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Rein In the Administrative State

Posted: 24 Mar 2022 01:42 PM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
Charles I would disagree.

Editor:

Karl Rove predicts that the courts and American voters will react
negatively if the Biden administration follows the advice of progressive
Democrats to rule even more by administrative (“executive”) diktat (“2022
Midterm Strategy Pulls Democrats Apart,” March 24). I hope Mr. Rove is
correct.

Refined by the Tudors and Stuarts to circumvent common law and Parliament,
such prerogative-court-like measures have no place in a liberal democratic
republic. They are incompatible with the rule of law generally, and with
the U.S. Constitution specifically. As Columbia University law professor
Philip Hamburger summarizes, “Being not law but a mode of evasion, which
flows around law and law-like things, administrative power has flowed
around the Constitution’s pathways of power and even around formal
administrative pathways, thus creating a cascade of evasions.”*

It’s long past time for the president and Congress to stop these unlawful
evasions to stop harassing the American people with diktats issued in
violation of constitutionally prescribed procedures. And it’s long past
time, too, for the courts to rein in this grotesque abuse of power.

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

* Philip Hambuger, The Administrative Threat (New York: Encounter Books,
2020), pages 16-17.




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Dissenting from Oren Casss Take on Adam Smith on Trade

Posted: 24 Mar 2022 10:53 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




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Pardon the length of this letter, but given that it’s mostly quotations
from Adam Smith, it should be a joy to read.

Mr. W__:

Persuaded that Oren Cass is correct to argue that, as you put it, “Adam
Smith[] was not a knee jerk free trade promoter,” you seek my reaction to
Oren’s argument.

No serious scholar ever accused Adam Smith’s knee of jerking in advocacy of
any policy. Smith developed his case for a policy of unilateral free trade
with great care, knowledge, reflection, and wisdom. Further, he explicitly
offered exceptions to his case for free trade. (I write about these
exceptions here.) But it’s wrong to conclude that the exceptions Smith
mentioned overwhelm his underlying case for free trade. Anyone who reads
The Wealth of Nations in its entirety understands that Smith was deeply
suspicious of economic nationalism generally, and of protectionism
specifically. This reader therefore understands that Smith would look with
immense disfavor upon Oren’s case for a policy of a “bounded market.”

And so I suspect that Oren hasn’t read The Wealth of Nations in its
entirety. Were he to do so, he’d realize the error of his assertion that
Smith favored free trade only “only so long as a nation’s capitalists
invested within its own borders.” Oren’s claim here is simply and fully
mistaken. (My colleague Dan Klein is working on an essay that further
exposes this error.)

My student Jon Murphy correctly notes that danger lurks in reading only
quotations from Adam Smith; Smith’s entire corpus should be read.
Nevertheless, The Wealth of Nations alone does contain more than enough
quotable passages to reveal that Oren errs in suggesting that Smith (1)
supported free trade only insofar as capitalists invest domestically, (2)
believed that free trade is desirable only if it doesn’t result in trade
‘imbalances,’ and (3) would have supported industrial policy. Here are some
of those passages:
The balance of produce and consumption may be constantly in favour of a
nation, though what is called the balance of trade be generally against it.
A nation may import to a greater value than it exports for half a century,
perhaps, together; the gold and silver which comes into it during an this
time may be all immediately sent out of it; its circulating coin may
gradually decay, different sorts of paper money being substituted in its
place, and even the debts, too, which it contracts in the principal nations
with whom it deals, may be gradually increasing; and yet its real wealth,
the exchangeable value of the annual produce of its lands and labour, may,
during the same period, have been increasing in a much greater proportion.
The state of our North American colonies, and of the trade which they
carried on with Great Britain, before the commencement of the present
disturbances, may serve as a proof that this is by no means an impossible
supposition.[Book IV, Chapter 3]

…..
Nothing, however, can be more absurd than this whole doctrine of the
balance of trade. [Book IV, Chapter 3]

