Russell Roberts's Blog, page 41

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 103 of economists Phil Gramm’s, Robert Ekelund’s, and John Early’s important and data-rich 2022 book, The Myth of American Inequality: How Government Biases Policy Debate (footnote deleted):

Income from saving and investing in 2017 remained a small fraction of total earned income up to the 99th percentile of households. Even up through the 99.99th percentile, saving and investing generated less than half of household income…. But even for the top four  hundred highest-earning households, wages, salaries, and benefits still created more than 20 percent of their earned income.

The fact that income from work is the dominant determinant of earned income for 99.99 percent of all households in America has significant implications. Prosperity for all but a tiny outlier group of very-high-income households comes from normal, everyday work.

DBx: In his flaw-filled 2014 tome, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty repeatedly used as an example of an idle rich person Liliane Bettencourt, heiress to the L’Oréal cosmetics fortune. But Ms. Bettencourt (who died at the age of 94 in 2017), while she was perhaps typical of rich people in France, was certainly not typical of rich people in America.

Contrary to Piketty’s tale – and to the belief of Elizabeth Warren and other advocates of imposing a wealth tax in America – vanishingly few Americans live idly off of investment income. Promoting the image of such living does, of course, help to gin up support for soaking the rich, but this image is false.

And note also that the figures reported above by Gramm, Ekelund, and Early are powerful evidence against Piketty’s assertion that capital grows automatically. If capital did grow automatically, far more Americans than is the case would be living idly off of their investment incomes.

Some Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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George Will rightly criticizes Biden and Schumer for leading the “nonsensical progressive charge against stock buybacks.” Three slices:

Forgive them because they cannot help themselves. Progressives have a metabolic urge to boss around the private sector. It is not just that, as is said, progressives do not care what people do as long as it is compulsory. Progressives want to be compellers because they think they know exactly what people must be made to do if progress is to arrive.

On a recent morning, a Wall Street Journal front-page headline said, “Buybacks Set Pace for Record,” and the New York Times’s lead Page 1 story reported that semiconductor manufacturers seeking government subsidies must curtail buybacks — corporations repurchasing their stock. Hostility to buybacks arises from foggy economic thinking that is encouraged by the progressive animus against the people and processes that create the wealth that progressives delight in redistributing.

The question is: What should corporations do when their profits exceed their needs for internal investments? Progressives know what they should not do: buybacks.

…..

John H. Cochrane, the “Grumpy Economist” of Stanford University and the Hoover Institution, recommends considering why buybacks raise share prices, if they do so at all. Yes, buybacks increase short-term demand for the company’s shares, sometimes producing a small price increase. But, Cochrane says, the main reason buybacks sometimes slightly raise a stock’s price is that the stock market recognizes this: Buybacks redirect cash from suboptimum uses within the repurchasing company to optimum uses elsewhere, often in companies that have immediate investment needs.

So, Cochrane says, giving management stock options and allowing them to profit from buybacks incentivizes managers to make decisions that benefit the company’s shareholders, its long-term prospects and the economy’s efficient allocation of capital. Money spent on buybacks does not disappear like rain into sand; it changes hands and trajectories, and continues to work.

…..

Warren Buffett’s grandfatherly persona was absent when, his patience exhausted, he recently wrote: “When you are told that all repurchases are harmful to shareholders or to the country, or particularly beneficial to CEOs, you are listening to either an economic illiterate or a silver-tongued demagogue (characters that are not mutually exclusive).”

Biden, to whom the private sector is a region as foreign as Outer Mongolia, says buybacks are pernicious. Buffett, who has caused the creation and distribution of wealth that dwarfs his net worth, disagrees. You decide whom to believe.

