Cafe HayekCafe Hayek - where orders emerge - Article Feed

///////////////////////////////////////////
Whos (Ir)Responsible?

Posted: 27 Aug 2021 04:50 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
Here’s a letter to a new correspondent:

Dr. L___:

You interpret my opposition to lockdowns and other government-imposed
restrictions designed to combat Covid-19 as evidence that I’m “blind to
responsibilities which we have to one another.”

Your interpretation is mistaken. Opposition to panic-driven, heavy-handed,
one-size-and-style-fits-all, unprecedented government measures meant to
protect people from Covid – measures imposed top-down and in contradiction
to what was regarded until as recently as 2019 as the best advice of
public-health officials – is opposition to the method, not the goal, of
promoting public health. My opposition to lockdowns and government-imposed
mask and vaccine mandates no more means that I am, as you accuse, “hostile
to Covid victims” than does my opposition to minimum-wage legislation mean
that I am hostile to low-wage workers.

Just as I believe that minimum wages are a counterproductive means,
unleashing a host of unintended ill-consequences, of raising low-skilled
workers’ incomes, I believe that lockdowns and other Covid mandates are
counterproductive means, unleashing a host of unintended ill-consequences,
of promoting public health. Perhaps I’m mistaken in one or both of these
cases. But I assure you that my position in neither case signals any
indifference on my part to human suffering, or any belief that each of us
should be allowed to act irresponsibly toward the rest of us.

The truly irresponsible actors, in my view, are government officials who
imposed lockdowns and other mandates. Anthony Fauci, for example, no doubt
sincerely pursues the goal of minimizing the spread of SARS-CoV-2. But he
does so irresponsibly – by which I mean that he does not, because he
cannot, weigh the costs to you, to me, and to each of the hundreds of
millions of other of our fellow citizens of being restricted according to
his counsel. Dr. Fauci advises tirelessly, but he’s immune to most of the
resulting consequences. Individuals who as a consequence of his advice lost
their jobs, or who died because of delayed cancer diagnoses, or who watched
their children sink into depression suffered directly from Dr. Fauci’s
advice, yet he personally suffers from these consequences not at all.

My criticism isn’t so much of Dr. Fauci and other such government officials
personally as it is of a system in which responsibility for decision-making
is so easily seized from individual men and women, each with his or her own
unique knowledge and circumstances, and replaced by commands issued by
these officials. I understand – as do most people – that the coronavirus is
a dangerous pathogen that’s contagious. But I also understand – as too many
people seem to have forgotten – that government power is not only also
dangerous, but also in its own manner highly contagious. As the economist
Robert Higgs’s persuasively argues, each expansion of government power –
especially when fueled by panic – nourishes itself. And as the state grows,
individuals’ abilities truly to act responsibly toward each other withers.
And thus is paved a path to hell.

Sincerely,

Donald J. Boudreaux

Professor of Economics

and

Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at
the Mercatus Center

George Mason University

Fairfax, VA 22030




///////////////////////////////////////////
Some Covid Links

Posted: 27 Aug 2021 03:05 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
James Bovard explains that government power weaves no effective safety net
that protects well against Covid. Three slices:

There is no “science” to justify prohibiting Australians from going more
than 2 miles from their home. But New Zealand and Australia presume that no
one will be safe unless government officials have jurisdiction over every
breath that citizens take.

In the United States, many of the same pundits and activists who howled
about the evils of “microaggressions” are now cheering for the government
to forcibly inject everyone with a Covid vaccine. Biden publicly declared
that he is checking to see if he has the power to force everyone to get
injected.

..

Politicians’ anti-Covid recommendations increasingly resemble frightened
soldiers shooting at any noise they hear in the dark. NIH Director Francis
Collins recently condemned the “epidemic of misinformation, disinformation,
distrust that is tearing us apart.” But much of the misinformation has
stemmed directly from the Biden administration’s flip-flops and
fearmongering. On August 3, Collins announced during a CNN interview that
“parents of unvaccinated kids should… wear masks” in their own homes. He
conceded: “I know that’s uncomfortable, I know it seems weird, but it is
the best way to protect your kids.” A few hours later, Collins recanted on
Twitter, perhaps after other political appointees persuaded him to stop
sounding like a blithering idiot.

