Russell Roberts's Blog, page 264

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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James Bovard argues that “Covid-19 is enabling politicians to turn freedom from an individual right into a conditional bureaucratic dispensation.” Two slices:

G-7 leaders enjoyed parties and plenty of backslapping – privileges denied to nearby British citizens whose lives continue semi-paralyzed by pervasive government restrictions. Brits were told that their lockdown misery would end on June 21, which became known as “Freedom Day.” But British politicians have invoked the fear of new variants to justify extending the lockdown at least another month and possibly far longer. Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared on Monday, “Now is the time to ease off the accelerator,” regardless of how many individual rights become roadkill. Spiked editor Brendan O’Neil declared that “this further suspension of liberty, is only possible in a society that has thoroughly devalued freedom” and derided the “creeping embrace of the lockdown lifestyle among significant sections of the Smart Set.”

…..

In the Covid era, destroying freedom is a negligible loss, akin to a government agency misplacing a few hundred filing cabinets. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti faced minimal criticism last December when he banned all unnecessary “travel, including, without limitation, travel on foot, bicycle, scooter, motorcycle, automobile, or public transit.” The mayor offered no evidence to justify placing four million residents under house arrest. Similar restrictions hit residents of Michigan, New York, Oregon, and other states. Federal judge William Stickman IV aptly declared last September, “Broad population-wide lockdowns are such a dramatic inversion of the concept of liberty in a free society as to be nearly presumptively unconstitutional.” But the scant controversy over lockdowns is a sign that many media outlets are happy to see liberty “inverted” into unquestioning obedience to any command issued by any government official.

The scientists at Imperial College continue to prove their incompetence – and, given their influence, their corresponding danger to the public.

Van Morrison understandably calls Neil Ferguson a “pseudo-scientist.”

Emily Carver, of the Institute of Economic Affairs, documents good reasons to mourn for the once-free country of Great Britain – a country tragically plagued by Covid Derangement Syndrome, a plague that itself was engineered, as if in a lab, by the Covidocracy. A slice:

Professor Susan Michie, a member of the Communist Party of Britain and SAGE scientist who openly endorses a “zero Covid” strategy, revealed on Channel 5 News that she believes social distancing, including mask wearing, should continue not only into the long-term but forever.

It is terrifying and depressing in equal measure to think that such extreme views may be reflected in the Government’s current strategy. Now, as we face an indefinite delay to the Government’s roadmap out of lockdown, it appears as if all cost-benefit analyses on restrictions have been thrown out in favour of a strategy to avoid Covid deaths at all costs, without even a pretence of parliamentary scrutiny.

More worrying for the culture of this country, is that it’s not just public health enthusiasts and risk averse bureaucrats who seem to adhere to this way of thinking. A YouGov snap poll yesterday found that 71 per cent of English people support the delay, with 41 per cent saying they “strongly” support it. According to the survey, only 24 per cent of those living in England oppose the delay, with 14 per cent saying they “strongly” oppose the decision.

Even if we allow for a large margin of error, it’s clear that most people in this country remain on board with the Government’s lockdown experiment – even 15 months after we were told “three weeks to flatten the curve”. But is this that surprising considering the UK government and Public Health England spent nearly £300 million last year on ad campaigns to frighten the public into submission?

Desmond Swayne speaks out passionately in the House of Commons against the Covidocracy’s continuing tyranny:

Robby Soave reports on lingering Covid Derangement Syndrome – in this instance, CDS is afflicting the mother of a fully vaccinated teenager, as well as an advice columnist. A slice:

This [advice from the columnist] is misleading. (Arguably, it constitutes misinformation.) Whether or not teenagers are at “greater risk” than previously thought—and keep in mind, U.S. coronavirus deaths in the under-18 age group total about 300, vs. 600,000 overall—is irrelevant to the mother’s question. Her kid is vaccinated, and vaccinated teenagers are at no statistical risk whatsoever. The vaccines are extremely effective at preventing severe illness, eliminate the chance of death almost entirely, and make transmission very unlikely.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis continues to fight the Covidocracy…. As do some state legislatures.

