Russell Roberts's Blog, page 330
January 9, 2021
Some Non-Covid Links
The Trump-Hawley-Cruz insurrection against constitutional government will be an indelible stain on the nation. They, however, will not be so permanent. In 14 days, one of them will be removed from office by the constitutional processes he neither fathoms nor favors. It will take longer to scrub the other two from public life. Until that hygienic outcome is accomplished, from this day forward, everything they say or do or advocate should be disregarded as patent attempts to distract attention from the lurid fact of what they have become. Each will wear a scarlet “S” as a seditionist.
Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel correctly blames Trump for making America less great. Here’s her conclusion:
The pity is that Mr. Trump’s conflagration will mostly burn the Americans he went to Washington to help. They will bear the higher taxes, the higher costs of regulation, the higher unemployment, the loss of freedoms. America became less great this week. And that’s fully on the guy at the top.
“I do whine,” Trump said on CNN in August 2015, “because I want to win and I’m not happy about not winning and I am a whiner and I keep whining and whining until I win.” His postelection whining spree is a testament to his consistency.
So while power didn’t corrupt Trump, Trump has vindicated [Lord] Acton’s larger point about how power invites corruption in others. Corruption means more than bribery and self-aggrandizement; it means rot, decay, the erosion of standards and principles and their replacement with baser motives.
Richard Ebeling writes on Carl Menger and the sesquicentennial founding of the Austrian school.
My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy has some wishes for the New Year. A slice:
The negative consequences of this unchecked spending will be huge. The Congressional Budget Office, for instance, warned that an extension of unemployment bonuses and benefits creates disincentives to work and a slowdown of the economy. This extra spending also produces an ungodly level of debt, which academic research shows will ultimately slow economic growth. This means that future generations will both live in a slower-growth environment and face higher taxes to pay for today’s obscene spending. And this doesn’t even address the cultural distortions created by programs designed to pay people not to work.
My Mercatus Center colleague, and GMU Econ alum, Matt Mitchell proposes an agenda for equal liberty. A slice:
Thanks to their resources and political organization, established firms have outsized influence over regulators and often gain the upper hand over consumers or public interest advocates. Though this phenomenon is well documented, some of the best evidence comes from the behavior of industry insiders themselves.
Go to any state capital in which occupational licensure is being debated. Nine times out of 10, those who push for the regulation are industry leaders — usually protecting their own positions — not consumer advocates. Licensure is ripe for reform. The research is clear that it raises prices, locks vulnerable people out of jobs and does little-to-nothing to increase service quality or safety.
Arnold Kling talks with Sebastian Stodolak about trends in academic economics.
Some Covid Links
Or take the hysterical criticism levelled at the authors of the lockdown-questioning Great Barrington Declaration, and lockdown-sceptical individuals, such as Sunetra Gupta, a professor of theoretical epidemiology at the University of Oxford University. They have been personally and professionally maligned, and, more troubling still, their critics want them removed from the public sphere. This has all the characteristics of a modern high-tech witch-hunt.
And as if to supply an ideal reason for heightened skepticism of what our overlords tell us about Covid-19, we get this new report from, of all places, the New York Times. Here are the opening paragraphs:
Reports of a highly contagious new variant in the United States, published on Friday by multiple news outlets, are based on speculative statements made by Dr. Deborah Birx and are inaccurate, according to several government officials.
The erroneous report originated at a recent meeting where Dr. Birx, a member of the White House coronavirus task force, presented graphs of the escalating cases in the country. She suggested to other members of the task force that a new, more transmissible variant originating in the U.S. might explain the surge, as another variant did in Britain.
Emily Hill decries the “totalitarian hell” created by the Covid-19 lockdowns. Here’s her conclusion, in which she rightly reminds us of just how vile is Neil Ferguson:
‘I think people’s sense of what is possible in terms of control changed quite dramatically between January and March’, Professor Neil Ferguson told The Times on Christmas Day. Our role in the response really began on 13 March, the article notes, when ‘[Ferguson], SAGE and Sir Patrick [Vallance] decided that it was past time the public were brought into the debate properly. Over that weekend, he and his colleagues prepared a paper outlining their projections for the pandemic in different scenarios, and organised a press conference. They finished writing the paper an hour before they presented it.’
How exactly does terrifying us out of our wits in mid-March, so we demanded to be locked down later that month, constitute bringing us ‘into the debate properly’? The fact that the government’s New and Emerging Virus Threats Advisory Group committee includes a consultant sociologist and an academic psychologist suggests the government is still trying to shape our thoughts. But while at this point there seems no choice but to let them control everything we do, we cannot let them control what we think. As the Soviets knew, the most efficient totalitarian regimes on this earth have never been able to control what you get up to in the privacy of your own head.
