Russell Roberts's Blog, page 347

Some Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Reason’s Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Nick Gillespie discuss lockdowns and leviathan. I fear, alas, that Nick Gillespie is correct about the downside he identifies of the prospect of a Covid-19 vaccine.

Ilya Shapiro writes on the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent upholding of the Constitution even in the face of a pandemic….

….while Jacob Sullum is rightly critical of Paul Krugman’s unwarranted take on this Court ruling.

Russ Roberts (Econ)talks with economist Emily Oster about Covid-inspired school closures.

No regular reader of this blog would mistake me as a Trumpian. I’m emphatically no such thing. But I share Wall Street Journal columnist Gerard Baker’s disgust at the media’s abandonment, over the past four years, of even the pretense of objectivity when reporting on Trump and on his political opponents. A slice:

There was the giggling excitement from reporters last week when the president-elect announced the latest recruit into his expanding animal kingdom. As I read the coverage from supposedly serious news sources, I tried to imagine for a moment what it would have been like if President Trump had announced at any point in the last year that he was acquiring a cat.

“President Trump to Forcibly Incarcerate Helpless Animal on Federal Property,” The New York Times would doubtless have thundered, in a multiple-byline, six-column front-page blockbuster. CNN would have featured interviews all day with scientists about how cats are Covid superspreaders and how this was the latest act of irresponsibility on the part of a president who had already murdered a quarter-million Americans.

Art Carden explores some of the many evils of communism.

GMU Econ alum Liya Palagashvili, writing in the Dallas Morning News, celebrates entrepreneurship – and American federalism. A slice:

But when California fails to get the rules right, the future of American entrepreneurialism does not fall apart. Instead, we see an exodus from California to more welcoming pastures in Texas, Nevada, Utah, Arizona or Colorado. This exodus was set into motion before the pandemic, too. From 2018 to 2019, 660 companies left San Francisco, and one of those was Charles Schwab, a Fortune 500 company, that set its sights on Dallas instead.

That’s the beauty and inherent hope of American federalism. When states and localities are allowed to set their own rules, they can experiment with various ideas, innovations and entrepreneurial ventures.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 182 of Deirdre McCloskey’s and Art Carden’s wonderful new (2020) book, Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich: How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World (original emphasis):

A liberalism – no slaves, the right to say no – is built into [Adam] Smith’s argument at the outset. You decide, not the government or the community, not the experts or the masters. You know best how to “economize” in using your own capital. It is a reasonable assumption, but one that all the statists firmly deny. And they deny that anyway an adult should in equal dignity be assumed to choose wisely – even if on occasion that adult does not. But the problem with statism is that only by an imposed assumption of political and administrative perfection will the general will choose better than the individual does. And always the statist general will takes away the dignity of individual choice. The general is a nasty master.

Further Reflections on Hygiene Socialism

(Don Boudreaux)

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Progressives and other opponents of free markets and genuine liberalism have for decades attempted to frighten people into accepting substantially greater government control over their lives. But none of the predicted horrors proved to be sufficiently alarming to cause people to accept a sudden massive scaling up of such government power.

Hysterical warnings of the dangers of global warming didn’t do it. Nor was it done by ostentatiously titled tomes about, and incessant predictions of, the countless calamities that allegedly are destined to arise from income and wealth inequality. Claims of decades-long economic stagnation don’t quite have the desired pro-statist ummpph when ordinary people read these claims on their smartphones as they await, steaming cups of latte in hand, flights to Maui. The “China Shock,” the Great Recession, and the health-insurance “crisis” – while each is responsible for some malignant growths of government – have proven insufficient to cause Americans instantly and without question to surrender nearly all their liberties to the state, and to cower in fear begging not only for guidance, but to be further commanded.

Even the manic fear of terrorism after 9/11, while creating much greater tolerance for surveillance and additional intrusions on privacy, did not result in most Americans being unquestioningly willing to abandon the great bulk of their liberties.

Covid-19 is different. What a blessing this pathogen is for Progressives and others who worship state power! For reasons that – should sufficient freedom of thought and expression remain – will be long debated by historians, something about this only-slightly-more-dangerous-than-ordinary virus has caused large numbers of people to forfeit, in a matter of days, a vast quantum of their freedoms and dignity.

Governors and mayors issue arbitrary dictates setting the maximum number of people who are allowed to gather in private homes and in places of worship. Our “leaders” order us to wear face masks even when outdoors. Government officials, and their moronic or spineless cheerleaders in the mainstream media, shame those who gather in numbers, and in ways, that are disapproved by public-health clerics. The state shutters businesses indefinitely (destroying many in the process); it keeps schools physically closed (thus resulting in the farce of five- and six-year old children being ‘educated’ on-line); and it pitilessly cuts people off from traveling and from familiar means of socializing (while, of course, the “leaders” themselves are too self-important to obey their own dictatorial mandates).

