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JP Sears On California Strongman Gavin Newsom

Posted: 03 Feb 2021 04:06 AM PST
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(Don Boudreaux)




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Some Covid Links

Posted: 03 Feb 2021 03:58 AM PST
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(Don Boudreaux)




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Im very happy to have discovered Shane Chalkes research on Covid-19.

Ivan Jankovic explores the political economy of mass panic. A slice:

The recent Covid-19 epidemic in the USA is a tragic cautionary tale. The
respiratory disease, for everything we know, is similar to a severe,
pandemic flu. The symptoms are similar, and the death rate according to the
initial estimate of the Centers for Disease Control is between 0.16% and
0.33% (later estimates don’t provide a unique IFR, but a range of different
IFR for different age groups show an extremely strong age gradient after 70
and an exceedingly low death rate for those younger than 40). A
comprehensive review of all antibody studies done so far by world-renowned
epidemiologist John Ioannidis found that the average death rate of Covid-19
is about 0.27%, with some regional variations.

This is certainly higher than the seasonal flu, but very close to a severe
pandemic flu, like the one the world experienced in 1957 and 1968 (without
doing anything to “tackle” them). Indeed Dr. Anthony Fauci himself, the
President’s principal scientific adviser for epidemics, in co-authorship
with Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control,
published a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine on March 26th of
2020, saying: “If one assumes that the number of asymptomatic or minimally
symptomatic cases is several times as high as the number of reported cases
the case fatality rate may be considerably less than 1. This suggests that
the overall clinical consequences of COVID-19 may ultimately be more akin
to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of
approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and
1968) rather than a disease similar to Spanish flu, SARS or MERS, which
have had case fatality rates of 9% to 10% and 36%, respectively.”

An overwhelming majority of people who died of Covid were older than 70 and
already had other significant ailments like heart disease, diabetes or
obesity. Among children and young people the disease is much less severe
than seasonal flu. Additionally, children are far less likely to transmit
the virus than older people, which is in stark contrast to the flu, where
children are the main spreaders and sufferers.

Through February 1st, 2021, how are the U.S. states least affected by Covid
Derangement Syndrome doing relative to U.S. states more affected by this
grotesque mental disorder?

The European countries with the strictest lockdowns have come out no better.

Rob Slane is correct: Covid lockdowns are cruel experiments using human
beings as guinea pigs. Heres his opening:

WHICH of the following is the more reasonable approach a society might take
in the outbreak of an epidemic?

· To quarantine the sick and take reasonable precautions to stop those who
are identified as vulnerable from contracting the illness.

· To attempt to ‘control the virus’ by preventing millions of healthy
people from having contact with other healthy people.

To any society before 2020, it would have been obvious that the first
approach is not only logical and proportionate, but the one least likely to
have other unintended and highly destructive consequences. However, to my
continued astonishment, many in our society not only believe that the
answer is the second, but they somehow believe it to be based on
established science.

GMU Econ PhD candidate Jon Murphy calls, as we grapple with Covid, for a
better understanding of the work of the late Nobel-laureate economist
Ronald Coase. A slice:

With the Covid-19 pandemic, we have seen the problem Coase discussed unfurl
at rapid speed. Lockdowns, business closures, and even deaths were
justified by politicians as necessary to contain the pandemic. Enterprising
economists jumped at the opportunity to use the market failure model to
justify said lockdowns: governmental actions were necessary to bring social
costs in line with social benefits.

But these justifications contained the very problem Coase discussed 60
years ago: they ignored the steps people were already taking to limit the
spread. Indeed, as my AIER colleague Phil Magness has documented numerous
times, many of the models (such as the Imperial College model) explicitly
refused to take people’s behavior into context. In a new working paper,
Abigail Devereaux, Nathan Goodman, Roger Koppl, and I document other such
failures of expert advisors. Thus, the predictable result occurred: policy
was too onerous even by its own standards and has failed to achieve its
goals.




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Quotation of the Day

Posted: 03 Feb 2021 02:51 AM PST
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(Don Boudreaux)




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is from pages 79-80 of Pierre Lemieux’s excellent 2018 monograph, What’s
Wrong With Protectionism? (footnote deleted):

For individuals, the benefits of exchange cut across political borders
they are not confined within a country. If free trade between the United
States and Mexico is detrimental, it should also be detrimental between
California and Mississippi. Average wages are 40 percent lower in
Mississippi than in California.

The typical protectionist will retort that free trade among countries is
different. But why would that be the case? Protectionism against foreigners
amounts to a coercive redistribution among the citizens allegedly
protected a coercive redistribution analogous to what would be the
consequences of forbidding California consumers to buy from Mississippi
producers, thereby redistributing income from California consumers to
California producers.

