Russell Roberts's Blog, page 332

Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: “Inflation & interest rates”

(Don Boudreaux)

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In my March 9th, 2011, column for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, I continued my discussion of inflation. You can read my column beneath the fold.

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Matt Zwolinski Replies

(Don Boudreaux)

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Philosopher Matt Zwolinski accepted my invitation to reply to my open letter to him. I’m pleased to share with you here Matt’s reply in full:

Dear Don,

I’m grateful for your thoughtful response to my tweet, and for the subsequent contributions to the conversation from Dan Klein and David Hart, as well as your personal friend. I’ve been thinking a lot about how libertarians have responded to COVID, and trying to make sense of the persistent disagreement among people who hold so much else in common. Not only are libertarians all over the place in terms of the preferred policy response to COVID – with some favoring lockdowns, some favoring mask mandates, and some favoring virtually no government response at all – but every side in the debate seems to be utterly baffled by every other. Many of the posts at Cafe Hayek suggest that those who favor restrictions on businesses and individual association have abandoned the core insights of libertarianism. Meanwhile, Tyler Cowen can’t understand why libertarians are so much less willing to accept restrictions on individual liberty now than they were in 2014 when Ebola was a threat.

After giving it much thought, I think I finally understand what’s going on here. The reason that libertarians disagree with each other so much about the best policy response to COVID is, I think, the same reason libertarians disagree with each other about the best policy response to climate change. Libertarian theory, by itself, simply isn’t much help in figuring out what to think about problems like these.

One of the core – if not the core – libertarian insights is an idea that has sometimes been called the “moral parity thesis” – the idea that if something is wrong for an private individual to do, it’s wrong for an individual or group of individuals in government to do as well. Stated that way, the idea sounds obvious, almost trivial. But as philosophers like Michael Huemer have shown, when applied consistently, it yields radically libertarian implications. It implies, in the words of Murray Rothbard, that “war is mass murder, conscription is slavery, and taxation is robbery.” In these cases, libertarianism provides us with moral clarity by reducing apparently complex phenomena to simpler cases where our intuitions are clearer.

But what does this idea tell us about a genuinely complex phenomenon like global climate change? If the scientific consensus is correct, and human activity is causing climate change that will (if not adequately addressed) cause serious harm to future people, then there’s a good case to be made that something has gone wrong from a libertarian perspective. People now are acting in a way that is causing harm to other people’s bodies and property. Doesn’t that violate the Non-Aggression Principle?

Well, maybe. The problem is that climate change is a phenomenon marked by two characteristics with which, to be frank, libertarianism doesn’t deal with very well. The first is risk. If I club you over the head and take your money, there’s no question that I’ve violated your rights. But what if I merely engage in an action that imposes some risk of harm on you, like driving under the influence of alcohol (or driving at all, for that matter!), expelling pollutants from my smokestack (or my lungs!), or burning fossil fuels? Libertarianism, as such, simply doesn’t have a good canonical answer to these questions. Barring all risky activity would grind civilization to a halt. Disregarding risk is lunacy. And trying to distinguish between “reasonable” and “unreasonable” risks threatens degeneration into utilitarianism.

The second characteristic of climate change is that whatever negative effects it produces are the unintended consequence of a large aggregation of individual decisions, none of which is necessarily harmful in itself. In that way, climate change is a kind of spontaneous order – though unlike the spontaneous order of market coordination, it’s a harmful order rather than a beneficial one. What should libertarians say about such phenomena? If Jones acts permissibly in performing action X, does his action become impermissible by the mere fact that 100,000 people also perform X, and that the aggregate result of their action is imposition of harm on Sam? Answering yes seems to run afoul of the spirit (if not the letter) of the moral parity thesis. Answering no, in contrast, seems to leave individuals’ bodies and property vulnerable to potentially seriously harmful invasion by others.