..

Faith in absolute power is not “science” – regardless of how many
scientists pledge allegiance to Washington in return for federal funding.
As historian John M. Barry, author of The Great Influenza, observed, “When
you mix politics and science, you get politics.” There is no safety in
submission to damn fools, regardless of their pompous titles.

The entire federal workforce is required to be vaccinated. So why is the
federal bureaucracy still operating as if routine public interactions are a
public health threat? a great question asked by Reasons Eric Boehm.

While I dislike el gato malos refusal to capitalize, he more than makes up
for this distracting tic by consistently offering excellent insights. (HT
Dan Klein) A slice:

sweden did very little to try to stop covid. they did not lock down, they
did not wear masks, they closed few businesses, they left most schools
open, undistanced, in person, and unmaksed.

many have endlessly screamed that “well look at the covid deaths! it was a
disaster!” but here’s the thing: it wasn’t.

sweden has one of the most aggressive covid counting methodologies in the
world. they tested a lot and then called any death for any reason within 30
days of a positive covid test a covid death.

get sick, recover, get hit by a bus? covid death

test positive, have no symptoms, die of a drug overdose? covid death.

die of cancer in hospital, test positive for trace covid? covid death.

you get the picture.

this definitional issue has made it very hard to compare to other places.

but even with this huge definitional issue, they outperformed the US,
especially since last summer.

Meanwhile, in the once-free but now dystopian Gehenna that is Australia.
(HT Todd Zywicki)

Guy de la Bédoyère decries the disaster now unfolding in Australia. A slice:

The individual states are asserting their autonomy and doing so with ever
more strident bio-authoritarian measures, some buying deeper into
zero-Covid. The destruction of individual freedoms in Australia and the
epic speed with which that has happened has no parallel in the modern world
in a modern democratic state. Yes, I know these have been hitherto widely
welcomed by Australians, but you’d have to be spectacularly naïve to think
that such support will necessarily be sustained. In 1943, Germany was full
of people who fanatically supported the Nazis. Two years later the country
was full of people shaking their heads and wondering what on Earth they’d
been thinking.

Reporting from the Covidocracy-run Australia is the Institute of Public
Afffairss Gideon Rozner. Three slices:

Yes, everything you’ve heard about Australia and coronavirus is true.

Yes, the entire city of Greater Sydney has been in full lockdown since late
June, at which time there were 82 cases in the entire state of New South
Wales. Not 82 deaths, not 82 hospitalisations – 82 cases. At the time the
latest lockdown was announced here in Melbourne, the total active case
count was six. And no, the lockdowns aren’t working – cases are rising
steadily in both states.

Yes, the premier of Victoria used a press conference to admonish people for
watching the sunset on the beach and has put rules in place that mean you
can take your mask off to sip your coffee but not your beer.

..

Yes, police in Melbourne forced a hunger relief charity to shut its doors
three hours early because they thought the traffic into the warehouse was
creating a “risk to public safety”. Yes, this week a rural town council
decided that a planned transfer of dogs from its animal shelter to another
town wasn’t worth the potential health hazard and had the dogs shot instead.

Yes, we Australians know you don’t understand it. We don’t either, if we’re
being honest with ourselves. But collectively, we can’t quite bring
ourselves to say out loud what a growing number of us are thinking – that
our de facto national goal of zero Covid is not only impossible, but that
it is also destroying us.

..

When Australia – thank goodness – made it through 2020 with the lowest per
capita Covid deaths of almost any country in the developed world, our
opportunistic political class took all the credit, and confected a kind of
Australian Covid exceptionalism. For all the pain, inconvenience and misery
of lockdowns, we had succeeded in keeping coronavirus out of the country.
That’s how our leaders can keep a straight face as they persist with the
political fiction that Australia is “the envy of the world” at a time when
those overseas are increasingly looking to us as a cautionary tale.

