Russell Roberts's Blog, page 292

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 462 of my late Nobel-laureate colleague James Buchanan’s Fall 2005 Cato Journal essay, “The Market, Yes; Demos, No”:

I admired Peter Bauer for his courage in sticking to the simple verities, and I shared with him the notion that we do not need fancier science, whether analytical or empirical, to know the institutional parameters that are required to ensure economic growth and development.

DBx: Pictured here is the late Peter Bauer.

Covid Tyranny

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to a new correspondent:

Mr. A__ H__:

Reacting to this post of mine you write that I “lose credibility by labeling as ‘tyrants’ government officials acting under the belief that strong responses are necessary to protect the populace from covid.”

The person who in this instance I call a tyrant is a British MP who supports Boris Johnson’s harsh lockdowns but who would not answer a reasonable question about how far the number of Covid-19 cases or deaths in that country must fall before the government finally releases British citizens from their Draconian fetters. An implication of this MP’s failure to answer is that the government refuses to be held accountable to any standards. Maximum discretion to do as it pleases is how BoJo’s government has acted these past 12 months and how it wishes to continue to act.

A government that acts without rules, that consistently changes course in favor of exercising ever-more and longer-lasting power, and that now refuses to publicly state guidelines for ending its unprecedented assault on ordinary human liberties is tyrannical. I don’t see how this word fails to accurately describe today’s British government – as well as many other governments across the globe.

All tyrants claim that their harsh exercise of arbitrary power is necessary to protect the people from terrible evil. Some tyrants, I’m sure, even make these claims sincerely. Further, all tyrants’ claims to rule in the interest of The People are widely believed by The People. Tyrants who are popularly understood to be tyrants never actually become tyrants because their support remains too narrow.

In short, most victims of tyranny never recognize their fate until it’s too late.

Reasonable people can disagree on just where the exercise of arbitrary power turns from being merely unwise into being tyrannical. But given that we’re now more than a year into lockdowns – given that, over this time, the justification for lockdowns has changed repeatedly – given that we are given no firm guidance about what level of Covid cases or deaths would be sufficient for a return to normalcy – given that nearly all of the major actors ignore the costs of lockdowns and other restrictions, and they act as if no amount of precaution against Covid can be too much – given that these unprecedented responses to Covid run counter to all public-health guidelines issued through the end of 2019 – given the media’s appalling reporting on this disease – and given the fact that people scared out of their wits by the incessant peddling of unwarranted hysteria are too likely to mistake tyranny for salvation, I’m convinced that much of the world today is solidly caught in tyranny’s gory grip. And so I call it what I believe it to be.

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

(Don Boudreaux)

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My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy is rightly appalled by the blatant lies told by Biden.

Eric Boehm reports on yet another of the many reasons already revealed for ditching the hope that Biden will govern from the center. And here’s the Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board on the same general topic. A slice:

Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders lost the Democratic presidential nomination, but you wouldn’t know from President Biden’s first two months in office. First came $1.9 trillion in social spending under the cover of Covid-19, and now comes $2.3 trillion more for climate and political spending dressed as “infrastructure.”

Jonah Goldberg has more.

Samuel Gregg, inspired by Nadia Nedzel’s new book, explains how so-called “stakeholder theory” undermines the rule of law. A slice:

When combined with the influence of figures such as Sir Edward Coke, common law’s bottom-up accent on custom, tradition and experience developed into a predilection for individualism and limited government. This differed significantly from the type of legal systems which became dominant throughout continental Europe. Rather different forces were at work in these countries.

John Stossel makes a case for school choice.

James Pethokoukis talks with Scott Lincicome about the perils of industrial policy.

Sarah Skwire writes liberally and wisely.

David Henderson recalls being a teaching assistant at UCLA for Chuck Baird.

I remember this calculator!

Joakim Book ponders MMT.

