Russell Roberts's Blog, page 305

The Wisdom of Walter E. Williams

(Don Boudreaux)

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From 35 years ago is this lecture by my late, great colleague – and much-missed dear friend – Walter Williams.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 56 of my late, great colleague Walter Williams’s 2011 book, Race & Economics (original emphasis):

The minimum-wage law has imposed incalculable harm on the most disadvantaged members of our society. The absence of work opportunities for many black youngsters does not only mean an absence of pocket money. Early work opportunities provide much more than that: important insights on how to find a job and to adopt proper attitudes toward both, punctuality, and respect for supervision in the workplace. Lessons of that sort learned on any job help make a young person a more valuable and successful worker in the future. In addition, early work experiences give youngsters the pride and self-respect that come from being financially semi-independent. That is even more important for black youngsters, a disproportionate number of whom grow up in female-headed households and to the nation’s worst schools. If they are to learn job-related lessons, many of them will be learned through a job.

DBx: Yes.

If a gaggle of Grand Wizards of the KKK wished to erect a surreptitious yet highly effective barrier to the economic advancement of minorities, they could do no better than to propose a minimum wage.

So to all you who support minimum wages: You might well have the motives of archangels, but your motives count for nothing against your preferred policies’ devilish results.

A Discussion about Lockdowns

(Don Boudreaux)

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Freddie Sayers and Unherd TV host this discussion featuring Tory MP Charles Walker and Lord David Blunkett of the Labour Party.

Some Non-Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins decries the intellectual state of humanity these days. A slice:

Especially but not exclusively on the left, it seems bad form nowadays, and even evidence of some kind of guilt, to subject any passionately-made claim to cool examination. Consider a well-covered racial incident at Smith College where slandering any number of white people became the preferred alternative to a black person having to hear that she was wrong.

Distrust of the media, and the media’s own disavowal of the supposedly tired idol of “objectivity,” is another factor. If no disinterested authority exists who can be trusted to refute a lie without fear or favor, it begets lying. A lawyer for a voting machine company told the New York Times recently: “So many people out there, including people in positions of authority, are just willing to say anything, regardless of whether it has any relationship to the truth or not.’’

Arnold Kling explains why he’s more worried than are many other economists about the return of high inflation. (I largely agree with Arnold, and am putting my money behind my fear of higher inflation by moving more heavily into inflation-indexed bonds. [Understand, however, that I know next to nothing about finance – even personal finance. But I do fear that inflation is coming.])

Art Carden is not in favor of forgiving student loans.

Nick Gillespie talks with Thomas Sowell’s biographer, Jason Riley.

Juliette Sellgren talks with Lenore Skenazy about parenting.

Thomas Hogan looks at electricity prices in Texas.

George Leef weighs in on minimum wages. A slice:

Most politicians know perfectly well that some workers will be hurt, but to them (the politicians), that doesn’t much matter. Very few of those hapless workers will pin the blame on them for the loss of jobs and besides, the unemployed are the natural constituency for Democratic rhetoric about the need to “build an economy that works for everyone.” Therefore, there is little if any political downside.

Ben Zycher bemoans bureaucrats’ and politicians’ insistence on pushing electric cars on a public that doesn’t really want such vehicles.

Should conservatives favor child allowances? Tune in this afternoon from 2:30pm to 4:30pm, EST, for a discussion.

Here’s the 11th installment in George Selgin’s important series on the New Deal.

Dan Klein on Adam Smith on Slavery

(Don Boudreaux)

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My colleague Dan Klein – one of the finest living scholars of Adam Smith – discusses the Great Scot’s analysis of, and attitude toward, slavery.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Art Carden is correct: There are indeed libertarians in a pandemic – and even in pandemics, governments do not operate as econ textbooks presume. A slice:

As we approach the second year of the two-week flattening of the infection curve, the simple points Cochrane makes should take center stage. As he argues, the pandemic checks all the boxes one would wish to check in order to construct a clear argument for government intervention, and yet the lion’s share of the vaccination discussion has emphasized the distribution of private benefits when reducing the disease’s reproduction rate is the only thing that matters.

Predictably, replacing commercial distribution—Cochrane believes, as I do, that the humane thing to do is to let market prices decide—with political distribution means political interest groups jockeying for priority. Even for all the market failures acknowledged above, combining market forces with vaccine vouchers for the poorest would be far more effective than the mess we are in now.