“Once you’ve locked down once – a measure thought unthinkable a year ago – it’s that bit easier the next time” – so reads the intro to Robert Taylor’s “Lockdown supporters must be ready for the same medicine every winter.” A slice:
‘Pah!’ people might say. Influenza shinfluenza. But, hold on. Influenza is deadly. Before this year it routinely killed around 20,000 people each winter in the UK – sometimes far more. As I know from ghastly experience, influenza can develop, like Covid, into pneumonia, hospital admission and oxygen up your nose. All too often, it means intensive care, ventilators and, tragically, death. As recently as the year 2000, more than 56,000 people died from influenza or pneumonia in England alone.
Now, surely, no one would classify thousands of deaths from influenza as any less awful than thousands of deaths from Covid. It therefore follows that if we are prepared to lock down to protect the vulnerable from one virus that kills, we must do so to protect them from the other. Every winter. Isn’t that just logical and humane?
And as if to support Robert Taylor’s point that humanity has been broken in, like a stupid mule, for further lockdowns, the chief economist for the OECD says that, to quote her, “We probably have another six to nine or twelve months of this ahead of us.” (What say all of you who, eager to criticize the Great Barrington Declaration when it was released in early October, declared with ridicule and great certitude that lockdowns were a thing of the past – that the authors of the GBD were battling a straw man? Another question: Given all the lies that pro-lockdown government officials and other establishment elites have spewed over the past year, why should we trust that even one year from now the threat of lockdowns will disappear?)
Zach Weissmueller reports that Californians are revolting against the lockdowns. (Let’s hope that he’s correct. Let’s further hope that this resistance will be effective in putting an end to this totalitarian madness. I, alas, am not optimistic.) A slice:
“Making someone wear a mask or close their business has absolutely nothing to do with someone that is overweight, diabetic, unhealthy heart-wise, possibly cancer going through treatments with a weak immune system, then going out into public and putting themselves at risk. That wasn’t my fault and nothing to do with me,” says [Riverside County, CA, sheriff Chad] Bianco. “But no one wants to take personal responsibility. It’s better if you blame someone else.”
There is little evidence that in-person dining, particularly outdoors, is a major source of COVID-19 spread, a fact that state health director Mark Ghaly appeared to admit in a December 8 press briefing.
The ban “really has to do with keeping people at home, not a comment on the relative safety of outdoor dining,” said Ghaly.
Research out of New York City found that 74 percent of COVID spread happens in households.
Rose, who once worked as an emergency room nurse, says that the responsibility for stopping the spread of COVID to the vulnerable doesn’t rest with law enforcement or business owners.
“Every individual has to keep and maintain the amount of risk they’re willing to assume. And that’s inherent to the individual,” says [restaurant owner Diego] Rose.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 125 of the 19th-century American jurist James Coolidge Carter’s posthumously published and brilliant, yet unfortunately neglected, 1907 volume, Law: Its Origin, Growth and Function:
When man made his first appearance upon earth, he did not wait until some lawgiver appeared to tell him how he must act.
DBx: This undeniable truth is implicitly denied by most people today. Pundits, professors, politicians, and pedestrians of nearly all ideological and political stripes suppose that each individual is either an inert blob or a chaotic fool unless and until the state injects him or her with the appropriate fuel – and gives to him or her detailed instructions for how – to act.
January 8, 2021
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from pages 306 of Philipp Blom’s 2010 book, A Wicked Company:
Every dictatorship needs transcendence, the promise of a better tomorrow – a perfect beyond, a heaven, a paradise…. After all, only the quasi-religious adherence to a great ideal hovering just out of reach and demanding great sacrifices can justify the cruelties and injustices of today.
DBx: All who have thirsted for authoritarian, top-down command of nearly every aspect of life were given a gift in 2020: Covid-19. With much of humanity scared irrationally out of its wits by fears of Covid, we are now in the iron grip of hygiene socialism. Our rulers promise us salvation from death-by-Covid in return for strict obedience to their diktats.
This paradise to which we are headed carries a ghastly price. And it is a price that we will pay not only today, but also – indeed, especially – when we sheep are more fully impounded in our hygiene paradise.