…..
All systems either of preference or of restraint, therefore, being thus
completely taken away, the obvious and simple system of natural liberty
establishes itself of its own accord. Every man, as long as he does not
violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own
interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into
competition with those of any other man, or order of men. The sovereign is
completely discharged from a duty, in the attempting to perform which he
must always be exposed to innumerable delusions, and for the proper
performance of which no human wisdom or knowledge could ever be sufficient;
the duty of superintending the industry of private people, and of directing
it towards the employments most suitable to the interest of the society.
[Book IV, Chapter 9]

…..
Were all nations to follow the liberal system of free exportation and free
importation, the different states into which a great continent was divided
would so far resemble the different provinces of a great empire. As among
the different provinces of a great empire the freedom of the inland trade
appears, both from reason and experience, not only the best palliative of a
dearth, but the most effectual preventative of a famine; so would the
freedom of the exportation and importation trade be among the different
states into which a great continent was divided. The larger the continent,
the easier the communication through all the different parts of it, both by
land and by water, the less would any one particular part of it ever be
exposed to either of these calamities, the scarcity of any one country
being more likely to be relieved by the plenty of some other. [Book IV,
Chapter 5]

…..
The statesman who should attempt to direct private people in what manner
they ought to employ their capitals would not only load himself with a most
unnecessary attention, but assume an authority which could safely be
trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate
whatever, and which would nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man
who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it.
[Book IV, Chapter 2]

There’s more – much more – from Adam Smith along these lines. But the above
quotations are sufficient to prove that this great Scot would have looked
with scorn upon attempts by government to engineer a “bounded market.”

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 Non-Covid Links

Posted: 24 Mar 2022 05:05 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




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GMU Econ student Dominic Pino, writing at National Review, is doing a
splendid job debunking Oren Casss latest call for protectionism. Heres one
of Doms pieces. A slice:

The true nature of Cass’s displeasure is thus not that the U.S. isn’t a
bounded market — it most certainly is. It’s that he wishes the market were
bounded differently than it has, in fact, been bound.

But here’s the thing about government-bound markets: They will always be
subject to special-interest pressure. This is especially true in the United
States, where forming associations and petitioning the government for a
redress of grievances are constitutionally protected rights. Trade groups
and lobbying firms have every right to make demands in Washington that they
believe will protect their members and clients. Other trade groups and
lobbying firms have every right to disagree.

Every duty and every exception in the Harmonized Tariff Schedule has a
backstory. These policies are not made by wise philosopher-kings seeking to
create a flourishing and virtuous economy. They’re made by bureaucrats and
members of Congress and presidential appointees, with input from the
Chamber of Commerce and the American Association of Widget Makers of
America.

In a representative republic with strong civil liberties, which is what the
United States is, the moment you give the government power to set a
boundary in the market is the same moment that interest groups you hadn’t
even heard of before will be lining up to tell you where to draw it. Some
of them are corrupt sleazes, but most of them are just exercising their
First Amendment rights. And elected politicians chasing votes and campaign
donations are going to listen to some of them.

If a bounded market is what you want, all you need do is look around. And
the federal government’s track record on establishing market boundaries is
not inspiring.

And heres Doms response to Casss reaction to Doms earlier essay. A slice:

The reason to avoid this trap is not some utopian sense of global fairness.
If all the costs to such intervention were borne by foreigners, there might
be a case for taking them. But the costs of government-granted privileges
for corporations are ultimately borne by American consumers, through higher
prices, fewer options, and yes, less freedom to spend their hard-earned
money as they see fit. If we want to see a flourishing American economy, a
goal Cass and I share, we should take pride in our place as a hub in the
global marketplace and remove the government regulations and taxes that
unreasonably hold our people back from participating in it.

J.D. Tuccille explains that no crisis justifies a dictatorship. A slice:

So, environmental advocates arent the only people impatient with debate and
persuasion. But they are on the leading edge of the illiberal impulse at
the same time that they embody the dangers inherent in trying to achieve
policy goals through authoritarian means—because authoritarian regimes have
a terrible record on environmental issues.

