Russell Roberts's Blog, page 258
July 4, 2021
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from John Adams’s August 24th, 1815, letter to Thomas Jefferson:
What do We mean by the Revolution? The War? That was no part of the Revolution. It was only an Effect and Consequence of it. The Revolution was in the Minds of the People, and this was effected, from 1760 to 1775, in the course of fifteen Years before a drop of blood was drawn at Lexington.
DBx: Indeed.
Ideas matter, and matter most of all.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 262 of Liberty Fund’s 2011 Definitive Edition (Ronald Hamowy, ed.) of F.A. Hayek’s soaring 1960 book, The Constitution of Liberty:
In England, after the complete victory of Parliament, the conception that no power should be arbitrary and that all power should be limited by higher law tended to be forgotten. But the colonists had brought these ideas with them and now turned them against Parliament. They objected not only that they were not represented in that Parliament but even more that it recognized no limits whatever to its powers.
July 3, 2021
Some Non-Covid Links
Ethan Yang talks with the great Richard Epstein.
But there is a harder lesson to heed: No group of Washington’s brightest and best can have enough knowledge to predict what will actually happen — who will benefit and who will pay — when major policy interventions occur. Try as we might, we just can’t get it right. But we can perhaps learn to accept what we don’t know and be more cautious before pulling a tariff trigger.
And let’s also hope that the Institute for Justice wins this case before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Eugene Volokh shares news of an applause-worthy ruling by the U.S. 5th Circuit.
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from near the two-minute, five-second mark of Juliette Sellgren’s recent Great Antidote podcast with Randy Barnett on the 14th amendment to the United States Constitution; it’s Barnett on the Constitution (emphasis original as I detect it in Barnett’s inflection):
The Constitution is the law that governs those who govern us. It’s not the law that governs us. The Constitution is the law that governs those who govern us.
Some Covid Links
Jacob Sullum looks back on Covid and the Constitution. Here’s his conclusion:
COVID-19 did not kill the Constitution. But the crisis made it vividly clear that we cannot count on politicians or bureaucrats to worry about limits on their authority, especially when they believe they are doing what is necessary to protect the public from a deadly danger. The task of enforcing those limits falls to judges who are willing to stick their necks out.
“All government power in this country, no matter how well-intentioned, derives only from the state and federal constitutions,” Texas Supreme Court Justice Jimmy Blacklock noted a month and a half after the first lockdowns. “Government power cannot be exercised in conflict with these constitutions, even in a pandemic….If we tolerate unconstitutional government orders during an emergency, whether out of expediency or fear, we abandon the Constitution at the moment we need it most.”
Laura Dodsworth decries the sadly successful efforts by government to engineer fear as a means of terrorizing people to accept lockdowns. A slice (link added):
Epidemics are fearful times for understandable reasons and of course we have to act in ways to mitigate them that we find difficult and, at times, frightening.
But, as I uncover in my book, there was a deliberate attempt [by the U.K. government] to amplify our fears to encourage us to follow the lockdown rules.
Writing at Spiked, Daniel Ben-Ami uses the work of Hannah Arendt to take the measure of Covid-19 lockdowns. Here’s his conclusion:
Moreover, spontaneity is virtually eliminated under lockdown conditions. The rules can make it impossible to go out on the spur of the moment, whether that’s to visit friends or family or just to go to the pub.
More than ever, we live in a world where the exercise of individual judgement is frowned upon. Challenging the rules laid down by experts – in this case, mainstream epidemiologists – is viewed as putting everyone at risk of death. The only responsible thing to do, so the argument goes, is to be obedient and conform. This message is constantly repeated both in the mainstream media and on social media.
So lockdowns, regardless of their intended purpose, increase social isolation and intensify pre-existing loneliness. Working out how to tackle these related social problems is an urgent task.
Arendt observes that ‘it may even be that the true predicaments of our time will assume their authentic form – though not necessarily the cruelest – only when totalitarianism has become a thing of the past’.
So perhaps only when we have finally shaken off the locked-down world, will we be able to see our ‘true predicaments’ — namely, social breakdown, loneliness and vanishing spontaneity.
One thing is for sure. Lockdown, like totalitarianism, has made these predicaments a whole lot worse. The sooner we emerge from our hyper-regulated condition, the better.
TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.) There really isn’t.
As economist and historian Robert Higgs explains in his influential and alarming book Crisis and Leviathan, government power often expands during times of crisis. Sacrificing freedom for (supposed) security, a fearful public allows the government to increase its size and scope over domains of public life in the hope that things will soon return to normal. Eventually, the crisis ends, but government rarely revokes the powers it gained during the crisis.
The CDC gained the authority to prevent landlords from evicting tenants for non-payment of rent and extended its expiration date five times. And this is far from the only example.