DBx: Protectionism artificially increases consumer demand for the outputs
of protected producers by intentionally intensifying scarcity in the home
country. Protectionism thus reduces overall material wealth in the home
country. The typical protectionist, though, misses this reality because he
or she mistakes protectionisms’ happy impact on protected producers for its
impact on the entire country. (Protectionists are fonts of many fallacies,
but the chief one in which they truck is the fallacy of composition.)

Thus, as Pierre above points out, the benefits that protectionism yields
for its clients come from its clients’ its proponents’ fellow citizens.
But these fellow citizens are out of sight of those not fitted with proper
economic’ lenses. These fellow citizens and their suffering are thus out of
protectionists’ minds. It’s easy to plunder unseen victims and heartwarming
to witness the joy that is experienced by those who receive the resulting
booty.




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Bonus Quotation of the Day

Posted: 02 Feb 2021 04:21 PM PST
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(Don Boudreaux)




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is from page 215 of George Will’s magnificent 2019 book, The Conservative
Sensibility (footnote deleted):

Conservatism has no more urgent task than that of convincing the country
that judicial deference often is dereliction of duty, and that an
energetically engaged judiciary is necessary lest, in Justice Robert
Jackson’s words, the lights go out.

DBx: Indeed (although what George Will calls conservatism is what I call
liberalism).

..

Pictured above is U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Stephen J. Field.
Nominated in 1863 for the Supreme Court by President Abraham Lincoln, Field
was one of the finest jurists ever to serve in that body.




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Sounds Like Something Out of an Ayn Rand Novel

Posted: 02 Feb 2021 09:52 AM PST
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(Don Boudreaux)




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Here’s a letter to someone in California who apparently believes that
economic reality is optional:

Mr. Víctor Sánchez, Director

Long Beach Coalition for Good Jobs and a Healthy Community

Mr. Sánchez:

You call “shameful” the decision by Kroger to close stores in Long Beach
after the City Council there ordered certain supermarkets to raise the
hourly pay of some workers by $4 (“Kroger to close 2 California stores
instead of giving $4 hourly ‘hero pay’”). This decision by Kroger, you
allege, will “deny their workers the compensation they deserve.”

Put your money and action where your mouth is. If these workers really are
worth employing at the wage mandated by the City Council, you should have
no trouble convincing investors to back you in efforts to buy Kroger’s Long
Beach facilities in order for you to keep these operating as supermarkets
that pay wages as high as those ordered by the City Council.

If, however, you’re unwilling to make this effort, then your talk is cheap.
No one has any reason to trust that you actually believe that the workers
who you pose as championing really deserve a $4 per hour raise.

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

For alerting me to this story I thank J. Nellis.




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Some Covid Links

Posted: 02 Feb 2021 04:10 AM PST
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(Don Boudreaux)




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The tyranny tightens. (But were assured that its for our own good. And our
government would never so assure us if that assurance werent based in fact.
So theres nothing to worry about, right? Right?)

Jordan Davidson reports on recent remarks by Stanford professor Dr. Jay
Bhattacharya. A slice:

“I’ve come to think of it as trickle-down epidemiology. We’ve used the
lockdowns to protect the rich, whereas we essentially expose the — like in
California for instance, it’s the poor areas that have had the high death
rates from COVID. The lockdowns haven’t protected people living in places
where there’s high poverty,” Bhattacharya said on “The Megyn Kelly Show.”
“Minority populations, especially Hispanics, have been hard hit. Fifty
percent of people who have had COVID deaths are Hispanic in California.”

Julius Ruechel exposes the immorality of Covid-19 lockdowns. A slice:

Lockdowns during COVID pose the exact same question as the Bystander at the
Switch. But its not a game; once again there are real lives at stake. Yet
in direct violation of the principles of universal human rights,
governments around the world are choosing to pull the switch by imposing
lockdowns for our safety. In doing so they have given themselves the
authority to play God with our lives.

Are you essential or non-essential? Each category now has different rights
and freedoms and different levels of individual autonomy. Some have the
right to earn a living. Others do not. Some have the right to choose how to
balance the risks and priorities in their lives. Others do not. How can any
job that feeds a family not be essential?

What about the collateral damage caused by lockdowns? Mandatory lockdowns
are leading to the deaths of countless individuals through
cancelled/delayed medical operations, suicides, drug overdoses, loneliness
and isolation in nursing homes, and more. None of these deaths would happen
without lockdowns. Government is throwing one group of people onto the
tracks with the goal of saving another.

