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"Walter E. Williams: One of a Kind"

Posted: 12 Jan 2022 06:10 AM PST
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




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My Liberty Matters essay on my late, great colleague Walter Williams is now
up, and can be found by scrolling down at this link. Two slices:

Walter Williams (1936-2020) catapulted into my consciousness in the late
1970s. One afternoon while flipping through the channels – numbering all of
five – on my parents’ television set I happened upon television talk-show
host Phil Donohue chatting with a guest who made unusually good sense.

By then I’d already fallen in love with economics; it was my collegiate
major, and I was, I think, then in my junior year. The guest’s
uncompromising and eloquent defense of free markets pleasantly surprised
me. I was even more surprised that he was black. I knew that free-market
policies were promoted by white guys such as Milton Friedman and William
Simon. But Walter Williams – Donohue’s guest – was the first black person
I’d seen doing so.

Donahue peppered Walter with questions – ‘Should we abolish the minimum
wage?’ Yes. ‘Don’t you agree that labor unions were key to creating
America’s middle class?’ No. ‘Hasn’t the welfare state helped Blacks?’ No.
‘Isn’t affirmative action needed to give minorities a fair chance?’ No. On
and on this questioning went until Donohue asked Walter about some
arms-control treaty between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Walter paused for a
moment, then laughed and said “Unlike you, Mr. Donohue, I don’t pretend to
know everything about everything.”

Donohue cut for a commercial break. (Not long before he died, I asked
Walter if my recollection of his appearance on Donohue was accurate. He
assured me that it was.)

I scribbled the name ‘Walter Williams’ into a notebook. I wanted to know
more about this man’s work but in that pre-Internet age found little to
read. Nevertheless, I was reassured to know that there was in the world
this articulate, charismatic, informed, and principled champion of economic
freedom.

The next time I encountered Walter was again on television during his
appearance on Friedman’s 1980 Free To Choose program. I enthusiastically
soaked it all in. I was a fan-boy.

..

A third characteristic was Walter’s unusual facility with basic economic
reasoning. An economist’s skill is perhaps best measured by how much
complex economic reality he or she can explain using only economic
principles. Any mediocre economist can explain a good deal of economic
reality by using the whole armament, including the jargon, that comes with
PhD-level training. But only the finest economists can explain that same
reality – and often explain it more fully and clearly – using only basic
economic propositions. Milton Friedman was notable for possessing this rare
skill, as is Thomas Sowell. Walter was in their league.

Possession of this skill is key to the ability to communicate profound
economic understanding to general audiences. An example is Walter’s
explanation of why minimum-wage legislation has a worse impact on Blacks
than it has on whites:
What minimum wage laws do is lower the cost of, and hence subsidize, racial
preference indulgence. After all, if an employer must pay the same wage no
matter whom he hires, the cost of discriminating in favor of the people he
prefers is cheaper. This is a general principle. If filet mignon sold for
$9 a pound and chuck steak $4, the cost of discriminating in favor of filet
mignon is $5 a pound, the price difference. But if a law mandating a
minimum price for chuck steak were on the books, say, $7 a pound, it would
lower the cost of discrimination against chuck steak.

Within this example is evidence of the fourth of Walter’s notable
characteristics – namely, his skillful use of what I call “gentle, humorous
shock.” Walter understood that an effective way to grab an audience’s
attention is with a bit of shock mixed with humor. Not shock that’s gross
or grotesque. Not shock or humor for the sake of themselves. But shock and
humor that are just enough to seize a reader’s or listener’s attention and
to intellectually stir that person into letting go of prior misconceptions.
Comparing low-skilled workers to inferior cuts of meat shocks people, and
even offends many. But the comparison works well to convey the economic
lesson.




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Some Covid Links

Posted: 12 Jan 2022 03:05 AM PST
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




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Thomas Fazi and Toby Green, writing at UnHerd, argue that the Great
Barrington Declaration has been vindicated. Three slices:

Has the Left finally woken up to the devastating costs of implementing
lockdowns? In its first edition of 2022, the Observer carried a
surprisingly balanced interview with Professor Mark Woolhouse, a member of
Sage whose new book — The Year the World Went Mad — argues that long
lockdowns promoted more harm than good and failed to protect the
vulnerable. Its favourable reception appears to herald a new direction in
the critique of Covid measures and policies on the Left; for the first
time, the question of what really represented the collective good in the
Covid debate has been put on the table by a mainstream left-liberal
publication.

This is certainly a new departure. As we have previously noted on UnHerd,
the Left has strongly supported restrictive measures in the fight against
the pandemic.

It argued that these restrictions, which clearly infringe on individual
freedoms and rights, were nonetheless justified in the name of “the
collective good” and “the collective right to life”. This allowed them to
pre-empt any criticism of the new Covid consensus: if you’re against any of
these measures, you’re against the collective interest. And so thinkers
like us, who have always criticised neoliberal individualism and argued in
favour of progressive state intervention, suddenly found ourselves accused
of being libertarians or outright “Right-wingers”, just for taking a
critical stance of governments’ response to the pandemic.

