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Here’s a comment – that, alas, I discover that I’m unable to post – on a response by “Matthew A.” to Scott Winship’s devastating analysis of the latest from Oren Cass’s shop, American Compass:

Matthew A.:

I write in response to your comment on Scott Winship’s thorough exposé of the many flaws in American Compass’s latest portrayal of the American economy. I here focus on your assertion that official measures of inflation intentionally undercount the dollar’s devaluation in order to save the government money.

While I’m the last person to doubt government-officials’ scurrility, I believe that the Boskin Commission finding remains valid – namely, that the Consumer Price Index overcounts – or, you might say, “inflates” – inflation.

But we needn’t quibble over this matter. A way to avoid the need to adjust for inflation is, first, to calculate the amount of time that an ordinary worker today must toil to purchase various goods and services, and then (2) compare these findings to the amount of time that an ordinary worker in the past had to toil to purchase these same items. We can perform this comparison using only nominal wages and prices.

A quick Google search turned up this list of prices of 16 familiar grocery items along with their nominal prices for both 1990 and 2020. And FRED has, for each of these years, reliable records of the nominal hourly wages of production and nonsupervisory workers. And so we can then divide the nominal price, for example, of a pound of beef in 1990 ($2.81) by the nominal hourly wage in 1990 ($10.22) to determine how long an ordinary worker in 1990 had to toil to earn enough income to buy a pound of beef (16.5 minutes). After performing the same calculation for 2020, we can then see if a worker today has to work longer or less, compared to a worker in 1990, to earn the requisite purchasing power.

In the case of beef, priced at $4.35lb in 2020, an ordinary worker in 2020, earning $24.67 per hour, had to work only 10.6 minutes to earn enough income to buy a pound of beef – nearly six minutes less than he or she had to work to earn the same ‘beef’ purchasing power in 1990.

I performed this calculation on each of the 16 grocery items listed at the above-mentioned link. The amount of time that an ordinary worker today must work to earn income sufficient to purchase each and every one of these products is lower than it was in 1990.

Of course, the fact that ordinary workers today don’t have to work as long as did their counterparts of 30 year ago to buy these 16 grocery items itself doesn’t prove that middle-class Americans today aren’t worse off than they were decades ago. But it does counsel some skepticism of your assertion that, unlike in the past, to maintain a middle-class lifestyle today “most wives are forced to work.”

In the near future, The Age of Superabundance­ ­– a brilliant, data-drenched book by Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley – will be published. The authors document beyond any doubt that each hour of work on the job today by an ordinary American worker yields that worker far more purchasing power, across a wide range of goods and services, than was yielded just a few years ago. (Here’s an essay that gives you a flavor of the book. And you’ll find here my own, more-modest efforts that point to the same happy conclusion.)

This reality is that the only reason women ‘must’ work today to maintain a household’s middle-class living standard is that what we regard today as a middle-class living standard is far more luxurious than it was in 1990, and made so by the voluntary participation today of more women in the labor force.

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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Oren Cass’s organization, American Compass, continues to dispense economically uninformed analyses of the American economy, all in an effort to pave the way for Cass and other nationalist-conservatives to impose on the rest of us their vision of what outcomes the economy should achieve.

Scott Winship has done a deep dive into American Compass’s latest effort – this one on inequality – and he is not impressed with what he found. Scott’s analysis is devastating. A slice:

At a time when national conservatism seems obsessed with cultural grievance to the exclusion of economic and social policy, we should all root for more serious policy analysis on the center-right. But as with earlier projects, American Compass’s latest looks like it begins with a set of priors about political economy—center-left priors—and then figures out how to make its argument with whatever evidence can be marshaled. Their inequality work looks similarly aimed at advancing center-left views through flawed analysis, ostensibly to advance national “conservatism.”

A brief review of AC’s past projects lays out the pattern. There was the early claim that the century-long project of modern inflation measurement had overstated improvement in living standards. Echoing Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s similarly confused Two-Income Trap from 17 years earlier, Oren Cass claimed that our lousy economy and dumb policy had created a situation where families need two workers to afford the same lifestyle that a single breadwinner could provide in the past. As I showed at the time, that was all wrong. Cass had simply misunderstood and assumed away the very measurement and conceptual challenges that economists have become successively better at addressing over time—namely how to account for consumers’ ability to switch up the goods and services they buy as prices change and how to address the replacement of older, lower-quality products with newer better ones.

Not only did American Compass purport to be smarter than microeconomists measuring inflation, in its next big economics project, “Coin-Flip Capitalism,” it discovered that hedge funds, private equity, and venture capital investments are losing bets—a conclusion that up to then had evaded ultra-wealthy investors putting their own money on the line.

But the AC analyses neglected the stronger long-run performance of private equity and venture capital beyond the 10-year window AC examined. Ignored, too, were the other reasons beyond expected average returns that investors turn to hedge funds (to hedge!), private equity, and venture capital. But concern for rich investors wasn’t the point. As Doug McCullough of the Lone Star Policy Institute succinctly put it, “American Compass seeks a virtual seat at the deal table to ensure private business decisions align with their concept of the general welfare.”

Like progressive groups such as the Roosevelt Institute (circa 2015), American Compass thinks the financial sector adds little value to the economy or the lives of everyday people and is a sort of vampire industry sucking up young talent who could do some good “in the real economy.” These critics reject arguments that finance promotes growth and higher living standards for all.

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Writing in the Wall Street Journal, UCLA medical-school professor Joseph Ladapo rightly laments the “epidemic of ‘Covid Mania’,” correctly noting that “[t]he problem isn’t only the overreaction to the virus but the diminution of every other problem.” Two other slices:

The novel coronavirus has caused suffering and heartbreak, particularly for older adults and their loved ones. But it also has a low mortality rate among most people and especially the young—estimated at 0.01% for people under 40—and therefore never posed a serious threat to social and economic institutions. Compassion and realism need not be enemies. But Covid mania crowded out reasoned and wise policy making.

Americans groaned when leaders first called for “two weeks to slow the spread” in March 2020. Months later, many of these same Americans hardly blinked when leaders declared that lockdowns should continue indefinitely. For months Covid had been elevated above all other problems in society. Over time new rules were written and new norms accepted.

Liberty has played a special role in U.S. history, fueling advances from independence to emancipation to the fight for equal rights for women and racial minorities. Unfortunately, Covid mania led many policy makers to treat liberty as a nuisance rather than a core American principle.

…..

Covid mania is also creating new conflicts over vaccine mandates. The same people who assured the public that a few weeks of lockdown would control the pandemic now argue that vaccinating children, for whom no vaccine has yet been approved, is essential to end the pandemic. Children account for less than 0.1% of Covid deaths in the U.S. Is enough known about vaccines to conclude that their benefits outweigh potential risks to children?

“Yes” is the answer of a salesman, not a scientist. Mandating a vaccine for children without knowing whether the benefits outweigh the risks is unethical. People who insist we should press on anyway, because variants will prolong the pandemic, should be reminded that a large reservoir of unvaccinated people in the U.S.—and in the world—will always exist. We cannot outrun the variants.

My colleague Bryan Caplan defends his ageless hypothesis against pushback from Jeremy Horpedahl.

Robby Soave is rightly critical of many on the political left who are addicted to Covid-19 panic porn. A slice:

Well, nope: COVID-19 deaths and cases continue to fall in Texas, even without a mask mandate or capacity restrictions on businesses. The same is broadly true of Florida, which relaxed its restrictions all the way back in September and has managed to weather the pandemic more successfully than super locked down states like New York and California.

This is good news! It’s more evidence that warmer weather does make it harder to spread COVID-19—in large part because the heat and sunshine allow people to socialize outdoors, where there is a significantly lower risk of transmission. It also shows that the vaccines are working. Fully vaccinated people are essentially immune from serious disease or death, and according to the latest data, they are very unlikely to carry or transmit COVID-19 at all. The message to the unvaccinated should be: Go get vaccinated. The message to the vaccinated should be: Rejoice! You can go back to normal life.

But the frustrating truth of the matter is that Team Blue doesn’t want to hear this. Many people—predominantly liberals—who claim to Follow the Science and Trust the Experts no matter what are nevertheless captivated by pandemic panic porn. By asserting, for instance, that social distancing and masks should be mandatory even for the vaccinated, they bizarrely fixate on the minuscule risk of post-vaccination infection.

(DBx: No surprise here, alas. The reaction to Covid from the start has rested on a lamentable inability to put risks into context. This inability quickly led to the deranged supposition that no amount of risk of coming into contact with SARS-CoV-2 is tolerable – or, what is the same thing, that no cost is too high to pay for even the most minuscule reduction in the risk of coming into contact with SARS-CoV-2).

Sherelle Jacobs reports on the continuing grip of Covid Derangement Syndrome in Britain. A slice:

The variant risk, then, is no more immediately terrifying than our five-year NHS backlog or that cancer research now faces its biggest setback in generations. And yet the Government seems captivated by the horror of a mutant punishing us for a sinful orgy of summer freedom. This is only in part explained by its fear that, after delaying the first lockdown, they will be accused of failing to act again. It is, more disturbingly, testament to the psychological power of the precautionary principle. Policy makers have become bewitched by the potentially infinite damage from existential risks, however remote or manageable they are in practice.

Over 40 years, the precautionary principle has mestasised from a fringe worldview propagated by environmental lobbyists to a groupthink mantra incorporated into everything from the Maastricht treaty to pesticide control. Despite its unscientific principles, demanding a level of certainty about safety that can never be reached and replacing trial and error with the elimination of error by banning trial, a weird synergy with predictive modelling has lent it academic credibility. Its intrusive hyper-caution has an aesthetic appeal for big-state politicians.

