Russell Roberts's Blog, page 286
April 15, 2021
Private Entities Should be Free to Choose
Here’s a letter to a new correspondent:
Mr. W__:
Thanks for your e-mail.
I share your fear of vaccine passports, as well as your hope that businesses in jurisdictions without passport mandates will not require customers and employees to show such passports. I cannot, however, agree that businesses and other private organizations not be allowed to choose to require customers and employees to show such such passports.
You’re correct that fear of Covid is far out of proportion to its true risks. You’re correct also that pundits and politicians will continue to stir up Covid hysteria such that many businesses will feel they have no choice but to require the presentation of vaccine passports. But such is the troubled world we live in. As a practical matter, if public attitudes are such as to demand the presentation of such passports, it’s futile to expect governments to prohibit businesses from requiring such presentation.
Gov. Ron DeSantis is able to impose – inappropriately, in my view – such a prohibition on businesses in that state precisely because Floridians’ fear of Covid and, hence, their demand for vaccine passports are sufficiently weak as to cause him no serious political trouble for this prohibition. Yet, ironically, this fact means that, absent this prohibition, while some businesses in Florida would require the presentation of passports, not all would. People would be free to choose.
While it’s always very dangerous to call upon the state to ramp up its restrictions on property, contract, and commerce rights, this danger is especially high in times such as these when the state is already abusing its powers unprecedentedly.
I would be justly accused of hypocrisy if, with one breath, I criticize – as I do – government for restricting businesses’, workers’, and consumers’ freedom to deal with each other as they choose according to their own preferences, whatever these might be, and then with the next breath call upon government to restrict businesses’, workers’, and consumers’ freedom to deal with each other according to their own preferences, whatever these might be.
That I intensely prefer my fellow citizens not to have a preference for patronizing businesses that require the presentation of vaccine passports doesn’t come close to being a sufficient condition for me to call upon the state to prevent businesses from catering to my fellow-citizens’ preferences. This conclusion is not changed one iota by the fact that this popular preference for the use of vaccine passports is one that I believe is both misguided and pumped-up by the absurd biases of the media and political elites.
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 Non-Covid Links
George Will writes wisely about technology – and the people who use it. A slice:
Today, the Internet and social media enable instantaneous dissemination of stupidity, thereby creating the sense that there is an increasing quantity of stupidity relative to the population’s size. This might be true, but blame it on animate, hence blameworthy, things — blowhards with big megaphones, incompetent educators, etc. — not technologies. Technologies are giving velocity to stupidity, but are not making people stupid. On Jan. 6, the Capitol was stormed by primitives wielding smartphones that, with social media, facilitated the assembling and exciting of the mob. But mobs predate mankind’s mastery of electricity.
Humanity is perpetually belabored by theories that human agency is, if not a chimera, substantially attenuated by the bombardment of individuals by promptings from culture, government propaganda and other forces supposedly capable of conscripting the public’s consciousnesses. A new version of such theorizing is today’s postulate that digital technologies are uniquely autonomous forces in need of supervision or even rearrangement by government because they rewire the brains of their users.
This is an important reminder that the private sector doesn’t seem to have any problem maintaining its infrastructure assets, as we see in the difference with railroads. Passenger rail is in mostly bad shape when owned publicly, whereas privately owned freight rail is mostly strong in quality. The best way to improve infrastructure isn’t to throw taxpayers’ money at it, but to privatize things such as passenger rail, airports, and air traffic controllers, as many other countries have done already.
The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board rightly decries corporate CEOs’ wokeness. A slice:
Well, here we are back at the same stand, with prominent CEOs and businesses signing up for all the supposed virtue that progressive government has to offer. The lectures on voting access have received the most attention, though it’s notable how fact-free most of these endorsements are. They float above the messy but crucial details of electoral politics because they are essentially declarations of solidarity. They want to be on the side of the right (er, left) thinking, or at least of their woke 20-something employees and consumers.
You don’t have to wander too far into policy, however, to see what’s really going on: Old-fashioned self-interest. CEOs know Democrats are in power, so they want to make sure they stay on the good side of the government that can hurt them. If this means throwing over principles to mark out some political safe space for their business, so be it.
James Pethokoukis understandably bemoans the GOP’s willingness to let populism distort its economics. A slice:
Rising GOP political star J. D. Vance, author of the best-seller Hillbilly Elegy, took to Twitter earlier this week to attack the more-than-100 CEOs who took part in a weekend conference to discuss state voting laws: “Raise their taxes and do whatever else is necessary to fight these goons. We can have an American Republic or a global oligarchy, and it’s time for choosing. … No more subsidies to the anti-American business class.”
Of course, lots of American workers get a paycheck from what Vance calls a “global oligarchy.” And those Trump corporate tax cuts would have raised worker wages had they not been undercut by Trump’s trade wars, previously popular with right-wing populists. Likewise, most economists agree that workers bear at least some of the corporate tax burden, maybe even much of it. Raising taxes on companies also raises taxes on workers.
