Russell Roberts's Blog, page 69

Are Free Traders Guilty of Naïve Globalism?

(Don Boudreaux)

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In my latest column for AIER, I argue that the case for a policy of free trade has overwhelmingly focused on the benefits of free trade – and the harms of protectionism – to citizens of the home country. A slice:

Yet the false impression that liberal advocates of free trade naively ignore the salience of the nation-state is indeed widespread. This impression is created, however, not by free trade’s liberal supporters, but instead by free trade’s illiberal opponents. Whether out of ignorance or cunning, a familiar protectionist tactic is to falsely accuse advocates of free trade of putting the interests of foreigners on a par with, or even ahead of, the interests of fellow citizens.

A few years ago, for example, just before he and I were to debate free trade at Hillsdale college, the outspoken protectionist Ian Fletcher asked me why American libertarians are so willing to put the interests of foreigners over the interests of Americans. Fletcher seemed genuinely to believe that free-traders’ foundational argument is that free trade enriches poor countries by more than it impoverishes rich countries and, therefore, free trade is justified by a cosmopolitan utilitarian calculation.

If we free traders really made our case on such grounds, we would indeed deserve much of the blame for whatever skepticism the public has of free trade.

But in fact, the core case for free trade has never taken such a form. Both the theoretical and practical cases for a policy of free trade have always emphasized the gains bestowed by free trade, I repeat, on the people of the home country. Read Adam Smith. Read Frédéric Bastiat. Read Henry George. Read William Graham Sumner. Read Gottfried Haberler, Milton Friedman, Leland Yeager, Jagdish Bhagwati, Arvind Panagariya, Russ Roberts, Dan Griswold, Scott Lincicome, and Doug Irwin. Read any remotely prominent proponent of free trade – or read even me – and you will find, front and center, arguments that demonstrate that free trade is a boon to the home country, whether that country be rich or poor, big or small, industrial or agricultural.

You will, in addition, it’s true, often find arguments about how home-country moves toward free trade help also to enrich foreigners. But such arguments are not central to the case for free trade, and for good reason: trade is positive-sum. Whenever trade is made freer in the home country, net economic gains are created both for fellow citizens and for foreigners. There’s simply no need to justify free trade by resorting to a utilitarian calculus in which net gains to foreigners are weighed against net losses to fellow citizens, for such losses are mythical.

The fact that the case for free trade is mistakenly regarded by so many people to be rooted in global cosmopolitanism is a cheap public-relations victory for protectionists. They incessantly repeat untruths about free trade, such as that free trade with low-wage countries lowers American workers’ wages. Another false, but frequently heard, accusation is that America runs trade deficits only because foreign countries engage in “unfair” trade practices, or because insufficiently patriotic American leaders allow foreign countries to take advantage of ordinary Americans. These and similar untruths convey the impression that American supporters of free trade are either dupes who are blind to the damage done to the U.S. economy by free trade, or are starry-eyed globalists willing to sacrifice the interests of fellow Americans to those of foreigners.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 229 of Russ Roberts’s splendid 2014 book, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life:

The Theory of Moral Sentiments simply has a different focus from that of The Wealth of Nations. It doesn’t represent a different view of human nature or a different theory of how people behave or a more optimistic vision of humanity. It’s about a different sphere of human interaction. The author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations is the same man with a consistent view of humanity. He is mostly interested in how people actually behave, not how he’d like them to behave. He’s interested in understanding human behavior. So in the two books the emphases are different because he is writing about two very different spheres of life.

DBx: Indeed so.

Smith understood that we humans are evolved to respond in certain ways to personal interactions, and that the sentiments that motivate us in our face-to-face interactions simply are not triggered when we are dealing with people with whom we have no personal interactions.

Consider the shoes on your feet. The number of individuals who exerted some effort to make it possible for you to wear those shoes is probably in the millions, yet you personally communicated with and saw only one or two of these people. While it’s true that the sentiments that you have for the salesperson who fitted you with the shoes differ from the sentiments that you have for your children, siblings, and friends, the more interesting point here is that the sentiments that you have for the salesperson differ also, and more greatly, from those that you have for the (literally) millions of strangers whose combined efforts made it possible for you to buy and wear those shoes. The sentiments that you have for strangers are not personal. If you have for these strangers any sentiments at all those sentiments are abstract and intellectual; they aren’t ‘natural’ or in your heart.