Some Covid Links
David Henderson compares the performance of markets to that of governments in 2020. Two slices:
One of the biggest government mess-ups was state and local government lockdowns of their economies. Although this has not been well publicized, epidemiologists themselves, before the pandemic, seemed to have a consensus that lockdowns were a bad idea. In a September 2019 report from the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, for instance, the authors stated:
In the context of a high-impact respiratory pathogen, quarantine may be the least likely NPI [nonpharmaceutical intervention] to be effective in controlling the spread due to high transmissibility. To implement effective quarantine measures, it would need to be possible to accurately evaluate an individual’s exposure, which would be difficult to do for a respiratory pathogen because of the ease of widespread transmission from infected individuals.
Yet massive quarantines were the main policy implemented by state and local governments.
…..
And how have the lockdowns worked? Remember that the original purpose of the lockdowns was to “flatten the curve.” This strategy was based on two ideas. The first was that it was important to reduce the number of people needing to go to hospitals so that the hospitals would not be overwhelmed. The second was that if disease and death were postponed, they might be postponed indefinitely, because we would either find cures or get effective vaccines.
Yet a look at the evidence as of January 4 gives little basis for the view that lockdowns reduced deaths. It’s true that the COVID-19 death rate for locked-down California, at 675 per million residents, is well below the 988 and 1,029 for, respectively, Texas and Florida, which are relatively open. But the death rates for locked-down Michigan, New York, and New Jersey, at 1,341, 1,980, and 2,180 respectively, are well above the rates for Texas and Florida. To be sure, a more careful analysis that sifts through the data and accounts for factors other than lockdown—maybe climate matters—is needed. But on their face, the data give cold comfort.
Moreover, what if a more careful analysis did show that lockdowns prevented COVID-19 deaths? That’s not a slam-dunk case for lockdowns because the costs of lockdowns are huge. They are shattering the careers and livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of restaurant workers, haircutters, gymnasium workers, and others. One might argue that the sacrifice is worth it, but isn’t it easier for vulnerable people, most of whom are old and have co-morbidities, to stay home? They would have to stay home anyway, so why insist that others who are younger and have fewer co-morbidities also stay home?
In their book The Price of Panic: How the Tyranny of Experts Turned a Pandemic into a Catastrophe, Jay Richards, William Briggs, and Douglas Axe correctly explain that during the peak of the lockdowns, the public supported criminalization of low-risk human activities such as walking in the park, family visits, shopping at an open-air fish market, and driving. They report:
“This was not a top-down dictatorship imposed on a resistant public. Polls showed that most Americans supported the lockdowns. If anything, we pushed for them. Neighbors snitched on small church groups with gusto. New Jersey posted a form on its website to make it easy to turn your neighbors in to the authorities. In late March, Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti said that ‘snitches’ in his city would ‘get rewards.’”
Who are the Tommies stirring irrational fears throughout the pandemic? We are responsible for our decisions, but we can be primed for irrational behavior as in the Twilight Zone episode.
But asserting that a statistically mediocre viral strain, “identified” by made-up tests never corroborated or intended for diagnosis, is a ravaging scourge so lethal, that it justifies turning the world into a penal colony while economic armageddon and educational apocalypse contend for being the greatest threat, would not have made it past a first reading for a B-grade thriller in the 70’s.
So we must just beware that we not get waylaid debating only the grand currents of change. This is so jolting because of how Monty-Pythonesque it is by comparison. How have we so blithely taken seriously the blatantly ludicrous (and I’m not sure we can point to a past precedent where utter indifference to what we actually statistically see to be the case held sway like this)? It would be riotously ironic as a position if it weren’t so devastatingly tragic in outcomes.
So let’s please keep debunking and never stop. Yes, agreed it may be a shout in the hurricane. And fully agreed it’s heroic, and perhaps heroically futile in the short run. But in the larger stream of history, that debunking is needed.
We cannot allow a smidge of respectability for these crimes to make it onto the ledger.
Edward Chancellor is correct: 2020 really was a year of extraordinary popular delusion. A slice:
According to the Brookings Institution, polls overstate the share of Covid-19 deaths among younger people (those aged under 25) by 800-fold. The public also appear to believe that many more coronavirus cases end up in hospital than is the case. Virus deaths as a share of the population are similarly skewed in the public mind. An August UK poll found that respondents believed that some 6%-7% of the British population had already died from the coronavirus, roughly 100 times greater than actual fatalities. Psychologists ascribe the exaggerated fears unleashed by the pandemic to “salience bias” and “emotional innumeracy”.