During the environmental decade of the 1960s and 1970s scholars first
wondered whether communist states might have developed in an
environmentally more sensitive way than capitalist ones, wrote Douglas R.
Weiner in The Cambridge History of Communism, published in 2017. Most
concluded that not only did communist regimes fail to realize the
theoretical advantages of a dirigiste system, their careless practices
brought about, in the words of Murray Feshbach and Fred Friendly, Jr., an
ecocide.'

Eric Boehm decries the Biden administrations apparent cluelessness of
economics.

Also decrying Bidens economic cluelessness and his penchant for cronyism
is my intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy. Heres her
conclusion:

So here you have it: Once again, Washington is giving us every reason to
believe its selling favors to cronies even if it means worker safety,
railroad efficiency, supply chains and the environment lose in the process.

As this editorial in the Wall Street Journal makes clear, politicians are
self-spoofing. A slice:

A trio of House Democrats—Mike Thompson (Calif.), John Larson (Conn.), and
Lauren Underwood (Illinois)—have introduced the Gas Rebate Act of 2022 to
send Americans a $100 check in any month this year when the national
average gas price exceeds $4 a gallon. Dependents will get another $100, so
the family of four can fill up that SUV on Uncle Sam’s dime. The national
average price has exceeded $4 in recent weeks.

The word “rebate” is a misnomer because this isn’t rebated from any payment
to the federal government. It’s a government check to pay for higher gas
prices caused in large part by government. Voters are blaming Democratic
policies for inflation and for making it harder to produce American oil and
gas. With an election coming, and their majority in peril, Democrats are
resorting to what they do best: Spending more of your money.

The non-rebate rebate is even worse policy than the gas tax holiday that
some states are proposing. Neither addresses the real problem, but at least
the tax holiday lets people keep their own money. The rebate idea deserves
to die in the crib, but the spectacle of climate-change warriors suddenly
trying to subsidize fossil-fuel consumption is almost worth it.

My GMU Econ colleague Bryan Caplan warns of the toxicity of the combination
of the unforgivable heuristic with collective guilt.

John O. McGinnis reviews Steven Pinkers new book, Rationality. A slice:

Third, determining the truth in social affairs is harder than in natural
science. We cannot run the social conditions of the world over again,
changing its conditions to isolate the causes of a social phenomenon.
Causation is ultimately about counterfactuals. If A causes B, it follows
that if A does not happen, neither will B given otherwise exactly similar
initial conditions. But precisely defined counterfactual social worlds live
only in our imagination. Thus, motivated reasoning inevitably dominates
social science more than natural science. Not only are the real-world
stakes in social disputes generally more immediate and personal (what will
be the effect of higher taxes on me) than in purely scientific ones (does
this gene cause this disease), but the effects of policy are genuinely hard
to pin down.

Heres part 17 of George Selgins marvelous series on the New Deal.




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Some Covid Links

Posted: 24 Mar 2022 03:04 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




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In the Wall Street Journal, GMU Law professor Eugene Kontorovich explains,
with Anastasia Lin, that not until Chinas authoritarian regime used
lockdowns did policy unthinkable in the west suddenly become a widespread
dystopian practice. Two slices:

Stay-at-home orders weren’t part of the script in pre-Covid federal
pandemic plans. The idea of “flattening the curve” through what are known
as “layered non-pharmaceutical interventions” can be traced to an
influential 2007 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance paper,
updated in 2017. Contemplating a severe pandemic with a 2% case fatality
rate, the CDC recommended now-familiar strategies, such as masking, surface
disinfection and temporary school closings.

Yet aside from suggesting limits on mass gatherings, the CDC paper makes no
mention of closing workplaces. Instead, it concludes that such a severe
pandemic could warrant recommending that employers “offer telecommuting and
replace in-person meetings in the workplace with video or telephone
conferences.” The closest it comes to lockdowns is recommending “voluntary
home quarantine” for people with an infected family member.

