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Change the Design

Posted: 21 Mar 2022 07:11 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
D__ isn’t the only person to write to me with this concern.

Hi D__:

Thanks for your e-mail about my new essay on what Christopher Snowdon calls
“public health paternalists.”

You’re correct that taxpayer-subsidized health care transforms many private
choices into ‘public’ ones. And so, for example, when Jones’s penchant for
eating poorly and not exercising lands him in the hospital, taxpayer Smith
is understandably angry at having to help pay for the ill-consequences of
Jones’s choices.

Yet I do not believe that this reality justifies public-health authorities
proscribing and prescribing actions that would be private in the absence of
government’s policy of collectivizing the provision of health care. With
collectivized health care – as with collectivized anything – the problem is
real of Jones and Smith free riding on each other and, hence, behaving in
ways that are collectively harmful. Real too is the resulting pressure for
government to reduce this harm by micromanaging personal choices.

But to ask a now-popular question: What’s the limiting principle? Where
does the assault on individuals’ freedom to choose end? The problem exists
only because government collectivized an activity – the provision of health
care – that can and should remain privately supplied and demanded. With
health care forcibly collectivized, rather than call for – or even to
tolerate – government restrictions on personal behavior, the better course
is to demand an end to the forced collective provision of health care.
Otherwise, additional government intervention is summoned to ‘solve’ a
problem that exists only because of earlier government intervention. And
these additional interventions will themselves create spillover effects
that are sure to fuel calls for yet further control by the state over
private choices.

If you discover that your house is structurally unsound because its design
is faulty, you don’t summon the same incompetent architect to use his same
flawed design principles to patch up the evident problems. You change the
design.

Sincerely,

Don




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Some Covid Links

Posted: 21 Mar 2022 03:15 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
Wall Street Journal columnist Allysia Finley ably defends the decision by
government officials in Florida to recommend against vaccinating healthy
children against Covid. Three slices:

The Sunshine State is bucking the public-health consensus again. “The
Florida Department of Health is going to be the first state to officially
recommend against the Covid-19 vaccines for healthy children,” Surgeon
General Joseph Ladapo announced March 7.

Cue the outrage. The American Academy of Pediatrics called the
recommendation “irresponsible.” The Infectious Diseases Society of America
accused Dr. Ladapo of putting “politics over the health and safety of
children.” White House press secretary Jen Psaki jabbed: “It’s deeply
disturbing that there are politicians peddling conspiracy theories out
there and casting doubt on vaccinations.”

Dr. Ladapo is doing no such thing. He is merely acknowledging the abundant
scientific evidence that Covid-19 poses a negligible risk to healthy
children, which makes it impossible to know if the benefit of vaccination
outweighs the risk.

..

But this makes vaccinating children even more senseless. The vast majority
have already been infected. The CDC estimates that 58% of children under 18
had infection-induced antibodies as of January, based on commercial
laboratory blood samples.

This is almost certainly an underestimate. Antibodies have probably faded
in those who were infected earlier in the pandemic, and a study in the
Journal of the American Medical Association found 63% of children under 18
who tested positive for the virus on PCR tests didn’t generate antibodies
in their blood. Unlike the current crop of vaccines, prior infection
stimulates mucosal immunity—including antibodies in the saliva and nasal
passages—that can provide a strong barrier to infection.

..

The public-health consensus has been wrong time and again during the
pandemic. When it comes to vaccinating children, especially the youngest,
Dr. Ladapo is right.

Heres an excellent letter in todays Wall Street Journal:

Each of us must decide which principled stands to take in life, and
mask-querade mandates sometimes force us to choose between convenience and
conviction. Even before mandates were lifted last month in California, I
entered many retail establishments without harassment from staff or
management, and only slight frowns from other customers. But other venues
tested my principles: barefaced, I could not enter restaurants, theaters,
libraries or museums. I am still barred from airports, public transit and
doctors’ offices.

This virus era will be over when we, as a people, stand up and determine
that it’s over. Ms. Sugar is correct that those who do not act on their
principles are the reason that mask mandates still exist, since it’s now
clear that “the science” offers no valid justification for these
questionable, confusing edicts.

