Russell Roberts's Blog, page 277
May 10, 2021
Some Covid Links
Stephen Humphries, writing in the Christian Science Monitor, explores this question: Will people get back the freedoms they’ve lost to Covid restrictions? Two slices (the second is from the caption of a photo that accompanies this essay):
According to Human Rights Watch, 83 governments restricted free speech and free assembly in the name of pandemic protections. Enforcement of those measures could be harsh. Youths in the Philippines were locked in dog cages following curfew violations, says Ms. Pearson. In India, police physically assaulted 10 journalists who reported that a COVID-19 roadblock in the southeast was preventing villagers from reuniting with their families. South Africa enforced a ban on cigarettes and alcohol by setting up roadblocks to search cars for contraband.
…..
Victoria’s pandemic lockdown rules have come in for criticism, as a pregnant woman faces up to 15 years in prison for a Facebook post.
That means six people or two households will be able to mix inside, pubs and restaurants can restart indoor dining, and overnight stays will be allowed from next Monday.
From that date people will also be allowed to hug each other again, face masks will no longer be needed in secondary school classrooms, and cinemas and theatres can reopen.
(DBx: Seriously, if in 2019 someone had shown you a credible report on a government’s plan to allow as many as six people to mix inside, and also to allow people again to hug each other – or a report of a pregnant woman facing up to 15 years in prison for a Facebook post supporting the right to protest – from what country would you have supposed such a report to come? China? North Korea? Venezuela? Had such a report come from one of these, or some other, totalitarian country, we in the west would have been aghast and quick to denounce any government that presumes to exercise such power over peaceful people. Yet for the past 15 months, most denizens of the so-called “free world” have allowed themselves to be tyrannized in the name of fighting SARS-CoV-2. Shameful.)
Ross Clark reports on a very dangerous result of Covid Derangement Syndrome. Two slices:
What joy it must have been to be an Australian over the past year – assuming that is, you weren’t one of those citizens unfortunate enough to have been abroad when Covid struck and have as yet been unable to return home. It hasn’t exactly been a non-stop party – crowds were banned from Sydney’s New Year celebrations, and everyone across the country has faced the prospect of being caught out by instant lockdown. Yet Australia can and does wear its low Covid death toll – just 910 since the beginning of the pandemic – as a badge of pride.
But, as the World Health Organisation loses no opportunity to tell us, this is a crisis which is far from over. And when the historians do finally get to deliver their judgment, it is far from certain that they will end up looking kindly on the countries that at present can boast of low Covid tolls.
Trouble is, once you have battled Covid with strict border controls, how do you ever open up again in a world in which Covid-19 has become endemic? In Australia’s case it isn’t going to be happening soon, to judge by comments by Prime Minister Scott Morrison. While Britain plans to reopen borders furtively from a week’s time, the Australian government has already put back its own scheduled reopening from this year until some time in 2022. Australians, says Morrison, are enjoying their freedoms and they don’t have an appetite for change so long as there is a threat from importing Covid variants. Yet that threat will never go away so long as Covid is present anywhere in the world.
…..
In Australia’s case, according to the think tank the McKell Institute, border closures are costing the economy Aus$203 million (£115 million) a day. Meanwhile, China may have been able to boast of being one of the few countries whose economy actually grew in 2020 – by 2.3 per cent. It is going to struggle to prosper, however, if it continues to fight Covid-19 as it has done to date: with savage and instant lockdowns.
It isn’t just the measures themselves which harm economic activity; it is the mentality which they implant in the population. Having established the principle of zero tolerance of Covid, it is going to be extremely difficult to switch to a policy of living with the virus, as European and North American countries have accepted they will have to do.
If actions taken over the last few months, even the last year, are anything to go on, a pattern is clearly establishing itself. At the start of the pandemic, significant changes were made by governments, with the implementation of numerous restrictions, even lockdowns, to cull the virus. It was at least remotely reasonable when the case numbers were increasing largely day by day, although in many circumstances this has been the fault of governments and their poor response systems. Now, however, when even one case pops up it’s straight to panic stations. The case is announced, the media hype it up to be more than it is, in turn causing a response from rent a quote “medical experts” and the social media fear-dwellers who call for restrictions. The relevant government then holds a press conference to announce new restrictions, or in the case of most Labor states a snap lockdown, and everyone is yet again required to cede their freedoms to a bunch of politicians who either have not a clue what they are doing or know exactly that and are deliberately doing all they can to assume as much power as possible.