I’ve written elsewhere about these issues as applied to the question of environmental pollution. But it’s pretty obvious that contagious diseases such as COVID raise precisely the same questions. Gathering with many others during a pandemic in a restaurant, or a mass protest, doesn’t automatically harm them. But it poses a certain risk of harming them. And, from a public health perspective, no single individual’s action is going to have any measurable impact on the spread of the disease or the strain on the country’s medical system. But the aggregate impact of individuals’ decision makes all the difference. So going to that restaurant, or that protest, isn’t exactly like punching somebody in the nose. But it’s not exactly unlike it, either.

Of course, the moral parity thesis isn’t the only libertarian insight. David Hart’s points about government failure are well-taken, as are libertarian insights about the ability of individuals to self-organize to accomplish public goals. (As Nozick reminds us, “people tend to forget the possibilities of acting independently of the state.”)

Still, when faced with problems like climate change and COVID, it should come as no surprise when libertarian responses are all over the map. These simply aren’t problems that libertarian theory is especially well-suited to address. And so libertarians, in seeking to address them, wind up falling back on their own personal values, preferences for risk, and assessments of the empirical evidence. Since libertarians presumably disagree amongst themselves on these matters as much as they disagree with anyone else, so too are their views about policy.

-Matt

Living Harmoniously and Inharmoniously with Nature

(Don Boudreaux)

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In my latest column for AIER, I argue that human beings today live in unprecedented harmony with the non-human natural world – but also in increasing disharmony with the nature of the market order that is responsible for our modern standard of living. A slice:

There is, however, one part of nature with which we today do live in a great deal of conflict – namely, the nature of modern society. A central feature of this society is each individual’s dependence on the knowledge and productive efforts of literally billions of strangers.

Every moment of every day every one of us in the modern world enjoys some good, service, or experience that is made possible only because countless strangers perform a complex series of astonishingly well-coordinated actions that have among their final results the goods, services, and experiences that are commonplace in modern life. From the alarm on your smartphone that awakens you in the morning, through the coffee and croissant that you enjoy for breakfast and the computer or other power tools that you use to work, to the hard shingled roof over your bedroom and the soft machine-woven sheets on which you fall asleep at night, you consume, each and every day of your life, a steady stream of the fruits of the labors of billions of strangers.

The unleashing and coordination of all this amazing productive effort is achieved only within free, entrepreneurial markets. Prices, profits, and losses emerge when buyers are largely free to spend their money as they choose on goods and services offered by entrepreneurs who are largely free to enter and leave different lines of production. These prices, profits, and losses daily guide these economic processes. The result is our fabulously prosperous modern world.

And while this unfathomably complex series of coordinated actions of billions of individuals from around the world isn’t without occasional glitches, testimony to the fact that it works smoothly and reliably is in your own massive material prosperity combined with your obliviousness to the nature of the market order that makes your prosperity possible.

Such obliviousness unfortunately leaves the globe-spanning market order open to attack. Too many people take its fruits for granted or imagine that its operations are far simpler than these really are. The results of this ignorance of the nature of a market economy can be cataclysmic.

I believe that we would have had no Covid-19 lockdowns if more people understood the complexity of the market order and more fully appreciated the magnitude of the material prosperity that this order makes possible. These lockdowns, and the deranged fears that fuel them, indiscriminately demolish countless unseen nodes of commercial interactions. Gubernatorial diktats obliterate business plans. Mayoral commands destroy businesses overnight. Government lockdown orders – and ongoing threats of such – severely obstruct the ability of entrepreneurs to innovate and of suppliers to compete to meet the needs of consumers. Unwarranted media and political hysteria over Covid severs many of the cords that form the complex web of supply relationships that are necessary for putting bread on our tables and roofs over our heads.

The market is no fragile flower. It can and does take a great deal of abuse without quitting on us. But nor is the market indestructible. By commanding people to steer clear of many commercial interactions – especially as these arbitrary commands morph from ones that were promised to last only a few weeks into ones that, we’re now told, might last for several more months – governments around the world are annihilating the global economy.