Jane Johnson

Ventura, Calif.

The Wall Street Journals Editorial Board is correct: Beijings deranged
pursuit of zero Covid hurts not only the Chinese economy it hurts all the
global economy. A slice:

China’s domestic growth will take a hit. The Communist Party regime
recently announced a GDP growth target of 5.5% for the year, but that will
be impossible to achieve if major commercial centers are locked down.
Another risk is consumer confidence, which already was under threat from
the property-market slowdown President Xi Jinping has orchestrated over the
past year. Beijing claims it’s pursuing a “shared prosperity” agenda in
which ordinary households will earn—and then spend—a greater share of the
country’s income. But first they need to be let out of their apartments.

Mr. Xi appears to be waking to the economic and political dangers. He
instructed officials on Thursday to reduce the cost households bear for
Covid controls. Vice Premier Liu He this week promised measures “that are
favorable to the market” to stabilize equity prices roiled by Covid fears
and worries that Beijing’s long-running regulatory crackdown on tech
companies could stifle growth.

Even as the lockdowns become more contentious with the public, Beijing
shows little sign of abandoning its zero-Covid fixation. That policy
stubbornness, combined with Beijing’s apparent failure to devise an
alternative in the two years since the pandemic began, is a danger to the
health of Chinese citizens and the prosperity of China and the rest of the
world.

Writing at City Journal, Nicholas Wade decries the credulity of many
science reporters. A slice:

Why are science writers so little able to report objectively on the origin
of the virus? Innocent of most journalists’ skepticism about human motives,
science writers regard scientists, their authoritative sources, as too
Olympian ever to be moved by trivial matters of self-interest. Their daily
job is to relay claims of impressive new discoveries, such as advances
toward curing cancer or making paralyzed rats walk. Most of these claims
come to nothing—research is not an efficient process—but science writers
and scientists alike benefit from creating a stream of pleasant illusions.
The journalists get their stories, while media coverage helps researchers
attract government grants.

K. Lloyd Billingsley wonders if Fauci will get the downsizing that he
deserves. A slice:

Senator Rand Paul will introduce an amendment to eliminate Dr. Anthony
Fauci’s position as head of the National Institute of Allergy and
Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and establish three new institutes headed by
presidential appointees, confirmed by the Senate, and serving a term of
five years.

“We’ve learned a lot over the past two years, but one lesson in particular
is that no one person should be deemed ‘dictator in chief,’” Paul wrote in
a Fox News commentary. “No one person should have unilateral authority to
make decisions for millions of Americans.”

Paul, a physician for more than 33 years, says he “never encountered
someone with the gall to proclaim himself ‘the science’ and portray anyone
opposing him as ‘attacking science.’ That is until Dr. Fauci became the
COVID dictator-in-chief.” Paul mourns “those we lost to the crushing and
overbearing lockdowns and mandates that were based on junk science.”

Anthony Fauci earned a medical degree in 1966 but if he ever practiced
medicine it was only for a short time. In 1968, Dr. Fauci was hired on with
the National Institutes of Health and he has headed NIAID since 1984. Dr.
Fauci’s bio shows no advanced degrees in molecular biology or biochemistry.

The government of New South Wales, Australia, admits that it lied in order
to do Covid health theater. A slice:

By far the more disturbing insight offered by [New South Wales premier
Dominic] Perrottet was the abuse of the state’s children to make the
Education sector ‘feel better’.
‘When we announced schools going back, the media would rush to find the
scariest epidemiologist who was out there saying “every child across New
South Wales would die”. And that was a problem, because we had to instil
confidence. So what did we do? Together we agreed we would go and get all
these Rapid Antigen Tests – which was a massive fee,’ said the Premier.

Instead of standing his ground and defending the much-lauded ‘science’ of
NSW Health – something that citizens were told that they could not question
when it was destroying their businesses and holding them hostage in their
homes – Perrottet implemented measures to keep the media quiet.

