Russell Roberts's Blog, page 263
June 19, 2021
Some Covid Links
Physical presence is what governmental authorities snatched from people, especially from the vulnerable, during the pandemic. Some of those interventions were necessary, Mr. Snead concedes, but the authorities—together with alarmist news media—showed little capacity to weigh costs against benefits.
We exchange stories of well-intentioned but cruel policies carried out on the elderly and infirm. Mr. Snead tells me about a court case in New Mexico in which an elderly man had to sue the state to care for his wife. The couple lived in an assisted-living home—the husband in independent living and the wife in a dementia unit—and a government edict had prohibited them from touching each other. Their health declined precipitously, but “the guy won, thank God.”
Is the benefit of not contracting Covid-19 worth the cost of going without the bodily presence of, say, one’s children and grandchildren for months on end? Put that way, I suspect most Americans’ answers would range from “probably not” to “hell, no.” But in 2020 public-health experts and their defenders in the media proceeded as though “yes” were the only conceivable answer. That suggests our cultural elites and policy makers haven’t thought deeply, or at all, about what the human person is.
“I’m worried that our risk calculus has shifted in a dramatic way,” Mr. Snead says. “You think about the flu, you think about other diseases that could be dangerous—or just driving your car—and it feels to me that our risk tolerance is basically zero at this point. And what does that mean? Is the point of human life simply to hide away in a bubble-wrap container so that you don’t ever encounter any risk?”
The pandemic also cast light on the elites’ attitudes toward work. Many politicians like to proclaim the dignity of work. “A job is a lot more than a paycheck,” Joe Biden’s father used to say, according to the president. “Joey, it’s about your respect, your dignity, your place in the community.” Yet a great deal of policy making since March 2020—months-long prohibitions on gainful labor, cash payments to able-bodied people—did not reflect that sentiment. Hasty and ill-defined appeals to public health were all Western political leaders needed to decree lengthy cessations to productive labor. A German TV ad suggested that the young could achieve heroism by doing absolut gar nichts—absolutely nothing.
On a related note, Guy de la Bédoyère refuses to allow the Covidocracy, authoritarian to its core, to keep him and his wife from seeing their youngest son. Two slices:
That we face many more threats than Covid-19, yet to read the mainstream press or to listen to broadcast media you’d be forgiven for thinking that there is little else that faces us either individually or collectively.
…..
Bombardment with meaningless statistics, invariably out of any context, has bullied many of us into believing we only face one threat to our existence and subjected us to the whims of a class of scientist desperate to control our every waking moment.
Here’s David Henderson and Charley Hooper on SARS-CoV-2’s origins.
Joakim Book ponders humanity’s fight against enemies that are invisible. A slice:
Beginning with the latest of our invisible enemies, Tim Stanley in The Telegraph writes about George Orwell’s notion of perpetual war in Nineteen Eighty-Four as a way for leaders to keep the masses in check. Ensure that we remain poor, frightened, and divided: “War is peace because it guarantees elite control.” Stanley is writing about Britain’s policy interventions for the pandemic, and the looming threat that restrictions on the poor Brits – who’ve already endured too many government atrocities in the last fifteen months – may not be lifted out of fear that a new coronavirus wave could paralyze the country (despite a 60%+ vaccination rate, one might add).
The Covid-19 coronavirus is invisible to the human eye, and it takes tests and specialized equipment to detect it (often with a time delay) which means that anyone, anywhere, could be a potential threat to you. The mythology surrounding the pandemic turned not so much the pathogen invisible, but the threat of extreme and unpredictable harm. Remain vigilant and nervous, always.
The Covidocracy, vile as ever, wins a battle against Andrew Lloyd Webber.
Ross Clark decries the Covidocracy’s hypocrisy.