No widespread event in my lifetime comes close to the Covid lockdowns as an instance in which we human beings have so ignorantly and arrogantly chosen to live not merely inharmoniously with nature but in direct and hostile opposition to it. The final price we pay for this folly will be astronomical.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Sebastian Rushworth offers an hypothesis for why humanity reacted so derangedly to Covid-19. A slice:

A hundred years from now, historians will not be talking about covid-19 as an example of a deadly pandemic on par with the Spanish flu. They will be talking about it as an example of how easy it is to induce a state of collective mass hysteria. Given that this is the case, how long will the present hysteria continue?

I think most governments have dug themselves in to a hole in relation to covid. They’ve portrayed it as for more deadly and dangerous than it is. They know this. But to admit the error now is impossible. Partly, that is because lockdown has resulted in so much suffering that it would be suicidal to say that it was all for nothing. Partly it is because the mass media and general public are so convinced of the seriousness of the disease, that any government that argued the contrary would be labeled as irresponsible and deranged.

Carrie Geitner, of Colorado, writes wisely about the failure of lockdowns as she calls on the governor of her state to end the lockdowns there. A slice:

Lockdown apologists insist that while there may be consequences, things could be far worse. Comparing data from across states tells a different story. Florida’s governor embraced focused protection strategies for the vulnerable as advocated by The Great Barrington Declaration after early lockdowns failed.  Florida now has a lower death rate than Colorado, California or New York, states with the most stringent restrictions. Today, Florida ranks among the 10-lowest COVID-19 death rates per capita in the nation.

Science is the systemic study of our world through observation and experimentation. Good policy is informed by evidence, including science. It must also take into account a variety of truths about society and human nature to be most effective. It is now obvious the lockdown experiment has failed spectacularly by ignoring all three. It is time for Gov. Polis to find the moral conviction to acknowledge his failures, follow the growing number of scientists, health policy experts, and the voice of the people and lift these failed lockdown restrictions.

George Michael (no, not that one) douses Covid hysteria with relevant evidence. A slice:

“PCR is just a process that’s used to make a whole lot of something out of something… It doesn’t tell you that you’re sick and it doesn’t tell you that the thing you ended up with is going to hurt you.” Kary Mullis, awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for inventing the PCR test.
Current mass-testing protocols are resulting in extremely significant proportions of false-positives. For example, 35–100% of all positive results regarding COVID-19 admissions to hospital in November were false.
The mass deployment of PCR testing has created the false appearance of an epidemic in the past — a “pseudo-epidemic”.
Many relevant experts have expressed concerns over the response to COVID-19, including the implementation of mass PCR testing.

Phil Magness exposes the disingenuousness of a prominent lockdowner:

This is epidemiologist Deepti Gurdasani – one of the principal organizers of the John Snow Memo and currently a vocal proponent of locking down the UK a third time.

I asked her directly a couple weeks ago if she believed the UK should have locked down earlier in the fall and she answered as follows. That answer would be unremarkable in itself as an expression of pro-lockdown beliefs, but in Gurdasani’s case it is complicated by what she was actually doing back at the time.

You see, Gurdasani also wrote an op-ed in mid-October that said another round of lockdowns was just a “strawman” to alarm the public and build up support for the Great Barrington Declaration. That means one of only two things is possible:

1. Gurdasani is lying now when she says she wanted a lockdown back in September and is trying to revise history to suggest that the current mess is the result of policymakers ignoring her advice rather than taking it.

2. Gurdasani was lying in October when she said lockdowns were a strawman, because she actually believed in that “strawman” herself at the time even though she was telling the public it wasn’t on the table.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 188 of Tom Palmer’s Summer 1998 Critical Review article titled “What’s Not Wrong with Libertarianism,” as this paper is reprinted in Tom’s superb 2009 book, Realizing Freedom:

So evaluation of consequences does matter, but it matters at the level of justifying a general system of rights. Precisely because of the limitations of human knowledge that [Jeffrey] Friedman acknowledges were the downfall of socialism, we cannot normally invoke consequentialism on a case-by-case basis. That is, after all, as Hume (and more recently, Hayek) so strongly emphasized, the justification for rules.

DBx: Yes.

It’s equal parts distressing and appalling how easily so many rules were – and continue to be – utterly disregarded amidst the hysteria over Covid-19.

…..