In An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (I love the full title), Adam Smith sought to understand and explain a modern economy one essential feature of which is that each denizen is supplied by the efforts of countless strangers and is employed in ways that help countless strangers (only some of whom are the strangers who help him or her). No such economy could possibly be governed by the personal moral sentiments that are natural and real and useful and wonderful when we personally interact with other individuals.

Grasping this reality about the two different spheres of modern humans’ interactions is a mark of intellectual and emotional maturity. Unfortunately, far too many people remain, on this front, intellectually and emotionally juvenile.

Some Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Wall Street Journal columnist Allysia Finley rightly decries the vile reality that “western scientists cheered on China’s covid repression.” Three slices:

China’s zero-Covid policies have recently come under criticism from public-health leaders—including those at the World Health Organization—who once held them up as a model for the West.

“China’s success rests largely with a strong administrative system that it can mobilise in times of threat, combined with the ready agreement of the Chinese people to obey stringent public health procedures,” the Lancet editorialized on March 7, 2020. Western countries, it added, “must abandon their fears of the negative short-term public and economic consequences that may follow from restricting public freedoms as part of more assertive infection control measures.”

That hasn’t worn well. The negative social and economic consequences of lockdowns in the West—from learning losses and destroyed small businesses to alcoholism and drug abuse—weren’t “short-term.” Nor were China’s draconian zero-Covid policies, which three years later are only slowly being eased.

…..

A charitable explanation is that China’s Communist Party bamboozled Western public-health officials by projecting competence and control. The National Institutes of Health sent deputy director Clifford Lane to China in February 2020 on a World Health Organization mission to assess the situation on the ground. “The Chinese were managing this in a very structured, organized way,” he explained in an April 2020 NIH newsletter.

“Dr. Lane was very impressed about how, from a clinical public health standpoint, the Chinese were handling the isolation, the contact tracing, the building of facilities to take care of people, and that’s what I believed he meant when he said [they] were managing this in a very structured, organized way,” Anthony Fauci stated during a deposition last month.

Yet one merely needed to pick up a newspaper or scroll the web to learn otherwise. “Lisa Wang was fighting a high fever when she was turned away from an overflowing hospital in Wuhan,” CNN reported on Feb. 23, 2020. “A chest scan showed her lungs were infected, but she couldn’t get treated for the novel coronavirus she likely had because there weren’t enough beds at the Wuhan Third Hospital, a doctor told her. Instead, she was given medication and instructed to self-quarantine at home.” Later, she was “forced into a makeshift quarantine center at a technology park—putting her at risk of cross-infection with hundreds of other patients warehoused in the bare-bones facility.”

Chinese who contracted or were exposed to the virus were forced into isolation centers, which weren’t as pleasant as tuberculosis sanitariums a century ago. “Bags of garbage, including unfinished meals and used masks, were piling up on the floor, and no medicine or treatment were provided to patients apart from daily temperature checks,” CNN reported. “There was no central heating inside.”

Yet by Dr. Fauci’s account, Dr. Lane concluded that “the Chinese had a very organized way of trying to contain the spread in Wuhan and elsewhere,” even though he never visited Wuhan.

…..

China’s three years of coercion and suppression of its people show why political debate on public-health issues is essential. If elites are so enamored with China’s command-and-control model, they should move there.

David Livermore, writing at Spiked, explains that “Beijing’s zero covid experiment has ended in catastrophic failure.” A slice:

The lessons here extend far beyond the CCP. China’s experiment shows that even with an extreme disregard for liberty, human dignity and privacy, lockdowns fail and the virus wins. Milder lockdowns, as pursued elsewhere, never stood a chance. All they achieved was to kick the pandemic can a few risible yards down the road and to encourage variants that spread more efficiently. For instance, the Alpha strain, the first to be labelled a variant of concern by the WHO, began its expansion during the UK’s second lockdown in November 2020.

Some supporters of lockdown still point to the examples of Taiwan, Korea, Australia and New Zealand. It is argued that can-kicking lockdowns can work if a country isolates itself, giving time for a vaccine to be developed and deployed – and that China has simply failed to grasp this opportunity. While the gains of such an approach would always be uncertain – the considerable costs are not. The US tried to isolate itself with border closures in early 2020 and failed. Melbourne, in ‘successfully isolated’ Australia, endured more days of lockdown than any other city worldwide while developing a police force that would embarrass a Central American junta. Moreover, the success of ‘warp-speed’ vaccine development remains uncertain for future pandemics.