Timandra Harkness decries ordinary Brits’ susceptibility to what I call Covid Derangement Syndrome. A slice:
The trouble is, we haven’t done nearly enough rational assessment of the harms and benefits of anti-Covid strategies. Invoking the idea of existential risk to push us all into complying with behavioural rules got the Government a free pass for policies that, in normal times, would have been unthinkable. Critics of specific measures were easily lumped in with conspiracy theorists who said the whole thing was a hoax, or “just the flu”. Suggesting that baton-charging sunbathers in parks was counter-productive provoked cries of “How many people do you want to die!?”
But there is also a danger that we’ll come to see the world only through the prism of risk, whether quantifiable or existential. If no level of risk is acceptable, why not surrender our everyday freedoms forever? When will we ever reach the point of it being safe to take off the masks and sit next to a stranger? When they first announced a lockdown in March 2020, the UK government turned on the tap of fear, but I don’t think they realised how hard it would be to turn off.
This essay by Australian economist Cameron Murray is superb. A slice:
The investments that make people live longer are not usually direct healthcare investments. They are instead things like clean water, dealing with city waste, functional sewerage systems, reducing urban and local pollution, and clean food supplies. These have been proven time and time again to be what makes people living longer.
Now consider the cost of locking down India. Each year investments in these types of basic services create enormous health improvements of around 0.25yrs of additional life expectancy across the population (i.e. every four years life expectancy increases one year). Delaying this process with lockdowns is hugely costly there. A one year delay costs 0.25 life-years x 1.37 billion population = 342 million years of life—an astronomically high figure compared to even the worst-case COVID death toll.
On top of the dodgy data, we had Independent Sage chair Sir David King last week rather hysterically warning that the situation could “explode” into a third wave. Would that be the same Independent Sage which last July proposed “a new overarching strategic objective of achieving a Zero Covid UK”? And the same Sir David King who, in January 2020, provided a defence statement in support of five Extinction Rebellion defendants, declaring that people “will die” if the Government doesn’t bring forward the zero emissions target?
Along with Susan Michie, professor of health psychology at UCL, King and his cabal have been among the chief contributors to the Post-Pandemic Stress Disorder now doing the rounds (look up PPSD, it is actually a thing). If it wasn’t bad enough that these academic doom merchants were perpetuating anxiety with not only misguided but also misleading advice, their damaging emotion-based messaging is also clearly politically motivated.
Left-wing King, the former chief scientific adviser to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, insists his group offers “robust, unbiased advice”. Yet supposedly “Independent” Sage includes two Labour donors, two communists (one former, one practising), a handful of Corbynistas and a Momentum activist.
Texas watch: The seven-day average of new Covid cases in Texas was yesterday (June 18th) only 14 percent of what it was on March 2nd, the day that Gov. Greg Abbott – accused then by Biden of “Neanderthal thinking” – eliminated all state-wide Covid restrictions. Since March 2nd, Covid cases, Covid hospitalizations, and Covid deaths in Texas have all fallen rather steadily and steeply.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from pages 198-199 of Maverick, Jason Riley’s splendid 2021 intellectual biography of the great Thomas Sowell:
Most analyses of social and economic intergroup differences focus on the immediate surroundings in which people live. Sowell’s writings exposed the limitations of that approach. He concluded that it isn’t the immediate environment per se, but cultural values and human capital – skills, work habits, saving propensities, attitudes toward education and entrepreneurship, developed sometimes over long period of time – that are the more dominant factors in explaining disparities.
June 18, 2021
64 + 15
Fifteen years ago today Paul McCartney turned 64. I stand by what I wrote when Sir Paul turned 64. I share the text below the fold.
Celebrating the Repeal of the Corn Laws
One week from today – June 25th – is the 175th anniversary of the repeal of the corn laws. On June 25th, 1846, the Duke of Wellington persuaded the House of Lords to join the House of Commons in repealing Britain’s protective tariffs on grain imports. This move was a major step on Britain’s road to a policy of unilateral free trade.
Some Non-Covid Links
GMU Econ student Agustin Forzani – inspired by Adam Smith – decries Argentine “meat nationalism.”