Pictured above is Gretchen Whitmer, the tyrant now wielding dictatorial powers in Michigan.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Brendan O’Neil eloquently both defends Karol Sikora, Sunetra Gupta, and others who question Covid-19 lockdown tyranny, and criticizes Sam Bowman, Owen Jones, and others who demand strict obedience to this monstrously intolerant religious dogma. A slice:

We are now in full-on witch-hunt territory. Sikora, Gupta, Carl Heneghan, also of Oxford, and others are now routinely demonised. They must be silenced, the illiberal fanatics cry. The witch-hunters have helped to unleash hysterical abuse against sceptics. Gupta says she regularly receives emails calling her evil and dangerous. She has even wondered: ‘Would I have been treated like this if I were a white man?’ Of course, identitarians who normally stand up for women from ethnic minorities who are being trolled and harassed have nothing whatsoever to say about the war of words against Gupta, because to them she is scum. Well, she’s critical of the lockdown, so she must be, right?

And Jay Bhattacharya accurately observes that “The illiberal response to people questioning the lockdowns by both left and right really has been something to behold.”

Ethan Yang reports on research that finds that lockdown tyranny indeed has nothing to do with genuine science; it is a brutal religion.

Hey, you lockdown proponents you – and even those of you who silently abide lockdown tyranny – here’s an example of what’s happening to society as humanity becomes ever-more infected with Covid Derangement Syndrome. (HT Phil Magness)

Phil Magness maps 2020’s disingenuous Faucisms:

Also from Phil Magness is this set of facts topped off by a germane question:

Richard Ebeling is correct:

The year 2020 demonstrated very clearly, unfortunately, the embeddedness of political paternalism in American society, in terms of both the arrogant presumption of those in government to impose nearly a comprehensive restrictive command and control system over the country, and the willingness of so many Americans to passively and obediently follow those in power down a road to economic disruption and destruction as long as politicians and government “experts” chanted the phrase “follow the science.”

The “science” has been found to be faulty and full of exaggerations and factual errors that have ruined the livelihoods and everyday lives of tens of millions of people. Shunted aside were any notions of “costs,” or “trade-offs” in the economic sense and meaning of these things. In the 20th century’s central planning tradition, a one-size-fits-all response was imposed on people, and with all the usual irrationality and arbitrariness seen in the actual centrally planned societies of the last century.

Arjun Walia righty decries the mainstream media’s canonization of politician-scientists such as Anthony Fauci and their (at best) disregard for non-politician scientists such as Jay Bhattacharya. A slice:

Many concerns have also been raised about the death count, with various public health authorities admitting to counting deaths as COVID when they’re not actually a result of COVID. For example, Ontario (Canada) public health clearly states that deaths will be marked as COVID deaths whether or not it’s clear if COVID was the cause or contributed to the death. This means that those who did not die as a result of COVID are included in the death count. You can read more about that and see many more examples, here.

Peter Hitchens is rightly critical of Neil Ferguson, the mad physicist whose recklessness and incompetence (at everything, it seems, other than hypocrisy and enchanting political and intellectual elites) has unleashed in the past several months so much unnecessary misery. A slice:

Even so, they hesitated. As Ferguson says: ‘It’s a Communist one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought.’

Aren’t those words ‘we couldn’t get away with it’ interesting? Is this the way in which public servants in a free country think of the normal limits on what they can do? I can only hope not.

But Ferguson and his friends then saw what happened in Italy, where a formerly free country reached for the weapons of repression and mass house arrest. And the rule of fear was so great that they got away with it. So we were next. Or, as Ferguson puts it: ‘And then Italy did it. And we realised we could.’

They could. But they did not have to. They chose the Chinese way. And so they ‘got away with’ beginning a disaster which still continues. There is still no evidence that any of this Chinese-inspired repression has worked.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from pages 327-328 of 2015 Nobel-laureate Angus Deaton’s 2013 book The Great Escape:

The slowdown in [economic] growth is likely overstated, because the statisticians miss a lot of quality improvements, especially for services, which represent an increasing share of national output. The information revolution and its associated devices do more for wellbeing than we can measure. That these pleasures are barely captured in the growth statistics tell us about the inadequacies of the statistics, not the inadequacies of the technology or the joys it brings.