Jeffrey Tucker rightly refuses to praise Covidocrats for returning to people freedoms that ought never have been taken from people in the first place.

John Roskam is correct: “George Orwell would have had an absolute field day analysing the great slogans of the great COVID-19 pandemic.” A slice:

“Following the science” connotes a degree of objectivity that simply doesn’t exist. For one thing, when it comes to how to respond to the pandemic there is no such thing as “the science”. Scientists such as Professor Susan Michie of University College London and a member of the advisory committee to the UK government have argued that people should wear masks and socially distance “forever, to some extent”.

Other scientists such as Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University have described the reaction of governments around the world to the virus as “the single biggest public health mistake in history”.

In any case, “science” doesn’t tell you what to do, only how to do it. Science can tell you how to build an atom bomb, but it can’t tell you what to do with it.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 171 of the original 1960 Harvard University Press edition of Frank Knight’s collection of lectures, delivered in 1958 at the University of Virginia, titled Intelligence and Democratic Action:

Probably the supreme economic stupidity – real prejudice – generally held is that employees are working for the bosses, any more than these are working for the employees. All are working for themselves, indirectly and far more effectively by working for one another – which is the nature and  supreme merit of exchange relations.

DBx: Yes. And while there is no shortage of economic stupidities to compete for the distinction that Knight assigns to this one, Knight’s central point is subtle and deep and vitally important.

A Brief History of Governments’ Covid Responses

(Don Boudreaux)

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Brilliant – shared by John Miltimore.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 17 of Thomas Sowell’s great 1987 volume, A Conflict of Visions:

Where intellectuals have played a role in history, it has not been so much by whispering words of advice into the ears of political overlords as by contributing to the vast and powerful currents of conceptions and misconceptions that sweep human action along.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Christian Britschgi shares insightful responses by Matt Kibbe, Karol Markowicz, and others to former Biden Covid advisor Andy Slavitt’s grotesque accusation that Americans, over the past 16 months, failed to sacrifice enough.

British MP Desmond Swayne is rightly appalled by the straw-man’s recent decision to continue to stomp through Britain. Here’s his conclusion:

I never believed that the Government’s response to the epidemic was proportionate: it had no right to the freedoms it took from us; now it continues to withhold them despite the emergency having passed, accordingly it has set the most disastrous precedent for the future of liberty in England.

Here’s a snapshot of life under the Covidocracy.

Take note of the deceptiveness used by the Covidocracy to justify its continued reign of terror.

Jonathan Sumption is correct: the once-free people of Britain are now paying a dreadful price for “the original sin of locking down.” A slice:

First, the government is excessively risk averse. It accepts that Covid is here to stay, but refuses to accept the implications of that. The risk of illness is part of life. Covid is now part of life. It cannot be suppressed without suppressing life itself. Viruses mutate all the time. As Oxford’s Professor John Bell has observed, if we bolt down a rabbit hole every time it happens, we are going to spend a very long time underground.

The second thing that has gone wrong dates right back to the original lockdown decision of March 2020. It is the Government’s abiding contempt for its citizens. It does not trust them to take sensible precautions and so resorts to coercion. The logic of coercion is that every one must be treated the same. It makes life easier for the police.

Yet people are not the same. Different groups face radically different levels of risk, depending on whether they have been vaccinated, whether they have certain clinical vulnerabilities, whether they are old, and whether they live in a hot spot like the north-east. The only efficient risk assessments are those made by the people involved, i.e. us. With each week that passes this anomaly becomes more glaring.

Thirdly, there is the tunnel vision which treats public health as the only relevant consideration. The Government’s four tests for emerging from this Hell are all clinical. They attach no weight to our jobs, our mental wellbeing, our culture, our emotional relationships or any other aspect of our lives as social beings.

Andrew Lilico rightly criticizes Covid modeling. A slice:

If we are trying to produce a technical model to inform policymaking and there is uncertainty about some parameter, such as how effective vaccines are in this case, how should we proceed? The correct way to go is to present our central best-estimates and then to express the uncertainty with ranges or alternative scenarios that explore how things might turn out better or worse than our central case.

