Cafe HayekCafe Hayek - where orders emerge - Article Feed

///////////////////////////////////////////
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: "Dont bank on infrastructure bank"

Posted: 06 Dec 2021 05:53 AM PST
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
In my column for the October 5th, 2011, edition of the Pittsburgh
Tribune-Review I warned against the falling for the promises politicians
were then making for an infrastructure bank. You can read my column beneath
the fold.

(more)




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

Posted: 06 Dec 2021 05:17 AM PST
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
Stacey Rudin continues to write insightfully about Covid, Covid hysteria,
and the tyrannical Covidocracy. A slice:

They are trying to save grandma, but grandma’s fate is sealed. What is
actually happening is they are paving the way to routine universal
mandatory vaccination. The political establishment intends to make “the
unvaccinated” second-class citizens, to dehumanize them and deny them basic
rights many generations have taken for granted. This conditions the
population to movement restrictions based on behavior. Compliance gets you
rights, like a dog earning treats.

Reason has been stalwart over the past year in combating Covid Derangement
Syndrome.

Noah Carl reports on a new study (although one not yet peer-reviewed) that
finds evidence that vaccine (and prior-immunity) passports reduce the
publics trust in public-health authorities.

el gato malo reminds us that health agencies were not always deranged. A
slice:

never forget this.

they knew before 2020 than none of these interventions worked, that their
prices were insanely high, and that they should never be undertaken.

they knew the dangers of vilification and polarization.

standing pandemic guidelines vehemently warned against any of this and
especially against making pariahs of the infected and cultivating
exaggerated fear to drive compliance.

this has NOT been “following the science” is has been the abrogation of a
century of evidence based epidemiology and social mores in order to take a
devastating and self-serving joy ride with the world’s populace like it was
some sort of video game.

TANSTAFPFC (There Aint No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.)

Edward Hadas digs deeply to uncover the cause(s) of lockdowns. Four slices:

There are two possible families of explanations for this litany of fearful
failure, which has continued for almost two years.

i) It was justified. The threat to public health from Covid-19 was in fact
so great and continues to be so great that it is worth sacrificing
everything else for the effort to fight it.

ii) Neither the system nor the social values were as strong as previously
believed.

The first type of explanation is completely unpersuasive. In March 2020,
there was no good reason to ignore the established procedures of dealing
with pandemics. The disease was undoubtedly frightening, but those
procedures were created exactly to help the responsible officials respond
calmly and realistically to frightening diseases.

Even if the panicked emulation of Chinese repression could initially have
been justified, it was clear by June 2020 that such measures were
disproportionate to the danger posed by Covid-19. By then, deaths in the
first wave had peaked and were declining in most countries. Calmer
scientists were persuasively arguing that Covid-19 would settle into the
typical pattern of infectious viruses – becoming less dangerous as the
population’s immunity increased and evolution led to more contagious but
less severe variants.

In addition, treatments for all sufferers improved significantly and
estimates of the case fatality rate steadily fell. Initial panic cannot
explain the continued copying of formerly unthinkable policies. Something
more was going on.

..

Among non-traditional liberals (non-libertarians in the American
vocabulary, non-neoliberals in the European discourse), enlightened
despotism has often been considered the most appropriate form of rule for
the development of positive freedom. The imposition of oppressive public
health rules for the good of the people whose lives are being disrupted can
be described as supposedly enlightened despotism.

The “supposedly” is needed, because the enlightenment is imaginary. Indeed,
the fervent commitment to anti-Covid lockdowns suggests an all too typical
authoritarian inability to use available knowledge wisely and an equally
typical tendency to exercise more force than any outside observer would
consider enlightened.

There is the second political explanation. Rather than thinking of
intrusive restrictions as manifestations of the desire for authoritarian
rule and rulers, the anti-pandemic expansion of government bureaucracies
into everyday private life can be explained as the latest step in the
expansion of what can be called the Intrusive State.

States have increasingly subsumed and tamed rival authorities (churches,
families, businesses), while encouraging subjects/citizens to consider the
State to be the ultimate judge of the people’s good. They exercise their
power primarily through rational, extensive, and basically competent
bureaucracies, in which moral standards are optional. (For people
interested in social philosophy, the idea of the State’s seemingly
expansion is Hegelian, the preeminence of bureaucracy is Weberian.)

The Intrusive State is generally quite popular with the people whose lives
it increasingly controls. Most people seem to crave the State’s protection,
especially when they feel threatened. Indeed, their respect for their
governments is so extreme that they readily believe that the State should
and can control natural phenomena, including highly contagious viral
respiratory infections. The intrusively ruled people are very happy to
participate in the processes of control, so they willingly obey the State’s
commands to suspend their normal economic and social lives.

..

The mastery of nature: Hubristic modern cultures are to some extent based
on the premise and promise of achieving every greater human control over
nature. From that perspective, it is easy to believe that the inability to
keep people from dying in a viral pandemic is a sign of scientific and
governmental failure. Because “saving” lives carries so much cultural
weight, it appears reasonable to destroy the quality of many lives in order
to delay the deaths of even a relatively few people.

