Russell Roberts's Blog, page 301

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

James Bovard details some of lockdowns’ devastation of democracy and liberty. A slice:

Britain unleashed some of the most absurd restrictions. In June, it prohibited couples who live in different homes from having sex indoors. The Independent (U.K.) noted, “People who have sex outside can be punished under pre-existing laws on outraging public decency and indecent exposure.” Steve Watson reported in January for Summit News that British cabinet ministers “ have privately debated preventing people from talking to each other in the street and in supermarkets, and even preventing people from leaving home more than once per week, and introducing curfews.” British vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi fretted, “I’m worried about some of the pictures I’ve seen of social interactions in parks, if you have to exercise you can go out for exercise only.” Apparently, a national vow of silence is necessary to fight Covid. Summit News noted, “Police are also demanding new powers to force entry into the homes of suspected lockdown violators.” Former British Supreme Court Justice Jonathan Sumption complained last month, “Foreign travel is being prohibited, turning us into a hermit island on the basis we cannot know what mutations may be lurking out there. The logic of these policies is that we must be locked down for ever simply because the world is a dangerous place.”

New Zealand has imposed four separate lockdowns in its pursuit to banish the virus from the island, repeatedly placing residents in the capital city under house arrest. In October, the government announced it was creating “quarantine centers” for anyone who tests positive and refuses to obey government orders. One Twitter wag scoffed, “New Zealand went from gun bans to concentration camps in less than a year.”

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy decries the deranged attempt to create a zero-risk society. Here’s her conclusion:

Finally, perhaps the greatest cost of the policy reactions to COVID-19 is that it will have left Americans believing that governments can and must do anything to achieve a zero-risk society. That mindset means spending trillions of dollars on any bills that pretend to protect us from adversity. But it also entails a worrisome tolerance for intrusive policies, such as vaccine passports, daily symptom surveys in schools, a permanent mask mandate in planes, and many other forms of hygiene socialism, regardless of the merits of these policies.

Yet, as economist Steve Horowitz recently wrote to me on Facebook, “The reality is that we can never achieve” a zero-risk society, and “the costs of trying to are enormous, in terms of both material resources and human freedom.”

Test and trace is illiberal, ineffective, and absurdly costly.

I’m honored to have been a recent guest on the Rod Arquette Show.

Here’s a report of one of the countless instances of the inhumanity unleashed by Covid Derangement Syndrome.

Here’s a reflection on Covid Derangement Syndrome and the terror and tyranny it fueled. A slice:

When the dust finally settles on this era of Covid-induced hysteria, the voices of the world’s media, politics and popular culture will most likely seek to spin this significant chapter in our lives as having been an inspirational tale of human resilience and unity.

They will say that despite being locked within the jaws of a deadly pandemic, millions of acts of sacrifice and charity ensured that society was able to adapt to every challenge put before it, and we will emerge as a stronger, better people having endured such suffering.

Except, that won’t be true because the enormous bulk of this suffering hasn’t come from the trail of death Covid-19 has left behind; no, it has come directly from the political decisions made in reaction to it. Draconian rulings inflicted on the citizenry by seemingly caring politicians and their covid-fixated advisors. From the comfort of their satisfying salaries and life-long pensions, making decisions which throw the bulk of the working population onto furlough or benefits. We have become but cannon fodder to be expended in the hubristic war on covid.

A virus with a high survival rate has not been the cause of millions of people losing their jobs in pubs, theatres, or airlines. This virus has not been the cause of family businesses closing and livelihoods destroyed. Government policies have. Crippling restrictions which have inflicted maximum damage on these businesses have been the cause.

When we look back from a time in the future, we will see that assisting the government in their hubristic policies has been the mainstream media who have been the architects of hysteria and fear.  They blame covid for the economic and social fallout we are facing, rather than blame the politicians and themselves who enabled it. The pandemic has not largely brought out the best in humanity, despite the media focus on doorstep clapping and brightly coloured rainbows whilst ignoring the old being forced to die alone in nursing homes. This time has brought out the worst in humanity, it has been an exceptionally cruel period of human history, and whereas it lacks the sickening, unique violence of the 1940s, a callous disregard for life persists.

