Russell Roberts's Blog, page 255

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from pages 65-66 of the deep and profoundly important 1976 Vol. II (“The Mirage of Social Justice”) of F.A. Hayek’s trilogy, Law, Legislation, and Liberty:

It might indeed be said that the main difference between the order of society at which classical liberalism aimed and the sort of society into which it is now being transformed is that the former was governed by principles of just individual conduct while the new society is to satisfy the demands for ‘social justice’ – or, in other words, that the former demanded just action by the individuals while the latter more and more places the duty of justice on authorities with power to command people what to do.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 112 of Eamonn Butler’s 2018 monograph, An Introduction to Capitalism:

The inability (or unwillingness) of business people to explain the public benefits of entrepreneurship and free markets is surely a huge weakness of capitalism, and a huge threat to it. By muddling capitalism with cronyism, such supposed champions do the cause no favours. The idea of capitalism is hard enough to understand already: the immediate benefits of interventions are easy to grasp, but not the long-term advantages of leaving markets and competition to work; and few people realise how delicate the market order is, and how wildly it can be thrown out of gear by even small political interventions.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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At Law & Liberty, James Allan reports on the continuing despotism crushed down on Australians by that country’s especially rabid covidocracy. Three slices:

Today, the only thing that apparently matters to Australia’s political and public health classes are cases. Should the State authorities uncover just a couple dozen odd cases, then boom—your State will be in lockdown. Queensland’s extension of lockdown a few days ago was attributed to three new cases. More than five million people forced to remain in lockdown because of only that! For this native born Canadian it is all madness. Well, madness, wrapped up in the name of “saving lives,” inside a heavy-handed despotism.
…..
Sixteen months later, we are still at it, still addicted to lockdowns, no curve ever having existed to flatten. The ABC (our national broadcaster) and nearly all of the commercial press seem to revel in hourly updates of case numbers and what might be described as “fear porn.” (Only one publication, Spectator Australia, has been skeptical of the heavy-handed lockdowns from the start.) Mask mandates have been myriad, and worse many Australians now wear them whether mandated or not. And still to this day, barring bureaucratic dispensation for which you need to beg, citizens cannot leave. Anyone managing to find a rare flight into the country must hotel quarantine for two weeks at his own expense—without leaving the room. Covid policy has turned Australia into a sort of modern day 17th century Japan.
…..
The next time you hear that Australia has had an exemplary Covid response, try not to bust a gut laughing. If you care even a fig for freedom concerns, well, Australia’s political class has been the worst in the country’s history.

And this report from Australia confirms – unintentionally – the reality of Covid Derangement Syndrome. (DBx: Who can read a report such as this one and fail to see that the response to this one ailment is powerful evidence of a nation gone mad?)

Also reporting on Australia’s return to being a prison colony – this time one established by covidicrats – is Angela Mollard. A slice:

If the pandemic has taught us anything, however, it’s that ‘success’ and self-satisfaction can mutate as quickly as the virus.

In just a few weeks, the nation has gone from the envy of the world for its low number of deaths, quick and effective lockdowns, formidable contact tracing and routine ‘doughnut days’ – where no cases are reported – to a hermit kingdom shut off from the rest of the globe.

We could be isolated for years, according to public health experts and epidemiologists.

Peter Hitchens decries the continuing grip that Covid Derangement Syndrome has on Britain. A slice:

Science is a hard mistress, which simply discards beliefs that have been overthrown by experiment. What the zealots have is reverence for individual scientists who happen to agree with them, a very different thing. In fact, it is much like the medieval religious view, that anything spoken from on high must be accepted.

I’ve pointed out on these pages the fascinating presence, among the Covid Commissars, of Professor Susan Michie, a Communist so hardline that her more liberal comrades once searched her baby’s pram for pro-Moscow propaganda.

I’d also note that her zone of expertise is psychology, not medicine or biochemistry, as you might be tempted to think from her frequent appearances in debates on Covid matters.

But I think she is really there because she can see, as many others like her do, that this is an unrivalled chance to turn Britain permanently into a country where people who think they are good and clever can boss the rest of us around.

Camilla Tominey rightly pushes back against those who use the prospect of Long Covid as a reason to continue living in fear of Covid.