DBx: Yes. And it seems to follow from this point that even the immediate damage done to the economy by the hysteria over Covid-19 and the lockdowns is understated.

Improvements in our living standards are understated by the failure of national-income statistics to accurately register the full, happy results of modern technology. And so to extent that Covid Derangement Syndrome and the associated lockdowns obstruct our access to existing technologies, as well as slow the advance of modern technologies, national-income statistics fail to adequately register the resulting economic damage.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Have our rulers no decency or even awareness of reality? Lockdown tyrant Bill de Blasio, mayor of New York City, danced with his wife on New Year’s Eve in an almost-empty Times Square. (Why do so many people still obey Covid-19 dictators such as de Blasio and Gavin Newsom?)

Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins is understandably mystified as to why so many people are discovering the lies and half-truths told about Covid only just now. Two slices:

Official lying about things large and small has been a staple of Covid politics: the letters to college students threatening them with arrest if they don’t quarantine, the interstate travel “bans” that were never enforced, the death counts that swept up anybody who died of any cause while infected with Covid.

Arguably, it began on day one. I don’t go to the doctor for a cold or flu, and neither do 80% to 95% of you. This has implications: Once Wuhan hospitals were besieged with severe cases, it was a waste of time asking ourselves if the virus was here. It was here. The blocked flights, the testing of recent arrivals were so much hand-waving so our government could be seen doing something.

The mummery has served to swathe and dilute a message that politicians were unhappy to deliver: It would be up to us citizens to control Covid the best we can.

…..

Most of it won’t matter in the least when natural selection throws up another disease with the properties of Covid-19. The virus wasn’t just transmitted easily; crucially, its effects were mild enough that for billions of humans the cost of quashing it outweighed the personal benefit.

This rock-bottom truth our uninsightful media spent much of 2020 trying not to understand. Worse, it tried to make this truth go away by frightening or morally bullying people into behaviors at odds with perceived self-interest.

Speaking of Covid lies, here’s a report from Ireland. It’s prudent to suspect that much of such occurs also in the United States and elsewhere.

Matt Ridley writes that lockdowns might actually prevent a weakening of Covid’s dangers. A slice:

Viruses will always evolve to be more contagious if they can, but respiratory viruses also often evolve towards being less virulent. Each virus is striving to grab market share for its descendants. The best way of achieving this is to print as many copies of itself as possible while in a human body, yet not make that person so ill that they meet fewer people.

Where the sceptics have a point is that it is a worrying possibility that lockdowns could prevent this natural attenuation of the virus. They keep the virus spreading mainly in hospitals and care homes among the very ill, preventing the eclipse of lethal strains at the hands of milder ones.

Here’s yet more insight and wisdom from my GMU Econ colleague Bryan Caplan about humanity’s deranged reaction to Covid-19. A slice:

My hardest realization of 2020 is that even most seemingly reasonable people go crazy in the face of a rather minor crisis.  Biologically speaking, this pandemic could have easily have killed ten times as many people – or people we’d miss ten times as much.  Never mind World War III.  Taking a far view, I expect a lifetime median of two additional global events worse than COVID.

Phil Magness is a master buster of monstrous myths. A slice:

False beliefs about COVID that nonetheless have widespread adherence in the media, academia, and parts of the epidemiology profession:

– Large numbers of Americans refuse to wear masks (Reality: mask adoption has held steadily around 80% since July https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/cimt2pupbs/econToplines.pdf)

– Large numbers of Americans are skeptical of the vaccine (Reality: 75% of Americans indicate that they plan to take it in surveys – higher than most European countries https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-1124-9/figures/1)

– Large percentages of Americans believe in conspiracy theories about COVID’s origins or believe the virus is a hoax (Reality: most of these conspiracy theories only resonate among a tiny minority of the US population, which is about the same for most other countries https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/…/Globalism2020%20Guardian…)