The comedian Kevin Hart had recently told the New York Times “You’re witnessing white power and white privilege at an all-time high.” Mr. Maher: “This is one of the big problems with wokeness, that what you say doesn’t have to make sense or jibe with the facts, or ever be challenged, lest the challenge itself be conflated with racism.”
He added: “Saying white power and privilege is at an all-time high is just ridiculous. Higher than a century ago, the year of the Tulsa race massacre? Higher than when the KKK rode unchecked and Jim Crow unchallenged?” He acknowledged that “racism is unfortunately still with us,” and its “legacy of injustice” lingers. “I understand best I can how racism singes a person’s soul so much they might see it everywhere. But seeing clearly is necessary for actually fixing problems, and clearly racism is no longer everywhere. It’s not in my home, and it’s probably not in yours if I read my audience right, and I think I do. For most of the country the most unhip thing you could ever be today is a racist.”
Gary Galles explains that you are not paying a higher relevant tax rate than billionaires.
Robby Soave reports on a new survey of college-students’ attitudes toward free speech.
John Stossel exposes some of the errors of the ways of those who criticize capitalism.
In this video presentation, John Cochrane discusses the prospect of inflation. (HT Arnold Kling)
David Boaz shares work by Scott Lincicome on failed government programs.
Sweden’s great Ratio Institute is in good hands.
Here’s George Selgin writing about El Salvador’s adoption of Bitcoin as its official currency.
Some Covid Links
Here’s more wisdom and a wise warning from my GMU Econ colleague Bryan Caplan. A slice:
When government explicitly admits that, “The probability of a severely bad outcome is low, but caution makes sense until we know more,” the natural response is to try to swiftly ascertain the truth. Mostly notable, if the world’s governments had responded to COVID with an earnest admission of ignorance, the impetus to apply the time-tested experimental method would have been far stronger. Voluntary Paid Human Experimentation wouldn’t merely have given us vaccines sooner; it would have allowed us to calmly cease a vast array of ineffective COVID precautions a year ago.
I’d like to assert that, “History will not be kind to the enemies of Human Challenge Trials,” but that’s wishful thinking. History is written by the victors, and the victors of COVID are unapologetic innumerates. Though we deserve a massive apology, we’ll be lucky to walk away with the freedoms we took for granted back in 2019.
The past three months have “cancelled out” more than 70% of the age-adjusted excess mortality observed in January and February. If June’s age-standardised mortality rate comes in as low as May’s, the overall level of mortality in the first five months of 2021 will be below the five-year average.
TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.) But… but… perhaps in this development there is a silver lining!
In Britain, ‘saving’ the NHS has come at the expense of the people whose health the NHS ostensibly is meant to save. (TANSTAFPFC)
Fraser Myers calls for Covid ‘models’ to be junked – for such should always be the fate of junk, which is what these ‘models’ were from the start…. Speaking of which, the atrocious Neil Ferguson simply will not quit his quest to cage humanity. (Why does anyone pay – indeed, why has anyone ever paid – attention to this quack-scientist Ferguson?)
Kathy Gyngell rightly praises Charles Walker.
The straw man visits Portugal.
Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya decry the “ill-advised push to vaccinate the young.” Two slices:
For younger adults and children, it is a different story, as their mortality risk is extremely low. Even a slight risk of a serious vaccine adverse reaction could tip the benefit-risk calculation, making the vaccine more harmful than beneficial. We have already observed rare problems with blood clots (J&J vaccine) and myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle, Pfizer and Moderna) in younger people, and additional equally serious issues might still be found.
Under such uncertainty, vaccine mandates are unethical. University presidents or business leaders should not mandate a medical intervention that could have dire consequences for the health of even a few of the people in their charge.
Second, recovered COVID patients have strong long–lasting protection against severe disease if reinfected, and evidence about protective immunity after natural infection is at least as good as from the vaccines. Hence, it makes no sense to require vaccines for recovered patients. For them, it simply adds a risk, however small, without any benefit.
…..