Phil Magness reports on yet another pro-Covid-lockdown hypocrite:

Eric Feigl-Ding has been one of the leading proponents of lockdowns and the ZeroCovid movement since last spring. Over the summer he was tweeting that his own kids could not go back to school until we ended the pandemic, presumably through lockdowns. He has spent the last several months arguing against school reopenings, and for the reimposition of more lockdown measures.

Well it turns out there’s a twist. Feigl-Ding is married to health policy analyst Andrea Feigl, an Austrian citizen. Last November, Mrs. Feigl tweeted out about how they had moved their kids to Austria from Washington, DC in order to allow them to resume in-person schooling while their US schools remain closed.

Mrs. Feigl has since deleted her twitter account after this was discovered last night.

Jordan Schachtel reports on reason enough for Americans to ignore anything and everything that comes now from the mouth or keyboard of Anthony Fauci. A slice:

Fauci embraced the Chinese propaganda, emphasizing the importance of Wuhan-style lockdowns to “suppress” the virus.

“To emphasize something that both of us said; if we do not completely suppress this, we will continue to be challenged by variants which have a way of coming back to bite us,” Fauci said.

“We have been successful in the past by global cooperation with smallpox, with polio, with measles. There’s no reason in the world why we cannot do the same thing with COVID-19 by a combination of cooperative public health measures and the application of science,” he added.

(DBx: Can someone point me to the best accounts of humanity’s lockdowns, mask mandates, school closures, and testing-and-tracing taken in the fight against polio, smallpox, and the measles? My poor memory needs to be refreshed.)

[image error] [image error] [image error] [image error]

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 105 of Frank Chodorov’s May 1940 Freeman article, “Civilization or Caveman Economy?”, as this article is reprinted in Liberty Fund’s superb 1980 collection, Fugitive Essays, of Chodorov’s writings, edited by Charles H. Hamilton:

Isolation and self-sufficiency are war techniques. Both ideas derive from the stupid concept of war as the reason for and goal of national existence. Both, therefore, are tendencies toward decivilization. And in the final analysis, the isolation and self-sufficiency idea is merely national caveman economy.

Less-than-Minimum Good Sense

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

Here’s a letter to the New York Times:

Editor:

Jason Cherkis argues that a 107 percent increase in the federal minimum wage will reduce suicides (“What Happens to Your Mental Health When You Can’t Pay Your Rent?” March 10). But in doing so he completely ignores the main argument that economists have long raised against minimum wages – namely, that such legislation casts some low-skilled workers into the ranks of the unemployed. For at least two related reasons, failure to as much as mention this effect is inexcusable.

First, as recently reported by economists David Neumark and Peter Shirley, the bulk of studies of minimum-wage hikes find nontrivial negative employment effects. Second, however difficult it is to live on an hourly income of $7.25, surely it’s far more difficult to live on an hourly income of $0.

If it’s true that low incomes promote suicide, and if the bulk of economic research is correct that hikes in the minimum wage slash many workers’ incomes down to $0, then raising the minimum wage is likely to be literally lethal.

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

(HT Alice Temnick for alerting me to this op-ed.)

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

The wisdom of Scott Atlas. A slice:

The coronavirus pandemic has been a great tragedy, there can be no doubt about that. But it has also exposed profound issues in America that now threaten the very principles of freedom and order that we Americans often take for granted.

First, I have been shocked at the enormous power of the government, to unilaterally decree, to simply close businesses and schools by edict, restrict personal movement, mandate behavior, and eliminate our most basic freedoms, without any end and little accountability.

Second, I remain surprised at the acceptance by the American people of draconian rules, restrictions, and unprecedented mandates, even those that are arbitrary, destructive, and wholly unscientific.

This crisis has also exposed what we all have known existed, but we have tolerated for years: the overt bias of the media, the lack of diverse viewpoints on campuses, the absence of neutrality in big tech controlling social media, and now more visibly than ever, the intrusion of politics into science. Ultimately, the freedom to seek and state the truth is at risk here in the United States.

