Cafe HayekCafe Hayek - where orders emerge - Article Feed

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Quotation of the Day

Posted: 13 Sep 2021 01:30 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
is from page 262 of 1993 Nobel-laureate economist Douglass North’s October
25th, 1994, lecture, “My Evolution as an Economist,” in Lives of the
Laureates, William Breit and Roger W. Spencer, eds. (3rd ed., 1995):

In economic markets there are objective criteria (size, weight, color,
etc.) to measure the physical dimensions of goods and services exchanged
and legal criteria to measure the property rights dimensions. Enforcement
is carried out by the judicial system. Competition is a powerful force to
reduce transaction costs but still economic markets are beset by high
transaction costs. But political markets are far more prone to
inefficiency. What is being exchanged are promises for votes; the voter has
little incentive to be informed since the likelihood that his/her vote
counts is infinitesimal; there is no comparable enforcement mechanism; and
competition is very imperfect. The complexity of the issues (together with
the lack of incentives of voters to be informed) leads to ideological
stereotyping taking over. In effect, the incentives for efficiency are
diluted by the structure of political markets and the complexity of the
issues.




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Some Covid Links

Posted: 12 Sep 2021 06:15 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
Harrison Pitt draws lessons for 2020-2021 from Hayeks 1944 book, The Road
to Serfdom. Two slices:

While the situation varies across the Anglosphere, in all of its countries,
from Australia to Britain, the relationship between the individual and the
state has fundamentally transformed — and these conditions will likely
outlive the pandemic. Sydney remains under a draconian lockdown, as does
New Zealand after the discovery of just one case of the coronavirus. The
British and Canadian governments intend to make freedom conditional on
state-issued vaccine passports, while President Joe Biden, fresh from his
Afghanistan debacle, recently called on parents to mask up their children
when they leave the house.

These measures can easily be relaxed or intensified by government officials
at a moment’s notice. But while restrictions can be tweaked, few in power
have renounced the overarching authority they represent. In this sense,
they are symbols of an abiding new normal, which, before 2020, was utterly
unthinkable in free societies.

Hayek’s defense of liberty was driven by more than a moral revulsion to
state force. He also argued that letting individuals take personal
responsibility for their lives makes greater practical sense. Hayek’s
ingenious arguments against a centrally run economy, therefore, are equally
devastating to the idea of a centrally run biosecurity state.

..

Hayek also understood that such temporary measures, implemented for a
limited purpose, rarely remain that way. In Law, Legislation and Liberty,
Hayek accepted that sometimes the liberal order ‘may yet have to be
temporarily suspended when the long-run preservation of that order is
itself threatened. During such emergencies, be it a war on germs or
Germans, protecting civil society itself becomes the ‘overruling common
purpose’.

But when defined vaguely enough, that ‘overruling common purpose’ can be
invoked to continue denying liberty even after the initial threat has waned
or passed. As Hayek wrote, ‘”Emergencies” have always been the pretext on
which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded — and once they
are suspended it is not difficult for anyone who has assumed emergency
powers to see to it that the emergency will persist.’

If anything, it is harder for governments to relinquish such powers. Once
people get attached to the idea of a benevolent, all-caring state, it
appears compassionless to return to normal. COVID restrictions were
initially put in place to ‘slow the spread’ so that hospitals would not be
overwhelmed with patients. Now, public health officials use them for a
myriad of different purposes: to minimize ‘long COVID’ or to prevent cases
entirely.

Heres some good news from Britain. (HT Yevdokiya Zagumenova)

Luke Massey reports Australias Covid facts facts that do not even begin to
justify the tyranny that has very quickly become normal in that once-free
country.

Bella d’Abrera writes from dystopian Australia that Calvin’s henchmen had
nothing on our premiers. A slice:

Australians are currently being subjected to hitherto unprecedented control
over, and incursions into, our lives by the state. We have been subjected
to a seemingly inexhaustible and constantly changing supply of confusing,
dehumanising and arbitrary edicts which are daily issued by a cabal of
unelected health bureaucrats and their politician handlers. Our police
forces have successfully cowed the citizenry into unquestioning obedience.
Even more remarkable has been the willingness of many to become accessories
to this political overreach by ‘ratting out’ our friends, families and
neighbours.

..

That Australians are being socially disciplined has been admitted by our
state apparatchiks. In May, the Chief Health Officer of Queensland,
Jeanette Young said that the decision to close schools was about messaging
rather than health. Dan Andrews has said repeatedly that the onus is not on
him to prove the efficacy of any one measure, such as curfews or the
closing of playgrounds.

The police have also admitted as much. Mick Fuller, Commissioner of the NSW
police, a public servant who is currently earing $665,000 per annum, has
increased on-the-spot fines for health disobedience to $5,000. ‘We have to
shape the behaviour of people’ he said to his subordinates. ‘If you write a
ticket and get it wrong,’ Fuller added, ‘I won’t hold you to account for
that.’ When the Victorian police opened the official snitching hotline in
April 2020, a staggering 21,000 Victorians rang to report on each other.
Even the police were surprised by the sheer number of informants. ‘I don’t
think we understood the role it would play and how committed Victorians
were to ensuring people followed the advice,’ Police Minister Lisa Neville
said.

Joel Zinberg reports that Delta is dying. Two slices:

Despite media claims that “We Can’t Turn the Corner on Covid,” the numbers
of Covid-19 cases, new hospitalizations, and deaths nationwide peaked and
started to decline around the beginning of September. The combination of
this milestone, new findings from the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention showing widespread levels of vaccination and natural immunity,
and improved availability of treatments suggests that, outside of isolated
pockets, Covid-19 is likely to become a diminishing health risk in the
United States.

..

Though a few vaccines induce a better immune response than natural
infection, experts generally say that “natural infection almost always
causes better immunity than vaccines.” This appears to be true with
Covid-19.

A new study from Israel confirms that natural immunity to Covid-19 is
superior to vaccine-induced immunity, even with the Delta variant. Between
June 1 and August 14, when Delta was dominant in Israel, the risk of
infections was 13 times higher for vaccinated people than for previously
infected, unvaccinated people when either the infection or vaccination had
occurred between four and seven months before. The risk for symptomatic
breakthrough infections was 27-fold higher. While natural immunity did wane
somewhat over time, vaccinated persons still had a six-fold higher risk for
infection and a seven-fold higher risk for symptomatic illness than people
infected up to ten months before vaccinations started.

James Harrigan decries Bidens Covid authoritarianism. A slice:

The Biden plan rests on mutually exclusive premises. First, there is the
implicit assertion that the vaccines work. Indeed, they work so well that
we should force 80 million people to get vaccinated, whether they want to
or not. This, of course, flies in the face of the other presupposition:
that we need to vaccinate damn near everyone because people are simply not
safe otherwise.

Aren’t those who voluntarily took a vaccine already protected? If not, the
vaccines are not all that effective, and mandating them will not make them
any more so. If that’s not the objective, are we really protecting the
anti-vaxxers from themselves? Since when is that an appropriate use of
government power? Either way, forcing people to submit to a vaccine they
don’t want as a condition of their continued employment doesn’t make a
whole lot of sense.




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