– The reason the spring lockdowns failed is because not enough Americans followed directions and stayed home when they were told (Reality: US mobility patterns in the spring almost exactly matched Germany, the Netherlands, and several other middle-of-the-pack European countries https://www.aier.org/article/fact-checking-fauci/)

– The reason the spring lockdowns failed is because the US reopened too early (Reality: the US reopening was slower than almost every country in Europe except for the UK https://www.aier.org/…/did-the-us-lockdown-too-late…/)

– Trump opposed the lockdowns and ignored the epidemiology models (Reality: The federal government directly and explicitly adopted a policy based on Neil Ferguson’s Imperial College model on 3/16. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01003-6… Trump also specifically touted Ferguson’s model and spent most of the year explicitly citing its projections to claim credit for lives it supposedly saved. https://www.aier.org/…/professor-lockdown-now-claims…/)

– Trump sidelined Fauci in favor of the anti-lockdown recommendations of Scott Atlas (Reality: Fauci has repeatedly and publicly credited Trump for following his policy recommendations. https://www.huffpost.com/…/fauci-trump-listened_n… Atlas did not even join the task force until August, and was constantly outnumbered by the Fauci-Birx-Collins faction after he arrived)

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 419 of Tom Palmer’s April 12th, 2005, address (“Challenges of Democratization“) to members of the Iraqi National Assembly, as this address is reprinted in Tom’s excellent 2009 book, Realizing Freedom:

Democracy is not magic. Having a democracy does not guarantee instant wealth, health, or happiness. All that democracy can guarantee is the right to “the pursuit of happiness.” It cannot guarantee the achievement of happiness, or even good fortune. Those must be earned by effort in a law-governed and just society in which the rewards to effort are protected by law, and not confiscated by the injustice of the powerful.

Some Covid Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Phil Magness argues sensibly that young adults are being killed by Covid-19 lockdowns. (Where’s the sympathy for these victims?) A slice:

The concession itself is stunning. If opioid overdose deaths are up compared to their 2018 baseline, they could explain the surge in excess deaths among young people rather than the speculated undercounting of Covid fatalities.

Opioid and other substance abuse problems have a well-documented connection to mental despair and economic downturns alike. The lockdown policies that have plagued the United States since the spring have unleashed their own mental health pandemic, in addition to destroying the national employment sector. It’s not unreasonable to conclude that younger people are among the hardest hit by these dual lockdown punches.

On December 18, just two days after the JAMA study came out, the Centers for Disease Control released preliminary data that strongly suggest the alternative explanation is correct. Substance abuse deaths including opioid overdoses have dramatically increased since the 2018 numbers that the JAMA article used as its baseline.

Furthermore, those already-increasing overdose deaths dramatically accelerated after the start of the lockdowns. The new CDC study shows this uptick across all measured categories of substance abuse deaths for April through June, the only months for which records are available as of this writing. In all likelihood, this pattern will continue when data are eventually made available for the summer and fall of 2020.

Robert Dingwall – in contrast to most mainstream pundits – writes like a sane and historically informed adult about infectious diseases and humanity’s responses to them. A slice:

Indeed, until the early 2000s when we started to vaccinate for flu, we accepted that outbreaks would kill [in the U.K.] 20,000 to 50,000 people every winter without much comment. It was a great number of deaths, but it was not considered so great that we should shut down the economy. Lots of us would get flu, some of us would have a bad time, but almost all of us would get better.

If we took a similar attitude to COVID-19 today, and got on with our lives, then we would find ourselves returning to the death rates of the early 2000s, before vaccination started delaying deaths (sometimes we seem to forget death can only ever be postponed, not prevented). There should, in other words, be a real choice in front of us, a choice that is not being discussed. We could move on from our current state of fear to acceptance.

It is important that we do this. Yet we are not being offered this choice by those in authority. Why not? Why are we still locked into the fear and anxiety of February and March?

Some people think that, in continuing with the draconian restrictions, there is a conspiracy to enslave the British people. I am not one of them. I think, rather, we have found ourselves in the hands of a scientific and medical elite with limited understanding of humanity and its needs. This failing is in the nature of their background and their high-minded pursuit of a noble ideal. Their intentions are good, but not practical.