Anthony Fauci is as dangerous as he is detestable:
During a segment on ABC’s “This Week” with George Stephanopoulos, Fauci said that possibly, if “certain conditions” are met, Mother’s Day 2022 might look close to “normal.”
Anthony Fauci, I repeat, is as dangerous as he is detestable. Here’s what Phil Magness said most recently on Facebook about Fauci:
So just to be clear, Fauci’s position is essentially Schroedinger’s Mask. It entails a simultaneous belief that:
1. The flu season was practically nonexistent last year because everyone was wearing a mask.
2. Covid had a second wave because not enough people were wearing masks.
“I think people have gotten used to the fact that wearing masks, clearly if you look at the data it diminishes respiratory diseases, we’ve had practically a non-existent flu season this year merely because people were doing the kinds of public health things that were directed predominately against Covid-19”
A year later, [Canada’s Health Minister Patty] Hajdu struck a notably different tone at a House of Commons public safety committee hearing. Canada’s borders had been closed to all non-citizens for more than a year. Additionally, the Liberal government led by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had mandated a draconian practice of quarantining all arriving passengers in government-approved hotels to the tune of $2,000 (CAD) for a three-day stay.
Conservative Party health critic Michelle Rempel Garner recounted a harrowing recent sexual assault which had allegedly occurred at the government’s newly mandated hotel quarantine facilities, demanding to know what data justified forcibly confining Canadian citizens to monitored hotel rooms.
This time, Hajdu’s response was different. “Every woman deserves to be free of violence and a life of dignity”, she noted.
But, these border measures are in place to protect Canadians, and they will remain in place until science and evidence indicate that it is safe to release them.
How did we get here? Canada ranks ahead of the United States on the Human Freedom Index. It has an entrenched bill of rights in the form of its Charter, and a generally permissive culture. But emergencies turn countries topsy-turvy. Much of Canada’s national destiny rests outside of its control. National budgets have long skimped on defence investment, under the unspoken assumption that our military-superpower neighbour and ally to the south would intervene were Canada ever to come under foreign threat. Canada has been in the happy circumstance to seamlessly flit from being the dearest ally of the world’s last two great powers (the United Kingdom and the United States, naturally). Yet its British constitutional heritage has meant that it generally lacks a widespread culture of liberty, and so it wasn’t entirely surprising that a parochial and draconian pandemic response turned out to prevail.
During the pandemic’s first wave, Canada’s Atlantic provinces of Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island pursued an aggressive ‘COVID zero’ approach. These provinces banned all who did not reside in the province from entering. The bans were cruelly absolute: immediate family members could not be permitted to attend funerals (even if willing to quarantine), married couples residing apart were not permitted to visit, Canadians from other provinces were barred, for a period, from accessing their properties in Atlantic Canada.
…..
What have all of these strict rules afforded Canada? According to the government’s stated rationale of protecting the country from variants, not much. The United Kingdom B117 variant is now dominant, representing about 75% of new cases. British Columbia is currently host to the world’s worst outbreak of the P1 variant outside of Brazil, with over 700 confirmed cases (including the majority of the Vancouver Canucks hockey team). Most likely, the variants arrived by way of the millions of truck drivers and essential workers who continue to cross from the United States into Canada and who are exempt from quarantine requirements, and not the tiny fraction of air travellers who were always subject to home quarantine and have been the targets of Canada’s pandemic theatre.
Micha Gartz writes about the Covid baby-boom bust. A slice:
The BBC reported that, last April, the UK banned all new fertility treatments. This means some couples have or will miss their last chance to conceive. “If you’re 25,” says Dr Barry Witt, a fertility centre medical director in Connecticut, “you can wait a year. If you’re 40 that’s a different story.”