Indeed, it would appear that for many on the Left today, anything can be
justified in the name of the “collective good”. It’s easy to see why
Right-wing critics view this uncritical invoking of collective benefits as
proof of the Left’s inclination towards authoritarian or “Stalinist”
control. While such caricatural definitions are easy to laugh off, as
leftists we can’t deny that there is something disturbing about the lack of
critical commentary from the Left on how to reconcile the need for
collective action with the importance of individual rights and freedoms in
the response to Covid.

..

The grotesquery of the global responses becomes even more apparent when we
take into account the fact that while governments went out of their way to
keep healthy people locked in, chasing runners down solitary beaches or
checking shopping trolleys to make sure people were only buying essentials,
they all but abandoned those most vulnerable: nursing home residents.
According to a recent Collateral Global study, Covid deaths in nursing
homes amount on average to a staggering 40% of all Covid deaths in Western
countries, despite representing less than 1% of the population. In some
countries (Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, the
UK and the US), more than 5% of all care home residents were killed.

In view of this, it seems obvious that the focused protection approach
championed by the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) — based on “allow[ing]
those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to
build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better
protecting those who are at highest risk” — was the right course of action.
It would have avoided inflicting needless pain on workers, women and
children through repeated lockdowns, while arguably saving countless lives,
by focusing first and foremost on the elderly and especially on nursing
homes.

..

It is time for the Left to look reality in the face and take stock of the
fact that the prevailing Covid response of most Western governments has
been an abysmal failure on all fronts —not least that of “saving lives”. An
alternative approach is desperately needed. Fortunately, and tragically,
it’s been hiding in plain sight all this time.

Writing in todays Wall Street Journal, Jay Bhattacharya and Tom Nicholson
unmask a deceptive Covid study out of Duke University. A slice:

But the researchers peppered their report with rhetorical sleights of hand
aimed at misleading readers into other, less well-founded conclusions that
were mostly inevitable products of their own study design. One of their
primary conclusions is that “in schools with universal masking,
test-to-stay is an effective strategy.” That invites readers to assume that
test-to-stay doesn’t work without forced masking. But since they studied no
unmasked schools, this conclusion is baseless. An honest report would
either have said so or not mentioned masking at all.

Duke’s Press office amplified the unfounded conclusion in its Jan. 4
summary of the study: “Children and staff who repeatedly test negative for
COVID-19 after contact with someone who has the illness can safely remain
in school if universal masking programs are in place.” The media took this
press release and added a further layer of falsehood. Raleigh’s WRAL
characterized the study as a defense of forced masking while pitching the
study as documenting the danger of youth sports: “Athletics were the source
of 50% of all COVID-19 school transmission found in the study.”

True, the ABC researchers found a higher rate of transmission during
sports. But that was entirely a product of how the researchers defined
Covid “exposure.” Students were counted as exposed only if they were
unmasked during the interaction with an infected person. In mask-mandatory
schools, that happened only during lunch and sports. If a transmission
occurred in a masked classroom, the definition didn’t count it as a close
contact. And the study found only three sports-related positives out of 352
tests. When combined with the three lunch-related positives, the six total
positives resulted in a mere 1.7% of maskless exposures ending up with a
Covid-19-positive contact.

An honest summary of the study might have said: “There is a low
transmission rate of the virus among students, even when unmasked at lunch
or during sports.” But a summary like that wouldn’t have reinforced the
politically acceptable message of public-health authorities today, and so
unfounded points had to be fashioned to fit the narrative.

Also in todays Wall Street Journal is a collection of very short pieces by
five college students, each decrying the continuing alas, intensifying
Covid hysteria on college campuses. A slice:

The evidence about the Omicron variant should be a rebuke to busybody
bureaucrats determined to lock down the nation. It is easy to spur hysteria
by counting cases, and Omicron seems highly infectious. More important,
however, is case severity. The metrics that epidemiologists should really
care about, such as fatality rates, are similar for Omicron as they are for
seasonal flu. Coercive and damaging tactics like lockdowns and employer
vaccine mandates are draconian overreach and a massive overreaction.
Lockdowns were disastrous, and we don’t need to repeat that mistake.

Nearly two years into the pandemic, vulnerable or concerned people already
know how to protect themselves. Although President Biden prophesied a
“winter of severe illness and death” for those unvaccinated, he has since
wavered, stating there is “no federal solution” and that Covid ought to be
solved at the state level. A transition to personal responsibility and
local control is long overdue. The latest evidence about Omicron should
hasten that realization, and hopefully we will soon learn to live with
endemic Covid.

