Russell Roberts's Blog, page 353
November 15, 2020
Some Links
George Will and the Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal each writes on the sheer lunacy of some of Seattle’s political “leaders.”
Mark Perry asks a question that ought to be put to every protectionist.
David Henderson Says what should be, but isn’t, obvious to every adult.
Juliette Sellgren talks with the Cato Institute’s Scott Lincicome.
Lockdowns and restrictions cost lives, whether in undiagnosed cancer treatments, deteriorating mental health and missed A&E appointments – not to mention the impact they have on young people’s education, job prospects and our soaring debts.
Eric Faden asks us to “Take a guess which one the media is focused on as a COVID policy ‘failure’:
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 18 of George Will’s excellent 2019 book, The Conservative Sensibility (footnote deleted; link added):
The Founders’ philosophy began with accommodation of, not cures for, human defectiveness. Harvey C. Mansfield rightly says of the Founders, “It is true that they distrusted democracy, but not because they loved aristocracy. They distrusted democracy for the same reason they rejected aristocracy – because they distrusted human nature.”
November 14, 2020
Keeping Covid Perspective
Here’s a much-modified reply that I earlier posted on Facebook to a sympathetic Facebook friend who recently lost her father to Covid-19:
Dear F.W.:
I am truly, deeply sorry for your and your family’s loss of your father to Covid-19, and for his suffering on account of this awful ailment. For the record, however, what I call Covid Derangement Syndrome is not the justified fear of, and prudent responses to, a disease that is undeniably real, painful, and abnormally lethal for the elderly.
Instead, what I believe is deranged is the failure to put Covid-19 in proper perspective. This failure, alas, is both chronic and calamitous. What I am certain is deranged is the current practice of treating everyone as being as vulnerable to Covid as are the elderly. And I am no less certain that the resulting mass hysteria is equally deranged.
Yet even more deranged is the trust that so many Americans today put in executive-branch officials, at all levels of government, to exercise unchecked dictatorial powers to respond to this mass Covid hysteria. Acceptance of this dictatorship is deranged – I’m sorry, I do not know a more descriptive term. And it is deranged to behave as if the risks that Covid poses to kindergartners, to college students, and to healthy young people are indistinguishable from the risks that Covid posed to your elderly father, or poses even to me, a 62-year-old.
I go further: This current derangement is a disgraceful disservice to people such as your father. To treat Covid as an indiscriminate dispenser-of-death is to diminish – to mask – the uniqueness and significance of the suffering endured by people in your father’s demographic by lumping their very real and intense suffering in with the unwarranted emotional over-wroughtness of people who are at no real risk from Covid.
You are rightly distraught that Covid shortened your father’s life. As such, you should be distraught also that healthy people – people young and vigorous, people who are at no real risk of suffering from Covid – are being misinformed by the media and by politicians that they are as likely be struck down by Covid as was your father. You should be distraught that these (non)victims of Covid are encouraged by institutional lies to believe themselves to be “victims” comparable to your father.
If I were you, these lies would have me incensed.
Sincerely,
Don
Quotation of the Day…
… is from Walter Bagehot’s 1856 essay “Percy Bysshe Shelley“:
Before a man can imagine what will seem to be realities, he must be familiar with what are realities.
DBx: How many of the pro-Covid-19 lockdowners or pro-obstructionists seem to be aware not merely that 95 percent of Covid deaths in the U.S. are of people ages 50 and above, but also that fully 41 percent of all Covid deaths in the U.S. are of residents of nursing homes? How many pro-lockdowners or obstructionists appear to know that, according to the CDC, the Covid infection fatality ratio for all Americans ages 50-69 is 0.005, while that for Americans ages 70 and older is 0.054?
When people call for – or even express their approval of – lockdowns and other government-imposed obstructions on economic and social activities, they almost never reveal any awareness of the above facts. Why not? Why do the media so rarely put Covid deaths in perspective? Why are reports of “surging” Covid cases reported with a tone and urgency suggesting that cases are nearly the equivalent of deaths?