Those of you who continue to believe that a pandemic provides a sound reason to trust that all, or even most, politicians act in the public interest might wish to read this piece by Eric Boehm.

And those of you who continue to deny that Covid Derangement Syndrome is real, you might wish to look at what some “experts” in Canada are proposing.

Here’s yet another Covid-19 pro-lockdown hypocrite: Berkeley Federation of Teachers president Matt Meyer – an opponent of re-opening schools to in-person learning – sends his daughter to an in-person private school.

Harold Greene documents the fact that Covid-19’s mortality risk is dying out. A slice:

Below the age of 60, the ACMR [Average Covid-19 Mortality Risk] is close to zero.

Alastair Cavendish explains why he is not, speaking precisely, a lockdown skeptic. A slice:

Lockdowns kill people, and the people who will suffer most from them are reasonably foreseeable. Those who live alone, and whose mental health is fragile, are clearly suicide risks. So are people who have lost their businesses and livelihoods, or jobs that gave their life meaning. Many others are at risk from untreated conditions less fashionable than COVID-19. To be in favour of lockdown is to say that these people are less valuable than others, the type of people one might as well shove off a bridge to stop a speeding trolley.

To get into a discussion about numbers is to miss the point. Viruses kill some people, and this is very sad. We should try to prevent it from happening as much as we can by shielding the vulnerable and providing the best medical care possible. What we should not do it decide that other people are less valuable and sacrifice their lives. The virus kills, but you don’t have to. Scientists may argue about whether these sacrifices are futile in any case. People like Professor Carl Heneghan and Professor Sunetra Gupta can make that case, and be relentlessly smeared for it by sanctimonious murder enthusiasts. Most of us do not have their expertise, but this does not mean that we cannot make a principled stand against pushing people off bridges.

As Sebastian Rushworth explains, lockdowns are lethal. A slice:

During the last few months of his life, in 2017, he wrote an excellent book called “Factfulness”, that summed up most of his thinking, and described how many of the things people “know” about the world are completely wrong. Hans Rosling is something of a hero of mine, and if he was still alive, I’m sure he would have contributed to bringing som sanity to the current situation. With his global influence, I think people would have listened.

Two of Hans Rosling’s former colleagues at Karolinska Instituet, professor Anna-Mia Ekström and professor Stefan Swartling Peterson, have gone through the data from UNICEF and UNAIDS, and come to the conclusion that least as many people have died as a result of the restrictions to fight covid as have died of covid directly.

And while almost all the people who have died of covid have died in rich countries and been old, the vast majority of people who have died of lockdown have died in poor countries and been young. This means that the number of years of life lost to lockdown is many times greater than the number of years of life lost to covid-19 (as I’ve written about on this blog previously).

Why don’t governments and their “expert” scientists get straight to the logical conclusion of their diktats and their recommendations by ordering everyone to commit suicide? That policy will then diminish, better than has any yet, the spread of Covid and Covid deaths.

Britain is not now a free country. Here’s the opening:

What do you call a country in which you are banned from seeing loved ones, from going to the pub, from even leaving your house without a ‘reasonable excuse’, and also banned from protesting against this unprecedented state of affairs? Britain in 2021, and much of 2020.

If you still doubt that Britain is besieged today by tyranny, take a look at this piece by Emily Hill. A slice:

So the prime minister had his chance to thank us for sacrificing our lives and surrendering our souls to the Covid lockdown by saying: ‘Congratulations! We did it! You may now pass go and work off the two trillion pounds of debt I ran up.’ But not a bit of it. Lockdown isn’t lifting. Sex is still illegal. As is holding hands. As is hugging. So we must tell him to go screw himself by refusing to desist from doing these things. We must go out and express as much human love as possible, until the forces of lockdown are defeated so decidedly that it’s lockdowns that are banned, not expressions of human love.

(DBx: I ask again: Why have so few classical liberal and libertarian voices been raised against this tyrannical madness? Why do so many once-stalwart voices for liberty and liberal civilization remain silent in the face of this ruthless assault on all that classical liberals and libertarians hold most dear?)

The term “hygiene socialism” was coined, not by me, but by David Hart. But whoever coined the term, hygiene socialism is rampant on college campuses.

Laura Perrins decries vaccine apartheid.

Speaking of vaccines, here’s the invaluable Phil Magness.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 249 of Thomas Sowell’s December 2008 column, “Freedom and the Left,” as this column is reprinted in Sowell’s 2010 collection, Dismantling America:

Most people on the left are not opposed to freedom. They are just in favor of all sorts of things that are incompatible with freedom.

