Russell Roberts's Blog, page 340
December 14, 2020
On the Sensation of Tyranny
Every tyrant convinces large numbers of the people under his rule that he uses force exclusively for the greater good. Tyrant wannabes who fail to convince The People of these wannabes’ noble purposes never grab the power they crave. Too few of The People submit.
Each actual tyrant points to some problem – perhaps real or perhaps fabricated yet unfailingly exaggerated – the persistence of which will inflict on his beloved People unprecedented harm. He persuades The People to obey him in his pose as a courageous and caring visionary unafraid to use whatever powers he must in order to save his People from the terrible perils that otherwise await them. And he insists that his exercise of power must be broad and bold, unchecked by legal or ethical niceties which would only prevent him from saving his flock.
Quaking in fear of these terrible perils and hopeful for the promised salvation, The People submit. Sheeplike.
Many people, of course, recognize and even chafe under the dictator’s arbitrariness and the harshness of his diktats. But believing these diktats to be necessary for the greater good, most of even these people meekly comply. “The end result tomorrow will be worth the pain, suffering, and indignity today. We have no good choice but to obey our leader” – so goes the thinking.
Thus does actual tyranny arrive and survive. It arrives and survives always with the acceptance – and often also with the enthusiastic approval – of large numbers of its victims. These victims thus do not sense that they are living under tyranny. Tyranny is what happens to other people – to people less enlightened or much less fortunate than us – to people whose oppressors, unlike our own familiar leaders, rant crazily in foreign tongues, often while dressed in military costumes.
Tyranny, it is believed, does not happen to us, for it’s not really tyranny if its stated goal is our salvation – if it promises to protect us from dangers that we are assured are real, large, and looming. And those few ideological freaks who recklessly insist on calling our saviors “tyrants” do not appreciate the need for quick and decisive action from the top. These freaks should be ignored, and perhaps even forcibly silenced.
Tyranny, again, doesn’t happen to us. We, after all, are complying voluntarily with our leaders’ commands, knowing that these are for our own good. If we were suffering the oppression of tyrants, we’d resist. We are, don’t forget, a proud people. We are enlightened, democratic, and free. And so because the vast majority of us are not resisting our leaders’ current rule, this rule cannot possibly be tyrannical. Q.E.D.
Our leaders, in short, aren’t tyrants. They’re public servants who we must trust if we are to be saved.
Or, so all who are tyrannized conclude.
Comparing Covid Cases to Covid Deaths
Here’s a letter to a reader of this blog:
Mr. Horn:
Thanks for your e-mail.
You’re unhappy with my linking to a December 10th Facebook post by Nobel-laureate economist Vernon Smith – a post in which Vernon shares a graph, from Our World in Data, comparing the number of daily Covid-19 cases to the number of daily Covid-19 deaths. Observing that the former is magnitudes larger than the latter, Vernon comments in his post: “Cases, lots, deaths not.”
About Vernon’s post, you object: “The gigantic scale gives a false impression of the number of covid deaths…. It makes them appear smaller than what they really are.”
I disagree with your objection. In light of the fact that the media incessantly report rising Covid cases with an urgency that suggests that these are imminent deaths, the very point of Vernon’s post, I’m sure, is to put Covid deaths in proper perspective relative to Covid cases. Doing so thus requires that daily deaths and daily cases be shown on the same scale – a scale that must be large because the number of daily Covid cases is indeed large.
The fact that the number of daily Covid deaths is minuscule relative to the number of daily Covid cases is the relevant reality to which Vernon points and which the graph he shares illustrates vividly. And it’s an important reality. If knowledge of this reality were more widespread, I believe that the irrational hysteria over Covid-19 would be much muted.
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
Some Covid Links
“If someone who has tested positive for COVID-19 commits suicide, the Ontario Ministry of Health will record their cause of death as COVID-19.” And more from the same report:
This information confirms what the Toronto Public Health Twitter account tweeted back in June 2020: “Individuals who have died with COVID-19, but not as a result of COVID-19 are included in the case counts for COVID-19 deaths in Toronto.”