The campaign for Zero-Covid is bad science, but it fits well the desire to
treat the virus as a military-style enemy that is expected to surrender
unconditionally to human willpower. Lost years of school, deaths of
despair, emotional distress, and even deaths from untreated conditions are
mere collateral damage in the battle to ward off this natural disorder.

..

Perhaps the worst aspect of the response to Covid-19 is the precedent it
sets. Barring a revulsion of the scale that produced Germany’s multi-decade
reeducation programme after the fall of the Nazi regime, most people in the
Western world will accept that the authoritarian-biopower-purification
responses were reasonable in 2020-2021 and will remain reasonable in the
future.

Such a grand revulsion is improbable, as there seem to be no brakes on any
of the deep historical, cultural, and spiritual forces that lead to
authoritarian governments, random exercises in bio-power, and
anti-scientific purity cults.

Vinay Prasad writes about a new study that casts further doubt on the
wisdom of vaccinating children against Covid-19.

Writing in the Times of London, David Quinn argues that [n]ew public health
totalitarianism gives government and officials endless chances for moral
blackmail to enforce restrictions.

Lets hope that Liam Halligan is correct when he argues that [t]he public
has turned against the excesses of the lockdown fanatics. Two slices:

This time last year, Professor Neil Ferguson observed how China’s draconian
anti-Covid restrictions had influenced the response to the virus across the
Western world – not least the UK. “We couldn’t get away with it in Europe,
we thought,” said the epidemiologist, dubbed Professor Lockdown. But after
Italy shut down “we realised we could”.

When Covid-19 first emerged as a global pandemic in early 2020, Prof
Ferguson had assumed, like the vast majority of government advisers, that
severely restricting freedoms would be deemed unacceptable by the British
public. Controlling where people go and who they meet was seen as a
non-starter in a liberal democracy. How wrong that turned out to be. Not
only did people accept the lockdowns, but there was a level of enthusiasm
for them – and a level of derision for those who questioned them – that
astonished those of us who had thought that the UK was a nation committed
to liberty.

..

Meanwhile, the costs of lockdowns have become far harder to ignore. The
fact that GPs made hundreds of thousands fewer suspected cancer referrals
during the pandemic, in part due to fewer face-to-face consultations, was
last week highlighted in a National Audit Office report. The impact has
been “devastating”, says Macmillan Cancer Support, given related delays in
the treatment of life-threatening conditions, including among the young.
The relentless focus on Covid, the NAO concluded, means that by March 2025,
some 12 million people – around a fifth of the UK population – could be on
an NHS waiting list, caught in the lockdown-related treatment backlog.

The “lives versus livelihoods” debate which characterised previous
lockdowns – in which those who opposed restrictions were damned as
selfishly concerned solely with the health of the economy – is therefore
being exposed as the nonsense it always was. The damage done to children’s
mental health and education when schools close is now undeniable – which is
why Children’s Commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza yesterday pleaded with
ministers to keep schools open. The tragedy of six-year-old Arthur
Labinjo-Hughes, murdered by his stepmother, has also highlighted
the pressure lockdown puts on vulnerable households.




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

Posted: 06 Dec 2021 01:30 AM PST
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
is from page 124 of Arthur Diamond, Jr.’s, superb 2019 book, Openness to
Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism:

In a system of innovative dynamism, creative inventors will finds ways to
reduce global warming, and innovative entrepreneurs will find ways to adapt
to it. Besides the risks of global warming, there are other countless risks
that are conceivable for example, the collision of a large asteroid with
Earth. Many of the conceivable risks seem unlikely in the short term, and
in any event we do not know how, or currently have the resources, to
counter them all. Whatever small subset of the conceivable future risks
actually occur, we should trust our future selves, and our descendants, to
have the entrepreneurial nimbleness to deal with them. IN addition to our
trust in their entrepreneurial nimbleness, they will also have the new
goods and process innovation tools that we will have created for them.

DBx: Yep. But this message is unwelcome by people who seek to rule others,
or who embrace a dogmatic faith in the powers of coercion.




///////////////////////////////////////////
A New Covid Variant Is Discovered in South Park

Posted: 05 Dec 2021 12:45 PM PST
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet





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

Posted: 05 Dec 2021 05:28 AM PST
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
Among other sensible proposals, my GMU Econ colleague Bryan Caplan calls
for an end to all Covid restrictions. A slice:

Despite the rising fashion of “national conservatism” among the right, I
suspect that the stars for American deregulation are indeed aligning as we
speak. A politician today could loudly promise lots of deregulation – and
win. Furthermore, he could fulfill his promises – and win again. Topping
the list of potentially popular deregulation:

1. An immediate end to all Covid rules. No more mask mandates – not in
schools, not in airports, not on planes. No more distancing. No more Covid
tests. No more travel restrictions on anyone. (The “anyone” phrasing is how
you free foreigners, as well as natives, without calling attention to the
fact).

2. An immediate end to all government Covid propaganda. No more looping
audio warnings at airports. No more signs or stickers. Indeed, a national
campaign to tear down all the propaganda that’s been uglifying the country
for almost two years.

Jay Bhattacharya explains what Focused Protection the policy advocated in
the great Great Barrington Declaration (of which Jay is a co-author) means
in practice for nursing homes.