Yet that does not appear to be what the Government’s Covid modellers are instructed to do. Instead, they build pessimistic assumptions into their central cases, then make their pessimistic cases a kind of disaster scenario where everything is much worse than even the worst current data suggest, and their optimistic scenarios assume things turn out roughly as the latest data implies.

Also appalled by what she calls “the unelected junta of scientists and modellers” who are responsible for continuing Covidocratic tyranny in Britain is Allison Pearson. A slice:

“Rejoice!” as a great prime minister once urged. Ah, but she wasn’t frit, was she? I have never missed Margaret Thatcher more in my life. Imagine the withering appraisal of her successors who somehow manage to be both draconian and timid. You just know Mrs T would have told Sage to get stuffed.

While I hope that Victoria Hewson’s fears are unjustified, I believe that this hope will prove to be in vain. A slice:

I have written before about the troubling inversion of the traditional view that impositions on fundamental freedoms must be justified, with benefits shown to outweigh the costs, to the Government’s present position that impositions on our freedom of association are to remain until it is satisfied that (unspecified) risks have been eliminated.

Jeffrey Tucker describes what he’s learned since early 2020. A slice:

In 2020, liberty was taken away in what seemed like an instant. There is a good excuse, they said, one that had never been tried before in living memory. That reason came out of the blue: public health, and the sudden assertion of the rights of people (some people) not to be exposed to germs. That one consideration became the overriding consideration, and liberty had to fall by the wayside. The “libertarian” movement (with some exceptions) not only had no consensus answer to that claim – people had not thought much about it either way – and many top voices in this community even affirmed this view, as if germs are a phenomenon visited upon the world for the first time and therefore required extraordinary measures by the state to protect society from pathogens. The lack of understanding of public health fundamentals disabled the decisive influence the “libertarian” sector of life might have had during the worst attack on liberty during our lifetimes.

DBx: The world owes Jeffrey Tucker a galaxy of thanks for sparking the meeting that produced the Great Barrington Declaration.

My Tribute to the Late, Great Walter Williams

(Don Boudreaux)

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I just realized that I’ve not yet shared here at Cafe Hayek the full text of my December 3rd, 2020, tribute, in the Wall Street Journal, to my late, great colleague Walter Williams. So here it is, beneath the fold.

(more…)

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 135 of my late, great colleague Walter Williams’s 2015 book, American Contempt for Liberty, which is a collection of many of Walter’s columns and essays; this quotation specifically is from Walter’s July 22nd, 2009, syndicated column, “The Racism of Diversity“:

Colleges and universities with racially preferential admittance policies are doing a great disservice to blacks in another, mostly ignored, way. By admitting poorly prepared blacks, they are helping to conceal the grossly fraudulent education the blacks receive at the K through 12 grades.

Some Economics of Pricing in the Real World

(Don Boudreaux)

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In my latest column for AIER I explore some basic economics of pricing in a world – our world – in which there are costs of transacting. (This column is the first in what will be a two-part series.) A slice:

Consider supermarkets. Nearly all supermarkets offer customers ‘free’ parking, despite the fact that building and maintaining these parking lots is costly. These costs are recouped in the prices supermarkets charge for groceries. Yet not all supermarket customers use automobiles. Some customers walk to the supermarket. I live within walking distance of a Whole Foods store, and so although I shop there frequently, I never use its parking facilities. Other customers take taxis or public transportation.

Are non-parking customers, myself included, being ripped off by the fact that part of the prices we pay for groceries is used to enable supermarkets to supply free parking to other customers? Of course not. In a world in which all transactions are costly to carry out – which is our world – it’s simply not worthwhile for supermarkets to identify non-parkers and then to determine just how many pennies should be shaved off of their grocery bills. That is, the costs that supermarkets would incur to prevent me and other non-parkers from ‘subsidizing’ parkers would be so great that, should supermarkets attempt this task, their total costs of operation would rise. Supermarkets would have to raise grocery prices for everyone, parkers as well as non-parkers.

So why don’t supermarkets charge customers to park?