And don’t forget that – again, in response to “the pandemic” – government spending and indebtedness are skyrocketing, with people across the political spectrum screaming for even more such lethal largesse.

Finally, those who have long wished for a complete transformation – a “great reset” – of modern society have been blessed with the catalyst for convincing the masses to let it be brought about: Covid-19. Unlike all of the previous apocalyptic boogeymen and monsters, Covid has proven to be the real deal that is finally enabling government officials and the media to convince the masses that they are under an unprecedented and horrible threat – a threat that can be avoided only if we surrender to the state all of the freedoms that it demands from us, and that we do so without question.

Welcome, comrades, to what my friend David Hart calls hygiene socialism and to the hell on earth that awaits us all.

Hygiene Socialism

(Don Boudreaux)

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The best term that I’ve yet encountered to describe most of humanity’s deranged reaction to Covid-19 comes from a personal e-mail sent earlier today by my friend in Australia David Hart. He calls it “hygiene socialism.”

I’m afraid that we are now in the grips of this absurd ideology and the tyrannical regimes that it fosters.

Just as conventional socialists are never eager to give up power, so too will our hygiene-socialist dictators be unwilling to give up power. Just as conventional socialists defend their tyranny by asserting that it is justified by science, so too do the hygiene-socialists point to science as a full defense of their tyranny. And just as conventional socialists use the very dislocations, suffering, and tragedies caused by their socialist policies as excuses to double-down on their suppressions of ordinary people’s freedoms, so too will the hygiene-socialist dictators – cheered on by the many hygiene-socialist comrades – find every excuse to suppress our freedoms in the name of protecting us.

Some Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Gilbert Berdine explores the process of classifying Covid-19 deaths (with special emphasis on the United States). A slice:

Figure 1 illustrates the death count from Covid-19. These data are based on death certificates. If the death certificate includes Covid-19, then the death is included whether or not Covid-19 was the primary or even contributing cause of death. The problems with these data are uncertainties about how many deaths are merely associated with Covid-19 rather than caused by Covid-19.

These uncertainties are not helped by the fact that many of these patients are cared for at university medical centers, the death certificates are often filled out by resident physicians in training, and these resident physicians receive no formal training on how to fill out the certificates. These uncertainties are not helped by the fact that the hospital receives a bonus payment for patients who have the ICD-10 diagnostic code for Covid which is included in the problem list for every patient with a positive PCR test. Therefore, a financial incentive exists to perform PCR testing on every patient and label every patient with a positive PCR test as having Covid-19.

Joe Soucheray writes wisely and with appropriate feeling on Covid and the deranged, tyrannical response to it. (HT Mark Perry) A slice:

A word keeps coming up from the authorities who are trying to guide us, presumably in our own self-interest. They appear to be disabusing us of the idea of risk. They are already telling us that even in the event of all of us getting a vaccine, don’t let your guard down. Even if hospital admissions thankfully decline, we are told to not let up. OK. But how long will this press on? The prospect of “prepare for another surge” could become the boilerplate mantra of our lives.

Risk is fundamental to the human condition. We cannot be made free of risk, nor should a government entity believe that such an impossible task is their mandate. Such a mandate opens the door to, in the future, there being other unknown manipulations of our behavior. If we are told by the government not to sing or talk loudly at our own family table, it is not necessarily far-fetched to imagine the unimaginable.

(I do, however, differ from Mr. Souchery on one matter. He writes that he and his family obeyed Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s order to limit the size of family gatherings and to refrain from singing while together from now until at least December 18th. How sad. I would never obey any such order. Indeed, I would go out of my way to violate it. No one has a right to tell me how many people I can have under my roof, and what I may and may not allow them peacefully to do while there. And no one has a right to issue such tyrannical commands to you, to Mr. Souchery, or to anyone else.)

Brian Doherty rightly applauds bourgeois libertarianism. A slice:

What makes civilization work is people roughly hewing to “live and let live” principles. Fortunately, most of us do so even when we are not governed in a libertarian manner. Most people, most of the time, simply want to live in their justly owned space, work for a living, engage in mutually beneficial commerce, and thus contribute to the web of peaceful interactions that makes our lives rich in every sense.

Civilization collapses, on the other hand, when people relentlessly seek state (or state-like) solutions to their grievances—particularly when they act in ways that threaten their fellow citizens’ liberty to live, think, express themselves, work, save, and do business in peace. Such violations of peaceful people’s lives are not justified even if what you are protesting against are indeed evils that ought to be halted.

“The Value is In the Ideas.”