Universities used to be bastions of enlightenment. Now many of them ignore basic benefit-risk analyses, a staple of the toolbox of scientists; they deny immunity from natural infection; they abandon the global international perspective for narrow nationalism; and they replace trust with coercion and authoritarianism. Mandating the COVID-19 vaccine thus threatens not only public health but also the future of science.
Here’s spot-on humor from Babylon Bee. (HT Tim Townsend)
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 202 of Lord Acton’s late-1890s lecture “The Influence of America,” as this lecture appears in Essays in the History of Liberty: Selected Essays of Lord Acton, Vol. 1 (J. Rufus Fears, ed., 1985; on-line access to this essay is available free of charge here):
Who are a free people? Not those over whom government is reasonably and equitably exercised; but those who live under a government so constitutionally checked and controlled that proper provision is made against its being otherwise exercised.
June 17, 2021
No, the Burden of Deficit Financing Is Not Confined to the Present
Here’s a letter to John Tamny:
John:
Much of what you write in your essay “Misunderstood Deficits” is correct. But your continued insistence that the burden of government indebtedness is incurred in the current period rather than passed on to future taxpayers is incorrect. It’s simply bad economics to assert, as you do, that “Government spending is always, always, always a tax that is paid right away.”
While all resources loaned to government are indeed used by government right away, this fact emphatically does not mean that these resource uses are paid for right away.
The reason should be obvious. Creditors lend money to government today in exchange for increased purchasing power tomorrow. If these borrowed funds are used to build, say, a highway, the creditors – quite correctly – don’t think of themselves as paying for the highway. The creditors turn over resources to government to get access to more resources in the future, not to pay for access to a highway. Nor would anyone else, if asked to identify who pays for the highway, point to the creditors.
Further, precisely because the highway is funded with debt, this highway isn’t paid for by today’s taxpayers. Yet someone must pay for the highway. That someone is tomorrow’s citizens-taxpayers – the citizens-taxpayers tomorrow who, to enable the government to service the debt, must either receive less than otherwise in government programs or pay more than otherwise in taxes.
If we rule out default, the above truth is inescapable. It holds regardless of whether tomorrow’s taxpayers are richer or poorer than are today’s taxpayers; regardless of whether the borrowed funds are used productively or unproductively; regardless of whether tomorrow’s taxpayers are pleased or angry at having to service the debt; regardless of whether the government’s fiscal position remains sound or becomes shaky; regardless of whether monetary policy is conducted prudently or recklessly – indeed, regardless of the truth or falsity of any claims you make in your essay.
On this matter I recommend strongly that you study the late Nobel-laureate economist’s Jim Buchanan’s 1958 book, Public Principles of Public Debt. Short of that, I’m sufficiently vain to suggest that this chapter – “On the Burden of Government Debt” – from my and Randy Holcombe’s new book, The Essential James Buchanan, supplies a clear and reasonably complete explanation of why the burden of deficit financing is indeed shifted to future taxpayers and how, as a result of such financing, the government spending that I join you fully in decrying is made larger and even more wasteful than it would be otherwise.
Sincerely,
Don
Some Non-Covid Links
Scott Lincicome and Huan Zhu have written a new paper on the dangers of industrial policy. A slice:
Perhaps the most widespread industrial policy obstacle is the “knowledge problem.” In “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” economist F.A. Hayek explained that the information needed to secure the best use of scarce national resources “never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.” Because this information is unique and ever-changing, central planners cannot discern it via aggregate, retrospective statistics: “The continuous flow of goods and services is maintained by constant deliberate adjustments, by new dispositions made every day in the light of circumstances not known the day before, by B stepping in at once when A fails to deliver.”
The stolen IRS data provide the story with voyeur appeal, but it turns out to be a bait-and-switch. ProPublica substitutes a magazine’s estimate of wealth appreciation, which never appears on the stolen tax returns, to falsify income. Using this deception the site calculates its “true tax rate.” ProPublica laments that taxpayers are acting “perfectly legally” in not paying a federal wealth tax, which doesn’t exist.
