Russell Roberts's Blog, page 356
November 5, 2020
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 108 of the hot-of-the-press (2020) splendid work by Deirdre McCloskey and Alberto Mingardi, The Myth of the Entrepreneurial State:
[F]ree will is meaningless unless it is free. Freedom means the freedom to sin, too.
DBx: Note – as Deirdre and Alberto repeatedly and rightly do – that freedom does not include the freedom to harm the persons or property of non-consenting others. But it does include the freedom to harm yourself and consenting others, as well as to discombobulate the sensibilities of officious, pretentious, arrogant, and haughty third parties. And heaven knows that humanity has no shortage of officious, pretentious, arrogant, and haughty third parties. Some are on the political left, some in the political middle, and some on the political right. All peddle ideas and ideals that threaten freedom and prosperity.
November 4, 2020
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 1 of Liberty Fund’s 2011 edition of Israel Kirzner’s 1963 textbook, Market Theory and the Price System (original emphasis):
In a predominantly free society, individuals are in most respects at liberty to act as they choose. That is, in such a society an individual is generally at liberty to take advantage of any opportunity (as he perceives the existence such an opportunity) in order to improve his position (as he understands the idea of improving his position). He is free to act in isolation, and he is free to engage in acts of exchange with other individuals (whenever he and some other individuals both perceive the opportunity of mutual benefit through trade).
DBx: Proponents of industrial policy and other advocates of protective tariffs and subsidies dislike this freedom. They dislike it because it results in patterns of economic activity that fail to tickle their fancies.
Each of these officious intermeddlers is so arrogant as to believe that if the complex pattern of production and consumption that emerges from individuals spending and investing their own money appears on its surface to be less ideal than is some pattern that the officious intermeddler can dream up in his or her brain, then he or she – the intermeddler – is entitled to recommend that government force millions of individuals to stop acting as each chooses and to start behaving as the intermeddler demands.
The haughtiness – the arrogance – is breathtaking. The world would be a more civilized and prosperous place were all such intermeddlers to mind their own business.
Seeing More of the Unseen
On Monday after I posted this letter in opposition to government-mandated paid leave, my friend Frayda Levy sent to me the following insightful e-mail. I share it here with her kind permission:
And btw, it is not just the employer who must “give” the leave. Other employees are also involved. Some employees will have to work more intensely, some will have to forgo their time with kids, some will have to learn new skills — that they may not otherwise need. Also consumers might be impacted. Some consumers might not get to see their doctor as quickly or their order for their children’s products may arrive later. Or some consumers may have to wait on long lines. In other words, it is surely not just a matter of one person giving while another just gets to take.
Some Links
Arnold Kling reviews Joseph Henrich’s The WEIRDest People In the World. A slice:
At the center of the book are the traits that Henrich describes using the acronym WEIRD: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic, referring to the cultures of certain societies. Over a decade ago, Henrich and colleagues came to the realization that many findings in psychology and behavioral economics that were based on studies of people living in WEIRD cultures did not replicate when attempted in other cultures.
One of Henrich’s central theses is that culture affects psychology, particularly when cultural institutions persist over many generations. For me, this raises a question: What makes a trait a psychological trait, as opposed to a cultural trait? Intuitively, I would say that if it is a trait that you would have regardless of the culture in which you are raised, then it is a psychological trait. But if a trait is mostly determined by the culture in which you are raised, then it is a cultural trait. Still, for me the distinction between psychological traits and cultural traits seems blurry, so I will describe traits as psychological/cultural, or PC.
Ben Domenech and Emily Jashinsky celebrate journalism’s “new contras” who are helping to pull back the curtain on much that is wrong with legacy media. (HT Betsy Albaugh)
Joakim Book’s take on the lockdowns – or whatever they’re called – is sober and superb. A slice:
The authoritarian threat of 2020 is very different, and instead of neo-Nazi movements of the early 2000s the culprits are established, well-meaning politicians and technocrats. Much like then, Sweden is depicted as a beacon of light, standing against a world gone mad, the last outpost of sanity and the values underpinning Western Liberal Democracy.
Most everywhere else, different rules apply: no matter the facts, we must squeeze harder. The badly-behaved virus must stop progressing, must cease and desist.
Quotation of the Day…
… is from page 123 of the 2009 edition of the incomparable H.L. Mencken’s 1926 volume, Notes on Democracy:
Democracy provides the machinery that Puritanism needs for the quick and ruthless execution of its preposterous inventions.
