Russell Roberts's Blog, page 274

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 214 of Deirdre McCloskey’s and Alberto Mingardi’s superb 2020 book, The Myth of the Entrepreneurial State:

Singling out certain kinds of activities as parasitic (“value extracting”) reveals an amateurish understanding of how an economy works. “Value extracting” financial businesses, the usual example these days favored by the amateurs, in fact directs resources to entrepreneurs under innovism. New ideas are commonly “inessential” at first: how can you consider essential something you don’t know yet? The bicycle and the auto were at first rich men’s toys. In 1783 in France Benjamin Franklin was present at the first manned ascent in a hot-air balloon. A companion snorted, “What is the use of that?!” To which Ben replied, “What is the use of a newborn child?”

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Who Was James Buchanan?

(Don Boudreaux)

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This short video is the first in the series of six that accompanies my and Randy Holcombe’s new book, The Essential James Buchanan.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Robby Soave rightly criticizes Team Blue’s dogmatic refusal to follow the science on masks. A slice:

But last week, the CDC abruptly reversed course. While Walensky had up until recently warned of “impending doom” if people did not continue to practice aggressive masking and social distancing, the government’s new position is that the vaccinated can go back to normal. People who are fully vaccinated do not need to worry about getting sick, and are extremely unlikely to contract COVID-19 and spread it to someone else. For them, the pandemic is over.

This wildly good news is, if anything, overdue: For weeks, if not months, it has been evident that the vaccines are incredibly effective and would likely significantly reduce transmission. No one should accuse the CDC of moving too quickly: It waited and waited and waited for a scientific consensus on the vaccines, and then it waited even longer, and now has finally conceded the truth.

Yet the reaction from the Listen-to-the-Experts crowd has ranged from disbelief to terror. Over on Twitter, many progressives have been shocked by the new guidance and have signaled they would ignore it. Gun control activist David Hogg declared that he intends to keep wearing a mask because he doesn’t want to be mistaken for a Republican. On the streets of D.C., I have overheard other people make similar remarks.

“There is no ‘Covid heart.’” (HT my intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy). Two slices:

A few weeks later, on Sept. 11, 2020, a study out of Ohio State University showed that 15% of competitive athletes who had recovered from Covid-19 had abnormalities on cardiac magnetic resonance scans. This study, of just 26 athletes, was entirely lacking in controls. What’s more, earlier and contemporary studies had found similar abnormalities among elite athletes without Covid-19. But the news coverage and social media posts continued at a frenzied pace. College sports nearly stopped. And people with mild or even asymptomatic disease sought out cardiac magnetic resonance scans, and some physicians even recommended having them.

…..

We take away two lessons from the Covid-19 myocarditis story. One is that SARS-CoV-2 can sometimes, though rarely, cause heart inflammation — just as many other viruses do. Clinicians, therefore, can appeal to sound medicine; further testing can be decided on an individual basis. Screening low-risk patients with MRI and other fancy tests is neither necessary nor wise.

The broader lesson is that science communication in times of crisis must keep a level head. The public, and decision-makers, need properly controlled studies instead of early sensational reports. In a world where success is measured by clicks, the idea that even mild cases of Covid-19 could pose a new and unprecedented threat to the heart took off. That fear has largely been unsubstantiated, though news of it won’t spread nearly as quickly.

The story of “Covid heart” is not over. Future studies will undoubtedly provide more information. But people who have recovered from Covid-19 have no special reason to worry about their hearts. Instead, we should all worry about the incentives in the modern media world, and why we got so far ahead of ourselves.

Annabel Fenwick Elliott decries how willingly people became sheeple in response to Covid-19. Two slices:

I hate to be a Debbie Downer on (yet another) celebratory ‘freedom’ day in the UK, but I’m here to tell you: we are not free. We are, as so many people continue to wilfully ignore, still living under a totalitarian regime that no-one voted for, which has for 14 long months seen our most basic freedoms given and taken away at a whim, all because of a virus that did indeed kill people, but on average at the same age as what the national life expectancy is anyway. That is not hyperbole. It is a fact. The average age of someone who dies from coronavirus is 82.4. Britons have an average life expectancy of 81.1.

Today, we have been given permission to hug the people we love. This is not something we should be grateful for. It should never have been against the rules for two consenting humans to embrace. Inadvisable, perhaps, for someone at high risk of being hospitalised due to Covid, to receive a hug. But their choice alone to make, much like smoking, which is significantly more deadly but nevertheless legal.

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I don’t think all this is the result of a carefully orchestrated global conspiracy plot. Rather, that our politicians’ obscenely draconian response to Covid has become a vicious cycle. Governments have so successfully frightened their people into a state of agoraphobic submission, they find themselves unable to put the genie back into the bottle. Behind closed doors, having seen the data which proves the vaccines have already done their job, I very much doubt that Boris Johnson truly believes it necessary to proceed with such economy-ravaging caution. But he has to give his citizens what they want, and what they want these days, overwhelmingly, is caution.