Sarah Manavis also ponders the grip of Covid Derangement Syndrome.

How can anyone learn of Australia’s policy and not believe in the reality of Covid Derangement Syndrome? Here’s a slice from an essay by Annabel Fenwick Elliott, who may never again see her father:

It is quite possible that I will never see my father or siblings again. That’s the logic behind Australia’s ongoing Covid policy, the country in which they live. Even if both he, my brother, sister, and I, are all fully vaccinated. Even though we therefore pose close to a zero risk of spreading the virus.

“If the whole country were vaccinated, you couldn’t just open the borders,” said Australia’s health minister Greg Hunt last week, dashing any hope that international travel will recommence this year, as was previously indicated. “Australia is in no hurry to open those borders, I can assure you”, its prime minister Scott Morrison confirmed yesterday.

The Australian government has also backed away from its promise to have its entire population inoculated by October. Due to inevitable supply issues, it looks like this won’t happen until 2022. Even then, it won’t allow vaccinated foreigners to visit. Even its own citizens, some 40,000 of whom are still stranded abroad, even if they’ve had the jab too.

Thing is, this is infinitely more ridiculous than banning all cars everywhere lest anyone die in a crash. It is drastically more insane than forbidding families from hugging come next flu season, even if they’ve all had the flu jab. It is further horrifying proof that democratic leaders are in no rush to release this North Korea-esque grip on their own people: No-one in. No-one out. No questions. Just obey.

Amidst all this bad news about Covid Derangement Syndrome, let’s hope that Jeffrey Tucker is correct that the lockdown paradigm is collapsing.

Phil Magness understandably wonders “how many people caught covid because Fauci disrupted the vaccine supply chain for over a week in order to put a warning sticker about an extremely rare complication on the J&J box…”

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… is from page 325 of Richard Epstein’s great 1995 book, Simple Rules for a Complex World:

No one can expect miracles from a system of limited government – but the smaller the size of the government and the more disinterested its administration of the laws, the more likely it is that diverse communities can thrive under its rule. Communitarian values, rightly understood, are best served by small governments, not large ones.

DBx: It’s worth pointing out that nor should anyone expect miracles from a system of unlimited, or “Progressive,” government. Yet the belief in such miracles is a staple among the crowd that is so oddly insistent on applauding itself as grounded in reality and attuned to “the science.”

“Progressives” are self-unaware in their belief in miracles.

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In my latest column for AIER, I argue against ad hominem argumentation. A slice:

An even weaker argument against the Great Barrington Declaration is the observation that some people associated with AIER say, write, or tweet some things that other people find to be beyond the pale.

I don’t wish here to assess, and much less to defend, everything ever said or written by everyone affiliated with AIER. Undoubtedly, were I to survey it all I’d find much with which I disagree. But the same is true for every organization under the moon and stars.

Of relevance here is the irrelevance to the merits of the Great Barrington Declaration of what AIER associates Mr. X and Ms. Y said or tweeted.

Had the Great Barrington Declaration been penned by individuals known chiefly for their membership in the Libertarian Party, by Fox News interns, or by Miss Grundy’s sixth graders as a class project, dismissing it merely by pointing to the identities and affiliations of its authors would be acceptable. But this Declaration is co-authored by world-renowned scientists, each of whom is expert in the public-health challenges presented by Covid-19. Furthermore, this Declaration has been endorsed by a large number of other credible scientists. Under these circumstances, ad hominem dismissals of the Declaration simply carry no credibility.

Substantively criticizing parts or the whole of the Great Barrington Declaration is legitimate. Indeed, such criticism is welcome; it’s part of the scientific process. But in far too many cases people dismiss the Declaration with nothing more than ad hominem assertions and attempts to establish guilt by association. The conclusion that I draw from these sorts of dismissals is that those who offer them actually have no substantive criticism of the Declaration. After all, because substantive criticisms would carry more weight even with Miss Grundy’s sixth graders, anyone with such criticisms to offer would present them front and center rather than resort to ad hominem argumentation.

The greatest compliment paid to the Great Barrington Declaration, therefore, is one wholly unintended: Many of its staunchest opponents offer against it nothing beyond ad hominemattacks and accusations of guilt by association. This Declaration must indeed be powerful!

…..

George Leef e-mailed to alert me to a potential confusion in my remarks above regarding members of the LP and sixth graders. I ought to have been more careful in my wording.

Ultimately, the only legitimate argument against any claim (or set of claims, such as the Great Barrington Declaration) is an argument that goes to the substance of the claim. No claim has its legitimacy established or debunked merely by pointing to the identity of those who put forth the claim. But the identity of those who put forth the claim is nevertheless an important source of information about whether or not it’s worthwhile to spend scarce time considering the claim.

A Declaration on how to deal with Covid-19 put forth by Miss Grundy’s sixth graders is so likely to be mistaken or vacuous as to justify a refusal to spend scarce time considering it and debunking it (if it is indeed mistaken or vacuous). But a Declaration written by eminent scholars such as Profs. Bhattacharya, Gupta, and Kulldorff cannot and ought not be dismissed so easily. Grappling with the substance of what they offer is necessary.

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… is from page 86 of the Second Edition (1999) of R.W. Grant’s The Incredible Bread Machine:

Only upon the premise of individualism can a free society be built. In fact, individualism was the implicit philosophical principle underlying the American concept of government as servant rather than master. The real significance of the American Revolution lay not in a military triumph (for other nations have won independence only to lapse back into tyranny), but in the partial triumph of the philosophy of individualism.

DBx: Today is the 246th anniversary of “the shot heard ’round the world” – the start in earnest of the American Revolution. I fear that the liberalism, however imperfectly it was practiced, that motivated the American revolutionaries’ cause is now in its death throes.

By the way, I cannot recommend highly enough Rick Atkinson’s 2019 volume, The British Are Coming.

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Andrew Gutmann explains – in this brilliant letter shared by Bari Weiss – why he’s pulling his daughter from one of New York City’s elite private schools. A slice:

I object to a definition of systemic racism, apparently supported by Brearley, that any educational, professional, or societal outcome where Blacks are underrepresented is prima facie evidence of the aforementioned systemic racism, or of white supremacy and oppression. Facile and unsupported beliefs such as these are the polar opposite to the intellectual and scientific truth for which Brearley claims to stand. Furthermore, I call bullshit on Brearley’s oft-stated assertion that the school welcomes and encourages the truly difficult and uncomfortable conversations regarding race and the roots of racial discrepancies.

I object to the idea that Blacks are unable to succeed in this country without aid from government or from whites. Brearley, by adopting critical race theory, is advocating the abhorrent viewpoint that Blacks should forever be regarded as helpless victims, and are incapable of success regardless of their skills, talents, or hard work. What Brearley is teaching our children is precisely the true and correct definition of racism.

I object to mandatory anti-racism training for parents, especially when presented by the rent-seeking charlatans of Pollyanna. These sessions, in both their content and delivery, are so sophomoric and simplistic, so unsophisticated and inane, that I would be embarrassed if they were taught to Brearley kindergarteners. They are an insult to parents and unbecoming of any educational institution, let alone one of Brearley’s caliber.

Also shared by Bari Weiss is this powerful essay by Paul Rossi, a teacher at Manhattan’s Grace Church High School. A slice:

Every student at the school must also sign a “Student Life Agreement,” which requires them to aver that “the world as we understand it can be hard and extremely biased,” that they commit to “recognize and acknowledge their biases when we come to school, and interrupt those biases,” and accept that they will be “held accountable should they fall short of the agreement.” A recent faculty email chain received enthusiastic support for recommending that we “‘officially’ flag students” who appear “resistant” to the “culture we are trying to establish.”

When I questioned what form this resistance takes, examples presented by a colleague included “persisting with a colorblind ideology,” “suggesting that we treat everyone with respect,” “a belief in meritocracy,” and “just silence.” In a special assembly in February 2019, our head of school said that the impact of words and images perceived as racist — regardless of intent — is akin to “using a gun or a knife to kill or injure someone.”

Imagine being a young person in this environment. Would you risk voicing your doubts, especially if you had never heard a single teacher question it?

While I disagree with some of what Georgetown University law professor Lama Abu Odeh writes here, much of it is correct and important. A slice:

The progressoriat are unable to talk about their impending demise because they have already used their own institutional power over decades to drive away conservatives. They turned their academic institution into a partisan echo chamber. Residing in an echo chamber only increases your moral certitude. Now they are being given a taste of their own brutal medicine. Meantime, the new elite is acting ruthlessly and impatiently and is only happy with declarations of complete submission. Any sign of hesitation on the part of a signatory—”Maybe we should talk about free speech too?”—is met with expressions of exasperation by the all-powerful members of the victim minority faculty. No hesitation or nuance is allowed: nothing but unequivocal loyalty oaths. The progressoriat can only repeat, “I believe in the cause. I believe. I believe. Believe me I believe.”

If this echoes a Maoist take-over, that’s because it is. It passes the sniff test.

John Cochrane writes a letter to Janet Yellen.

Also from John Cochrane is this post on inflation expectations.

Pierre Lemieux reports on Hitler’s version of MMT.

GMU Econ alum Alex Salter, writing in the Wall Street Journal, explains that “Keynesians have it backward: Growth is driven by production, not consumption.” Another slice:

Mr. Biden’s plan also largely directs resources away from uses that would increase productivity. Improvements in roads and bridges may boost how much companies can produce, and hence growth, by making it easier to move labor and goods across the nation. But that’s a minority of the bill’s spending; other expenditures will have the opposite effect. Take the proposal to invest in expanding clean energy and electric-vehicle charging stations. This is a rather elastic interpretation of infrastructure, and a wealth-wasting one besides.

