Russell Roberts's Blog, page 331

A Sober Look at Covid Claims

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

Here’s a letter to a regular and much-respected correspondent:

Mr. K___:

Thanks for this e-mail:

Los Angeles is running out of oxygen for patients as covid hospitalizations hit record highs nationwide.

States in West and South have highest shares of residents hospitalized as Los Angeles hospitals turn away ambulances.

Even if we overlook the relevant reality that being hospitalized with covid differs from being hospitalized for covid – and that hospitals have a financial interest in classifying as many patients as possible as being infected with Covid – what are we to make of the facts that you report?

Unless all states have the same share of residents hospitalized, some states will at any time necessarily “have [the] highest share of residents hospitalized.” And it is not now, nor would it ever be, surprising that such states are in the same region. So the first fact reported in your second paragraph tells us nothing of any relevance.

The only relevant set of facts reported in your e-mail is of the crunch on hospital resources in Los Angeles. But what does it mean?

Because southern California has suffered some of the harshest lockdowns in the U.S., one plausible conclusion to draw from today’s crunch on hospital resources in L.A. is that lockdowns do not reduce the demand for medical resources and might even increase this demand.

An additional plausible conclusion – consistent with the first – is that some of California’s pre-Covid policies have contributed to rendering that state’s health-care resources inadequate. As reported in today’s Wall Street Journal,

The problem is worse in California in part because its hospitals were ailing before the virus hit. Dozens of hospitals in low-income areas have closed over the past two decades amid financial distress. California has the fewest hospital beds per capita of any state save Oregon and Washington, yet it has many more low-income patients with chronic illnesses.

Blame California’s Medicaid program, which manages to be both too large and miserly. It compensates providers at about half the rate of Medicare and among the lowest rates in the country.

When government seizes from the market the responsibility for allocating resources, the results are nearly always poor, and sometimes calamitous. Making matters worse is the habit of politicians and the media to falsely blame these bad outcomes on what remains of market forces – and then to use these bad outcomes as excuses for yet further government control over people’s lives, with Covid lockdowns being the most draconian of late.

Sincerely,

Don

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

Jeffrey Tucker is deeply despondent about the damage that Covid Derangement Syndrome has done, and continues to do, to civilization. I share his despondency. A slice:

Sheer cowardice explains most of the dearth of dissent. It’s easy to forget how cravenly careerist people become when they are afraid. Most people would rather lie or be silent than risk facing disapproval of friends and colleagues. Cancel culture makes this worse. Doctors who dare talk about natural immunities or the talisman of masks and distancing find themselves investigated by medical boards. Academics who speak out are accused of encouraging superspreaders, blasted by colleagues including students. It’s way beyond witch hunts at this point. As a result, you can easily get the impression that everyone agrees with the desperate need to dismantle civilization as we know it.

Also justifiably pessimistic about the lockdown-distorted future of humanity is Laura Perrins. A slice:

Every day, on the airwaves, in the newspapers and on social media, people famous and not famous get more and more bloodthirsty for harsher lockdowns. Communism is the new value system, and I have to say I did not see this coming. From people at the Adam Smith Institute who describe themselves as ‘neo-liberal’, extolling the virtues of communist lockdowns to columnists at the Daily Mail the thirst is for more and more power over your neighbour.

It is no longer love thy neighbour: it is crush your neighbour, judge your neighbour, snitch on your neighbour. And we are told this is all for the neighbour’s own good. I don’t think so.

Newcastle University philosopher Sinéad Murphy writes wisely about Covid, lockdowns, and cynicism. A slice:

Cynicism is the refusal, or the inability, to believe. We lockdown sceptics, for this reason, though we may be labelled as cynics by our moralistic opponents, are in fact not cynical. We believe in freedom, dignity, reason, truth, joy, and many other human possibilities. We believe. Neither are the lockdown zealots cynical. They too believe, in the primacy of health and safety, in the threat posed by the virus, in the need to sacrifice individual rights for the common good, and other events and values. The argument on both sides is populated by believers, many of whom may have surprised themselves and us. Before the Covid events of this year, we may never have felt ourselves to have the convictions on which we have recently relied upon and acted. But we clearly did have those convictions; it is just that we lived with them in more or less peace and were not required to make urgent appeal to them on a daily basis.