Food retailing in the U.S. is intensely competitive. Because of this reality we can be sure that the value to consumers of ‘free’ parking paid for in the form of higher grocery prices is greater than parking-for-pay combined with lower grocery prices. Determining exactly why this outcome is so is, for us, unnecessary. But the likely reason is that, for supermarket customers, the transaction costs, reckoned in terms of time and inconvenience to each customer of paying out of pocket for parking, exceed the costs of paying for parking in the form of higher grocery prices. Charging directly for parking would thus result in less shopping at supermarkets. Some stores might become uneconomical to operate, while stores that remain open would raise prices to cover electricity, managerial salaries, building rent and maintenance, and other overhead expenses.

We can be pretty certain that if government forced supermarkets to stop non-parkers from ‘subsidizing’ parkers, the total costs of groceries would rise for everyone.

Similar reasoning applies to merchants that accept payment through credit cards. If government forced these merchants to stop customers who pay with cash from ‘subsidizing’ customers who pay with credit cards, merchants would have to spend resources on this costly effort. It’s not only grocery retailing in America that is intensely competitive; almost all retailing is so. Merchants – and there are indeed many – who do not offer cash discounts have discovered, or have good reason to believe, that the costs of offering such discounts exceed the benefits.

Note that merchants have incentives to offer cash discounts whenever doing so would raise their revenues by more than any accompanying increase in costs. The reason is that cash discounts enable merchants to attract more poor customers – a desirable outcome even for (indeed, especially for) the greediest of merchants. So the fact that relatively few merchants offer cash discounts reveals that, were government to compel the offering of such discounts, merchants’ overall expenses would rise by more than their revenues. To cover these higher expenses, prices would rise, including those paid by poor customers.

Another way of putting the above conclusion is this: Merchants that accept credit cards (even ones with bonus points) typically find that the lowest-cost way to serve consumers is to charge the same prices to customers who pay with cash as are charged to customers who pay with credit cards. (That some merchants do give cash discounts proves that experimentation is occurring!) My guess is that this typical policy of not giving cash discounts results in more sales than otherwise and, thus, better ability for merchants to spread total overhead costs more thinly, with the result being overall lower prices even for customers who pay exclusively in cash. Or perhaps not. Maybe there’s some other benefit to this policy, one that no armchair economist, think tank researcher, or magazine reporter is informed enough to detect.

Some Non-Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Ryan Bourne reports on a new study that finds – shockingly! – that retailers adjust their employees’ work schedules in ways that reduce retailers’ costs of higher minimum wages. A slice:

Their results are striking. The minimum wage hikes are found to have no impact on overall hours worked at the California stores. So, if one was looking at hours alone as a proxy for employment, you might conclude that “the minimum wage has no apparent effect on employment.” Yet the researchers find that the business changes its workforce composition and scheduling significantly to try to mitigate the cost increase of the rising wage floor.

First, the number of workers making up those total hours increased significantly–i.e. the company used more workers working shorter hours. When the minimum wage increases by $1, the number of workers scheduled to work each week goes up by 27.7 percent, while the average hours per worker per week falls by 20.8 percent. So the average worker would be 13.6 percent worse off in terms of total wages when the minimum wage was increased from $11 to $12 per hour. But, crucially, this move to more short‐​time workers saves the company significant amounts of money by reducing the number of workers eligible for retirement and healthcare benefits.

Also reporting on the adverse effects on workers of minimum-wage legislation is Mark Perry.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy talks with John Batchelor about the global minimum tax.

Ben Zycher responds to an SEC commissioners’ request for input on a proposal to require publicly traded companies to issue ‘climate risk disclosures.’

Insight from Arnold Kling: “Somehow, over the course of the 1960s the culture managed to go from lots of anti-black racism to lots of anti-white racism without stopping at ‘color-blind.'”

Here’s John Cochrane on Adrian Woolridge on meritocracy.

Eric Boehm reports on “a broad prohibition on tax cuts [by states] that was slipped into March’s $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill.”

George Will wonders if America today capable of performing building feats that were not uncommon several decades ago. Here’s his conclusion:

Whereas “Kennedy called the nation to dare,” today, [Ben] Domenech writes, America is where “schools can’t fail kids for giving the wrong answers, where teachers refuse to teach even with precautions and vaccinations, and where local authorities won’t put down riots.” A different country.

