Russell Roberts's Blog, page 261

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from pages 428-429 of Frank Knight’s 1944 lecture “The Planful Act: The Possibilities and Limitations of Collective Rationality,” as this lecture is reprinted the 1982 Liberty Fund edition of Knight’s 1947 collection, Freedom and Reform:

Economic competition is one of the unfortunate accidents of terminology; what it means is simply the freedom of individuals to cooperate through exchange with the others who offer (or accept) the best terms.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 95 of Thomas Sowell’s great 1995 work, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy (original emphasis):

Everyone is a “progressive” by his own lights. That the anointed believe that this label distinguishes themselves from other people is one of a number of symptoms of their narcissism.

On the Repeal of the Corn Laws

(Don Boudreaux)

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Today is the 175th anniversary of the repeal of the Corn Laws – a major event in Britain’s move toward being a free-trade nation. To commemorate this happy occasion, Doug Irwin and I have this essay in The Economist. (It’s still behind a paywall, but I’ll be able to share it fully in a few weeks.)

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Those of you who still believe that politicians can be trusted to use wisely the resources they seize for purposes of dealing with crises such as Covid might want to consult this report by Reason‘s Elizabeth Nolan Brown.

Here’s yet another high-profile Covidocrat who is discovered to be a hypocrite.

And decrying the hypocritical Covidocrats is Kate Andrews.

Allister Heath mourns what Covid Derangement Syndrome has done to Britain. A slice:

All societies impose taboos – prohibitions the origins of which are not always understood but which help define a community. Britain’s included an aversion to ID cards, a belief that the state had no right to tell us what to think or wear, and that it was none of officials’ business whom we chose to consort with.

Yet such traditional restraints on power are fragile. Once they are widely broken, they cannot be reinstigated: we have turned from a society where none of us knew our NHS numbers (or even that we had one) to a country which relishes the idea of “Vos Papiers, S’il Vous Plaît!”. Until Covid, it would have been unthinkable for a government to shut airports: now it’s just another tool to fight disease. We have normalised the abnormal. This applies equally to economics: if printing money works for Covid, why not for HS2? If higher benefits buy votes during a pandemic, why not all the time? Decline and fall takes many forms.

Also mourning for Britain is Fraser Nelson.

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

Jeffrey Tucker explores Donald Trump’s reaction to the Covid crisis. A slice:

Most people remember the part when he favored opening the economy, from late summer 2020 onward. What they forget are the two previous periods. There was the initial period in January, when he seemed to deny that the pathogen could do any real damage, as if he could know that. He treated the whole subject like a minor annoyance that would soon vanish (apparently, no one showed him seasonality charts from previous pandemics).

Then there was the second period in which he panicked in the other direction, from late February 2020 when he was being pushed around by Anthony Fauci and others who were pushing an unprecedented experiment of locking down the whole population to control the virus. I will never forget his March 12 speech to the nation which looked like a hostage video. He ended the video with an announcement that he would block all planes from…Europe. I didn’t even know a president had such power.

The third period came many months later, long after the economy had been wrecked, the population demoralized, and his political opponents had him on the run. Out of options, he finally turned to a scientist outside of the government bureaucracy, one who had clarity of mind and the ability to communicate clear truths. He was Scott Atlas of Hoover and Stanford.

The CDC clings to its Covid powers. A slice:

Covid cases have plunged 96% since early January. Nearly two-thirds of U.S. adults have at least once vaccine dose, and states have lifted virus restrictions. Yet the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday declared that the public-health emergency continues and extended its nationwide eviction moratorium for another 30 days.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from a November 14th, 1850, speech given in Wrexham, Wales, by Richard Cobden:

But when I advocated Free Trade, do you suppose that I did not see its relation to the present question, or that I advocated Free Trade merely because it would give us a little more occupation in this or that pursuit? No; I believed Free Trade would have the tendency to unite mankind in the bonds of peace, and it was that, more than any pecuniary consideration, which sustained and actuated me, as my friends know, in that struggle. And it is because I want to see Free Trade, in its noblest and most humane aspect, have full scope in this world, that I wish to absolve myself from all responsibility for the miseries caused by violence and aggression, and too often perpetrated under the plea of benefiting trade.

DBx: On this date, June 25th, one hundred and seventy five years ago the House of Lords joined Commons in voting to repeal the corn laws. Thus did Britain take its most momentous step toward becoming a free-trade nation for more than three-quarters of a century. No individual was more responsible for that repeal than was the great Richard Cobden. (I discuss the repeal in this podcast with Steve Davies, Doug Irwin, and Arvind Panagariya.)

An Open Letter on Antitrust

(Don Boudreaux)

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I was very happy to sign my name to this concise open letter on antitrust, which you can read in full beneath the fold.