How much misery and suffering is government allowed to impose on other
people for your safety? How many jobs is the government allowed to destroy
for your safety? How many people will lose their homes for your safety? How
many people will lose their life savings, have their marriages broken,
suffer bankruptcy, lose their careers, have their childrens education
irreparably damaged, or have their mental health destroyed because of
actions taken by the government for your safety?

Amelia Janaskie, Jenin Younes, and Taleed Brown show us more faces of
lockdown.

COVID-19 rarely spreads through surfaces. So why are we still deep cleaning?

Heres more from Noah Carl on excess deaths in the U.K.

Mark Ellse exposes appallingly misleading reporting on Covid. A slice:

Yes, indeed. Every time comparison figures are given to us by the media or
the government they use raw comparison figures, not Age Standardised
Figures. This makes increases in death rate seem bigger than they actually
are. As for the rise from 2019 to 2020, it is significant. But before
deciding how significant, we need first to consider what death rate for
2020 we should have expected.

Hector Drummond argues that Swedens Covid numbers show that lockdowns are
indeed criminal. A slice:

You will see that April 2020, supposedly the worst month for the world in
hundred years outside wartime, in fact had lower deaths than about twenty
other months in Sweden in just the last thirty years.

Most governments, scientists, and media outlets have inexcusably ignored
these facts for over half a year, and when forced to look at Sweden they
have continued to spin the line that Sweden is a charnel house.

Now, ten months since the Western world went mad, the overall figures for
Sweden’s all-cause mortality for 2020 are available. And it is time we had
a proper look at these figures and stopped taking this lunatic mania for
lockdowns seriously.

I thank Lyle Albaugh for alerting me to this interview with Knut Wittkowski:






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Quotation of the Day

Posted: 02 Feb 2021 03:14 AM PST
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(Don Boudreaux)




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is from page 30 of the late, great UCLA economists Armen A. Alchian’s and
William R. Allen’s Universal Economics (2018; Jerry L. Jordan, ed.); this
volume is an updated version of Alchian’s and Allen’s pioneering earlier
textbook, University Economics; at the end of each chapter, Alchian and
Allen offered a list of brilliant questions, each with an answer; this
quotation is from the Questions and Meditations section of Chapter 2:



What is nonsensical about the proposition, A good economic system maximizes
the welfare of the maximum number of people?

Answer:



Only one quantity can be maximized subject to all others being held at
specified levels. You can maximize the welfare of one person provided that
the welfare of each of the other people is unchanged.

DBx: Yep.

The moment we admit into consideration the welfare of a second person who
potentially interacts, directly or indirectly, with the first person, the
literal maximization of the first person’s welfare is no longer ethically
desirable. If maximizing the first person’s welfare were truly the goal,
then the second person must disregard his or her own welfare and act
exclusively as a means of assisting the first person to achieve maximum
welfare. The second person, in effect, would be the first person’s slave.

Once the welfare of the second person is admitted to be desirable, we
encounter the necessity of making trade-offs. Although very often
cooperation of person one with person two enables both persons to increase
their welfare, neither person gets all the gains from the cooperation. The
gains are shared.

More generally, whenever there are multiple goals, to speak of maximization
masks the necessity of trade-offs among these goals. Goal B can be achieved
more fully only if we accept a less-full achievement of goal A, or of goals
A and C.

If society were a single, sentient entity in the way that you are a single,
sentient entity, it would be meaningful to speak of society making these
trade-offs among all the many different goals in a way that results in
maximum possible satisfaction (maximum utility) for society.

But despite much loose language and bad theorizing, society isn’t a single,
sentient entity. Society, as such, has no mind, no preferences, no
purposes. These are all had only by each member of society a reality that
isn’t altered one bit by the fact that cooperation among members of society
enriches everyone. Nor is this reality altered by the fact that the
preferences of each of us are heavily influenced by the details of the
society in which we live. And nor is this reality altered by the fact that
each of us cares what other people think about us and typically act
accordingly.

This reality remains: Society, as such, has no mind, no preferences, no
purposes. Talk of maximizing social welfare or utility thus misleads more
than it enlightens. Such talk too easily leads to the conception of society
as confronting challenges all of which can be solved in an engineering in
a scientific manner.

Consider the current hysteria over Covid-19. Many people talk as if the
goal is to maximize our protection from Covid. If this goal were real, then
every action inconsistent with reducing anyone’s risk of suffering from
Covid would be inappropriate. All action and all resources would be turned
toward reducing humanity’s encounter with Covid. There would be no
trading-off the benefit of any potential reduced risk of encountering Covid
against the benefit from action that raises that risk.

