Russell Roberts's Blog, page 300
March 14, 2021
Some Covid Links
Eric Boehm warns of the dangers of vaccine nationalism. A slice:
The New York Times reports that the Biden administration is refusing to allow America’s unused doses of the vaccine to be shipped overseas, despite requests from foreign governments and AstraZeneca itself. The company has pledged to replace any donated doses of the vaccine once FDA approval has been granted, according to the Times.
This is nearly indefensible. On the long list of ways that the government has screwed up the COVID-19 response, hoarding lifesaving vaccines that it won’t allow to be used deserves a place at or near the very top.
Since AstraZeneca has not even finalized its application for FDA approval and doesn’t expect to be done for several more weeks, there’s only one rational and ethical option available: Send those doses of the company’s vaccine to places where they can legally be injected into human beings as quickly as possible. Every day that they languish in a warehouse, unused, adds to the pandemic’s length and unnecessarily increases the final death toll.
Paul Alexander and co-authors contrast the CDC with common sense. Here’s their conclusion:
To close, the entire Covid-19 pandemic response in Western nations and perhaps the entire world, has led to disastrous outcomes. We argue that most have taken the lead from Western nations like the UK, US, and Canada. It has been a complete disaster and the irony is that we had strong reasonable pandemic plans in place prior to the advance of SARS-CoV-2 that for inexplicable reasons were shelved by the WHO, with no apparent or at least scientifically defensible rationale. As an example, we argue that after constant lockdown, by the time Australia emerges, they will likely discover as other nations did, that all they have done is delayed the inevitable, and while at it, destroying people’s lives, their economies, and eviscerating civil liberties and law. We also feel that ad hoc remarks made by ‘media’ medical experts and authorities promoting fear is reprehensible, and we suggest a more science-based approach, with rational and validated evidence, that educates the public and will yield more benefit to a healthier free, and compliant society. The currency of credit is lost with illogical and haphazard statements when borne without relevant facts. Our governmental agencies are bestowed with certain powers to safeguard the lives of individuals and not to harass and subjugate them to the whims of a few narrow field “experts” who have no idea about the well-being of the society as a whole. We are allowing government agencies and inept government bureaucrats and technocrats to destroy our lives and futures. Stopping Covid ‘at all costs’ will destroy us societally and globally!
Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins riffs on New York strongman Andrew Cuomo and Covid. A slice:
The highest-cost deaths, it follows, were likely those not directly caused by the illness. In separate studies, U.S. government and Virginia Commonwealth University researchers say a third of “excess deaths” might fall into this category—delayed medical care, unemployment stress, substance abuse, suicide, depression, etc. One study looked at the effect of unemployment and predicted 30,231 additional deaths over a 12-month period.
Also writing about New York’s strongman is Liz Wolfe.
Molly Kingsley is appalled by many adults’ cruelty to children. A slice:
There is a long list of adults and organisations with a duty to children – be that legal, fiduciary, professional or simply moral – and in some cases who are paid to carry out that duty. Some have spoken, but many more have acquiesced. Their failure, however, should come as no surprise: the Milgram experiment of the Sixties shows how enormous the weight of pressure to conform is. In that now infamous experiment ordinary citizens were ordered to inflict increasing degrees of pain on volunteers. Almost all did and the majority were willing to take the experiment to an extreme. The central idea is that when confronted with a persuasive authority, individuals focus on the task they are given by that authority rather than the morality of the action. They become an agent of the authority so as to abdicate responsibility for the outcome of their activity.
I never expected to live through a real-time re-enactment of this experiment; less still one where the subjects were children. Over the last year, we have, in the name of protecting the elderly and vulnerable, somehow managed to reverse one of the key tenets of medical ethics: first do no harm. We’ve introduced, and we continue to introduce, interventions not only without proper, or indeed any, evaluation as to harms; but worse, we do so in the knowing presence of potentially serious, and escalating, harm. Yet, it has fallen on those of us challenging this madness to explain ourselves: “prove the harm”. When we do prove the harm we’re told we’re being hysterical, or we’re vilified and smeared for being “Covid deniers”. I don’t understand this – that I care about children does not mean I care less about the elderly and vulnerable – the two have never before been mutually exclusive.