—Sarah Montalbano, Montana State University, computer science

Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins in response to Fridays oral
arguments over Bidens abominable vaccine mandates describes U.S. Supreme
Court associate justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor
as dizzy as the rest of us from the political spin. A slice:

But the discussion was bad enough, confused by 24 months of incoherent
government messaging about Covid. Justice Breyer declared it “unbelievable
that it could be in the public interest to suddenly stop these
vaccinations,” as if he imagined the Biden mandate had already taken effect
and was playing an important role in the vaccinating of America. Not true.
A large majority of the U.S. population has already been vaccinated; the
mandate targets only 25% of the population, the private workforce, most of
whom have already received the shot voluntarily or at their employer’s
behest. At least half have also likely been infected and acquired natural
immunity. And given an average age of 42, this sub-population hardly
represents a bullseye on the lingering unvaccinated older cohort most
likely to end up in the hospital.

In other words, the Biden workplace mandate, even if approved, is destined
to have a negligible, almost invisible, impact on either vaccination rates
or the unfolding of the pandemic.

On the latter point, the well-advertised blunder of Justice Kagan, her
statement that vaccination was the “best way to prevent spread,” suggested
she hadn’t heard of Delta or Omicron, both of which the vaccinated can
transmit. This alone guts the incoherent argument for requiring workers in
private workplaces to be vaccinated so private workplaces can be safe for
unvaccinated workers.

The worst moment was Justice Sotomayor’s claim that Omicron was filling up
the hospitals with kids, “many on ventilators.” The Washington Post awarded
her four Pinocchios, adding censoriously, “It’s important for Supreme Court
justices to make rulings based on correct data.”

The last bit was perhaps unfair. Ms. Sotomayor wasn’t offering legal
reasoning but a “think of the children” soundbite to comfort liberals even
as the administration’s workplace mandate likely doesn’t stand a snowball’s
chance when the Court eventually rules.

SUNY-Cortland history professor Jared McBrady warns of the totalitarianism
lurking in the othering of the unvaccinated. A slice:

Now, some politicians are othering the “unvaccinated.” These politicians
attempt to scapegoat and marginalize this minority group, despite knowing
that vaccinated and unvaccinated persons alike can contract and spread
COVID-19. Below, I provide the words of three politicians as examples of
othering language. I also encourage you to read their words in context.

In the United States, President Joe Biden’s September 9 press conference
announced sweeping vaccine mandates. He expressed that “many of us are
frustrated” with unvaccinated persons. He laid blame on them for the
continued pandemic; Biden claimed that this “pandemic of the unvaccinated”
was “caused by nearly 80 million Americans who have failed to get the
shot.” He faulted “a distinct minority of Americans” for “keeping us from
turning the corner.” And he promised “We cannot allow these actions to
stand in the way of protecting the large majority of Americans who have
done their part and want to get back to life as normal.”

In a September 17 interview on the Quebec talk show La semaine des 4 Julie,
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau labeled those opposed to vaccination
“misogynists” and “racists.” Then, he exclaimed that Canada needed to make
a choice: “Do we tolerate these people?”

In France, President Emmanuel Macron gave an interview with Le Parisien on
January 4. In this interview, he categorized the unvaccinated as
non-citizens, referred to their “lies and stupidity” as the “worst enemies”
of democracy, and proclaimed “I really want to piss [the unvaccinated]
off.” Macron argued these unvaccinated persons to be only “a very small
minority who are resisting,” and asked a chilling question: “How do we
reduce that minority?”

Heres more insight from Vinay Prasad. A slice:

Omicron has three characteristics different than prior variants. First, it
spreads very fast. Second, it is less lethal, and, third, vaccines do less
to stop symptomatic infection. These three features mean that in this wave,
or in a series of subsequent waves, the virus will eventually reach all
people.  You cannot avoid it forever. There are five key policy lessons
from all this.

First, mask mandates make no sense. Almost all community wide mask mandates
this entire pandemic asked people to wear any mask, and most people chose a
cloth one. Cloth masks never worked to slow the spread of the virus.  We
analyzed all relevant studies months ago, and found no benefit, and a
cluster randomized trial in Bangladesh found that cloth masks failed.
Recently, CNN admitted as much.

Now, some argue that we need to wear higher grade masks, such as n95s or
equivalent. Anyone who wishes should be free to do so, but they should not
be mandated.  We have no evidence such population wide mandates will help,
and the truth is, even if worn perfectly, the mask might only delay the
time until you are eventually infected, and not avert it. Worse, along the
way you will suffer the discomfort and inconvenience of the mask.

Second, schools should not close.  Closing schools was always a fool’s
errand. High quality studies show school closure does not even slow spread
in communities. Kids, working moms and society suffer significantly when
schools close.  Kids have bigger worries in life than COVID19. Outcomes for
healthy kids are excellent and on par with seasonal flu. School closure in
the USA was disproportionately an indulgence of liberal cities with strong
teacher’s unions.

Third, we cannot keep the brakes on society. People are voting with their
feet, and outside of urban liberal enclaves, people are enjoying
restaurants, bars, and vacations. In many regions, you would not know a
pandemic is going on. This reflects a fundamental exhaustion of the
public.  Given that so much of the public is done with restrictions,
placing extremely harsh ones on college campuses, for instance, makes no
sense. Colleges are full of the healthiest members of society. Asking these
kids to be imprisioned in their rooms or dorms or on campus neither helps
them or broader society.