(more…)

Keep the Dogs of Antitrust Muzzled and Caged

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:

Editor:

Robert Bork, Jr., wisely warns against siccing the dogs of antitrust on “Big Tech” firms (Letters, June 24). The smarter course is to rely on competitive market processes over time either to compel today’s firms to better serve consumers or to replace these firms with new rivals who will.

Many will protest that Big Tech is immune to competition. But such protests display ignorance of economic history. For nearly 150 years Americans have heard countless warnings that this firm and that industry are impervious to market competition, only to discover that, save for firms protected by government from competition, each such alleged “monopolist” soon lost significant market share to entrepreneurial rivals.

As my emeritus Nobel-laureate colleague, Vernon Smith, put the matter to me in an e-mail last year:

How do they [those who allege that the U.S. is in the grips of Big Tech monopolists] explain the fact that Amazon (also EBAY, GOOGLE, FB et al.) are all relatively new firms? They were survivors of the huge creation of new firms in the 1990s and the dotcom crash in 2000-1.

Everything they say about Amazon was being said about IBM in the 1970s-80s. No one could dislodge them from the monopoly power of their operating system; all their clients were locked in. Then came Microsoft that beat ’em fair and square. In the 80s IBM barely survived bankruptcy.

Ask them to list the five top firms, every 10 years, starting in 1950. Their model cannot predict the turnover.

The turnover was, and remains, tremendous. Creative destruction is real. A return to mid-20th-century antitrust enforcement will severely hamstring this healthy competitive process.

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)

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… is from page 12 of the first edition of Bruce Benson’s indispensable 1990 volume, The Enterprise of Law: Justice Without the State (original emphasis):

Customary law is recognized, not because it is backed by the power of some strong individual or institution, but because each individual recognizes the benefits of behaving in accordance with other individuals’ expectations, given that others also behave as he expects. Alternatively, if a minority coercively imposes law from above, then that law will require much more force to maintain social order than is required when law develops from the bottom through mutual recognition and acceptance.

A Courageous Teacher

(Don Boudreaux)

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As George Will reports, Dana Stangel-Plowe just resigned her teaching position at an elite New Jersey primary school. Please watch her four-minute-long explanation.

And here’s more from George Will’s column:

Progressives, who are selectively aghast about “politicizing” education, do not object to those state and local governments that are mandating the CRT indoctrination that other governments are forbidding. Would progressives object to legislatures’ banning the teaching of, say, creationism?

Or that the Earth is flat, which is about as defensible as the assertion (see the New York Times’s 1619 Project, which is being adopted in thousands of schoolrooms) that the American Revolution was launched to protect slavery, after the November 1775 British offer of freedom to slaves who fled to join the British army. This offer came, however, seven months after the battles of Lexington and Concord, which had been preceded by the Stamp Act (1765), the Boston Massacre (1770), the Boston Tea Party (1773), the British closure of the port of Boston (1774), the June 15, 1775, appointment of George Washington as commander in chief of the Continental Army, and the June 17 Battle of Bunker Hill.

Although John F. Kennedy ascribed this to Edmund Burke, it is unknown who actually said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” Never mind. A good woman has made this axiom vivid. Stangel-Plowe might be indicative of a wholesome nationwide infection of indignation among parents dismayed by political agendas occupying what should be K-12 instructional time in schools sodden with ideological conformity that stigmatizes independent thinking.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Writing in the Wall Street Journal, medical professors Joseph Ladapo (of UCLA) and Harvey Risch (of Yale) argue that the risks to young people of Covid-19 vaccinations might well be greater than are the risks to young people of Covid-19 itself. A slice:

The implication is that the risks of a Covid-19 vaccine may outweigh the benefits for certain low-risk populations, such as children, young adults and people who have recovered from Covid-19. This is especially true in regions with low levels of community spread, since the likelihood of illness depends on exposure risk.

And while you would never know it from listening to public-health officials, not a single published study has demonstrated that patients with a prior infection benefit from Covid-19 vaccination. That this isn’t readily acknowledged by the CDC or Anthony Fauci is an indication of how deeply entangled pandemic politics is in science.

Matt Ridley argues that “flawed modelling” – especially that of the reckless Neil Ferguson and his fellow ‘scientists’ at Imperial College – “is condemning Britain to lockdown.” Two slices:

Britain leads the pack on vaccination, but lags far behind America, Germany and France on liberation. A big reason is that our Government remains in thrall to a profession that has performed uniquely badly during the pandemic: modellers. The Government’s reliance on Sage experts’ computer modelling to predict what would happen with or without various interventions has proved about as useful as the ancient Roman habit of consulting trained experts in “haruspicy” – interpreting the entrails of chickens.