I believe that what is happening to children in schools goes beyond anything that any reasonable person could consider fair or proportionate.
There’s much wisdom in this unsigned editorial in The Spectator. Here’s some of it:
In a democracy, police cannot ultimately enforce laws for which there is no public consent. To do so risks damaging the public co-operation on which the police depend. Say a mother is recovering from a serious illness in lockdown and her friends club together to help her with childcare: all involved would be breaking the law. Three friends taking a walk together could be stopped by police.
This is clearly nonsensical. And the public know it. They are also aware that lockdown rules have affected people in very different ways. If you live in a large house with a large garden, and you have a professional career, with secure pay and pension, lockdown has not been a great hardship. It is a very different matter if you are poor and live alone in a small flat in a densely packed and highly policed urban area.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 21 of the 1993 Liberty Fund reissue of the 1969 Cambridge University Press edition of the 1854 translation of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s great 1792 work, The Limits of State Action:
But the happiness for which man is plainly destined, is no other than that which his own energies procure for him; and the very nature of such a self-reliant position sharpens his intellect and develops his character. Are there no instances of such evils where State agency fetters individual spontaneity by too detailed interference? There are many, doubtless; and the man whom it has accustomed to lean on an external power for support, is thus given up in critical emergencies to a far more hopeless fate. For, just as the very act of struggling against misfortune, and encountering it with vigorous efforts, lightens the calamity; so delusive expectations aggravate its severity tenfold.
March 13, 2021
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 14 of “12 Myths of International Trade,” a June 2000 Staff Report of the Joint Economic Committee (which, I think, was written either by, or under the guidance of, the great Jim Gwartney):
As Adam Smith noted more than two centuries ago, a nation can gain from trade whenever a good can be acquired from foreigners more cheaply than it can be produced domestically. When foreign governments subsidize their exports to us, they are subsidizing American consumers. Of course, the subsidies are costly to the taxpayers funding them. With time, they are likely to tire from the burden and bring the subsidies to a halt. If foreigners are subsidizing their producers, some argue we should do the same. This makes no sense. Merely because foreigners are wasting their resources propping up inefficient suppliers is no reason for us to engage in the same folly. As with other trade restrictions, export subsidies will channel more of our resources toward production of things we do poorly and away from things we do well. A smaller output and lower level of income will result. Put simply, neither individuals nor nations can expect to get ahead by spending more time producing things they do poorly.
DBx: Pictured above is retaliatory protectionism.
Some Covid Links
Phil Magness and Jack Nicastro decry the brutalization – sparked by Covid Derangement Syndrome – of college students. Here’s their opening:
On March 10, 2020 at 7:16 p.m. the University of Dayton tweeted that all dormitories on campus would be closed less than 24 hours later in order to protect “the health and safety of our campus community.” It was one of hundreds of colleges and universities that rushed to clear out its campus in mid-March over fears of an impending coronavirus outbreak.
Most of these decisions were announced at a moment’s notice, leaving only a matter of days or hours for students to comply and make last-minute travel and housing arrangements in the face of impending eviction.
Dayton’s order proved particularly egregious. The college displayed little concern for the health and safety of its community members who had no mode of transportation or financial means to leave the campus with virtually zero notice. Its 11,271 student population had to vacate immediately. When a group of students took to the streets around campus to protest the hasty and chaotic decision, they found themselves accosted with pepper spray pellets by police officers who broke up the protest at 2:15AM.
The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board looks back at a year of Covid hysteria. Two slices:
U.S. deaths adjusted for population are comparable to Western Europe’s. Asian countries also experienced surges, though fewer deaths because of healthier populations. Island nations Australia and New Zealand closed their borders. Mr. Trump too often downplayed the virus, and his compulsion to make himself the center of the Covid story is a major reason he lost the Presidency. But most politicians and public-health officials also minimized the virus early on because they didn’t want to cause panic.
Mr. Trump’s biggest mistake was putting too much faith in health experts and their lockdown models. As hospitals in northern Italy burst with patients, epidemiologists predicted U.S. hospitals would soon be overwhelmed. On March 16, Mr. Trump ordered a 15-day national lockdown to “slow the spread,” which he later extended through April.
