Russell Roberts's Blog, page 273

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 210 of Frank Chodorov’s June 20th, 1956, National Review essay, “What Individualism Is Not”, as this essay is reprinted in Liberty Fund’s excellent 1980 collection, Fugitive Essays, of Chodorov’s writings, edited by Charles H. Hamilton:

At any rate, the economist refuses to pass judgment on men’s preferences; whatever they want, they will get more of it out of a free market than one commandeered by policemen.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from pages 220-221 of Deirdre McCloskey’s and Alberto Mingardi’s superb 2020 book, The Myth of the Entrepreneurial State:

Profits signal the preferences of ordinary people massing about in markets, proving that a certain move, a certain technique, a certain innovation has been wisely put forward. Entrepreneurs are free to enter new lands, imagine useful goods and graceful services. Consumers are free to choose. Such a negative liberty has led in the past two centuries to an enormous increase, too, in the ill-named “positive liberty,” also known as “income.”

DBx: Yes.

People who decry profits (and losses) decry accurate information.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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David Zweig reports on new research that gives us very good reason to believe that data on the number of children hospitalized because of Covid-19 are greatly inflated. (HT my intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy.) A slice:

In one study, conducted at a children’s hospital in Northern California, among the 117 pediatric SARS-CoV2-positive patients hospitalized between May 10, 2020, and February 10, 2021, the authors concluded that 53 of them (or 45 percent) “were unlikely to be caused by SARS-CoV-2.” The reasons for hospital admission for these “unlikely” patients included surgeries, cancer treatment, a psychiatric episode, urologic issues, and various infections such as cellulitis, among other diagnoses. The study also found that 46 (or 39.3 percent) of patients coded as SARS-CoV2 positive were asymptomatic. In other words, despite patients’ testing positive for the virus as part of the hospital’s universal screening, COVID-19 symptoms were absent, therefore it was not the reason for the hospitalization. Any instance where the link between a positive SARS-CoV2 test and cause of admission was uncertain the authors erred toward giving a “likely” categorization.

Let’s amend the U.S. Constitution to allow this young lady to run for president in 2024. She’ll have my support! (HT my GMU colleague Todd Zywicki.)

Judith Woods is rightly furious with Boris Johnson. A slice:

There is something unutterably spineless about the way he twists in the wind, talking up our glorious vaccines while talking down to us, the vaccinated.

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that having nannied and infantilised us for almost a year and a half, this Government has started to rather enjoy bossing us about, in the erroneous belief we are too stupid or supine to recognise when we are being hoodwinked and manipulated. We are neither.

Covid Derangement Syndrome is fueling xenophobia.

Douglas Murray mourns what’s become of the once-free country of Britain. Three slices:

In the whole political debate over Covid and Britain’s response to it, it is striking that there has been almost no counter-pressure from the other side of the debate. While there is plenty of pressure on the Government to be more cautious, there is none at a party-political level urging the Government to be more favourable towards the case for liberty.
…..

While Dr Fauci’s wisdom is questioned openly [in the U.S.], Britain is haunted by the presence of Prof Neil Ferguson, who repeatedly returns to our screens like a bad horror movie. Rarely has any expert in British life been more wrong about so many major things, and yet still he crops up, where he is given a respectful audience at government level and by most of the media. His latest appearance has seen him warning — with the Prime Minister following suit — that the Indian variant of Covid might necessitate delaying the end of lockdown. But what is striking is not just that Ferguson gets away with repeatedly being wrong, but that his constant urges for greater caution are not balanced by any force urging the opposite.

…..

Is it healthy for British politics that when the Government and BBC tell us how, where and when we might hug our loved ones, which direction to face, how often to do it and what settings one might do it in, there is only the sound of dull acceptance or audible gratitude from grateful subjects? I am not certain that it is.

How sadly ironic.