And here’s Noah Carl on Long Covid. His conclusion:

Overall then, estimates for the prevalence of long Covid range from 0.04% to 1.7% of the population. And estimates of the chance of reporting symptoms after 12 weeks range from less than 1% to almost 12%. Given all the available evidence, I would suggest that those toward the low end are more plausible – especially if we’re talking about something of clinical significance.

Daniel Hannan asks his fellow Brits, “What the hell is wrong with you people?” A slice:

I have learned some hard truths about my country these past 15 months. I used to imagine that we would reflexively favour liberty. Sure, we would be open to persuasion, ready to accept proportionate restrictions if they were justified by the evidence. But our default assumption would be that, as freeborn Brits, we should be able to go where we pleased without needing to explain ourselves to anyone.

Boy, did I get that wrong. The epidemic brought out our most petty, priggish and puritan tendencies. True, it also brought out our kindness, compassion and community spirit. But these things are often two sides of the same coin. Psychologists have long known that wars, earthquakes and natural disasters give people a sense of purpose and solidarity that can be extremely pleasurable, but that that brain chemistry also makes them intolerant of any behaviour judged to be eccentric or nonconformist.

The tyranny always lurking in the heart of nudgers is on the loose in Britain – so reports Laura Dodsworth. Here’s more:

With more than half of the population now double-vaccinated – 51.2 per cent of all eligible Britons have now had both jabs – expect the emphasis to shift on to long Covid. It’s all too apparent that Covid doesn’t kill children, so scientifically its “hangover” effects are a grey area that can be leveraged, potentially exploited to encourage, say, the idea of vaccination in children, or the rollout of daily testing in schools.

Can it be coincidence that, in recent days, Prof Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer, has warned of a “significant” increase in long Covid among the young?

Similarly, if the Government really wants us to retreat from the state of fear it put us in at the start of the first lockdown last March – when the Prime Minister urged us, “at this moment of national emergency, to stay at home, protect our NHS and save lives” – we must get wise to its reporting of data. The current Covid dashboard, to which we are subjected on the news every evening, has floated the big scary numbers to the top – but without context. We are told about deaths and hospital admissions, but never about the recoveries.

If the Government was serious about things returning to normal, the nightly reported figures might be better switched to the amount of antibodies in the population at large, or the reduced lethality of new variants, both of which tell a positive story.

Scott Alexander did a deep dive into the effectiveness of lockdowns.

Thank goodness the killer of these teenage girls wasn’t Covid!

Jeffrey Tucker understandably wonders what’s going on with the Biden administration’s “unrelenting push for more and younger” Americans to be vaccinated. A slice:

The Biden administration’s announcement that it would go door-to-door pushing vaccines is alarming, to say the least. Vaccine data reveal that more than 90% of those vulnerable to severe outcomes from Covid are already vaccinated. Why not cheer this and move on? Why the unrelenting push for more and younger? How is this consistent with the idea of the common good? It’s mystifying.

The low rates of vaccinations among many might not reflect ignorance. They don’t need to be muscled. They could be uninterested because they can read demographic data about Covid risk. Or maybe they are already immune due to previous infection (natural immunity remains a taboo topic, and scandalously so). Maybe they just don’t want the jab, which is their right (one once supposed).

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Tom Nicholson reports on some appallingly bad ‘science’ done regarding the consequences of mask wearing.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from James Madison’s October 17th, 1788, letter to Thomas Jefferson:

Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression. In our Governments the real power lies in the majority of the Community, and the invasion of private rights is cheifly to be apprehended, not from acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the constituents. This is a truth of great importance, but not yet sufficiently attended to….

DBx: Madison here wisely warned Jefferson that majority-rule democracy, standing alone, provides no good protection against oppression and rights-suppression by government.

Some Non-Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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My GMU Econ colleague Bryan Caplan, with his usual unusual insightfulness, explains media bias. A slice:

For the vast majority of human beings, the alternative to first-hand experience is not statistics, but news. And compared to news, first-hand experience is ultra-reliable, for a long list of reasons.

