Russell Roberts's Blog, page 308

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Dan Hannan laments the destruction of the liberal order now in full swing. A slice:

“Free trade, the greatest blessing a government can bestow on a people, is in almost every country unpopular”, wrote Lord Macaulay in 1824. Since then, average global incomes have risen, at a conservative estimate, by 3,000 per cent – having previously barely sloped upwards at all. Globalisation and open markets have been miraculous poverty-busters. Take any measure you like: literacy, longevity, infant mortality, female education, calorie intake, height.

Yet, in thrall to our Palaeolithic instincts, we still refuse to accept it. We deny the evidence of rising prosperity; or else we tell ourselves that rising living standards come at a terrible cost, that society has become soulless and materialistic, that something is missing. Every protest movement against the modern liberal order – romanticism, existentialism, fascism, communism, religious fundamentalism – is a tortured cry from our inner caveman, yearning for the collectivism and authority of the kin-group.

As we haul ourselves from the pupa of lockdown, we find we are subtly transformed. There is more demand for authoritarian governments of both Left and Right. There is more protectionism, and thus more poverty. There is less tolerance of dissent. There is more identity politics – the ultimate form of collectivism, because it defines people, not as individuals, but by group.

Jeffrey Tucker sees signs warranting cautious optimism – but still, of course, he’s stunned, as am I, by what’s become of liberal civilization in less than a year.

. A slice:

A regime of constant testing, recurrent lockdowns and internal passports does not sound much like a return to normality. However, it does present boundless opportunities to promote the idea that the avoidance of disease is the only objective of a good society – life takes priority over liberty and the pursuit of happiness, rather than being held in balance with them. Once we accept the presence of widescale interventions, they will be very difficult to scale back, let alone eliminate. Airport security since 9/11 is a good model.

Barry Brownstein explores the how and why of governments’ creation of disease panic.

Suzie Halewood warns of the dangers of credulity in the face of numbers. A slice:

But why aren’t people digging through the data forensically? Why aren’t mainstream journalists asking about these numbers – real or imaginary? Where are the Woodward and Bernsteins? Are they too embroiled in the Westminster bubble to see outside it? Are they in fear of losing their jobs should those great bastions of morality and ethics Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon cancel them? Are they terrified of looking stupid in the face of conflicting ONS charts, excel spreadsheets and empirical data?

“New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is falling from grace at epic speed” – so begins James Bovard’s latest column at AIER. A slice:

A New Yorker profile, entitled “Andrew Cuomo, King of New York,” explained that Cuomo and his aides saw the battle over Covid policy as “between people who believe government can be a force for good and those who think otherwise.” For many liberals [DBx: Progressives] and much of the nation’s media, placing people under house arrest, padlocking schools, bankrupting business, and causing two million people to lose their jobs vindicated government as “a force for good.”

MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace declared that Cuomo is “everything Trump isn’t: honest, direct, brave.” Entertainment Weekly hailed Cuomo as “the hero that America never realized it needed until he was on our television screens every night.” As National Review recently noted, local reporters failed to ask questions on his nursing home edict “for months, as the governor held his much-praised daily press briefings about the pandemic. There were literally hundreds of hours of Cuomo press conferences in the first half of 2020 where not a single question was asked about nursing homes.”

Liz Wolfe wonders if voters will join the media in finally realizing how vile are Andrew Cuomo and Gavin Newsom.

Laura Dodsworth offers this photo-essay on masks.

For those of you who deny the Covid Derangement Syndrome is creating an Orwellian world, here’s a photo from Australia that you might wish to study.

British MP Charles Walker, writing in The Telegraph, describes the British government’s campaign to terrify people into compliance with Covid rules as shameless and cruel. A slice:

Suffering in one’s head matters. Knowingly creating that suffering strikes at the heart of the state’s own morality and our morality as lawmakers. It should be to our lasting shame that some of those struggling have taken their own life and many others have been severely damaged in ways that will shorten their lives. If “parity of esteem” between physical and mental health is to be anything more than just a jumble of words, the Government, Sage and all of its outriders need to be held to account for what, to many, seems a deliberate act of cruelty.