Fourth, we have to focus on the most vulnerable people in society, as we
always should have. The CDC director has now admitted this, in a remarkable
turn. Nursing homes should get booster shots right now. We should think
about improving staffing and infection control at these settings.

Fifth, hospitals should improve their capacities. Some health care workers
were fired or forced out because of not receiving the vaccine. Some of
these people had already had COVID19. These people should be permitted to
return to work, with appropriate precautions, because at this juncture we
need them far more than any risk they pose.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Vivek Ramaswamy and Apoorva Ramaswamy
warn of the danger posed by slowing omicrons spread. A slice:

Meanwhile, mask mandates and social-distancing measures will have created
fertile ground for new variants that evade vaccination even more
effectively. Significant antigenic shifts may create new strains that are
increasingly difficult to target with vaccines at all. There are no
vaccines for many viruses, despite decades of effort to develop them.

Will relaxing restrictions come at the cost of more hospitalizations and
deaths as the next variant starts to spread? Perhaps, but it would reduce
the risk of a worst-case scenario and greater loss of life in the long run.

Allison Pearson is correct: It’s not ‘anti-vaxx’ to say people like Novak
Djokovic don’t need to be jabbed. A slice:

Why would Djokovic, one of the fittest people on the planet and still in
his mid-30s, want to get vaccinated against a virus which, as multiple
studies have shows, can do him little harm? At his age and with no
pre-existing health problems, Djokovic is reportedly at greater risk of
drowning than of ending up in ICU with Covid. Also, as athletes’ hearts are
different to our sedentary human hearts and myocarditis is a known, if
extremely rare, side-effect of the jab in slim younger men, the jab might
even pose a tiny risk to him.

As it happens, Djokovic says he has had Covid twice, most recently on
December 16, which means that, when he flew to Australia to defend his Open
title, he was still teeming with antibodies. (Remember, the UK guidance
says you should not receive the vaccine for 28 days after your Covid
symptoms started.) I completely sympathise with Australians who objected to
the idea that this arrogant tennis overlord had played a fast one,
bypassing strict rules which prevented their fellow countrymen from
returning home for 18 months, even to see dying loved ones. That applies
doubly to the stoical people of Melbourne who endured 262 days of lockdown
– the longest of any city in the world.

The fact remains, however, that although the state of Victoria now has a 90
per cent vaccination rate, it is currently recording over 30,000 Covid
cases a day. Vaccines are a fantastic protection against severe illness and
death – thank God and Dame Sarah Gilbert for that – but they are pretty
powerless against omicron, which shimmies past their defensive net like a
Djokovic dropshot. The latest research suggests that an unvaccinated Novak,
who has terrific natural immunity from two bouts of the virus, poses no
greater threat of infecting your average Melburnian than a non-sports
superstar with two jabs and a booster.

Look, I never liked Novak Djokovic very much. What a cold, calculating
machine he always seemed, compared to the easy grace and smiley magnanimity
of Roger Federer. The events of the past few days have changed my view.

The treatment Djokovic received at the hands of Melbourne airport border
guards, after he had been granted a visa, was extremely unjust. It seems
clear that the Australian government, led by Scott Morrison, acting more
like a Witchfinder General than a prime minister, wanted to make an example
of this “anti-vaxxer” and the unlovable Serb was an easy target. (Some less
famous players entered the former “No worries, mate” capital of the world
without fuss under exactly the same exemptions.)

Covidocratic authoritarianism, dystopianism, and irrationality intensify in
Scotland. (DBx: I wonder what bagpipes sound like when used to play
Scotland the Cowardly.)

And the straw man continues his tyranny of the Chinese.

Sinéad Murphy defends children against the Covidocracy and against
journalists who carry the Covidocracys water. A slice:

This spiral into abstraction by the Left is, quite literally, demoralising.
Nothing matters when nothing is what it really is. We’re not serious, for
all our deep tones and hushed voices and pained expressions. We’re just
playing around. Just moving the counters about the board and admiring the
configurations that result.

Heres an interview with Monica Smit, an heroic warrior against Australias
tyrannical Covidocracy, which in response Ms. Smits refusal to take a PCR
test confined her for 22 days to solitary confinement. (HT Dan Klein)

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) deserves loud applause for challenging the arrogant,
authoritarian, and medieval Anthony Fauci.

Inspired by this report, UnHerds Freddie Sayers tweets:

Remember all those reasons why South Africas mild Omicron experience wasnt
relevant to the UK?

Turns out the real-world data from Gauteng was a better predictor of the
London wave than the models produced by SAGE

Time to live with Covid and treat virus like the common cold, says
Wellcome so reports the Telegraph.




