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Some Covid Links

Posted: 27 Feb 2021 03:36 AM PST
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(Don Boudreaux)




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Is the U.K.s Covid-19 death count inflated? Heres the opening of a new
report by the Daily Mail:

Grieving families last night said deaths had been wrongly certified as
Covid-19.

Demanding an inquiry, top medical experts and MPs also insisted they were
‘certain’ that too many fatalities were being blamed on the virus.

One funeral director said it was ‘a national scandal’. The claims are part
of a Daily Mail investigation that raises serious questions over the
spiralling death toll.

Im always pleased to be a guest on Dan Profts radio program.

Guy de la Bédoyère explores the insane fantasy world of the movement for
zero Covid.

Sinéad Murphy is rightly appalled by the dishonesty and ill-tempered
arrogance of some in the pro-lockdown crowd. A slice:

An example. Following his grotesque ‘take-down’ of Karol Sikora, Jones
turns his vitriol on Sunetra Gupta, who he introduces as having been
remarkable this year for “her sheer wrongness”. In general, during this
video, Jones’s language is that of the schoolyard – full of hyperbole and
poor in vocabulary.

To prove Gupta’s “sheer wrongness”, Jones reveals that, contrary to her
claims, early on in the first lockdown, that the Sars-CoV-2 virus was
already on the wane, by the end of the year “one in every 554 Britons had
been killed by the pandemic”. So, either Gupta must admit her “sheer
wrongness” or she must deny that “one in every 554 Britons had been killed”.

Of course, Sunetra Gupta would wish to do neither. The number of those who
died in 2020 with ‘Covid’ mentioned on their death certificate may indeed
translate as one in every 554 Britons – if it does, then Gupta would surely
admit this. But does this mean that she admits that “one in every 554
Britons have been killed by the pandemic”?

One of Gupta’s repeated insights throughout 2020 has been that no number is
so reliable as the overall mortality number. How many Britons died in 2020?
And in 2019, in 2015, in 2008? 2020’s overall mortality, when adjusted for
age profile, is more or less equivalent to that of 2015, slightly lower
than that of 2008, and only the ninth highest of all of the years since the
turn of the millennium.

Those in an ethical abyss are the pro-lockdowners.

Sonia Elijah makes the case against putting masks on school children.

How do those persons who continue to praise the authoritarian New Zealand
government for protecting people in that island nation from Covid process
this news? (HT Phil Magness)




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Quotation of the Day

Posted: 27 Feb 2021 01:15 AM PST
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(Don Boudreaux)




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is from page 26 of Thomas Sowell’s slim yet significant 1981 volume,
Markets and Minorities (original emphasis):

Economics takes as axiomatic the proposition that more of anything is
demanded at a low price than at a high price. Discrimination is no
exception. A pair of twins might be equally racist, but, if one was an
employer of violinists and the other an employer of basketball players they
would face very different costs of excluding blacks. Their subjective
prejudices might be identical, but economics would predict that the
differing costs would produce different amounts of overt discrimination.

Looked at another way, there are costs to the discriminator, as well as to
the victim, and the magnitude of those costs affects the extent to which
subjective prejudices produce overt discrimination. Foregone opportunities
to make money as employer, landlord, seller, lender, etc. put a price on
discrimination. Economic competition means that the less discriminatory
transactors acquire a competitive advantage, forcing others either to
reduce their discrimination or to risk losing profits, perhaps even being
forced out of business.

DBx: Indeed so. And history testifies to the validity of the prediction
from economics.

I first read Sowell’s Markets and Minorities in 1981, the year it was
published. I just re-read it. I’d forgotten how deep, subtle, and excellent
is the economic analysis that runs through this slim but profoundly
important work. This book is written with Sowell’s signature clarity, yet
also displays, on nearly every one of its 136 pages, both his sharp and
rare talent as an economic theorist, and his remarkable ability to use that
theory to make better sense of reality.




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Bonus Quotation of the Day

Posted: 26 Feb 2021 09:57 AM PST
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(Don Boudreaux)




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 is from page 58 of my late, great colleague Walter Williams’s 2011 book,
Race & Economics (original emphasis):

The real problem is that workers are not so much underpaid as they are
under-skilled. And the real task is to help those people become skilled.
Congress cannot do this simply by declaring that as of such-and-such a
date, everybody’s productive output is now worth $7.25 per hour. This makes
about as much sense, and does just about as much harm, as doctors curing
patients simply by declaring that they are cured.