…..
There was an alternative. Tens of thousands of doctors signed the Great Barrington Declaration, which recommended that government minimize deaths and economic harm by protecting the vulnerable while letting most Americans return to normal life. Individuals and businesses could adjust to the virus and socially distance as they saw fit. The media and progressive elites dismissed these voices and refused to drop their lockdown dogmatism.
The Covid pandemic has seen the greatest loss of American liberty outside wartime. Politicians closed houses of worship without regard for the First Amendment. They ordered arbitrary shutdowns that favored some businesses but punished others. Politicians and governments have used the pandemic to justify an enormous expansion of state power. Government had to act in March to avoid economic catastrophe from the lockdowns it ordered. But the politicians keep amassing power even as vaccines are rolling out.
What we had were livelihoods wrecked, dreams shattered, and despair spreading faster than the disease these measures attempted to counteract. Against that, indiscriminately delivered government checks are small comfort.
What we’ve had in the last year are mostly stupid government regulations (are there any clever ones…?) and people sheepishly internalizing them as if they were handed down by a prophet on stone tablets. Yes, the Covid mania is a religious cult. What worries me more than a misplaced resurgence in idolatry is the social attitudes that come with this. Now any threat can again be dealt with by imposing rules like we just did – my life becomes yours to govern. (You don’t think the climate crowd is eager for their turn to call the shots?)
While the U.S. was busy dishing out dough in a not-so-covert attempt at introducing Universal Basic Income (UBI) schemes, European rulers went with the more zombifying version: freeze labor markets in place, by paying employers and workers not to work. “Hands up, nobody moves,” said European governments and regulators.
One year and several lockdowns later, and this remarkable experiment in social control has done untold harm to the economy, to education, mental health and civil liberties. Care home residents have suffered the worst of Covid 19, thanks in part to a bizarre policy of discharging patients suspected to have had Covid back into those places – but also the worst of lockdown, being deprived of family contact. It is reported that some dementia patients have even lost the power of speech. Meanwhile, victims of domestic abuse have been trapped at home with their tormentors.
James Moreton Wakeley argues that the lockdowns reflect the failure of the political class. Two slices:
The uniformity of the new ruling class, and the games that one must play to enter it, explains the consensus on lockdown. The political class is naturally drawn to power, meaning that its members are often keen to signal how ‘on board’ they are with elite projects. This distorts the line between those responsible for policy and those who should critique it. It is evident in the tendency of mainstream journalists to discuss the pandemic within the framework set by lockdown rather than to think outside of the box, or in their total failure to ask probing questions of ministers and state scientists. They can further tell one another that they are being ‘responsible’ by refusing to question a Government policy designed, of course, to ‘save lives,’ but this means that they partake in the state’s management of society rather than in holding power to account. Many journalists will also avoid criticising lockdown because a lot of those who do are political class undesirables, notably Donald Trump, with whom they do not want to appear associated. It often appears to be a political class article of faith that frequently unreasonable people cannot, in fact, say reasonable things.
….
Who the actual ‘expert’ is or the nature of their track record is not entirely relevant (and the influential Professor Neil Ferguson’s past performance at predicting pandemic lethality is indeed abysmal). What is important is the rhetorical role that citing the expert plays: it is the argumentum ad verecundiam, designed to intimidate and embarrass opponents, which also abrogates the need to play the ball rather than the man and therefore to grapple with the issue at stake in a truly critical manner. It is the helpful quote in the rushed, weekly essay that allows you to stop thinking about one aspect of the subject and to move on.
And also this from Phil Magness:
This is something important to consider as we approach the 365th anniversary of “two weeks to flatten the curve.”
Epidemiology modelers tricked many well-meaning and intelligent people into backing the lockdowns out of fear and a belief in the limited timeframe we had to forestall emergency. If you were among them and have since updated your position in light of overwhelming evidence that they do not work, that’s a defensible position.