The Covidocracy – heavily reliant on a straw man – has turned the Republic of Ireland into a dystopia.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 514 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 from March 30th, 1867, drawn from Acton’s extensive papers at Cambridge University:

It is possible to lose the end in a too technical regard to the means, and to sacrifice liberty by an exaggerated devotion to the forms of law.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from pages 12-13 of the late biologist George C. Williams’s excellent 1997 book, The Pony Fish’s Glow (emphasis added):

Fishhooks today come in a great variety of shapes and sizes. Some have more than one barb or more than one point, often three turned 120° from one another. They vary in size, from those designed to take large sharks to those used in fly fishing for miniature trout. They vary in materials used and in the length of the shank, the curvature of the hook, and the placement of barbs. These variations did not all arise in final form from some contriver’s inspiration. Fishermen using the hooks noted, from long experience, that some variants worked better than others for different fish and different circumstances. The evolution of fishhooks has undoubtedly been much influenced by a selection process. Those variants found to catch more fish were more likely to be made (or ordered) than those that caught fewer – a process that takes place with or without understanding. If a hook with a 20-millimeter shank was more reliable than one with a 25-millimeter shank, it would be favorably selected. There was no need to understand why 20 was better than 25.

DBx: Note that the way that an evolutionary biologist – George Williams was one of the most eminent – reasons and understands reality very much as does a market-oriented economist. Variation and experimentation tested in actual uses. Feedback from self-interested (not necessarily selfish) participants, each with a stake in ‘getting matters correct,’ causes self-interested suppliers to better serve users. A process of trial and error ‘discovers’ what works well enough and what doesn’t; the latter give way to the former.

Further, there arises from this trial-and-error process a variety of types; there is no single, one-size-fits all ‘solution’ or outcome. And this happy outcome arises from no “contriver’s inspiration” – from no central planner. Why, it’s almost as if Adam Smith’s invisible-hand metaphor has scientific merit!

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Purdue University president Mitch Daniels delivered stirring remarks to that school’s graduating class of 2021. A slice:

This last year, many of your elders failed this fundamental test of leadership. They let their understandable human fear of uncertainty overcome their duty to balance all the interests for which they were responsible. They hid behind the advice of experts in one field but ignored the warnings of experts in other realms that they might do harm beyond the good they hoped to accomplish.

Sometimes they let what might be termed the mad pursuit of zero, in this case zero risk of anyone contracting the virus, block out other competing concerns, like the protection of mental health, the educational needs of small children, or the survival of small businesses. Pursuing one goal to the utter exclusion of all others is not to make a choice but to run from it. It’s not leadership; it’s abdication. I feel confident your Purdue preparation won’t let you fall prey to it.

But there’s a companion quality you’ll need to be the leaders you can be. That’s the willingness to take risks. Not reckless ones, but the risks that still remain after all the evidence has been considered.

Wall Street Journal columnist James Freeman exposes the hypocrisy of Michigan strongwoman Gretchen Whitmer. A slice:

There’s also more news on Ms. Whitmer’s rejection of her own government’s travel advisory. It’s not just an issue of deciding to fly to Florida—which she has singled out as a travel risk—but also her government’s guidance on what to do in the event of such travel.

Rod Meloni and Natasha Dado of NBC affiliate WDIV report that a few weeks before her trip, Michigan’s health department released guidance saying, “get tested with a PCR viral test one to three days before you travel.” The WDIV report continues:

Then upon your return to Michigan the guidelines read, “Get tested again with a viral test three to five days after your trip and stay home and self-quarantine for a full seven days after travel, even if your test is negative.”

“If you don’t get tested, stay home and self-quarantine for 10 days after travel,” the guidelines continued.

Yet [three days after her return]… Local 4 News cameras rolled as the governor bypassed the self quarantine and attended a vaccination press conference at Ford Field…

Local 4 News asked the governor’s office why she did not follow her own health department’s guidance and the response was it wasn’t an executive order and she followed all orders.

One would think that, if nothing else, this episode at least has given the governor an appreciation of how difficult it is for Michiganders to live by the standards she has demanded of them. One might even expect that Ms. Whitmer would finally show a measure of regulatory restraint.

One would be wrong on both counts. Taylor DesOrmeau reports for mlive that “the state is working through a process to make permanent its workplace COVID-19 rules, enforced through the Michigan Occupational Safety and Health Administration.” Business owners hoping for an end to emergency regulations are now facing the prospect that some burdens will be with them forever.

“We have simply lost our minds.”

Here’s the conclusion of David Marcus’s latest piece at The Federalist:

Of all the side effects of COVID, none is more stark and disturbing than Americans’ disregard for the welfare of our children. Let us pray that, like the virus itself, this horrible new normal in which we sacrifice our kids dissipates. And then let us beg their forgiveness.