Here’s George Selgin on Joshua Greenberg on antebellum paper money. A slice:

Greenberg’s talk is worth a listen. I was especially intrigued by his suggestion that, because they had to deal with so many different banknotes, including many of doubtful value, early Americans acquired a degree of financial savviness they sorely lack nowadays. Greenberg’s related thesis that, by virtue of their very lack of uniformity, antebellum banknotes conveyed a lot of useful information about the locations and conditions of banks that issued them, sounds downright Hayekian.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Wall Street Journal columnist James Freeman pushes back against the unending peddling of Covid hysteria. A slice:

Maybe it’s too much to hope that government health experts have learned something in the past year about the massive unintended consequences of lockdowns and the paucity of evidence demonstrating their effectiveness. But Monday’s White House teleconference with the Biden Covid team could almost have been mistaken for a March 2020 event—complete with government doctors stoking fear, urging restrictions on liberty and not even bothering to address costs and benefits.

This column understands that infectious disease specialists focus on infectious disease. But roughly $4.5 trillion of new federal debt later, following a 29% surge in commercial bankruptcy filings, a rash of delayed non-Covid medical treatments, a lost year of classroom instruction for many students who will never get it back, and skyrocketing health claims related to self-harm among adolescents—especially in jurisdictions that maintained harsh lockdowns—it is not too much to ask disease specialists to consider the societal impact of their recommendations. Outside government, doctors generally understand they have a duty to first do no harm. Government doctors also have a basic responsibility to ensure that their public health proposals yield net benefits for society, and do not focus on one risk while ignoring all others.

…..

Yet what exactly is the scientific case against reopening and relying on individual judgment? To date, the two U.S. states with the highest total per capita Covid death tolls—New Jersey and New York—are governed by two of the most aggressive closers of activity and opportunity. You will also find the lockdowners among the states with high unemployment rates.

It’s well past time for government doctors to recognize there are consequences to their recommendations. Pediatrician Ari Joffe of the University of Alberta writes in the journal Frontiers in Public Health:

The lockdowns implemented in the name of public health entailed trade-offs that were not adequately considered… Lockdowns may prevent some COVID-19 deaths by flattening the curve of cases and preventing stress on hospitals. At the same time, lockdowns cause severe adverse effects for many millions of people, disproportionately for those already disadvantaged among us. The collateral damage included severe losses to current and future wellbeing from unemployment, poverty, food insecurity, interrupted preventive, diagnostic, and therapeutic healthcare, interrupted education, loneliness and deterioration of mental health, and intimate partner violence. The economic recession has been framed as the economy vs. saving lives from COVID-19, but this is a false dichotomy. The economic recession, through austerity in government spending on the social determinants of health, can be expected to cause far more loss of life and wellbeing over the long-run than COVID-19 can. We must open up society to save many more lives than we can by attempting to avoid every case (or even most cases) of COVID-19. It is past time to take an effortful pause, calibrate our response to the true risk, make rational cost-benefit analyses of the trade-offs, and end the lockdown groupthink.

Jordan Schachtel warns of the tyranny of vaccine passports.

Ian Dunt rightly describes vaccine passports as “ID cards on steroids.”

Thanks go to my colleague Dan Klein for alerting me to the revised version of Christian Bjørnskov’s important paper titled “Did Lockdowns Work? An Economist’s Cross-Country Comparison.” Here’s the abstract:

I explore the association between the severity of lockdown policies in the first half of 2020 and mortality rates. Using two indices from the Blavatnik Centre’s COVID-19 policy measures and comparing weekly mortality rates from 24 European countries in the first halves of 2017–2020, addressing policy endogeneity in two different ways, and taking timing into account, I find no clear association between lockdown policies and mortality development.

Here’s the conclusion of Stephen R. Bowers’s 2020 paper titled “Medical Tyranny”:

We live in a time of growing cynicism about both the government and other administrative authorities. The response by those elites is not to allow an open discussion and presentation of research, but to denounce skeptics as people who are simply opposed to “science” without explaining which scientists they recognize. In a pluralistic society, it is not sufficient to simply demand that critics stay silent and obedient. If we are unable to resolve this issue, the greatest fatality of COVID will not only be the many elderly and health impaired citizens but rather our free society.