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Quotation of the Day

Posted: 12 Jan 2022 01:30 AM PST
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




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is from page 154 of F.A. Hayek’s profound 1952 book The Counter-Revolution
of Science, as this book appears as part of volume 13 (Studies on the Abuse
& Decline of Reason, Bruce Caldwell, ed. [2010]) of the Collected Works of
F.A. Hayek:

It may indeed prove to be far the most difficult and not the least
important task for human reason to comprehend its own limitations.




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Bonus Quotation of the Day

Posted: 11 Jan 2022 11:49 AM PST
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




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 is from page 138 of Thomas Sowell’s 2013 book, Intellectuals and Race:

Many people who advocate what they think of as equality promote what is in
fact make-believe equality. In economic terms, taking what others have
produced and giving it to those who have not produced as much (or at all,
in some cases) is make-believe equality as contrasted with real equality,
which would be enabling the less productive to become more productive, so
that they could create for themselves what they are trying to take from
others.

DBx: Yes.

Government policies that hinder the achievement of real equality include
minimum-wage legislation (which reduce employment opportunities for the
least-skilled in society) and occupational-licensing restrictions (which
both reduce employment and entrepreneurship options for the politically
unconnected, and artificially raise the prices that consumers must pay for
certain goods and services). Another enemy of real equality is
government-supplied education, especially at the K-12 levels, where the
monopoly privileges of the schools and teachers (so called) are especially
numerous.




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Harold Black Remembers Walter Williams

Posted: 11 Jan 2022 10:29 AM PST
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
This months Liberty Matters episode is devoted to the work and legacy of my
late, great colleague and dear friend Walter Williams. The first essay is
by Professor Harold Black. Other essays, including one by me, will appear
within the next few days.

Heres a slice from Professor Blacks essay (footnotes deleted):

Williams was a fierce advocate of limited government and opponent of forced
income redistribution. He famously stated, “Let me offer you my definition
of social justice: I keep what I earn and you keep what you earn. Do you
disagree? Well you tell me what I earn belongs to you – and why?” He also
stated “No matter how worthy the cause, it is robbery, theft and injustice
to confiscate the property of one person and give it to another to whom it
does not belong.” As such, Williams added to the debate of reparations and
paying one’s “fair share” and did it in a manner that was intentionally
provocative. Williams’ prescription for lessening poverty was simple:
“complete high school; get a job, any kind of job; get married before
having children; and be a law-abiding citizen. Among both black and white
Americans so described, the poverty rate is in the single digits.” A
controversial statement in today’s “woke” climate but again one that cannot
be proven wrong.

Although Williams was labeled as a “conservative”, he was even handed when
it came to criticizing both liberals and conservatives in government. Both
liberals and conservatives advocate the confiscation of one person’s
property to give it to another. The difference was in who was to get the
spoils. In essence,ntaxation was theft, and since the government is
essentially nonproductive, it has to seize the property of others to
function and to reward its friends and not its enemies (which change with
each election). To quote Williams, “The compelling issue for both
conservatives and liberals is not whether it is legitimate for government
to confiscate one’s property to give it to another, the debate is over the
disposition of the pillage.”

(DBx: By liberals, Walter of course meant Progressives.)




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Some Progress Against Progressivism Is Better Than None

Posted: 11 Jan 2022 06:51 AM PST
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
Here’s a letter to The Atlantic:

Editor:

Angie Schmitt deserves applause for realizing that her political tribe –
Progressives – have throughout the pandemic been both unreasonable and
untrue to their stated principles (“Why I Soured on the Democrats,” Jan.
7). Progressives’ exaggeration of the dangers of Covid especially their
refusal to recognize that Covid poses little risk to young people and to
the healthy – and their dogmatic devotion to school closures and the
masking of children have resulted in policies that are irrational and,
hence, excessively costly, especially to those persons not fortunate enough
to belong to the Zoomgeoisie.

Ms. Schmitt reached her realization because she’s a mother obliged by
lockdowns to stay home with her school-age children. She thus personally
witnessed and suffered government-interventions’ downsides that are
typically invisible to those who endorse and implement such interventions.

This experience should prompt Ms. Schmitt to question more extensively the
Progressive creed. Many long-popular Progressive policies, appearing lovely
to those who are unaffected by them, inflict very real damage to
flesh-and-blood persons who remain unseen, save as abstractions, to
Progressives. An example is minimum-wage legislation. Well-educated
professionals such as Ms. Schmitt are never thrown out of work by such
legislation. Nor does such legislation ever deny entry-level jobs to these
professionals’ children. But poorly educated, especially inner-city,
minorities are adversely affected by minimumwages, which does indeed
prevent many of them from being gainfully employed in the above-ground
economy.

I doubt that Ms. Schmitt would continue to support the larger Progressive
agenda if more of the people who suffer the ill-consequences of minimum
wages and other such interventions could describe their experiences by
writing essays for the Atlantic. And I’m certain that Ms. Schmitt would
reject all of Progressivism, rather than just its Covid policies, if she
were personally to experience the full range of the damage that it inflicts
on the poor and the powerless – damage to which Progressives are blind.