Barry Brownstein writes informatively on the bias toward bad news.
David Henderson writes more on what we should fear.
Until this morning I’d never heard of Tomi Lahren, so I know nothing about her other than what might be inferred here. But I agree with this sentiment that she expressed on air (although I don’t begrudge Amazon and other large retailers the profits they earn in helping consumers cope with Covid restrictions):
Lahren added, “Enough having law enforcement agencies go do the bidding and dirty work for these tyrant mayors and governors while they dine in luxury and poo-poo all of us little people dumb enough to follow the rules, their rules, they don’t follow themselves.”
“None of this seems right,” she concluded. “None of it seems American, and none of it makes sense.”
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 169 of University of Glasgow Senior Lecturer Craig Smith’s excellent 2020 book, Adam Smith:
Hayek suggests that constructivist rationalists have misunderstood the nature of social order. Societies are not made orders which are deliberately directed by politicians. Instead, they are orders which arise by individuals adjusting to each other and to the rules of the society. Hayek believes that humans have evolved a form of association (civilization) that is governed by rules of just conduct rather than deliberate commands. The success of this kind of order arises from the fact that rather than being directed by a few minds it is able to rely on the whole of society adjusting to their local circumstances.
DBx: Society can survive a good deal of obstruction of the ability of individuals each to adjust in light of his or her local knowledge and preferences. Fortunately, the free society is not a delicate flower that must be put on death watch the moment it encounters conditions that are less than ideal.
But nor is a free society indestructible. At some point the obstructions placed by governments on the ability of individuals each to act on his or her unique knowledge as he or she prefers while respecting the same rights of others will become too burdensome. The connections that we form with each other to create a genuine civilization will become too few to sustain that civilization. Each of our abilities to rely on – to benefit from – the knowledge that is possessed only by hundreds of millions of other of our fellow human beings will be so weakened that we eventually revert to a state of society that, from the perspective of 2019-2020, is primitive and inconceivably poor both materially and spiritually.
December 13, 2020
Some Links
Arnold Kling reviews Alberto Mingardi’s book on Thomas Hodgskin.
GMU Econ alum Erik Matson writes intelligently on Adam Smith and the common good. A slice (footnote deleted):
To Smith, “common good capitalism” would seem redundant. Smith of course never used the word “capitalism”—that came with Karl Marx and his followers. But if we think about capitalism simply in terms of the private ownership of property, which includes a person’s ownership of her physical and human capital and the liberty to use that capital as she sees fit, the word can be reasonably mapped onto Smith’s thought. We can view capitalism as broadly synonymous with what Smith called “the liberal plan” or the “system of natural liberty” in which “every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men.”
It is liberty, in Smith’s view, that is at the heart of capitalism, and at the heart of liberty lies commitment to the good of humankind. Considering Smith’s position reminds us of a long-standing, but increasingly endangered, American moral sensibility: liberty and the economic freedom it entails serve the common good.
Michael Fumento is pessimistic about a return to normalcy any time soon from Covid Derangement Syndrome. (I fear that he is correct.) Here’s his conclusion:
Meanwhile about 2.2 million children alone die each and every year in poorer countries from diarrhea, according to the CDC. That’s last year, this year, and next year as well. (Assuming coronavirus doesn’t drain anti-diarrheal efforts – which apparently it is. No Covid-19 shibboleth is more disingenuous than “All lives matter.” Perhaps, but obviously some lives matter more than most.
What we clearly have is a pandemic of self-absorption, part and parcel to mass psychogenic illness. At some point hopefully we will feel the shame of the Salem witch hunters and all those who aided and abetted them, those in the courts who squirmed and screamed every time a suspect witch was questioned. Maybe we’ll shun the current panic-mongers, as those people were later shunned. But for now it’s full-bore hysteria. And there’s no end in sight. It’s more for that reason that, indeed, 2020 has been a very bad year.