As it turns out, lots of things that populist culture warriors promote are bad for workers, such as immigration restrictions that make America less innovative and trade wars that make goods more expensive.
How did Dartmouth economist Meir Kohn become a libertarian? (HT Arnold Kling) A slice from Kohn’s essay:
Progressivism rests on two critical assumptions. The first is that we know how to improve society: “social science” provides us with a reliable basis for the necessary social engineering. The second critical assumption is that government is a suitable instrument for improving society. My second and third lessons taught me that these two critical assumptions were unfounded and unrealistic.
And here’s a slice from the Arnold Kling post that alerted me to Kohn’s essay:
Every other ideological viewpoint, from “state capacity libertarianism” to “national conservatism” to progressivism to socialism, presumes that government will do other jobs well. For me, those ideological viewpoints have a burden of proof to show that they are not delusional.
GMU Econ alum Dave Hebert writes knowledgeably about economists’ assumptions about knowledge.
David Henderson likes my colleague Larry White’s book The Theory of Monetary Institutions.
Scott Lincicome writes about the moronic, and dangerous, senator from Missouri, Josh Hawley.
Some Covid Links
Scott McKay is rightly appalled by 60 Minutes‘s scurrilous and dishonest treatment of Ron DeSantis. A slice:
[CBS 60 Minutes “reporter” Sharyn] Alfonsi found a couple of Democrat politicians who said Florida’s vaccine rollout was racist because DeSantis prioritized senior citizens of all races for the first doses of vaccines available. As Florida’s senior population skews white and rich, it’s therefore Jim Crow if you opt for a race-neutral strategy to vaccinate the vulnerable.
Richard Ebeling shares relevant wisdom from Ludwig von Mises. A slice:
Mises’s next sentence follows: “And no one can find a safe way for himself if society is sweeping towards destruction.” No safe spaces in a crisis. Destroy the market, smash the normal functioning of the social order, and you threaten everything that matters to our material well-being. You smash life and well-being. You crush the ability of people to provide for themselves, everyone’s sense of self worth, access to food and housing and health care, and the very notion of material progress. You reduce life to subsistence and servitude. The world becomes Hobbesian: solitary, poor, nastty, brutish, and short.
The emphasis here is on the word “no one.” No one can free ride off others in the long run. There is no essential and nonessential, no one person with more priors and privileges than anyone else. Not in the long run, in any case. The Zoom class might imagine it has hid and thereby saved itself from wreckage but like Prince Prospeo in Edgar Allan Poe’s classic, the pathogen eventually finds its own.
“Therefore,” Mises continues, “everyone, in his own interests, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle.” No hiding, no seclusion, no silence, no “stay home stay safe.” We must all enter the battle of ideas. Perhaps this one seems to be a stretch because not everyone qualifies as an intellectual. We know that. And yet good ideas, and good instincts about how life should work, is more distributed throughout the population that is normally supposed.
Britain is no longer a free country.
Here’s a snapshot – this one from Finland – of ‘life’ under the Covidocracy.
The Manhattan Institute’s Connor Harris, writing three weeks ago in City Journal, surveys the evidence on masks. Here’s his conclusion:
It would be an overstatement to say that cloth and surgical masks are unambiguously ineffective or harmful. But neither is there a firm case that they provide any meaningful benefit. Limited mask mandates may be justified in circumstances with unavoidable face-to-face contact within the range of droplet spread, such as public transport, and private businesses should be free to require masks if they like. Citizens at high risk should be free to wear effective N95 masks for their own protection, and federal regulators should clear away barriers to domestic production.
But mandates of cloth and surgical masks impose major inconveniences and potentially serious health risks on citizens, for no clear benefit either to themselves or to others. Leaders who pride themselves on following the science should consider ending them and letting citizens protect their health as they see fit.
Ostensibly, the passports are designed to allow individuals to partake in everyday commerce and “life” with freedom.
The same freedoms that each and every individual is entitled to under the Constitution and other bills of rights and freedoms in democratic societies by definition. And yet we now require a passport to exercise our ‘unalienable’ right? Absurd. While vaccine records were and still are a requirement for international travels where infectious diseases are common, this is as a safeguard for the traveler. But for citizens of the USA, and elsewhere, the requirement of a digital SARS CoV-2 injection passport has taken on a darker and sinister meaning. These passports are now being touted as a requirement for living a life within the country, our own country. This is simply a shattering idea. Public discourse is already available suggesting that one’s life could be essentially ‘shut down’ if one does not acquiesce to getting vaccinated in order to obtain a vaccine passport. Will these passports now constitute, as they have in the past under the governance of totalitarian regimes, the very currency for free existence?