DBx: So true.
Of course, the specific superstitions, terrors, and lusts of puritanism in the 2020s differ from those of puritanism in the 1620s and even the 1920s. And today’s high pastors of the puritan faith boast not degrees in divinity but, instead, MDs, JDs, and PhDs. But puritanism’s basic character is unchanged. Ditto for its pastors’ conceits. Today’s puritans, like yesterday’s, believe that ordinary human beings are corrupted sinners who pose unspeakable harm to each other unless firmly bridled and muzzled by stern ’tho saintly elders.
The puritan elders of 2020 have frightened the flock into the belief that they – the flock – are all sinners infected by a Satanic force named “Covid-19,” and that the only salvation from this evil spirit is unquestioning obedience to the elders’ harsh but God-ordained commands. (It is an insignificant detail that in 2020 “God” has been renamed “Science.”)
Sure, such obedience results in the abandonment of all joy, spontaneity, pleasure for the sake of pleasure, beauty for the sake of beauty, and natural human engagement and commerce. But if we don’t obey, our destination is as certain as it is terrible: Covid hell – an unspeakably painful and gruesome place in which everyone of all ages is sure to perish in agony. Avoidance of this pulmonary inferno is worth any price paid over any length of time – or so our elders thunder from their pulpits.
Obey, ye sinners, lest ye suffer justly at the hands of an angry God!
November 3, 2020
James Bovard on the Battering of the U.S. Constitution
The Constitution was intended to place politicians under “house arrest” – to strictly limit their power over private citizens in perpetuity. But in 2020, “house arrest” has been the default decree of many governors, and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden said he may impose a national lockdown if more people test positive for Covid. Biden says he changed his mind and won’t shut down the economy. But his rhetorical reversal could be as nonbinding as were campaign promises to keep the nation out of war by Woodrow Wilson in 1916, Franklin Roosevelt in 1940, and Lyndon Johnson in 1964.
Biden has run one of the most brazen fear-based presidential campaigns in modern memory. He routinely exaggerates Covid death tolls by a hundred- or a thousand-fold and talks as if every American family has lost a member or two from this plague. The more fears that politicians fan, the easier it becomes to seize boundless power.
Covid shutdown advocates flaunt claims of “science and data” like righteous priests invoking God and the Bible to sanctify scourging enemies. In the same way that local health czars felt entitled to shut down all private and public schools if the Covid positivity rate exceeded 0.000008% of the population, so the next president may feel entitled to nullify the Constitution if more than a statistically insignificant number of people nationwide test positive. And it won’t matter that the tests are wildly inaccurate or that WHO overestimated the Covid fatality rate by 50-fold. Bogus Covid test results will be sufficient to euthanize bonafide constitutional rights.
Attorney General William Barr said that imposing a “national lockdown” would be “the greatest intrusion on civil libertiesthe Amarillo Sod Poodles minor league baseball team.
…..
This year’s political developments have illustrated how easily politicians can nullify Americans’ rights merely by promising to play King Canute and magically sweep away a virus. Federal judge William Stickman IV ruled in September, “Broad population-wide lockdowns are such a dramatic inversion ofthe concept of liberty in a free society as to be nearly presumptively unconstitutional.” But the response to the dictatorial governors such as Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer and New York’s Andrew Cuomo reveals that tens of millions of Americans will happily sacrifice anything and everything for promises of a risk-free life.
Can Americans read their future in the fetters proliferating in other English-speaking nations? Last week, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced another national lockdown – 30 days of unmitigated misery, shutting down all “nonessential businesses” and confining people to their homes unless they have a few specific reasons to step out into the cold, cruel world. A senior cabinet member said yesterday that Britain’s shutdown may be extended beyond one month because “we will always be driven by what the data shows.” In New Zealand, the government last week announced it was creating “quarantine centers” for anyone who tests positive and refuses to obey government orders. One Twitter wag scoffed, “New Zealand went from gun bans to concentration camps in less than a year.”
Bonus Quotation of the Day…
… is from page xiii of Deirdre Nansen McCloskey’s and Art Carden’s hot-off-the-press (2020) book, Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich: How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World:
The evidence is overwhelming that liberty, not coercion by a private master or a public state, inspires people to continuous betterment. For the poorest.
DBx: Yes.