Daniel Hannan justifiably hates the lockdowns. Two slices:

I hate everything about the lockdown. I hate the confiscation of liberty, and the ease with which it is surrendered. I hate the damage to children’s education. I hate the prying and the prissiness and the pettiness. I hate the way university students have missed out on what should be the best time of their lives. I hate the tone in which police officers address people going about their lawful business.

I hate the way the goalposts keep moving: flatten the curve; no – wait for a vaccine; no – keep the pressure off the NHS; no – stop new variants. I hate the cataclysmic impact on small businesses, and the indifference of large parts of the public. I hate the debt we are racking up. I hate the protectionism and the authoritarianism. I hate hearing words like “hoarder” and “profiteer” – words we used to associate with extremist ideologies. I hate the loneliness that I see weighing on my elderly neighbours. I hate the profusion of pettifogging laws.

But d’you know what I hate the most? I hate what it has revealed about us. It turns out that we quite like being bossed around – at least, a lot of us do. Given the excuse of a collective threat, we revel in crackdowns and prohibitions.

…..

Let me proffer a gloomier explanation. Safetyism is a natural instinct. Throughout almost all human civilisation, people have accepted various forms of hierarchy and tyranny in the name of security. The liberal interlude through which we have lived is exceptional. We may be witnessing its end.

Plus de tyrannie en France.

In response to the newly announced lockdown in France, Phil Magness asks a pertinent question. This question is posed to those who, when the Great Barrington Declaration was released in early October, ridiculed it in part by saying that lockdowns are a thing of the past – that the policy of lockdown opposed by the Declaration’s co-authors is “a strawman”:

Looks like France is getting another strawman.

In related news, are *any* of the epidemiologists, economists, and other pundits who adamantly insisted last October that renewed lockdowns were “just a strawman” ever going to admit their error & apologize for their misleading statements?

Julia Hartley-Brewer, obviously and justifiably frustrated with a pro-lockdown MP, asks this tyrant “What is the number of deaths from Covid we’re willing to live with?” The tyrant refused to answer.

Will Jones exposes Covid-19 misinformation on Wikipedia.

Here’s a new interview with Great Barrington Declaration co-author Martin Kulldorff. Two slices from Prof. Kulldorff:

The media has been very reluctant to report reliable scientific and public health information about the pandemic. Instead they have broadcast unverified information such as the model predictions from Imperial College, they have spread unwarranted fear that undermine people’s trust in public health and they have promoted naïve and inefficient counter measures such as lockdowns, masks and contact tracing.

While I wished that neither SAGE nor anyone else would argue against long-standing principles of public health, the media should not censor such information. During a pandemic, it is more important than ever that media can report freely. There are two major reasons for this: (i) While similar to existing coronaviruses, SARS-CoV-2 is a new virus that we are constantly learning more about and because of that, it takes time to reach scientific conclusions. With censorship it takes longer and we cannot afford that during a pandemic. (ii) In order to maintain trust in public health, it is important that any thoughts and ideas about the pandemic can be voiced, debated and either confirmed or debunked.
…..
It should now be obvious to everyone that lockdowns, masks and contract tracing failed to protect older high-risk people, as it could not suppress and contain COVID-19, with far too many deaths as a result. Lockdowns are just a dragged out let-it-rip strategy. That was clear to most infectious disease epidemiologists already a year ago. The fatal logical flaw of the lockdowners has been that we must lock down because COVID-19 is dangerous. The opposite is true. Because it is a very dangerous disease among the old, they should have been properly protected through focused protection.