It’s not too late to learn from 2020 and “follow the science,” as President Biden likes to say. One place to start is with Mr. Mulligan’s findings summed up in a press release for the study: “Data show that as a result” of prevention protocols put in place by employers, “workers have been 4-5 times less safe outside their workplace than inside it. While stay-at-home continues to be pushed as promoting public health, nobody is checking the data which say the opposite.” And that was before vaccines.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from the new David Hart translation – still only on-line, but forthcoming in print – of Frédéric Bastiat’s 1850 Economic Harmonies; specifically, it’s from Chapter XXII, titled “The Driving Force of Society” (references removed; parenthetical remarks original to Hart):
This being so, how do these leaders of (different) schools (of thought) band together under the common denomination of “socialists,” and what is the link that unites them against natural or Providential society? It cannot be other than this: They do not want a natural form of society. What they want is an artificial form of society that emerges fully formed from the brain of the inventor. It is true that each of them wants to be the Jupiter of this Minerva, that each nurtures his own form of artifice and dreams of his own form of social order. But there is one thing that they have in common: they do not acknowledge that the human race possesses either a driving force that impels it toward good nor a curative force that delivers it from evil. They quarrel over who will knead the human clay, but agree that it is a clay that requires kneading. In their eyes, the human race is not a living and harmonious being; it is an inert material waiting for them to give it feeling and life. It is not a subject for study but a material on which to experiment.
May 9, 2021
Some Covid Links
TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.)
Freddie Sayers wonders if many in Britain are victims of the Stockholm Syndrome. A slice:
To a degree never before seen in British history, these leaders have had power to control every aspect of our lives — should it surprise us if psychologically they have assumed something of the space of our benevolent captors?
Australia’s government is to be admired for its quick and draconian and response to Covid-19 – a response that has assured Australians now of a life without Covid restrictions? I think not. Definitely not.
Hmmm…. I wonder what this new Van Morrison song is about.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 205 of Jerry Z. Muller’s 1993 book, Adam Smith In His Time and Ours:
Smith was remarkably prescient in identifying the promise of capitalism, and his work contributed in no small measure to the fulfillment of that promise. The difficulties and dangers to which Smith pointed remain with us. That he did not solve them may reflect the fact that they are incapable of resolution. But some insoluble problems are more benign than others, and it was Smith’s judgment that the problems posed by commercial society are preferable to the alternatives.
May 8, 2021
Some Non-Covid Links
George Will reflects eloquently and wisely on the experience of turning 80. A slice:
In 1941, life expectancy at birth in the United States was 64.8 (today, 77.8), only 6.8 percent of the population was over 65 (today, 16 percent), penicillin was on the horizon but the Salk polio vaccine was a dozen years distant, and most hospitals spent more on clean linen than medical technologies. Sixty-three percent of households did not have telephones, less than half the U.S. population age 25 and older had a high school diploma (today, 90 percent) and homosexual sex was criminalized in all 48 states. The nation has undergone a moral advancement — consider the casual callousness toward minorities of all sorts eight decades ago — as stunning as its material improvement.
Yet the United States’ social hypochondria has deepened, and Americans’ pain thresholds have lowered during the nation’s advancement. Perhaps it is progress, of sorts, that status anxieties have displaced material deprivations in fueling the national pastime — no, not baseball: whining. But to be 80 is to have, beginning in the second half of the 20th century, lived through the emergence of today’s therapeutic culture. It saturates a large class of painfully earnest Americans — expensively schooled but negligibly educated — who, when not extravagantly indignant about Lincoln and other supposed national blemishes, are preoccupied with their malleable identities and acute sensitivities.
George Leef explains why the federal spending and borrowing binge matters. A slice:
The real problem is the enlargement of the federal leviathan. The bigger the government, the more potentially productive resources are squandered on things that politicians like (more IRS agents, more diversity bureaucrats) and the less is left for growth. People will see their government checks but will never see the increased output and innovation that was crowded out.
This transition began in March, when Democrats enacted a federal unemployment-insurance bonus of $300. That bonus, pushing benefits past market wage rates, indisputably is causing many to shun previously held jobs, which surely will do long-term damage to the notion of working to get ahead.
Why bother? Instead, hold out for all this new state-subsidized compensation that reduces the incentive or need to work—the same skip-work choice public-school teachers across the country have made the past year.
Mr. Biden’s American Families Plan proposes four significant new federal entitlements: two years of free, universal prekindergarten; virtually free child care for all; a paid family and medical leave program; and two years of community college.