The government is not good at picking investments. President Obama promised smart green projects. What we got was the Solyndra debacle, which consumed hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars while producing little of value. Those dollars are resources that could have been invested elsewhere. What Mr. Biden proposes amounts to a great many Solyndras. That’s an enormous amount of productive capital to squander.

In affirming his support for the protectionist Jones Act, Joe Biden polishes his Trumpian credentials as he harms the environment about which he, apparently falsely, claims to care.

Here’s David Henderson on Canadian banking compared to U.S. banking.

Peter Earle predicts the demise of woke capital.

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Jay Bhattacharya was a recent guest on the Tom Woods Show.

Jeffrey Tucker is impressed with Sunetra Gupta’s 2013 book, Pandemics: Our Fears and the Facts. A slice from Tucker’s essay:

Dr. Gupta, I suspect, wrote this book to familiarize readers with the normalcy of pathogens, and to explain why it is not likely that an entirely new and deadly disease will arrive to wipe out large swaths of the human race. She had solid reasons to doubt that there was a case for panic. In all human experience, taking on germs and minimizing their threat took place with marginal steps toward better therapeutics, medical attention, better sanitation, vaccines, and, above all else, exposure. Much of this text is about exposure – not as a bad thing but as a hack to protect the human body against severe outcomes.

With computer viruses, the way to deal with them is to block them. Our operating systems must remain perfectly clean and free of all pathogens. For the machine to work properly, its memory must be pure and unexposed. One exposure could mean data loss, identity theft, and even machine death.

Despite what Bill Gates seems to believe, our bodies are not the same. Exposure to milder forms of germs works to protect us against more severe forms. The cell memory of our body is trained through experience, not by blocking all bugs but by incorporating the capacity to fight them off into our biology. This is the essence of how vaccines work, but more than that, it is how our whole immune system works. Pursuing an agenda of zero-pathogenic exposure is the road to disaster and death. We did not evolve that way and we cannot live this way. Indeed we will die if we take the route.

Writing in the Telegraph, Charles Walker, MP, applies the logic of supporters of vaccine passports to obesity. A slice:

The Government’s own research shows that 63 per cent of adults in England are overweight and 27 per cent of all adults are obese, with a BMI above 30. The cost of this fat epidemic to the NHS and wider economy is put at £27 billion a year. How many lives could be saved and improved with this £27 billion? It is clear that by sucking resource away from deserving illnesses and social causes, the obese kill those of a healthy weight.

But at last change might be possible. In the same way that people will soon have to prove their Covid status, we could also be at the stage where technology could be deployed to monitor people’s obesity status. Such a breakthrough would finally allow the state to restrict the overweight’s access to certain dining facilities and high-calorie foods.

Think of it. Upon entering a restaurant, the business could scan a mobile phone app that showed your BMI. Those within the healthy range could order what they wished off the menu, while the overweight could be restricted to ordering size-limited portions. As for the obese, they could be asked to settle for a salad or simply invited to leave.

“Cancer research ‘could be delayed by two years’ due to coronavirus pandemic.” (TANSTAFPC – There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.)

Covidocrats love their power. A slice:

As states around the country lift COVID-19 restrictions, Oregon is poised to go the opposite direction — and many residents are fuming about it.

A top health official is considering indefinitely extending rules requiring masks and social distancing in all businesses in the state.

The proposal would keep the rules in place until they are “no longer necessary to address the effects of the pandemic in the workplace.”

Michael Wood, administrator of the state’s department of Occupational Safety and Health, said the move is necessary to address a technicality in state law that requires a “permanent” rule to keep current restrictions from expiring.

Sinead Murphy reveals the horrors of ‘public-health’ policy grounded in the sweet-sounding but evil notion that “Nobody is safe until everyone is safe.” A slice:

As we embark on our second Covid year, the sentiment is chilling.

‘Nobody is safe until everyone is safe’ is the latest phase in the capture of virtue that has been the most profound effect of Covid.

At first, we were asked to keep our distance. Other people, for whose sake we do most of the good things we do, were put beyond our reach. We no longer held the door for the next person to pass through. We no longer offered to carry an old lady’s shopping. We stopped shaking one another’s hand and patting each other on the back. We no longer hugged.

Almost all of the ways in which we knew how to be good to each other were paused; the bonds of mutual support were severed.

Then, for the first time uncertain about how to do good, we were asked to mask up. Not for our own sake. For the sake of the other person – I mask for you, you mask for me. Being good to other people was returned to us. But it was not quite like it had been before. Other people, still at a distance, were now also without faces, and faces are so important in arousing our pity, requesting our assistance, eliciting our smile. Virtue had been readmitted, but for the sake of anonymous beings.

Great Barrington Declaration co-author Martin Kulldorff, writing in The Hill, warns of the dangers of pausing the J&J vaccine. A slice:

With more than six million J&J doses administered, CVST is a very rare adverse reaction at around one per 1 million doses, but that number is misleading. The risk is higher for those under 50, who are better off receiving the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines. Even though many more patients have received those vaccines, no CVST safety problems have been linked to them.

The policy should be different for the older population, for which there were no reported cases of CVST. To deny the J&J vaccine to older people is neither desirable nor necessary. With a pause for all ages, the total vaccine supply will decrease, delaying vaccinations and increasing COVID-19 mortality.

While anyone can get infected, there is more than a thousand-fold difference in the risk of COVID-19 mortality between the old and the young. The older population – for whom this disease is particularly deadly – needs this vaccine. We need to vaccinate them as quickly as possible, not only in the United States but worldwide.

It may seem strange to have different vaccine recommendations for different ages, but that is common.

(DBx: By the way, among the ad hominem arguments blasted against the GBD is that it’s associated with anti-vaxxing. How does one square this piece by Prof. Kulldorff with the implication that the GBD is either opposed to vaccines or, at least, insufficiently enthusiastic about them?)

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… is from page 101 of Thomas Sowell’s 2009 volume, Intellectuals and Society:

More generally, it is doubtful whether there are many – if any – individuals in a free society who are completely satisfied with all the policies and institutions of their society. In short, virtually everybody is in favor of some changes. Any accurate and rational discussion of differences among them would address which particular changes are favored by which people, based on what reasons, followed by analysis and evidence for or against those particular reasons for those particular changes. All of this is by-passed by those who simply proclaim themselves to be in favor of “change” and label those who disagree with them as defenders of the status quo. It is yet another of the many arguments without arguments.

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Wanna know just how deadly 2020 was in the United Kingdom, what with Covid-19 and all? Unprecedented, right?! Off-the-charts, don’tchaknow?! And you’d be correct! I mean, to encounter in the U.K. a year with as many deaths per 100,000 as was experienced during the dread year 2020 you have – drumroll – To. Go. Back. All. The. Way. In. Deep. History. To (wait for it)…. 2003. Yes! Truly so! 2003 – the Dark Ages. There are people still alive today who don’t remember 2003! That’s how very long ago was that very long-ago year!

It’s a damn good thing that civilization in 2020-2021 was ground to a halt – that Christmas and Easter were cancelled – that public protests were prohibited – that pubs were closed, churches shuttered, private gatherings limited by the force of law, and school children caged in plastic bubbles. Otherwise, the number of Brits per 100,000 who would have died in 2020 might – might – have been what it was during the even Darker Ages of the 1990s. Whew!

Thank you, Saints Boris, Chris, and Matt!

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Here’s a letter to an undergraduate student who is writing a paper on the U.S. economy during WWII:

Mr. W___:

Thanks for your e-mail and for reading Cafe Hayek.

You likely did encounter on my blog the argument that, contrary to popular belief, the American economy was not rescued from the Great Depression by World War II. This argument, however, isn’t mine. While I fully accept it, this argument was developed and refined by the great economic historian Robert Higgs.

And so research for your paper will be greatly enhanced by listening to this 2008 EconTalk episode in which Russ Roberts talks with Higgs about the many reasons for dismissing the notion that the Depression was ended by the war. I strongly encourage you also to read, on the same topic, at least chapters 2, 3, and 4 of Higgs’s 2006 book, Depression, War, and Cold War.

Here’s a bonus: Unlike most economists, Bob Higgs writes with remarkable clarity and concision. You need not, therefore, let your past experiences with slogging through impenetrable academic prose deter you from reading Higgs’s important work.

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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Reason‘s Robby Soave reports yet further evidence of the reality and severity of Covid Derangement Syndrome, and of the menace to humanity that is Anthony Fauci. A slice:

Fauci responded by largely echoing her [Joy Reid’s] concerns. He eventually conceded that people who were vaccinated could have unmasked gatherings in their own homes under some limited conditions, but stressed continued mask wearing outside the home.

“I don’t understand why that freaks people out,” said Reid. “Get a cute mask and make it fashion. Just put a mask on.”

She has it exactly backward: It is Reid and Fauci who are being irrationally paranoid, not the people they are criticizing.

In Britain, too, the benefit of Covid-19 vaccination is now being downplayed. Covid Derangement Syndrome simply will not allow people to escape being deranged with fear of Covid.

Janet Daley, writing in the formerly free country of Britain, wonders why Boris Johnson’s government is sounding increasingly Faucian about vaccines. A slice:

The most charitable explanation of Mr Johnson’s comment, and presumably the advice that drove it, is that some of the people in charge believed there was a real risk that the optimism would get out of hand and the whole apparatus of regulation would collapse. In their panic, they urged him to say something that was misleading, illogical and self-defeating: in effect, encouraging vaccine scepticism and undermining the Government’s own “get the jab” campaign.