Im very pleased and proud as reason for which this essay serves as
evidence that the faculty at GMU Econ now counts in its ranks Vincent
Geloso. A slice:

Well, let’s take the data most frequently used on vaccination rates at the
county level, which has been heavily publicized in outlets such as the New
York Times and Washington Post. For the sake of comparison, let’s use the
dataset of Tom Pepinsky at Cornell University which has been assembled from
multiple sources to properly match county vaccination rates with
demographic data for these counties (his analysis is here). That data does
indeed show that counties with larger Trump margins have lower vaccination
rates. However, not all counties are the same. For example, Loving County
(TX) voted 90% for Trump. It also has 64 people as of the 2020 census.
Meanwhile, Los Angeles County (the most populous in America) voted 75% for
Biden. Would we be crazy enough to say the vaccination rate in both places
speak to the same thing? Few would!

The latest essay from Philippe Lemoine is titled Why COVID-19 Is Here to
Stay, and Why You Shouldn’t Worry About It.

Even the BBC, long a cheerleader for Covidocratic tyranny, is starting to
admit that lockdowns collateral damages were not sufficiently taken into
account. A slice:

A report by the National Childrens Bureau previously said that families of
children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) felt they
were forgotten in the response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Many therapies and essential services they relied on were withdrawn and
have not fully returned.

The NICCY report draws attention to the widespread suspension of services
and their effect on children.

Many face-to-face services in early years, for children aged 0-3 and their
families, were suspended.

Ross Clark reports on the new study out of Israel that finds that natural
immunity against Covid-19 is stronger than vaccination.




///////////////////////////////////////////
Quotation of the Day

Posted: 27 Aug 2021 01:30 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
is from page 59 of Richard Epstein’s brilliant 1995 book, Simple Rules for
a Complex World:

The reason for the dominance of the autonomy principle is not any belief
that people live in small social islands uninfluenced by and unconcerned
with the interests and the behavior of others. It is that no other
principle matches power with interests to the same degree.

DBx: Indeed. A legal regime that concentrates in me power over my person
and possessions, and concentrates in you power over your person and
possessions, much better ensures that everyone’s persons and possessions
are used in socially beneficial ways than would a regime that concentrates
in me power over your person and possessions and concentrates in you power
over my person and possessions.




///////////////////////////////////////////
Infant-Industry Protection Infantalizes

Posted: 26 Aug 2021 07:54 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
Bryan Caplan has a superb post at EconLog on (some of) the problems with
the so-called infant-industry argument for protectionism. Do read it all.

One of the arguments (indeed, the chief argument) offered by proponents of
infant-industry protection is that government-supplied protection from
foreign competition will intensify the incentives of the owners and
managers of the protected firms to improve their efficiency to improve the
quality of their outputs and to achieve maximum possible efficiencies in
production and distribution. As Bryan points out, this argument is very
weak.

Heres a slightly expanded version of a comment that I added to Bryans post:

Bryan,

As usual, great post.

Here’s a mental experiment that I share with students in my International
Economic Policy course when we get to the topic of infant-industry
protection:

Suppose that I, as teacher of the course, were to tell each of you students
that on each exam and paper that you submit for the course, I’ll raise the
grade you earn by one letter grade. So a student who earns a C+ on a
mid-term exam will be recorded in my Excel spreadsheet as having earned on
that exam a B+. A student who earned a B on a paper will be recorded in my
spreadsheet as having earned on that paper an A.

I explain that my grading policy is meant to encourage each student to
study harder and, thus, to better learn the material. My reasoning is that
a student who senses that he or she, with ordinary studying, is destined
only to earn, say, a C- will feel that it’s not worthwhile to study harder
if the likely result will be only a C or a C+. The improved outcome isn’t
worth the effort. But if by studying harder this student understands that
the C+ he thereby earns will be raised by me to a B+, the result suddenly
does seem worth the effort.

What could be simpler?!

Even my students understand that, were I really to make such a promise to
artificially raise their grades, the result would be less studying rather
than more – and, hence, less learning rather than more. Similarly, of
course, were government to use tariffs or other protective measures to
artificially increase demand for certain firms’ outputs, the result would
be less effort to improve output quality and productivity and, hence, less
economic growth in the country.




--
You are subscribed to email updates from "Cafe HayekCafe Hayek - where
orders emerge - Article Feed."
To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now:
[link removed]

Email delivery powered by Google.
Google, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States