John Masko reports on “BlackRock’s tyrannical ESG agenda.” A slice:

Not only is ESG failing to make money, but it is not even achieving its non-financial goals. One sizeable Columbia University and London School of Economics study published in 2021 found that US companies in 147 ESG portfolios had worse compliance records for both labour and environmental rules than US companies in 2,428 non-ESG portfolios. They also found that companies added to ESG portfolios did not subsequently improve compliance with labour or environmental regulations. This study added to a growing body of evidence that ESG investing is not only anti-democratic but ineffective.

Stephen Ford puts his finger on a major reason why housing in America costs more than it should. A slice:

Why do urban areas constantly get more expensive and exclusive? My neighborhood provides a clue. A proposed redevelopment of a single property in Del Ray, a much-loved part of Alexandria, recently died after a yearlong fight. The brouhaha, which divided the community, shows how the not-in-my-backyard mindset blocks virtually any increase in housing supply, even those that strive to maintain local character while making relatively modest changes.

In volunteering to get bumped from a flight, Paul Schwennesen finds reason to celebrate the market.

J.D. Tuccille’s son did his taxes for the first time – an experience that induced rage.

David Henderson has good reason to believe that the Russian economy is in a tailspin.

Here’s Jenny Holland on Scott Adams: “His ugly, segregationist comments are the mirror image of what the woke set has been saying for years.”

The Telegraph‘s Lockdown Files Team continues its report on the intentional inflaming of fear of covid by the British government. Two slices:

Matt Hancock wanted to “deploy” a new Covid variant to “frighten the pants off” the public and ensure they complied with lockdown, leaked messages seen by The Telegraph have revealed.

The Lockdown Files – more than 100,000 WhatsApp messages sent between ministers, officials and others – show how the Government used scare tactics to force compliance and push through lockdowns.

In another message Simon Case, the Cabinet Secretary, said that “the fear/ guilt factor” was “vital” in “ramping up the messaging” during the third national lockdown in Jan 2021.

The previous month, Matt Hancock, the then health secretary, appeared to suggest in one message that a new strain of Covid that had recently emerged would be helpful in preparing the ground for the looming lockdown, by scaring people into compliance.

…..

Six months earlier, in June 2020 – when the UK was coming out of its first Covid lockdown – Mr Hancock and Sir Patrick Vallance, the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, appeared pleased that a study on the virus’s spread showing it going in a “positive direction” had not received publicity, while a “gloomy” survey had been picked up by the media.

“If we want people to behave themselves maybe that’s no bad thing,” said Mr Hancock in a WhatsApp message. Sir Patrick appeared to agree, responding: “Suck up their miserable interpretation and over deliver.”

“From the moment the first ‘stay home’ order was issued, I had profound misgivings about lockdown – everything about it.”

Bjorn Lomborg tweets:

Quite astounding:

Sweden took a lot of flack for its Covid19 policies

But actually, Sweden has done best in Europe over 2020-22

measuring excess mortality in percent of total mortality

Jay Bhattacharya is conducting a poll on Twitter:

What is worse for the reputation of scientists? That there was a consensus in favor of disastrous, useless pandemic policies? Or that a majority of scientists stayed silent to avoid ex communication by the mob?

Consensus for nonsense 31.1%
Scientists self censored 68.9%

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 266 of Thomas Sowell’s 1999 book, Barbarians Inside the Gates:

There are too many people who ought to be grateful for their good fortune, but who are arrogant instead.

DBx: The two great teachers in my life are my parents and economics. In both, I was unusually fortunate. Both taught me to despise envy and to be appropriately humble in the face of a reality that is far more complex than it appears to our senses. In the former, the larger role was played by my parents; in the latter, the larger role was play by economics.

I was fortunate, too, in the kind of economics that I first encountered. It was a mix of Armen Alchian and Milton Friedman-style UCLA and Chicago price theory, and Austrian – especially Hayekian – economics. Practitioners of both styles refuse to fall into a trap that captures many other economists – namely, mistaking models meant to enable our puny minds to better grasp reality for reality itself.