Dan Wootton offers a snapshot of a singularly sad day in the life even of royalty under the reign of the inhuman Covidocracy. (This photo alone, of the widowed queen seated masked and alone, at the funeral of her husband of 73 years, should be sufficient to expose the Covidocracy’s deranged tyranny.)

Here’s some good news from Canada:

Police in cities across Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, on Saturday refused to make random stops greenlighted by the provincial government seeking to impose a stay-at-home order amid a surge in COVID-19 cases.

Toronto, the country’s largest city, Ottawa, Hamilton, Windsor and at least 19 other municipal police forces said they would not conduct random vehicle or individual stops though they had been given the power to do so.

“The Toronto Police Service will continue to engage, educate and enforce, but we will not be doing random stops of people or cars,” the force said on Twitter. Mayor John Tory supported the move.

Ontario, home to 38% of Canada’s population, had 4,362 new infections on Saturday after a record of 4,812 cases on Friday, and projections indicate the virus could spike to 10,000 per day in June without more strict health restrictions.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford, increasingly under fire for mishandling the province’s pandemic response, on Friday gave police the authority to stop anyone driving or walking to ask them to explain their reason for leaving home, and ticket them if in breach of the rules.

Nicole Russell engages in understatement when she argues that “lockdowns are a farce.” Lockdowns are also cruel and intolerable tyranny. A slice:

At this point, it’s worth observing that in places where states have reopened faster, cases seem to go down as a general whole. Whether this is because fresh air is helpful or herd immunity is being reached faster because people are out and about remains to be seen. But at the very least, it’s absurd to suggest strict lockdowns should remain anywhere.

Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel celebrates federalism’s check on lockdown powers. A slice:

If ever there was a reason to celebrate federalism, look to the continued incarceration of the cruise industry. Even living in California lockdown would be preferable to living under the Covid tyranny of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Most businesses are subject to state laws. Not so the cruise business, one of the few industries subject to near-total federal control and the only one that has remained in complete lockdown since March 2020. Want to imagine life if the public-health oligarchy had free rein? This is your case study.

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… is from pages 264-265 of Matt Ridley’s excellent 2020 book, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom:

One of the peculiar features of history is that empires are bad at innovating. Though they have wealthy and educated elites, imperial regimes tend to preside over gradual declines in inventiveness, which contribute to their eventual undoing. The Egyptian, Persian, Roman, Byzantine, Han, Aztec, Inca, Hapsburg, Ming, Ottoman, Russian and British empires all bear this out. As time goes by and the central power ossifies, technology tends to stagnate, elites tend to resist novelty and funds get diverted into luxury, war or corruption, rather than enterprise. This despite empires being effectively giant ‘single markets’ for ideas to spread within. Italy’s most fertile inventive period was in the Renaissance, when it was the small city states, run by merchants, that drove innovation: in Genoa, Florence, Venice, Luca, Siena and Milan. Fragmented politics proved better than united ones.

DBx: Or put somewhat differently: Innovation that raises the living standards of the masses is not a function of the state’s wealth, reach, power, or glory. Nor is such innovation the result of conscious planning by the state.

Instead, innovation that raises the living standards of the masses requires respect for bourgeois virtues, a socio-legal system that prevents the state from being used to predate too harshly on the fruits of innovation, and the resulting competitive market system in which innovations can be introduced without the permission of elites and then tested in the market according to consumers’ willingness to buy.

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A transcript is available here.

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Phil Magness is a national – nay, a global – treasure. Here’s a post from his Facebook page, in which he further exposes both the gross incompetence of Neil Ferguson and the Imperial College ‘modelers,’ as well as Ferguson & Co.’s downright dishonesty. Here it is:

Huge discovery this morning showing data malfeasance involving Imperial College and Neil Ferguson.

Almost exactly 1 year ago I wrote an article on how a team of researchers at Uppsala University had adapted Ferguson’s UK model to Sweden, and yielded preposterous results – e.g. a prediction of over 90K dead if they did not go into lockdowns. My article made waves over in the UK, and Ferguson himself was grilled about it in testimony before the House of Lords. This caused Imperial College to fire off a bunch of tweets and statements disavowing any connection to the Uppsala adaptation of their model. It wasn’t their product, they insisted, and Imperial itself had never claimed between 40-100K deaths would result in Sweden

Well guess what. On March 26, 2020 the Imperial team released an update to its Covid model labeled as “Report 12” on its website. Buried deep in a spreadsheet appendix file, they included the results of their own runs of their same model for dozens of other countries…including Sweden. I reproduce a screenshot of it below from the spreadsheet. Their results were almost identical to what the Uppsala team got, including a top-end projection of 90,157 deaths if Sweden did not go into lockdown.

DBx: Why does anyone pay attention – why did anyone ever pay attention – to Ferguson and his fellow Imperial College clowns?

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Without mentioning Fauci by name, Florida governor Ron DeSantis nevertheless appropriately slaps him down. (For proof of the reality and severity of Covid Derangement Syndrome, you need look no further than Fauci’s insistence that fully vaccinated people continue to avoid normal living. That the media continue to treat Fauci as if he deserves to be taken seriously only strengthens that proof.)

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Steve Hardy, a friend from Nevada, sent to me an e-mail that I share here with his kind permission:

Friday’s Wall Street Journal reports that approximately 5800 people who have been vaccinated have gotten Covid out of 66 million people vaccinated.  This is .0008%. And ALL of these cases have been mild and haven’t required hospitalization.  The stupid part of the article says that officials say that even vaccinated people are at risk and should continue to wear masks and practice social distancing.  To put this in perspective about 3 to 11% of all people get the flu each year in the US.

The CDC estimates that between 12,000 and 61,000 people die each year from the flu.  So why haven’t we all been wearing masks and socially distancing all of our lives?

DBx: Great question. The answer, I think, is that people have been frightened into believing not only that that Covid-19’s dangers are greater than those dangers really are, but that Covid-19 is a pathogen that differs categorically from influenza viruses.

While Covid-19 is indeed an unusually dangerous pathogen, nearly all of its differential danger is reserved for the elderly. Quite simply, Covid-19 is not the categorically different threat to humanity that it is believed so widely to be. What is categorically different is humanity’s response to Covid. This response bears absolutely no proportion to Covid’s dangers.

What in the end will be, by far, the greatest harm that Covid inflicted on humanity is its capacity to have allowed political and media elites to instill in the general public a deranged level of fear – and, hence, a deranged tolerance for deranged and draconian measures to combat Covid. Over time we will be made poorer and, hence, exposed to higher risks of injury, disease, and death. We will also be far less free. The biosecurity state – or as David Hart calls it, hygiene socialism – will oppress us all in the name of protecting us all.

Chances are high – indeed, I think it to be nearly certain – that life will never return to any condition close to normal (that is, as life was as recently as 2019). Freedom of commerce, freedom to travel, freedom of religion, freedom to speak and to write, freedom to engage in scientific inquiry, and even freedom to be with family, friends, and lovers are all under threat of being permanently squelched, and squelched hard.

As it has survived over the millennia countless nasty pathogens, humanity will certainly survive Covid-19. I have serious doubts, however, that liberal civilization will survive Covid Derangement Syndrome.

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After I posted my praise of Juliette Sellgren’s recent podcast on the Jones Act with Colin Grabow – a post in which I mention my long-ago summer job at Avondale Shipyards – Colin alerted me to this November 2008 paper by William Gray in the Journal of Ship Production. (Who knew such a publication existed?!) Here’s part of the abstract:

Since WW II, major US shipbuilders have been unable to compete in price with shipyards in other parts of the world, and often the quality from US yards has been inferior to world standards. Furthermore, the mistaken US government assumption that shipyards and ship owners have a common interest has led to laws to protect American yards from competition. It has also caused commercial shipping to lose out to alternative forms of transportation such as trains, trucks, pipelines, and tug/barge rigs from more efficient smaller yards and crews. The “US built” requirement of the 1920 Jones Act for domestic cargo has been a prime reason for this modal shift. Tragically for coastal shipping, most large US shipyards have failed to adopt the efficient manufacturing lessons of pioneers such as Admiral “Jerry” Land and Henry Kaiser that led to the “WW II shipbuilding miracle,” that built nearly 6,000 merchant ships in 5 years, a feat that Winston Churchill said “saved Europe.” After WW II, while foreign yards adopted these efficiency measures, that did not happen here, and our yards suffered from few repeat orders because of their high prices.

Colin highlighted this passage on page 209 of the paper:

Avondale shipyard in New Orleans, LA, also used IHI in some of its projects in late 1970s into the 1980s. Interestingly, this yard was then, and still is, interspersing Navy and commercial work. For the Navy, they have usually built fleet oilers or auxiliaries apparently successfully. Avondale also built at that time three LNG tankers for El Paso Gas, probably with a cargo membrane containment system provided by one of two French companies Gaz de France or Technigaz, or the British Conch system of independent prismatic aluminum tanks. In any case, all three completed ships failed their gas trials and were declared constructive total losses at delivery because of insulation failure, a catastrophe technically and financially. Two were eventually converted in Asia to coal-burning main engine and bulk carriers for cargo, but hardly ever traded. The third one broke its tow at sea and became an actual total loss off Nova Scotia, a sad chapter.

I was unaware of the fate of those LNG tankers that were built by Avondale in the 1970s, but I’m not surprised to learn that it was unhappy. Even as a teenager working during the summers in that shipyard, I was struck by how haphazard were the operations that I observed from my small perch.

I worked in the “Steel Storage” office. As parts of the ships were prefabricated, they had to be stored until the time came to weld or bolt them onto the final product. There was no systematic method of storage. Each piece was simply deposited into any space that would accommodate it. Prefabricated ship parts were literally scattered all across the shipyard, which was quite a large place.