“Two-thirds of New York City’s Arts and Culture Jobs Are Gone” – in one year. (This job loss is not the result of creative destruction; it’s the result of destructive destruction – pointless, tyrannical, deranged, civilization-sledgehammering destruction.)

Freddie Sayers is rightly aghast at humanity’s sheepishness in the face of lockdown tyranny. A slice:

How did we come to be here? The political argument against lockdowns was lost, comprehensively and globally. The awkward-squad journalists who styled themselves as “lockdown sceptics” were systematically pilloried; the scientists who thought there were better ways were shut down. The campaign was effective and only made easier by the careless statements of the “sceptics” themselves.

No one now wants to hear arguments about Sweden, which — still now — poses an awkward counter-factual to lockdown, with its strikingly similar (although less bad) epidemic trajectory to the UK, or India with its partial herd immunity and mysteriously small death rate in comparison to ours; no one wants to admit the stubborn absence of any clear dataset showing that countries with more stringent restrictions performed better than those that avoided them.

Quotation of the Day..

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 282 of Albert Jay Nock’s 1943 essay “Liberalism, Properly So Called,” as it is printed in Liberty Fund’s 1991 collection of some of Nock’s essays – a collection titled The State of the Union: Essays in Social Criticism (Charles H. Hamilton, ed.):

Twelve years ago, when a government made up of professing Liberals proposed a large scale positive bureaucratic intervention to relieve distress, and by use of the taxing-power brought all citizens into enforced cooperation with it, Liberals were in favour of it. They regarded only the immediate end – the relief of distress – and not at all the nature of the means; and the means did actually serve that end, though in a most disorderly and wasteful fashion.

The true Liberal, the Liberal of the eighteenth century, would at once have looked beyond that end and asked the great primary question which finally judges, or should judge, all political action: “What type of social structure does this measure tend to produce? Does it tend to improve and reinforce the existing type, or to bring about a reversion to the primary militant type? Does it tend towards advance or retrogression, towards progress in civilisation or towards re-barbarisation?” Let us take the measure apart, and see.

Life – “Life” – Under Covid Derangement Syndrome

(Don Boudreaux)

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How can anyone look at this photo from a high school in Washington state and not immediately realize that society’s response to Covid-19 is deranged? That it’s derangedly disproportionate? How can a sane human being learn that healthy young people, who are at virtually no risk from Covid, are each enclosed in a pod while playing musical instruments, and not wretch at the absurdity and inhumanity of today’s sanitation insanity?

How can a decent person not worry, deeply, about how this experience is conditioning young people for the future? “Stuff yourself and your saxophone into a plastic pod, Alison, and play,” the student is commanded. “Your confinement in the pod is for the good of society!”

What will young Alison and her classmates not do in twenty or fifty year’s time when a commandant or commandantress points to some public good as a pretense for demanding complete obedience?

…..

I beg my many eloquent classical liberal and libertarian friends who have remained silent amidst this madness to get back in touch with your good sense – to remember your principles – and to be courageous. Please. Please break your silence against this civilization-destroying hysteria.

I will not name names, although I’ve many in my head. I cherish you all. I respect you all as scholars, as thinkers, as lecturers, as teachers, as writers, as (to use a popular term) “thought leaders.” I do. Truly I do. Many of you are dear, personal friends. But too many of you are not speaking out against this grotesque battering of liberty. You are keeping silent. Why?

Please. Look at the data on Covid-19 and on the lockdowns. Revisit history. Remember Hayek. Recall public choice. Use your good sense. Please speak out against this utter, inexplicable madness that is on the verge of destroying liberal civilization.

…..

I thank Phil Magness for alerting me to the news story in which appears the above horrifying photograph.

“Education” in America Today

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to a high-school junior who reads my blog. (Smart kid!)