The unavoidable truth is that lockdowns caused vast collateral damage. To the economy. To relationships. To education. To mental health. To the work ethic. To our equilibria with other pathogens – from influenza to Group A Streptococcus. Persistent excess non-Covid mortality is currently being recorded across Europe, the US and Australia, thanks to illnesses that were neglected while health systems were obsessed with Covid. If this continues for another year – and it shows little sign of abating – non-Covid excess deaths could begin, country by country, to exceed those attributed to Covid.

The brutal truth is that humans, like other mammals, are prey to occasional respiratory pandemics, as in 1889-94 (Russian flu), 1957-58 (Asian flu), 1968-69 (Hong Kong flu) and, worst of all, the 1918-19 (Spanish flu). In the past we sweated them, protecting our vulnerable as best we could, tending our sick and mourning our dead. Otherwise, life continued. There was no lasting economic or social harm. This approach was still advocated in the influenza-preparedness strategies drawn up by the UK Department of Health in 2011 and the World Health Organisation in 2019.

Yet, in 2020, country after country adopted a different, untested course. Perhaps we pivoted because Wuhan’s lockdown seemed to work and because influential scientific and media opinion demanded we follow suit. Regardless, the resulting damage is unprecedented, both in China and the West.

[DBx: Never forget that Imperial College’s hypocritical ‘scientist’ – or ‘modeler’ – Neil Ferguson explicitly cited Beijing’s authoritarianism as the model for lockdowns of the sort that he desired in the west. What a scourge has Ferguson proven to be to civilization.]

Jay Bhattacharya tweets:

I spent the afternoon yesterday at Twitter HQ at the invitation of @elonmusk to find out more about the trend “blacklist” that twitter placed on me & more. A short thread on what I found out follows.
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The Mail reports on Twitter’s suppression of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.

Kathy Gyngell is correct: “The cruel masking of children was always down to politics, not science.”

Inspired by my esteemed GMU Econ colleague Jim Bennett’s latest book, Highway Heist, George Leef asks if our roads must be built by government. A slice:

The federal government stayed out of roads (but not railroads) until late in the 19thcentury. The impetus for its involvement came from a lobbying group called the League of American Wheelmen (LAW). The “wheelmen” were bicycling enthusiasts who wanted governments to improve the roads. LAW was led by a Civil War officer named Albert Augustus Pope, who happened to have gotten in on the fad for cycling in a big way—he manufactured bicycles. Cycling would be much more enjoyable if our rutted roads were improved. And he’d sell more.

The LAW wanted both state and federal action. They were opposed by farmers, who didn’t want any further taxes for roads that they generally regarded as satisfactory for their needs. In one of the many intriguing bits of history in Highway Heist, Bennett explains that in those days, the upkeep of roads was mostly a local matter. Inhabitants were expected to devote a few days each year to road upkeep. This in-kind “tax” was perfectly acceptable to the farming community and it was able to fend off LAW’s legislation for a number of years.

But not, of course, indefinitely.

What eventually broke the back of the opposition to federal meddling with the roads was that language about “post roads” lurking in the Constitution. In the late 19th century, the Post Office began to offer Rural Free Delivery, thus saving country-folk the trouble of having to go into the nearest town to get mail. The catch was that RFD would only be offered on roads deemed good enough to be “post roads.” Thus did the federal camel get its nose under the road construction tent.

Although Bennett doesn’t mention this, many of the country’s earliest roads were built by private enterprise. (There was no reason for him to do so, since his book is only about the intrusion of government into road building.) When good-quality roads became commercially important, profit-seeking firms were there to provide them. As we read in this article in Access magazine, “During the 19th century more than 2,000 private companies financed, built, and operated toll roads. A glimpse at our history may provide a useful perspective on today’s budding toll-road movement. Private road companies in the 19th century answered an urgent community need, where the government couldn’t, and they did it with creativity and imagination.”

Larry Reed details six ways that socialists are anti-social.

Here’s GMU Econ alum Nathan Goodman on ChatGPT.

Tim Carney decries the political left’s increasing hostility to freedom of expression.