Sincerely,

Donald J. Boudreaux

Professor of Economics

and

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

George Mason University

Fairfax, VA 22030




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Some Covid Links

Posted: 11 Jan 2022 03:39 AM PST
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
Children forced to Zoom into school ended up with suboptimal immune
systems—the opposite of herd immunity so reports Pamela Hobart. A slice:

By May and June 2021, pediatricians noticed an unprecedented,
counterseasonal surge in communicable illnesses, particularly RSV. Hand,
foot, and mouth disease came right along with it, tearing through schools
and day care centers all summer with unmistakable boils. Strep throat got
in on the action too. Instead of dodging diseases, this catch-up wave
suggested, children had largely just deferred them.

Some alleged COVID-19 mitigation measures, such as more frequent sanitizing
of preschool surfaces, would have actually done more to prevent RSV (which
does commonly transmit itself via contact with contaminated surfaces) than
to prevent COVID-19 (which does not). Yet kids were slammed by RSV anyway.
Isolation turned them into dry immunological kindling.

Writing at National Review, Jim Geraghty rightly criticizes CDC Director
Rochelle Walensky for failing publicly, when given the opportunity, to
correct U.S. Supreme Court associate justice Sonia Sotomayors appallingly
egregious misapprehension of the realities of Covid. A slice:

When public-health officials denounce misinformation about the pandemic,
what they usually mean is misinformation that comes from the powerless
people — Aunt Edna sharing absurd theories on Facebook that if everybody in
the ICU took some Vitamin C or colloidal silver then they would be up and
feeling great in no time. President Joe Biden can say, “How about making
sure that you’re vaccinated, so you do not spread the disease to anyone
else,” and no public-health official blinks. Rachel Maddow declares, “The
virus stops with every vaccinated person. . . . It cannot use a vaccinated
person as a host to get more people,” and no public-health official
objects. If you’re prominent and important enough, and you’re on the
correct side of the ideological divide, your false statements about
Covid-19 don’t count, apparently.

Speaking of Dr. Walensky, Wall Street Journal columnist James Freeman
wonders why she is only now coming around to endorse a more Focused
Protection approach to Covid. A slice:

Her CDC website notes that close to 95% of death certificates listing Covid
as a cause also mention other causes along with Covid and states:
For deaths with conditions or causes in addition to COVID-19, on average,
there were 4.0 additional conditions or causes per death.

..

On Sunday Dr. Walensky tweeted:
We must protect people with comorbidities from severe #COVID19. I went into
medicine – HIV specifically – and public health to protect our most
at-risk. CDC is taking steps to protect those at highest risk, incl. those
w/ chronic health conditions, disabilities & older adults.

Fair enough, but this recognition that some face great risk from Covid
while others face much lower risk has been obvious from the start. In
response, a group of accomplished and wise scientists crafted the Great
Barrington Declaration in 2020 to promote a ”focused protection”
strategy—taking great care to shield those at high risk while allowing the
vast majority who are at low risk to continue working, learning and doing
all the things that sustain life. This sensible prioritization sounds very
much like what Dr. Walensky is suggesting in her Sunday tweet.

And speaking earlier of Justice Sotomayor, Jacob Sullum adds his voice to
those who are, shall we say, rather surprised by the Justices
(mis)understanding of the applicable constitutional rules. Two slices:

On Friday, when the Supreme Court considered whether it should block
enforcement of the Biden administrations COVID-19 vaccine mandate for
private employers, most of the discussion focused on whether the
Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has the statutory
authority to issue that rule. But the justices and lawyers also touched on
a constitutional argument against the mandate, one that hinges on the
distinction between state and federal powers.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor claimed not to understand this distinction.

OSHAs emergency temporary standard (ETS), which it published on November 5,
demands that companies with 100 or more employees require them to be
vaccinated or wear face masks and submit to weekly virus testing. While
arguing that OSHA does not have the power to issue such an order, Ohio
Solicitor General Benjamin Flowers said there may be many states, subject
to their own state laws, that could impose this [policy] themselves.
Sotomayor said she found that concession puzzling.

If its within the police power to protect the health and welfare of
workers, she said, you seem to be saying the states can do it, but youre
saying the federal government cant, even though its facing the same crisis
in interstate commerce that states are facing within their own borders. Im
not sure I understand the distinction—why the states would have the power
but the federal government wouldnt.

Flowers noted that the federal government has no police power—the general
authority to enact legislation aimed at protecting public health, safety,
morals, and welfare. While states retain that broad authority under the
Constitution, the federal government is limited to specifically enumerated
powers. This principle is reflected in the 10th Amendment, which says the
powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor
prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or
to the people.

..

Sotomayors reference to a federal police power was not quite as striking as
her false claims about the omicron variants impact on children. But her
exchange with Flowers raised some eyebrows.