Workers called “expediters” would make hand-written notes of where each of the particular pieces was stored. These notes were brought to the office where I worked and then I and a few other clerks would record this information, by hand, into “log books.” The log books were then consulted weeks or even months later when the time came to locate the pieces to be welded onto the ship.

But the information proved, with surprising frequency, to be faulty. During my final two summers working at Avondale, being over 18, I was often sent out on a mo-ped to physically search for missing pieces. (It was during one of these search-for-missing-steel expeditions that I ran into my father and saw, for the first time, just how incredibly hard he worked.)

Sometimes I never found what I was looking for, and so replacements had to be constructed. And when I did find what I was looking for, the pieces were often nowhere near where our official records said they would be.

It was a mess that only a protected producer could afford to get away with.

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Those of you who dismissed – and who continue to dismiss – those of us who warn that the Covidocracy will not willingly relinquish its power might wish to consult this report from Jarrett Skorup; it’s titled “Michigan Moving To Make ‘Emergency’ COVID-19 Mandates Permanent.” A slice:

State bureaucrats are moving to impose permanent regulations that would mandate the following and more on all Michigan businesses: mask wearing whenever employees are within six feet of someone else, daily health screenings, extensive record keeping, and keeping a “COVID-19 safety coordinator” on-site. Retail stores, personal care services, and other businesses open to the public would have to become the mask police: They would be required to make all customers wear masks, vaccinated or not.

Many of these rules are based on mandates put in place last spring by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. As such, many are based on outdated scientific knowledge about how COVID-19 spreads. For instance, employers must “increase facility cleaning and disinfection” and “prohibit workers from using other workers’ phones, desks, offices or other work tools and equipment.” These rules were dreamed up when public health experts thought the virus could easily spread via surface contact. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently said there’s a one in 10,000 chance of getting infected from touching a contaminated surface.

The rules make no accommodations for vaccinations. The word vaccine doesn’t even appear in the rules. This means that even if a movie theater or bowling alley has fully vaccinated its entire staff and is in a community with no cases, masks are mandated at all times.

Other mandates in the proposed rules may be impossible for businesses to comply with. Sports stadiums must, for instance, “establish safe exit procedures for patrons,” such as dismissing attendees by section. Would the Detroit Lions need to prevent people from individually leaving Ford Field early during a blowout loss (a common occurrence)? That may be illegal.

Alberto Mingardi writes wisely. A slice:

During the last year, I have asked myself a number of times what [Vilfredo] Pareto would have made of the public debate in the time of Covid19- of our increasing inability to cope with the tragedy of death, the tendency to “medicalize” the public debate, the many attempts (at least, in Italy) to lay the blame for the epidemic on the allegedly reckless behavior of youngsters, the faith in increasingly bestowing public funds on society as a way to mend whatever social ills, including those the pandemic brought about, the need for “magical” solutions which feed the public debate, the new role of scientists in public policy making and the transformation of some of them in “influencers” with star power.

I cannot say what Pareto would have made of all of it, but I suspect it would not have made him more inclined to any optimism about the fate of liberalism.

To describe Anthony Fauci as a menace to humanity is to engage in extreme understatement. And kudos to Rep. Jim Jordan for standing up to this menace. (HT Phil Magness)

Wall Street Journal columnist James Freeman also takes on the menace-to-humanity who is Fauci. Two slices:

Dr. Anthony Fauci is the government infectious disease expert who now refuses to provide his expert opinion on infectious disease. It’s a safe bet he won’t stop appearing on television—as long as polite media folk don’t demand too much transparency regarding his Covid advice. But questioned by Rep. Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) at a Thursday congressional hearing on Covid-19, Dr. Fauci simply refused to answer an appropriate question about Covid-19.

…..

Dr. Fauci’s refusal to consider the larger societal impact of his Covid advice is an ongoing national tragedy. As politicians were following his advice and locking down last spring, Dr. Fauci described the impact on Americans as “inconvenient.” Millions of lost jobs and more than $4 trillion in federal debt later—amid abundant evidence that lockdowns didn’t work—he’s still urging restrictions on normal life. Last year he also acknowledged that he did no cost-benefit analysis and really had no idea what the consequences were for students: “I don’t have a good explanation, or solution to the problem of what happens when you close schools, and it triggers a cascade of events that could have some harmful circumstances.”

Dr. Fauci’s defenders might argue that he was simply doing his best to apply his expertise on infectious disease and that it’s not his job to notice the economic and non-Covid health problems resulting from his policies.

But there is no excuse for today’s refusal to share his expert opinion on the appropriate Covid measurement to determine when normal life can resume. Dr. Fauci spent several minutes fencing with Rep. Jordan and saying liberty could be restored when the level of infection is “low enough.” But the government doctor repeatedly refused to put a number on it.

It’s impossible to believe that Dr. Fauci hasn’t thought about this question and formed an opinion. He may be able to dodge accountability for all the non-Covid destruction. But he owes the public a straight answer to the most important question at the center of his area of expertise.

How many patients in America would tolerate this behavior from their own physicians?

John Tamny sensibly asks “Where’s Dr. Fauci as another Corona-myth dies?”

Jay Bhattacharya accurately calls Fauci “probably the number one anti-vaxxer in the country.” Here’s the full comment from this courageous co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration:

“Dr. Fauci is probably the number one anti-vaxxer in the country in some sense, because he has modeled behavior that has made people think the vaccine won’t give you back your life, but it will. It’s an incredibly effective vaccine. You know, he was wearing a mask. He has been vaccinated, I don’t really understand what he’s trying to do here.”

“Lockdowns do not suppress the virus, studies show.”

J.D. Tuccille decries the terrible impact of Covid-19 lockdowns and school closures on children. A slice:

Anecdotally, my wife, a pediatrician, has seen a huge surge in depression, anxiety, and self-harm in the months of the pandemic. Deprived of social interaction with classmates, teammates, and friends for a period of time that constitutes a significant percentage of their short lives, kids are falling apart. Too many of them are having suicidal thoughts in a world distorted beyond recognition and acceptability. And there’s no doubt as to the culprit.

“Pandemic life is not conducive to normal developmental events and this is having a significant impact,” comments Mamilda Robinson, a specialty director and clinical instructor of psychiatric mental health at Rutgers School of Nursing.

At least some people in Britain are principled and brave as they steadfastly resist the Covidocracy and its goons.

As Phil Magness would say, the straw man is stomping across Ontario.

Here’s GMU Econ alum Dan Mitchell on vaccine passports.

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… is from page 104 of University of Notre Dame philosopher James Otteson’s superb, hot-off-the-Cambridge-University-Press book, Seven Deadly Economic Sins (2021):

The problem … is not that there is no such thing as expert knowledge, but rather that the knowledge experts have is general, not particular. It is about averages, aggregations, composites, and macro-level predictions, not about specific individuals and their peculiar situations. That means that their general prescriptions can be fruitfully applied to individual situations only once the particularities of those situations are known – and therein lies the rub.

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Juliette Sellgren’s podcast with the Cato Institute’s Colin Grabow is a gem. It’s on the 1920 Jones Act, a particularly nasty piece of still-existing legislation that protects a very small number of U.S. ship owners, ship builders, and maritime workers at the larger expense of the American public.

Under the Jones Act, each vessel carrying goods by water between U.S. ports must be:

– owned by U.S. companies that are controlled by American citizens with at least 75 percent U.S. percent ownership;
– at least 75 percent crewed by American citizens;
– built (or rebuilt) in the United States;
– registered in the United States.

Anyone searching for an unalloyed real-world example of the realities of cronyism and interest-group politics can do no better than to listen to this podcast. If you listen, you’ll also learn about how government-granted special privileges produce consequences that, while foreseen by economists and other knowledgeable people, are the opposite of the consequences that are publicly promised. Further, you’ll learn about negative consequences that almost no one foresaw.

Among the latter consequences is the Jones Act’s negative impact on the environment. Here’s just one example: Because the Jones Act artificially raises the cost of coastal shipping in the U.S., Puerto Ricans buy no liquified natural gas (LNG) – which they use to generate electricity – from the U.S. mainland, but they do buy much of it from locations much further away, including Russia. (Those who wring their hands over the environmental consequences of cryptocurrencies should take a look at the Jones Act. It would be interesting to compare the amount of energy used by cryptocurrencies to the amount of energy used because of the Jones Act.)

My first job with a firm was in the summer of 1975, just before my senior year of high school. It was with my parents’ employer, Avondale Shipyards near New Orleans. Being not yet even 17, I worked in an office rather than out in the yard itself, which was an unusually dangerous workplace. One of my chief tasks was to record – by hand on paper – the reported storage location of prefabricated parts of ships under construction. That summer, the shipyard – “Avondale,” as we simply called it – was building a few LNG tankers (which I gather from Colin’s podcast with Juliette must have been among the last such tankers built in the U.S.).

One day that summer someone walked into the office in which I worked with a petition to sign. The person explained that the petition is meant to strengthen U.S. shipbuilding by protecting it from foreign competition. Being still 16 and not yet knowing any better, I signed (although, as I think about it now, I doubt that a minor’s signature was permissible on such a document).

I’m sure that both of my parents also signed it. Sounds good. Protect our jobs. Make America strong.

Protectionism is bunk.

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Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:

Editor:

Daniel Henninger rightly denounces CEOs’ pandering to Progressives – pandering that chews cancerously at the market order that alone makes possible not only the success of these CEOs’ companies, but also the wealth that Progressives rely upon to fund their countless schemes (“When CEOs Zoom for Democrats,” April 15).

