear threat of government making business impossible for companies that don’t oblige.

The pandemic has shaken faith in liberal democracy: opinion polls show huge support for curfews and quarantines. Johnson himself has remarked in private that he has been amazed at how easy it is to take freedoms away — and how hard it is to give them back. It’s quite possible he has concluded his liberalism was for an era that perished in the pandemic. Some of the most liberty-loving Tories have looked with envy towards Asian countries whose surveillance technology seemed to do a better job of stopping the spread of Covid. The future may well be one in which the government knows your temperature wherever you go, and vaccine passports may be welcomed as an alternative to blanket lockdowns.

“Anthony Fauci is wrong about the need for 3-year-olds to wear masks.”

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Leslie Bienen and Monica Gandhi report on the reasons why the Delta variant should cause no additional fear of Covid. A slice:

A second question is whether a particular variant is making infected people sicker. This question is answered fairly easily by looking at publicly available data from the CDC and comparing hospitalizations per case, particularly in regions where a new variant is more common. We analyzed these CDC data and found that the hospitalization data support none of the alarming headlines suggesting Delta is more dangerous than earlier strains.

Also writing on the Delta variant is Joel Zinberg. A slice:

But the bump in infections is nearly entirely among the unvaccinated. The authorized Covid-19 vaccines appear to be effective against Delta. And Delta is not clearly more dangerous than earlier variants: the average Covid-19 case with Delta is no more likely to lead to severe disease, hospitalization, or death than cases with other variants. Despite rising numbers of U.S. Delta cases, hospitalizations in July have risen only minimally, while Covid-19 deaths have remained flat.

The accumulating evidence shows that the authorized vaccines are highly effective at lessening transmission for all variants—including Delta. In the rare cases where vaccinated people become infected, their disease is mild and they pose a lower risk of transmitting the virus to others than do unvaccinated people.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 279 of my late Nobel-laureate colleague James Buchanan’s 1976 paper “Public Goods and Natural Liberty,” which is chapter 9 in the 1976 collection The Market and the State: Essays in Honour of Adam Smith (Thomas Wilson and Andrew S. Skinner, eds.) – a collection of original papers delivered at the University of Glasgow, in April 1976, on the bicentenary of the publication of Adam Smith’s magnificent An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations:

The restrictions on ‘natural liberty’ surely constitute ‘public bads’, from which it follows that their removal would be equivalent to the production of ‘public goods’. And surely these ‘public goods’ would increase the utility of persons in the community more than the sometimes piddling adjustments that are suggested for correcting minor market distortions. Smith would quickly discern that, now as then, markets ‘fail’ largely because they are not allowed to work because of overt political-governmental restrictions. It follows from this that the first steps toward making markets work more efficiently involve removing restrictions.

DBx: Adam Smith died at the age of 67 on this date, July 17th, in 1790.

Who Says Covid Derangement Syndrome Isn’t Real?

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

Here’s a letter to the staff of the Melbourne (Australia) School of Population and Global Health

Folks:

Unhappy with 9New Australia’s description yesterday of Victoria’s latest lockdown as “our worst nightmare,” you tweeted this:

Lockdown is not our “worst nightmare” @9NewsAUS.

Our worst nightmare is hospitals overrun with cases & buckling under the strain, a deadly virus out of control in the community and having to cope with loved ones dying from covid19.

What are you talking about? As of yesterday, the seven-day average of new Covid cases – cases, not deaths or even hospitalizations – in Victoria was 4. In the entire month of July so far the total number of new cases is a paltry 38. Of Victoria’s population of 6.7 million, that’s 0.0006 percent. Surely hospital capacity in your state isn’t so minuscule that it will be overrun by however many hospitalizations might emerge from 38 Covid cases – or even ten or twenty times this number of cases.

You’ll undoubtedly respond with a ‘What if?!’ – as in ‘What if the number of cases increases exponentially? At some point our hospitals will be overrun.’ Yep; that is indeed how math works. But that’s not how public policy works – or, at least, not how it should work. Good public policy is not done by first blithely assuming a worst-case scenario to be realistic and then, with equal blitheness, by assuming that no cost is too high to pay to avoid that scenario.

What is among society’s worst nightmares is public policy done in the manner you propose: Obsessively focus on a single risk; ignore all others; and drive that one risk as close as possible to zero, all else be damned. As it now appears that governments in Australia believe that the only acceptable goal in life is to avoid Covid, 9News Australia was indeed correct to describe public policy there as nightmarish.

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

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 75 of Harry Kurz’s 1975 English translation of Etienne de la Boétie’s remarkably insightful 1552-1553 tract, The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude:

[I]t has always happened that tyrants, in order to strengthen their power, have made every effort to train their people not only in obedience and servility toward themselves, but also in adoration.

DBx: Lamentable but undeniable.

It’s too bad that so many people, believing the state to possess the power to work miracles, regard their favorite politicians as high priests invested not merely with the power to work these miracles, but also with the god-like benevolence to use such power wisely and for the greater good.

Halting Comments Temporarily

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

In order, hopefully, to discourage the malignant, rodential spammers who have recently been invading the Cafe Hayek comments section with their absurd get-rich-quick schemes – schemes as intellectually valid and as ethically defensible as are the many adverts that I encounter everyday in the DC area for the Virginia and DC lotteries – I’m temporarily stopping all comments on future posts at this blog.