..

The Chinese Communist Party aimed to eradicate Covid cases completely,
regardless of the human cost. China’s zero-Covid policy continues. A
handful of cases can put a city under strict lockdown, devastating normal
life. Xi’an, a city of 13 million people suddenly went into lockdown in
December. An eight-month-pregnant woman lost her baby after being denied
medical attention for hours, causing national outrage. This month, a
4-year-old girl in Changchun died while waiting for a negative Covid test
before being admitted to a hospital for acute laryngitis.

By denying individual dignity and freedom, communism leaves no basis for
moral judgment other than a brutal utilitarianism. On the Chinese internet
at the pandemic’s outset one could read comments to the effect that
sacrificing 11 million for the sake of 1.4 billion was a good bargain. A
Wuhan resident, in an anonymous March 2020 essay for NPR, saw through this
rationale: “When someone says we can accomplish something but we must pay a
price, do not rush to applaud. One day you may become the price that is
paid.”

When Western nations were confronted with Covid-19, they seemed to believe
the Communist Party’s unproven claims about the efficacy of lockdowns. In
the end, every other country got some variant of the virus and some variant
of China’s official response.

More Americans 65 and Under Died from Alcohol-Related Causes Than Covid-19
in 2020, Study Finds

in response to which Karol Markowicz tweets:

Our leaders behaved as if the lockdowns were so super easy to do (remember:
stay the fuck home!) and would have no consequences. They did.

GMU Econ alum Dan Sutter rightly applauds some beneficial policy changes
all deregulatory spurred by Covid hysteria. A slice:

Health care has featured some significant rule waivers. Telehealth has
received an enormous boost. Like remote work, the required technology has
existed for some time. Legal restrictions were holding telehealth back. The
pandemic forced experimentation for patients fearful of catching COVID at a
doctor’s office.

Telehealth, though, offers enormous benefit going forward, particularly for
residents of underserved rural areas. Safety is also a factor: individuals
with health conditions can avoid potentially dangerous drives to doctors’
offices. Patients with rare illnesses or difficult cases can consult more
specialists.

State licensure creates barriers for virtual consultation across state
lines. State medical boards claim to uphold quality in licensing, but this
is only true if other states license unqualified quacks. I read about a
Pennsylvania patient again facing a two-hour drive to Johns Hopkins in
Maryland with the end of the pandemic exemption. Does the Pennsylvania
medical board truly think that doctors at Johns Hopkins – one of the
nation’s leading medical schools – are not qualified to treat
Pennsylvanians?

Pandemic deregulation waived limits on medical professionals known as scope
of practice regulation. For example, physician assistants were allowed to
practice to the extent of their training. Scope of practice limits are
driven by profits, not safe medicine and simply keep professionals from
fully employing their expertise. Researchers will determine if these
exemptions increased misdiagnoses; if not, this would demonstrate the
limits’ lack of medical purpose.

David Henderson and Charley Hooper make a strong case that in pandemics,
old drugs may save us. Heres their opening:

Imagine that a new pandemic hits and, sadly, you test positive. Luckily,
we’re better prepared this time and a widely used, safe, convenient pill
priced at only $1 is available and can reduce your risk of death by 56%.
Would you take it?

Actually, such a drug was available during this pandemic. It has been on
the market for decades.

This drug and others like it were available at the start of COVID-19. Yet
few of us knew about them or had them easily available as therapeutic
choices. Why? These life-saving drugs were purposely and systematically
ignored and, when not ignored, denigrated by the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration, making them generally unavailable. If they had been widely
available, and encouraged, hundreds of thousands of Americans might not
have died unnecessarily.

While newer drugs are often better than older drugs, older drugs have
something that newer drugs don’t: they are cheap and widely available
today. When a pandemic starts, they are all we have.

