Russell Roberts's Blog, page 294

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Tim Black decries the fundamental transformation that Covid-19 lockdowns are working on society. Three slices:

As Britain was heading into lockdown on 23 March 2020, UK health secretary Matt Hancock was busy introducing the accompanying legislation in parliament. ‘To defeat [Covid-19]’, he said, ‘we are proposing extraordinary measures of a kind never seen before in peacetime’.

He was underselling them. In their repressiveness, their illiberalism and often their sheer arbitrariness, the ‘extraordinary measures’ the government was then about to impose on British society had never been seen before in wartime, either. They exceeded powers granted by the Defence of the Realm Act 1914. And they went beyond those of the Emergency Powers (Defence) Act 1939. These were draconian pieces of legislation, placing people and property at the service of the state. But they certainly didn’t authorise the de facto imprisonment of every single citizen in his or her home.

Because that is what Hancock’s ‘extraordinary measures’ amounted to: the quarantining of everybody, regardless of health. As Lord Justice Hickinbottom described it, the government’s response to Covid represented ‘possibly the most restrictive regime on the public life of persons and businesses ever’.

…..

So, not only has the state assumed an unprecedented regulatory control over our lives since March last year — mechanisms it has used to do so have rendered it largely unaccountable. The result? An ever-expanding regulatory regime, consisting of often ill-thought-out and confusing rules, issued, as it so often seems, on a ministerial whim. As Lord Sumption puts it, ‘The sheer scale on which the government has sought to govern by decree, creating new criminal offences, sometimes several times a week on the mere say-so of ministers, is in constitutional terms truly breathtaking’.

The effect has been dystopian. Empowered by the government’s regulatory regime, the police have been busily treating once taken-for-granted freedoms as potentially criminal acts.

…..

But the problems go deeper. The legal assault on liberty leads to and reinforces its cultural devaluation. What would have been thought an unacceptable incursion on our liberties before the imposition of the lockdown regime becomes all too acceptable during and after it. The government’s Policing and Crime Bill, currently making its way on to the statute books, is a case in point. It will make permanent the de facto restrictions on the right to protest established under lockdown regulations. In authoritarian conditions even the most draconian measures can appear sensible.

Perhaps most worrying is the extent to which our conception of freedom has been forcibly transformed under the regulatory regime of lockdown. It really has started to become Napoleonic. We are free when the state determines we are free. Civil liberties are being transformed into state permits. Freedom from the state is being transformed into the permission of the state. After all, what are ‘vaccine passports’ if not permission slips?

The degree to which the British are gripped by Covid tyranny is insane: behold what Covid Derangement Syndrome can do to a once-free and once-proud people. And here.

(DBx: I cannot imagine that this Covid tyranny in Britain would have been tolerated by the likes of Adam Smith, Burke, T.B. Macaulay, Harriet Martineau, Cobden, Gladstone, Acton, H. Spencer, A. Herbert, Dicey, Ralph Harris, or Arthur Seldon. I can, however and sadly, believe that J.S. Mill might have been duped into tolerating it.)

Covid-Derangement-Syndrome-induced tyranny is on the loose in Canada. And of course also in New Zealand – that lovely little island nation so lavishly praised for its government’s ‘rational’ response to Covid.

Kiley Holliday and Jenin Younes remind us that TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid).

James Heartfield asks: Where are the postmodernists when we need them? A slice:

[Giorgio] Agamben reflects on the meaning of the new order and warns that: ‘Fear is a bad adviser, and I don’t believe that transforming the country into a plague-ridden land, where we all look at each other as potential sources of contagion, is really the solution.’ He is alive to the way that a kind of social alienation has become deeply embedded in the management of the epidemic, explaining that ‘because our neighbour has become a potential source of contagion, we have agreed to suspend our friendships and relationships’. He also warns that ‘social distancing… will be society’s new organising principle’. ‘I do not believe that a community based on “social distancing” is humanly and politically liveable’, he states.

I stand by what I wrote one year ago today.

“Neanderthal thinking” seems to be working in Texas.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 5 of Rick Atkinson’s 2019 volume, The British Are Coming:

A majority of all European urban growth in the first half of the [18th] century had occurred in England; that proportion was now [by 1773] expanding to nearly three-quarters, with the steam engine patented in 1769 and the spinning jenny a year later. Canals were cut, roads built, highwaymen hanged, coal mined, iron forged. Sheep would double in weight during the century; calf weights tripled. England and Wales now boasted over 140,000 retail shops. A nation of shopkeepers had been born.

A Chief Cause of Covid Derangement Syndrome

(Don Boudreaux)

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(HT Yevdokiya Zagumenova)

The New British “Habit of Coercion and Control”

(Don Boudreaux)

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Also speaking out against the unconscionable recent extension of the British government’s tyrannical lockdown powers is MP Graham Brady.