Heres a report from last weeks gathering, at Hillsdale Colleges DC campus,
of some of the relatively few scientists, academics, and journalists who
wisely counseled caution against Covid hysteria and warned of Covidocratic
tyranny. (HT Jay Bhattacharya, who was among the participants in this
event) Three slices:

Johns Hopkins medical professor Marty Makary, a National Academy of
Medicine member, said the New York Times functionally blacklisted him after
he went on Fox News, and his department started to squash critics like him
early in the pandemic. He compared Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, and
former NIH Director Francis Collins to African presidents who rule for
decades.

Epidemiologist Sheila Weiss said her company, which has close Stanford
ties, wouldnt let her publish a commentary on booster mandate madness
because it was too much of a political or corporate risk. An investigative
journalist declined her offer to run with the story because Faucis goons
already targeted him, Weiss said.

Cal Poly microbiologist Pat Fidopiastis, who leads its COVID wastewater
testing lab, explained how he became the campus villain for refusing to
wear masks unless required, challenging mask efficacy and referring to
COVIDs origin in Wuhan, which drew student accusations of racism. He voted
for Barack Obama twice and Hillary Clinton, but they made me a Trump
supporter.

..

Bioethicist Aaron Kheriaty, fired by UC for refusing COVID vaccination,
said public health has morphed into seeking behavioral outcomes through
moralistic framing and frowns on objective data that could give false
reassurance. To Kheriaty, thats the definition of propaganda.

..

Former NYT science columnist John Tierney blamed the crisis crisis on
Fauci, who first rose to prominence in the AIDS crisis. The media have
perverse incentives to indulge alarmism on scientific issues, from
overpopulation to energy shortages and now COVID, because it increases
readership.

You have to do counter-scares such as the Great Barrington Declaration,
which emphasized collateral damage from lockdowns, he said.

Add 12 months or so to right-wing COVID coverage and Leonhardts daily NYT
newsletter will validate it, giving liberals permission to acknowledge
reality, according to Maxwell Meyer, former editor of The Stanford Review.
He pointed to a series of very conspicuous coincidences in which the CDC
revised guidance following a Leonhardt column.




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Quotation of the Day

Posted: 21 Mar 2022 01:30 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
is from page 268 of Herbert Spencer’s insightful July 1853 Westminster
Review essay, “Over-Legislation,” as this essay is reprinted in Liberty
Fund’s 1981 collection of some of Spencer’s writings, The Man Versus the
State, with Six Essays on Government, Society, and Freedom:

Ever since society existed Disappointment has been preaching, Put not your
trust in legislation; and yet the trust in legislation seems scarcely
diminished.




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Beware Public-Health Paternalists

Posted: 20 Mar 2022 08:31 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
My latest column for AIER is inspired by IEAs Christopher Snowdon. In it,
I as does Snowdon warn against the mix of faulty understanding and hubris
that motivates what Snowdon calls public health paternalists. A slice:

In the minds of public-health paternalists, the body politic becomes almost
a literal body. The aggregate (as described by statistics) is treated akin
to a sentient entity that suffers health problems, many of which can be
cured by this entity’s team of physicians – namely, public-health
paternalists. And in a country with a population as large as that of the
United States, the number of different health problems suffered by
absolutely large numbers of individuals will be enormous, thus ensuring no
end of opportunities for public-health paternalists to use the power of the
state to proscribe and prescribe individuals’ behaviors.

But as Snowdon notes, public-health paternalists sense that, to justify
their interventions, they need more than to point to scary statistics drawn
from a large population. At least in societies with a liberal tradition –
in societies that historically accord some deference to individuals to
freely make their own choices – public-health paternalists must bolster the
case for their officiousness by convincing the public that seemingly
private decisions are not really private. Public-health paternalists thus
insist, for example, that obese people are innocent victims of predatory
marketing by companies such as McDonald’s, while smokers have been trapped
by the vile tactics of Big Tobacco as well as by the peer pressure of
simply being surrounded by friends who smoke.

According to public-health paternalists, therefore, almost no decisions
that affect individuals’ health are truly ‘individual.’ Nearly all such
decisions are either heavily determined by the actions of third parties, or
themselves affect the choices of unsuspecting third parties.