Scott Winship asks: “How much would creating a Child Allowance reduce work among parents?” Here’s his conclusion:

The evidence remains consistent with the Chicago team’s claims: a permanent expansion of the CTC that resembles the temporary child allowance created in 2021 could reduce employment among single mothers by about one million, an effect that would go a long ways toward reversing the employment gains among single mothers since the policy reforms of the mid-1990s.

Matthew Continetti remembers Jeffrey Friedman. A slice:

Jeff preferred markets to government not because markets are more rational or more efficient but because they are easier to escape. Markets allow for a greater possibility of exit. And the ability to leave counterproductive, hazardous, or perverse conditions is a guarantor of freedom that also creates opportunities for innovation and improvement. Jeff’s classroom at NYU was where I first heard of A.O. Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, and where I first encountered Schumpeter’s aphorism, “The picture of the prettiest girl that ever lived will in the long run prove powerless to maintain the sales of a bad cigarette.”

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 173 of F.A. Hayek’s 1950 essay “Economics,” written for Chambers’s Encyclopaedia, as this essay is reprinted as chapter 11 in Essays on Liberalism and the Economy (2022), which is volume 18 (expertly edited by Paul Lewis), of The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek:

The specific set of problems which is singled out for treatment by economics as a distinct discipline arises from the circumstance that in most of their activities men are constrained to choose between the various ends they would wish to achieve, because the available means which can be used for a variety of these ends are limited in quantity and insufficient to satisfy all requirements.

DBx: Yes.

Yet a great deal of government ‘policy’ is undertaken as if the constraint of scarcity can be escaped by magical thinking or merely because today’s majority wishes the constraint to disappear. The state, in the eyes of far too many people, possesses god-like powers to work miracles. Most such people commit what has been identified – I think by Matt Ridley – as the “reverse naturalistic fallacy,” which is the jejune belief that if something or some condition ought to exist, then that thing or condition can indeed be made to exist.

Freeman Essay #146: “It Just Ain’t So!”

(Don Boudreaux)

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I thought that I’d completed the full archiving here at Cafe Hayek of all of my writings for The Freeman, but I was mistaken. Available here is a short essay of mine in the August 1998 Freeman; it kicked off what became for a time a regular Freeman series (with different authors) titled “It Just Ain’t So!.” Specifically, my short essay here is a defense of Adam Smith against a misreading of him that appeared in the March 1998 edition of the Atlantic by Jonathan Schlefer. You can read my essay beneath the fold.

(more…)

On Social Media Suppression of Expression

(Don Boudreaux)

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In response to a comment of mine made in this Cafe Hayek post, University of Washington economist Ian Fillmore sent to me the following e-mail, in which he makes a superb point. I here share Ian’s e-mail in full with his kind permission:

Hi Don,

You write:

I still oppose using the word “censor” to describe the actions of private entities, but when those private entities are being pressured by government officials to restrict information, the situation obviously becomes cloudy.

I agree. I have been troubled about recent revelations that social media companies have been accepting…input…from government officials about their content moderation decisions. The extent of that input is still unclear and probably varies from case to case. But the prospect of government officials weighing in on content moderation makes me sick. I’ve been frustrated to see self-described civil libertarians wave this all away because “The first amendment applies to the government, not private businesses.” That’s true, but it completely misses the point.

To be clear, private social media companies can choose any moderation policy they want, although I think they should be transparent about it. Some moderation is probably necessary (vulgarity, pornography, harassment, etc.) to keep the platform from devolving into a sewer. But notice that this sort of moderation improves the quality of the product for the vast majority of users. In contrast, it appears that Twitter has been making it harder for users to see posts from people that they are following, which makes the product worse, not better. It’s very odd for a private company to deliberately reduce the quality of its product. For me, that’s a giant red flag that something other than basic content moderation is going on.

Ian Fillmore

Some Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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As reported by Wall Street Journal columnist James Freeman, Securities and Exchange Commission commissioner – and my former Mercatus Center colleague – Hester Peirce is wisely resisting that agency’s attempt to impose on every publicly traded company an environmental agenda. A slice:

Securities and Exchange Commissioner Hester Peirce is sounding the alarm on the destructive climate proposal that SEC Chairman Gary Gensler is still trying to jam through on a partisan vote.