Here’s an early snapshot of life in a world of vaccine passports. (HT Phil Magness)
Public health bureaucrats at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have brought Johnson & Johnson’s vaccination efforts to a screeching halt pending an investigation into six confirmed cases of blood clotting among the nearly 7 million people to become inoculated. This decision will inadvertently get people killed, but if you dare to question it, you will be branded an enemy of science by the “trust the experts” mafia.
Make no mistake, the pause represents lethal risk aversion. There is no real question that many, many more people will contract COVID-19 because they did not receive a vaccine quickly enough—suffering hospitalization or even death as a result—than will have an adverse health outcome from the vaccine.
“This decision was made by the CDC and FDA,” said Jeff Zients, a White House coronavirus response coordinator. “We’re ruled by the science, not any other consideration.”
Since the decision to pause the J&J vaccine cannot be defended on any sort of basic life-saving calculus—oral contraceptives carry a greater risk of blood clotting, and the FDA hasn’t prohibited them—government health experts and their media mouthpieces are instead arguing that the pause is necessary to stave off a surge in vaccine hesitancy.
Three cheers for Julia Hartley-Brewer!
The Covidocracy (of course) threatens democracy.
Quotation of the Day…
The economic case for international labor mobility, immigration, is similar to the economic case for free trade in goods. Both imply that, as a general rule, wealth is maximized when government does nothing to interfere with the free choices of individuals in the marketplace. Thus, the starting point for crafting policy should begin with a baseline presumption of free trade and free immigration. Any deviation from this baseline should be justified by appealing to a specific circumstance or situation that would clearly make free trade or free immigration suboptimal, and any such deviation in policy should be targeted as narrowly as possible, to only apply to the specific externality.
April 14, 2021
Gov. Ron DeSantis’s New Discussion with Scott Atlas, Jay Bhattacharya, and Martin Kulldorff
Infamously, YouTube removed the video of Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s mid-March roundtable discussion with Scott Atlas, Jay Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta, and Martin Kulldorff. Thus, the video of this discussion is, alas, no longer available at Cafe Hayek – but here’s my original link to it.
(By the way, I happened just now to stumble upon this March 18, 2021 ‘report’ in the Tampa Bay Times on Gov. DeSantis’s March roundtable. Check out the absurd headline: “DeSantis gathers hand-picked doctors to help validate his COVID response”. Why does anyone continue to trust that the public is adequately informed about Covid-19 and the responses to it? The headline suggests that DeSantis scoured the globe to find the few doctors who agree with his Covid-response policies.)
Fortunately, Gov. DeSantis held another discussion just a few days, although this time Sunetra Gupta apparently was unavailable. Here’s the video of this latest discussion. Let’s hope that this video is not pulled down.
Or Read Robert Higgs
Here’s a letter to a new correspondent:
Mr. M__:
I fervently hope that you are right that I am wrong when, as in this essay, I predict that most of the powers seized by governments in the name of fighting Covid-19 will remain in place long after SARS-CoV-2 is endemic. But given the terrifying transformation of society over the past year – given that people have shown themselves to be easily stirred into hysteria by obsessive focus on one particular risk – and given, as I see now, that there is no amount of liberty that people are unwilling to sacrifice in exchange for the promise of even infinitesimal reductions in risks to their physical health, the future that I see is bleak, swarming as it will be with agents of what some are calling “the biosecurity state.”
I’m reminded of this observation offered by the great 16th-century French political philosopher Étienne de La Boétie:
It is incredible how as soon as a people become subject, it promptly falls into such a complete forgetfulness of its freedom that it can hardly be roused to the point of regaining it, obeying so easily and so willingly that one is led to say, on beholding such a situation, that this people has not so much lost its liberty as won its enslavement.*
He is, sadly, correct.
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
* Étienne de La Boétie, The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude (Harry Kurz, trans., 1975 [originally posthumously published in 1577]), page 60.
Some Covid Links
Great Barrington Declaration co-author Jay Bhattacharya, writing in the Wall Street Journal, justly decries the mindless masking of children and the Orwellian muzzling of dissenting scientific voices on Covid-19. A slice:
Consider also data from Sweden, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in February. Swedish primary schools have been open for in-person instruction throughout the epidemic, no masks required, even when cases were increasing. Of more than 1.8 million children in school in spring 2020 ages 1 through 15, not one died from Covid-19. This study also showed that teachers were at low risk for Covid; they contracted the disease at rates lower than the average of other Swedish essential workers.
But the evidence is overwhelming that masking can harm children’s developmental progress. Look at the World Health Organization’s guidance document on child masking, which says that up to age 5 masking children may harm the achievement of childhood developmental milestones. For children between 6 and 11, the same document says that mask guidance should consider the “potential impact of mask-wearing on learning and psychosocial development.” The WHO explicitly recommends against masks during exercise because masks make breathing more difficult.