Yet this evidence, as overwhelming as it truly is, is ignored or dismissed by all who pray to the god-state to make the world more closely satisfy the particular fancies of those who pray. Most people who offer such prayers to the state believe it to possess miraculous powers, for only a being in possession of such powers could bring about the prayed-for outcomes.
And as I’ve said before, the fact that these worshippers of the state are unaware that they believe the state to possess god-like powers only further discredits their case for [fill-in-the-blank with whatever particular schemes or outcomes are prayed for].
More Covid Links
Roger Koppl decries the inexpertness of ‘expert opinion’ issued by ‘experts’ with monopoly power. A slice:
Like governments across Europe, Number 10 is toggling lockdowns on and off on like a faulty light switch. This toggling creates uncertainty, which is bad for investment and job creation, without providing a clear health benefit. Number 10 must be afraid of the terrible cost of doing nothing and afraid of making things even worse with bad policy. What would you do? You would probably do what they seem to be doing, consulting the scientific experts. Ironically, that is the problem. The minutes of the SAGE meeting of 21 September let slip the not-so-secret secret of pandemic policy prescription: the experts do not know what to do. “The existing evidence base for the effectiveness and harms of individual interventions is generally weak.” As the generally weak evidence shifts, so does expert opinion, and their advice toggles back and forth in the process.
“Dear Members of Parliament” (HT Dan Klein) A slice (original emphasis):
The most important message to convey is that I strongly believe the Government’s response has been, and continues to be, disproportionate to the true threat posed by this virus. While this was, perhaps, understandable in March when less was known, the policies that are still in place, which are both economically and societally ruinous, are now much less credible.
The Government appears to be locked into the single objective of dealing with this one virus at the expense of a myriad public health issues, many of which are exacerbated by the current COVID-centric policy choices.
The first recorded outbreak of the virus in the spring teaches us that the health impact of the virus was, in terms of clinical impact, akin to a severe influenza season. Indeed Dr Anthony Fauci said in the New England Journal of Medicine in February that the “clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza”. The data both in the UK and worldwide have borne this out. The mortality burden of COVID-19 in the UK has been similar to the relatively severe 2018/19, 1998/1999 and 1999/2000 influenza seasons, and significantly lower than the 1968 H3N2 influenza pandemic which killed approximately 80,000 people in the UK. These outbreaks were as severe, if not more so, than the current COVID epidemic and yet the country was not closed down risking economic ruin and serious long-term public health consequences.
These reckless and deranged Covid-19 lockdowns kill innocent people.
Quotation of the Day…
… is this October 24th, 2020, Facebook post by Mario Rizzo:
When I see this, I do not see the beauty of democracy where everyone can decide what kind of government they want. I see a threatening mob — each member of which is trying to voice their opinion about how to force me to do what I don’t want to do. The “tyranny of the majority.” Government which long ago exceeded its moral limits.
DBx: Mario’s vision is accurate and unobstructed.
If one were to make a list of the three most mistaken and dangerous notions that are widespread today, that list would surely include the commonplace equation of majority rule with freedom.
Far too many people naively assume that because it was liberating and productive to transfer the power to make collective decisions from monarchs and landed gentry to the broader population through democratic procedures, it is wise and productive to similarly transfer the power to make non-collective decisions.
November 2, 2020
A Completely Misleading Headline
Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:
The headline of your report – “Covid-19 Burden Falls Heavily on Middle-Aged Men” (Nov. 2) – is recklessly misleading, as is this summary on your site’s homepage: “With men in middle age dying disproportionately of Covid-19, scientists are looking for reasons not only in the underlying health risks, but also in biological and external factors.”
These claims convey the impression that middle-aged men’s risks of dying from Covid are not only especially high, but are higher than for any other demographic group. But in fact what the text of your report reveals is something entirely different and far less worrisome – namely, of all the middle-aged people who die from Covid, a higher proportion (about 2/3rds) are men rather than women.
The reality is that, while middle-aged men have a higher chance of dying from Covid than do middle-aged women, that chance remains minuscule, and significantly lower than elderly people’s chance of encountering such a death. 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.
Also from the CDC: Of all Covid deaths in America, the percentage that is of men ages 45-54 is a tiny 3.6. The percentage that is of men ages 55-64 is only 8.2. In contrast, a whopping eighty percent of all Covid deaths are of people 65 and older; and nearly one third of all Covid deaths are of people older than age 84.
Your headline uses a minor truth about Covid to tell a major lie.
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
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