OTOH, if you’re still arguing for lockdowns a year later, or defending those policies as justified in the hindsight of the destruction they have caused to no meaningful effect at stemming the pandemic, you are exhibiting a level of delusion that should cast doubt upon your judgment in all other matters as well.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 244 of the Appendix to the 1991 Liberty Press edition of Bruno Leoni’s utterly brilliant 1961 volume, Freedom and the Law; specifically, it’s from an updated version – entitled “Voting Versus the Market” – of Leoni’s 1960 Il Politico essay, “Political Decisions and Majority Rule”:
A continuous overinvestment through group decisions tends to take place in a political community whenever the decision-making rules are such as to encourage minorities of shrewd maximizers to get something for nothing by letting minorities of less shrewd victims foot the bill.
DBx: Who of any sense doubts the truth and relevance of this observation? Who with eyes not completely blind, and a soul not completely corrupted, can look at what governments do today and not be disgusted at the ever-present sight of interest groups using the state to live parasitically on others?
It’s worth pointing out here that no victims of such sharks are less shrewd than are citizens-taxpayers yet to be born. Deficit financing of government projects enable people today to free-ride on future generations.
March 12, 2021
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 4 of Thomas Sowell’s excellent 1981 volume, Ethnic America: A History (footnote deleted):
The massive ethnic communities that make up the mosaic of American society cannot be adequately described as “minorities.” The largest single identifiable ethnic strain are people of British ancestry – who make up just 15 percent of the American population. They barely outnumber German Americans (13 percent) or blacks (11 percent). Millions of Americans cannot identify themselves at all ethnically, due to intermixtures over the generations.
Glorious Normalcy! Glorious Florida!
I’m in Destin, Florida, to participate in a GMU Law & Economics Center event for judges. Specifically, I’m sharing, with my friend Andy Morriss, discussion-leader duties in a seminar titled “American Law and the Political Economy of Economic Freedom.”
Last evening for dinner, Andy and I took a short Uber ride to Boschamps, a popular seafood restaurant in Destin. Both Andy and I were delighted to find the place packed, outside and in. And there was hardly a mask to be seen!
I didn’t at all mind the 90-minute wait for our indoor table. We found two chairs at one of the restaurant’s outside bars, and just gloried in the normalcy of it all. We saw the bartender’s face, as later we would see our waitress’s face. I didn’t realize until last night just how much I missed this normal human interaction.
Boschamps is huge and sprawling, with lots of rooms, and tables everywhere indoors and outdoors. People – young, old, and middlin’ – swarmed around. Despite Boschamps’s size, it was quite crowded throughout with people smiling (visibly!), laughing, and talking without any of the muffling brought on by masks. I saw lots of hugging and handshaking. And I noticed no ridiculous markers on the floor instructing people to stand apart from each other.
The sweet icing on this delicious cake of an evening came when the ride-share driver who drove us back to the hotel was wearing no mask and indicated that he’d not mind if Andy and I didn’t wear ours. An immigrant from Africa, our driver said succinctly, “I’m sick of those things.” Andy and I enjoyed the maskless ride back.
My gosh, how this normal human interaction lifted my spirits!
As recently as one year ago nothing about this experience would have struck me as notable, except my complete lack of annoyance at having to wait 90 minutes to be seated at a dinner table. But, again, far from being annoyed by the wait, as Andy and I sat at the bar and talked shop with each other, I felt a kind of happiness that I’d not felt in a long, long time.
…..
Probably because I was born and raised in New Orleans and developed there a distaste for hot, humid weather, I’ve never had a desire to live in Florida. But all of a sudden I find myself in love with this paradise. I’m here in Destin until Monday afternoon. But I don’t want to return home. I want to remain in civilization where people do not live in fear of strangers who are in close proximity – where people do not cover their faces – where life is normal and civilized – where there is life!
Florida is glorious!
Some Covid Links
Philippe Lemoine, writing in the Wall Street Journal, argues that the lockdowns weren’t worthwhile. A slice:
Sweden was the first to learn this lesson, but many other countries have confirmed it. Initially held up as a disaster by many in the pro-lockdown crowd, Sweden has ended up with a per capita death rate indistinguishable from that of the European Union. In the U.S., Georgia’s hands-off policies were once called an “experiment in human sacrifice” by the Atlantic. But like Sweden, Georgia today has a per capita death rate that is effectively the same as the rest of the country.