But of course even those persons who are most fearful of Covid don’t fully
act in this manner. I doubt that anyone sleeps in a Hazmat suit and refuses
to remove the suit even to bathe. Each person makes trade-offs. And just as
it is officious and illiberal for Jones to sit in judgment of the manner in
which Smith trade-offs the benefits that he gets from exercising against
those that he gets from lounging lazily, it is officious and illiberal for
Smith to sit in judgment of the manner in which Jones trades-off the
benefits she gets from taking steps to reduce her exposure to Covid against
the benefits she gets from pursuing activities that raise her Covid risk.

Yes, yes, yes I understand that whenever Jones takes actions that increase
her risk of encountering Covid or even refuses to take actions that reduce
such risk she thereby increases the risk that she will expose unwilling
others to Covid. But while there has been some adult talk of the ability
and responsibility of these others to protect themselves, such talk hasn’t
featured prominently in the public debate over Covid. The overwhelming
assumption as revealed by the ignorant hostility to the Great Barrington
Declaration has been that the importance of having every person reduce his
or her exposure to Covid, even on very small margins, is so great that
government is entitled to force all of us to remain separated indefinitely
from each other.

Maximizing the risk reduction from Covid-19 is now regarded by many people
to be humanity’s chief goal, one that takes precedence over almost any
other.

It’s madness. It’s a lethal obsession. It’s inhuman and inhumane. It’s
contrary to the way that each of us lives our daily life. It’s Covid
Derangement Syndrome.




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Resist the Hysteria and Tyranny

Posted: 01 Feb 2021 01:03 PM PST
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(Don Boudreaux)




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In my latest column for AIER, inspired by Henry Manne, I call for peaceful
resistance to the misinformation being spread about Covid-19, and to the
tyranny being unleashed in the name of protecting us.

In late 1973 and early 1974 Henry decried the biased and uninformed
reporting on the fuel shortages that then plagued America, and he called on
people to resist the demands for the strict government controls that were
then said by many in elite circles to be necessary to best deal with these
shortages.

Todays Covid-19 pandemic isnt identical to the 1970s fuel shortages, but
the two crises share with each other many parallels. In both, media
reporting consistently missed important points and, in doing so, fueled (!)
unwarranted panic. Worse-case scenarios were presented as likely outcomes.
Elite opinion very quickly settled on the conclusion that key human
liberties must be sacrificed indefinitely to government leaders wielding
discretionary powers in order to deal with an almost-existential scourge.
Talk of society being at war against an insidious enemy was widespread.
Unfathomably complex arrangements of human engagement were treated as if
they are as simple as Lego structures that children build, can disassemble,
and can easily rebuild. And evil-doers were said to be afoot whose
misbehaviors from negligence to intentional malfeasance were making a bad
situation worse. These evid-doers, thus, were accused of being threats to
innocent other people.

In both instances, governments heavy-handed attempts to deal with each
crisis made each crisis worse.

Yet there is at least one important difference separating these two crises
from each other. Compared to the energy crisis of the 1970s, today very few
prominent voices in the media and in high political circles are speaking
out forcefully against the misinformation and the tyranny that this
misinformation is believed to justify. Are people today more cowardly than
they were nearly 50 years ago? Are people today more easily frightened by
misinformation and misperception than they were back then? Are people today
less willing than they were back then to speak out against the dominant
narrative?

I remember well the cocksure predictions made by many elite voices of the
horrors that would befall us Americans if energy price controls were
abolished and we refused to alter our way of life. Fuel prices would
skyrocket. Ordinary families would suffer grievously as they impoverished
themselves simply to fuel their automobiles and to keep their homes warm
during winter. We were even warned that if we refuse to adopt rationing and
other strict controls and lifestyle changes that wed soon find ourselves
unable to get any affordable energy whatsoever. Failure to follow our
leaders advice would spell doom for us all.

To this day I thank the memory of Ronald Reagan for eliminating, almost
immediately after he assumed office at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., all federal
price controls on energy.

Heres a slice from my AIER column:

Then as now, reality threw humanity a curveball. But instead of dealing
with war-disrupted oil supplies intelligently and calmly, fear mongering by
the media became de rigueur. For our own benefit and that of society, we
little people must be reminded of the calamity that awaits us if we resist
being regimented by our superiors.




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The Market Makes People Pay for Their Prejudices

Posted: 01 Feb 2021 08:53 AM PST
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(Don Boudreaux)




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As Art Carden notes, today is the 77th birthday of the great economic
historian Robert Higgs. One of Bobs many pioneering books is his 1977
Competition and Coercion: Blacks in the American Economy, 1865-1914.