Mr. J__ C__

Dear J__:

Thanks for your e-mail.

You correctly predict that I disagree with your teacher’s claim that (as you quote her) “America is the most racist, class structured society in all history.” I apologize, though, for being unable to grant your request that I tell you how you can best respond. Such a response is up to you. I’m sure that you’ll do an excellent job. Yet regardless of the contents of your response, offer it with respect, with politeness, and with an open-mind – and with courage.

Although I can’t tell you how to respond, I can recommend to you some sources of historical knowledge that I’ve found to be especially informative on this topic. For starters, read the slim Walter Williams volume – Race & Economics – that I mentioned in the blog post of mine that sparked your e-mail. It’s inexpensive and readily available.

I’m no historian, but if you have the interest and more time, I recommend that at some point you also study the following:

– Robert Higgs, Competition and Coercion: Blacks in the American Economy, 1865-1914 (revised edition, University of Chicago Press, 1980).

– Deirdre N. McCloskey, Bourgeois Equality (University of Chicago Press, 2016).

– Thomas Sowell, Ethnic America (Basic Books, 1984).

If I think of other sources – and I’m certain that I will – I’ll pass them along to you.

I leave you here with this observation from Lord Acton, the eminent British historian of the second half of the 19th century; it’s found on pages 589-590 of this volume:

America first established the idea that absolutism is wrong. Till then it had been inconvenient, injurious, a burden and a drawback to prosperity etc. It was a privilege to be free from it. But liberty was an acquired privilege, not a universal right. Aristotle had allowed absolute power; S. Augustine likewise. In the Middle Ages, the idea that the heterodox are equal, that rights belong to individuals, apart from their land, their faith, their colour, was not known…. Indeed, it would have overthrown every throne in Europe. It arose in America.

That this belief in individual rights arose in America only imperfectly is undeniable; we regret the imperfection. But equally undeniable, or so it seems to me, is the fact that before the American experiment “the idea that the heterodox are equal, that rights belong to individuals, apart from … their colour, was not known.” Surely we can take some pride in the reality that this idea “arose in America” – a reality that strikes me as being at odds with your teacher’s claim.

Good luck!

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

UPDATE: An e-mail from my colleague Dan Klein prompts me to wish that I’d been just a bit more subtle in using the quotation from Acton. To say, as Acton does, that the idea that rights belong to individuals arose in America seems not quite correct. This idea was certainly at the heart of the American revolution (which I suspect is what Acton had in mind). But it’s more accurate to say that this world-changing idea was birthed in Britain, with America nourishing it with greater, if not perfect, care and gusto.

Tyranny Is Always Initially Tolerated, Even Welcomed, By Its Victims

(Don Boudreaux)

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I’m honored that AIER produced this video version – narrated by Kate Wand – of my December 14, 2020, essay, “Tyranny During Its Reign Is Unrecognized by Its Victims.”

Being Reckless with Other People’s Lives

(Don Boudreaux)

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This economics-student correspondent of mine is determined to find justification for minimum wages:

Mr. A___:

You describe as “wise” Rep. Ro Khanna’s assertion that – as you put it – “businesses that can’t afford to pay at least $15 an hour shouldn’t be in business to begin with.”

I describe Rep. Khanna’s assertion as witless, and perhaps even as wicked. It’s also, as Christian Britschgi writes, remarkably cavalier.

Four years ago I did a blog post on the fallacy now spread by Rep. Khanna. And I could write a long paper simply listing additional weaknesses in Rep. Khanna’s ‘argument.’ But I’ll here mention only two.

First – and being a student of economics, Mr. A___, you should be aware of this reality – worker pay generally reflects worker productivity. Therefore, what Rep. Khanna’s position amounts to is a reckless disdain for businesses that employ workers whose skills do not yet allow them to produce at least $15 per hour worth of output. One would think that a tender-hearted Progressive such as Rep. Khanna would applaud businesses that provide jobs for low-skilled workers. But no. Rep. Khanna apparently believes that workers who aren’t capable of producing at least $15 per hour are unworthy of employment. (I don’t dare suppose that Rep. Khanna secretly applauds the fact that a higher minimum wage will further swell the ranks of the welfare-state’s clientele and, thus, increase his and his fellow Progressives’ political support.)