Nothing is personal and private; everything is political and public.
Because, according to public-health paternalists, a vast array of seemingly
‘private’ decisions are both the results of “externalities” and themselves
the causes of “externalities,” the work of public-health paternalists is
plentiful, while the power these ‘experts’ require to protect the health of
the body politic is vast.

This perversion of classic public health into public-health paternalism is
alarming. As public-health paternalism comes to dominate the field, persons
attracted to study and practice public health will be, in contrast to
traditional public-health scholars and officials, far more insistent on
expanding public-health’s domain. Public-health paternalists will excel at
the dark art of portraying as ‘public’ – and, hence, as appropriate targets
of government regulation – many activities that traditionally and correctly
are understood as private and, hence, as not appropriate targets of
government regulation.

How much of the overreaction to COVID-19 is explained by the rise of
public-health paternalism? I suspect an enormous amount. Public-health
paternalists are not only already primed to misinterpret private choices as
ones that impose ‘negative externalities’ on third parties, they are also
especially skilled at peddling their misinterpretations to the general
public. And so although the quite real contagiousness of the SARS-CoV-2
virus renders it a valid concern of classic public-health scholars and
officials, the contagiousness and ‘publicness’ of other aspects of COVID
were exaggerated in attempts to justify excessive government control over
everyday affairs.

The most obvious example of an activity traditionally regarded as private
and, thus, not properly subject to government control is speech and
writing. Of course, no one has ever denied that speech and writing have
effects on others; indeed, changing other people’s minds and hearts is the
very purpose of much speech and writing. But in liberal civilization the
strong presumption has been that individuals are to be trusted to judge for
themselves the merit or demerit of whatever expressed thoughts they
encounter. We’ve long recognized, and rightly feared, the danger of
allowing government officials to superintend and suppress peaceful
expression.

Yet with COVID, this presumption was significantly weakened, if not (yet)
reversed. The US Congress held a hearing to investigate “the harm caused
by the spread and monetisation of coronavirus misinformation online to try
and identify the steps needed to stop the spread and promote accurate
public health information,” while high-ranking US government public-health
officials tried to orchestrate an effort to discredit the Great Barrington
Declaration. A Cornell Medical School official, writing in the New York
Times, openly called for suppressing the speech of physicians who dissent
from the prevailing ‘expert’ consensus.

Peaceful expression and the exchange of ideas are now regarded by many
elites as sources of potentially dangerous ‘externalities.’ And in the
minds of public-health paternalists, the only way to protect the body
politic from becoming lethally infected with what public-health
paternalists themselves deem to be misinformation is for government to
suppress the spread of viral ideas no less than it suppresses the spread of
viral molecular structures. This ominous development during COVID surely
was encouraged by the rise over the past few years of public-health
paternalists.




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Bonus Quotation of the Day

Posted: 20 Mar 2022 08:30 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
is from page 228 of Lionel Shriver’s great 2016 novel, The Mandibles:

All governments rob their people. It’s what they do.




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Some Non-Covid Links

Posted: 20 Mar 2022 04:43 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




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Arnold Kling is thoughtful and wise. A slice:

Another concern that I have is the need for turnover. When agencies
perpetuate themselves, there is little chance for new thinking to emerge.
In government, we need to find a way to balance the advantage of
institutional knowledge with the adverse consequences of thinking that
becomes stale and rigid.

But most of all, we need an overall political culture that does not suffer
from excessive faith in central government. Too many well-educated people
believe that credentialed experts have all the answers. And too many
anti-elitists believe that popular opinion provides all the answers.
Skepticism, epistemic humility, and appreciation of my four propositions
are all too rare.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Adam White warns against the further
politicization of the the U.S. Supreme Court. A slice:

It is remarkable to see how little the court’s loudest critics even attempt
to anchor their attacks to our basic constitutional principles. They
attempt to delegitimize the court for failing to act like a legislature.
They accuse it of being insufficiently representative and promoting the
wrong policies.