1. Random error. Since the news is a vast industry, this might seem like a minor problem. Due to severe media herding, however, the problem remains severe. Journalists are not independent draws, but echoes in a vast echo chamber.

2. Selection bias. Journalists are far from average humans. They are highly-educated and highly-left-wing. Even more importantly, they are desperately trying to grab people’s attention with shocking anecdotes and images. What’s more, they have impressive resources to hunt down these shocking anecdotes and images. The upshot is that media selection bias is literally off the charts. What they choose to show is outside the first-hand experience all humans on Earth. By which I mean that zero humans have personally experienced all – or even a tiny sliver – of the horrors on the news.

3. Availability bias. After filtering reality through the biases of their ideology and need to grab people’s attention, journalists take the distillate and run it through yet another filter: their own memories. So when they bring up old stories, or provide context for new stories, they are piling bias on bias.

Institute for Humane Studies president Emily Chamlee-Wright recently spoke with George Will.

University of Washington professor Tony Gill explains that democracy is more than just majority rule. A slice (typo corrected):

A more realistic view of the world, however, informs us that wherever there is a concentration of power over valuable resources, individuals who want to control those resources will seek to get it by hook or by crook. If political power can be gained via a free and fair elections with no irregularities then all is well and good. But if electoral margins are thin, and the resources to be distributed are increasingly large, shenanigans will rein. That both political parties in the United States engage in playing loose with elections is only proof positive that this is not a matter of some ideological commitment to democracy, but an age-old desire to obtain and preserve power over others.

For this reason, we shouldn’t expect electoral irregularities to stop any time soon regardless of all the well-intentioned calls for “reform.” As government grows in scope and power, and as trillions of tax dollars pile up in Washington, DC and billions elsewhere, there is all the more incentive to “rig” elections to ensure a favorable outcome for one’s favorite political team. Such “rigging” can take the form of illegal activity (e.g., stuffing the ballot box with the votes of deceased citizens) or legal “reform” of electoral laws (e.g., voter ID, absentee balloting rules, or gerrymandering electoral districts). Reform may just well be a Potemkin village established to make one side or the other feel good that things will get better.

Steven Greenhut rightly criticizes zoning.

The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board wisely warns of the Biden administration’s dangerous reinvigoration of antitrust. A slice:

The new Brandeisians in the Biden Administration led by the National Economic Council’s Tim Wu (godfather of net neutrality) and FTC chair Lina Khan want to replace the rule of reason with the rule of politics. Mr. Biden’s order includes 72 directives that mostly aim to shackle businesses.

Kay Hymowitz explains why the child-tax credit will not live up to the hype offered by its supporters.

My GMU Econ colleague Dan Klein explores the “virtuous asymmetry” between gratefulness and resentfulness.

Jim Bovard blasts calls for “national service” requirements and other instances of mass subjugation. A slice:

Compulsory national service is the deranged civics version of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). MMT theory presumes that politicians can fabricate and spend unlimited amounts of fiat money without profoundly damaging the economy. Similarly, compulsory national service proponents presume politicians can destroy a vast swath of freedom without harming America. Proponents tacitly assume that the time of young people is of zero value, so their scheme costs nothing. Since every 18-to-20 year old is squandering all their time playing video games and watching Pornhub, why not round them up? But where did politicians acquire the right to command young people to postpone building their own lives?

Compulsory national service would provide “attitude adjustment” for an entire generation.  Many proponents stress that shackling young people is the best way to encourage them to be tolerant and appreciative of people of different backgrounds. Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian Doris Kearns Goodwin favors national service because “you get people from the city to the country, country to the city, you begin to create a new generation that has shared values.” Indoctrination would be a huge part of any such program but the media wouldn’t use that term because progressive values would be inculcated. The vast majority of young Americans spend 12 years in government schools but politicians want more control over their thoughts.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from pages 3-4 of Jonathan Israel’s 2010 book, A Revolution of the Mind:

The notion, still widespread today, that Enlightenment thinkers nurtured a naïve belief in man’s perfectibility seems to be a complete myth conjured up by early twentieth-century scholars unsympathetic to its claims. In reality, Enlightenment progress breathed a vivid awareness of the great difficulty of spreading toleration, curbing religious fanaticism, and otherwise ameliorating human organization, orderliness, and the general state of health and was always impressively empirically based. Its relative optimism rested on man’s obviously growing capacity to create wealth, invent technologies capable of raising production, and devise stable legal and political institutions, as well as, it should be mentioned, the disappearance of the plague.

