Russell Roberts's Blog, page 272
May 25, 2021
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 212 of my GMU Econ and Mercatus Center colleague Pete Boettke’s Winter 2014 Independent Review paper, “Fearing Freedom: The Intellectual and Spiritual Challenge to Liberalism,” as this paper is reprinted in The Struggle for a Better World – a new (2021) collection of some of Pete’s writings:
One of the great scientific truths of the “invisible hand” is that the participants do not have to grasp (in fact cannot grasp) the overall operation of the system but are guided only by their own private interests in particular contexts. But it may very well be the case that while we don’t have to understand the spontaneous order of the free-market economy in order to benefit from it, a significant portion of the general public might need to grasp the basic scientific principles and the aesthetic beauty of the “invisible hand” in order for it to be sustained in the face of ordinary political pressures for expediency.
A Discussion of “Price Gouging”
I am very pleased to have joined GMU Econ alum Anne Bradley in this 45-minute-long discussion of so-called “price gouging.” The discussion – which took place this past Thursday afternoon – was hosted by the Fund for American Studies. I thank TFAS’s Roger Ream and Matt Bagnoli for inviting me to participate.
Some Covid Links
Sherelle Jacobs warns of the risk of “a sinister new bio-surveillance state.” A slice:
The Cummings consensus [in favor of hard and fast lockdowns] is not simply factually spurious but potentially dangerous. The establishment of “fast, hard” lockdowns as the policy gold standard could spell stay-at-home orders every time there is a variant scare. So, too, the institutionalisation of fallible modellers as a new breed of philosopher kings, thanks to the precautionary principle.
The unconditional acceptance of lockdowns – and with this the demolition of the individual’s right to freedom – also risks leading us into ethical quagmires from which there is no obvious escape.
There is a powerful body of medical opinion which would like to see a new relationship between the State and the citizen.
It consists of public health professionals interested only in public health and blind to most things that make good health worth having.
They seem indifferent to mass unemployment, recession and educational disaster. They care not a fig for basic social needs and daily human pleasures.
Hence the present fuss about the Indian variant.
For years, these people have been frustrated by the fact that not everyone shares their priorities or suffers their special brand of tunnel vision.
They have lectured us about being too fat, too thin, not taking enough exercise, or too fond of drink, sugar, tobacco or sunshine for our own good.
We have listened but continued to make our own decisions, not always to their liking.
With Covid-19, these health fascists have come into their own. They have had a chance to strut across the stage, giving us orders rather than just advice. They have welcomed a world in which experts can compel us to do what they regard as good for us.
But their vision of what is good for us is a wretched thing: a narrow, colourless and impoverished vision with little room for human fellowship, culture or any of the collective activities that give value to our lives.
They never ask themselves whether the risk of living with Covid may be better than the certainty of distress, impoverishment and destruction provoked by their plan for suppressing it.
They must suppress risk, even if it means suppressing life itself.
Every day, some professor is wheeled out on radio or TV to say we should have even less liberty, in order to serve their joyless agenda.
Freddie Sayers (emphases added for those of you who doubt the reality of Covid Derangement Syndrome):
Zoom out and the astonishing political fact of the Covid era, the thing that analysts will ponder for decades, is how a nominally libertarian Tory Prime Minister so easily confined his citizens to their homes for so long. Even today, when we have some of the lowest Covid rates in the world and more than 70% of adults have been vaccinated, it is still illegal for a family of four to have three friends over for tea.
Michigan strongwoman Gretchen Whitmer is not only a tyrant, but also a hypocrite. A slice:
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer issued an apology Sunday after a photo emerged showing her at a restaurant with 12 other people gathered around tables pushed together in violation of her health department’s current epidemic order.
John Tamny imagines 2020 without Fauci and the rest of the American covidocracy.
TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.) Really, there isn’t.
Jay Bhattacharya understandably doesn’t “understand this impetus to vaccinate children.”