Phil Magness asks if governments in the United States should have responded to Covid-19 more like Australia, New Zealand, and some other Pacific countries did. A slice:

In practice, the five Pacific “success stories” may have similar results thus far in limiting outbreaks. But they also employed five completely different policy responses to the virus. One would not know this by reading the remarks of Fauci or the many commentators who invoke these countries, only to stress the supposed propriety of locking down again. Although the Oxford Stringency Index remains a deeply imperfect measure of lockdown severity, it nonetheless captures the extreme policy variation in the Pacific “success stories” when compared to the United States.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Andy Pudzer decries the destruction of small businesses caused by Covid lockdowns. A slice:

The latest lockdowns across the country will be deadly for the small businesses that have endured the pandemic this far. While there are no official numbers yet, business data show significant losses. Yelp’s Local Economic Impact Report found that, from March 1 through Aug. 31, nearly 100,000 businesses listed on Yelp had closed permanently due to the pandemic, an average of more than 500 a day.

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: “Protectionism echoes Luddism”

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

In my column for the March 23rd, 2011, edition of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review I wrote of the similarities between protectionism and Luddism. You can read my column beneath the fold.

(more…)

Some Links

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

Arnold Kling writes perceptively and wisely about libertarianism and populism. A slice:

People who trust themselves will

1. Prefer to make their own decisions, rather than have “officials” make decisions for them.

2. Prefer not to make decisions for others.

I see populism as failing to embrace (2). But if you do not embrace (2), then you cannot live by (1). The difference between populists and elitists is about who gets to make decisions for others. For progressive elitists, it is experts, by which they mean people who think like themselves. For populists, it is popular will, by which they mean people who think like themselves.

Art Carden calls for a rollback of border socialism.

Richard Rahn predicts a return of significant inflation.

Pierre Lemieux reminds us that protective tariffs are punitive taxes on fellow citizens.

George Will hopes that the U.S. Supreme Court follows the wise counsel of the Institute for Justice and restores Constitutional protections for economic liberty.

Glenn Garvin likes Mr. Mayor.

Fiona Harrigan decries Hollywood’s ignorant and illiberal closed-mindedness.

Did Michael Strain lowball upward mobility in America?

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from pages 83-84 of my late, great colleague Walter Williams’s 2010 autobiography, Up From the Projects:

As a professor, I have never used my class for proselytizing students, as so many professors do. I do think that’s academic dishonesty. Personally, I want students to share my conviction that personal liberty, along with free markets, is morally superior to other forms of human organization. The most effective means of getting them to share it is to give them the tools to be rigorous, tough-minded thinkers.

DBx: Walter is correct both ethically and empirically.

The purpose of education is to teach students to be better thinkers. But today increasing numbers of people – especially many so-called “educators” – believe that the purpose of education is to stoke particular sorts of feelings.

‘Feeling’ is easy; it’s done expertly by toddlers. Yet ‘feeling’ is also human. And so it’s true that we want ourselves and others to have appropriate feelings – to have an appropriate set of what Adam Smith called “moral sentiments.” Formal education is not and will never be a chief source of appropriate moral sentiments. Formal education can be, however, a source of knowledge and mental habits that discipline our thinking in ways that assist us in improving the application of our moral sentiments to the outside world.

Yet More Inaptness of a Mad Gunman Analogy to Covid-19

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

In response to my letter to Richard Fulmer, Jeffrey Tucker sent to me the following e-mail, which I share here with his kind permission:

Also getting the virus yields two forms of positive externalities: you thereby gain some degree of personal immunity and you contribute to herd immunity in a way that protects others who might be more vulnerable. This is why in the entire history of liberal philosophy, there is absolutely no record of anyone imagining that risking the spread of a respiratory infection, especially by someone asymptomatic, has been considered some kind of aggression. If it were otherwise, liberty and progress would never have emerged from within the pathogen-soaked world of the Enlightenment and after.

An Inapt Analogy about Covid-19

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

Here’s a response to Café Hayek commenter Richard Fulmer:

Mr. Fulmer:

Thanks for commenting in a thread on Matt Zwolinski’s reply to my open letter. In one of your comments you take issue with a point made by commenter Patrick Barron. Mr. Barron argues that lockdowns are an inexcusable offense against liberty because persons who are frightened of Covid-19, or who are especially vulnerable, can and should individually take steps to reduce their risks of exposure to the coronavirus. In response you write:

I choose to spray bullets in all directions and I demand that others “take whatever action they deem necessary” to protect themselves.