“Wedded to the Stick”

(Don Boudreaux)

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Desmond Swayne speaks out in Parliament against the unconscionable extension in Britain of lockdown tyranny.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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On March 2, 2021, Texas governor Greg Abbott conditionally eliminated all state-mandated Covid-19 lockdowns and other restrictions. The result was a predictable wave of mindless predictions of rising danger (such as the Washington Post Editorial Board’s claim that “Greg Abbott is endangering the health of Texas and beyond”). So Jeffrey Tucker wonders why these predictions aren’t panning out. A slice:

What’s striking about all the above predictions of infections and deaths is not just that they were all wrong. It’s the arrogance and confidence behind each of them. After a full year and directly observing the inability of “nonpharmaceutical interventions” to manage the pathogen, the experts are still wedded to their beloved lockdowns, unable or unwilling to look at the data and learn anything from them.

The concept of lockdowns stemmed from a faulty premise: that you can separate humans, like rats in cages, and therefore control and even eradicate the virus. After a year, we unequivocally know this not to be true, something that the best and wisest epidemiologists knew all along. Essential workers still must work; they must go home to their families, many in crowded living conditions. Lockdowns do not eliminate the virus, they merely shift the burden onto the working class.

Here’s more on Texas from the Wall Street Journal. The title of the report is “Weeks After Texas Reopened, Health Experts Look for Impact.” It’s followed by this description of facts on the ground discounted by those who apparently wish to keep humanity in a state of perpetual Covid hysteria: “State hasn’t seen rise in cases two weeks after businesses fully reopened, but public-health officials say it’s too soon to tell.”

Prof. Karol Sikora reminds us that TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid).

Gary Sidley writes that “There are four key reasons why quarantining the healthy in their own homes, along with the shutdown of schools, retail and hospitality businesses, must forever be consigned to that skeleton cupboard labelled, ‘Cataclysmic Government blunders never to be repeated’.” Here’s another slice:

Prior to March 2020, the World Health Organisation (WHO) and other public health bodies consistently recommended against the imposition of lockdowns as a way of managing a pandemic. For example, a comprehensive review of the available evidence by the WHO in 2019 stated that the quarantining of exposed – but currently healthy – individuals was ‘not recommended under any circumstances’ (p3), and later concluded that ‘There is a very low overall quality of evidence that quarantine of exposed individuals has an effect on transmission of influenza’ (p45).

Recent evidence supporting the assertion that lockdowns save lives largely derives from mathematical modelling, involving hypothetical predictions of the type, ‘If we hadn’t have done x, then y would have happened’. The most prominent proponent of this approach is Professor Neil Ferguson and his team at Imperial College London. Modelling for the purpose of forecasting COVID-19 cases and associated mortality has been widely criticised. The accuracy of such predictions is highly dependent on the assumptions made within the model, omission or inaccuracy of key variables often resulting in wildly pessimistic forecasts.

Undoubtedly, the most reliable data to evaluate the efficacy of lockdowns is that derived from measuring the real-world impact of this intervention. Over 30 studies of this type have now been reported; they have consistently failed to find evidence that lockdowns reduce COVID-19 mortality.

Michael Curzon decries the sheeple acceptance of lockdown tyranny in Great Britain…

… a nation that Nicholas Orlando calls “a zombie.” A slice:

THE Covid virus is no longer a credible threat to the population of the United Kingdom. Hospitals are no longer under pressure. Mortality rates are stable. The emergency is plainly over.

Yet here we are, chained for a further six months by a government who dismiss our capacity for individual responsibility in favour of police state control.

Few in the media system seem willing (or able) to wave the banner for our liberty in opposition. Uncritical reporting on the extension of the Coronavirus Act, which is anathema to our values, underlines how wretchedly detached the media class are from truth. Do they not comprehend what it means that they won’t challenge the indefensible position Johnson’s men have taken against the people?

An ever-consuming Covid narrative has done much to spread fear but little to inform. The context of the virus’s severity, its potential to harm – virtually zero for the vast majority of us patient Brits – never gets a mention.

“Sweden: more freedom, less death.” A slice:

Data from Eurostat, compiled by Reuters, show that in 2020 Sweden’s overall mortality rose by 7.7 per cent. In Spain and Belgium, which had some of Europe’s harshest lockdowns, overall mortality rose by 18.1 per cent and 16.2 per cent respectively. Sweden ranked 18th in terms of mortality increases out of the 26 countries considered.

All of this despite the fact that Sweden has largely remained open. In December 2020, Sweden enacted its harshest Covid measures of the year – closing schools for over-16s and limiting the opening times of bars and restaurants. But even this pales in comparison to the restrictions found elsewhere in Europe.

Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s state epidemiologist, told Reuters: ‘I think people will probably think very carefully about these total shutdowns, how good they really were … They may have had an effect in the short term, but when you look at it throughout the pandemic, you become more and more doubtful.’

Not only have Swedes been freer than most Europeans during the pandemic – their economy has also fared better. It was estimated last month that Sweden’s GDP was 2.6 per cent lower in the fourth of quarter of 2020 than the year before – for the EU as a whole, the fall was by 4.8 per cent.

Sweden’s moderate approach has exposed the key myth of lockdown: that fundamental freedoms can be traded off to reduce mortality. Who could possibly argue with more freedom and fewer deaths?

Sensible people plead for no vaccine passports.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 11 of the published version of James Coolidge Carter’s brilliant speech delivered on July 25th, 1889, to the annual meeting of the Virginia State Bar Association – a speech titled The Provinces of the Written and the Unwritten Law:

All systems of law, therefore, are marked by the peculiar traits which distinguish the character of the nations by which they are framed. No standards of justice can be upheld in any nation which its people cannot comprehend and be willing to enforce. None will satisfy it which is not fairly on a level with its existing state of moral and intellectual progress.

DBx: One among many implications of this reality is that what Thomas Sowell calls “the quest for cosmic justice” is – as Sowell argues – the quest of dangerous fools.

Is It Any Wonder Why Covid Hysteria Is Over the Top?

(Don Boudreaux)

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Listening to Juliette Sellgren’s excellent Great Antidote discussion with free-range mom Lenore Skenazy reveals at least part of the reason for Covid Derangement Syndrome: Over the past couple of decades many parents have come bizarrely to believe that a world of zero-risk should be pursued for their children. This manner of parenting – in intent and display so caring while in consequences so cruel – cannot but help instill in children an inordinate fear of reality, a belief that even the most remote risk is intolerable, and a foolish faith that, if we try hard enough, we can and should make the world 100 percent safe.

There’s no doubt in my mind that there would never have been lockdowns if elites did not have the ability granted by the modern marvels of technology to continue to earn incomes from their homes. But another factor that contributes to the acceptance of this 21st-century tyranny is the absurd and detached-from-all-reality attitudes toward risk possessed today by so many people, and especially by young professionals.

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I just returned from a long, fast walk around a beautiful lake in northern Virginia. The weather is lovely and the path around the lake was not crowded. I never wear a mask outdoors and so, of course, I didn’t have one on during my walk.

As on my walk I got nearer to a masked young mother and her masked toddler who were walking toward me, the young mother, apparently noticing that I was maskless, frantically grabbed her toddler and quickly carried him about fifteen feet off of the footpath as I walked by. I couldn’t bear to look back at this pathetic spectacle of irrational fear, but I assume that Masked Mom waited a minute or two for my contamination to disperse before she and Masked Junior returned to the footpath. One can’t be too safe!

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from pages 95-96 of Thomas Sowell’s 2009 volume, Intellectuals and Race (footnote deleted):

The last year in which black unemployment was lower than white unemployment – 1930 – was also the last year in which there was no federal minimum wage law. The Davis-Bacon Act of 1931 was openly advocated by some members of Congress on grounds that it would stop black construction workers from taking jobs from white construction workers by working for less than the union wages of white workers.

A Future of Playing Whack-a-Mole with Risks

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to the Times (of London):

Editor:

In “The political class have lost their taste for risk” (March 25), James Forsyth identifies a great danger unleashed by the public and political reaction to Covid-19: governments’ determination to pursue safety at all costs.

The most obvious problem with this policy is that, because safety isn’t the only ‘good’ that we humans value, governments pursuing such safetyism will force us to consume too much of it. They’ll impose on us an amount of safety paid for too dearly with foregone prosperity, education, pleasures of social interaction, and individual liberty. (If you fancy that no price is too high to pay for safety, ask yourself why you’ve never chosen to live 24/7/365  in a hazmat suit. The constant wearing of such a suit, after all, would better protect you against viruses and bacteria.)

But another, less obvious, and deeper problem plagues the pursuit of safety at all costs: doing so is very unsafe. Reducing the risk of one kind of harm unavoidably raises the risks of other kinds of harm. Even if, for example, locking populations down does reduce suffering from Covid, it increases the risk of suffering from mental illness, of undetected cancers and other non-Covid ailments, and of delays in treating injuries.

Testament to this reality comes today from New Zealand. While that country’s draconian response to the coronavirus might well have significantly reduced its Covid case counts – which are indeed very low – its lockdowns apparently have so damaged the health of New Zealanders that hospitals there are now experiencing unprecedented overcrowding.

This lesson is one that I fear should, but won’t, be learned any time soon.

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
USA