Since the pandemic started, some older drugs, vitamins, and minerals have
been widely tested for therapeutic activity against COVID-19. Table 1 shows
some of the key results. Mortality rates are shown because death is the
most serious outcome, and yet these pills also prevent infections, help
keep patients off mechanical ventilators, keep them out of the ICU and the
hospital altogether, foster faster recoveries, and improve viral clearance.
Their utility against this deadly virus has been tested in hundreds of
clinical trials involving hundreds of thousands of patients. Moreover,
their other attributes are clearly known after decades of use and many
millions of doses.

el gato malo proposes a plausible theory for why so very many human beings
have become addicted to dystopian Covid restrictions. Two slices:

getting hooked on dope is not really different than getting hooked on
betting the ponies. anything that you can use to hide from, avoid, or
escape something painful in your life can become an addiction. this is why
people who carry damage, who were raised in badly dysfunctional families,
who were abused as kids, who have been through war, or who have undergone
some other massive stressor see their rates of addiction explode: they are
the ones with things to avoid and escape.

and this is what made a 2 year fear campaign about a virus in combination
with compulsory masking and lockdown a truly nasty form of societal
predation.

..

this is going to be with us for a long time.

that’s the nature of addiction. when you remove that which has been being
used to mitigate pain and the pain returns, addicts will bend reality and
anyone around them to get back to the place where it doesn’t hurt.

Jeffrey Tucker talks with Leigh Vossen and Brandon Paradoski, who are with
Students Against Mandates.

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

The New York Posts Editorial Board calls on the city government to free all
workers from Covid vaccine mandates.

Michael Deacon explains that, as bad as things got under lockdown in
Britain, matters would have been worse in Scotland had the government there
followed a policy from Panama. A slice:

Two whole years have now passed since the first Covid lockdown. None of us
will ever forget how awful it was. The park benches taped off. The
children’s swings removed. The innocent dog walkers tracked by police
drones. The local councils trying to stop shops from selling Easter eggs,
because they weren’t deemed to be “essential items”. And, most absurdly of
all, the father in Rotherham reprimanded by a police officer for playing
with his own children in his own front garden.

It was absolutely suffocating, and often farcical. Believe it or not,
though, it could actually have been even worse. Because, crazy though some
of our rules were, at least we didn’t adopt the craziest rule of all.

Newly published documents reveal that, in spring 2020, the Scottish
government was invited to consider adopting a bizarre lockdown policy from
Panama. A paper presented to Scotland’s Covid advisory group listed a wide
range of measures that were being tried out in other countries across the
globe. And one of them was called “population scheduling”.

This, the paper explained, would mean that on Tuesdays, Thursdays and
Saturdays, only men would be allowed to leave the house. And on Mondays,
Wednesdays and Fridays, it would only be women.

The aim, apparently, was to reduce the risk of overcrowding in supermarkets
and chemists. In the event, the proposal was rejected. Which is a relief.
Because just imagine what it would have been like.

(DBx: The fact that such a proposal was even aired in Scotland testifies to
the dangers that Covid Derangement Syndrome poses to liberal civilization.)




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Quotation of the Day

Posted: 24 Mar 2022 01:00 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
is from page 7 of Deirdre McCloskey’s 2021 book, Bettering Humanomics: A
New, and Old, Approach to Economic Science (link added):

Economic logic itself contradicts social engineering in its varied forms.
If the social engineers were so smart, as I noted long ago in studying the
rhetoric of storytelling in economics, why aren’t they rich? Industrial
policy, anyone? It’s a fair question to ask of any expert proposing to run
your life with helpful suggestions or with coerced policies based on an
alleged ability to predict the future. Supernormal profit is a strict
implication of a supposed ability to predict and control. Yet we can’t
predict and control, not profitably, in a creative economy. Name the
economist who predicted the internet or containerization or the Green
Revolution or the automobile or the modern university or the steam engine.