Thankfully, voters in Pennsylvania are resisting the unchecked Covidocracy that Gov. Tom Wolf wishes to create. Here’s the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board:

Voters finally rode to the rescue Tuesday with a pair of state constitutional amendments that will restore a healthier separation of powers. One limits the Governor’s emergency declarations to 21 days, unless the Legislature extends them. That passed 53% to 47%, according to the latest tally.

The other amendment says the Governor can’t veto a resolution that ends an emergency. The write-up on Tuesday’s ballots, controlled by a Wolf appointee, tendentiously presented this change as “removing the existing check and balance of presenting a resolution to the Governor for approval.” But if Mr. Wolf’s veto can protect Mr. Wolf’s emergency, that’s no check at all. Voters also approved that amendment 53% to 47%. One question is whether Mr. Wolf will deign to obey the voters or look for some legal ruse to get around them.

And here’s Eric Boehm on this happy development in Pennsylvania.

Jacob Sullum rightly criticizes the New York Times‘s encouragement of a “COVID cult of caution”. A slice:

The fact that the Times describes COVID-19 safeguards as “golden rules,” analogous to a timeless ethical principle, suggests that its advice is based on something other than rational, context-dependent concerns about virus transmission. Mask wearing and physical distancing, once presented as temporary responses to the pandemic that would no longer be necessary after the danger had passed, have been transformed into rituals that signify membership in a COVID-19 cult of caution.

As Reason‘s Robby Soave notes, that cult has strong partisan overtones. “The mask was supposed to be a temporary public health intervention,” he writes, “and it’s regrettable that for many people these little bands of cloth have become Team Blue’s version of the Make America Great Again hat.”

That conclusion is hard to deny given the comments of some dedicated mask wearers and the weak scientific basis for urging vaccinated people to act as if they never got their shots. “Vaccines do not offer 100 percent protection,” the Times warns. But they come pretty damned close.

Gordon Rayner and Liam Halligan write on, and talk with, A State of Fear author Laura Dodsworth. A slice:

“It’s not just a genie that has been let out the bottle. It’s like we’ve unleashed a Hydra and you can keep chopping its head off, but they keep employing more of these behavioural scientists throughout different government departments. It’s very much how the Government now does business. It’s the business of fear.”

Dodsworth set off on her quest after being struck by a now-infamous minute of a Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) meeting last March. It noted that a sub-group of Sage, the Scientific Pandemic Influenza group on Behaviours (SPI-B), had warned that many people “still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened” and that “the perceived level of personal threat needs to be increased”.

This has become “Exhibit A” in the case against the Government’s use of alleged covert psychological strategies – but Dodsworth found multiple branches of the State employing similar methods. There is the Behavioural Insights Team, better known as the “nudge unit”, which has become so successful it is now a semi-independent body advising other countries on how to use nudge theory to the greatest effect.

Sarah Knapton reports on yet another Covid variant (the Indian one) that, like all the other variants so far, is proving to be far less worrisome than the Covidocracy initially proclaims it to be.

Those of you who continue to dismiss claims that the Covidocracy is tyrannical might wish to read this report from the once-free country of Great Britain. A slice:

Families should expect a ‘knock on the door’ when they return from abroad, Priti Patel warned last night.

The Home Secretary said enforcement was being stepped up to make sure travellers who visit amber-list countries such as France, Spain and Italy obey the ten-day quarantine rule.

Officials have the capacity to carry out 10,000 home visits a day and 30,000 were conducted last week.

Madeline Grant identifies “some striking and dangerous similarities between the movements to eradicate carbon and Covid.” A slice:

Now, however, the Net Zero fanatics have a twin. It was bad enough the first time around, but a similar kind of utopian posturing is visible in the ongoing calls to eliminate coronavirus from Britain and achieve Zero Covid.

There are startling similarities between these ideas – illogical, impractical projects whose costs will fall disproportionately on the poorest, with a worrying lack of transparency about their true impact. Although the Government’s advisers have – hearteningly – spoken of “learning to live with the virus”, a sizable crop of scientists beg to differ.

“Zero Covid” does appear to be gaining ground. It’s present in the demands for open-ended border closures. You can see glimmers of it among the calls to delay or even reverse the end of lockdown. Ignoring the previous criteria (overwhelming the NHS, or surging deaths), we appear to have switched to shutting everything down because cases are rising in discrete areas. The ever-mobile goalposts have shifted so often that the football match is now being played with the neighbouring cricket club.