Sunetra Gupta, another of the three co-authors of the great Great
Barrington Declaration, writes that Covid variants don’t warrant
restrictions on our freedom. Two slices:

Variants gain an advantage in two ways: first, by increasing
transmissibility and, second, by evading pre-existing immunity. Both the
delta and omicron variants clearly evade neutralising antibody responses
which can temporarily prevent infection. This gives them an advantage even
if they are not significantly more transmissible than the variants they
replace. Indeed, they could succeed even if they were less transmissible.

It is a shame that these well-established principles of evolutionary
epidemiology appear to have been disregarded by the majority of the
scientific community.

..

It is time that we acknowledge that the way in which we aggressively
implemented non-pharmaceutical interventions – underpinned by multiple
lockdowns – caused extensive collateral damage when there were better ways
to protect the vulnerable. Yet we remain wedded to the same means of
responding to any new potential threat.

We must regain a position of compassion – one that is in line with the
social contract.

It may therefore be useful to consider how we have managed the threat of
influenza. We do not, when we detect new mutations in influenza, lock down
borders and force school children to wear masks and eat lunch in the
freezing cold. We do not take away jobs and ostracise those who have
elected not to take the influenza vaccine. We remember that we do not want
anyone to tell their children that there is only baked beans on toast for
supper just to protect ourselves from the risk of dying from influenza.

David McGrogan identifies a foundational problem with mask mandates.

Telegraph columnist Janet Daley is correct: It is dangerously misleading to
talk about the ‘war’ against Covid. Two slices:

Some letter writers to this newspaper have pointed out, with great
generosity of spirit, a similarity between today’s requirement for mask
wearing with its threat of prosecution and fines, and the legal enforcement
of wartime blackout, the suggestion being that this is a quite small
inconvenience which we should not begrudge. The experience of all out war
has been implicitly reinforced by government ministers with their
description of the virus as a “silent enemy” which must be “defeated”.

This metaphor, useful as it might be to politicians who adore the image of
themselves leading their countries into battle, is seriously misleading. It
is a good example of what an earlier generation of Oxford philosophers
called a “category mistake”. Wars eventually come to an end usually
definitively. One side is defeated, the other is victorious. Sometimes, in
more contained local conflicts, the outcome is ragged and there is residual
fighting on disputed borders or guerilla resistance to occupation. But with
the great global wars of the last century (to which this pandemic is being
compared) there was a defined, identifiable finality of outcome. The losing
side not only submitted to public humiliation and in the case of Nazi
Germany, to prosecution by a world court  but generally sacrificed its
right to re-arm or wage any form of military aggression for the foreseeable
future: an edict which could be policed by international law. This was the
objective to which all of those civilian sacrifices were dedicated and
there was no question of what counted as the ending.

Presumably you can see the difference between that sort of struggle which
was a literal confrontation with a knowing enemy, and the present “battle”
with a virus which cannot decide to surrender because it cannot decide to
do anything. Covid is not a sentient being: it has no malign intentions or
devious tactics even though politicians often talk as if it did, thus
adding to the air of superstitious fear. Like any virus, it has only the
evolutionary imperative of all living organisms to survive and replicate.

..

Even supposing that Omicron turns out to be a more transmissible but less
dangerous form of the virus, allowing the new restrictions to be rolled
back pretty quickly, the precedent has been established. Personal liberty
is no longer a right. It is a conditional privilege which can be recalled
whenever current circumstances which are (unlike aerial bombardment by a
military enemy) hazily defined, uncertain in their effect and only barely
understood, seem to indicate a possible need.

In the true spirit of national emergency, members of Parliament with a few
honourable exceptions have accepted this shift in our constitutional
arrangements with scarcely any resistance. The Government is now permitted
to seize powers that would have been unthinkable even during a war. If it’s
any consolation, European Union member states have gone much further. But
the whole point of the EU was to install benign oligarchy in place of
chaotic, potentially irresponsible democratic government so that should
come as no real surprise.

Covid hysteria can be hazardous to your health.

And whats most important all-important, apparently, as it always trumps
all else is that what will kill these people wont be Covid-19. We have
learned, over the past two years, that humanitys overriding goal, a goal
ever above all others, is to avoid exposure to SARS-CoV-2. People who will
die early deaths from cancer should feel some sense of relief, for what
will sweep them away from this vale is something other than Covid-19.

See also this piece, with the sub-headline: The UK is facing a ‘cancer
catastrophe’, after huge numbers of referrals were missed during lockdown.

Phil Magness reports on someone still advocating for the straw man.

Some Europeans have the courage and good sense to protest Covidocratic
tyranny.

el gato malo reveals the truth behind the propaganda peddled by Australias
Covidocracy.




///////////////////////////////////////////
Yep

Posted: 05 Dec 2021 04:34 AM PST
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
This Venn diagram created by Mark Perry is brilliant.