DBx: This point, as simple as it is profound, continues to be ignored by
proponents, left and right, of industrial policy. The reason it is ignored
likely is that it is unanswerable. Once this point is grasped and granted,
the case for industrial policy is revealed to be as intellectually
substantive as dryer lint.




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A False God

Posted: 23 Mar 2022 12:53 PM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




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Here’s a letter to UnHerd:

Editor:

Mary Harrington reports that Canadians who support strong Covid
restrictions are more willing than are Canadians who are skeptical of such
restrictions to risk a shooting war with Russia (“The Covid-cautious are
hungriest for war,” March 23). She attributes this pattern of attitudes to
tribalism: Persons who embrace the official narrative of Covid restrictions
and mandates are especially prone to align without much thought with those
who accept the official narrative of Russia vs. Ukraine.

I propose a different explanation for these attitudes. People increasingly
believe that the state can work miracles – miracles such as using coercion
to control the spread of a highly contagious virus without inflicting
serious damage on society. For many who treated the state as an
all-powerful savior from Covid, it’s a short step to support policies that
increase the likelihood of a shooting war with Russia. After all, if our
leaders possess enough intelligence, wisdom, prescience, and
trustworthiness to deploy coercion to defeat, at acceptable cost, an enemy
called Covid, they surely possess enough intelligence, wisdom, prescience,
and trustworthiness to deploy coercion to defeat, at acceptable cost, an
enemy called Putin.

Regardless of the correctness or incorrectness of one’s understanding of
the dangers of Covid and of Putin, the problem is that too many people, in
effect, worship the state as a god. For these people, there’s almost no
blessing that this god cannot and will not grant – no prayer that this
deity cannot and will not answer – as long as We the People faithfully
kowtow to its high priests with fawning deference and reverence.

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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Bonus Quotation of the Day

Posted: 23 Mar 2022 10:32 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
is from page 8 of Deirdre McCloskey’s 2021 book, Bettering Humanomics: A
New, and Old, Approach to Economic Science:

We humans live in economies the way we live in cities and in language and
in art and in cookery and in the natural environment. Attempts at
overmastering by central planning usually do not work. We should restrain
therefore the impulse for a masterful prediction and control, and
impulse theorized in August Comte’s constructivist rubric two centuries ago
savior pour pouvoir. As it was put by the philosopher Yogi Berra (and, it
turns out, the physicist Niels Bohr), in the face of human creativity, or
of quantum mechanics, prediction is difficult, especially about the future.
So, therefore, is control.

DBx: Truly so. And so a fundamental problem with advocates of full-on
socialism, as well as with advocates of the socialism-lite that’s called
industrial policy, is that they do not know what they do not know. They
erroneously believe that they know more than they can possibly know. They
mistake the images in their minds, and the words on their laptops and in
their PowerPoint presentations, for reality. They falsely conclude that
their ability to easily describe some imagined future implies an ability
actually to create that imagined future.

And not only do these people not know about the present and the future what
they think they know, they don’t know enough even of what is knowable about
the past about economic history and the many failures of socialism and of
industrial policy.

These people do not know that they write, talk, and propose policies as if
they are gods. But sensible individuals know that these people are not
gods. Sensible individuals know also to beware of the ignorance-fueled
hubris of people whose policy proposals would make sense only if and when
such proposals are issued by genuine gods.




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Some Covid Links

Posted: 23 Mar 2022 03:35 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
Finally, New York Citys youngest schoolchildren are being freed from the
CDCs absurd guidance on masks.

Thankfully.

Two years ago today Britain locked down. Will Jones reflects.

Also reflecting on Britains lockdown is David McGrogan. A slice:

“Après nous, le déluge” should have been the motto of the past two years.
As long as one was “safe” and able to enjoy one’s splendid isolation with
one’s gin, one’s tonic, one’s Netflix, one’s Amazon Prime account and one’s
lockdown puppy, what consequence was it that government debt was
skyrocketing to 103.7% of GDP? What consequence was it that quantitative
easing would inevitably lead to eye-watering levels of inflation? What
consequence was it that a generation of children were not just being denied
schooling, but were being inducted into a world of addiction and vice by
being babysat by screens for days at a time? What consequence was it that
our young people, and their children, and their children’s children, would
likely have to deal with the fallout from all of this for their entire
lives?