Jason Riley writes in Reason on Thomas Sowell. A slice:

By contrast, the University of Chicago was “itself,” he recalled, “and not an imitation of anything.” The Chicago economics department was extremely demanding, and the vetting was brutal, said Ross Emmett, an authority on the history of the Chicago school of economics. “During that period of time, Harvard took in 25–27 students and graduated 25 of them, whereas Chicago took in 70 students and graduated 25 of them.” The department also had a reputation for being conservative, and Sowell’s political views at the time were, in his words, “still strongly left wing and very much under the influence of Marx.” Nevertheless, he had no qualms about leaving Columbia for Chicago: “I was far more impressed by the fact that we shared similar intellectual values.” Graduate economics “is a technical field and not an ideological battleground,” he reasoned. “As I came to understand the Chicago views on economic policy, they seemed less and less like any conservatism that I knew about.”

David Henderson reports on what he learned from auditing Jeff Hummel’s course in Monetary Theory and Policy. (DBx: I knew about the check tax from work done by my dear friend and former roommate George Selgin. Were it not for my close friendship with George, I, like David, would almost certainly not have known about this absurd tax.)

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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E.J. Antoni and Casey Mulligan, writing in the Wall Street Journal, report on collateral damage unleashed by trusting governments with greater powers to respond to Covid-19. A slice:

The Biden team and Democrats in Congress were warned repeatedly that the March “stimulus” bill would shrink employment by five million to six million because of the rewards for not working. Three months later the evidence is clear: The stimulus bill stimulated unemployment, not employment.

More than a million jobs are waiting to be filled in the construction and manufacturing sectors, but these industries have gained almost no new employees over the past two months. These are high-paying blue-collar jobs.

Who decided that suffering and dying from cancer is a more acceptable fate than suffering and dying from Covid?

Ross Clark decries the straw-man’s decision to delay by another month his departure from Britain. A slice:

Yet come the hour and the target, yet again, has been changed. When the first lockdown was called, in March 2020, it was supposed to be a case of maintaining social distancing for three weeks so that we could prevent A&E units from being overwhelmed. Then it became a case of suppressing the virus until we had a vaccine. Then we had a vaccine and we were asked to lock down until it had been rolled out among vulnerable groups. That was achieved, on schedule, in the middle of February, but no, we had to stay locked down until the over-50s – who had accounted for 99 per cent of deaths – had been offered at least one jab. That target was reached in early April. But now we are being asked to wait until the entire adult population has had at least one jab.

Will that be enough? No, of course not, because we will still have Covid infections – the virus has become endemic. Yet government ministers have become so obsessed with daily movements in new infections that it is hard to see how they will ever accept even a modest rise in cases. The excuse for further delay is that the delta – or Indian – variant is more transmissible and, it is claimed, more likely to land us in hospital. But is it? While the number of new infections has more than trebled since the low in early May and daily hospitalisations have approximately doubled from the low point in May. Never mind that serious illness is nothing like tracking new infections – the number of patients in hospital and the number of people on ventilators are each up by less than a third. What seems to be happening is that larger numbers of people are being admitted for short periods, with the result the NHS is far less likely to be overloaded – which of course was supposed to be the whole justification for lockdown in the first place.

Also decrying the straw-man’s apparent itch to take up permanent residency in Britain is Sherelle Jacobs. Two slices:

The world has probably changed forever due to the West’s decision to follow China’s lead in adopting lockdown to control Covid-19. This draconian policy that was never part of liberal democracies’ pandemic planning but came to be seen as an inevitability after Beijing pursued it. China, in the words of Prof Neil Ferguson, “changed people’s sense of what is possible in terms of control”.

Once again, we may be about to witness the power of seemingly innocuous events. For many, Boris Johnson’s decision to postpone freedom day to mid-July will seem like a commonsensical measure if the time is used to accelerate vaccinations. But I fear what he has agreed is much more significant than that. Will this really turn out to be a minor delay on the long road to freedom? Or will it instead prove to be the first step down a dangerous path that ends with lockdown restrictions continuing in some fashion indefinitely?

…..

