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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
… 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.
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.
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.
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 isn’t getting annoyed as fast, as fully, and as furiously as it should.)
We’re 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 they’re 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.
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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 Organization’s 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 aren’t particularly effective isn’t 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.”
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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. We’ll also get the consequences of new curbs on trade and travel.
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.
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.
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.
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.
… 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.
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
You work for the American Institute for Economic Research, which hosted the conferencethat 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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.’
With lockdowns and mandates, the professional class is attacking workers and poor countries, and most professionals are not even smart enough to realize it.
… 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).
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.
[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”. 
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.
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).