The blitheness with which these issues have been treated over the past two
years puts one in mind of Edmund Burke’s famous warning, that the
“possessors” of a “commonwealth”, “unmindful of what they have received
from their ancestors, or of what is due to their posterity”, might “commit
waste on the inheritance” of the young. Apart from being bad in itself
(passing on society’s wealth to the young is one of the most important
duties of adults), this would have the even worse effect of teaching the
younger generations the same bad habits, to the ultimate ruination of the
“commonwealth” itself. Burke’s warning has been ignored for decades, but
the experience of lockdown confirmed its horrible predictive power – it is
bad enough that we spend £60 billion a year (that could be spent, for
example, on education) merely on servicing debt, and that inflation will
soon approach 10% (meaning that savers will lose a tenth of the value of
their children’s inheritance in a single year). But what is truly
terrifying is that most of the adult population of the country do not seem
to care, and certainly have no interest in teaching to children the message
that the nation’s wealth is a valuable inheritance that they are to
steward, and pass on to their own children in turn. And that’s just the
economic side of life: what can one say about a society which sees nothing
wrong in forcing children to stay at home for months, without meeting or
playing with other children, and inflicting great mental harm as a result –
merely to make adults feel safe? It is a society shorn of loyalty to
anything larger or longer-lasting than the immediate physical existence of
its members; a society comprised of individuals in the truest sense,
thinking only of their own health and in signalling their own virtue in
purportedly “protecting others”.

The straw man continues to romp through China.

Jeffrey Jaxen isnt impressed with Bidens choice of Ashish Jha to serve as
the new White House Covid Response Coordinator. A slice:

The Biden Administration has announced a new pandemic roadmap and with it,
a new response coordinator. Although the new plan claims to “Prevent
Economic and Educational Shutdowns” by providing schools and businesses the
supplies and guidance they need to remain open, its incoming response
coordinator has been a proponent of lockdowns, school closures, masking
kids, vaccine passports, businesses mandating vaccines on their employees
and not communicating the science on natural immunity (calling for
previously infected to get vaccinated). Due to his visibility in the press
during the COVID response, Dr. Jha has appeared to be a Fauci in waiting.

The Great Barrington Declaration has been both a bellwether and teaching
point during, and now after, the flawed government pandemic response is
subsiding.

The Declaration’s three highly credentialed signatories promoted a policy
called “focused protection” of high-risk populations. Its authors strongly
cautioned to avoid lockdowns. They predicted it would lead to known, heavy
burdens on the working class and younger members of society, bringing
irreparable damage and disproportionate harm to society’s underprivileged.

Tragically, time has shown these authors were right.

Yet, Dr. Jha didn’t seem to understand the public health debate he was a
part of. Which was fine as many health professionals fell for the fear play
and became cheerleaders of lockdowns – only later to apologize for their
errors.

Dr. Jha told lawmakers discussing the COVID response to Stop talking about
things they dont know much about’ yet perhaps it was he who should have
heeded such advice.

On October 15, 2020, less than two weeks after The Declaration was released
publicly, Dr. Jha bashed the document calling it ‘junk science.’

Your Ontario Doctors tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

2yrs ago we uncritically accepted unreliable mathematical models that
predicted this microbiological apocalypse.. Now enormous sunk costs of
reputation/politics make it hard for ppl to admit they were wrong

—Dr Schabas

Former ON CMOH [Ontarios Chief Medical Officer of Health]




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Quotation of the Day

Posted: 23 Mar 2022 01:00 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
is from page 99 of F.A. Hayek’s last book, his 1988 The Fatal Conceit:

The creation of wealth is not simply a physical process and cannot be
explained by a chain of cause and effect. It is determined not by objective
physical facts known to any one mind but by the separate, differing,
information of millions, which is precipitated in prices that serve to
guide future decisions.