In all of it, these critics ignore the fundamental requirements of their
own role as citizens. Judicial legitimacy isn’t simply a matter of
hecklers’ vetoes. It requires the critics themselves to grapple seriously
with the court’s explanations. And it requires all of us to recognize that
disagreements are a part of constitutional government.

Tim Padgett reviews, in the New York Times, William Neumans new book,
Things Are Never So Bad That They Cant Get Worse: Inside the Collapse of
Venezuela. A slice:

Neuman skillfully explains just how insane. “Chávez’s socialism was all
means and no production,” he writes. “It was showcialismo,” an endless
bacchanal of multibillion-dollar projects — like a national electricity
monopoly, Corpoelec — that were essentially left to rot after the
ribbon-cuttings. As Venezuela gorged on imports and prices ballooned,
Chávez and his handpicked successor, the witless ideologue Nicolás Maduro,
kept forcing price controls that further discouraged domestic industry,
spawning huge shortages and extortionate black markets.

“It was a Yogi Berra economy,” Neuman wryly observes. “Stuff was so cheap
that nobody could afford to buy it anymore.”

Epic graft schemes proved even more crippling, especially after oil prices
went south again. Using fraudulent contracts and invoices, Chavista
mandarins and their business cronies gamed the chasm between the official
and black-market bolívar-to-dollar exchange rates. They reaped Mafia-grade
profits; they also bled the state-run oil monopoly, PDVSA, of cash and
robbed Venezuelans of urgent necessities like food, housing and energy
infrastructure.

And heres an excerpt from Neumans book.

Heres a short course from David Henderson in oil economics.

Robert Bork, Jr., busts some of todays myths about the alleged
monopolization of the American economy. Heres his conclusion:

Perhaps the administration is right about one thing. There is excessive
concentration of power – in Washington, D.C.

Stephanie Slade asks if libertarians must care about more than state power.
A slice:

As good libertarians, we know better than to ask the state to solve these
sorts of problems, but we dont have to pretend they arent real. To say that
a good society just is a free society and a good life just is a free life
is to miss all of that. Greater freedom from force and fraud is always a
positive thing. Greater freedom from cultural constraints may not be.

Smoke does not get into George Wills eyes. As slice:

Today, many corporations slather their business calculations with a syrup
of fashionable blather. By the time this geyser of corporate-gush
concludes, no progressive trope has been unused: Ending “exclusionary
policies” will ameliorate “climate change” and “institutionalized
inequity.” PMI wants to achieve “a smoke-free future” by selling
noncombustible tobacco products — e-cigarettes. PMI and Altria rightly
resent those who insist that only zero-risk products are virtuous
alternatives to the known high risks of cigarettes.

The behavior of many millions of Americans is generating an ocean of data
that can be acquired no other way — data about harm-reduction from
smoke-free, non-combustion products. Do they, over time, wean smokers off
cigarettes? Or do they, particularly with flavors that delight the young,
become a gateway to cigarettes? We will find out, unless government
regulations truncate the experiment.

Robby Soave reports on the New York Timess admission of the dangers of
cancel culture. A slice:

The New York Times published a terrific editorial on Friday that takes note
of Americas free speech problem and points to both right-wing legislation
and cancel culture—enforced by an uncompromising strain of progressivism—as
culprits.

For all the tolerance and enlightenment that modern society claims,
Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free
country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public
without fear of being shamed or shunned, wrote The Times.

The editorial includes a predictable (and mostly well-deserved)
condemnation of conservative attempts to legislate away uncomfortable
discussions about sex and race in schools. But it stands out for directly
attacking the lefts censorship impulse.

Many on the left refuse to acknowledge that cancel culture exists at all,
believing that those who complain about it are offering cover for bigots to
peddle hate speech, wrote The Times.

Daniel Hannan explains that [i]dentity politics is eroding the values which
set the West apart from Putin. A slice:

Could we be returning to that older ethic? We might dismiss Putin as an
outlier. But can we be certain that he is not also an augur? It might seem
a trivial thing, but look at how quickly we have extended our quarrel with
Putin to all Russians. An orchestra in Montreal cancels a Russian pianist,
despite his opposition to the invasion; Tchaikovsky is dropped from
programmes; Russian paintings are removed from exhibitions. My tribe good,
your tribe bad.