During manias people have trouble absorbing information that doesn’t fit with their prior beliefs. Dissonant facts are suppressed. Non-believers or sceptics are savaged. Scientists who challenged the consensus beliefs on Covid-19 have been pilloried. After epidemiologist John Ioannidis of Stanford disputed Imperial’s doom-laden forecast, his financial motives were questioned and a rumour circulated on the internet that his aged mother had died of Covid. Likewise, the Nobel laureate biophysicist Michael Levitt was disinvited from an academic conference for expressing a non-consensus view on coronavirus risk.
I want to say now that should another virus hit these shores and I am older and more vulnerable than I am now, that I do not expect everyone else to put their lives, jobs, education and way of life on hold for my precious health because I am the most special diamond in all the land. To expect this would selfish indeed.
The boomers demanded that the government use the ferocious power of the state to cancel exams, cancel Christmas, criminalise playdates between children, to criminalise children having a birthday party, and to cause mass employment to protect them from a virus that has a mortality rate of less than 1 per cent.
Those who support the Covid-Fascist state and all its immense destruction are doing something that is evil.
Douglas Murray rightly denounces attempts to censor critics of Covid lockdowns. A slice:
Throughout the Covid crisis the WHO has repeatedly been shown to be untrustworthy, under-informed and politicised to an extent which would shock anybody not previously aware of their existence. It was the WHO, for example, that said some while back that asymptomatic spread of the virus is very rare; other authorities, including the CDC and the UK government, have said that it is in fact responsible for a large number of infections. Back in the spring US health authorities stated that masks don’t reduce transmission and should not be worn, something that would get a content creator removed from YouTube only weeks later.
The only answer is that there should be as wide a debate as possible. This is not just a principle that has seen us through in the past, but one which has never been more urgent.
(Note: I – Don Boudreaux – bemoan many of the contents decisions made by private companies such as Facebook and Twitter. And I applaud any and all persons who speak out against poor decisions made by these companies. But I emphatically oppose any attempt to use government to prescribe or proscribe the contents decisions made by such companies. Such a ‘cure’ would be far, far worse than the disease.)
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 186 of Barbara Crossette’s 2000 paper “Culture, Gender, and Human Rights,” which is chapter 13 in Culture Matters, Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington, eds. (2000):
Special interest groups whose principal goals are not necessarily the improvement of human rights have learned to manipulate the media and legislatures by championing causes in one-dimensional terms. In an age of information overload, a heart-rending story may not always be checked too carefully.
January 7, 2021
Saying Goodbye to Cafe Hayek Patron Mr. H
Here’s a letter to someone unhappy with what he calls my “heartlessness in the middle of a historical catastrophe”:
Mr. H___:
You write that I have “a monotonous Covid obsession” and that, unless I stop, you will quit reading my blog.
I regret that I’ll lose you as a reader, for I will not stop pushing back against the Covid-19 madness.
Tamping down the current derangement is the most pressing challenge facing humanity today. I believe that this effort is the most important one to which I have ever, and will ever, contribute. Liberal civilization – the open society – itself is threatened by what my friend David Hart calls “hygiene socialism.” This hubris is a mix of several insane dogmas. Here are only three.
Dogma 1: The spread of an infectious pathogen once on the loose in a globalized world can be, and must be, successfully halted until the arrival of a vaccine. Such a halting, the dogmatists devoutly believe, will happen if we humans alter our behaviors with sufficient discipline and in unquestioning obedience to public-health experts.
Dogma 2: Protection from the pathogen du juor – today, SARS-CoV-2 – is life’s be-all and end-all. Every other goal is either to be ignored or severely discounted if pursuit of that goal is alleged – if only on the flimsiest of evidence or even on mere conjecture – to possibly interfere with humanity’s new Great Purpose, which is reducing as much as is physically possible the risk of exposure to the pathogen. Dying of the likes of cancer, suicide, drug overdose, or poverty is sad but acceptable; dying of Covid-19, however, is an unspeakable tragedy and utterly unacceptable. And wishing simply to enjoy life at the risk of exposure to the virus is the height of suicidal irrationality and homicidal evil.
Dogma 3: Concern for freedom is not merely foolish but downright intolerable if our rulers tell us that we can reduce our risk of exposure to the coronavirus by giving up more of our freedom. All dissent from efforts that are said to promote the Great Purpose must be ignored and perhaps even forcibly quashed. All for the greater good, you see.
As is true of all human experience with governments wielding unlimited, arbitrary power, we little folk are assured that our rulers are shepherding us into paradise. And our rulers have legions of hangers-on and apologists who devoutly believe in both the reality of the promised paradise and in our rulers’ goodness and god-like ability to guide us there if we obey.