How virulent does a virus have to be before it becomes as deadly as my bullets? As deadly as Ebola? When it reaches that point, what is the libertarian response to the man who chooses to spray the virus in all directions?

I believe that your sprayed-bullets analogy is, for four reasons, inapt.

First, unlike people who might be murdered by a psycho gunman, individuals who are at genuine risk from Covid know, or should know, who they are. Covid does not strike indiscriminately. So at-risk individuals can indeed take sensible, individualized precautions to protect themselves without compelling everyone else to abandon normal living.

Second, a gunman recklessly spraying bullets acts in a manner that has zero potential upside for anyone (other than, perhaps, the psycho gunman). In contrast, individuals going out and about amongst others generally yield real benefits to others. These benefits can be social (e.g., fraternizing at bars), commercial (e.g., waiters helping restaurant diners enjoy meals and restaurant diners helping waiters earn their livings), instructional (e.g., teachers teaching students), and physical (e.g., physicians attending to ill patients).

Third, we humans are naturally gregarious creatures whose well-being – physical and mental – depends on our ability to interact face-to-face with others, including with strangers. We have from the start interacted regularly with each other. Doing so is part of what it means to be human. Therefore, Smith’s freedom to seek to interact face-to-face with Jones and Jones’s freedom to seek to interact face-to-face with Smith is embedded in our legitimate expectations of how human life is lived. Obviously, there is no similar expectation about being free to spray bullets into a crowd or about being in a crowd into which bullets might be sprayed.

Fourth, each of us humans – also from the start – has been a potential source of unintended harm to others. Emitting dangerous pathogens is nothing new. And unless each of us is sealed away hermetically into a bubble, such emissions are impossible to avoid. Unlike dealing with murderous gunmen, dealing with the risks of such emissions is, as it has been forever, a daily and unavoidable part of life. These risks have been, and ought to be, part of our expectations – expectations that can and will prompt different individuals to take different levels of precaution under different circumstances.

A danger of your sprayed-bullets analogy is that it implies that these risks should not be part of our legitimate expectations – or at least no more a part of our expectations than is the risk of being murdered by a sociopathic gunman.

If Covid-19 were categorically more dangerous than many other infectious diseases, then your sprayed-bullets analogy might become apt. But despite the hysteria over Covid, it is not remotely so much more dangerous as to be associated with such an analogy.

You’ll understandably protest by noting that you yourself asked the question of when an infectious disease becomes so lethal as to justify it being analogized to sprayed bullets. My reply to this protest is that, given what we now know about Covid, the analogy is too sensationalist and lurid, and too far removed from reality, to be useful. It stymies rather than stimulates useful thinking.

Sincerely,

Don

Ivor Cummins’s Latest Important Update

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

Here’s Ivor Cummins’s new data-packed video. This one is 37-plus minutes long and was released yesterday (January 4th).

It’s unspeakably tragic that so many people paid attention to – and continue to pay attention to – the reckless and consistently mistaken hypocrite Neil Ferguson while they ignore, or pick inessential nits, with the great Ivor Cummins.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

Although it has one or two nits that can be picked, this essay by Paul Collits is very much worth reading in full. (HT David Hart) Two slices:

2020 was a year of abject surrender, of hysteria, of derangement, of paranoia, of delusion on a grand scale.  A Kafkaesque year in which governments and their voters opted into the creepy new project of making the whole world a safe space.  A year in which we gave up our cherished freedoms for a middling virus that in Australia was less harmful to our health than the 2018 flu season. Less harmful than many other flu seasons.

Freedom of speech?  Gone. 

Freedom of movement?  Gone. 

Freedom of assembly?  Gone.

Freedom to earn a living?  For many, gone. 

Whole industries shot to pieces.  Hopes and dreams eviscerated.  Plans derailed.  A year in which the young and the healthy have been forced by the Covid State sacrificed much, for no gain whatsoever.  A year of political venality and bungling on a massive scale, of politicians self-protecting by lies big and small.

A year where rational thought, perspective, evidence-based policy and science all left the building.  A year that saw the triumph of ideologised technocracy (the rule by experts who may not actually be experts), the victory of those with global power.

…..