Such venal opportunism, alas, is as old as, well, venal opportunism. In the conclusion of his masterful survey of the works of Adam Smith, Craig Smith writes that

he [Adam Smith] did not think that commercial societies were perfect. Indeed many of the imperfections of commercial society were the result of the behaviour of merchants and businessmen. These groups had their own partial interests and were seldom friends of the sort of free markets that Smith advocated.”*

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

* Craig Smith, Adam Smith (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2020), page 178.

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Joakim Book bemoans the deep and unhinged hostility of so many people to those of us who question Covid-19 lockdowns and the mainstream narrative that supports them.

Toby Young makes the case against vaccine passports. A slice:

The strongest objection to making access to any service or activity contingent on producing evidence that you don’t have an infectious disease is that it’s an inversion of the Common Law principle that everything should be permitted unless the law specifically prohibits it. It’s more in keeping with the Napoleonic Code, i.e., you are only free to do that which the law explicitly permits. As a freeborn Englishman, I prefer the Common Law tradition to the Continental one and that was one of the reasons I supported Brexit.

Incidentally, I think the Common Law principle is consistent with allowing sporting clubs/businesses to decide for themselves what hoops to make customers jump through and if the Government’s position is to leave the matter to them to decide I’ll have no objection. Provided, that is, they don’t penalise them for rejecting a certification scheme.

Also protesting vaccine passports as the immoral documents that they are is British MP Andrew Rosindell. A slice:

What is this dystopian monstrosity? This is a call for a biosecurity state, in which not just the Government, but private businesses large and small take a detailed interest in our personal health choices. It is a grotesque invasion on our personal liberty, after a year in which we have all sacrificed our most basic freedoms to protect others.

It is also demonstrably unnecessary, now that the vulnerable have been almost universally vaccinated. One has to wonder as to the aim of this policy. It surely can’t be to protect the vulnerable, who have nearly all been vaccinated. For those in the vulnerable categories who have refused the vaccine, they have made a deliberate choice to take that risk.

If the aim is to reduce cases, then this is a largely pointless objective now that cases and hospitalisations/deaths have been decoupled. If the aim is to increase state control over the individual, then this is a sign of creeping state control over the individual, which must be opposed by all freedom-loving people.

Charles Oliver shares a snapshot from the Philippines of life – and death – under the Covidocracy.

And here’s another snapshot shared by Charles of life under the Covidocracy:

The British government is allowing pubs to reopen, with one catch. Drinkers will have to present their phones to pub staff to show they have registered on the National Health Services COVID-19 test-and-trace app. The app alerts people if they have been close to someone who tested positive for the disease. Pubs that don’t comply with the requirement may be fined up to £1,000 ($1,370 U.S.).

Even if Long Covid is a thing, we should worry at least as much about Long Lockdown. A slice:

Before the pandemic, psychoanalyst Josh Cohen’s patients might come into his consulting room, lie down on the couch and talk about the traffic or the weather, or the rude person on the tube. Now they appear on his computer screen and tell him about brain fog. They talk with urgency of feeling unable to concentrate in meetings, to read, to follow intricately plotted television programmes. “There’s this sense of debilitation, of losing ordinary facility with everyday life; a forgetfulness and a kind of deskilling,” says Cohen, author of the self-help book How to Live. What to Do. Although restrictions are now easing across the UK, with greater freedom to circulate and socialise, he says lockdown for many of us has been “a contraction of life, and an almost parallel contraction of mental capacity”.

This dulled, useless state of mind – epitomised by the act of going into a room and then forgetting why we are there – is so boring, so lifeless. But researchers believe it is far more interesting than it feels: even that this common experience can be explained by cutting-edge neuroscience theories, and that studying it could further scientific understanding of the brain and how it changes. I ask Jon Simons, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, could it really be something “sciencey”? “Yes, it’s definitely something sciencey – and it’s helpful to understand that this feeling isn’t unusual or weird,” he says. “There isn’t something wrong with us. It’s a completely normal reaction to this quite traumatic experience we’ve collectively had over the last 12 months or so.”

Omar S. Khan reviews 2020’s and early 2021’s freight of fallacies. Two slices (with link added):

Lockdown was a tardy Chinese panic spasm to contain, we take it, the Wuhan outbreak. It is only mildly sane as a short, sharp intervention. It is a penal concept unprecedented in public health prescriptions essentially from the Middle Ages until last year. It suffers from only a “few” quintessential issues.

…..

The relevant measure of lethality is the ‘Infection Fatality Rate’ or IFR. When seroprevalence studies worldwide demonstrated that many more people had been infected than we realized, based on the presence of antibodies and other indicators, then we knew IFR was somewhere between 0.3% to 0.12% (much more likely in the neighborhood of the latter). Possibly even less because we are unsure of how long this has been circulating and how far and wide it has rampaged because most people don’t even know they have been infected (global recovery rate ranges from 99% below 70 years of age, 95% above 70 with preexisting conditions) and the symptoms are, anyway, indistinguishable from other respiratory illnesses.

Fraser Nelson write that “In choosing common sense over lockdown, the country [Sweden] controlled the virus but not at the expense of normal life.”

Also on Sweden, Noah Carl explains that “the case for lockdown collapsed when Sweden’s epidemic began to retreat.” A slice:

Sweden, of course, was the only major Western country that didn’t lock down in 2020. And the argument for lockdowns made a clear prediction concerning what would happen there: since the country hadn’ttaken drastic measures, it would see substantially more deaths (relative to its population) than the countries that had locked down. Using a model “based on work by” Neil Ferguson’s team at Imperial College, researchers at Uppsala University predicted there would be 96,000 deaths by July 1st.

Fortunately, that isn’t what happened. The number of confirmed COVID-19 deaths by July 1st was only 5,370. And up to week 51, the country saw age-adjusted excess mortality of just 1.7% – below the UK and below the European average.

Now of course, Sweden isn’t identical to the UK. It’s more trusting, less densely populated, and has fewer multi-generational households. However, it isn’t dramatically different from the UK in these respects. So even if one might have expected fewer deaths in Sweden than in the UK, given the same policies, the fact that Sweden didn’t lock down should have massively increased its death toll. But it didn’t.

One reply to the argument I’ve just made is that Sweden did much worse than its neighbours. This reply has been extensively addressed by other commentators, and in any case the point remains that Sweden did not do catastrophically. Both its first and second epidemics retreated long before the herd immunity threshold was reached, and far less than 1% of the population has died.

Jeffrey Tucker recommends three books on the lockdowns and on the wicked politicians who panicked (to steal from the title of John Tamny’s book).

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… is from page 573 of the 1988 collection of Lord Acton’s writings (edited by the late J. Rufus Fears), Essays in Religion, Politics, and Morality; specifically, it’s a note drawn from Acton’s extensive papers at Cambridge University; (I can find no date for this passage):

Official truth is not actual truth.

DBx: Pictured here is a dispenser of official truth.

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Here’s a letter to a new correspondent:

Mr. W__:

Thanks for your e-mail.

I share your fear of vaccine passports, as well as your hope that businesses in jurisdictions without passport mandates will not require customers and employees to show such passports. I cannot, however, agree that businesses and other private organizations not be allowed to choose to require customers and employees to show such such passports.

You’re correct that fear of Covid is far out of proportion to its true risks. You’re correct also that pundits and politicians will continue to stir up Covid hysteria such that many businesses will feel they have no choice but to require the presentation of vaccine passports. But such is the troubled world we live in. As a practical matter, if public attitudes are such as to demand the presentation of such passports, it’s futile to expect governments to prohibit businesses from requiring such presentation.

Gov. Ron DeSantis is able to impose – inappropriately, in my view – such a prohibition on businesses in that state precisely because Floridians’ fear of Covid and, hence, their demand for vaccine passports are sufficiently weak as to cause him no serious political trouble for this prohibition. Yet, ironically, this fact means that, absent this prohibition, while some businesses in Florida would require the presentation of passports, not all would. People would be free to choose.

While it’s always very dangerous to call upon the state to ramp up its restrictions on property, contract, and commerce rights, this danger is especially high in times such as these when the state is already abusing its powers unprecedentedly.

I would be justly accused of hypocrisy if, with one breath, I criticize – as I do – government for restricting businesses’, workers’, and consumers’ freedom to deal with each other as they choose according to their own preferences, whatever these might be, and then with the next breath call upon government to restrict businesses’, workers’, and consumers’ freedom to deal with each other according to their own preferences, whatever these might be.

That I intensely prefer my fellow citizens not to have a preference for patronizing businesses that require the presentation of vaccine passports doesn’t come close to being a sufficient condition for me to call upon the state to prevent businesses from catering to my fellow-citizens’ preferences. This conclusion is not changed one iota by the fact that this popular preference for the use of vaccine passports is one that I believe is both misguided and pumped-up by the absurd biases of the media and political elites.

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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George Will writes wisely about technology – and the people who use it. A slice:

Today, the Internet and social media enable instantaneous dissemination of stupidity, thereby creating the sense that there is an increasing quantity of stupidity relative to the population’s size. This might be true, but blame it on animate, hence blameworthy, things — blowhards with big megaphones, incompetent educators, etc. — not technologies. Technologies are giving velocity to stupidity, but are not making people stupid. On Jan. 6, the Capitol was stormed by primitives wielding smartphones that, with social media, facilitated the assembling and exciting of the mob. But mobs predate mankind’s mastery of electricity.