My parents and economics each counseled me that, at least in the society of which I am a part, there’s a high correlation between a person’s material wealth and that person’s contribution to his or her fellow human beings. And correlation here is indeed largely causation. (This causal connection was taught to me by economics.) In the case of my parents, I’m not sure of the source of their notable aversion to envy, but that aversion was real and passed on to my three siblings and me. In the case of economics, once you understand that in a market economy wealth is created and earned by successful efforts to assist fellow human beings to survive and thrive, the attitude one comes to have about successful entrepreneurs is one of gratitude rather than of envy.

Economics also instills gratitude for living in a society that, by allowing markets to work, encourages innovation as well as vast productive cooperation of, today, billions of people around the world. Persons who understand economics look upon strangers across town and across the globe – strangers who produce and purchase in markets – not with suspicion or as enemies, but with thankfulness and as friends.

Economics and my parents also each counseled me that reality is indescribably complex. In the case of my parents, this lesson was conveyed to their children by an insistence on the importance of rules. The greater is our information about the consequences of our particular actions, the less need is there for rule-following. Fully informed creatures take each situation as it comes; they take in any situation those particular concrete actions that are likely to work best in that situation. But if we are, as we are, largely ignorant of the range of the consequences of our actions, the wise course is to act according to the established rules for action in the situations that we confront.

Neither my mom nor dad was aware that their unbending insistence on the importance of rule-following was consistent with the economics and social philosophy that I learned chiefly from F.A. Hayek. My parents simply understood right from wrong – defined, in their minds, by appropriate and inappropriate behavior – and demanded that their children follow the ‘right’ rules and not make excuses for failing to do so. Similarly, economics properly taught conveys the utter puniness of even the smartest and most-well-informed individual’s knowledge of reality compared with reality itself.

Once one realizes the reality of reality’s vast and incomprehensible-in-its-concrete-details complexity, one is naturally humble about what one can do to ‘change’ reality. Schemes for using the coercive powers of government to achieve economic and social betterment are then naturally viewed with enormous skepticism. How do you know? How will you acquire the knowledge you must acquire if your scheme is to work as promised? Such questions are instinctively asked by the wise and stubbornly ignored by the schemers.

An Open Letter to a Protectionist

(Don Boudreaux)

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Mr. Jayson Ramos

Mr. Ramos:

Your regular Facebook responses to my posts on trade reveal that your confidence in protectionism is a product of your unfamiliarity with the case against it. Your latest response – sparked by a recent Café Hayek post in which I observe that most parents understandably want their children to have careers in the service sector – is no exception.

In that reaction, you mistakenly think that you score points by correctly noting that I composed that post on a computer, which is indeed a manufactured good. But a key point that you miss is that this computer, which I do own and use, wasn’t manufactured by me.

I personally could have manufactured for myself a usable computer. But to do so would have taken far too much time and effort. So instead of manufacturing my own computer, I instead produced that output for which I have a comparative advantage – economic instruction – and used some of the income that I thereby earned to purchase a computer from a company that, because it specializes in producing consumer electronics, was profitably able to sell to me an excellent computer at a price far lower than the cost that I’d have borne had I produced the computer with my own hands.

I submit that I’m neither hypocritical nor myopic for happily using a product that I myself did not produce.

You’ll sincerely protest that you don’t advocate that all the manufactured goods that I consume be manufactured by me. You merely want more such goods to be produced by our fellow Americans.

But in so protesting you miss the point – which is that it is not, contrary to your suggestion, hypocritical or myopic of me to own and use manufactured goods while simultaneously opposing government policies to artificially create more manufacturing jobs in America.

What does it matter that most of the workers who assembled my computer work in a foreign country rather than in the country where I live? Either way, the computer wouldn’t be manufactured by its ultimate owner and user: me.

More to the economic point, if our fellow Americans had no better job alternatives than snapping together computer components into finished laptops, my laptop might well have been manufactured in the U.S. But thankfully our fellow Americans do have better job alternatives – just as I have a better job alternative – than snapping together computer components into finished laptops. We Americans therefore profitably rely for this task’s performance on workers for whom this task is their best alternative.