What reasonable person believes, in light of the above facts about Covid-19’s lethality and overwhelming disregard for the non-aged, that it is reasonable, prudent, and justified to massively upend economic and social intercourse, as has been done and as governments continue to do? What sensible human being, in light of these facts, agrees to have government dictate the number of persons who are allowed to gather in private homes? To grind to a halt a great deal of productive activity? To shutter schools and have five- and six-year-old children “learn” through Zoom? To trust executive government officials with powers never before exercised in the United States on such a scale and with such utter arbitrariness – that is, to trust executive government officials to be dictators, for that’s what they have become and that’s what they remain as I write these words in fear, sorrow, and anger?
Why are so many Americans, the vast majority of whom are at no real risk of suffering from Covid, treating fellow human beings as lethal monsters?
Why have so many of my fellow human beings lost touch with reality and become deranged?
…..
(I discovered the above quotation from Bagehot on page 223 of Gertrude Himmelfarb’s 1968 volume, Victorian Minds.)
November 13, 2020
Associate Justice Samuel Alito
Those of us who are distressed, dismayed, and deeply depressed by the tyranny again being sledgehammered down upon us because of Covid Derangement Syndrome can, perhaps, find some comfort in the remarks that U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Samuel Alito delivered yesterday (on November 12th) to the Federalist Society. His remarks begin just after the 15 minute, 30 second mark.
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from pages 413-414 of the 5th edition (2015) of Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics:
In short, while externalities are a serious consideration in determining the role of government, they do not simply provide a blanket justification or a magic word which automatically allows economics to be ignored and politically attractive goals to be pursued without further ado. Both the incentives of the market and the incentives of politics must be weighed when choosing between them on any particular issue.
DBx: When you encounter arguments that Covid-19 justifies continued, massive government obstruction of ordinary life and human interaction, look for evidence that those persons who offer these arguments are aware that government officials might have perverse incentives. Look for evidence that pro-lockdowners or pro-obstructionists understand that government officials aren’t perfectly informed angels. Look for evidence that those people who assert that Covid justifies today’s unprecedented proscriptions and prescriptions by the state know that the state is not a divine institution but, rather, a human one operated by men and women who are motivated by an unusually intense desire for power.
I myself am always on the lookout for such evidence among the pro-lockdowners and pro-obstructionists. So far I’ve found almost none.
Some Links
This debt explosion happened even though, during the 16 years under Bush and then Obama, Republicans enjoyed more congressional majorities than Democrats. But the Obama administration and congressional Democrats have been just as complicit. And the Democratic agenda has arguably never been more fiscally radical — more insistent on growing government’s size and scope — than it is now, as Joe Biden prepares to move into the White House. But here’s the difference: Democrats have been mostly honest about their desire to grow the government. Republicans have generally been — to put it politely — hypocritical.
The Trump administration deserves loud applause for this move. A slice:
Under the new rules finalized last month, consumers will have more options. The upcoming generation of dishwashers will take less time to get dishes clean, and they’ll actually get those dishes clean in the first place. As The Wall Street Journal notes, this isn’t “peace in the Middle East or a Covid-19 vaccine.” But it is the sort of rule-making that Americans should want from Washington.
Then along came Trump, who commandeered the Democratic Party playbook on trade, making good on promises unkept by Democrats in the past. Biden, who campaigned as the “tougher‐on‐China” candidate, promising to expand Buy American provisions and to compel supply chain repatriation, and emphasizing his blue‐collar, Scranton roots is going to find it very difficult to rescind any of Trump’s tariffs anytime soon. The Rust Belt flipped for Biden and, indeed, the continued blueness of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Michigan cannot be taken for granted.
John Tamny writes sensibly about Covid Derangement Syndrome and the media’s fueling of it.
The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal warns of the dangers posed to Americans by Joe Biden’s Covid-19 advisory team, each of whom suffers from Covid Derangement Syndrome. (This disease – CDS-20 – is highly lethal and is on track to be one of the most painful and destructive viruses ever to afflict humanity.) A slice:
The problem with Mr. Biden’s advisory committee is that its members are part of the conformist Covid clerisy who think that lockdowns dictated from on high are good for the little people. He ought to diversify his advice by calling in the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration on the alternative policy of “focused protection.”