Nowhere will you find a Democrat calling these proposals what they are—entitlements like Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security. Rejecting that criticism at his news conference Wednesday, Mr. Biden said all his spending will “create” jobs and growth.
And don’t forget to read also David Henderson. A slice:
The increase [in employment] did not happen despite the Biden “stimulus” bill; it [failed to] happen[] in large part because of the bill, which was not mainly about stimulus. When the federal government pays people an extra $300 a week to be unemployed, a few million people who would have taken the many jobs available will instead take a summer holiday.
Eric Boehm reports, correctly yet sadly, that the era of bigger and bigger government is upon us. A slice:
Twenty-five years later, that senator is now president of the United States. Just weeks after taking office, Joe Biden’s first major legislative achievement was the passage of a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill, the entire cost of which will be added to a budget deficit that was estimated to be $2.3 trillion before the new spending was approved. Although ostensibly a package meant to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, the bill contains a large number of government-expanding measures unrelated to fighting the disease, including an expensive new child subsidy entitlement that is likely to become permanent.
Clearly, the prevailing view in Washington of deficit spending and the role of government has changed over the past quarter-century. In fact, there has been a near-complete reversal. Where talk of reducing budgets and ensuring the government lives within its means used to be a bipartisan affair, now the opposite is largely true. Republicans still make occasional noises about the deficit—as they did during the passage of Biden’s stimulus bill, which received no GOP votes—but they effectively traded away any serious claim to being fiscal conservatives after overseeing deficit-hiking spending increases and tax cuts that were supposed to pay for themselves but didn’t under President Donald Trump.
Now, the new right wing is agitating for more government subsidies for families and workers, deficits be damned. Democrats, meanwhile, view low interest rates as an invitation to turn the printing press up to 11. Beyond the budget ledger, the ballooning deficit has coincided with a massive expansion of government programs.
Art Carden applauds the bourgeois deal.
Juliette Sellgren talks with Michelle Minton about vaping.
This animated chart by Mark Perry is quite revealing.
Some Covid Links
The move is long overdue, and the pandemic offers Republicans the perfect opportunity to explain to voters how the unions’ ironclad control over public education does grave harm to children. We’ve known from the earliest days of the virus that youngsters are the least likely to catch it or spread it to others. We also know that many low-income parents struggle with home schooling and need to go back to work. Distance learning exacerbates racial and economic achievement gaps and takes a heavy psychological toll on kids. Union leaders couldn’t care less.
California, which is the most populous state and currently has the lowest per capita Covid rate in the country, also has the highest percentage of school districts that remain entirely virtual. Teachers unions have used the pandemic to demand more money and more-generous benefits. They know that millions of Americans can’t return to work if kids can’t return to schools. For parents it’s a dilemma, but unions see it as leverage. The United Teachers of Los Angeles requested free child care for its members as a condition for returning to the classroom. Union clout is the main reason that California’s percentage of all-virtual school districts is more than three times the national average.
An exposé published in Sunday’s New York Post shows how diligently teachers unions have been working to capitalize on our misery. “In the days before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released their much-anticipated school-reopening guidelines on Feb. 12, the American Federation of Teachers launched a full-court press to shape the final document and slow the full-reopening of schools,” the Post reported. “The lobbying paid off. In at least two instances, language ‘suggestions’ offered by the union were adopted nearly verbatim into the final text of the CDC document.”
Alastair Cavendish decries the disappearance of dissent, and he documents its morphology. A slice:
If everyone ignores it, nothing happened anyway.
The simplest way to deal with dissent is simply to pretend it isn’t there. After all, if there had been significant anti-lockdown protests involving tens of thousands of people in central London, the BBC, CNN and every other mainstream media outlet would have reported these events, would they not? Their lack of interest, therefore, shows that there really wasn’t a story here at all.
Say that it was just a few cranks.
This is where photography comes into its own. Find a few stragglers to make it look as though the entire protest consisted of five people and a dog. Seek out the two or three placards about conspiracy theories, ignoring the thousands that make cogent criticisms of lockdown or vaccine passports. Ensure that Piers Corbyn, or someone who looks like him, features prominently.