That foreign workers can perform this task at a lower cost than can we Americans means that we Americans have better job alternatives than do those foreign workers. Do you think this reality is lamentable? Would you prefer American workers to have job alternatives as poor as those of many workers abroad? I assume not.

Yet if the U.S. government were to use protectionist policies to ‘bring back’ to America more such manufacturing jobs – jobs that can be performed abroad at lower costs – to produce the same amount of manufacturing output that Americans now consume, the U.S. government would ‘successfully’ direct many American workers out of jobs at which they are highly productive and into jobs at which they are less productive – that is, into jobs at which American workers are roughly no more productive than are the lower-productivity and lower-wage workers abroad who today manufacture goods that American workers don’t manufacture. We know that this unfortunate outcome would prevail because, if American workers were most productively employed to manufacture goods that are now manufactured abroad, businesses would on their own move to employ these American workers in those manufacturing tasks. There’d be no need for government intervention.

Exactly how would American workers, families, and consumers benefit from government policies that force untold numbers of American workers from their most-productive jobs – nearly all of which are in the service sector – into less-productive jobs in the manufacturing sector?

Unless and until you can convincingly answer this question, you should refrain from what appears to be knee-jerk advocacy of policies designed to artificially increase manufacturing employment in America.

The basic economics of trade aren’t difficult, Mr. Ramos, but they are real and important. I recommend that you learn this economics before you next pronounce on trade policy.

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 Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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James Harrigan and Antony Davies talk with Phil Magness about the error-infected 1619 Project.

Juliette Sellgren talks with Chris Freiman about consequentialism.

Ryan Bourne and Vanessa Brown Calder add their voices to those who decry Biden’s attempt to use the CHIPS Act to subsidize child care.

Christian Britschgi explains that “[t]rue abundance requires a minimal state and free markets.”

Steven Greenhut wisely counsels us to “just say ‘no’ to new forms of prohibition.”

Brendan O’Neill reports on how what he rightly describes as “the sinister cruelty of locksdowns” has been “laid bare.”

Telegraph columnist Fraser Nelson is understandably angry that Britain’s lockdowners won’t admit their grotesque errors. A slice:

In coming days, this newspaper will show the treatment meted out not just to lockdown critics, but ministers asking awkward questions about what all of this would lead to. This shows the groupthink atmosphere: how hard it was, even as a Cabinet member, to urge caution. By the end, ministers were left in no doubt that anyone who asked questions would be seen by the No 10 team as a problem – or even the enemy. (Even, on occasion, the prime minister himself.)

It’s a classic study of groupthink, but decades of study into so-called cognitive dissonance in political leadership shows we should expect this. The bigger the stakes, the stronger the denial. At a certain stage in a high-stakes drama, the politician starts to see their policies as not just correct but heroic and their critics as confused, malign or ideologically-motivated. A poor backdrop for error correction.

Eric Abbenante tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

Bill Maher on the pandemic “I feel like the people who were the dissenters are looking pretty good.”

Russell Brand: “I think dissent is a great duty around all topics.”

Here’s the Wall Street Journal‘s latest “Notable & Quotable”:

Epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff and Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R., Iowa), a physician, at a Feb. 28 hearing of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic:

Kulldorff: By forcing children to have a vaccine that they don’t need because they’ve already had the disease, that undermines the trust in other vaccines like the measles vaccine or the polio vaccine and that’s very, very serious.

I think during the last several decades we have the never-vaccinate people, the antivaccine people, have tried to undermine their trust in vaccine, but with very little success. But the vaccine fanatics who want to vaccinate every person in this country, even though they are children who have very little risk for it, even though they have already had Covid, that has undermined the trust in other vaccines enormously, creating enormous vaccine hesitancy.