For many, life has become prematurely purgatorial.  Life replaced by mere existence, clock-watching instead of living.  The dying who were wickedly deprived of the chance to say goodbye to their loved ones.  We had to keep them alive a little longer, just so they could … die!  The grieving who, also, could not say goodbye.  Except by zoom.  Not for these families the joy of a good death surrounded by peace and love.

A purgatorial year too for the imprisoned of Victoria and elsewhere.  The populations under house arrest.  Those stressed by being forced to wear muzzles.  By the curfews.  By the fear mongering that was all too successful.  The innocent citizens who were hounded, and in some cases brutalised, by thuggish, out-of-control police whose job used to be catching criminals.  And innocent cardinals.

2020 has been a year of Covid cliches, of casual propaganda, of corporates doing infomercials for the government.  Stay safe.  We are all in it together.  Now more than ever …  Unprecedented.  Uncertain times.  We’re here for you.  In effect, they have been promoting the purgatorial life.  Superspreading the message.  Enjoy misery!  It is good for you.

Flatten the curve?  How about flatten the English language.  Make the language a cliched implement of oppression.  To flatten the population.

Robert Sauer and Donald Siegel reveal the ominous parallels between the U.S. government’s misbegotten and tragic war in Vietnam and governments’ misbegotten and tragic ‘war’ on Covid-19. A slice:

Inaccurate statistics also played a role in faulty decision-making during the Vietnam conflict. General Westmoreland’s beloved “body counts,” or the number of enemy killed, wounded, or captured during an operation, were routinely overstated to overestimate progress and enhance funding and support for the war. In the Covid-19 context, both “cases” (overwhelmingly either asymptomatic or with mild symptoms) and deaths (with the virus, not of the virus) are overstated, to increase funding for the “war” against the virus and to magnify and prolong the “state of emergency.”

The same scientists from Imperial College London whose wildly inaccurate models stoked panic in March and April are wreaking havoc once again, with dire predictions of a “new strain” of the virus. This has prompted more severe lockdowns and travel restrictions in several nations. At the same time, recent studies showing how rare asymptomatic spread of the disease is (e.g., from the University of Florida) are virtually ignored by the media and politicians.

For those of you who ridicule those of us who point out that those with political power today act arbitrarily and tyrannically, read Billy Binion’s report on the latest from New York state’s dictator-in-chief, Andrew Cuomo. (Do not forget that any lockdowns or other restrictive measures implemented in response to infectious pathogens will be implemented and enforced by people such as Cuomo.)

More hypocrisy by a prominent pro-lockdowner. And also here.

Martin Kulldorff:

In case you hadn’t noticed, the lesson of 2020 is that people who thought spring lockdowns would work have all been proved wrong, and the people who tried to warn you that they would simply postpone things have all been proved right.

Here’s the abstract of a new paper by University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan:

Weekly mortality through October 3 is partitioned into normal deaths, COVID, and nonCOVID excess deaths (NCEDs). Before March, the excess is negative for the elderly, likely due to the mild flu season. From March onward, excess deaths are approximately 250,000 of which about 17,000 appear to be a COVID undercount and 30,000 non-COVID. Deaths of despair (drug overdose, suicide, alcohol) in 2017 and 2018 are good predictors of the demographic groups with NCEDs in 2020. The NCEDs are disproportionately experienced by men aged 15-55, including men aged 15-25. Local data on opioid overdoses further support the hypothesis that the pandemic and recession were associated with a 10 to 60 percent increase in deaths of despair above already high pre-pandemic levels.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

Tweet

… is from page 23 of George Will’s 1992 book, Restoration:

All the economic arguments for the subsidy are tendentious rubbish. They are also irrelevant to the subsidy’s immorality. The subsidy has a political rationale: Some attentive and intense voters want it.

DBx: George Will is here speaking of subsidies to producers of mohair. But his point applies to all subsidies: each and every subsidy exist not because politicians are wise leaders with an especially keen ability to foretell the future. Instead, each and every subsidy, at bottom, is nothing more than political graft. Each is an economically damaging and ethically indefensible privilege created to benefit the politically influential relatively few at the expense of the politically weak many.

So, too, each and every protective tariff.

And as with subsidies to mohair producers, so too are all other subsidies, and protective tariffs, defended by arguments that are never anything other than tendentious rubbish. That some people – including many pundits and thinktank “scholars” – sincerely are gulled by these arguments is a fact that can’t be doubted. But it is also a fact that is disheartening.