Freedom ultimately means the right of others to do things that you do not approve of. Nazis were free to be Nazis under Hitler. It is only when you are able to do things that other people don’t approve that you are free.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 81 of Thomas Sowell’s 1993 collection, Is Reality Optional?:

Running left-wing movements has always been the prerogative of spoiled rich kids. This pattern goes all the way back to the days when an over-indulged and affluent young man named Karl Marx combined with another over-indulged youth from a wealthy family named Friedrich Engels to create the Communist ideology.

Is Bernie Sanders Working Undercover for White Supremacists?

(Don Boudreaux)

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My late, great colleague Walter Williams would have put the following point far more eloquently than I do in this letter to the Wall Street Journal:

Editor:

Suppose that a KKK Grand Wizard is caught on tape squawking out the following: “Compared to white workers, a larger portion of black workers are low-skilled. So companies that employ low-skilled workers give disproportionate help to blacks. These employers are helpin’ to raise the inferior race up to our level! To discourage this assistance to our inferiors, I propose that government punitively tax the employment of low-skilled workers!”

The predictable public reaction to this proposal would be revulsion. Properly so. This proposal would be dismissed as the poisonous fruit of hatred and ignorance.

So where’s the revulsion at Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-VT) proposal to punitively tax certain firms that employ low-skilled workers – that is, to punitively tax firms that employ workers currently earning less than $15 per hour (“Plan B for a $15 Minimum Wage,” March 1)?

Because wages are lower the lower are workers’ skills, and because a larger portion of black workers than white workers are low-skilled, Sen. Sanders’s proposal to punitively tax the employment of low-skilled workers amounts to a proposal to use the U.S. tax code to encourage labor-market discrimination against blacks.

Don’t black jobs matter? Where’s the outrage at Sanders’s proposal?

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

Single-Minded Obsessions are Irrational and Lethal

(Don Boudreaux)

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In my latest column for AIER I try my hand at writing fiction – yet fiction that is not very different from today’s reality. It’s a (very) short story of a woman who is single-mindedly obsessed with avoiding one particular danger. A slice:

Vicky refused ever again to ride in automobiles. And she admonished everyone she knew and had the slightest interest in also to avoid ever getting into cars. “Don’t you see?!” Vicky impatiently asked others. “You can die – die – in a car crash! And even if you don’t die, you can suffer injuries that will long reduce the quality of your life, perhaps for the rest of your days! These are facts! You mustn’t ignore them!”

One by one, Vicky’s friends stopped visiting and even calling and texting her. Although otherwise a charming and interesting woman, Vicky’s obsession with avoiding death or injury from automobiles became too much.

Even the great love of her life, her longtime boyfriend Will, in time broke up with her.

Will loved Vicky with the same fire that she loved him. And so at first he tolerated her insistence on walking or bicycling everywhere they went. But when Vicky would not let go of her insistence that he stop driving in a car to her place from his own – which was eight miles from Vicky’s apartment – he began to chafe. Still, he agreed to abide by her wish that, to visit her, he always ride his bicycle or take the bus.

But Vicky soon realized that buses are, like cars, motorized vehicles that can, and sometimes do, crash. “No more riding in buses, Will. I can’t bear the thought of you being killed or harmed in a bus crash. Please avoid buses, for me!”

Will was beside himself, torn between his love for Vicky and his need to live something close to a normal life. The last straw came when Vicky informed him that whenever he walks or rides his bike to her place, he must always stay at least six hundred feet away from any road on which cars drive. “That’s the minimum safe distance, my love. If you get within six hundred feet of a road, the chances are too high that you’ll be killed by an out-of-control car. And I can’t bear the thought of that tragedy.”

This latest demand from Vicky – combined with Will’s dawning recognition that Vicky’s mental health was severely compromised – prompted him, with a heavy heart, to break up with her. Yet as he drove his car back home from her place after he delivered the news, he felt strangely liberated, happy, and hopeful.

Vicky was devastated by the break-up, but her resolve to avoid ever again being affected by the horrors of automobile accidents was undiminished. Indeed, she soon comforted herself with the realization that Will didn’t deserve her. How, after all, could she possibly be happy with a man who was so unintelligent as to be indifferent to avoidable danger and death? She knew the facts, and one undeniable fact was that people are regularly killed or maimed by motorized vehicular traffic. In Vicky’s ideal world, there would be zero automobiles.