Say that the protesters were violent.
You might need to employ a bit of latitude here. Find any violent altercation that happened in London on the same day as the march and tack it on to the end of your footage. Or send in some masked thugs masquerading as protesters. This is what the Chinese government does, and Chinese tactics for social control are terribly fashionable these days.
Cameron English reports on the CDC’s unscientific counsel regarding vaccinated individuals. A slice:
Despite this mounting evidence that the approved shots greatly reduce the risk of transmission, the CDC maintains that “We are still learning how well vaccines prevent you from spreading the virus that causes COVID-19 to others, even if you do not have symptoms.” Like so much information circulating online these days, this is technically true but unhelpful. The pandemic is just over a year old; “we are still learning” about every aspect of SARS-COV-2, and we will be for years to come.
But the CDC wants it both ways. The agency emphasizes the safety and efficacy of the shots and urges you to get them to “protect people around you,” then tries to deny people the incentives that would encourage additional vaccine uptake. It’s another example of the confused messaging that has undermined public trust in the scientific establishment over the last year. Vaccine expert Dr. Ben Locwin laid bare the obvious flaw in this reasoning in an email. We’ll give him the last word:
Keeping unnecessary mask and distance restrictions – on the immunized – is the exact WRONG messaging, and erodes the public national vaccine campaign. It’s pandering, and it’s scientific nonsense. After being fully immunized, it’s as safe for those people as it’s ever going to get.
This past Thursday evening I was a guest in Zach Weissmueller’s Hayek Hangout. Here’s the recording of our 90-minute-long discussion. (I thank Zach for the invitation.)
TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.)
I repeat: TANSTAFPFC. A slice:
The X-ray revealed that cancer had eaten into Joy’s hip and femur. A major operation followed. Nick was utterly distraught on behalf of his wife of 46 years. “Is it surprising that we are both bitter and traumatised? This, Allison, is the truth of what happens when Covid is all that matters. If I hear Matt Hancock say once more that GP and hospital services are looking after all those who need the NHS, I will scream. If I hear him boasting that GPs can now provide the same service through telephone contact, I will throw something at the TV.
“The truth is very different. Our GP actually admitted that he was horrified how my wife had deteriorated when he eventually saw her in person! The cancer that was not diagnosed because our GPs would not see patients face-to-face has spread, not just to Joy’s bones, but into her brain. She is too weak to commence the full cancer treatment. Joy is fearful and frightened while I cannot contemplate life without her. Turning the NHS into the National Covid Service has caused my wife and I endless pain and suffering.”
The CDC’s new cruise ship guidelines for a proposed reopening “test period” are absolutely insane. They want to force passengers to wear wristbands that track their social contacts and signal an alarm if they commit “social distancing infractions.”
https://www.cdc.gov/…/covid19-operati...
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 136 of Vol. II (“The Mirage of Social Justice” [1976]) of F.A. Hayek’s great work, Law, Legislation, and Liberty (footnote deleted):
The possibility of men living together in peace and to their mutual advantage without having to agree on common concrete aims, and bound only by abstract rules of conduct, was perhaps the greatest discovery mankind ever made.
DBx: We denizens of modernity – we beneficiaries of the enormous prosperity and opportunities for human flourishing made possible only by the market-driven worldwide division of labor – take our good fortune for granted. Our glass is 99.96 percent full, a fact that causes us to notice only the 0.04 percent that’s absent, and to complain bitterly about this failure of heaven to materialize here on earth.
Unfortunately, of course, one consequence of such uninformed and ungrateful complaining is that it might well usher in attitudes and institutions that substantially drain our glass.
…..
Today – May 8th, 2021 – is the 122nd anniversary of the birth of F.A. Hayek.
May 7, 2021
Perpetual-Motion Machines Are Impossible (Even in Public Finance)
Here’s a letter to a long-time reader of my blog:
Mr. S__:
Thanks for your e-mail.
About the video and chapter that I recently posted (from my and Randy Holcombe’s The Essential James Buchanan) you ask: “Can’t the government just keep paying off debts that come due by issuing new debt? Why does it ever have to use taxation to get funds?”