Instead of continuing to take advice from those who were wrong then, Boris should listen to those who were right. In the UK, you have the world’s preeminent infectious disease epidemiologist in professor Sunetra Gupta. She can help implement a focused protection strategy of older high-risk individuals through vaccination and other means, while removing the lockdowns. If the Prime Minister needs the comfort of company with other politicians, get in touch with Governor Ron DeSantis in Florida.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 41 of Milton & Rose Friedman’s great 1980 book, Free To Choose:

Another fallacy seldom contradicted is that exports are good, imports bad. The truth is very different. We cannot eat, wear, or enjoy the goods we send abroad. We eat bananas from Central America, wear Italian shoes, drive German automobiles, and enjoy programs on our Japanese TV sets. Our gain from foreign trade is what we import. Exports are the price we pay to get imports. As Adam Smith saw so clearly, the citizens of a nation benefit from getting as large a volume of imports as possible in return for its exports, or equivalently, from exporting as little as possible to pay for its imports.

DBx: Indeed so.

Today it is fashionable on the political left and right to discount, or even to altogether dismiss, Milton Friedman’s policy advice by slapping on it, and on him, an opaque label, such as “neoliberal” or “market fundamentalist.” People who slap such labels play cheap games; they do not engage in serious thinking and argument.

Milton and Rose Friedman would have been the last people to claim immunity from error and criticism. But any such criticism, to be worthy, must be substantive. So if you wish to dismiss the Friedmans’ policy analyses and advice, engage their claims and ideas. For instance, explain what you believe to be mistaken in the above quotation. Unless you can offer such an explanation, you should keep your mouth shut on this matter.

Again, If Pundits Are So Smart, Why Aren’t Pundits Super-Rich?

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to a first-time correspondent:

Mr. Chuck W___:

Thanks for your e-mail prompted by my AIER column in which I argue that if workers who lose jobs to imports really would prefer to keep those jobs, these workers can do so by offering to lower their wages to levels that make continued operation of their factories worthwhile.

You write in response that, when imports increased, workers “weren’t offered the option of staying employed in the same job at lower pay.”

You’re correct that, in response to greater competition from imports, employers generally downsize or even shut down rather than ask workers to accept lower wages as a means of avoiding any loss of existing jobs. But we must ask why.

Compared to downsizing or shutting down, employers would surely prefer that workers agree to wage cuts that restore these factories’ profitability. The very fact that employers today almost never even ask for such wage cuts reveals that employers know that too many workers would refuse. And the reason workers would refuse is because most workers prefer their alternatives to the option of working at wages low enough to restore profitability to the affected factories. Don’t forget that one key reason wages in those factories rose their current levels is that factory owners had to offer those high wages in order to attract workers to begin with – a reality that implies that workers generally have options that are superior to that of remaining in those jobs at lower wages.

But what if all current owners of factories are mistaken? What these current owners don’t realize that many workers would actually prefer to keep their jobs even if doing so means accepting lower wages? Well, that’s a profit opportunity for alert entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs can buy factories on the cheap and then employ the workers in their old jobs but at lower wages.

The last paragraph is not fanciful. People such as Oren Cass routinely assert that workers value job security more than the market realizes – which is to say that people such as Oren Cass claim to have spotted entrepreneurial profit opportunities. He and like-minded folks should therefore put their money where their mouths are and purchase factories that compete heavily with imports, and then rework the employees’ contracts to ensure greater job stability.

That Mr. Cass and like-minded folks content themselves with talking and never actually take such actions indicates one of two things: These people either do not understand the implications of what they assert about markets, or they don’t actually believe what they say. Because people such as Mr. Cass strike me as being sincere, I believe that they do not understand the implications of what they assert about markets. Either way, however, the inconsistency of the actions of people such as Mr. Cass with their words is powerful evidence that their policy prescriptions do not deserve serious attention.

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 Adam Smith

(Don Boudreaux)

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Eamonn Butler hosts this excellent discussion of some of the work of Adam Smith. The participants are Professors Jimena Hurtado, Craig Smith, and my GMU Econ colleague Dan Klein. Enjoy!