Sotomayor professed not to be able to understand the distinction between
federal authority and state police powers, National Reviews Isaac Schorr
wrote. Sotomayor claims not to understand [the] distinction between state
and federal power, Ilya Shapiro, director of the Cato Institutes Robert A.
Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, tweeted. Mind-boggling. Calls OSHAs
regulatory authority…a police power. OH SG tries to explain con law 101,
eventually Roberts rescues the embarrassing discourse.

Also dismayed by some associate-justices deep ignorance of Covid realities
is Jonathan Tobin. Heres his conclusion:

Misinformation has come from those who dwell in the fever swamps of the far
right and the far left. But some of the worst of the fallacies about the
pandemic have come from public-health officials and their dutiful enablers
in the mainstream media.

Bent on scaring people into compliance with arbitrary rules that have
changed continuously as they’ve reacted to a crisis for which they were
unprepared, the experts have often encouraged the kind of exaggerations and
mistakes that the three Supreme Court liberals repeated.

The high-court hearing wasn’t just fodder for a fact check that earned
liberal judges scorn. It should be a wake-up call for the rest of us to
understand that the real problem here isn’t a disease. It’s the way those
who ought to know better have gone along with fearmongering intended to
quash opposition to the most heavy-handed COVID regulations regardless of
the truth.

Writing in Newsweek, Catos Ilya Shapiro predicts that the U.S. Supreme
Court will strike down Bidens abominable vaccine mandate issued through
OSHA. Two slices:

Based on Fridays Supreme Court oral argument, it seems that sanity will
prevail and the justices will block the federal private-sector vaccine
mandate, an emergency standard the Occupational Safety and Health
Administration announced in November. Just as the Court blocked the Centers
for Disease Controls eviction moratorium last summer, six justices are now
clearly troubled by a claim of sweeping regulatory authority based on
flimsy statutory text.

..

To put a finer point on it, federal lawmaking powers are constitutionally
enumerated—and thus limited to those listed in Article I, Section 8—while
states enjoy a broader police power to regulate on behalf of public health,
safety, welfare and morals. To hold that a state vaccine mandate can be
constitutional, as the Supreme Court did in the 1905 case of Jacobson v.
Massachusetts, doesnt begin to answer the question of whether a federal
agency has statutory authority to impose one. And to hold that federal
regulation of workplace conditions is constitutional doesnt begin to answer
the question of whether and how OSHA can address viral threats that arent
specific to the workplace.

A former Canadian Mountie writes sensibly about Covid and Covid hysteria.
(HT a former Canadian, David Henderson) A slice:

So back to my Covid journey. I was skeptical of the pandemic from the start
but decided to wait and see what evidence would surface of this dangerous
pandemic. So I sat back and quietly observed. At that time, and still at
the time I’m writing this, I was the admin NCO on the watch. I was in the
unique position of seeing every file that came through PRIME in the 46 hour
window I was at work each week. Naturally, this included all sudden death
files. Pay attention now, have another sip of your latte if you have to.
Since the pandemic began, until now, I was in a position to see every
single sudden death file that came through our detachment area. What did I
notice in this position? Nothing. No upwards trend whatsoever. Funny
enough, I didn’t see people dropping dead in my neighbourhood either.

This was a very stark contrast to what I saw in media. A non-stop chorus on
TV, radio, and internet, of case counts, hospitalizations and deaths. At no
time in my life had I seen anything like it. A complete disconnect between
my observed reality and that which was portrayed by my government and the
government subsidized mainstream media. And they were reporting deaths in
care homes. Care homes? When did the media ever report deaths in care homes
unless it was some sort of instance of gross negligence? It’s called end of
life care for a reason. People go to care homes at the end of their life.
Death is the natural consequence, and this fact used to be understood as
common sense.

When the statistics started showing that the vast majority of anyone dying
from Covid, either had one or more co-morbidities, or was older than the
average life expectancy, my skepticism of the pandemic narrative only grew.
Then in the summer of 2020, I got Covid. For a few days I was really tired
and shivered a lot. Then it was over. I survived the “deadly” disease like
the vast majority of anyone else who caught it. To be honest, I’ve had
worse Flus, and worse hangovers.

David Henderson looks back, over the past two years, on executive-branch
government officials lust for power a lust mixed with dangerous degrees of
hubris.

Oxford Universitys Sunetra Gupta explains that [m]asking children is
illogical and irrational. Two slices:

The argument for masking children, or obliging them to be vaccinated
against a pathogen that is less likely to kill them than many others in
normal circulation, should have stopped at the level of logic rather than
continuing into a debate over its ethical and political implications.
Neither masks nor vaccines can reliably prevent children from passing
Sars-CoV-2 onto others, and I worry for the unvaccinated grandparent in a
multi-generational household who believes themselves to be protected
because their grandchild is attending school with an unpleasant (and
environmentally unfriendly) piece of material on their face. I remain
convinced that many people (including my cousins in India) have lost their
lives labouring under this misapprehension.