Just look at the US, where the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently decreed that people who have been vaccinated no longer need to wear face coverings – an entirely rational move that was met with a bitter left-wing backlash from those who want the mask mandate to stay longer.

Fraser Nelson looks at the data on Sweden, Covid, and lockdowns. Here’s his conclusion:

All this explains why Sweden refuses to lock down and tolerates what is, at the time of writing, Europe’s highest Covid levels. Polls show almost three-quarters of Swedes saying that the health authority’s handling of the crisis was either ‘good’ or ‘very good. When these other points are factored in, it becomes easier to understand why, after all the last year has brought, Swedes still think they will be proved right in the end.

Those of you who doubt that the Covidocracy is authoritarian might wish to read this report out of Calgary.

“But surely it is ministers, not the unvaccinated, who are ruining it for everybody else.”

From Newsweek: “Texas Reports Zero COVID Deaths 2 Months After Biden Called its Reopening Plan as ‘Neanderthal Thinking’.” (And note that, as of yesterday – May 17th – Texas’s Covid case count was a mere 28 percent of what it was on March 2nd, the day statewide Covid restrictions were lifted in Texas.)

Roger Watson mourns for Australia.

“Variant caution risks becoming an excuse never to return to normality” – so reads the headline of Sherelle Jacobs’s latest. Here’s her opening:

There are few better windows into the state of the nation’s psyche than what the public is watching on online streaming sites. And as lockdown lifts, and people return to pubs, restaurants and the theatre, currently trending on Amazon Prime is a 2015 docudrama about the notorious Stanford Prison experiment. In 1971, professor Philip Zimbardo recruited a group of university graduates to participate in a mock prison. While pretend guards subjected their “prisoners” to psychological torture, submissive inmates harassed fellow comrades into following the rules.

The experiment went down as a lesson in how easily people can slip into authoritarianism. But there was another revelation that Zimbardo and his contemporaries didn’t know quite what to make of – how effortlessly the participants lost all sense of reality. The most sadistic guard became absorbed in the persona of the captain in Cool Hand Luke. Prisoners soon referred to themselves by their prison numbers rather than their names. Zimbardo himself described a Kafka-eaque feeling of unease about “where our roles ended and our personalities began”.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 11 of economist Arthur M. Diamond, Jr.’s marvelous 2019 book, Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism (footnote deleted):

An alternative to the “imposed” antitrust regulation by the government would be the “organic” antitrust regulation by the market. Organic antitrust regulation checks the power of dominant firms by allowing innovative startups to leapfrog the incumbents, providing new goods and new process innovations that are mostly better and cheaper.

DBx: Yes.

Relying upon government officials to rid markets of monopoly power makes no more sense than relying upon neo-Nazis to rid society of anti-semitism.

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Pictured above is Gustavus Swift – a brilliant entrepreneur who made the market for beef and pork much more competitive.

The Beginning of the End of Liberal Civilization?

(Don Boudreaux)

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My most recent column for AIER was written by my inner pessimist. A slice:

Modernity is impossible without widespread peaceful engagement with strangers. And such engagement is impossible without mutual trust. Yet abruptly starting 16 months ago, we were told to abandon our modern, liberal sensibilities.

Abruptly starting 16 months ago we were warned not to trust strangers and not to engage with them commercially or socially. Abruptly starting 16 months ago, we were instructed to see strangers – indeed, to see even members of our extended families – as being chiefly carriers of death. Abruptly starting 16 months ago, we were initiated into the cult of pathogen avoidance; we were urged to behave as if avoiding a headline-grabbing virus is not only the main responsibility of each individual, but a responsibility that should be pursued at all costs.

Abruptly starting 16 months ago, modern men and women were not only given license to revert to atavistic dread of strangers, but positively encouraged to harbor such dread and to act on it. Such atavistic attitudes and actions came all too naturally.

Abruptly starting 16 months ago, humanity was encouraged to hold in contempt – even to censor – the relatively few persons who refused to abandon liberal sensibilities.

Abruptly starting 16 months ago, we prostrated our panicked selves before our “leaders,” begging that they use their god-like knowledge and powers (called “the Science”) to safeguard us from one particular source of illness, believed to be demonic.

Abruptly starting 16 months ago, there quite possibly began the end of liberal civilization.

…..

I would love nothing more than to be proven mistaken.

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Wen Tyranny Arrives

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to the Washington Post:

Editor:

With “The CDC’s mask guidance is a mess. Biden needs to clean it up.” (May 17), Leana Wen is becoming increasingly irrational and authoritarian in pushing for policies that require proof of vaccination.