Paul Alexander decries the brutal attack on open scientific inquiry. A slice:

In this regard for example, when experts and academics who speak out by calling for the balanced approach to Covid-19 responding and for the catastrophic harms of the lockdown policies to be factored into the decision-making by government bureaucrats and by adopting an age-risk targeted approach, they are denounced and pilloried by the general media, social media, and alarmingly, by their own academic peers. Yet how is this approach not reasonable and sensible? Protect the vulnerable (that would be the aged) and keep the economy/society open in order to not inflict even more damage and harm on people.

There appears to be this personal vendetta, vindictiveness, and scorn heaped upon alternative viewpoints, regardless of whether the alternative view may actually be more optimal. Tobin explains the intolerance to opposing viewpoints by stating that “All it usually takes is an accusation, a circulated letter, or a demonstration of some sort, and the woke usually get their way […] most university administrators obey the cancel mob and punish whoever has been deemed to have stepped out of line.” There must be absolute conformity and if there is none, then there is rancorous intimidation and one is disparaged with impunity.

More invisible victims of Covid hysteria.

And yet more victims of Covid hysteria. A slice:

The ONS mortality report this morning showed that in the week ending February 26th (week 8) deaths registered in England and Wales were 9.2% above the five-year average (1,066 deaths higher).

However, drilling down into the data it becomes clear that perhaps all of those excess deaths this week are deaths caused by the lockdown not by the virus, primarily denial of healthcare.

Allison Schrager reports on some instances of Covid Derangement Syndrome:

We all have different tolerances for risk, and the pandemic has thrust these differences to center stage. Because the choices we make based on our personal risk profiles inevitably affect others, shaming and judgement have been prevalent.

I witnessed this firsthand at my weekly bridge game. My bridge partner, in her early forties and fully vaccinated, insisted that we play outside, in cold, damp weather. My opponent, in his sixties and also vaccinated, asked why we should suffer. She explained that the evidence was not yet established that indoor activities with vaccinated people were safe. The discussion got heated, and my friend later asked me if she was being unreasonable. I shrugged and said that we all have to do what makes us comfortable, but the evidence is encouraging that vaccinated people not only can’t transmit the virus but also face essentially no risk of severe illness. She nodded—and said that she’d play bridge inside when there was definitive evidence that it was completely safe. Such evidence may never come. Science is rarely that definitive.

…..

The worst, most consequential failure in risk communication concerns the current vaccine rollout. The media constantly instruct us that, even weeks after receiving the second shot, it’s still not safe to socialize without masks. President Biden and Anthony Fauci have warned that we may not be able to resume “normal” life for another year. Fauci recently counseled against vaccinated people eating in indoor restaurants or playing mahjong together. Public-health officials today gave the green light for vaccinated people to gather together—but only after weeks of confusing and contradictory guidance.

We can’t go on like this forever, much less for another year. At a certain point, we have to learn to live with low-grade Covid risk. Indeed, we should have been doing so the whole time. Research from psychologists such as Gerd Gigerenzer suggests that people are good at weighing risks against rewards; we tend to make mistakes only when the data are presented in a confusing way or when it seems untrustworthy. Unfortunately, the media and public-health authorities have repeatedly failed on both counts.

Jeffrey Tucker is rightly appalled at lockdown denialism.  A slice:

Daniela Lamas, a critical care doctor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, has written a terrifying article in the Washington Post. It’s about the non-Covid cases of sickness in her hospital. There are older Americans dying of malnutrition, young men drinking themselves to death, others with cancers that could have been treated had they not skipped medical services for a full year, and drug overdoses breaking all records.

The article is a wake-up call for those who have thus far refused to recognize that there is more to public health than the avoidance of the pathogen with the name SARS-CoV-2. Good public health deals with the whole range of threats to human well being.  As the epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff has stated, “[p]ublic health is about all health outcomes, not just a single disease like Covid-19. It is important to also consider harms from public health measures.”

Nicholas Orlando understands the true, tyrannical nature of lockdowns. A slice:

Lockdown isn’t up for negotiation. It isn’t a means to avoid a medical disaster. It is quite clear now that lockdown is a deliberate policy, pursued for its own sake.

To get away with what they are doing, we are being demoralised. Gradually. Meaningfully.