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

Posted: 05 Dec 2021 04:21 AM PST
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
is from page 8 of Bruce Caldwell’s Introduction to the 1997 collection of
some of F.A. Hayek’s essays and papers (Bruce Caldwell, ed.), Socialism and
War (footnote deleted; link added):

[Ludwig von] Mises’s reasoning was straightforward. In a market economy,
entrepreneurs choose from among innumerable possible combinations of
factors of production in an attempt to find the combination that minimizes
their expected costs. They do this in an attempt to maximize their profits,
which is the difference between revenues and costs. This self-interested
search for the best combination helps to guide resources to their
highest-valued uses, an outcome beneficial to society as a whole. Because
of the multiplicity of production-goods and the fact that production takes
place through time (during which all manner of changes on both the
demand  and the supply side of the market might occur), the task is not an
easy one. Entrepreneurs are aided in their deliberations by the money
prices attached to the factors which reflect their relative scarcity. But
in the socialist state no such prices would exist. Socialist managers would
not have recourse to price signals to tell them which factors are
relatively scarce and which are relatively plentiful: they would be left
groping in the dark. The results were plain to see: Where there is no free
market, there is no pricing mechanism; without a pricing mechanism, there
is no economic calculation.

DBx: Yes. And note that problems begin to arise the moment the pricing
system is obstructed, as is done with tariffs and subsidies. With few such
obstructions, the problems are few; these remain hidden by the enormous
dynamism and prosperity produced by the largely free market. But the
greater the number and severity are the obstructions of the pricing system,
the greater are the problems.

The problems are most extreme, of course, when the obstructions of the
pricing system are most extreme for example, in full-on socialism. But the
Mises-Hayek criticism of socialism, although initially aimed at the many
advocates of full-on socialism (who were numerous in the first half of the
20th century), does not become applicable only when the discussion is of
full-on socialism. The Mises-Hayek criticism of socialism is more general:
it is a criticism of government obstruction of the pricing system a
demonstration of the marvels of the pricing system and of how it elicits
and makes use of dispersed knowledge, and a corresponding explanation of
the problems that inevitably arise whenever that system is obstructed.

Advocates of industrial policy cannot legitimately declare that the
Mises-Hayek criticism of socialism is irrelevant to their schemes. That
criticism is, in fact, highly relevant and devastating.

[Pictured above is Ludwig von Mises.]




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

Posted: 04 Dec 2021 04:32 AM PST
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
UnHerds Freddie Sayers talks to a former prisoner of Australias
Covid-internment camp.

Heres the abstract of a new paper by Daron Acemoglu, Victor Chernozhukov,
Iván Werning, and Michael D. Whinston a paper which lends a good deal of
support (without mentioning it) to the spirit of the great Great Barrington
Declaration): (HT Ian Fillmore)

We study targeted lockdowns in a multigroup SIR model where infection,
hospitalization, and fatality rates vary between groups—in particular
between the young, the middle-aged, and the old. Our model enables a
tractable quantitative analysis of optimal policy. For baseline parameter
values for the COVID-19 pandemic applied to the US, we find that optimal
policies differentially targeting risk/age groups significantly outperform
optimal uniform policies and most of the gains can be realized by having
stricter protective measures such as lockdowns on the more vulnerable, old
group. Intuitively, a strict and long lockdown for the old both reduces
infections and enables less strict lockdowns for the lower-risk groups.

Speaking of the great Great Barrington Declaration and its recommendation
of Focused Protection, heres Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins:

This speed of transmission is what keeps throwing the world for a loop;
moreover, it seems indisputable in retrospect that we squandered our best
point of leverage by failing to focus on protecting the elderly and those
at highest risk.

Indeed, so much of what we became hysterical about—mask wearing and vaccine
hesitancy as applied to the low-risk—was a poor substitute for
communicating about and acting on distinctions in risk.

The worst part is we knew better on day one, but political imperative did
not favor realistic communication about risk or prioritization.

Another Wall Street Journal columnist writing recently about Covid is
Kimberly Strassel. A slice:

The White House on Thursday released its latest list of Covid rules in
anticipation of a rise in winter cases and the arrival of the Omicron
variant. The administration imposed new testing rules for international
travelers, extended its transportation mask mandate, and announced it would
launch hundreds of vaccination clinics and a campaign for boosters,
distribute 25 million free tests, and allow reimbursement for home testing.

Feel better now? Confident that this time we’ll whup the virus? Of course
not. If there’s one thing a weary world has realized, it’s that there’s no
beating a highly transmissible respiratory disease. Vaccines prevent
serious disease, but they don’t stop transmission. No amount of masking,
social distancing or locking down has stopped the surges of the past six
months, including in states like Michigan and New Mexico, which boasted
about their restrictions. The virus doesn’t follow executive orders.

But the Biden administration hasn’t worked this out. The White House has
instead created for itself a toxic Covid loop. With each new surge it rolls
out more restrictions and actions. With each failure of these measures to
beat the virus, the public loses faith. Cue yet more administration rules
that are designed to restore confidence, even as they are destined both to
fail and to annoy the country.

(DBx: From my perspective, the country isnt getting annoyed as fast, as
fully, and as furiously as it should.)

Reasons J.D. Tuccille rightly decries the latest round of pointless travel
restrictions imposed in response to the omicron variant. Three slices:

Were long past the point in the COVID-19 pandemic when politicians are
doing much more in response to viral scares than engage in rituals to
soothe a fearful public and enhance their own power. With the new omicron
variant spreading across the world, travel restrictions seem to be the
response of choice because theyre politically popular. Never mind that
closing borders is ineffective at anything other than further burdening
already hobbled families and economies. The actual danger posed by omicron
remains uncertain, but the policy response is as pointless as it was
preordained.