As Sarah Knapton has revealed in these pages, the brutal postponement of Freedom Day coincided with the release of a bunch of alarmist models predicting a huge new wave of deaths. The most pessimistic, inevitably from Imperial College, estimated at the extreme end of its range of scenarios 203,824 deaths over the next year. It did so by assuming a range of possible percentage reductions in hospitalisations following two vaccinations. Imperial’s data on vaccine efficacy assumed 87% for AstraZeneca, 90% for Pfizer or in a worse case scenario just 77 per cent for Astra Zeneca and 84% for Pfizer. The real world data published after the Imperial modelling shows two vaccinations to be between 92 per cent (AstaZeneca) and 96 per cent (Pfizer) effective in preventing hospitalisation. That would cut the Imperial forecast of deaths by a gob smacking 90 per cent to 26,854.

This keeps happening. In April the modellers assumed a 30 per cent effectiveness for the vaccine at preventing the spread of the virus. This was described as “a pessimistic view – but it is plausible, it’s not extreme”, by Professor Graham Medley, chairman of the SPI-M sub-group of Sage. It turns out it was far from plausible. At the end of March the BBC’s favourite modeller, Imperial College’s Neil Ferguson, was forecasting that by June 21, even with “optimistic” assumptions, less than half of Britain would be protected against severe disease by vaccination. The true figure is over 80 per cent of those aged 18 and over that have been vaccinated at least once.

This is the same Professor Ferguson who told us in the 1990s that thousands might die of mad-cow disease. The correct number, as it turned out, was 178.

…..

Again and again, worst-case scenarios are presented with absurd precision, sometimes deliberately to frighten us into compliance.

Allison Pearson reports from Great Britain on the continuing grip there of hypocritical Covidocrats. A slice:

It was Freedom Day on Monday, except our June 21 liberation was cancelled after the Brothers Grim peered into the tea leaves, sorry, models, in the Sage canteen and decided it was safer to keep the British people under restrictions until we all get flu in October and promptly expire because our immune systems haven’t mingled since March 2020. I think I’ve got that right.

In the US, meanwhile, most states have lifted all restrictions. Bruce Springsteen performed to a packed, ecstatic, maskless audience at Madison Square Gardens. My American friends are struggling to understand why they are Dancing in the Dark while Brits aren’t allowed to dance at all. In May, Covid was the 24th highest cause of death in the UK. You are currently more likely to perish in a paddling-pool-related incident performing an I Hate Hancock unmasked tableau. Or maybe that’s just me.

A perplexed New York Times asked why the UK was “worrying more than any other country”. It’s embarrassing, it really is. Embarrassing and unsettling, although not everyone is subject to the same rules. You may have noticed a big divide opening up between the Have Freedom and the Have Nots. Even those who have quietly gone along with the restrictions so far will have been staggered to hear that the Government has caved in to demands from Uefa and will allow thousands of football fat cats to attend the Euro 2020 semi-finals and finals at Wembley without quarantining as mere mortals must.

This WHO official is spreading Covid Derangement Syndrome.

Philip Johnston decries the British people’s “irrational fear of Covid.” Here’s his conclusion:

Five years after the Brexit vote, the pandemic response has suffocated the boosterism that was one of the driving forces behind the Leave campaign. On our own, freed of the EU straitjacket, we would flourish by demonstrating a quintessentially British can-do spirit. Instead, we are still exhorted to cower behind the national sofa by leaders terrified of what the future might bring.

The straw man will continue to stomp through Scotland until at least August 9th.

Here’s the abstract of a new paper by Virat Agrawal, Jonathan Cantor, Neeraj Sood, and Christopher Whaley (emphasis added):

As a way of slowing COVID-19 transmission, many countries and U.S. states implemented shelter-in-place (SIP) policies. However, the effects of SIP policies on public health are a priori ambiguous as they might have unintended adverse effects on health. The effect of SIP policies on COVID-19 transmission and physical mobility is mixed. To understand the net effects of SIP policies, we measure the change in excess deaths following the implementation of SIP policies in 43 countries and all U.S. states. We use an event study framework to quantify changes in the number of excess deaths after the implementation of a SIP policy. We find that following the implementation of SIP policies, excess mortality increases. The increase in excess mortality is statistically significant in the immediate weeks following SIP implementation for the international comparison only and occurs despite the fact that there was a decline in the number of excess deaths prior to the implementation of the policy. At the U.S. state-level, excess mortality increases in the immediate weeks following SIP introduction and then trends below zero following 20 weeks of SIP implementation. We failed to find that countries or U.S. states that implemented SIP policies earlier, and in which SIP policies had longer to operate, had lower excess deaths than countries/U.S. states that were slower to implement SIP policies. We also failed to observe differences in excess death trends before and after the implementation of SIP policies based on pre-SIP COVID-19 death rates.

Here’s a slice from a recent editorial in the Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star:

The second lesson was that the information given to the public by the CDC was deeply flawed. “The CDC data was nearly useless,” [Shane] Chalke noted. “The worst was the frequent characterization of historical revisions as current surges. We also saw many jurisdictions double count cases by inferring that each COVID test was a unique individual. I hope that the CDC develops reporting and definitional standards now for anything that might happen in the future.”