Arthur Diamond laments the failure, during the Covid hysteria, to heed Hayek’s insights about local knowledge.

For the distressingly many of you who continue to cling to the fantasy that politicians will generally behave responsibly and apolitically during pandemics, Art Carden has some information that you might wish to consult.

“The incessant urge to make COVID-19 infection a morality play is corroding our humanity and distracting us from solutions.” – so writes Reason‘s Matt Welch. A slice:

Paradoxically, those most likely to wield blame against individuals and regions suffering from coronavirus tend to be far more sure in their judgments – and reliant on the mantra follow the science – than the people who spend their days actually compiling the messy data about this deadly virus. The anonymous author of the Marginally Compelling newsletter, which painstakingly assembles COVID research by region, had an interesting Twitter thread Thursday in response to the aforementioned DeSantis/Cuomo comparison.

“I’m fascinated with how wedded the press continues to be to the idea that COVID numbers MUST be driven by policy decisions,” he wrote. “They constantly say that numbers are rising in red states DUE TO those states not taking it seriously[.] Let me be as frank as I can here: There is no solid evidence that state policy choices protect a region from a COVID surge[.] None[.] To the degree that they can be controlled (which is not very high, but does seem to exist) the most impactful variable seems to be social patterns.” And those “are not controllable by the government.”

He continued: “Yet the press continues to *demand* that COVID numbers are a direct result of state policy … but only when it fits the insanely crude rubric of ‘red is bad, blue is good’. They are proffering an absolute fiction as if it was obviously true. And the insane thing (to me) is their confidence in this. They clearly believe this to be true when it is *obviously* untrue to anyone who has tried to weigh this idea against the data. They *clearly* have no idea what they are talking about but the speak as if they are experts.”

Christian Britschgi reports on one of the many ways that the deranged response to Covid-19 appears already to be transforming public policy permanently for the worse. Who’d a-thunk it?

Lucio Saverio Eastman and Micha Gartz detail 15 signs that ordinary people are in an abusive relationship with their ‘governments.’ A slice:

9. Tell you it is for your own good, and that they know better

In May, AIER’s Editorial Director Jeffrey Tucker documented how dentists and doctors were prevented from accepting new patients. We were told that, to protect our health we cannot receive medical care (unless it is an emergency). You cannot see a dentist. You cannot see a doctor. You cannot have elective surgery, continue chemotherapy, or receive a transplant either.

They will tell you that it is for your own protection and to follow the experts to ensure the safety of the whole. “Consensus” is the clarion call of these pundits. This is a form of Pathological Altruism which is defined as:

any behavior or personal tendency in which either the stated aim or the implied motivation is to promote the welfare of another. But instead of overall beneficial outcomes, the altruism instead has irrational… and substantial negative consequences.

10. Don’t allow you to question it

Many highly qualified and respected scholars and public health officials stepped up to question the current trajectory and consequences of lockdowns and policy. They have been met with brutal opposition. Any attempts to question the lockdowns or raise doubts about the approach led to attempted deplatforming or silencing of any debate.

A California trauma medical director, Dr. Michael Deboisblanc, was fired for concluding (based on data) that it is safe to reopen schools and writing a letter questioning Contra Costa County’s lockdown measures. Even our local town council condemned the Great Barrington Declaration, and the official website was originally excluded from Google searches in the UK and Australia.

11. Tell you you’re crazy, and no one agrees with you

If you spend any amount of time on social media and if you have an opinion that counters the narrative, you probably experienced some backlash. As our colleague Phil Magness knows too well, there is seemingly no end to accusations of “strawman” arguments and denials of any wrongdoing from lockdown supporters.

Political figures, such as Fauci, claim there is consensus on “the science” they are following. Claims of consensus are defied by petitions, such as the Great Barrington Declaration – now signed by nearly 40,000 medical practitioners, over 13,000 medical and public health scientists, and 700,000+ members of the public – which show that you are not alone in recognizing the substantial adverse effects (and limited success) of lockdowns.