These cancellations are happening in a culture newly primed to categorise
and condemn. We damn institutions for some ancient benefaction. We stop
publishing authors because of opinions that had nothing to do with their
work. We teach identity politics, encouraging people to believe that they
have grievances or obligations purely on grounds of their physiognomy.

GMU Econ alum Eli Dourado offers several excellent suggestions for raising
economic productivity. A slice:

If we wanted to raise American productivity, for example, we could simplify
geothermal permitting, deregulate advanced meltdown-proof nuclear reactors,
make it easier to build transmission lines, figure out why high-speed rail
is so expensive, fix permitting generally, abolish the Jones Act, automate
our ports, allow drones to operate autonomously, legalize supersonic flight
over land, reduce occupational-licensing requirements, train more medical
workers, build more hospitals, revamp our pandemic-response institutions,
simplify drug approvals, deregulate land use to allow denser housing and
mixed-use neighborhoods, allow more immigration, cancel inefficient
programs, restrict cost-plus procurement contracts in favor of more
effective methods, end appropriations based on job creation, avoid
political direction of scientific research, and instill urgency in
grantmaking.




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Some Covid Links

Posted: 20 Mar 2022 03:40 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
In this Twitter thread, Alexandros Marinos exposes the misinformation being
spread by the U.S. Surgeon General in a document marketed as a guide for
helping Americans avoid misinformation. (HT Jay Bhattacharya) A slice:

In fact, the CDC has been a source for comically bad science throughout, or
more likely, papers constructed in violation of the scientific method, to
provide backing for a politically expedient position.

Also justifiably dismayed by the U.S. governments peddling of misleading
information specifically, here, misleading assertions of the alleged net
benefits of vaccinating young children against Covid-19 is el gato malo. A
slice:

one fact in medical care is unarguable:

medical interventions are everywhere and always a risk/benefit calculation.

this is just bedrock reality. nothing is free. you must always compare that
which a treatment will gain you to that which it will cost you. you must
weigh risk as well as reward.

anyone pushing just reward is lying to you.

i could douse you in gasoline and light you on fire. it would reduce your
chance of being stung by a bee.

seem like a good trade?

and the CDC is, yet again, failing to do this or even acknowledge the
concept.

Using as an example the experience of Hong Kong, Ian Miller busts some
myths about masking.

Other than the laughable assertion that lockdowns structurally reinforced
key sections of capitalism the author mistakes benefits to existing big
businesses with capitalism this criticism, from the far left, of
zero-Covid lunacy is quite good. A slice:

The left zero-covid cultists, however, ‘knew’ they were right because they
had the right politics. This superior politics told them that ‘non
pharmaceutical interventions’ could eliminate the disease. It told them
they did not need an understanding of the nature of respiratory disease in
general and the four coronaviruses in particular. It left them clueless
about the nature of transmission. They remained ignorant of the
inevitability of the process of evolution that characterises the 200 or so
respiratory viruses humans live with or the resulting limits of vaccines.

MITs new mask policy bans groups from forcing people to wear masks.

The Telegraphs Science Editor Sarah Knapton reports on the difficulty of
getting an accurate measure of Covid deaths in Britain. Two slices:

The number of people who have died from Covid in Britain during the
pandemic is impossible to determine because of the inconsistent definitions
of what is meant by a coronavirus death, researchers have concluded.

Experts from Oxford University discovered that public health and statistics
organisations across the UK are operating under 14 different definitions to
classify a death from Covid.

Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, collated for a new report published
on Saturday, show that many people who died in the first wave never tested
positive for the virus, particularly older people who died in care homes.

Instead, their deaths were registered as Covid simply based on a statement
of the care home provider, and because coronavirus was rife at the time.

In some care homes, more than half of the Covid deaths were registered in
people without pre-existing conditions, which the report authors said was
“implausible” for people who needed residential care.