That isn’t to say that restrictions have no effect. Had Sweden adopted more-stringent restrictions, it’s likely the epidemic would have started receding a bit earlier and incidence would have fallen a bit faster. But policy may not matter as much as people assumed it did. Lockdowns can destroy the economy, but it’s starting to look as if they have minimal effect on the spread of Covid-19.
After a year of observation and data collection, the case for lockdowns has grown much weaker. Nobody denies overwhelmed hospitals are bad, but so is depriving people of a normal life, including kids who can’t attend school or socialize during precious years of their lives. Since everyone hasn’t been vaccinated, many wouldn’t yet be living normally even without restrictions. But government mandates can make things worse by taking away people’s ability to socialize and make a living.
The coronavirus lockdowns constitute the most extensive attacks on individual freedom in the West since World War II. Yet not a single government has published a cost-benefit analysis to justify lockdown policies—something policy makers are often required to do while making far less consequential decisions. If my arguments are wrong and lockdown policies are cost-effective, a government document should be able to demonstrate that. No government has produced such a document, perhaps because officials know what it would show.
In its guidance the CDC says the risks of infection in vaccinated people “cannot be completely eliminated.” True, we don’t have conclusive data that guarantees vaccination reduces risk to zero. We never will. We are operating in the realm of medical discretion based on the best available data, as practicing physicians have always done. The CDC highlights the vaccines’ stunning success but is ridiculously cautious about its implications. Public-health officials focus myopically on transmission risk while all but ignoring the broader health crisis stemming from isolation. The CDC acknowledges “potential” risks of isolation, but doesn’t go into details.
It’s time to liberate vaccinated people to restore their relationships and rebuild their lives. That would encourage vaccination by giving hesitant people a vivid incentive to have the shots.
Throughout the pandemic, authorities have missed the mark on precautions. Hospitals blocked family members from being with their loved ones as they gasped for air, gagging on a ventilator tube—what some patients describe as the worst feeling in the world. In addition to the power of holding a hand, family members coordinate care and serve as a valuable safety net, a partnership that was badly needed when many hospitals had staffing shortages. Separating family members was excessive and cruel, driven by narrow thinking that focused singularly on reducing viral transmission risk, heedless of the harm to the quality of human life.
Christian Britschgi writes about Paso Robles, CA: the town that didn’t lock down. A slice:
Johnson made the decision to defy Newsom’s shutdown order and keep her business open. She wasn’t the only one.
Across California, the reaction to the governor’s order was swift and negative. Videos of business owners pointing out the absurdities of the new restrictions went viral on social media. Sheriff’s departments across the state, including in Los Angeles and Orange counties, said they wouldn’t enforce the order. Trade associations and local governments readied lawsuits. Nine months into a deadly pandemic that had left hundreds of thousands of people dead nationwide, and everyone else stuck inside their homes away from family, friends, and colleagues, the risk was clearly real, as I would find out myself. But patience for another lockdown had been depleted.
Nowhere was this more evident than Paso Robles, where most of the businesses in town came to the same realization as Johnson: Another shutdown could mean their doom.
But instead of accepting their fate, they got organized. Through Facebook groups and clandestine in-person meetings, a coalition of business owners decided to defy the state’s latest order and keep their town open.
It was an exercise in COVID-era civil disobedience. And in many ways, it worked.
Studies which show social restrictions do not lead to lower Covid mortality and infection rates are numerous (see this collection of 31 from AIER, which is kept up to date).
We now have another paper to add to the collection. Published last week in Scientific Reports in Nature, it looks at whether the extent to which people stayed at home (measured using Google mobility data) is associated with Covid mortality in different countries. Doesn’t look like it, they conclude.
Paul Alexander, et al., describe the masking of children as “tragic, unscientific, and damaging.”
Noah Carl asks: What happened in South Dakota?
Stephen LeDrew talks with Anthony Furey about the horribly inaccurate modeling of Covid.
TANSTAFPFC: There ain’t no such thing as free protection from Covid-19.
Jemima Lewis reports that many British parents are ignoring the government’s restrictions on the play of their children. (DBx: I applaud these parents for doing their part to help fight the highly contagious and dangerous disease of statism.)