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 166 of University of Notre Dame philosopher James Otteson’s excellent 2021 book, Seven Deadly Economic Sins:
What markets enable, then, is extensive networks of cooperation. Indeed, the networks can become so vast that it might be literally impossible to know or trace them all. Adam Smith claimed – in the eighteenth century – that an attempt to trace out all the links in even a single chain of cooperation “exceeds all computation.”
DBx: Very often the simplest of intellectual points are of realities profoundly important yet very easily missed. The Smithian-Hayekian point made above by Otteson is one such point.
I call this point “Smithian-Hayekian,” but it is a point that is understood and accepted by all competent economists – indeed, by all people who think with competence about the economy or about society. And its importance cannot be over-emphasized.
If a list were to be made of the top five most significant errors made by people who propose economic or social policies, on that list would surely be some entry such as this: “Failure to appreciate just how inconceivably complex is the economy and society.” Too many people mistake the end results that they see – the rising money price of propane, the department store filled with goods bearing labels reading “Made in China,” the neighbor who loses her job because her employer downsized, the fall in mortgage interest rates – without seeing the vast, swirling, dense, and inconceivably complex economic forces that give rise to each of these, and billions of other, economic phenomena. Too many people think that by forcibly pushing or pulling on the observed phenomena – pushing or pulling on one of the more visible nodes of a massive, globe-spanning web interconnections – the observed phenomena will change in the way that the pusher or puller desires without any other significant consequences.
People do not understand the incredible interconnectedness of countless suppliers with each other and with consumers. This interconnectedness is inseparable from the competitive processes that make available to the masses today’s great variety of affordable goods and services.
…..
The unseen parts of market processes that give rise to the goods, services, and other economic phenomena that are visible on the economy’s surface are magnitudes more vast, relative to the surface phenomena, than is the unseen part of any iceberg relative to the ice that is visible on the ocean’s surface.
May 24, 2021
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 281 of Randy Simmons’s 2011 Revised Edition of his and the late William Mitchell’s 1994 volume, Beyond Politics, which is an excellent primer on public-choice scholarship:
The overproduction of words about the environment is analogous to the externalities environmental activists are so concerned about. Perhaps, word pollution should be subjected to the very harsh policies that mainstream environmentalists are so eager to have applied to others for much of the literature is the policy equivalent of garbage.
I Thought that Australians Beat Covid-19
This morning, my friend David Hart, who lives in Australia, e-mailed to me this picture.
A popular belief goes something like this: ‘Well, yes, the Australian government did indeed react to Covid-19 with especially draconian restrictions, including restrictions still in place on travel. But the reward for these measures is that life in Australia, unlike in most of the rest of the world, now goes on normally.’
This ad that appeared when David opened Cafe Hayek’s page suggests that this popular belief is, perhaps, inaccurate.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page x of my late, great colleague Walter Williams’s Foreword to Richard McKenzie’s superb 1985 book, Competing Visions (original emphasis):
Industrial planners everywhere face an information problem. From the standpoint of consumer and producer satisfaction, how can a planning board know which industries should be “born” and which should “die,” which should be subsidized and which should be self-sufficient, which should receive tax credits and which should not? A computer the size of the United States could not manage the innumerable interdependent decisions made every day in our economy. Is it reasonable to expect an army of bureaucrats to do better?
May 23, 2021
Some Covid Links
The COVID-19 pandemic is coming to an end—cases and deaths are declining throughout the U.S. as more people become vaccinated—and government officials are finally repealing mask mandates and easing other restrictions.
But for very young children, government restrictions are actually growing more onerous. In Michigan and New York, for example, state officials recently expanded mask requirements for kids at camps and day cares. Now, for the first time, kids between the ages of 2 and 4 will be expected to mask up as well.
“To help ensure maximum protections for staff and children at child care and camp programs, we are issuing this guidance so the facilities can implement basic but critical measures that will allow them to operate safely,” said New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) in a statement.
A straw man (as Phil Magness would say) is now stomping across Argentina.