Both Net Zero and Zero Covid offer intellectual cover to those who love state control for its own sake. Many who long for the downfall of capitalism have passionately embraced the Net Zero arms race; some Zero-Coviders possess dubious motives for trying to make Britain just a little more like China, or at least of potentially ignoring the financial consequences of continued lockdown.

Fraser Myers reports that, at least in Britain, claims of “vaccine hesitancy” are quite overblown. A slice:

The panic over vaccine hesitancy is just the latest expression of our establishment’s tendency towards authoritarianism. Officials and the media are far less interested in tackling Covid-19 than in shaming perceived deviants and enforcing draconian measures. Compare, for instance, the press’s demonisation of ‘Covidiots’ in parks and on beaches – which evidence suggests have never been linked to a single Covid outbreak – to their relative silence on the hospitals which released Covid-infected patients into care homes. Vaccine hesitancy may not exist on any large scale, but it does make for a good pretext for more illiberal measures, such as vaccine passports or continued social-distancing rules.

Covid Derangement Syndrome on display in Germany.

Diederik van Hoogstraten decries Covid restrictions on international travel as “cruel and unscientific.”

Ethan Yang talks with Maja Graso about the moralization of Covid-19.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 43 of economist Arthur M. Diamond, Jr.’s, important 2019 book, Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism (footnote deleted; link added):

During the Industrial Revolution, not only was the past remembered as better than it really was, the present was seen as worse than it really was. Historian Patrick Allitt suggests that one reason for the belief in an increase in poverty during Victorian times was that the movement of the poor from the countryside to the city made them more visible. Also, the increasing size and living standards of the middle class made them more sensitive and sympathetic to poverty.

Deficit Financing Fuels Excessive Government Growth

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to someone whose “commitment to individual freedom leads [him] to skepticism of deficit hawks”:

Mr. C__:

Thanks for your e-mail.

You write, in response to this piece on government indebtedness, that “there is no good logic to not use debt to pay for as many government programs as lenders are willing to lend for … because lenders lend voluntarily but taxes are forced extractions.”

This argument is made by a surprisingly large number of free-market-minded people such as yourself. I’ll not here repeat all of the several reasons why I believe it to be mistaken, but I will repeat one: Government’s size and influence over the lives of citizens is not independent of the means of financing government’s activities.

If the size of government’s budget and the length of its reach into people’s lives were determined exogenously – that is, if this size and this reach would be whatever they are regardless of the source of government’s funds – then the case for deficit financing would be stronger. But in fact the size of government’s budget will be larger, and the reach of its activities longer, the less is the resistance of today’s citizens to a growing government.

By relieving today’s citizens of the need to pay fully for government, deficit financing diminishes this resistance. Deficit financing reduces citizens’ actual and perceived cost of expanding government. Thus, deficit financing encourages government to grow larger and more intrusive than it would under a balance-budget constraint.

In short, deficit financing fuels excessive government growth.

Precisely because you want government kept, as you say, “within proper limits,” you should oppose deficit financing and support annually balanced budgets.

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

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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National Review‘s Charles Cooke exposes Rebekah Jones – the shameless charlatan who lied about the alleged cooking of Florida’s Covid-19 numbers. A slice:

Jones’s central claim is nothing less dramatic than that she has uncovered a massive conspiracy in the third most populous state in the nation, and that, having done so, she has been ruthlessly persecuted by the governor and his “Gestapo.” Specifically, Jones claims that, while she was working at the FDOH last year, she was instructed by her superiors to alter the “raw” data so that Florida’s COVID response would look better, and that, having refused, she was fired. Were this charge true, it would reflect one of the most breathtaking political scandals in all of American history.

But it’s not true. Indeed, it’s nonsense from start to finish. Jones isn’t a martyr; she’s a myth-peddler. She isn’t a scientist; she’s a fabulist. She’s not a whistleblower; she’s a good old-fashioned confidence trickster. And, like any confidence trickster, she understands her marks better than they understand themselves. On Twitter, on cable news, in Cosmopolitan, and beyond, Jones knows exactly which buttons to push in order to rally the gullible and get out her message. Sober Democrats have tried to inform their party about her: “You may see a conspiracy theory and you want it to be true and you believe it to be true and you forward it to try to make it be true, but that doesn’t make it true,” warns Jared Moskowitz, the progressive Democrat who has led Florida’s fight against COVID. But his warnings have fallen on deaf ears. Since she first made her claims a little under a year ago, Jones has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars through multiple GoFundMe accounts (and, once she realized that she was losing a percentage to credit-card fees, through paper checks); she has become a darling of the online Left; and, by pointing to her own, privately run dashboard, which shows numbers that make Florida’s COVID response look worse than it has been, she has caused millions of people to believe quite sincerely that the state’s many successes during the pandemic have been built atop fraud. Stephen Glass, the famous writer-turned-liar who spent years inventing stories but got caught when he pushed it too far, could only have dreamed of such a result.