The irrational: Wen asserts without evidence that eliminating mask mandates absent proof of vaccination “was a major blunder that threatens to set back much of the progress made.”

Wen’s likely reason for steering clear of facts is that the evidence runs counter to her assertion. For example, statewide mask mandates were eliminated in Texas on March 2nd. The 7-day-average Covid case count there has fallen ever since; it’s now a mere 29% of what it was on March 2nd. Over this same period Covid hospitalizations and deaths have also fallen. Similarly, the evidence from Florida is inconsistent with Wen’s insistence that failure to mandate masks without proof of vaccination imperils the public health.

The authoritarian: Wen protests that she’s “not saying the federal government should issue a ‘vaccine passport’; rather, it should help private entities set up a health and safety screen that incorporates proof of vaccination or testing in lieu of a vaccine verification.”

What, pray tell, is the real difference between “vaccine verification” and “proof of vaccination or testing”? In each case, individuals wishing to go about the ordinary affairs of life will be presumed to be carriers of a lethal pathogen until they provide evidence to the contrary. It’s appalling that Wen does not see such a requirement as being wholly incompatible with life in a free society.

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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Peter Earle details some of the damage wrought by Covid Derangement Syndrome.

Those of you who dismiss those of us who insist that Covid Derangement Syndrome is both real and readily available as an excuse for the exercise of arbitrary state power might wish to ponder this report from CBS News. (HT Phil Magness). Here’s the sensational headline: “DHS warns violent extremists may exploit easing of COVID restrictions to plan new attacks” – a headline that can, without any loss of ‘substance,’ be re-written as: ‘DHS warns violent extremists may exploit freedom to plan new attacks.’ (Remind me why, in times of crises, we should trust government officials.)

Delhi is now being stomped on by – apologies to Phil Magness – a man of straw. This straw man is stomping also in Taiwan, and in Trinidad and Tobago. (It was just announced in T&T that “All outdoor sports and exercise are now prohibited 24/7 under the 2021 emergency powers regulations.”)

Let’s all continue to applaud Australia’s draconian response to Covid…. Not.

Still applauding Australia (and government involvement in health care)? Read this piece. A slice:

State health departments are still determining exactly why Australians are getting more seriously ill and in greater volumes as healthcare systems have been switched back on this year. The ministers believe the likely driver is the impact of delayed or deferred care.

Well: “Members of Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour express regret about ‘unethical’ methods”. And here’s the Telegraph headline: “Use of fear to control behaviour in Covid crisis was ‘totalitarian’, admit scientists”. A slice:

Members of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour (SPI-B) expressed regret about the tactics in a new book about the role of psychology in the [British] Government’s Covid-19 response.

SPI-B warned in March last year that ministers needed to increase “the perceived level of personal threat” from Covid-19 because “a substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened”.

Gavin Morgan, a psychologist on the team, said: “Clearly, using fear as a means of control is not ethical. Using fear smacks of totalitarianism. It’s not an ethical stance for any modern government. By nature I am an optimistic person, but all this has given me a more pessimistic view of people.”

Mr Morgan spoke to author Laura Dodsworth, who has spent a year investigating the Government’s tactics for her book A State of Fear, published on Monday.

Ministers have faced repeated accusations that they ramped up the threat from the pandemic to justify lockdowns and coerce the public into abiding by them – a claim that will be examined by the forthcoming public inquiry into the pandemic response.

Despite the item immediately above, Britain’s Covidocrats continue to stoke Covid Derangement Syndrome. A slice:

In fact, there is no evidence (outside models, which are not evidence) that lockdown measures or social distancing have any significant impact on reducing Covid infections or deaths. This is why the states in America which removed their restrictions in March (Texas) or last autumn (Florida) or never imposed them (South Dakota) are doing no worse, and often better, than many states which maintained strict restrictions throughout the winter (see the graph above). Sweden demonstrates a similar point in Europe.

The depressing truth, though, is that sceptics have largely failed to get this basic point across to those in charge and their scientific advisers. It’s not as though the evidence is not there. There are numerous peer-reviewed articles in leading journals that set out the evidence on this, and more keep appearing. Leading scientists have raised their heads to make the evidence-based case.

I’m honored to have been a return guest on Bretigne Shaffer’s podcast.

Here’s J.D. Tuccille’s latest. A slice:

Those families, having seriously altered their lives in response to pandemic fears, probably entrusted their kids to us because my wife is a pediatrician who presumably understands health perils and precautions. And that’s true, but not necessarily in the way those who have self-isolated might assume. While she has seen families fall ill and lose people (usually older or with preexisting conditions) to COVID-19, she also has seen children fall prey to lockdown-triggered depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts. During a pandemic, as always, life is about balancing risks, not eliminating them.