New Yorker Karol Markowicz celebrates Florida. A slice:
But the truth was that our time in Florida was the most “real life” for us since the pandemic began. We enrolled the kids in sports. The boys played soccer and our daughter played softball. There was no discussion about the kids wearing masks while playing—they would not. Masking outdoors was rare in Florida in general. In February, Governor Ron DeSantis posted a photo on Twitter of himself and a Little League team, no one in masks. There were some gasps on Twitter. Just the week before, I had watched my daughter take her own mask-less team pictures with tears in my eyes. Normal felt amazing, even luxurious. When my daughter’s softball team won the championship, the kids all hugged. It felt human and real in a way that seeing other people as disease vectors for nearly a year had not.
Two months later, Anthony Fauci said, “The risk when you’re outdoors—which we have been saying all along—is extremely low.” He had not, in fact, been saying it all along, but some people, DeSantis and many Floridians among them, understood the low risks and adjusted their behavior accordingly. New Yorkers largely had not.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 184 of Charles Koch’s and Brian Hooks’s excellent 2020 book, Believe in People: Bottom-Up Solutions for a Top-Down World (footnotes deleted):
One way that companies – especially large ones – try to rig the system is by supporting complex and anticompetitive regulations. Why? Because they have large legal teams and can afford to comply, while the added costs will hurt smaller competitors and reduce start-ups.
Hence, some big businesses cheer the growth of federal red tape, which ran to 23,000 pages in the Code of Federal Regulations in 1960 and nearly 190,000 pages in 2017.
DBx: Indeed, and sadly, so.
Another advantage that large firms typically have over smaller firms is a larger customer base – over which the fixed costs of complying with government diktats can be spread more thinly.
May 22, 2021
Some Non-Covid Links
This is because strong climate policy is enormously expensive and delivers minuscule climate benefits. President Biden has promised to spend $500 billion annually on climate policy. Yet his much-lauded pledge to double Obama’s promised reductions, even if fully delivered and maintained throughout this century, will provide little climate benefit. Run on the standard UN climate model, Biden’s new promise will at best reduce global warming by 0.07°F by the end of the century, delivering just 2% of the global climate target.
Joakim Book decries the success of climate mainstreaming.
Scott Lincicome decries U.S. government subsidies to makers of microchips.
My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy decries efforts to mandate paid family leave. Here’s her conclusion:
In fact, rather than return to the pre-COVID and limited work arrangements, the administration and state governments should promote more flexibility in the workplace by removing the regulatory barriers that make raising a family harder. Two such changes would be to eliminate occupational licensing for child care workers and to let employees be paid in the form of additional leave time for their overtime work.
There are many more nongovernmental ideas for helping workers, and even more to be discovered. Let’s pursue them, rather than ram through a federal paid leave program.
Nick Gillespie’s new podcast with Scott Winship is excellent.
Matt Welch reports on the appalling “Randi Weingarten’s hilariously awful media rehabilitation tour.” A slice:
Weingarten paints a dystopian picture in which schools lack soap and water, which suggests an urgent follow-up question: So what have they been spending those billions of federal dollars on? There was the $13 billion in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act in March 2020, and the $54 billion in the COVID-19 relief bill in December 2020 (both on top of the Department of Education’s annual $40 billion transfer to K-12 schools). Then there was the $81 billion already spent from the March 2021 American Rescue Plan (with another $41 billion being contingent on school reopening), plus $12 billion in school testing, and an estimated $70 billion extra that will trickle out over the coming years.
And we’re talking soap and water?
The argument for regulation gets considerably weaker when the regulators themselves don’t actually know what the product is. Regulatory roadblocks on fermented foods are a product with which I have a bit of personal experience. Incidentally, it speaks volumes about business and the legal/regulatory environment that one of the tracks at the 2021 International Fermentation Conference is “Business, Legal, and Regulatory,” where participants can “Learn how to launch and grow a fermentation business, and navigate the industry’s legal and regulatory hurdles.” As John W. Dawson and John J. Seater explain in a 2013 article in the Journal of Economic Growth, regulation has slowed economic growth considerably.
Why Arnold Kling became a neverTrumper.
John McWhorter calls for ditching the term “systemic racism.” (HT Arnold Kling)
David Henderson predicts inflation, although not hyperinflation.
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