The authors also point out that it is unlikely that a Covid infection on
its own could cause death in the absence of contributing factors, such as
other illness, or the infection leading to a more deadly condition such as
pneumonia.

The report also found that in some trusts, up to 95 per cent of Covid
deaths were in people with Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) orders.

The team said the confusion meant they were unable to separate deaths
caused by Covid from those triggered by the pandemic response, and called
for a proportion of deaths to be verified by post-mortem in future
pandemics to determine the true reason.

Dr Tom Jefferson, of the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine (CEBM) at
Oxford University, said: “Every night we were given this diet of cases,
admissions and deaths. But we found that even the ONS doesn’t have a
standard definition for deaths. We found 14 different ways to express the
cause of death.

“There are a number of death certificates where Covid-19 is the only cause
of death, and that is not possible. It has to be something like Covid-19
induced pneumonia, if it goes to the kidneys and you get kidney failure.

“We found some organisations coded Covid deaths even in the absence of
positive Covid tests. Some nursing homes had allocated causality to
Covid-19 not on the basis of tests but when those deaths occurred, usually
in the Spring of 2020. Nursing homes decide themselves what was the cause.

“All of this means that we don’t really know who has died of Covid, or how
severe it is, and this continues to this day. Separating the ravages of the
virus from the ravages of human stupidity is not possible.”

..

The UK Statistics watchdog has said that excess deaths give the closest
indication, but researchers said it was impossible to separate deaths from
Covid and those caused by the pandemic response.

“It’s very hard to understand who is dying of Covid and who is dying from
the measures put in place to tackle the virus,” added Prof Henghan.

“For example, if you’re elderly and have dementia and are left alone,
you’ll be dead in two to three days. We were in panic mode.

“When you look across the devolved nations there are real problems. There
are subtle variations in how the deaths were recorded, and these different
interpretations have left everyone seriously confused.”

See also this report by Eve Simmons.




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Quotation of the Day

Posted: 20 Mar 2022 01:30 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
is from page 651 of the 1988 collection of Lord Acton’s writings and notes
to himself (edited by the late J. Rufus Fears), Essays in Religion,
Politics, and Morality; specifically, it’s a note drawn from Acton’s
extensive papers at Cambridge University:

You may govern by force, but you cannot at the same time hold by both
physical and moral means.

DBx: Indeed so.

The greater is the amount of physical coercion that the state must credibly
threaten to use against its citizens in order to pursue its goals, the more
immoral are those goals.




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Beware Drawing Parallels Between Smallpox and Covid-19

Posted: 19 Mar 2022 10:42 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
Much of this letter relies on Jay Bhattacharya’s and my op-ed in the August
5th, 2021, edition of the Wall Street Journal.

Editor, Los Angeles Times

Editor:

Saad Omer concludes his op-ed on the surge of omicron in China by praising
the U.S.’s and U.S.S.R.’s earlier joint effort to eradicate smallpox
(“China’s lockdowns are a warning to us all,” March 18). As admirable as
was this effort to eradicate a deadly disease, we must beware of drawing
too many parallels between smallpox and Covid-19.

Smallpox was dozens of times more deadly than are earlier strains of the
SARS-CoV-2 virus. Because omicron is less deadly than are earlier Covid
strains, the huge gulf separating the lethality of smallpox from that of
omicron is even larger. Another notable difference is that smallpox killed
children in droves, while Covid is disproportionately dangerous to the
elderly while posing almost no danger whatsoever to children and hardly
any danger to young adults.

Also, unlike SARS-CoV-2 which uses as reservoirs animals in addition to
humans, smallpox used only humans. This reality helps explain why smallpox
is only one of two contagious diseases that humans have deliberately
eradicated – the other being rinderpest, which affected only even-toed
ungulates.

Finally, it’s worthwhile to recall the wisdom of the late epidemiologist
Donald Henderson, who’s credited with playing a key role in smallpox’s
eradication. In a 2006 article, Henderson, et al., counseled careful
thinking about disease-mitigation measures such as “travel restrictions,
prohibition of social gatherings, school closures, maintaining personal
distance, and the use of masks.” The authors conclude:
Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse
events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social
functioning of the community is least disrupted. Strong political and
public health leadership to provide reassurance and to ensure that needed
medical care services are provided are critical elements. If either is seen
to be less than optimal, a manageable epidemic could move toward
catastrophe.