George Will hopes that the U.S. Supreme Court will correctly interpret the U.S. Constitution in a way that makes criminal justice more just.

Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley document the changing cost of an American Thanksgiving dinner.

Juliette Sellgren’s podcast with Robby Soave on college radicals is superb.

Perspective Is Always Necessary

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a letter to an upset Cafe patron.

Ms. Grayson:

You disagree with my criticism of USA Today for its failure to report that, as a percentage of total Covid-19 deaths in America, that of people younger than 40 (at 1.5%) is tiny. “The fact of the matter,” you write, “is that more than 3500 kids and young adults died of this disease. That’s more than 3500 shortened lives and grieving families. It was right for government to respond with tough emergency measures.”

Of course all premature deaths are especially sad and to be regretted. And these deaths are downright tragic when the victims are children. But such deaths are sad and tragic regardless of their cause. By failing to put the number of young people killed by Covid in perspective, however, USA Today not only conveyed the false impression that Covid is unusually dangerous to young people, it also implicitly discounted the sadness and tragedy of the deaths of young people who die of causes other than Covid.

Consider that each year in the U.S. the number of children and adolescents who are killed in automobile accidents is, at around 4,000, nearly 8 times higher than is the number (515) of Americans ages 24 and younger killed by Covid. To paraphrase you, that’s more than 4,000 shortened lives and grieving families. Yet are you moved by this number to demand that government reduce the maximum speed limit on all roads to 10 MPH, or that it prohibit young people from riding in automobiles? Such “tough emergency measures” would, after all – and with greater certainty than Covid restrictions will actually reduce net deaths – dramatically reduce the number of young people killed in automobile accidents.

If we live with the risk that automobiles pose to young people – if this risk does not cause us to utterly upend our familiar ways of living – certainly, and contrary to your claim, the harsh restrictions imposed in the name of fighting Covid find no justification in the much smaller number of young people killed by this disease.

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

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 163 of Philipp Blom’s 2010 book, A Wicked Company; here Blom is describing the thought of, and quoting, Thiry d’Holbach:

Infantilized and deformed by a constant diet of falsehood, human beings are “amused with marvelous chimeras.”

DBx: Holbach’s remark was directed at conventional religion. Yet I believe that it applies with even stronger force to the dogmatic belief held by many people in the power of the state to perform miracles – the power of state officials to know what mortals cannot know, to achieve what mortals cannot achieve, to transcend the realities of scarcity and human nature in order to create heaven on earth.

This conceit in the ability of human beings invested with state power is fatal, yet it persists. So many people – smart and not-so-smart people; well-educated and poorly educated people; rich and poor people; men and women; people of all ethnicities and nationalities – embrace this childish dogma, one as dangerous as it is ridiculous.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from this new essay – titled “Viruses, Lockdowns, and Biomic Learning” – by George Gilder:

The ultimate scarcity is time. Contriving remedies for every disease is a fool’s errand that would doom the human race to an endless waste of time and resources in a whack-a-mole frenzy beating down diseases that always crop up in unexpected times and places.

Russ Roberts (Econ)Talks with Virginia Postrel

(Don Boudreaux)

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I’ve not yet read Virginia Postrel’s new book, The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World, but seldom has a book been released that I’m so eager to read as this one. My eagerness to read it was only heightened by listening to Russ Roberts’s latest podcast with Virginia.

The podcast is fascinating throughout. Here, though, are two of my favorite parts.

Just after the 32-and-a-half-minute mark, Russ asks Virginia about the Luddites. She points out that the Luddites where hypocrites. (The term is mine, not hers.) The Luddites were early 19th-century hand-loom weavers in Great Britain who selfishly opposed the introduction of power looms. But as Virginia notes, the hand-loom weavers themselves at that time earned the relatively good livings that they earned – and which they sought to use coercion to protect – only because of earlier mechanization of spinning. Had not good thread been made much more abundantly available by earlier technological advances in spinning, the hand-loom weavers would not have had the relatively high-paying weaving jobs that they cherished so much and wished not to lose.

This fact is key to why I describe the Luddites as selfish. They were content to enjoy the fruits of technological advances that yielded to them personal benefits, but they were not content to allow others to enjoy such fruits if this enjoyment came at the Luddites’ expense.

A second especially nice point that Virginia makes starts around the 51-minute mark. There, Virginia explains that, just recently, an American weaver reintroduced into Peru a long-lost weaving technique once used by the Incas.

More Ivor Cummins on Covid Derangement Syndrome

(Don Boudreaux)

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Lockdowns kill. And contrary to the prevailing narrative, lockdowns are not justified by science. Quite the opposite. As the heroic Ivor Cummins correctly says,”The government is addicted to the medieval ideology of lockdowns.”