Humanity is perpetually belabored by theories that human agency is, if not a chimera, substantially attenuated by the bombardment of individuals by promptings from culture, government propaganda and other forces supposedly capable of conscripting the public’s consciousnesses. A new version of such theorizing is today’s postulate that digital technologies are uniquely autonomous forces in need of supervision or even rearrangement by government because they rewire the brains of their users.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy busts myths about America’s infrastructure (or “crumblinginfrastructure,” which in American English has become a word). A slice:

This is an important reminder that the private sector doesn’t seem to have any problem maintaining its infrastructure assets, as we see in the difference with railroads. Passenger rail is in mostly bad shape when owned publicly, whereas privately owned freight rail is mostly strong in quality. The best way to improve infrastructure isn’t to throw taxpayers’ money at it, but to privatize things such as passenger rail, airports, and air traffic controllers, as many other countries have done already.

The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board rightly decries corporate CEOs’ wokeness. A slice:

Well, here we are back at the same stand, with prominent CEOs and businesses signing up for all the supposed virtue that progressive government has to offer. The lectures on voting access have received the most attention, though it’s notable how fact-free most of these endorsements are. They float above the messy but crucial details of electoral politics because they are essentially declarations of solidarity. They want to be on the side of the right (er, left) thinking, or at least of their woke 20-something employees and consumers.

You don’t have to wander too far into policy, however, to see what’s really going on: Old-fashioned self-interest. CEOs know Democrats are in power, so they want to make sure they stay on the good side of the government that can hurt them. If this means throwing over principles to mark out some political safe space for their business, so be it.

James Pethokoukis understandably bemoans the GOP’s willingness to let populism distort its economics. A slice:

Rising GOP political star J. D. Vance, author of the best-seller Hillbilly Elegy, took to Twitter earlier this week to attack the more-than-100 CEOs who took part in a weekend conference to discuss state voting laws: “Raise their taxes and do whatever else is necessary to fight these goons. We can have an American Republic or a global oligarchy, and it’s time for choosing. … No more subsidies to the anti-American business class.”

Of course, lots of American workers get a paycheck from what Vance calls a “global oligarchy.” And those Trump corporate tax cuts would have raised worker wages had they not been undercut by Trump’s trade wars, previously popular with right-wing populists. Likewise, most economists agree that workers bear at least some of the corporate tax burden, maybe even much of it. Raising taxes on companies also raises taxes on workers.

As it turns out, lots of things that populist culture warriors promote are bad for workers, such as immigration restrictions that make America less innovative and trade wars that make goods more expensive.

How did Dartmouth economist Meir Kohn become a libertarian? (HT Arnold Kling) A slice from Kohn’s essay:

Progressivism rests on two critical assumptions. The first is that we know how to improve society: “social science” provides us with a reliable basis for the necessary social engineering. The second critical assumption is that government is a suitable instrument for improving society. My second and third lessons taught me that these two critical assumptions were unfounded and unrealistic.

And here’s a slice from the Arnold Kling post that alerted me to Kohn’s essay:

Every other ideological viewpoint, from “state capacity libertarianism” to “national conservatism” to progressivism to socialism, presumes that government will do other jobs well. For me, those ideological viewpoints have a burden of proof to show that they are not delusional.

GMU Econ alum Dave Hebert writes knowledgeably about economists’ assumptions about knowledge.

Pres. Joe Trump.

Or, Pres. Donald Biden.

David Henderson likes my colleague Larry White’s book The Theory of Monetary Institutions.

Scott Lincicome writes about the moronic, and dangerous, senator from Missouri, Josh Hawley.

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AIER deserves tremendous thanks for hosting, and for making available the full transcript of, Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s April 12th roundtable discussion of Covid-19 and lockdowns with Scott Atlas, Jay Bhattacharya, and Martin Kulldorff.

Scott McKay is rightly appalled by 60 Minutes‘s scurrilous and dishonest treatment of Ron DeSantis. A slice:

[CBS 60 Minutes “reporter” Sharyn] Alfonsi found a couple of Democrat politicians who said Florida’s vaccine rollout was racist because DeSantis prioritized senior citizens of all races for the first doses of vaccines available. As Florida’s senior population skews white and rich, it’s therefore Jim Crow if you opt for a race-neutral strategy to vaccinate the vulnerable.

Richard Ebeling shares relevant wisdom from Ludwig von Mises. A slice:

Mises’s next sentence follows: “And no one can find a safe way for himself if society is sweeping towards de­struction.” No safe spaces in a crisis. Destroy the market, smash the normal functioning of the social order, and you threaten everything that matters to our material well-being. You smash life and well-being. You crush the ability of people to provide for themselves, everyone’s sense of self worth, access to food and housing and health care, and the very notion of material progress. You reduce life to subsistence and servitude. The world becomes Hobbesian: solitary, poor, nastty, brutish, and short.

The emphasis here is on the word “no one.” No one can free ride off others in the long run. There is no essential and nonessential, no one person with more priors and privileges than anyone else. Not in the long run, in any case. The Zoom class might imagine it has hid and thereby saved itself from wreckage but like Prince Prospeo in Edgar Allan Poe’s classic, the pathogen eventually finds its own.

“Therefore,” Mises continues, “everyone, in his own interests, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle.” No hiding, no seclusion, no silence, no “stay home stay safe.” We must all enter the battle of ideas. Perhaps this one seems to be a stretch because not everyone qualifies as an intellectual. We know that. And yet good ideas, and good instincts about how life should work, is more distributed throughout the population that is normally supposed.

Britain is no longer a free country.

Here’s a snapshot – this one from Finland – of ‘life’ under the Covidocracy.

The Manhattan Institute’s Connor Harris, writing three weeks ago in City Journal, surveys the evidence on masks. Here’s his conclusion:

It would be an overstatement to say that cloth and surgical masks are unambiguously ineffective or harmful. But neither is there a firm case that they provide any meaningful benefit. Limited mask mandates may be justified in circumstances with unavoidable face-to-face contact within the range of droplet spread, such as public transport, and private businesses should be free to require masks if they like. Citizens at high risk should be free to wear effective N95 masks for their own protection, and federal regulators should clear away barriers to domestic production.

But mandates of cloth and surgical masks impose major inconveniences and potentially serious health risks on citizens, for no clear benefit either to themselves or to others. Leaders who pride themselves on following the science should consider ending them and letting citizens protect their health as they see fit.

While I could pick a few nits with Paul Alexander’s, Howard Tenenbaum’s, and Parvez Dara’s essay here, they eloquently warn that vaccine passports are passports to tyranny. A slice:

Ostensibly, the passports are designed to allow individuals to partake in everyday commerce and “life” with freedom.

The same freedoms that each and every individual is entitled to under the Constitution and other bills of rights and freedoms in democratic societies by definition. And yet we now require a passport to exercise our ‘unalienable’ right? Absurd. While vaccine records were and still are a requirement for international travels where infectious diseases are common, this is as a safeguard for the traveler. But for citizens of the USA, and elsewhere, the requirement of a digital SARS CoV-2 injection passport has taken on a darker and sinister meaning. These passports are now being touted as a requirement for living a life within the country, our own country. This is simply a shattering idea. Public discourse is already available suggesting that one’s life could be essentially ‘shut down’ if one does not acquiesce to getting vaccinated in order to obtain a vaccine passport. Will these passports now constitute, as they have in the past under the governance of totalitarian regimes, the very currency for free existence?

Here’s an early snapshot of life in a world of vaccine passports. (HT Phil Magness)

Robby Soave is correct: Anthony Fauci and the other tyrants who are in charge of the U.S. Covidocracy “have lost the benefit of the doubt” (and that’s putting it mildly). A slice:

Public health bureaucrats at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have brought Johnson & Johnson’s vaccination efforts to a screeching halt pending an investigation into six confirmed cases of blood clotting among the nearly 7 million people to become inoculated. This decision will inadvertently get people killed, but if you dare to question it, you will be branded an enemy of science by the “trust the experts” mafia.

Make no mistake, the pause represents lethal risk aversion. There is no real question that many, many more people will contract COVID-19 because they did not receive a vaccine quickly enough—suffering hospitalization or even death as a result—than will have an adverse health outcome from the vaccine.

“This decision was made by the CDC and FDA,” said Jeff Zients, a White House coronavirus response coordinator. “We’re ruled by the science, not any other consideration.”

Since the decision to pause the J&J vaccine cannot be defended on any sort of basic life-saving calculus—oral contraceptives carry a greater risk of blood clotting, and the FDA hasn’t prohibited them—government health experts and their media mouthpieces are instead arguing that the pause is necessary to stave off a surge in vaccine hesitancy.

Three cheers for Julia Hartley-Brewer!

The Covidocracy (of course) threatens democracy.

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… is from pages 279-280 of my former student Alex Nowrasteh’s and GMU Econ alum Benjamin Powell’s excellent hot-off-the-Cambridge-University-Press book, Wretched Refuse? (2021):

The economic case for international labor mobility, immigration, is similar to the economic case for free trade in goods. Both imply that, as a general rule, wealth is maximized when government does nothing to interfere with the free choices of individuals in the marketplace. Thus, the starting point for crafting policy should begin with a baseline presumption of free trade and free immigration. Any deviation from this baseline should be justified by appealing to a specific circumstance or situation that would clearly make free trade or free immigration suboptimal, and any such deviation in policy should be targeted as narrowly as possible, to only apply to the specific externality.

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Infamously, YouTube removed the video of Florida governor Ron DeSantis’s mid-March roundtable discussion with Scott Atlas, Jay Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta, and Martin Kulldorff. Thus, the video of this discussion is, alas, no longer available at Cafe Hayek – but here’s my original link to it.

(By the way, I happened just now to stumble upon this March 18, 2021 ‘report’ in the Tampa Bay Times on Gov. DeSantis’s March roundtable. Check out the absurd headline: “DeSantis gathers hand-picked doctors to help validate his COVID response”. Why does anyone continue to trust that the public is adequately informed about Covid-19 and the responses to it? The headline suggests that DeSantis scoured the globe to find the few doctors who agree with his Covid-response policies.)