The irrepressible Lionel Shriver is correct to argue that the west has lost its moral high ground. Here are two slices from her latest piece in The Spectator:
International travellers running the gauntlet of English airports must already test negative for Covid before the flight, and on return to the UK get tested again before boarding, fill out a locator form, quarantine for ten days and test negative twice more. But that’s not enough oppression for Boris Johnson’s government. As of this week, outbound intrepids have also to fill out ‘declaration forms’ explaining why their trip is essential. Not doing so is a criminal offence.
…..
Like much of the West, Britain has navigated this pandemic with heavy-handed state coercion: threats of ten-year imprisonment for not filling in a form properly, fines of £10,000 for organising a protest of any sort, arbitrary arrest and police harassment for sitting on a park bench or walking a dog in the wilderness. Whatever is not expressly permitted is forbidden. It’s the state’s business whether we hold our mother’s hand. Rule is by decree; rare parliamentary approval of still more draconian restrictions is a rubber stamp. Dissenting scientific opinion is suppressed, sledgehammer-subtle propaganda goons from hoardings and broadcast media almost exclusively recapitulate government messaging. The public is encouraged to shop recalcitrant neighbours and relatives to the authorities. Does this sound like somewhere else you know of? Like Covid itself, lockdowns were exported from China, then espoused by the World Health Organisation, a once reputable institution now largely captured by China as well.
There were other routes to managing this disease. Reliable, benevolent advice, financial support for at-risk age groups, sequestration of Covid patients in healthcare settings — methods that pandemic prepared-ness studies already commended. Instead, most of the West abandoned once-sacrosanct principles on a dime, and democratic governments fell over themselves in their eagerness to copy not only one another, but China. In so doing, our politicians have demoted our civil rights to privileges — ever provisional, readily revoked, restored only if we’re terribly good, like children hoping for presents from Santa. So-called rights — to free movement, free association, free speech — now resemble the ‘social credits’ Chinese AI apps award for paying your bills and refraining from jaywalking. Thus the West kisses goodbye its last few square inches of moral high ground. Under stress, the West is demonstrably as authoritarian as the CCP. The supreme ideals of harmony and safety are peas in a pod.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 82 of the original edition of IHS-founder F.A. “Baldy” Harper’s 1949 tract, Liberty: A Path to Its Recovery:
An essential feature of a liberal government is the protection of minorities, and of the rights of minorities against plunder by the majority. The ultimate of minorities is one person. And so the ultimate of liberalism … is the protection of each person against the plunder of one or more other persons.
March 11, 2021
Some Non-Covid Links
George Will rightly decries the increased militarization of Capitol Hill. A slice:
In normal life, when there is no penalty for failure, failures proliferate. In government, failure, far from being penalized, is often rewarded. Those whose bad judgments botched the Capitol’s security on Jan. 6 now are granted seemingly unlimited deference regarding their judgments about needed security measures. Hence their infuriating project currently scarring the epicenter of American democracy: more than three miles of seven-foot-tall fencing that is topped by razor wire and patrolled by soldiers. This seals off from a phantom menace the Capitol, the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress, symbols of liberty under law, and the reign of intelligence.
Robert Fellner wonders if Randi Weingarten is a real-life Marla Grayson. A slice:
Thankfully, Grayson’s character is fictitious. But I was reminded of a similar type of duplicity when listening to a recent interview with Randi Weingarten, who the New York Times describes as “the nation’s most powerful teachers union president.”
As much as we can know anything, we know that keeping schools closed harms kids. This is why there is universal consensus among experts, ranging from the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and even UNICEF, among others, that schools should be reopened as soon as possible.
Yet, when asked the softball question of whether there is any point at which the damage from extended school closures is not reversible, Weingarten replied that, “No, I don’t believe that. I believe that kids are resilient and kids will recover.”
You get that? You could keep schools closed for the next 5 years and there wouldn’t be any lasting harm to kids, according to Weingarten. The boldness of that lie is on par with Marla Grayson’s claim that she is simply someone who cares a lot.
Juliette Sellgren talks about taxes with Adam Michel.
Samuel Gregg reviews Kenneth Dyson’s new book on conservative liberalism in Europe.
That’s what politicians do: Biden puts the future at greater risk to goose-up the present.
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