Miller-Meeks: So not allowing their provider or physician to determine the risk and the benefit.

Kulldorff: Yeah, and also people themselves, because people know that about immunity. We learned that in school. People know that if you’ve had a disease, you are—

Miller-Meeks: It wasn’t until I came to Congress that I found out infection-acquired immunity was a novel concept.

Kulldorff: Yeah, I guess we knew about it since 430 B.C., the Athenian plague, until 2020, and then we didn’t know about it for three years, and now we know about it again.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 73 of Phil Magness’s superb 2020 book, The 1619 Project: A Critique:

Capitalism was not proclaimed, adopted, imposed, or arrived at as a moment in time. In the classical-liberal sense, capitalism simply refers to a set of conditions and circumstances that are favorable to voluntary human interactions and that are distinguished by their absence of a centralized design. It describes a number of attributes in an economy – a freedom in the exchange and movement of goods and people, a general recognition of the validity of private property and a stable and discernible system of contracts built upon it, a cultural environment of toleration for choice and discovery, and a worldview that – at least in its professed values – deprecates forceful predation, whether by other economic actors or the power of the nation-state. A classical liberal history of capitalism is therefore a history of the conditions that permit free exchange and discovery, and with them the witnessed results of the past two hundred years.

A Telling Tale of Toil

(Don Boudreaux)

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In this splendid new essay, David Henderson sings the praises of globalization. Do read the whole piece, but this paragraph stood out to me:

At an event I spoke at about fifteen years ago, during the “China shock,” another speaker, financial adviser Ron Muhlenkamp, told an interesting story. He had spoken to an audience of steelworkers in Pennsylvania whose median age, he estimated, was about fifty-five. They, to a man, all wanted to hold off on steel imports until they retired in about five or so years. Then he asked, “Who here wants your son to work in the steel industry?” Not a hand went up. They realized that they had tough jobs and wanted protection of the industry only until they retired. But they wanted their adult children to get cleaner, safer jobs. They didn’t get their way totally; some of their jobs disappeared, but at least their adult children would get nicer jobs, even if the jobs paid somewhat less.

Ron Muhlenkamp’s experience doesn’t surprise me.

My father dropped out of school in the 6th grade, although in his mid-30s he earned his GED. The GED, alas, didn’t change his career path. He worked for most of his adult life in a shipyard, first as a pipe fitter, then toward the end of his working days as a crane operator. At the end of my first, less-than-successful semester of college – the semester before I luckily stumbled into a course on the principles of microeconomics – I mentioned to my parents that I was seriously considering dropping out of college. (I was indeed serious. I went to college to chase women and drink beer. I was wholly unsuccessful in the former endeavor and far too successful in the latter. I cared not a whit about school work, and my grades accurately reflected my indifference.)

Having worked at the shipyard during each of the previous two summers (1975 and 1976), I knew that I could get a job there. My mother and father were aghast at my announcement. I don’t recall my dad’s exact words, but he made crystal clear to me that if I dropped out of college and followed in his career footsteps, I would be throwing away a golden opportunity to get employment of the sort that he always wished he could have gotten but knew was out of his reach.

My father (and mother), in short, would have been deeply disappointed in me had I aspired to work as a laborer in the manufacturing sector.

Please do not think that I hold manufacturing workers in contempt. I do not. Again, my father was one such worker, and I loved him dearly and respected him immensely. But as a matter of indisputable reality, nine-to-five jobs on factory floors are not jobs that most parents want their children to hold. And parents are correct in the sense that the ‘best’ jobs – in terms of pay, fulfillment, and work conditions – are in the service sector, such as my job as a college professor. And such as also are the jobs held by the pundits and tweeters who are today nostalgic for America’s manufacturing past.

Nearly all such manufacturing-obsessed pundits and tweeters who advocate that state power be used to artificially create more manufacturing jobs in the United States (and, as a result, fewer service-sector jobs) want to condemn future generations to what almost no parents want for their children – namely, future careers on factory floors.