Fortunately, Gov. DeSantis held another discussion just a few days, although this time Sunetra Gupta apparently was unavailable. Here’s the video of this latest discussion. Let’s hope that this video is not pulled down.

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Here’s a letter to a new correspondent:

Mr. M__:

I fervently hope that you are right that I am wrong when, as in this essay, I predict that most of the powers seized by governments in the name of fighting Covid-19 will remain in place long after SARS-CoV-2 is endemic. But given the terrifying transformation of society over the past year – given that people have shown themselves to be easily stirred into hysteria by obsessive focus on one particular risk – and given, as I see now, that there is no amount of liberty that people are unwilling to sacrifice in exchange for the promise of even infinitesimal reductions in risks to their physical health, the future that I see is bleak, swarming as it will be with agents of what some are calling “the biosecurity state.”

I’m reminded of this observation offered by the great 16^th-century French political philosopher Étienne de La Boétie:

It is incredible how as soon as a people become subject, it promptly falls into such a complete forgetfulness of its freedom that it can hardly be roused to the point of regaining it, obeying so easily and so willingly that one is led to say, on beholding such a situation, that this people has not so much lost its liberty as won its enslavement.*

He is, sadly, correct.

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

* Étienne de La Boétie, The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude (Harry Kurz, trans., 1975 [originally posthumously published in 1577]), page 60.

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Great Barrington Declaration co-author Jay Bhattacharya, writing in the Wall Street Journal, justly decries the mindless masking of children and the Orwellian muzzling of dissenting scientific voices on Covid-19. A slice:

Consider also data from Sweden, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in February. Swedish primary schools have been open for in-person instruction throughout the epidemic, no masks required, even when cases were increasing. Of more than 1.8 million children in school in spring 2020 ages 1 through 15, not one died from Covid-19. This study also showed that teachers were at low risk for Covid; they contracted the disease at rates lower than the average of other Swedish essential workers.

But the evidence is overwhelming that masking can harm children’s developmental progress. Look at the World Health Organization’s guidance document on child masking, which says that up to age 5 masking children may harm the achievement of childhood developmental milestones. For children between 6 and 11, the same document says that mask guidance should consider the “potential impact of mask-wearing on learning and psychosocial development.” The WHO explicitly recommends against masks during exercise because masks make breathing more difficult.

The WHO recommends against masking children 5 and under and only tepidly recommends masking children between 6 and 11. My reading of the same evidence comes down definitively against masking children up to 11. My colleagues in the Florida roundtable agreed; so do many other doctors, scientists and epidemiologists. This sort of disagreement based on the weight of evidence is common in scientific policy; I place an enormous value on children flourishing.

My colleague Bryan Caplan offers here a hypothetical for the ages.

Those of you who still trust government officials to rationally ‘manage’ pandemic response might wish to consult this essay by Ron Bailey.

TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid): “4.6m people missed out on hospital treatment in England in 2020.”

David Henderson sensibly asks: “Is Fauci that ignorant?” (DBx: ‘That ignorant’? – Almost surely. ‘That mad for celebrity and inflated self-importance’? – Without question.)

Speaking of Fauci, the Babylon Bee’s latest on him is darkly hilarious precisely because it’s so believable.

Jordan Schachtel wonders if there is any longer a free world.

One snapshot of the brave new world created by the Covidocracy: “Widower David Walters, 78, wrote to The Telegraph after he was denied a drink in a Northumberland pub that required him to use a tracing app.”

A second snapshot of the brave new world created by the Covidocracy: “Scottish grandmother, 82, who stayed indoors for a year is given £60 Covid fine after police broke-up illegal 70th birthday bash with seven friends – despite them ALL having jab.”

Jonathon Riley decries the brave new world created by the Covidocracy. Two slices:

Why are they doing this? The discredited Professor Neil Ferguson’s interview with the Times provided one clue. They did it because they could. ‘Sage … had watched as China enacted this innovate (sic) intervention in pandemic control that was also a medieval intervention … Sage debated whether … it could be effective here.

‘It (China) is a communist one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought … and then Italy did it. And we realised we could.’

…..

It all reminds me forcibly of conditions under communism in Eastern Europe before 1989. It is hard not to conclude either that the vaccine is ineffective and the continuation of restrictions is to disguise this, along with the enormous sums of money being made from it; or that regardless of its effectiveness, the vaccine is simply another control measure designed to instil fear and compliance.

And do not doubt that the Covidocracy is real, at least in Britain. A slice:

Last week, the Government launched its new UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA).

Billed as ‘combining key elements of Public Health England with NHS Test and Trace, including the Joint Biosecurity Centre’, it would be easy to dismiss this as a sort of tidying-up process, bringing together the different government agencies that have formed part of its response to Covid.

But for those of us who have been deeply troubled by the interventions of government, this new department represents the realisation of what we always feared: The institutionalisation of a kind of health fascism.

At the heart of the problem lies the assumption that illness presents a security risk. We have seen this principle underpin government policy throughout and it has been used to justify some of the most restrictive, illiberal measures our country has ever seen.

The use of a lockdown in itself speaks of an assumed security threat, as this strategy was previously only associated with prisons, to control rioting inmates.

The Covidocracy is real also in Australia.

Gary Oliver rightly scolds the otherwise-sound Frederick Forsyth for going wobbly on vaccine passports.

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… is from pages 98-99 of University of Notre Dame philosopher James Otteson’s excellent and hot-off-the-Cambridge-University-Press book, Seven Deadly Economic Sins (2021):

[T]he “Great Mind Fallacy,” or GMF … has two aspects. Its first is to believe that there is some person or group of people who possess enough information, and is endowed with sufficiently superior character, that we can safely entrust with the authority of crafting policy for citizens. Its second aspect is to endorse public policy that could succeed only if such people were in charge of administering the agencies and mechanisms required to effectuate the beneficial results we hope from them.

DBx: To that assume any such mind and character exists is indeed to assume the existence of that which isn’t, never was, and will never be. But hordes of people arrogantly fancy themselves to possess such a mind and character, and hordes of other people fall for the alluring promises of these obnoxious pretenders.

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Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:

Editor:

Scott Gottlieb paints a far too happy picture of vaccine passports (“The Case for Vaccine ‘Passports’,” April 13). These documents would, he says, serve “as a fast lane. Those who present proof of a vaccine might be able to skip requirements for a temperature check, health questionnaire or negative Covid test…. The ‘passport’ wouldn’t impose an intrusive new layer; it would eliminate other requirements.”

Sigh.

Government, of course, shouldn’t prevent businesses and other private institutions from requiring customers and workers to present proof of vaccination. Nevertheless, I dread a future in which people are accustomed to showing their health credentials as a condition for entering places that, until 2020, they freely entered without any such requirement.

The transformation of humanity over the past year is ghastly. We’ve become so frightened of each other that, from here on in, we will presume that each person who wishes to interact with us in physical space is a deadly threat until we’re shown official evidence to the contrary. How uncivilized. How unspeakably sad.

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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Here’s a letter to Politico:

Editor:

Victoria Guida offers the following as a reason for the 1970s’ high inflation rates: “double-income households as women entered the workforce in droves” (“Why big-spending Biden can shrug off GOP warnings of inflation,” April 12).

She’s mistaken. Inflation is not caused by an expansion of the workforce. Yes, the money that women earn is spent, and this additional spending would indeed push prices up if the amount of goods and services available for sale were to remain unchanged. But women entering the workforce earn for their households additional money to spend precisely by producing and making additional goods and services available for sale.

Indeed, because the value of what workers in the market produce for sale by their employers is worth at least as much as is the value of what workers are paid, we can be sure that additional monetary incomes paid, and spent, as the workforce expands are offset by additional outputs worth at least much as the additional spending.

Inflation is caused by the monetary authority’s creation of excess purchasing power; it is not caused by the market’s creation of additional output.

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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In my most-recent column for AIER I advise wariness of vaccine-passport peddlers – and conclude by lamenting how differently different people see today’s world. A slice:

Thus I lost sleep. I lay awake wondering if I’m losing my grip on reality. I asked myself if my priors are so strong that they blind me to what should be obvious, and create in my mind mirages that, to a less-biased brain, are obviously of things unreal.

Even if I were assured beyond doubt that my interpretation of reality is the ‘right’ one, sleep remains elusive. After all, if my reading of today’s world is at all accurate, then a distressingly large number of other people are delusional. Where I see Covid as posing to humanity no categorically different threat than is posed by many other pathogens, other people do see a categorically different threat. Where I see the reaction to Covid as being disproportionate to Covid’s risks by many orders of magnitude, other people see the reaction as appropriate, or even in some cases inadequate. Where I see the combination of craziness and danger of each person treating other persons as emitters of lethal poisons, other people see the good sense and prudence of each person avoiding death.

Where I see media personalities and government officials working hard to sensationalize and exaggerate Covid’s dangers, other people see trustworthy and intrepid reporting of, and dedication to, “the facts” and “the science.” Where I see many of these same media personalities and government officials doing and saying things that clearly reveal their wish to keep Covid hysteria high and going for as long as possible, other people see nothing of the sort.

Where I see an utterly unjustified and permanent expansion of government power to superintend and obstruct private behaviors in ways that a mere 14 months ago was unthinkable, other people see government responding humanely to society’s needs, and government’s willingness to abandon those powers when this pandemic is past.

Where I see liberal civilization being brutally transformed by a Covidocracy into what David Hart calls a “hygiene socialist” society, other people see civilization being compassionately reset into a safer and more humane arrangement in which, presumably, no one ever again will be killed or even discomforted by pathogens.