This week Commissioner Peirce explained that beyond requiring public companies to demand data on climate risks from even small businesses and farmers in their supply chains, the rule could also force changes in how companies operate and even who runs them. In a speech at the American Enterprise Institute Ms. Peirce noted;

… the climate proposal mandates disclosure about board oversight of climate-related risks, including identifying board members or board committees responsible for overseeing climate-related risks; detailing board member climate expertise; describing the processes and frequency of discussions about climate-related risks; explaining how the board is informed about, and how often it thinks about, climate-related risks and whether it considers climate-related risks as part of its business strategy, risk management, and financial oversight; and describing whether and how the board sets climate-related targets or goals and how it oversees progress in achieving them.The proposal also includes a corresponding set of disclosures related to management: who is responsible for managing climate-related risks, what their climate expertise is, how they get informed about those risks, and how often the managers responsible for climate-related risks report to the board…

One comment letter objected that the “disclosures usurp the decision-making authority of corporate boards and executive management, authority specifically granted to them by state corporate law.”

Washington would essentially be forcing every public company, regardless of industry, to focus on climate, while also pressuring them to hire leaders who share this obsession. But even the most climate-obsessed ought to recognize that such change requires a new law, not unelected financial regulators suddenly deciding to appoint themselves ministers of global warming.

George Leef explains yet another sad consequence of the wokes’ nasty racism: that “If you dispute the work of a black radical, you will face an angry mob calling for your head.”

GMU Econ alum Dominic Pino writes wisely about the abuse, as well as about thelegitimate use, in America of appeals to freedom.

Also from Dominic Pino is this worthy call for prison reform in America. A slice:

Nathan Deal, governor of Georgia from 2011 to 2019, gave conservatives a good model to work from. Throughout his eight years in office, he oversaw a reduction in the state’s prison population that coincided with a reduction in crime and a fast-growing overall population. Better prison administration and more effective rehabilitation programs saved taxpayer money while delivering better results.

Deal expanded the number of “accountability courts” that allow nonviolent offenders to avoid prison time by proving to the court that they are turning their lives around.

Steven Greenhut warns Republicans of Trump’s megalomaniacal threat to anyone and all that he perceives as obstructing his personal desires. A slice:

Trump has yet to denounce Fuentes’ views just as he couldn’t quite issue an unequivocal rebuke after Charlottesville. I believe it’s the result of Trump’s narcissism. As the center of the universe, he praises or condemns others based on their fealty to him. It wasn’t hard for him to give an unequivocal condemnation of Islamic terrorism because there aren’t many jihadists who adore him. The same can’t be said for the far right.

Phil Magness and David Waugh report on the confirmation by the Twitter files that pre-Musk Twitter suppressed information on covid that contradicted the hysterical mainstream narrative. Three slices:

Yesterday (Dec 8 2022), using the information provided by Twitter under direction from new Chief Executive Elon Musk, journalist Bari Weiss, released a Twitter thread confirming these suspicions. Twitter secretly suppressed accounts, operated a “search blacklist,” and blocked certain content from trending, Weiss’ thread confirms. In response, Musk tweeted that Twitter plans to release software that will provide users with more clarity regarding shadowbanning.

Victims of Twitter’s practices include Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Stanford professor of medicine and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD). Weiss’s thread and The Twitter Files confirm what we’ve long suspected. Seeking to prop up Anthony Fauci and the lockdown policies he promoted in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Twitter (and other Big Tech companies) intentionally blacklisted, censored, suppressed, and targeted the GBD and its signers.

…..

Still unfolding in this investigation is the role of government officials in pressuring Twitter to engage in censorship over the COVID-19 pandemic. As revealed by a lawsuit earlier this year, internal company Slack messages show that Andy Slavitt, a former official on Joe Biden’s pandemic task force, met with Twitter officials and pressured them to restrict the account of COVID gadfly Alex Berenson. Slavitt also , delivered an ominous warning to executives at Facebook that the company would find itself in the White House’s crosshairs if it did not step up its efforts to restrict what the task force deemed to be “COVID misinformation.”

We now have conclusive evidence that public officials pressure private companies to do the dirty work of censorship. We have yet to discover, and may never know, how far the political involvement in social media censorship went, and which officials were given the power to silence. An ongoing lawsuit by the Attorneys General of Missouri and Louisiana is currently seeking to get to the bottom of those questions. Just two weeks ago, they obtained a court-ordered deposition from Anthony Fauci, in which they grilled him over similar suppressive tactics. Fauci proved evasive, invoking the “I don’t recall” line 174 times, but was caught in a lie about his direct personal involvement in the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) efforts to smear and discredit the GBD’s authors as “fringe epidemiologists.”