I’ll keep you posted on further developments.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is this comment earlier today (on a Facebook posting by David Henderson) of my emeritus Nobel-laureate colleague Vernon Smith:

What I have learned in the past year is that the mandators like controls, to control, and to have a justification for it. And now there is a reluctance to give them up.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

Bravo for Allison Pearson who declares that “[i]t’s our patriotic duty to live as freely and boldly as we can.” Two slices:

And how about Ruth, who says hospitals have been told to ensure there is extra paediatric capacity this winter “as they are expecting an influx of babies and children with severe respiratory infections. Not Covid, but other respiratory infections – eg flu, RSV.” The severity of these infections is down to children having been isolated from normal bugs for most of the past 16 months. So natural immunity will not have developed. “The time to build up their general immunity is now, not keep them restricted until flu season when they are more likely to get severely ill.”

Are the children who will be gasping for breath in paediatric units this coming winter not “people” the Prime Minister will do whatever it takes to keep safe? Or are he and his tunnel-visioned scientific advisers really only bothered about patients with Covid?

…..

It’s those who are trying to postpone normal life indefinitely who are the selfish and irresponsible ones. I reckon that it’s our patriotic duty to live as freely and boldly as we can. Ironically, that’s what it will take to keep people safe.

Jim Bovard wants no laurels bestowed on America’s lockdown governors. A slice:

Cuomo justified placing almost 20 million people under house arrest: “If everything we do saves just one life, I’ll be happy.” Though his repressive policies failed to prevent New York from having among the nation’s highest Covid death rates, he became a superhero thanks largely to media scoring that ignored almost all of the harms he inflicted. Cuomo won an Emmy Award for his “masterful use of television” during the pandemic. Media valorization helped make Cuomo’s self-tribute book, American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic, a bestseller.

Cuomo had plenty of power-mad accomplices in the governors’ association.  Oregon Governor Kate Brown banned residents from leaving their homes except for essential work, buying food, and other narrow exemptions and also banned all recreational travel. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer imposed some of the most severe restrictions, prohibiting anyone from leaving their home to visit family or friends. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti even banned people from walking or bicycling outside. The CDC eventually admitted that there was almost no risk of Covid contagion from outdoors activity not amidst a throng of people. But that did not stop politicians from claiming that “science and data” justified locking people in their homes.

A day in the life of those tyrannized by the covidocracy.

Britain indeed is, as Douglas Murray writes, “sleepwalking into a state of perpetual Covid tyranny.” A slice:

In the pages of this newspaper not so many years ago, Boris Johnson could be found railing against the idea of ID cards. When Tony Blair’s government looked at introducing such a thing, Johnson and others on the liberal wing of the Conservative party insisted that it was fundamentally un-British to allow a situation in which a state apparatchik could demand to see your papers and make you meekly hand them over.

But what the Government that Johnson heads is now suggesting is far more intrusive than that. The creation of “vaccine certification” means that we now face the prospect of having our papers demanded not just if we dare to think about leaving the country for some reason, but if we just want to go to almost any public gathering. Only by proving that you have had the vaccine or a recent negative test will you be allowed to take part in activities which we didn’t even question as among our rights before 2020.

Things are no better in France. A slice:

‘Freedom’ for the French will from now on be loosely defined as freedom to do what you think is best, as long as the state agrees, and if you disagree with the state, there will be consequences for your freedom – consequences the state will decide upon.

Does it make sense to vaccinate persons who have had Covid? Martin Kulldorff quite sensibly thinks not.

Here’s the latest jointly authored essay by Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, and Sunetra Gupta. A slice:

As Theresa May, Sajid Javid and Boris Johnson have pointed out, we must learn to live with Covid. As Covid becomes endemic, it will no longer pose the same danger to people that it once did. In its endemic state, there is no point in testing asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic people and obsessing over case numbers (unless the objective is endless panic). We do not test and count every case of flu or the common cold. Epidemiologists should continue to track Covid’s progress, but within reason.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 246 of University of Notre Dame philosopher James Otteson’s important 2021 book, Seven Deadly Economic Sins:

Thus, if we have any natural rights at all, one of them – perhaps the first of them – is the right to say “no”: no to any offer, suggestion, command, edict, or mandate; no to any question, inquiry, or demand for information; no to any person, however high, noble, authoritative, or rich. The right to say no is so intimately connected with every aspect of human moral agency, so foundational to what makes us human, and so crucial for the construction of a life of meaning and purpose that it should be considered sacrosanct. We  relinquish it at the risk of losing what makes us unique and valuable creatures, and when we take it from others we compromise their humanity.

DBx: No doubt about it.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 257 of F.A. Hayek’s September 1939 – note carefully the date – New Commonwealth Quarterly essay, “The Economic Conditions of Interstate Federalism,” as this essay is reprinted in Hayek’s indispensable 1948 collection, Individualism and Economic Order:

The existence of any measure of economic seclusion or isolation on the part of an individual state produces a solidarity of interests among all its inhabitants and conflicts between their interests and those of the inhabitants of other states which – although we have become so accustomed to such conflicts as to take them for granted – is by no means a natural or inevitable thing. There is no valid reason why any change which affects a particular industry in a certain territory should impinge more heavily upon all or most of the inhabitants of that territory than upon people elsewhere. This would hold good equally for the territories which now constitute sovereign states and for any other arbitrarily delimited region, if it were not for custom barriers, separate monetary organizations, and all the other impediments to the free movement of men and goods.