“The Origins and Political Persistence of COVID-19 Lockdowns” – by Phil Magness and Peter Earle.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 142 of the late Tom Bethell’s superb 1998 book, The Noblest Triumph:

It is a great irony of communism that those who did not believe in God believed that godlike knowledge could be concentrated at a central point. It was believed that government could be omnipotent and omniscient. And in order to justify the idea that all lives should be determined by a single plan, the concomitant tendency of communist regimes was to deify the leader – whether Lenin, Stalin, Mao or Kim Il-sung.

Some Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Steven Greenhut rightly warns of the noxious notions of “nationalist conservatives.” Here’s his conclusion:

This is just a grandiose justification for government intervention in private decisions. What is the common good? It is whatever policy makers and government planners say it is. This proposal sounds remarkably similar to the progressive vision of letting “public-spirited” bureaucrats and politicians have unlimited power. They know what’s best, after all.

Despite their common-good promises, “all government is, in its essence, organized exploitation, and in virtually all of its existing forms it is the implacable enemy of every industrious and well-disposed man,” as journalist H.L. Mencken noted. That’s why our founders believed in liberty—and why I would rather put up with drag queens in libraries than throw in the towel and submit to despots.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy rightly warns of the noxious notion that government indebtedness is nothing to worry about. Here’s her conclusion:

The bottom line is this: Even if you assume that interest rate increases and debt crises are so far off in our future that it doesn’t make much sense to fret about them today, it still doesn’t mean that deficits don’t have a cost to us today. Those costs are real and significant. Prudent leaders should take steps now to make sure their actions don’t cause a debt crisis in the future. Sadly, there are no such leaders in sight today.

George Will rightly warns of the dangers of executive overreach.

Here’s David Henderson on Ryan Streeter’s grounds for optimism.

And now for some pessimism: Arnold Kling issues this lament:

With apologies to Milton Friedman, the “new” theory seems to be that inflation is, anywhere and everywhere, a temporary and idiosyncratic phenomenon.

Except that the theory is not new. It is the same theory that prevailed in the early 1970s. Apparently there aren’t any economists left at the Fed who are old enough to remember back that far. And no journalists.

My new GMU Econ colleague Vincent Geloso explains that the industrial revolution was not a wash. Here’s his conclusion:

The findings of these articles are incredible for anyone seeking to bridge the divide between scholarly knowledge and the popular imagination. They show that even the worst-case scenario implies that the Industrial Revolution constituted a momentous and positive development in terms of the quality of life of the poorest.

Richard Ebeling draws lessons from Frank Knight’s 1950 presidential address to the American Economic Association. A slice:

Common-sense understanding and rational economic thinking all seemed to be out the window. Knight said that it had long been his habit to explain to his students the “sinister” significance of wrong-headed ideas about trade protectionism or “the perpetual popular demand for making capital cheap by manufacturing money; and for creating a demand for labor by enforcing all sorts of inefficiency, waste and even destruction.”

For the most part, teaching the fallacies in these things was not difficult for others to follow, if people were willing to see it. Instead, he was finding far too many people accepting “new and depressing” examples of “arbitrary price-fixing.” It should be common sense, with a little bit of thinking, that fixing a price above or below its market level will, respectively, create wasteful surpluses or unnecessary shortages.

What had helped to foster such misunderstandings and confusions were attitudes and rationales insisting that the only “principle” worth following was that there are no principles worth knowing or following, other than the expediencies of the changing political moment. But if not fleeting expediencies, what principles should be followed, and particularly those that economics may offer as guides to government policy?

Knight argued, “Economic principles are simply the more general implications of the single principle of freedom, individual and social, i.e., free association in a certain sphere of activity…. The free association in question is exchange, in markets, an instrumentality necessary to specialized production, and distribution of the joint result.” He suggested that there were four general reasons for placing freedom and free association as the corner-stone principles of sound thinking on social and economic matters.

Juliette Sellgren talks with Tim Carney about cronyism.

David Henderson reports on his debate with labor economist Alan Manning.

Here’s part 14 of George Selgin’s superb series on the New Deal.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Frank Murphy’s concurring opinion in the 1943 case Hirabayashi v. United States (320 U.S. 81); I learned of this quotation from Robert Higgs’s July 1987 Reason article titled “,” which is reprinted in the superb 2004 collection of some of Bob’s essays, Against Leviathan:

[W]e must not forget that few indeed have been the invasions upon essential liberties which have not been accompanied by pleas of urgent necessity advanced in good faith by responsible men.

DBx: Yes. Yet at least as numerous have been invasions upon essential liberties encouraged by the pleas of irresponsible men (and women).