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 96 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:
“Resources” don’t matter until new ideas make them valuable.
DBx: Yes.
Indeed, as Deirdre’s and Art’s use of quotation marks suggests, “resources” don’t even exist as resources until they are created by ideas. What does exist is a collection of differently arranged atoms – that is, raw materials. Raw materials have always existed, and in abundance. But raw materials become resources only when human ideas figure out how – when human ingenuity creates the means – to use these materials in ways that further human well-being.
There are no natural resources.
For example, the electromagnetic spectrum existed for the entire duration of human existence. Yet it became a resource only within the past two centuries. And what transformed the electromagnetic spectrum into a resource was human ideas.
The same is true for any other resource you care to name. It’s true for petroleum, for iron ore, for magnesium, for bauxite, and for wood. It’s true for fish in the streams, for beaver on the riverbanks, and for boar in the forests. It’s true (with apologies to my Georgist friends) even for land.
As the late, great Julian Simon (pictured above) taught us: the ultimate resource is the human mind.
November 12, 2020
Some Links
Here’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown on the deranged new lockdowns. A slice:
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s new orders go the furthest into hygiene theater, creating new limits on how many people can gather in private houses (10) and shutting down bars and other establishments that serve alcohol after 10 p.m. with little scientific evidence that such arbitrary limits will really help slow the spread. Even putting aside more philosophical concerns about dictating how many people can gather in private dwellings, the idea makes little practical sense, since there’s a big difference between 10 people crammed into a tiny studio apartment and spread out in a four-story brownstone. Its necessarily selective enforcement threatens to come down hardest on politically or culturally disfavored communities. (See, for instance, New York City’s obsessive focus on pandemic transgressions in large Orthodox Jewish communities.) Similarly, there’s little reason to expect alcohol-serving establishments to be less safe than restaurants that don’t serve alcohol. And giving New Yorkers fewer hours in which to congregate in semi-public spaces like bars and restaurants means more people packed into small indoor spaces at once, potentially exacerbating the virus’s spread.
My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy is no fan of bipartisanship.
George Will explains how Joe Biden and Mitch McConnell can help each other.
Here’s a podcast with AEI’s Scott Winship on inequality and poverty in America.
I join with Pierre Lemieux in raising a glass to the memory of the great Jean-Baptiste Say.
Ethan Yang likes the new book by Deirdre McCloskey and Alberto Mingardi. A slice:
The authors go even further to point out that oftentimes innovation takes place to outmaneuver the state as regulations bog down progress in various industries. This can partially explain things like the emergence of private equity over public equity in the world of finance. One of the key benefits of private equity is not having to abide by the cumbersome regulations that govern public financial markets.
Bryan Caplan shares important wisdom from Chris Freiman.
Questions for All Who Support (or Tolerate) Covid-19 Lockdowns
How do you justify your position given the data presented in this new 19-minute-long video (below) by Ivor Cummins? Are his data fake or insufficiently complete? Does he slice and dice data in a manner that leads his audience into what you are sure is the dangerously mistaken impression that Covid-19 isn’t the categorically different monster killer that you and so many other people continue to insist that it is? Are Cummins’s interpretations of the data inaccurate or implausible? Is he lying?
As for me, I cannot look at this video – or his previous ones, or read analyses from other serious thinkers, such as those from the co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration – and come to any conclusion other than that the current level of fear of Covid reflects complete derangement. It’s Covid Derangement Syndrome driven by homo avoidcovidous.
If humanity manages to survive this derangement, the Covid-19 lockdowns and other attempts to obstruct normal human interactions will be recorded for all of history as an episode in equal parts irrational, grotesque, cruel, and evil. It will likely also prove to be, on net, lethal. And Neil Ferguson will forever be remembered as a rogue scientist whose reckless Imperial Model was a chief spark of policies that caused untold misery in exchange for no benefit.
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