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Richard Ebeling argues that “wars and ‘following the science’ are sure paths to tyranny.” A slice:

For more than a year, now, we have been in the grip of a massive “new wave” of a dangerous and deadly ideological virus that has the names political paternalism and social engineering. It is often pointed out that the current coronavirus crisis is the first of this magnitude and global dimension since the infamous Spanish Flu from 1918 to 1920, during which estimates say that tens of millions of people, worldwide, may have died from that earlier virus.

But it is less often highlighted that a political virus of government control, regulation, restriction and planning enveloped all the major countries of the world at about the same time, a little over 100 years ago during the First World War. After the 25-year European-wide war between, first, revolutionary and then Napoleonic France against Great Britain, Imperial Russia, Prussia, Spain, and some other minor countries that ended in 1815, a number of leading nations, of which Britain was preeminent, “inoculated” themselves against the all-dominating state through classical liberal reforms that recognized individual rights, personal and civil liberty, the sanctity of private property, the freedom of enterprise and mostly unrestricted international trade and investment, which were all bolstered by formal and informal institutional restrictions on government spending, taxing, borrowing, and the printing of paper money through introduction of constitutional limits and national gold standards.

Robby Soave rightly resists the deranged Covid hysteria issuing from Biden’s White House. A slice:

It’s true that cases are currently plateauing around 60,000 each day, and hospitalizations have ticked up slightly. What federal health authorities do not seem to understand, however, is that human beings are not just numbers on spreadsheets. We have a desire to socialize, to reopen our schools and businesses, to go outside and start living life again. Mass vaccination was intended to make this dream a reality, and the news is very good. According to the data, vaccination reduces death and severe disease to basically zero, and vaccinated people are much less likely to transmit COVID-19 to others. This means that vaccinated people can reclaim normality with minimal danger—particularly if the activities in question (going to the park or the beach) do not themselves carry much risk in the first place.

If the authorities really believed we were facing impending doom, they should immediately distribute all available vaccines. And yet 30 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine are currently sitting unused in a warehouse in Ohio, just waiting for the government to get around to signing off on them. According to the government, the situation is so dire that people should cancel summer travel plans and keep wearing masks even after they’re vaccinated, but not dire enough to tell federal bureaucrats to pick up the pace.

Patrick Fagan argues that “intense fear messaging by the government is inadvisable: it is likely damaging mental health while being of questionable practical value.”

Glen Bishop corrects a professor peddling hysteria. A slice:

Professor Brown should feel free to lock himself away for the rest of time if he wants to make sure he isn’t putting the ‘vaccine hesitant’ community at risk, but he shouldn’t advocate forcing the rest of sane society to do so. What next? A ban on car travel because some people refuse to wear seat belts and it puts them at risk of dying? A ban on ‘do not resuscitate’ wishes from patients? Do SAGE want to ban sex outside of committed relationships because some people do not use condoms and could spread STDs? What about “a circuit breaker on sex” whilst we do mass testing for STDs and make everyone get a “coitus passport”, so the plebs can only fornicate if they have tested negative for chlamydia, herpes, and HIV? If Professor Brown insists on advocating one set of restrictions, it is illogical not to advocate the others.

Alan Dowd calls for a Covid-19 Lockdown Commission. A slice:

Yes, there are green shoots of critical thinking and individual liberty now sprouting—and blessedly so—but they’re originating from the grassroots up. The Washington elites, the public health pop stars, the authoritarian governors, the producers and playwrights of mask theater, the “laptop class,” the disciples of scientism, the disgraced computer modelers, the media outlets trying to hold on to their captive audience—all these entities oppose America’s yearning for normalcy. Trapped in an echo chamber of groupthink, they either see no reason to review what happened in the past 12 months—or realize that doing so would be to admit that they made a mistake of historic proportions.