..

Official reaction seemed crafted more to further separate families and
impoverish an already troubled world than to address a bug that was already
loose. Health experts make exactly that point.

Travel restrictions may play a role in slightly reducing the spread of
COVID-19 but place a heavy burden on lives and livelihoods, the World
Health Organizations Africa office warned as travel bans proliferated. If
restrictions are implemented, they should not be unnecessarily invasive or
intrusive, and should be scientifically based.

The warning that restrictions on movement carry their own costs and arent
particularly effective isnt new; health experts said the same thing years
before COVID-19 appeared when they considered ways of slowing the spread of
new varieties of flu.

The results of our systematic review indicate that overall travel
restrictions have only limited effectiveness in the prevention of influenza
spread, according to a 2014 article in the Bulletin of the World Health
Organization. Only extensive travel restrictions – i.e. over 90% – had any
meaningful effect on reducing the magnitude of epidemics. In isolation,
travel restrictions might delay the spread and peak of pandemics by a few
weeks or months but we found no evidence that they would contain influenza
within a defined geographical area.

..

Stopping the spread of the virus in the U.S. with restrictions on travel
from elsewhere would be quite a feat given that omicron is already here.
But public officials gain office by winning elections, not assessments of
logical reasoning. So, we get not just bans on travel from a subset of
countries where omicron was detected early, but new testing requirements on
anybody else who might want to visit from overseas. Well also get the
consequences of new curbs on trade and travel.

Now who could have predicted this?

Robert Freudenthal warns of the medicalised objectification of humans. A
slice:

The pandemic has turbocharged this process of medical objectification. We
are no longer individuals, with unique desires, responses, wishes and
drives, but rather are primarily considered by policy makers to be
infection risks. Once we are primarily objects, rather than diverse human
beings, it then becomes legitimate for medical procedures to be mandated,
mask wearing to be forced, or our movements to be tracked and traced.

Steve Templeton decries the destruction by Covid panic of communities.

Sabine Beppler-Spahl reports on Germanys lurch into Covid authoritarianism.
A slice:

Indeed, the new Covid measures run counter to much that voters were told
only a few weeks ago by leading figures in the SDP, FDP and some Green
politicians. During the election campaign, they led people to believe there
would be no compulsory vaccination programme and that they were opposed to
nationwide lockdowns. The FDP, in particular, won the support of many
younger people by promising more liberty and freedom. ‘We Free Democrats’,
its manifesto declared, ‘place our faith in freedom, the rule of law and
civil rights, which apply even in times of crisis and must not be dismissed
as “privileges” to be allocated or withheld from us at will’. Grand words
now betrayed by authoritarian actions.

Speaking of Germany, el gato malo compares that country to Sweden.

But at least what these children will suffer from isnt Covid-19!

Laura Perrins is outraged at Irelands masking of eight-year-olds. A slice:

Have you noticed this concept of ‘resilience’ is frequently used to justify
adult and governmental abuse of children? Close the schools: the kids are
resilient. Mask the kids: they are resilient. Scrap the nativity play for a
second year in a row: it will build the resilience. Very rarely are adults
asked to be resilient, but children are.

Kat Rosenfield warns of Anthony Faucis dangerous narcissism. A slice:

But the result is not just oddly religious, but perverse. Unlike actual
science, which is one of the most vital truth-seeking mechanisms we have,
this “science” is utterly incurious, hostile to questions, incapable of
admitting fault. And while this would be an alarming development at any
time, it’s especially bad amid a global catastrophe in which it’s never
been more important to stay humble and ask questions, even if they’re
politically inconvenient, even if they make powerful people bristle at your
insubordination.

We can try to blame Anthony Fauci for this: for accepting the accolades,
for licensing his bobblehead likeness, for letting us call the vaccine the
“Fauci ouchie,” for buying wholesale into the myth of his own
infallibility. But while Fauci may be at fault for getting a bit too high
on his own supply, he didn’t appoint himself to this position; we did, when
we decided to make him the Science Daddy without whose say-so we can never
live normal lives again.

For two years, a frightened populace has looked to Fauci for the answers to
impossible questions, for a sense of control amid the uncertainty, for
assurance that we’re on the right side of history — even though nobody can
tell us exactly what went wrong. We made science a civic religion, and we
told Fauci he was the Pope. Unfortunately, he believed us.

In response to a lockdown fundamentalist, Jay Bhattacharya tweets:

Given the devastation wrought by lockdowners on the working class and poor,
they face two choices:

1. Admit their hypocrisy and repudiate lockdown, or

2. Smear the people who pointed out the cruelty and folly of lockdowns with
defamatory lies.

This guy chose option 2.




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

Posted: 04 Dec 2021 02:55 AM PST
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
is a response that F.A. Hayek in May of 1945, after a talk that he
delivered in Washington, DC offered to a question about tariffs (as quoted
on page 20 of Bruce Caldwell’s splendid Introduction to the 2007 Definitive
Edition [Bruce Caldwell, ed.] of Hayek’s classic 1944 book, The Road to
Serfdom):

If you have any comprehension of my philosophy at all, you must know that
one thing I stand for above all else is free trade throughout the world.