Our individual and shared humanity is being crushed through enforced separation. Why do you think they have kept the pubs and gyms closed? We might talk: share those lurking thoughts that the NHS-guilt-rainbows are intended to suppress.

On paper, life’s great. My credit score has never looked so good. I’m learning to play the cello. The balance of read vs unread books in my growing pile is tipping towards the former. I no longer commute.

But I feel a deepening fatigue. An exiling of individual purpose. I need connection. Human connection.

The thriving world of acquaintance is lost. Does anyone talk casually any more? Colleagues in the corridor. Mates on the gym floor. The stranger you shared a joke with about the late bus at the stop. Small insignificant moments that bound us. Now kept at an anxious distance. Sanitised away through masked compliance. Spontaneity has been replaced fear of contact. I’m living a lonely monotony.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 175 of Tom Palmer’s February 2007 paper “Twenty Myths about Markets,” as this paper is reprinted in Tom’s excellent 2009 book, Realizing Freedom:

Free markets tend to be characterized by a “circulation of elites,” with no one guaranteed a place or kept from entering by accident of birth. The phrase “the rich get richer and the poor gets poorer” applies, not to free markets, but to mercantilism and political cronyism, that is, to systems in which proximity to power determines wealth. Under markets, the more common experience is that the rich do well (but may not stay “rich” by the standards of their society) and the poor get a lot richer, with many moving into the middle and upper classes. At any given moment, by definition 20% of the population will be in the lowest quintile of income and 20% will be in the highest quintile. But it does not follow either that those quintiles will measure the same amount of income (as incomes of all income groups rise in expanding economies) or that the income categories will be filled by the same people. The categories are rather like rooms in a hotel or seats on a bus; they are filled by someone, but not always by the same people. When income distributions in market-oriented societies are studied over time, a great deal of income mobility is revealed, with remarkable numbers of people moving up and down in the income distributions. What is most important, however, is that prosperous market economies see all incomes rise, from the lowest to the highest.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 42 of the late Harvard historian Richard Pipes’s splendid 1999 volume, Property and Freedom:

They [the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau] displayed just the right mixture of noble sentiment, lofty rhetoric, muddled thinking, and disregard for reality to attract those intellectuals who, like him, refused to “tolerate the world as it is.”

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

Robert Wright details some flaws in the CDC’s new study on the purported benefits of mask mandates and prohibitions on indoor dining at restaurants.

Disputing yet another piece of misleading ‘advice’ from the CDC is Jacob Sullum: “Contrary to What the CDC’s New COVID-19 Advice Implies, There Is Strong Evidence That Vaccination Curtails Virus Transmission“.

Will Jones decries the costliness and irrationality of the U.K.’s on-going Covid-19 tyranny.

Take a look at Finland.

Here’s an account of yet more victims of Covid tyranny.

Malcolm Kendrick busts more Covid myths.

My colleague Bryan Caplan rightly laments the lack of rationality surrounding Covid-19.

Here’s Chadwick Moore:

The double face mask is a queer, late-stage coronavirus grotesquerie. Just as America’s trifling, paper-pushing dictators sensed skepticism metastasizing in the peasant flock, they needed to make things a little more frightening. Turns out, the one mask you’ve been wearing for an entire year was never good enough.

In February, the Centers for Disease Control updated coronavirus recommendations to include double masking. Dr Fauci and President Joe Biden enthusiastically got on board. California’s embattled governor, Gavin Newsom, also suggested just last week two masks ought to be worn in public.

Phil Magness asks more intelligent questions:

If the economic downturn is a result of “the pandemic, not the lockdowns!!!” as we’re constantly told, then:
1. Why are there observable spikes in crowds engaging in previously forbidden economic activity whenever a restriction is lifted?
2. Why do the same people who insist it’s “the pandemic, not the lockdowns!!!” tend to come out strongly against lifting those restrictions?

Jeffrey Tucker mourns the loss of trust in public health. A slice:

The loss of trust was triggered by using an egregious and destruction means – lockdowns – in order somehow to achieve the unachievable; that is, the control of a widespread respiratory virus with severe outcomes for the elderly and sick but which is mostly mild for everyone else. It so happened that SARS-CoV-2 was not the universally deadly plague it was presumed to be one year ago, so these measures were wildly disproportionate.