Second, workers – especially low-skilled workers – receive from their employers more than hourly wages. My late, great colleague Walter Williams, writing on pages 150-151 of his 2011 book, Race & Economics, explains:

It is important to note that most people acquire marketable skills by working at a “subnormal wage,” which amounts to paying to learn. For example, inexperienced doctors (interns), during their training, work for salaries that are a tiny fraction of what trained doctors earn. College students pass up considerable amounts of money in the form of tuition paid and income foregone in order to develop marketable skills. It is ironic, if not tragic, that low-skilled youths from poor families are denied an opportunity to get a similar start in life. This is exactly what happens when a high minimum wage forbids low-skilled workers to “pay” for job training in the form of a lower beginning wage.

Rep. Khanna seemingly wishes to deny job training to low-skilled workers. Do you share his wish?

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

Decrying Covid Propaganda

(Don Boudreaux)

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Speaking this week in the House of Commons, conservative MP Charles Walker rightly criticized the official propaganda meant to create in the British people an excessive fear of Covid-19.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Phil Magness recalls Anthony Fauci’s reckless fear-mongering, nearly 40 years ago, on AIDS. A slice:

The damage was already done though, as the media went to work stoking alarm about AIDS transmission through simple routine contacts. Hundreds of newspapers disseminated the distressing theory from Fauci’s article. Writing a few weeks later, conservative columnist Pat Buchanan enlisted Fauci as the centerpiece of a rebuttal against Health and Human Services Secretary Margaret Heckler, who told him “there is no evidence…that the general population is threatened by [AIDS].”

On July 14, both Buchanan’s column and its excerpt of Fauci’s article were entered into the congressional record along with moralizing commentary that assigned blame for the disease to homosexual establishments and gatherings. Unfounded fears of transmission risk through simple contact, and accompanying social ostracization of the disease’s victims, became one of the most notorious and harmful missteps of the entire AIDS crisis.

It might be tempting to chalk Fauci’s error up to the scientific uncertainties of a novel disease. Medicine advances by investigating all plausible theories, subjecting them to testing, and ruling out those that lack evidence. In this case however, the more likely candidate was scientific negligence and unwarranted alarmist speculation.

Journalist Randy Shilts documented the incident in his classic early history of the AIDS crisis, And the Band Played On. Immunologist Arye Rubinstein had already offered a more plausible explanation for the infant case, which even cursory examination would verify: the disease transmitted from the mother to the baby during pregnancy. As Shilts explains, “Upon investigation, Rubinstein learned that Anthony Fauci had not bothered to read his paper.” The NIH scientist instead relied on second-hand information from another researcher to indulge in open-ended speculation (for a longer excerpt of Shilts, see David Henderson’s post on Fauci’s early career).

And here’s David Harsanyi on Fauci. Three slices:

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the chief pandemic adviser to President Joe Biden, is a bureaucrat. He’s not our parent, or our personal physician, or a shaman, or our life coach.
…..

This story of American ineptitude in the face of a pandemic, popular among statists, pessimists, and left-wingers pining for federalized control over states, is a myth. The United States has performed just as well as most Western nations, where fatality rates are between 100 and 190 per 100,000, with variations most likely due to density, climate, inherent social behavior, or, one imagines, reasons yet to be figured out. This is true before we even begin taking into consideration the disparity in ways nations count fatalities, the meticulousness with which they count them, or the transparency with which they report them.

…..