I thought of Bobs research and scholarship yesterday as I watched 42, the
2013 movie, starring Chadwick Boseman, about the baseball career of the
great Jackie Robinson who would yesterday have turned 102.



I dont know if the scene depicted here is historically accurate or not.
(This scene isnt, at the link above at 42, listed as being among the movies
historical inaccuracies.) Either way, this scene does capture much of the
manner in which market competition actually works to impose on bigots the
costs of exercising their irrational prejudices. It depicts also the fact
that many bigots, unwilling to pay those costs, change their behavior for
the better.

Its beautiful to behold!

Contrary to popular belief, such competition was at work in America during
the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as Bob Higgs documents in his book.
Indeed, the reality of such competition is what drove state and local
governments during the Jim Crow era to forcibly impose racial
discrimination by enacting Jim Crow legislation.




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Some Non-Covid Links

Posted: 01 Feb 2021 07:19 AM PST
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(Don Boudreaux)




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Art Carden celebrates Robert Higgss birthday. (Happy Birthday, Bob!) A
slice:

This year is also the fiftieth anniversary of Higgs’s first book, The
Transformation of the American Economy 1865-1914, a remarkable achievement
for any scholar but made all the more impressive by the fact that it was
published as Higgs was entering his late twenties. As he would spend his
career doing, he took what “everybody” knew about exploitation, inequality,
and Robber Barons during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
and showed that it was wrong. The book stands up well even five decades
later.

In 1977, Higgs published a pathbreaking book on the economic history of
race, Competition and Coercion: Blacks in the American Economy 1865-1914.
Competition, Higgs argued, helped explain black economic advancement while
coercion held them back.

In the Wall Street Journal, Barton Swaim reviews a few books about markets
and morals including a new edition of Milton Friedmans 1962
classic, Capitalism and Freedom (reissued by the University of Chicago
Press with a Foreword by someone who could not be more inappropriate,
Binyamin Appelbaum). A slice:

I had never read “Capitalism and Freedom” and was renewed in my admiration
for midcentury American reading audiences. The book, full of tightly
reasoned arguments about the principles of economic freedom in various
spheres of life, sold 400,000 copies in its first 18 years. The University
of Chicago Press, which first published the book six decades ago, evidently
would rather it stop selling. The new edition’s foreword is written by
Binyamin Appelbaum, a member of the New York Times editorial board, who
treats Friedman’s classic text as mildly interesting artifact. “Friedman’s
claim that ‘widespread use of the market reduces the strain on the social
fabric,’ ” Mr. Appelbaum assures us, “misapprehended the nature of society,
which is more like a muscle than a fabric.” I await Chicago’s edition of
J.K. Galbraith’s “The Affluent Society,” with a foreword by Larry Kudlow.

Arnold Kling reviews Kevin Valliers book, Trust in a Polarized Age.

Claude Barfield is understandably unimpressed with the Biden
administrations early moves on the trade-policy front.

J.D. Tuccille warns of the consequences of abandoning free speech. A slice:

Protections for free speech, its worth pointing out, arent some perfect
counter to false and extreme ideas. Instead, theyre a recognition of core
individual rights. But theyre also a pragmatic acknowledgment that putting
government agencies in charge of suppressing misinformation just gives one
team of bullshit artists an advantage over their less-powerful competitors.

Inspired by Ludwig von Misess 1944 book, Bureaucracy, Stefanie Haeffele and
Anne Hobson warn against the false allure of top-down solutions. A slice:

However, it is important to note that the lack of standards of determining
bureaucratic success creates impassible problems for monitoring and
managing the size of bureaucracy. For example, it is likely impossible to
calculate whether an agency should have 500 employees or 50,000 and it is
difficult to know whether agency services are too costly, and by how much.
Because bureaucrats are not limited by considerations of financial success,
superiors have to provide limitations in the form of rules and regulations.
The mission of the bureaucrat is to serve the public, but the incentives
point toward serving one’s supervisor and their preferences for
implementing the agency’s goals.

My colleague Tyler Cowen warns against raising the minimum wage. A slice:

Or consider Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. She supports the proposed
hike, as she noted in her confirmation hearing last week, yet in 2014
she endorsed the view that a minimum wage hike would lead to significant
job loss. Maybe now she knows better, but if the 2014 Janet Yellen could
have been so fooled, then perhaps this debate is not so settled.

You cant count on governments to either follow the economics or follow the
science, because their job is to follow the politics so writes Steve
Horwitz.




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