DBx: If your goal is to extinguish the Enlightenment, you can do no better than to frighten the populace into believing that they are on the verge of being mowed down by a pathogen that is categorically more dangerous than is any other peril that they’ve encountered during their lifetimes. We now know that even a modern and ‘enlightened’ populace, when so alarmed, will without much thought or hesitancy sacrifice to the state all their freedoms and rights – and, hence, their dignity and humanity – in exchange for promised reductions, no matter how minuscule, of their prospects of encountering this Dreaded Monster.

I Anti-Trust These People

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:

Editor:

Your home page today offers vivid evidence of the Biden administration’s confusion on matters economic. One report, headlined “Biden Targets Big Business in Sweeping Executive Order to Spur Competition,” describes the administration’s goal as ensuring against “higher prices and fewer product choices.” Yet accompanying this report is a link to Greg Ip’s July 7th column titled “Antitrust’s New Mission: Preserving Democracy, Not Efficiency.”

It’s fair to ask the administration: Which is it? Does the administration, as the first report claims, wish to keep prices low and product choices abundant? If so, it’ll want markets to be as efficient as possible. This outcome requires that antitrust continue to be guided exclusively by the consumer-welfare standard. But if, as Mr. Ip reports, the administration is eager to abandon the consumer-welfare standard in order to turn antitrust into a tool for “preserving democracy, not efficiency,” then the administration is in fact not interested in ensuring against higher prices and fewer product choices.

The administration can’t have it both ways. It would be good of Mr. Biden to decide, and to inform us clearly, which of these two conflicting goals he’ll pursue.

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

…..

Even Greg Ip – with whom I often disagree – hits the nail on the head when he concludes that “For all its flaws, antitrust governed by the consumer welfare standard is less at risk of politicization than beliefs about what’s good or bad for democracy.”

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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David Henderson correctly points out that actions that have potentially detrimental effects on other people are not necessarily negative externalities that justify intervention by government.

Unlike too many other reporters and pundits, Elizabeth Nolan Brown puts the dangers of the Delta variant in proper perspective.

Speaking of the Delta variant, Matt Welch reports the (sadly unsurprising) news that some officials – especially ones in blue U.S. states – are exploiting exaggerated fears of this variant as an excuse to avoid fully opening their so-called ‘schools.’

The straw man, or at least his fraternal twin, is romping through South Korea.

“Just 25 Under-18s Died From Covid in England Up Until February, New Data Shows – Figures Much Higher for Suicide and Trauma.” But at least these children didn’t die of Covid – which, apparently, today is all that matters.

Oh, look! A negative health effect of lockdowns. But at least these children won’t die of Covid – which, apparently, today is all that matters.

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

Paul Collits explores the groundwork for the Covidocracy. A slice:

The second enabler has been the perfecting by the political class of telling the big lie and being believed. The dry run was climate change. The pandemic, like climate change, would simply not be believed to be a real thing without the daily banging on about threats, fear, death. Would anyone on earth believe there was a dangerous (dare one say ‘unprecedented’) sea-level rise if we weren’t told about it by a so-called expert every other day? Do most people even know someone who has died of Covid? Or even got sick from it? The big lies – masks work, lockdowns help stem the virus, distancing and endless handwashing are necessary, vaccines will save us and nothing else will – are able to be told and believed because the political class know now how to do it well. We know they lie, make stuff up, gild the lily, exaggerate their ability to change things through policy, cover up, refuse freedom of information requests, bribe journalists in myriad ways, ignore hard questions, speak in Sir Humphrey-ese, brazen things out, never apologise or admit error. It is just that now, in addition to lying to cover up failings for which the elected might be punished, they tell massive lies that wreck economies and trash communities and societies. Without blinking. Many people still believe in the inherent goodness of politicians, who are doing all this to ‘save’ us. We are that gullible, and they are that good at lying.