I’m sorry the Constitution is inhibiting Fauci’s work, but he is a public-health official. His job is to relay information to the public, not to threaten doom, or coax or trick us into doing things. Yet even now, despite the immensely promising results of the vaccination program (the United States, incidentally, easily outperforms the European Union’s “unified approach”), Fauci is underplaying the effectiveness of the vaccine for the same reasons, one suspects, that he misled us about herd immunity. Even when most American are immunized, Fauci says, we won’t be back to “normal” until new infections drop “to a baseline that’s so low, it is virtually no threat.”

This is a disqualifying statement — an insane standard that no free society would ever indulge. For Fauci, herd immunity is effectively 99 percent.

Perhaps it’s understandable that an immunologist such as Fauci, who will continue to make more money than any other official in the United States government through all of this, isn’t very alarmed about the economic, social, and constitutional tradeoffs that accompany his approach. For a year, any criticism of Fauci was immediately slotted into the alleged debate between Donald Trump vs. “science.” But it’s Fauci’s technocratic instincts, not science, that makes him more likely to praise Chicom’s lackeys at the World Health Organization than the resilience of the United States.

Here’s the Babylon Bee trying to satirize Fauci – but it’s ultimately impossible, as this man (like so much else about Covid Derangement Syndrome) has become self-satirizing. (Relatedly, see this tweet from Derek Thompson, and also this short piece by Ron Bailey.)

Speaking of impossible-to-satirize, here’s Alexander McKibbin on Lord Protector Boris’s new scheme to somewhat loosen the thumbscrews that his subjects have worn for so long now.

Maria McFadden Maffucci reports, in National Review, on New York strongman Andrew Cuomo’s other coronavirus victims.

Glen Bishop wonders why the British ignore Florida.

My, my, but isn’t the mysteriously admired-by-many Neil Ferguson tetchy.

How can any people with even the slightest pretense to being freedom-loving have ever tolerated a government issuing such totalitarian diktats? A slice:

I’m not sure how to break this to those clever chaps in the bunker at No 10, but allowing us to have a walk or even a coffee on a bench “with one person outside your household” from March 8 will not strike many as a hugely exciting relaxation of this interminable lockdown.

A quick shufty in any park, wood or country lane over the weekend would have revealed that millions of Britons had already weighed up the risk of breaching the guidelines and decided that, on balance, they’d rather have an illicit dog walk with “one person outside your household” (which used to be called “a friend”) than go mad.

I applaud this new encouragement of peaceful violations of the U.K.’s tyrannical lockdown diktats. A slice:

Here at Lockdown? What Lockdown? we know all too well what the mental and societal costs of these nonsensical lockdowns have amounted to and, therefore, we want to celebrate those enterprising individuals who have done anything from found the courage to have dinner with their “bubble”, or identified little loopholes in the regulations, right through to having hosted a massive party, or an illegal rave, all in the name of attempting to reclaim a sense of normality and because you, like us, believe that waiting for June 21st is the true definition of covidiocy.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 298 the great Frank Chodorov’s September 1945 essay “George Mason of Virginia” as this essay is reprinted in Liberty Fund’s splendid 1980 collection, Fugitive Essays, of Chodorov’s writings, edited by Chuck Hamilton:

To be sure, the question of rights – or natural rights, as it was called – had been the subject matter of philosophic speculation for several centuries before America became a political entity, and it had also been the battle cry of a few rebellious undertakings in Europe; but never and nowhere was its content equivalent to that which it attained in the freak republic carved out of the western wilderness. Here it became a formula for the guidance of organized life, a standard by which to measure the correctness of political institutions. It was a principle, not a handout.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 10 of my late, great colleague Walter Williams’s 2011 book, Race & Economics:

The ability to prevent a less-preferred worker from accepting a lower wage is one of the most effective tools in the arsenal of racists everywhere.

DBx: Yes.

Racists who used minimum wages as a means of denying economic opportunity to others had, despite their vile motives, a correct understanding of economics. Well-intentioned people today who support minimum wages as a means of helping poor workers score better than racists on the ethical front, but worse than racists on the economic-understanding front. Minimum-wage statutes still, as always, impose disproportionate harm on society’s most vulnerable individuals.