In the Wall Street Journal, David Rivkin and James Taranto make a solid case that mask mandates violate the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. A slice:

Critics argue that masking has become a form of virtue signaling. Mr. Biden reinforced that claim with his appeals to patriotism, which began during last year’s campaign as a rebuttal to the mask-resistant President Trump. But if wearing a mask conveys a political message, mandating it is constitutionally suspect. “No official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein,” Justice Robert Jackson wrote in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette (1943), which held that forcing schoolchildren to salute the flag and recite the Pledge of Allegiance violated their freedom of speech.

To wear a mask in public is to affirm a viewpoint no less powerful than the Pledge of Allegiance: that Covid poses a crisis so dire as to demand unprecedented government control of our lives and a transformation of the norms of interpersonal behavior. Ubiquitous mask mandates make assent impossible to avoid except by breaking the law or staying home.

Officials would argue that they are regulating conduct, not expression, and that they are doing so to protect public health. A few months ago that defense almost certainly would have prevailed. The pandemic’s severity, coupled with the lack of effective means to control it, would have persuaded most judges to defer to the government’s contention that the danger of infection outweighed the right to dissent or any other rights (such as bodily autonomy) that plaintiffs might assert.

Now the facts have changed. The pandemic has receded rapidly, with the number of daily U.S. infections down 88% since its January peak and still declining. Since mid-April vaccines have been available free of charge to any adult in America. Almost 124 million Americans—including more than 47% of adults and nearly 73% of the vulnerable 65-and-over population—have been vaccinated fully. The CDC acknowledges implicitly with its latest guidance that vaccinated people are at trivial risk of contracting the virus or transmitting it to others.

The disingenuous and power-drunk Anthony Fauci admits to yet another deception. A slice:

Appearing on Good Morning America on Tuesday, Dr. Anthony Fauci admitted that his post-vaccination mask-wearing was meant to serve as a “signal” — rather than a genuine attempt to stem the spread of COVID-19. The admission came just weeks after Fauci scolded Senator Rand Paul for suggesting that his insistence on wearing a mask, despite being at virtually no risk of contracting or spreading COVID, constituted public health “theater.”

Behold the qualifications – or lack thereof – of one of Britain’s pro-lockdown SAGE ‘experts.’

Speaking of SAGE, David Paton decries its detachment from reality.

Here’s one example of the insanity wrought by Covid Derangement Syndrome.

“Direct your anger at the lockdown obsessives, not the unvaccinated few” – so argues Philip Johnston.

Allison Pearson warns of “the coronafear.”

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

A straw man continues to stomp through Ireland.

Jon Dobinson reviews Laura Dodsworth’s new book, State of Fear. A slice:

This was a different kind of fear to that felt by the public: fear not of the illness itself, but of its political fall-out. Politicians were terrified of failing in any step which might later be found to have saved lives. The virus might not represent a deadly threat to the vast majority of British people, but it could certainly be lethal to their own prospects for electoral success.

An insider tells Dodsworth that ministers fear ‘they’ll get hauled through the press for their own mistakes and that’s worse for them than ruining people’s businesses.’

This spectre still stalks Whitehall. I’m told that from March 2020 onwards, any Civil Servant minded to reject tough restrictions has simply been asked, ‘what will you tell the Inquiry?’ Few are brave enough to resist that threat. Yet it only works one way – deaths and suffering from Covid-19 may bring retribution. Deaths and suffering caused by restrictions are so unimportant to the decision-makers that they have not even bothered to consider whether the harm of measures may outweigh the benefits. Recovery has been campaigning since its launch for the coming Covid-19 inquiry to be comprehensive, investigating the full impact of the measures taken, positive and negative: this is why it’s so important.

(DBx: See today’s Quotation of the Day.)