GBD co-author Jay Bhattacharya was slapped with a secret “Trends Blacklist” tag by Twitter executives at some point after his account was created in September 2021, Weiss’s thread confirms. The blacklist tag effectively suppressed Bhattacharya’s tweets by preventing them from going viral or being picked up by Twitter’s trends algorithm. By all appearances, one or more persons on the company’s SIP-PES team made the decision to suppress scientifically grounded dissent against lockdowns.

…..

Last week, Anthony Fauci denied any involvement in coordinating attacks on the GBD under deposition by the Missouri Attorney General. He claims that he was too busy to do so. His emails reveal a different story, though. Fauci expressed his agreement with Collins’ directive, and colluded with Deborah Birx to preempt discussion of the GBD at a White House COVID task force meeting. At some point, Fauci even directed his Chief of Staff Greg Folkers to assemble a list of anti-GBD political editorials, evidently to be parrotted back to the news media during interviews about the GBD. We still don’t know the full extent of Fauci’s efforts, because the NIH heavily redacted several pages of the requested records. But his involvement in the “take down” is undeniable.

Given the nature of Fauci’s smears, lies, and demeanor towards those who question his policy prescriptions, it is time to fully open up the public record at the NIH. It is time to scrutinize the decisions they made during COVID-19, including decisions to politicize science and suppress dissenting viewpoints.

Jay Bhattacharya reacts to the revelations of the Twitter files.

“What Is CISA and Why Does It Matter?”

Anthony LaMesa tweets about the rise in Denmark of common sense and the decline there in covid hysteria: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

Denmark: “In a statement, the [Danish] Health Authority said on Thursday that Covid-19 is no longer considered to have any special status compared to other illnesses, and that isolation is therefore no longer required following a positive test.”

Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from the editors’ footnote #8 on pages 453-454 of Book IV chapter II of the 1981 Liberty Fund edition of Adam Smith’s monumental 1776 An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations: – specifically, it’s a passage quoted by the editors from section 3.5 of the Early Draft of the Wealth of Nations:

[T]here is in every country what may be called a natural balance of industry, or a disposition in the people to apply to each species of work precisely in proportion to the demand for that work. That whatever tends to break this balance tends to hurt national or public opulence; whether it be by giving extraordinary discouragement to some sorts of industry or extraordinary encouragements to others.

DBx: A perennial industry thrives of people attempting to conscript the ghost of Adam Smith into the ranks of the political left. Don’t fall for it. While Smith believed in a role for the state beyond that of mere nightwatchman, he cannot be read today with even a modicum of care and objectivity to honestly reach the conclusion that, were he alive today, Smith would align himself ideologically or politically with interventionists.

Bonus Quotation of the Day…

(Don Boudreaux)

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… is from page 236 of Russ Roberts’s splendid 2014 book, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life:

I suspect that if we appreciated the role of specialization and exchange in creating the wonders  of modern life, we would be more tolerant of its imperfections and more eager to preserve what gives it its power.

DBx: Russ is right.

Unfortunately, too few people have this appreciation. And, as Russ understands, the absence of this appreciation is a chief reason why so many people – left and right – so blithely propose having the state obstruct this sort of exchange, subsidize that other sort of exchange, or otherwise try to engineer society into patterns or ‘outcomes’ that appear so beautiful on paper but which are either impossible in reality or can be brought about only at costs that are obscenely excessive.

Some Links

(Don Boudreaux)

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Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Justin Hart describes Twitter’s pre-Musk policy of masking or hiding tweets by Dr. Jay Bhattacharya – tweets that recommended covid policies more humane and better grounded in science than were the authoritarian and often-deranged policies imposed on much of the public and supported by most intellectuals and people in the mainstream media. A slice:

How many people endured weekslong quarantine because Dr. Bhattacharya’s message was suppressed? How many students would have been spared the education death knell of remote learning had schools heeded his advice, or even known about it?

Unlike Dr. Bhattacharya, I am not a medical expert. Normally I wouldn’t insert myself into someone else’s domain, but the nation’s health authorities had no problem inserting themselves into mine. They meddled in my business, my church, my kids’ education, my health, my grocery store, my gym, my coffee shop, my barber. In each case, some government entity was there with strangling regulations or an order to shut down entirely.