I know that none of the “national conservative” and progressive pundits and tweeters who peddle policies to ‘restore’ manufacturing employment understand that, were government to succeed in artificially increasing manufacturing employment in the U.S., manufacturing wages, and wages overall, would be made lower than they are today. These pundits and tweeters unfailingly display their ignorance of basic economics. But I wonder how many of these pundits and tweeters were raised in households in which one or both parents worked on factory floors. I’ll bet not many.

Some Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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George Will explains the folly and the political attractiveness of “Buy American.” Two slices:

“Buy American,” like protectionism generally, can protect some blue-collar jobs — but at a steep price: A Peterson Institute for International Economics study concludes that it costs taxpayers $250,000 annually for each job saved in a protected industry. And lots of white-collar jobs are created for lawyers seeking waivers from the rules. And for accountants tabulating U.S. content in this and that, when, say, an auto component might cross international borders (U.S., Canadian, Mexican) five times before it is ready for installation in a vehicle.

In the usual braying-and-pouting choreography of the State of the Union evening, members of the president’s party leap ecstatically when he praises himself, and members of the other party respond sullenly, by not responding. This year, however, something unusual happened when President Biden vowed to “require all construction materials used in federal infrastructure projects to be made in America.” A bipartisan ovation greeted his promise to reduce the purchasing power of tax dollars spent on infrastructure projects by raising the cost of materials.

This will mean more borrowing, not fewer projects. Federal spending is not constrained by a mere shortage of revenue. So, Biden was promising to increase the deficit. And this policy, which elicited red-and-blue bonhomie in the State of the Union audience, also will give other nations an excuse to retaliate (often doing what they want to do anyway) by penalizing U.S. exporters of manufactured goods.

…..

Washington lobbyists for both will prosper. Remember Solyndra, the Obama administration’s industrial policy pratfall? Before its bankruptcy, this renewable energy company gorged itself on $535 million in federal funds. And spent almost $1.8 million on lobbyists.

Progressives lament what they call America’s “market fundamentalism.” Sensible people say: Would that this were real. Populists will note that Buy American is popular. It is that, and it also is proof that polarization can be ameliorated by the bipartisan appeal of a bad idea.

Historian Blake Scott Ball tells the tale of how Charlie Brown and Peanuts were made possible by free markets. Here’s his conclusion:

None of this would have been possible outside of a liberal free market society. Creations like Peanuts are an essential part of human flourishing. As a great Western philosopher once said, “Man does not live by bread alone.” Our material needs are essential, of course. But humanity needs more to live a full life. We need the imagination of Snoopy. We need the romance of Sally in pursuit of her beloved “Babboo,” Linus. We need the joys of success and the lessons of defeat on the baseball field with Charlie Brown.

For humanity to flourish, we must be free to explore our full selves. Charles Schulz’s Peanuts gave us that every day for 50 years, and it would never have happened without the free market.

Robert Bork Jr. encourages a Congressional investigation of the lawless FTC Chairwoman, Lina Khan. A slice:

Similarly, FTC employees in confidential government surveys have twice awarded Ms. Khan low marks for “honesty and integrity.” She continues to override staff recommendations and double down on losing legal strategies that earn her one courtroom rebuke after another, most recently with a judge tossing out her antitrust suit against Meta…. In my discussions with current and recent FTC officials, they describe Ms. Khan as a Machiavellian who muddies transparent processes and trashes precedent by announcing surprise policy reversals.

In this letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal, Ben Zycher exposes the fallacy of Chuck Schumer’s feeble effort to defend the indefensible – here specifically, ESG investing:

Sen. Chuck Schumer argues in favor of a regulation explicitly allowing retirement-fund managers to include environmental, social and governance objectives as investment criteria, maintaining that ESG factors “minimize risk and maximize their clients’ returns” (“Republicans Ought to Be All for ESG,” op-ed, March 1). Oh, please. ESG criteria, among which are disinvestment from industries purportedly contributing to the climate “crisis,” charitable donations to community (leftist) groups, and identity-group representation on corporate boards, are necessarily political. They allow fund managers to substitute their political preferences in place of the fiduciary interests of plan participants under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974.