Although mainly focused on his infrastructure bill, President Biden is still open to more stimulus payments. Many states continue to provide Covid-19 related unemployment benefits despite reopening and facing a shortage of labor. Travel bans from Europe and the UK continue despite medical research indicating there is a low risk of Covid-19 spread during a flight.
Creating the best post-covid world possible involves more than eradicating the virus. It also requires returning to pre-covid levels of government involvement in our lives. The ratchet effect stands in the way, and it lasts much longer than a pandemic.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 588 of the 1988 collection of Lord Acton’s writings (edited by the late J. Rufus Fears), Essays in Religion, Politics, and Morality; specifically, it’s a note drawn from Acton’s extensive papers at Cambridge University; (I can find no date for this passage):
America: At first they strove to preserve the rights of Englishmen. This failed, and they declared their rights as human beings. This had never been done so largely.
July 2, 2021
Again, Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is
Here’s a letter to the New York Times:
Editor:
Michael Corkery describes the 2018 closing of a Target store in inner-city Baltimore as “a sobering reminder of the realities of capitalism” (“Target Store Closings Show Limits of Pledge to Black Communities,” June 30). The text of the story suggests that, by this charge, Mr. Corkery doesn’t mean that the operation of a large retail outlet in such a neighborhood is unprofitable. Instead, the insinuation is that capitalism is either naively or evilly biased against inner-city communities of people of color.
Such an insinuation is odd given the widespread belief – especially in Progressive circles – that capitalists are incurably greedy for ever-greater profits. One wonders why Target’s profiteers intentionally abandoned profits by closing that store. Surely, among the “realities of capitalism” is not the refusal to seize opportunities for profit.
Here, though, is a genuine – and decidedly not sobering – reality of capitalism: entrepreneurial opportunity. If a large retail store in that location can indeed be run profitably, then Mr. Corkery or some of the people he interviewed for his report should themselves open up such a store in that location. If they’re correct that Target abandoned a profitable opportunity, they’ll earn with their store handsome profits while simultaneously improving the lives of many Baltimoreans.
But they’d better hurry up and do so! Now that word is out that Target is leaving profit on ground in parts of Baltimore, experienced retailers such as Walmart are sure to rush in to take advantage of this golden opportunity.
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
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 250 of University of Notre Dame philosopher James Otteson’s important 2021 book, Seven Deadly Economic Sins (original emphasis):
What I am paid, and what jobs I am will to do for that pay and under what circumstances, is none of your business. What other are paid, and what others are willing to do for what pay and under what circumstances is their business and no one else’s. As equal moral agents they are entitled to choose employment and negotiate terms of employment for themselves with other willing partners. And as proper persons they are entitled to make choices about their own paths in life without uninvited interference from others.
DBx: Yes.
Minimum-wage legislation, mandated leave (paid or unpaid), and other officious government interventions into labor markets are not only economically harmful especially to the workers these interventions are ostensibly meant to help; such interventions are also unethical.
Some Non-Covid Links
A closer look reveals that the plan is instead a jackpot for public unions and big business. Coming after two decades of spending indulgence under the last three presidents, culminating in an explosion of outlays during Washington’s COVID-fighting efforts, Biden’s spending extravaganza is in effect the final stage of an effort to centralize power in the federal government, which will fund ever more private, state, and local government -functions.
Also from Vero is this lament of Congressional hyper irresponsibility. A slice:
We have $28 trillion in debt. Even if you ignore the last year, we didn’t accumulate that much debt on a partisan basis. And we didn’t just accumulate it during emergencies or even mostly through tax cuts. It’s the product of many bipartisan agreements on massive government spending, year after year. That includes trillions in subsidies to farmers, loan guarantees for energy, infrastructure, small businesses and exports. It includes ever-expanding entitlement programs. And most importantly, it includes willful neglect or a conscious disregard for how to pay for it.
GMU Econ grad student Dominic Pino decries “Biden’s fact-free infrastructure fact sheet.” A slice:
The only thing the American people know about this infrastructure deal is that politicians want to spend $1.2 trillion of their money. On what? Infrastructure. It should be said that this is an improvement over the Democrats’ proposed plan, wherein everything was infrastructure. At least we’ve narrowed down to actual infrastructure. But Congress agreeing to spend money on a broad category is a pretty low standard for celebration.
It’s a bit like planning to meet a friend for lunch. To decide where to meet, you ask what he’s in the mood for, and he replies, “Food.” Insofar as you want to have lunch with him, that’s a good thing, but it does not move you any closer to actually meeting him somewhere and having lunch.
Here’s Matt Welch on Robin DiAngelo.
Robert Wright draws a lesson from Shirley Jackson’s great 1948 short story “The Lottery.”
David Hart remembers his late friend Nicolás Maloberti.
Lee Ohanian reviews the just-completed banner year for K-12 education in California.
David Boaz wishes us Americans a Happy July 2nd!
Juliette Sellgren talks about hate speech with Nadine Strossen.
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