In Britain, we tend to believe that moderation will always prevail. Yet, in crises, it tends to be ideologues rather than pragmatists who gain momentum. Mr Johnson has for months been locked in a vicious cycle of seeking a middle ground, before relenting to those who favour extreme caution.

The Prime Minister still does not seem to fully appreciate that he is increasingly fighting not just a pandemic, but an ideology. This is not simply a case of a few overzealous modellers. The interests of the two most powerful movements of the moment, environmentalism and global health, are converging. Eco-warriors have attracted attention for unapologetically eyeing the collapse in aviation as an opportunity. Less appreciated is the fact that infectious disease specialists have been warning against the dangers of globalist capitalism and mass travel even longer than the green lobby. The window of opportunity to challenge their drastic, deglobalising remedies is closing. Even if the Prime Minister wanted to, with so many citizens terrified, and a middle class zoomocracy facing few risks to its material comfort, he will struggle to mount a challenge later down the line.

Wise words from British MP Miriam Cates:

Our preoccupation with Covid has caused — or perhaps exposed — a significant shift in public attitudes towards life and death. We’ve come to see death as something that should be prevented even in old age, no matter the cost to our way of life, and held the Government responsible when it isn’t. We’ve placed insufficient emphasis on the long term impact of lockdowns on young peoples’ lives (from poverty, lost opportunity, loneliness, online harms) and focused far too narrowly on the short term impact of Covid on the longevity of older people….

We do not live just to avoid death. The meaning of our lives does not come principally from their length, but from our relationships, our responsibilities, our successes and our failures. Death, especially in old age, is a normal part of life and, while of course every death is a sadness, it does not follow that we should sacrifice those things that make life worth living for the sake of a short increase in longevity.

And also here on the straw man who refuses to leave Britain is Richard Littlejohn. A slice:

The human cost is incalculable, never mind the financial catastrophe. A colleague tells the story of a Liverpool hotel manager breaking down in tears on the reception desk when the last lockdown was announced at short notice.

A Government which is always banging on about tackling a ‘mental health’ crisis clearly gives not a fig for the mental torture it is imposing on small business owners.

Not to mention the debilitating anguish caused to those who have been callously denied life-saving treatment for everything from cancer to heart disease — and even refused appointments with their GPs — as the NHS diverted all hands to the Covid pump.

By the way, Richard Littlejohn, in the piece linked just above, uses Texas as an example to expose the absurdity of the refusal to end the Covidocracy’s reign in Britain. He’s correct to do so. Since statewide Covid restrictions were lifted in Texas on March 2nd, Covid cases, hospitalizations, and deaths in that state have all fallen steadily. As of yesterday (June 14th), the seven-day average of Covid cases in Texas was a mere 16 percent of what it was on March 2nd.)

Julia Hartley-Brewer talks with Sunetra Gupta about the man-made tragedy now unfolding in Britain.

Luke Perry is rightly angry at the creation and abuse of Covid Anxiety Syndrome:

‘Covid Anxiety Syndrome’, an epidemic in its own right, and made possible by the constant flow of naked propaganda campaigns terrifying its victims into hysteria, has ensured that lockdown restrictions are accepted by enough of the electorate.

Fraser Myers is understandably annoyed by “the persistence of all the Covid theatre” at the recent G-7 meeting. A slice:

What the G7 leaders fail to recognise is that the same is true for the rest of society. Social life, business and creativity are all being sacrificed to Covid theatre, even as the threat from Covid recedes. It would be impossible to calculate the vast number of ideas, inventions and creative leaps that would have otherwise emerged in the past year or so were it not for bans on people mixing informally. Spontaneous interactions, chance encounters and rubbing up against each other are what drive society forward. But these kinds of interactions have been effectively banned for all but the most powerful people on Earth.

All of the G7 nations have instituted lockdowns and social-distancing rules of some form over the past 15 months. And in all of these countries, high-ranking politicians and public-health officials have been caught, in their private lives, breaking the very rules they devised for the public.

The straw man also continues to haunt Chile.

GMU Econ alum Raymond Niles warns of the dangers – exposed so starkly over the past 16 months – of government funding of science.