A substantial body of evidence demonstrates that the insertion of nonpecuniary investment criteria imposes a substantial penalty over time in terms of realized returns. This isn’t surprising: The criteria impose artificial constraints on investment choices. Far from being a way to “let the market work,” ESG in reality is the most recent version of the timeless game of “Other People’s Money.”

Benjamin Zycher
Fellow, American Enterprise Institute
Long Beach, Wash.

George Leef applauds “a new combatant in the battle against abusive government power.”

Emma Camp reports that support for free markets by young American conservatives is waning. Two slices:

Of the dozen young conservative voters Reason interviewed at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), a significant majority voiced waning support for free market values, instead favoring regulation, protectionism, and cultural war zeal to battle abortion, “wokeness” in schools, “cancel culture,” and globalism.

…..

Shunning the free market in favor of protectionist policies and government regulation is increasingly popular on the left and the right. “At a time of polarization, you might expect the right to react by doubling down on support for free markets and private property,” wrote Stephanie Slade in Reason‘s October 2022 issue. “Instead, concurrent with democratic socialism’s ascendance, many prominent conservatives have taken a leftward turn of their own.”

With the current culture war continuing to heat up, a commitment to free market economic policy seems to be losing its allure for many young conservatives. When protectionism can be levied to achieve culture war ends, it seems all the more attractive.

Writing in the Telegraph, Carl Heneghan reports that his correct warning of the incorrectness of the data used to justify Britain’s second covid lockdown was ignored. A slice:

While several others on that call were also trying to aid the understanding of the data, the message was clear – the Government was about to lock down again, based on the wrong information.

I couldn’t help but think that the public won’t forgive you when they find out they are being fed a narrative of fear based on untruths.

But nothing changed. By Saturday night, the Downing Street press conference went ahead. “Unless we act, we could see deaths in this country running at several thousand a day,” said the PM. The second lockdown was announced that evening.

I’ve had many sleepless nights during the pandemic as I’ve wrestled with how to get an evidence-based approach to the Government.

But by the morning, I realised the advisers weren’t listening. A fixed ideology had rooted itself at the heart of Downing Street. The data was there to support the policy – it didn’t matter if it was incorrect, so long as it supported the lockdown.

Jay Bhattacharya tweets:

In the name of suppressing ‘disinformation’ the American government violated the free speech rights of America’s citizens. Scientist bureaucrats used this power to create an illusion of concensus in covid science that did not exist.

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page xxxvi of the 2003 Third Edition of economic historian Eric Jones’s 1981 book, The European Miracle:

Protection from one’s own ruler was second in importance only to defence against outside attack. ‘Peace and easy taxes’ is not an empty first approximation, and Adam Smith was not altogether bigoted when he saw them as preludes to business prosperity.

DBx: Yes.

It’s important, though, to be clear that Adam Smith cared about business prosperity only insofar as such prosperity contributes to the prosperity of the masses. Smith understood that the prosperity of the masses requires freedom of commerce; the prosperity of the masses requires the ability of businesses to compete freely for customers and to reap and retain the reward of profit if and when they successfully do so. But also – and crucially – those businesses that fail to satisfy consumers as well as do other businesses – domestic or foreign – must be allowed to suffer losses. Smith rejected the fallacy that business prosperity itself and as such is what defines the ‘wealth of nations.’

Good Sense Spoken to Congress by Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, and Marty Makary

(Don Boudreaux)

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Here’s a video of testimony delivered two days ago in Congress by three heroes in the battle against covidian irrationality and tyranny: Jay Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, and Marty Makary.