Humanity – now in the throes of a deranged, out-of-proportion fear of a somewhat-more-dangerous-than-normal virus (and one that, mercifully, reserves its dangers overwhelmingly for the very elderly) – is collectively agreeing to enslave itself to those persons who promise a paradise of hygiene.
Unless this madness stops, what really awaits us all is a hell of horrors.
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
On the Role of Ideas
In this eighth installment of the Mercatus Center series “Ask Us Anything” about Adam Smith, I discuss the central role of ideas. (As always, I thank my Mercatus Center colleague Matt Beal for producing these videos and inviting me to appear in them.)
Some Covid Links
I understand the CCP’s role in manifesting corona madness more than almost anyone, having been one of the few journalists who has reported extensively on this issue. Yes, China is to blame for allegedly allowing the virus to escape from their laboratories, but China is not to blame for our destructive, continuing response to the virus. But for a select few states, the American worker has been absolutely crushed under the weight of the boot of his own government. There are 30 million small businesses in the United States, and many of them are on their last legs, because of policies that have nothing to do with China, and everything to do with the politicians in this country that have revealed themselves as power-drunk aspiring tyrants.
The Chinese Communist Party is not responsible for Gavin Newsom, Andrew Cuomo, Mike Dewine, JB Pritzker, Muriel Bowser, Phil Murphy, & countless others on all levels of government imprisoning their own citizens in their homes on December 30th of 2020. Simply put, the expiration date for the “China did this!” rallying cry occurred many months ago.
For those of you who deny that Covid-19 lockdowns are tyrannical, Charles Hymas has a report from Britain that you might wish to consult. (This tyranny is the new world order now being recklessly ushered in by those who are infected with Covid Derangement Syndrome.)
Brendan O’Neill properly decries the censorious war on lockdown skeptics. A slice:
There’s a great deal of scapegoating going on here. Britain has been in and out of lockdown for nearly a year and the virus continues to spread. Some in the pro-lockdown lobby are looking for people to blame for the failure of the policy they themselves argued for and supported. And they have landed upon sceptics. Just as eccentric elderly women were held responsible for inclement weather and crop failures in pre-modern times — and often burnt as witches — so sceptical voices are treated as the devils of our time, making Covid worse, causing people to die.
Covid is real. Hospitalisations are rising. Many people are dying. But that does not mean we should suspend public debate about what works and what doesn’t work. On the contrary, in times of crisis we need more discussion, not less. And in times of stifling conformism, such as we have now, we need more heresy.
Laura Perrins offers more wisdom on the lockdown madness. A slice:
If your worldview is that there is no limit on government power, that government is God, and that it can and morally must do everything in its power to stop people dying, then it follows naturally that any failure to take action, even in the form of a draconian Chinese lockdown, is a moral wrong.
It doesn’t matter what the threat to life is: Terrorism, invasions from a foreign enemy are treated the same as natural disasters like a virus or a hurricane. Government, the State is God. It can do what it wants and it MUST act.
However, if you are a conservative, and your worldview is that governments have enough power, thank you very much, that they should be limited in their exercise of power because it is so often abused, then taking any action against a threat to life, especially in the form of a virus, must be examined.
Secondly, that examination will involve asking the following: Will the action taken 1) be effective 2) be proportionate to any outcome achieved 3) will the inevitable negative consequences both foreseeable and unforeseeable be worth the government action and 4) is it in keeping with our culture and values? In other words, is it moral and ethical?
Pathologist John Lee is interviewed about Covid and Covid testing.
Stacey Rudin wants to know what’s up with the Great Reset. A slice:
Scaring people into their homes, making them fear their own family and friends, preying on their vulnerabilities, shattering their social existences— especially when you knowingly do this in hopes of making it permanent — is just about as bad as human behavior gets.
2006 WHO report on NPIs during influenza pandemics:
– Mass quarantines (i.e. lockdowns) are ineffective, a poor use of resources, and socially disruptive.
– Encourage social distancing, handwashing, and personal hygiene.
– Discourage people from traveling to infected areas, but travel bans are impractical and should not be used.
– Encourage mask use based on high-risk situations, but masks should NOT be mandatory.
So please tell me again: what exactly changed between 2006 and 2020 that rendered these perfectly sensible and evidence-backed findings obsolete?
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 292 of Thomas Sowell’s 2000 autobiography, A Personal Odyssey:
Facts simply do not seem to matter to many in the media, once they have gotten a stereotype fixed in their minds.
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