The third enabler of lockdown culture has been the coming of health and safety to institutions, workplaces, businesses and society. This has coincided with the rise of human resources departments and corporatist ideology in large organisations. Some call this ‘safetyism’. That fear of a virus has become the default position of a sizeable majority of the population is a testament to the success of the push, from the 1960s on. We have been thoroughly prepped for the current fear-athon by decades of this rubbish. Would the Omaha Beach generation have been cowed into wearing masks and enduring house arrest to defeat a virus from which over 99 per cent of those who get it recover? We have been conditioned to fear minor things. Or to fear being sued if we do not eliminate all risk. Safetyism and litigiousness work in lockstep.

Sherelle Jacobs decries the grip that Covid Derangement Syndrome still has on so many of her fellow Brits. Two slices:

Freedom won the Cold War, of course, and for decades libertarians – myself included – have assumed that freedom was almost a basic instinct, a natural and universal desire, happily glossing over the basic conundrum that tortured Berlin. That was until Covid struck.

Although I’m obviously elated that Boris Johnson intends to remove almost all restrictions on July 19, I can’t help feeling apprehensive, too. The Prime Minister’s stark statement yesterday that, if we do not reopen society in the next few week, then “we must ask ourselves – when will we be able to return to normal?” sends a clear message to every household in the land: it is now or never.

But a depressing truth looms over Britain: many people do not seem to want restrictions to end. Millions have become attached to the gilded trappings of lockdown, from furlough to flexi-home working. With our every movement micromanaged by one metre signage and one-way arrows, our instincts for independent self-direction have shrivelled. And after nearly 18 months of relentless – and irresponsible – anti-Covid messaging, terror of the virus is still everywhere.

…..

We are starting to see now that commitment to the value of individual freedom, far from being robust as a coil spring, is fragile as glass. [Isaiah]Berlin, who always suspected this was the case, warned more than 60 years ago that “principles are not less sacred because their duration cannot be guaranteed”. In other words, Freedom Day is just the beginning of the battle to remake the case for personal liberty and responsibility. Although many of us will shudder at the thought of another culture war, some things are worth fighting for.

This letter in the Telegraph is spot-on:

SIR – Television reporters constantly interview members of the public who claim that they don’t want lockdown to end. Where do they find these people?

If their lives have not been blighted by the lockdowns of the last 16 months, I can only assume that they don’t work or run a business; they don’t go shopping; they never eat out; they don’t have school-age children or students in their family; they don’t know anyone in hospital or a care home; they don’t have health problems or ever need to see a GP; they never go on holiday; they never go to the theatre, a cinema or to a concert; they don’t support a charity; they neither attend nor support nor try to organise a local club or organisation; they don’t go to public talks or meetings; they don’t have or want any social contact; their family never plans an event such as a wedding; they don’t wish to attend any funerals.

This amounts to existing, not living. Some of us want to live!

Valerie Monaghan
Cowbridge, Glamorgan

Jay Bhattacharya courageously speaks out against the growing habit of bullying people to get vaccinated against Covid-19:

Watch the latest video at foxnews.com

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 403 of the 2016 second edition of Thomas Sowell’s Wealth, Poverty and Politics (original emphasis):

The “legacy of slavery” argument is often presented as if to excuse bad behavior in black communities by depicting such behavior as results of the past sins of whites. But the “legacy of slavery” argument also serves as an exemption from scrutiny for counterproductive social trends in the wake of welfare state policies and the vision behind those policies. Tactically, these arguments have been very successful in a political sense. But, empirically, to say that a “legacy of slavery” has kept black communities from rising above their current level of behavior is to defy historical evidence that many black communities had a higher level of civilized behavior generations ago, before the triumph of the welfare state vision. Moreover, a very similar retrogression in the behavior of low-income whites in England, in the wake of very similar policies and visions there, suggests that similar policies and visions have produced very similar results on both sides of the Atlantic.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 6 of Vol. II (“The Mirage of Social Justice” [1976]) of F.A. Hayek’s great work Law, Legislation, and Liberty:

The whole history of the development of popular institutions is a history of the continuous struggle to prevent particular groups from abusing the governmental apparatus for the benefit of the collective interest of these groups.