///////////////////////////////////////////
A Note to a Student on the Advisability of a Policy of Unilateral Free Trade

Posted: 03 Dec 2021 01:46 PM PST
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
Here’s a letter to a student in my International Economic Policy course
(ECON 385) this semester; this student wishes to remain anonymous.

Ms. C__:

Thanks for your e-mail.

You’re correct that I disagree with your global-affairs professor who told
you that “a country can gain from free trade with any other country only if
the other country does not limit its imports.”

To explain why I and most other economists believe that your global-affairs
professor is mistaken, allow me to use a hypothetical example. Suppose that
the U.S. is trading with Sweden and the government of neither the U.S. nor
Sweden interferes in any way with trade. Your global-affairs professor
would then correctly understand that under these conditions we Americans
benefit from trading freely with Swedes.

Now suppose that a gigantic, once-in-a-millennium earthquake devastates
Sweden, thus greatly reducing for decades the Swedes’ ability to produce
outputs. Able to produce fewer outputs, the Swedes can now afford to buy
fewer American exports. (It’s just as if you as an individual were to
suffer a serious injury that reduces your ability to work and earn income:
your spending power would fall.) In short, the earthquake reduces the
Swedes’ willingness to import from America.

But should the U.S. government retaliate against this earthquake by now
imposing punitive tariffs on Americans who chose to buy goods from Sweden?
I suspect that your global-affairs professor will agree with me that any
such retaliation would be foolish; it would reduce Americans’ (and the
Swedes’) ability to enrich themselves through trade.

Your global-affairs professor presumably, and correctly, understands that
we Americans would be made poorer if our government hampers our freedom to
trade with the Swedes on the grounds that the Swedes’ ability to buy our
exports is obstructed by the earthquake. And so given his correct
understanding, why does your professor think that we Americans are not made
poorer when our government hampers our freedom to trade with the Swedes
(and with other foreigners) on the grounds that their ability to buy our
exports is obstructed, not by a natural disaster, but instead by their
governments’ protectionist policies?

As I mentioned in class, it’s possible to tell a logically coherent story
of how temporary retaliatory tariffs at home, by persuading foreign
governments to reduce their tariffs, will over the long run lead to
additional net benefits from trade in the home country (and, by the way,
also in the foreign country). But as I also explained, as a practical
matter retaliatory tariffs are highly unlikely to work in this happy
manner. As such, the best practical trade policy is one of unilateral free
trade – that is, free trade at home regardless of the trade policies
pursued by foreign governments.

But either way regardless of the advisability of retaliatory tariffs
economics is clear that the people of a country unambiguously gain by
trading freely with the people of other countries even when the people of
other countries suffer the misfortune of living under governments that
obstruct their freedom to trade. The gains from those trades that are not
obstructed are made no less real by whatever obstructions prevent the
carrying out of other trades.

Good luck on your final exams!

Sincerely,

Don Boudreaux

Professor of Economics

114 James Buchanan Hall




///////////////////////////////////////////
Neil Oliver on Omicron and Modernitys Plummet Into Dark-Ages Superstition

Posted: 03 Dec 2021 07:44 AM PST
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
This video 9.5 minutes long by Neil Oliver is powerful. Do watch the
whole thing. (HT Jonathan Fortier)






///////////////////////////////////////////
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review: "Spent theory"

Posted: 03 Dec 2021 06:16 AM PST
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
In my column for the September 9th, 2011, edition of the Pittsburgh
Tribune-Review I explain why I believe Keynesianism to be simplistic and
wrongheaded. You can read my column beneath the fold.

(more)




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

Posted: 03 Dec 2021 04:20 AM PST
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
Jay Bhattacharya talks with Aadi Golchha about omicron, the dystopian
notion of Zero Covid, and other Covid-related matters.

Noah Carl interviews Phil Magness. A slice:

You work for the American Institute for Economic Research, which hosted the
conference that led to the Great Barrington Declaration – a public
statement advocating focused protection. Could you tell us what happened at
that conference?

In early October 2020, AIER hosted a small academic conference for the
purpose of calling scientific attention to the costs of lockdowns. Up until
that point, the media and political figures such as Anthony Fauci had been
working to create a false impression of strong scientific consensus behind
the lockdown measures – even as they were failing to perform as promised
(recall “two weeks to flatten the curve”). This new consensus was an
outright falsehood. As recently as 2019, the WHO, leading epidemiology
research institutions such as Johns-Hopkins University, and even Fauci
himself had gone on record stating that lockdowns would not work in a
respiratory pandemic, and should be ruled out as a policy response.

The conference would call attention to the largely ignored harms of
lockdowns, while proposing alternative approaches that were in keeping with
the pre-2020 public health science. We hosted three eminently qualified
scientists from top research institutions, who presented the case against
lockdowns in a filmed discussion panel. This was followed by interviews
with journalists who specialize in pandemic coverage. On the last day of
the conference, the three scientists then drafted a general statement of
principles that (1) summarized the case against lockdowns and (2) called
for an alternative “focused protection” strategy. They dubbed this the
Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), and released it publicly the next
morning.