A government that has the confidence of borrowers can pay off some of its outstanding debt with newly borrowed funds, but it can’t do so forever. Any confidence that creditors have in a government to repay its loans is rooted in creditors’ belief that that government has access to sources of revenue other than borrowed funds. And any government’s chief source of revenue is taxation – either overtly (as through income taxation) or covertly (as through inflation).
A government that swore off taxation would tell the world that it plans to operate as a private entity – that is, no longer as a government. If this entity then announced that it plans to continue to supply citizens with goods and services paid for exclusively with borrowed funds – that is, never by charging citizens for these goods and services – this ‘government’ would immediately find itself unable to borrow as much as a cent. If you doubt this conclusion, ask what would happen if, say, McDonald’s swore off charging its customers for food. McDonald’s lines of credit would immediately collapse.
To get rid of taxation requires getting rid of the state. This letter isn’t the place to debate the practicality of a society operating successfully without the state. What is not debatable, however, is the fact that as long as the state exists, taxation will exist. The belief that the state can be funded exclusively with funds loaned to it voluntarily by creditors is equivalent to believing in the possibility of a perpetual-motion machine. Regardless of how lovely such a thing would be, it simply ain’t happening.
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
Jay Bhattacharya debates Alberto Giubilini on ‘immunity passports.’ Giubilini supports such documents; Bhattacharya opposes them. Here are two slices from Bhattacharya’s contribution to the debate:
Age is the most important risk factor for severe Covid infection outcomes; there is a thousand-fold difference between the mortality risk faced by the oldest individuals and the youngest after infection. A comprehensive meta-analysis of seroprevalence studies published in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization finds that people aged 70 and over have a 95% infection survival rate. In comparison, people under 70 have a 99.95% infection survival rate.
…..
First, the absolute reduction in Covid infection risk for the medically unvaccinated from an immunity passport scheme is likely to be small. The long-run environment in which the immunity passports will be implemented will be one of herd immunity, with a large fraction of the population immune due to natural infection or the vaccine. While immune people may still be asymptomatically infected and pass on the virus to others, the probability of such an event is vanishingly small. So we need only consider the unvaccinated. The virus will not be gone but will be endemic in the population, with case rates substantially lower than we have grown used to this past pandemic year. A random interaction between two unvaccinated people in this endemic equilibrium state will be much less likely to result in disease transmission than during the height of the epidemic since it will be less likely that either is infected. Immunity passports will thus take a small risk and reduce it by a very modest amount. The unvaccinated will still need to be more careful about their exposures during the Covid high season, whether there is a vaccine passport or not.
Second, for many people for whom there is a true medical indication against Covid vaccination, it’s likely that Covid is not the only infectious disease that threatens their health.
Also from Jay Bhattacharya is this essay, in The Spectator, on how the West can best help India. A slice:
Closing any society has serious consequences, but the results were always going to be worse in the developing world. I have been watching the pandemic unfold in India from Stanford University, where I’m a professor of medicine. But for me, it is not just an abstract problem in a faraway country. I was born in Kolkata and still have many family members in India. Some have contracted Covid, while others have suffered from the terrible effects of lockdown.
As soon as the pandemic started, India followed the familiar litany of Covid lockdown policy: masks, a test-and-trace system, school closures and border closures. India was one of the first emerging economies to announce a lockdown and adopted one of the world’s most stringent approaches.
Stay-at-home advice is easier to follow if you have a proper home. But in India’s’ slums, where millions of people live, quarantine is almost impossible — as is the concept of ‘working from home’ or home-schooling.
Then there are migrant labourers, ten million of whom were living in India’s cities before the pandemic. Lockdown meant many of them immediately lost their jobs, livelihoods and homes. Millions started on the long journey back to their villages on foot, not knowing whether they would ever make it home.
Joakim Book writes here with special insight. Two slices:
A friend recently asked me how I can be so positive about the world’s progress yet so desperately pessimistic about the long-lasting horrors that will come from last year’s authoritarian power grab.
And it’s true: it’s a dissonance I often struggle with – the joy at the flourishing wonders of the world, coupled with the desperate fear of decline. I can go from pondering last year’s permanent loss of freedom to idealistically proclaim a century of liberty and an age of patronage prospering outside the rotten institutions of government.