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Some Non-Covid Links

Posted: 26 Feb 2021 09:14 AM PST
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(Don Boudreaux)




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George Will rightly decries the U.S. governments unprecedented peacetime
fiscal diarrhea. A slice:

[Brian] Riedl, a student of ancient (or so it suddenly seems) U.S. fiscal
history, remembers that the 2009 stimulus included a $25 addition to weekly
unemployment checks. In 2020, Democrats wanted $600 bonuses, and
Republicans were considered skinflints because they favored only $300 — 12
times the 2009 sum. During the Great Recession, the typical family of four
(a family with income below the $150,000 threshold where the phaseout
begins) received tax rebates of $2,600 ($1,800 in 2008 and $800 in 2009).
If legislation the Biden administration wants and the House of
Representatives will almost certainly pass becomes law, a typical family of
four will have received $11,400 in 12 months. In previous deep recessions,
state and local governments received up to $200 billion in federal aid.
Today Democrats want to add $350 billion to the $360 billion approved last
year.

The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board exposes the lunacy of the case for
a national-government bailout of U.S. state governments. A slice:

Nearly half of states rolled in more tax revenue in calendar year 2020 than
2019, according to the Reason Foundation. On average, state revenues were a
mere 0.01% lower across the board. Seventeen state treasurers recently
moaned to Congress that “tax revenues have plummeted,” but collectively
they’ve seen a 1.8% increase year-over-year, the Kansas Policy Institute
reports.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo recently warned of a $15 billion budget deficit and
threatened to raise New York’s top income tax rate to 14.7%—the nation’s
highest—though New York’s revenues were down a mere 1.5% from 2019. He
refuses to renegotiate union contracts or cut spending.

Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel is appalled by the
increasing fever on Capitol Hill for censorship. A slice:

What was new this week was Democrats’ brazenness: their shocking and open
targeting of news organizations. The left has long worked to shut down
speech with which it disagrees, but officials in the past did it with more
subterfuge. It came via legislation for “campaign finance reform,” or via
their successful effort to push the IRS to target conservative nonprofits;
or via Sen. Dick Durbin’s campaign to pressure companies out of funding
free-market nonprofits. Liberal activists have honed intimidation
campaigns, threatening boycotts and other actions against companies that
advertise on disfavored platforms or donate to right-leaning groups.

Heres Alberto Mingardi on Terence Kealey on Mariana Mazzucatos impact on
the British government.

Simon Lester offers some thoughts on likely trade policy under Biden.

Damon Root reports on U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Neil Gorsuchs
efforts to rein in the power of the police by strengthening 4th Amendment
protections.

My Mercatus Center colleague Adam Thierer explains that antitrust can kill
innovation. A slice:

The most important feature is the proposed change to the legal standard by
which regulators approve business deals. It would allow the government to
stop any deal that creates an “appreciable risk of materially lessening
competition,” and it also defines exclusionary behavior as, “conduct that
materially disadvantages one or more actual or potential competitors.”

These may sound like simple, semantic tweaks, but – much like some of the
other policy ideas currently circulating – they would upend decades of
settled law and create a sea change in U.S. antitrust enforcement. This
change could undermine business dynamism, innovation and investment in ways
that inhibit the global competitiveness of U.S. businesses.

Critics of merger and acquisition (M&A) activity by large tech firms
include not only Sen. Klobuchar but also Republicans such as Sen. Josh
Hawley (R-Mo.). Hawley recent offered an amendment to a budget bill that
would preemptively prohibit mergers and acquisitions by dominant online
firms. Klobuchar and Hawley believe that M&A skews the market in favor of
today’s largest firms, entrenching their market power and discouraging
innovation.

History teaches a different lesson.

Juliette Sellgren talks with GMU Law professor Todd Zywicki about law and
economics.




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David Henderson on the Economics and Ethics of Lockdowns

Posted: 26 Feb 2021 07:27 AM PST
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(Don Boudreaux)




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Last Friday, David Henderson in this lecture offered an economic and
ethical case against lockdowns.






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