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




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

Posted: 19 Mar 2022 08:45 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
is from page 6 of Columbia University law professor Philip Hamburger’s
2020 monograph, The Administrative Threat:

Ever tempted to exert more power with less effort, rulers are rarely
content to govern merely through the law, and in their restless desire to
escape its pathways, many of them try to work through other mechanisms.
These other modes of binding subjects are absolute power.




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

Posted: 19 Mar 2022 03:15 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
Jen Psaki claims that the White House doesnt know that a 79-year-old man
who gets Covid might suffer more seriously than would someone in his or her
20s who gets Covid. (DBx: Please tell me again why government officials are
to be trusted to follow the science.)

CDC reports of historical covid deaths drop by 70k to correct coding error.'

Reasons Eric Boehm reports yet more gross incompetence by Americas
public-health (so-called) bureaucracy.

Covid hysteria further battered the democratic ethos.

Maybe some good news out of China?

Dr. Eli David tweets: (HT Martin Kulldorff)

Two years after the entire world (except Sweden) locked down, it is now
clear that they were all wrong and Sweden 🇸🇪 was right.

Will they admit it? Will Fauci apologize for causing the most damage any
scientist ever caused? Dont hold your breath

Linking to a (gated) piece that she recently coauthored in the San
Francisco Chronicle, Leslie Bienen tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

Our nation’s top health officials must undo the fear they helped create and
reassure families and educators that normal pre-pandemic school is safe.




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

Posted: 19 Mar 2022 01:15 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
is from page 227 of the late, great UCLA economists Armen A. Alchian’s and
William R. Allen’s Universal Economics (2018; Jerry L. Jordan, ed.); this
volume is an updated version of Alchian’s and Allen’s magnificent and
pioneering earlier textbook, University Economics:

Knowledge is a valuable (economic) resource. To assume it is free is, for
example, to deny that teachers perform a useful and desirable service. A
substantial fraction of our wealth is devoted to gathering information of
one kind or another. Do not suppose that ignorance is always irrational,
ridiculous, or the result of inefficiency or lying.

DBx: Because we humans aren’t gods, we spend huge amounts of time gathering
knowledge. But because time is scarce (and, hence, valuable), we waste it
if we do not rationally choose which sorts of knowledge to pursue and which
to ignore.

Ignorance that is, the absence of knowledge being what it is, we
prospectively can only make reasonable guesses about which sorts of
knowledge are worthwhile to pursue and which to not pursue. What we
subsequently learn might well indeed, often does reveal to us that our
earlier decisions are ones that we would not have taken had we then knew
what we later come to know. Such is the inescapable fate of us mere mortals.

Yet no person will knowingly spend his or her scarce time and effort
acquiring knowledge that he or she believes will be of no use to him or
her. I chose the above photo to accompany this quotation because each
semester I teach my freshman students about rational ignorance meaning,
ignorance that it is rational not to dispel. There in a classroom, I ask my
students Without looking up, how many of you can tell me the correct answer
to this question: Whats the number of lightbulbs in the ceiling above your
heads? I have never had a student offer an answer to this question.

I then point out that knowledge of the number of lightbulbs that are in the
classroom ceiling is very easy knowledge to acquire. First graders can
gather it. Yet no college student or their professor has an answer to
this question. The reason for our ignorance, I inform my students, is that
that piece of knowledge is utterly useless. Gathering this piece of
knowledge isn’t worth spending even the tiny amount of time and effort
required. So this ignorance is rational. Acquiring this knowledge would be
wasteful and irrational.

Even the smartest and most well-informed human who has ever lived or who
will ever live will come to know only an invisible fraction of the total
amount of knowledge available to be known. One of the great challenges of
an economy is to prompt individuals to acquire knowledge that is worthwhile
to acquire while not tempting them to waste time and effort acquiring
knowledge that is pointless.




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