So I formed a ragtag group of activists, analysts, experts and parents, all trying to get our lives back to normal. We called our group Rational Ground and worked to amplify common-sense Covid policies. We published interactive charts, highlighted data refuting the stay-at-home orders, and pointed out the low risk of the virus for children. It was a lonely and difficult fight, but Dr. Bhattacharya was a calm and steady ally.

By the fall of 2020 we focused our efforts to support Scott Atlas, a Stanford colleague of Dr. Bhattacharya and a key adviser to the Trump administration on Covid. After President Trump lost the election, the momentum Dr. Atlas had won was seemingly lost. The Biden administration pushed for restrictions and for censorship of those who disagreed with the government’s official position.

In July 2021, White House press secretary Jen Psaki announced, “We’ve increased disinformation research and tracking within the Surgeon General’s office. We’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.” Ms. Psaki also revealed that senior staff for President Biden were a part of the White House’s efforts to suppress free speech.

This week’s revelations about Twitter add to the evidence that something bad was afoot.

Here’s Jeffrey Tucker on the Twitter files. A slice:

Bari Weiss, who left the New York Times in protest against the culture of that paper, had been given access to another tranche of inside information about the operation of Twitter before Elon Musk took over. She found vast confirmation of what we’ve suspected for years now: the platform was censoring people who objected to lockdowns and vaccine mandates among the whole litany of coercion and compulsion that swept the world from March 2020.

The first person highlighted here is Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya, who only joined the platform in the summer of 2021. During this entire time, Twitter spokespeople had said repeatedly that it did not shadowban but of course all of us knew otherwise.

[DBx: I still oppose using the word “censor” to describe the actions of private entities, but when those private entities are being pressured by government officials to restrict information, the situation obviously becomes cloudy.]

Writing in the Telegraph, Sunetra Gupta – one of the co-authors of the great Great Barrington Declaration – explains that “lockdowns put us at the mercy of disease.” Two slices:

Fans of Little Women will know that Beth March died of the lingering complications of scarlet fever, but who would have thought that this bacterial disease would be in the headlines in 2022? Is this because we have left children who were born during, or just ahead of, the Covid pandemic with an “immunity debt”?

It is now widely acknowledged that lockdowns caused harm to our already stretched health service, with many of the direct consequences such as increased cancer and cardiovascular deaths being reported regularly. Most of these harms were entirely predictable. Less obvious was how some of the more indirect consequences of lockdown might play out, such as the effect on our relationship with other pathogens circulating within our communities.

…..

More than anything, it is clear that we are experiencing an entirely predictable perturbation in our finely balanced ecological relationship with the organisms which are capable of causing serious disease.

Eventually that balance will return. The “immunity debt” that we have incurred will be gruesomely paid off and scarlet fever will once again become a storybook word. Sadly, the same cannot be said of the enormous financial debt we have taken on board to pay for these fruitless lockdowns. Our children will be shouldering this debt for years to come.

Jay Bhattacharya tweets:

Let us reject the idea that prudence requires that we treat each other as biohazards. We the people were made to breathe together freely in the company of our friends, family, and loved ones. It is one of the main purposes of our lives.

Brendan O’Neill is correct: “The eco-derangement of the elites is a threat to reason, freedom and jobs.” [DBx: Well, a threat to good jobs. The economic destruction unleashed by environmental policies will, in fact, leave humanity with many tasks to be done, but tasks that are more-difficult and lower-paying than would be prevalent without such destruction.]

Reason‘s Scott Shackford explains that “the FTC has no business trying to stop video game company mergers.”

Washington Post columnist Jason Willick decries the media’s uninformed coverage of the recently heard U.S. Supreme Court case, Moore v. Harper. Here’s his conclusion:

Sometimes, such dynamics are driven by partisan interest — but in Moore v. Harper, it’s not entirely clear which side would benefit from one ruling or another. This suggests the controversy over the meaning of the Constitution’s elections clause is the result of competing legal methodologies, rather than partisanship. Moore v. Harper reflects judicial authority applied as it’s supposed to be. As far as the health of democracy goes, the wild public distortions of the case are a greater concern.

Juliette Sellgren talks with Craig Biddle about philosophy and Objectivism.