The WHO recommends against masking children 5 and under and only tepidly recommends masking children between 6 and 11. My reading of the same evidence comes down definitively against masking children up to 11. My colleagues in the Florida roundtable agreed; so do many other doctors, scientists and epidemiologists. This sort of disagreement based on the weight of evidence is common in scientific policy; I place an enormous value on children flourishing.
My colleague Bryan Caplan offers here a hypothetical for the ages.
David Henderson sensibly asks: “Is Fauci that ignorant?” (DBx: ‘That ignorant’? – Almost surely. ‘That mad for celebrity and inflated self-importance’? – Without question.)
Jordan Schachtel wonders if there is any longer a free world.
Jonathon Riley decries the brave new world created by the Covidocracy. Two slices:
Why are they doing this? The discredited Professor Neil Ferguson’s interview with the Times provided one clue. They did it because they could. ‘Sage … had watched as China enacted this innovate (sic) intervention in pandemic control that was also a medieval intervention … Sage debated whether … it could be effective here.
‘It (China) is a communist one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought … and then Italy did it. And we realised we could.’
…..
It all reminds me forcibly of conditions under communism in Eastern Europe before 1989. It is hard not to conclude either that the vaccine is ineffective and the continuation of restrictions is to disguise this, along with the enormous sums of money being made from it; or that regardless of its effectiveness, the vaccine is simply another control measure designed to instil fear and compliance.
And do not doubt that the Covidocracy is real, at least in Britain. A slice:
Last week, the Government launched its new UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA).
Billed as ‘combining key elements of Public Health England with NHS Test and Trace, including the Joint Biosecurity Centre’, it would be easy to dismiss this as a sort of tidying-up process, bringing together the different government agencies that have formed part of its response to Covid.
But for those of us who have been deeply troubled by the interventions of government, this new department represents the realisation of what we always feared: The institutionalisation of a kind of health fascism.
At the heart of the problem lies the assumption that illness presents a security risk. We have seen this principle underpin government policy throughout and it has been used to justify some of the most restrictive, illiberal measures our country has ever seen.
The use of a lockdown in itself speaks of an assumed security threat, as this strategy was previously only associated with prisons, to control rioting inmates.
The Covidocracy is real also in Australia.
Quotation of the Day…
[T]he “Great Mind Fallacy,” or GMF … has two aspects. Its first is to believe that there is some person or group of people who possess enough information, and is endowed with sufficiently superior character, that we can safely entrust with the authority of crafting policy for citizens. Its second aspect is to endorse public policy that could succeed only if such people were in charge of administering the agencies and mechanisms required to effectuate the beneficial results we hope from them.
DBx: To that assume any such mind and character exists is indeed to assume the existence of that which isn’t, never was, and will never be. But hordes of people arrogantly fancy themselves to possess such a mind and character, and hordes of other people fall for the alluring promises of these obnoxious pretenders.
April 13, 2021
The Worst Disease: Covid Derangement Syndrome
Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:
Editor:
Scott Gottlieb paints a far too happy picture of vaccine passports (“The Case for Vaccine ‘Passports’,” April 13). These documents would, he says, serve “as a fast lane. Those who present proof of a vaccine might be able to skip requirements for a temperature check, health questionnaire or negative Covid test…. The ‘passport’ wouldn’t impose an intrusive new layer; it would eliminate other requirements.”
Sigh.
Government, of course, shouldn’t prevent businesses and other private institutions from requiring customers and workers to present proof of vaccination. Nevertheless, I dread a future in which people are accustomed to showing their health credentials as a condition for entering places that, until 2020, they freely entered without any such requirement.
The transformation of humanity over the past year is ghastly. We’ve become so frightened of each other that, from here on in, we will presume that each person who wishes to interact with us in physical space is a deadly threat until we’re shown official evidence to the contrary. How uncivilized. How unspeakably sad.
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
On Inflation
Here’s a letter to Politico:
Editor:
Victoria Guida offers the following as a reason for the 1970s’ high inflation rates: “double-income households as women entered the workforce in droves” (“Why big-spending Biden can shrug off GOP warnings of inflation,” April 12).
She’s mistaken. Inflation is not caused by an expansion of the workforce. Yes, the money that women earn is spent, and this additional spending would indeed push prices up if the amount of goods and services available for sale were to remain unchanged. But women entering the workforce earn for their households additional money to spend precisely by producing and making additional goods and services available for sale.
Indeed, because the value of what workers in the market produce for sale by their employers is worth at least as much as is the value of what workers are paid, we can be sure that additional monetary incomes paid, and spent, as the workforce expands are offset by additional outputs worth at least much as the additional spending.
Inflation is caused by the monetary authority’s creation of excess purchasing power; it is not caused by the market’s creation of additional output.
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
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