That wealth is taxed only when converted into income or on death may be an outrage to those in government who want to spend that wealth, but it is a purposeful, enlightened policy that lets wealth work as the nation’s seed corn, making America the richest nation in the history of the world. That wealth in turn makes it possible for the government today to provide $45,000 a year in transfer payments to the average household in the bottom 20% of American earners.
And here’s Jonah Goldberg on ProPublica’s appalling ‘report.’ A slice:
Let’s say you collect baseball cards. On paper, your collection is worth a bundle. But its real value is realized only when you sell it. Do you think the IRS should tax you every year for what your collection could be worth if you sold it? Do you want the IRS to tax you for the value of your wedding ring—not at purchase, but forever—even if you’re never going to sell it?
The same principle applies to other unrealized gains. If your stock portfolio increases in value, you get taxed on your gains when you sell.
ProPublica ignores all this. “We compared how much in taxes the 25 richest Americans paid each year to how much Forbes estimated their wealth grew in that same time period,” they explain. “We’re going to call this their true tax rate.”
Except it’s not a true tax rate.
First, this suggests that the only taxes they’ve paid are income taxes, when in reality they’ve paid a slew of other taxes: capital gains, property, sales, etc. Second, wealth is not income.
Randy Holcombe applauds peaceful competition among governments. A slice:
Normally, economists (and politicians) argue that competition is beneficial because it disciplines companies to provide good products to people at low prices. The exception is government, where they argue that competition is bad. They seem to like it when Wal-Mart offers customers everyday low prices, but when Ireland does the same for its taxpayers, it’s called a race to the bottom.
If low Irish corporate tax rates were harmful, shouldn’t the citizens of Ireland be the ones complaining? They seem to be happy with the results of the intergovernmental competition. Those who are complaining aren’t the Irish, they are Ireland’s competitors. Those competitors are conspiring to prevent other countries from offering taxpayers a better deal.
President Biden and Secretary Yellen are advocating the extension of a cartel of governments to limit intergovernmental competition. Private companies that conspire to limit competition are guilty of antitrust violations and governments take action against them. Meanwhile, governments are doing that exact same thing and claiming it is in the public interest.
Tony Gill takes a (lemonade) stand for free enterprise!
George Will explains that American K-12 education – “education” – is now a cultural contradiction. Here’s his conclusion:
So, there is a distinctively 2021 cultural contradiction of K-12 education: Pupils who are assumed to be unfolding flowers of spontaneous individuality are nevertheless treated as empty vessels into which government-approved political doctrines should be poured. In 2022, multitudes of parents are properly going to take their anger about all this to polling places.
Juliette Sellgren talks about nationalism with Shikha Dalmia.
Eric Boehm reports on the PRO Act.
The Market for Scary Covid Fiction Must be Huge
Here’s a letter to the Washington Post:
Editor:
Leana Wen continues to stoke excessive fear of Covid by making false claims (“Coronavirus vaccinations for young children should be an urgent priority,” June 16). An example is her assertion that “Covid-19 is now one of the leading causes of death among children.”
Is it? By her own admission a few weeks ago, the number of children in the U.S. so far who have died from Covid is “just more than 300.” Yet a quick check of data compiled by the CDC on the ten leading causes of death, in 2019, in America of people under the age of 15 reveals that the number of children whose lives were taken by these causes was 20,660. Of this figure, the number of children killed since 2019 by Covid is a mere 1.6 percent.
Drilling down into these CDC data shows that in 2019 the number of children killed by unintentional injuries alone was, at 3,907, more than ten times greater than is the number of children killed over the past 16 months by Covid. Malignant neoplasms – cancerous tumors – took the lives of another 1,060 children. An additional 630 childhood deaths were homicides, and 534 were suicides.
Slice, dice, and stir the data however you like, they simply cannot reasonably be rendered consistent with the assertion that Covid is “now one of the leading causes of death among children.” But Dr. Wen’s persistence in peddling this myth of Covid’s danger to children does render her guilty of journalistic malpractice.
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
Russell Roberts's Blog
- Russell Roberts's profile
- 39 followers