Even if the pandemic had been as grim as the models predicted, there is no evidence in the historical record of lockdowns doing anything about a virus except to disrupt and destroy social and market functioning in a way that makes dealing with severe health outcomes even more difficult.

Consider one huge and unprecedented mitigation measure deployed last year: the stay-at-home order. Most states imposed them and enforced them with police power. It was not that different from near-universal house arrest – right here in the United States.

The claim was that this would slow or stop the spread or somehow cause the virus to be controlled, resulting in fewer severe disease outcomes. The propaganda became outrageous at points, with signs everywhere ordering people to “stay home and save lives,” as if leaving your house would result in lives lost.

People undertook enormous personal sacrifices to comply, at great personal expense. The economic costs were huge but so were the psychological and social costs. The result was an epidemic in loneliness and a rise in deaths of despair.

How did it work? A new study in Nature by four epidemiologists looked at the experience of 87 countries with a variety of policies, some loose and some extreme in strigency. They sought to correlate state-at-home orders with virus control. The results: they were unable to do so. The relationship does not exist, which is to say that it is consistent with randomness. The policy was worse than useless.

A Report from Down Under by David Hart

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

My Australian friend David Hart shared this report of Victorian strongman Daniel Andrews’s serious fall, one that has landed Mr. Andrews in intensive care. I truly do wish Mr. Andrews a full and speedy recovery.

The reason this accident is noteworthy here comes from the data that David sent along with the news of Mr. Andrews’s mishap. I quote David in full (links added):

I checked at the government health website on deaths from accidental falls. There were more than 5,100 in 2017/18 (latest data).

Deaths from/with Covid in Australia so far are 909, 90 percent of them (820) in the state of Victoria alone which “Il Duce” Dan rules with an iron fist.

So – over the past year in Australia the number of deaths from/with Covid-19 is approximately 18 percent of the annual number of deaths in Australia from accidental falls (assuming that the year 2017-18 is representative on this front).

I leave the reader to draw from these facts whatever conclusions he or she finds most plausible.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 393 of the Book III, Chapter ii, of the 1981 Liberty Fund edition of Adam Smith’s 1776 masterpiece, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations:

Avarice and injustice are always short-sighted….

DBx: Today – March 9th, 2021 – is the 245th anniversary of the publication of this magnificent work from the quill of Adam Smith.

Steering the Liberal Course Through Covid Hysteria

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

In my latest column for AIER I explain why I retracted my harsh criticism of classical liberals and libertarians who remain silent in face of Covid-19 lockdowns and other draconian restrictions. Here’s my conclusion:

Again, I’m as confident as I can be that liberal civilization is now in grave peril. Whether it’s called “safetyism” or “bioprotective statism” or (as David Hart has named it) “hygiene socialism,” the dangers are high and real of the sudden acceptance of the dual idea that the worst fate that can befall a person is to come into contact with a pathogen, and that the state must protect us from this fate by imposing on us lockdowns, mask mandates, and other draconian restrictions.

Civilization as we know it – liberal, free, dynamic, prosperous civilization – cannot survive what I fear will be repeated rounds of pathogen panic and the resulting Covidocracy-like tyranny.

And so I will continue with every sinew to publicly protest this madness – to play whatever role I can to persuade people to temper their excessive fear of Covid – to warn whenever I can of the many dangers of hygiene socialism – to urge in private my quiet friends to break their public silence.

I cannot deny that I’ll feel much disappointment whenever I encounter Mr. __’s or Ms. __’s refusal to add his or her voice to the protests against lockdowns. Never will I understand how a classical liberal or libertarian can behold what’s going on today in the name of fighting Covid and not see misinformation and tyranny on such a scale as to demand, from all of liberty’s friends, forthright public opposition.

But my failure to understand isn’t a sufficient warrant for me to criticize those who remain silent. I will respect their choices. Showing such respect is what Leonard Read would have done. It’s what my ever-wise Friend does and will always do. The liberalism destroyed by hygiene socialism need not have added to it the liberalism destroyed by liberals’ own intolerance.