Barry Brownstein explains how to be anti-authoritarian. A slice:

Glenn Greenwald has sounded the alarm about ongoing attempts to curtail the First Amendment. Recently Greenwald described his experience as he listened to the “tyrannical goal” expressed at a Congressional hearing: “Words cannot convey how chilling and authoritarian this all is: watching government officials, hour after hour, demand censorship of political speech and threaten punishment for failures to obey.”

In the UK, former Supreme Court judge Jonathan Sumption has called out his government’s oppressive Covid-19 policies:

“A society in which oppressive control of every detail of our lives is unthinkable except when it is thought to be a good idea, is not free. It is not free while the controls are in place. And it is not free after they are lifted, because the new attitude will allow the same thing to happen again whenever there is enough public support.”

Underline attitude. We are only free to the extent that we understand freedom. Widespread individual authoritarian mindsets fuel authoritarian politicians. Sumption writes, “The Prime Minister claims to believe in liberty and to find the current measures distasteful. Actions speak louder than words, and I am afraid that I do not believe him. He is too much of a populist to go against public sentiment.”

Phil Magness yesterday on Facebook:

All 6 of the states that are currently experiencing a noticeable spike in covid cases have lockdowner governors, and spent the better part of the last year under some of the heaviest restrictions in the country. None have meaningfully reopened to the levels now widely seen in the south and western interior. They’re also among the hardest states in the nation to get a vaccine in due to interminably bureaucratic rollout schemes.

But don’t expect the media to note any of this, let alone suggest that it speaks to a failure of the policy approaches that all of these states followed.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 177 of my late, great colleague Walter Williams’s 2015 book, American Contempt for Liberty, which is a collection of many of Walter’s columns and essays; this quotation specifically is from Walter’s August 21st, 2013, syndicated column, “Progressives and Blacks”:

Progressives’ agenda calls for not only excuse-making but also dependency….

This is all a part of the progressive agenda to hook Americans, particularly black Americans, on government handouts. In future elections, they will be able to claim that anyone who campaigns on cutting taxing and spending is a racist.

DBx: Had he not died (in early December of last year) Walter would today – March 31st – have celebrated his 85th birthday.

Walter E. Williams was a great economist, a great teacher, a great friend, a great colleague, and, above all, a great man. And, as the above quotation shows, he was also quite prescient. Along with Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams was among the three most effective communicators over the past half-century, to the general public, of both sound economics and the philosophy of liberty.

That Walter is no longer of this world continues to sting. The world could have used another dozen or so years of his wit and wisdom – and those of us lucky to have known him, even more years of his counsel and friendship.

Walter, wherever you are, know that you are missed by many – sorely so – here in this mortal vale.

…..

Here’s Cafe Hayek’s Quotation of the Day from exactly one year ago.

It’s Not Journalism; It’s Fear-Mongering

(Don Boudreaux)

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What an outrageously misleading ‘report’ in the New York Times:

Editor:

Apoorva Mandavilli’s report titled “Cases in Florida, a national Covid bellwether, are rising – especially among younger people” (March 28) is irresponsible and deeply misleading.

Florida’s 7-day average of daily new Covid-19 cases is indeed, as of March 27th, 8 percent higher than it was two weeks earlier. Yet by reporting case counts only from Florida and not from other states, Ms. Mandavilli conveys the mistaken impression that Floridians are about to endure an unusually excessive amount of unnecessary suffering because of Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (in)famous refusal to lock that state’s citizens down and to compel them to wear masks.

So let’s compare Florida to other some other states.

Over the same time period, the 7-day average of daily new Covid-19 cases in New Jersey is up by 20%; in New York by 28%; in Puerto Rico by 13%; and in Michigan by a whopping 134%. Citizens of each these jurisdictions have lived under, and continue to live under, tighter Covid restrictions than do Floridians. Puerto Ricans, in fact, are still under a stay-at-home order.

Reporting such as is done here by Ms. Mandavilli is either appallingly incompetent journalism or reckless fear-mongering. Either way it’s inexcusable.

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