Here’s the Wall Street Journal‘s formal obituary of my late, great colleague Walter Williams. A slice:
In 1968, he flunked a theoretical exam at UCLA. A professor told him his exam paper was among the worst but that he believed Mr. Williams could do better. He buckled down and passed the exam the next semester. Flunking the exam the first time “convinced me that UCLA professors didn’t care anything about my race; they’d flunk me just as they’d flunk anyone else who didn’t make the grade,” he wrote later. He appreciated it.
Armed with his doctorate, he discovered a love for teaching and was a professor at Temple before moving to George Mason. “One of the most significant benefits of teaching is that it forces you to learn your subject,” he wrote.
Cal Thomas recalls the wisdom of Walter Williams. A slice:
Williams was also unapologetic about his devotion to capitalism. He wrote: “Prior to capitalism, the way people amassed great wealth was by looting, plundering and enslaving their fellow man. Capitalism made it possible to become wealthy by serving your fellow man.”
The True Blue Covid Lockdown Resistance
Wall Street Journal columnist Dan Henninger explains, in this short video, that the unhinged tyranny of blue-state brutes such as Gavin Newsom and Andrew Cuomo might well lead the states over which these dictators rule to lose residents to red states, where a bit more sanity reigns.
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 75 of the 2003 edition of Benjamin Constant’s brilliant 1815 work Principles of Politics Applicable to All Government (Dennis O’Keefe, trans., Etienne Hoffman, ed.):
The pretext of crime prevention has the most immense and incalculable consequences. Potential criminality inheres in everybody’s freedom, in the lives of all classes, in the growth of all human faculties. Those in authority endlessly affecting to fear that a crime may be committed, may weave a vast web that envelops all the innocent. The imprisonment of suspects, the endless confinement of those whom due process would acquit, but who instead may find themselves subjected to the indignity of prolonged detention, the arbitrary exile of those believed dangerous, though there is nothing they can be reproached with, the enslavement of thought, and then that vast silence so pleasing to the ear of government: this pretext explains all these. Every event offers a justification. If the crime the government claimed it feared does not occur, the credit goes to its watchfulness. If one or two unjustified actions provoke opposition, this resistance to which injustice alone led is itself quoted in support of such injustice. Nothing is simpler than passing off the effect for the cause. The more a government measure offends against freedom and reason, the more it drags in its wake disorder and violence. Then government attributes the need for the measure to the disorder and violence themselves.
DBx: Indeed so.
And by replacing, in the above, “crime” and “crime prevention” with “disease” and “disease prevention” we make the above passage written more than two centuries ago especially relevant to 2020.
Peter Hitchens on Covid Derangement Syndrome’s Pummeling of Civilization
I thank my GMU Econ colleague Dan Klein for sharing with me this new interview with Peter Hitchens. Although Hitchens is a bit too self-congratulatory for my tastes, I agree with nearly all that he says about the deranged response to Covid-19.
Quite appropriate is this early comment left at the YouTube site where this video is posted (original ellipses): “Peter knows that humanity is in grave danger…. People all around the world are sleep walking towards a life that will not be worth living.”
Star Parker on Walter Williams
Star Parker devotes her latest show to my late, great colleague – and her friend – Walter Williams. It’s splendid. (I thank Ms. Parker for inviting me to be a guest, which allowed me the pleasure not only of meeting her for the first time, but to see Bill Allen for the first time in many years.) [UPDATE: Earlier this morning, the video appeared to be publicly available, but I see that it is now not so. Even I no longer can access it. However, I will keep this post up (1) to alert people that Ms. Parker’s show about Walter is indeed out there somewhere; and (2) in case the video is again made public.]
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 78 of the 2003 edition of Benjamin Constant’s brilliant 1815 work Principles of Politics Applicable to All Government (Dennis O’Keefe, trans., Etienne Hoffman, ed.):
Arbitrary government is to moral life what plague is to the body.
DBx: Yes.
Oui. Si. Ja. Da. Sim. Ye.
The plague that today threatens humanity with devastation is not Covid-19; it is not a physical pathogen. It is, rather, the toleration of the arbitrary and suffocating government diktats slammed down on humanity in the name of protecting humanity from Covid-19.
Humanity is being pummeled not by the coronavirus but, instead, by Covid Derangement Syndrome.
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