Is this the mark of a schizophrenic mind or is there a deeper method at work? Is it possible to hold two thoughts in our heads at once?
I have no doubt that the 2020 government invasions of every aspect of life – monetary, fiscal, regulatory, medical, or whether you may leave your country, your state, or even your house – won’t (fully) roll back. Temporary government policies never do; this is the new normal.
…..
Every country’s political scene is riddled with examples like these: leftover rules, a heavy and incomprehensible tax code, a bloated bureaucracy of incompetent public “servants.” Public choice economists like James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock and those inspired by them have convincingly shown that it isn’t an accident. Once temporary government assistance is introduced, or temporary taxes levied, exiting those policies angers their new benefactors and the established bureaucracies, who by the time the original “emergency” has passed have found new arguments for why the larger government presence is absolutely critical. This is what Robert Higgs means by the size of government ratcheting up: it rapidly increases during an emergency, with few people able to object, and once the emergency is over, some non-trivial portion of the powers remain, never to be abolished. Result? An ever-expanding government.
And what did you expect? Politics is a game that shifts the natural and inherent relationship between human beings. Ordinarily, people in their commercial or civic engagements have strong incentives to harmonize, to avoid conflict, streamline, make efficiency gains, and reach workable consensus; they have skin in the game, bear responsibility and costs for the (negative) outcomes of their actions, and often simply want to get on with their lives. Politicians, involved in their sinister games, disrupt this harmony: they do not have skin in the game (at least not above the minor risk that voters will make them leave that particular office in a few years’ time); they rarely suffer the consequences of their actions; they have little incentive to harmonize or downplay conflicts and routinely exaggerate them for personal grandeur, heightened self-importance, or signal their virtues to voters.
If Mr. Biden wants to encourage Americans to get the shots, he should change his attitude toward masks. Last week he said wearing masks in public is a “patriotic duty.” He continues to do so, even outdoors, even though he is vaccinated and therefore at almost no risk of either contracting the coronavirus or transmitting it to others. Federal mandates remain in place requiring masks in airports, national parks and public transit, among other places.
Think about the messages that sends: If you get vaccinated, you’ll be afforded virtually no relief from the pandemic’s most persistent burden—the social and legal pressure to cover your face in public—which has lingered for more than a year. If you don’t get vaccinated, society will keep trying to protect you from infection by imposing discomfort on everyone. And the authorities, at least at the federal level, seem to be in no hurry for the pandemic to end.
“Early cancer diagnoses plummeted in England during Covid pandemic” – TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid).
Phil Magness will have fun with this new action figure.
Quotation of the Day…
[C]ulture is critically important for growing prosperity, but culture can change – and quickly. The culture that enabled the growth in worldwide prosperity we have experienced over the last two centuries is not only recent but rare. And it is fragile.
DBx: We humans have been on this orb for at least 200,000 years. Thus, for only about 0.1 percent of our time on this globe have large portions of ordinary men and women lived entire lives well above mere subsistence. For literally 99.9 percent of our existence, we’ve lived lives about as materially prosperous, and perhaps even a bit worse, than are the lives lived today by Americans’ pet dogs, cats, hamsters, and goldfish. (Certainly, Americans’ dogs and cats today are better fed and sheltered than were nearly all of our ancestors, and these animals also have better medical care than was available to our great-great-great grandpappys and our great-great-great grandmas.)
The chief reason I so strongly resist, and so loudly decry, Covid Derangement Syndrome is that I fear that this mindset will work as an acid on bourgeois culture. The Covid-Derangement-Syndrome mindset is, in many ways, a reemergence of the tribal, fear-all-strangers mindset of our deep evolutionary past.
Since March of 2020 much of humankind has come to regard as not only acceptable, but as applause-worthy, fear of close contact with others. So many of us now resist personal engagement with strangers – so many of us regard strangers in the flesh as dangerous enemies rather than as potentially helpful trading partners – so many of us see strangers in the same way that all of our pre-modern ancestors saw strangers: as threats to be avoided, even scorned, rather than as opportunities for mutually advantageous cooperation and exchange.
So, so sad – and fraught with terrible consequences.
Russell Roberts's Blog
- Russell Roberts's profile
- 39 followers