Also from Noah Carl is this assessment of lockdowns. Two slices:

Aside from its effects on health, education and the economy, lockdown
represents the greatest infringement on civil liberties in modern history.
Here and elsewhere, the state used its monopoly on force to outlaw some of
the most basic human interactions, such as having a meal with friends.

..

Suppose at the start of 2020, the [British] government had said, “In order
to prevent mortality falling to the level of Scotland, we’re going to
undertake the greatest infringement on civil liberties in modern history.
Thanks to our measures, it will only fall to the level of Wales instead.” I
suspect that public support for lockdown would have been much lower.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Eugene Kontorovich one of my many
excellent GMU colleagues over in the Scalia School of Law argues that some
of Bidens proposed restrictions on travel are unconstitutional as well as
an affront to the norms of a free society. A slice:

A quarantine isn’t a banishment, but it can become one. Early in the
pandemic, Australia imposed rigid entry requirements on citizens—a
mandatory two-week quarantine and a tight limit on total arrivals. Many
Australians were stranded outside their country for months. Such a
situation is no longer a dystopian fantasy for Western countries, so it’s
important to draw constitutional lines early.

A suspicionless quarantine requirement, especially as applied to citizens,
erodes basic rights. The government could take many lesser steps, from
limiting flights from high-risk places to imposing rigid testing
requirements. But a universal quarantine is unreasonable. It would burden
even vaccinated citizens coming from places with less infection than the
U.S.

Restricting citizens’ ability to travel is a hallmark of a police state.
Infectious disease will always be with us. It cannot become an excuse to
give the federal government carte blanche to control the lives of citizens.

Wall Street Journal reporter Adam ONeal applauds the refusal of Isabel Díaz
Ayuso president of the Community of Madrid to succumb to the Covid
hysteria that still terrorizes much of Europe. A slice:

She says Madrid got back on its feet “around the values of freedom, of
prosperity. It has been an example. In fact, the May 4 elections are an
example for a lot of countries.” Covid-19 devastated the Spanish capital,
but several regions have faced more deaths per capita. Critically, the
results suggest voters understand that a locked-down economy has
public-health implications as well.

“I believe in freedom in all aspects of life. And against everything that
tyrannizes and enslaves the person—against addictions, against the identity
division between man-woman, left-right, rich-poor. That is what the
communist ideology often does, always seeking to collectivize the person
and control them from above,” she says. “Responsibility and freedom is what
I think there has to be.”

Vinay Prasad is appalled by Anthony Faucis unscientific arrogance and
hubris.

But at least the source of these childrens suffering and dying isnt
Covid-19 and as we have learned since early last year, the overriding goal
in life, a goal that trumps all others, is to avoid exposure to SARS-CoV-2.

The Wall Street Journals Editorial Board applauds a Massachusetts court for
ruling against Covidocratic authoritarianism. A slice:

This overreach has dangerous political implications. “This Court perceives
great mischief in allowing a municipality or one of its agencies to exceed
its power, even for compelling reasons,” Justice Bagdoian wrote. “In this
Court’s view, such expansion of power by a governmental agency, even for
compelling reasons, should be unthinkable in a democratic system of
governance.”

But that’s the pandemic world we now live in. Boston’s new mayor, Michelle
Wu, said Monday the city “will seek a stay of the decision to keep the
eviction moratorium in place.” Some politicians love the power the pandemic
has provided and won’t give it up easily, which means courts must check
their abuses.

Heres the latest from Lionel Shriver on Covid and Covidocratic tyranny. Two
slices:

What a shock: the coronavirus has spun off another variant. Battle
stations, everyone. The PM warns that Omicron — evocative of an Arnold
Schwarzenegger thriller more than a Bill Murray romcom — ‘can be spread
between people who are double vaccinated’, which could seem alarming, save
for the fact that the vaccinated communicate all the other variants, too.
Omicron ‘might’ evade the protection of vaccines; then again, our planet
‘might’ be blitzed to smithereens by an asteroid tomorrow. Besides, the
logic is a bit warped, isn’t it? Our weary public-health superheroes don’t
trust the vaccines to protect against this terrifying new kryptonite.
Restored restrictions are therefore meant to ‘buy time’ to administer even
more of the very vaccines they’ve little faith in.

Regarding the variant’s transmissibility or virulence, our overlords have
virtually no information, which hasn’t stopped them from acting on it.
(South African doctors’ reports of Omicron’s unusually mild symptoms —
fatigue and headache — seem to have made no impression.) Here we go again.
Yet another ‘variant of concern’. Yet another return of restrictions. Yet
another promise to ‘review’ these impositions in three weeks, which if
history serves will mean increasing restrictions in three weeks and
maintaining them almost indefinitely. Yet another promise that Christmas is
safe, and nothing makes my heart sink like this administration’s
reassurances. Yet another collective call from journalists in the audience
for still more oppressive measures — for vaccine passports, renewed
hospitality check-ins and working from home: You’re sorely remiss, sir, for
not making life crap enough! Yet another synchronous plummet in
international stock markets, from fear not of the variant itself, but of
governmental overreaction to the variant.

..