Kat Rosenfield, writing at Unherd, nails it on masks – and the political-left’s mindless insistence on continued masking. Two slices:

When the pandemic hit, it was this sentiment that fuelled the widely agreed-upon notion that whatever Donald Trump wanted to do, the right, morally correct, caring thing was to do the opposite. If Trump wanted to close the borders to travellers from China, we wanted to keep them open (and suggest that closing them was racist.) If Trump wanted to reopen schools, we wanted to keep them closed (and, yes, suggest that reopening them was racist.) A with-us-or-against-us mentality emerged, making dissent dangerous; as one parent confided to a reporter, “If we say anything about wanting our kids to return to school, we’re painted as Trumpers.”

And if Trump disliked pandemic safety measures like lockdowns, distancing, and, most especially, masks? Then we were all for these things. The more Trump or his supporters railed against them, the more we dug in. Masks were good. Masks were great. And most importantly, masks were political: a symbol of tribal affiliation that was literally all over your face.
…..

But when vaccinated people won’t remove their masks, they send the opposite message: that getting the vaccine changes nothing. Combined with visuals like this one — in which Kamala Harris wears a mask on a Zoom call, in a socially-distanced room where everyone present has been vaccinated — the impression being created by our political leadership and our media influencers is that the vaccines don’t work.

For a coalition that prides itself on caring about other people, the Left-wing pro-mask-even-after-vaccination folks are remarkably unconcerned that they might be discouraging their fellow Americans from participating in our most important life-saving public health measure. Instead, public responses to the vaccine-hesitant (including a video public service announcement that aired on the Jimmy Kimmel show) have been mainly centred on mocking them, an approach that does plenty to stoke existing tensions but very little to move us toward herd immunity.

Here are the opening paragraphs of John Tierney’s latest piece at City Journal:

At the end of a recent 800-meter race in Oregon, a high school runner named Maggie Williams got dizzy, passed out, and landed face-first just beyond the finish line. She and her coach blamed her collapse on a deficit of oxygen due to the mask she’d been forced to wear, and state officials responded to the public outcry by easing their requirements for masks during athletic events. But long before the pandemic began, scientists had repeatedly found that wearing a mask could lead to oxygen deprivation. Why had this risk been ignored?

One reason is that a new breed of censors has been stifling scientific debate about masks on social media platforms. When Scott Atlas, a member of the White House’s coronavirus task force, questioned the efficacy of masks last year, Twitter removed his tweet. When eminent scientists from Stanford and Harvard recently told Florida governor Ron DeSantis that children should not be forced to wear masks, YouTube removed their video discussion from its platform. These acts of censorship were widely denounced, but the social media science police remain undeterred, as I discovered when I recently wrote about the harms to children from wearing masks.

Facebook promptly slapped a label on the article: “Partly False Information. Checked by independent fact-checkers.” City Journal appealed the ruling, a process that turned out to be both futile and revealing. Facebook refused to remove the label, which still appears whenever the article is shared, but at least we got an inside look at the tactics that social media companies and progressive groups use to distort science and public policy.

The “independent fact-checkers” of my article are affiliated with a nonprofit group called , which has partnered with Facebook in what it calls a “fight against misinformation.” The group describes itself as “nonpartisan,” a claim that I would label “Mostly False” after studying dozens of its fact-checks enforcing progressive orthodoxy on climate change and public health. I didn’t see anything that would have displeased the journalists and officials promoting lockdowns and mask mandates. Nor did I see anything that would have displeased a Democrat, particularly during the last presidential campaign. In October, when Donald Trump was predicting that a vaccine was imminent, the group labeled that prediction “Inaccurate” and proclaimed that “widespread Covid-19 vaccination is not expected before mid-2021.” (Fact check: The vaccine rollout began in December.)

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from pages 119-120 of Thomas Sowell’s 2018 book Discrimination and Disparities (original emphasis):

Given how prone all human beings are to mistakes, in all kinds of institutions, one of the most important characteristics of any decision-making process is its ability to recognize and correct its own mistakes. Businesses that do not recognize their own mistakes, and change course in time, can face bankruptcy, even when they have been very successful in the past. Individuals suffering the painful consequences of their own bad decisions have often been forced to change course in order to avoid impending catastrophe, and in many cases have ended up with great personal fulfillment and insight going forward.

Various governmental institutions, however, have major built-in barriers to changing course in response to feedback. For an elected official to admit to having made a mistaken decision, from which millions of voters are suffering, is to face the prospect of the end of a whole career in disgrace.