There is now ample observational data to suggest that mask mandates do not
work, and the few formal trials that have been conducted show no credible
effect. The failure of the modelling exercises conducted by Sage and their
satellites in predicting cases and deaths allows us to reject the role of
such non-pharmaceutical interventions in driving the dynamics of spread.

..

Ultimately, the argument for imposing restrictions upon children should die
within the logical core we all share as international participants in the
culture of enlightenment (lest anyone see it as a European construct):
there is no rational case for them. Banning singing lessons on the basis of
the simplistic notion that singing causes the virus to spread further is as
much a failure of critical thinking as it is of the moral and
socio-political imagination.

Telegraph columnist Sherelle Jacobs argues persuasively that Omicron has
humiliated Britains dismal lockdown establishment. A slice:

Moreover, far from winding down, Project Fear is becoming
institutionalised, as Public Health England’s replacement, the UK Health
Security Agency (UKHSA), is fashioned into a propaganda arm, pumping out
worst-case scenario modelling to complement Sage. The basic elements that
need to be in place to live with Covid – like an advanced bulk vaccine
manufacturing industry, and a robust variant preparedness plan – are being
held back by civil service red tape. Again, the question is: why? The
answer: a combination of state incompetence and middle-class vested
interests.

Well, she was just following the science! And given that the official high
priests of science, the keepers and protectors of its Truths, proclaim the
enormous benefits and lack-of-risks of vaccines to any and all persons over
five years old and proclaim also the untold damage that each and every
unvaccinated person inflicts on society as a whole how can this teacher
not have taken it upon herself to vaccinate the young man? Not to have done
so would have rendered her an enemy of humanity. (HT Charles Oliver)

I dont recall hearing of Peter Yim until yesterday, so I dont know what hes
about. But I agree with much in this essay of his, and I agree strongly
with its overall theme which is that the marriage between science and the
state, while likely to be very good for the state, poses a serious threat
to both science and society. A slice:

Some acknowledge all of the above mendacity of the federal medical
authorities and more but do not denounce those same authorities. The lies
are defended as noble lies, lies for some greater good. Nonsense. These
deceptions are fundamental violations of medical ethics and of the
principles of democracy. In democracy, there is no presumption that the
state has the best interests of the people at heart. Rather, democracy only
functions properly when the people are fully informed. Or, in the words of
JFK: “[a] nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and
falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”

Wisdom from Australian Dr. James Kildare:

There is a final element of informed consent often overlooked, and that is
the specific relationship between a treating clinician and a patient. It is
a personal relationship based on mutual respect where the deference to the
clinician’s knowledge is tempered with respect for the patient’s
preference, understanding and priorities.

A reasonable risk for a doctor may be unacceptable for a patient. With
diseases such as Covid, where risk profiles differ enormously between
population demographics the decision to take any treatment must be made on
an individual basis. By removing an individual’s ability to make healthcare
decisions for themselves, we are removing that fundamental element of
healthcare practice. Sadly, this seems reflective of our society’s present
lack of belief in the value of the individual.

Johns Hopkins School of Medicine professor Marty Makary explains that the
federal governments booster push shows that public-health decisions arent
data-driven. A slice:

Yet Moderna’s CEO has already suggested annual boosters, with no supporting
clinical data. While his shareholders love that news, many experts do not.
Dr. Vinay Prasad of the University of California this week nicely
summarized the problem with using efficacy as the ultimate metric to
evaluate a vaccine. In a recent Kaiser Southern California study, the
efficacy of two doses of the mRNA vaccines went to essentially zero at 6
months, despite a lot of data showing that these same vaccines provide
strong protection against hospitalization in younger people.

Yet as many of us predicted, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
officially changed the lexicon from “Did you get a booster?” to “Are you up
to date?” COVID vaccines are not software.

Booster recommendations are nuanced and need to be tailored to each
person’s age and health situation. They should be medically precise. That’s
the art of medicine.

To date, the clinical benefit of boosters has not been reported in younger
people or people with natural immunity from prior infection. In fact, young
healthy people have a strong immune system and develop strong immunity from
the primary vaccine series. A large Israeli population study published in
the New England Journal of Medicine found that the risk of COVID death in a
fully vaccinated, non-boosted person under age 30 was zero. A booster
cannot lower that risk further. A recent German population study found that
no healthy child 5 to 17 years old died of COVID over a 15-month period
when the vast majority were unvaccinated.

Many of us have been alarmed by the CDC and Food and Drug Administration
pushing boosters for young people, despite zero clinical data to support
this recommendation and concerns of unintended harm from myocarditis, which
can affect as many as one in 1,860 young men, ages 18 to 24.

Heres another interview with Jay Bhattacharya:






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

Posted: 11 Jan 2022 01:15 AM PST
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
is from page 181 of Armen Alchian’s and William Allen’s Universal
Economics (2018; Jerry Jordan, ed.); this volume is an updated version of
Alchian’s and Allen’s magnificent earlier textbook, University Economics:

The line between innovative leadership and disgusting nonconformity is not
bright and clear, but it does exist.




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