For containing the spread of Sars-CoV-2, non-pharmaceutical interventions
do not work. This point risks becoming tiresome, but given the
near-universal failure to digest the lesson, it’s worth reiterating: all
over the world, you would struggle to find correlation between the severity
of government restrictions and Covid infections, hospitalisations and
deaths. Countries and American states with mask mandates have averaged no
lower rates of infection than those without. Even vaccines don’t stop the
spread of the virus. Some of the world’s most highly vaccinated populations
— in Iceland, in Gibraltar — are now having some of the worst outbreaks.

I’m not the only one who’s been wondering for months: how will we ever get
out of this terrible movie? Ours is an anthropocentric era, prone to
presentism. We like to think our time is exceptional, and we like to think
we control everything (like the climate, but we won’t get into that now).
Yet humanity has suffered pandemics before. Globally, we may only escape
these repeated hysterias over ‘fifth waves’, if not ‘85th waves’, the
old-fashioned way: loads of people get infected and recover and acquire
natural immunity. It’s not fancy, but that’s how we’ve weathered pandemics
of respiratory viruses before. Despite the feeble efforts of America’s
Centers for Disease Control to claim otherwise, natural immunity to Covid
is proving at least as robust as vaccine-induced immunity and appears
longer lasting. But natural immunity seems to annoy public health
authorities, because it isn’t within their control, and they can’t take
credit for it.

Too many people have a vested interest in this permanent Covid emergency
so explains the Telegraphs Allister Heath. A slice:

It is not just for politicians that there is an upside from the
omicron-induced shift in the national agenda. It suits big companies and
incompetent managers who made the most of Covid to downgrade their customer
service. They used to blame Brexit; now they blame omicron. It is
convenient for disruptive trade unions and lazy employees on the look-out
for an excuse to work less. It will embolden some to seek a hugely extended
festive period working from home, regardless of the needs of employers or
the extra burden imposed on colleagues. It suits the public sector, and its
determination to put the interests of producers above those of consumers.
Shut schools and cancelled nativity plays are a hideous, immoral blow to
children, but are grist to militant unions’ mill.

Fraser Nelson decries the fact that Europe’s omicron panic has left the
Continent in a very dark place. A slice:

The arrival of booster jabs makes the idea of compulsion harder still: if
top-ups are needed every three to six months, how will this affect vaccine
passports? Will people have to receive every top-up for the ongoing right
to enjoy their liberty? Otto Schily, a minister in Gerhard Schröder’s
government, yesterday pointed out that even Communist China isn’t
considering mandatory vaccines. So where, he asked, will Merkel’s idea
lead? Will Mr Scholz now yield to the activist lawyers advocating prison
sentences for vaccine refuseniks?

The politics of all this is just as divisive in Italy, now in its 19th
consecutive week of anti-restriction protests. Next week, it will bring in
a “super green pass” where a negative test is no longer enough. Austria
will start issuing fines for the unvaccinated from February, as Greece will
do next month (but only for pensioners). Even Sweden, having defied the
world for so long by rejecting mask-wearing and lockdowns, has now
succumbed to vaccine passports. Britain is starting to look like the new
Sweden: keeping calm and carrying on.

Joel Kotkin warns of the tyranny lurking in nudging. A slice:

The pandemic has rained manna for nudgers. Across the high-income world, we
now see a form of hygiene authoritarianism, promoted and enforced by
nudgers in government and media. This goes beyond debunking clearly
unhinged and unsupported claims. It also includes purging anyone opposed to
particular government Covid policies, including recognised professionals.
The most egregious example was the cancelling and marginalisation of the
authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, written by leading
epidemiologists from Harvard, Oxford and Stanford – all for the
‘thoughtcrime’ of opposing lockdowns.

Much the same can be said about the discussion of the pandemic’s origins,
notes Jonathan Chait, a left-of-centre writer for New York magazine. For
months anyone mentioning the possibility that Covid escaped from a Chinese
lab was denounced as racist and sent to the digital gulag. Only recently,
as the case for it became credible, has the lab-leak theory been deemed
acceptable.

But reversing positions does not bother the nudgers, who, like apparatchiks
under Stalin or bishops of the medieval church, follow each shift of policy
assiduously. This has led to a dizzying confusion as health officials
switch official positions on the duration and severity of the disease, and
on the usefulness of masks, while their projections on infections, deaths
and hospitalisations have often been too high. Anyone who dares to dissent,
for example, from the views of US chief medical adviser Dr Anthony Fauci is
cast as an antediluvian ignoramus. ‘They’re really criticising science
because I represent science’, Fauci said recently of those questioning him.
‘That’s dangerous.’

Martin Kulldorff tweets:

With lockdowns and mandates, the professional class is attacking workers
and poor countries, and most professionals are not even smart enough to
realize it.




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

Posted: 03 Dec 2021 01:30 AM PST
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
is from page 26 of Bruce Caldwell’s superb Introduction to the 2007
Definitive Edition (Bruce Caldwell, ed.) of F.A. Hayek’s classic 1944 book,
The Road to Serfdom:

Hayek was trying to show his readers that planning, everyone’s
favorite remedy for the ills of the world, might sound good in theory, but
would not work out in practice (or, at least, not unless the western
democracies were prepared to accept severe constraints on personal liberty
of the sort on display in the systems against which they currently [in
1944] were fighting).




--
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