DBx: Hayek (1899-1992) died on this date 30 years ago.




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Some Non-Covid Links

Posted: 22 Mar 2022 01:06 PM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
Richard McKenzie offers to the White House some basic economics lessons
about oil prices. A slice:

When the Biden administration took over on January 20, 2020, it immediately
began a “war on fossil fuels” under its green agenda, heavily weighted
toward substantially reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. One of
President Biden’s first acts was to terminate by executive order
construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. He wrote, “Leaving the Keystone
XL pipeline permit in place would not be consistent with my
administration’s economic and climate imperatives.”[ii]

What Ms. Psaki and the President have overlooked is that termination of the
pipeline construction reduced the anticipated domestic and global supply of
oil in the future and, therefore, increased future oil prices above what
they would have been (as economists Dwight Lee and David Henderson argued
years ago[iii]). The hike in anticipated future prices likely caused
producers in the United States and around the globe to hang on to their
current oil reserves in anticipation of higher future profits. They can do
this by reducing their current and future drilling, leaving their easily
accessible known reserves in the ground, and holding on to a greater
fraction of their stored output.

The resulting domestic and global market outcome from the pipeline
cancellation? Higher current gasoline prices than Americans (and everyone
else) have faced since President Biden first occupied the Oval Office.

If the Biden administration announced a restart of the Keystone pipeline,
oil producers would reverse their thinking, because anticipated future oil
prices would fall with the greater future supply at lower cost, which can
be expected when the Keystone becomes operational. This means they could
anticipate that they future profits would fall below levels previously
anticipated. Producers could be expected to increase current market supply
drawn from reserves, which would put immediate downward pressure on the
current price of gasoline at the pump.

Scott Sumner exposes some of the flawed reasoning of industrial-policy
advocates.

Dan Mitchell rightly applauds states that cut taxes.

Eric Boehm decries the Congressional Progressive Caucuss disdain for the
role of Congress. A slice:

Every member of the progressive caucus in Congress is, by definition, a
member of Congress capable of writing and introducing legislation. If these
lawmakers want to see changes to existing laws like the Affordable Care Act
or want to create more laws to limit gas drilling, abolish student loans,
or change the immigration system, they should work with their colleagues to
pass those pieces of legislation.

The executive branch does not exist so ideas that cannot get the requisite
votes in Congress can become national policy anyway. This is exactly
backward. Presidents are supposed to take their agendas before Congress to
get approval or denial by the representatives of the American people. Isnt
that the whole point of the State of the Union dog and pony show we had to
sit through last month?

Its a sad commentary on our current Congress that its members would invite
and even urge the executive branch to arrogate legislative power to itself,
writes David Boaz, executive vice president of the libertarian Cato
Institute. Boaz notes that Trump accused [former President Barack] Obama of
taking the easy way out and promised to do away with executive orders—only
to then issue 220 executive orders in four years compared to 276 issued by
Obama over eight years. Biden, despite frequently talking about the
necessity of political consensus, has already issued 85 executive orders,
putting him roughly on pace to match or exceed Trumps one-term output.

Its a shame that George Will isnt on the Senate panel to put questions to
U.S. Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson and other nominees to federal courts.
Three slices:

Like watching an infant eat pureed spinach, watching senators question
Supreme Court nominees is not for the squeamish. But beginning Monday, the
confirmation hearings for Ketanji Brown Jackson can be instructive if she
is asked:

In the 1978 decision that permitted racial preferences in university
admissions, Justice Harry Blackmun said, “In order to get beyond racism, we
must first take account of race.” Do you agree? By what criteria should the
nation decide that it has arrived “beyond racism”? Or does the “diversity”
rationale mean race-based admissions are forever?

..

Article I “vested” legislative power in Congress, making Congress the
mandatory location of this power. So, presumably there are some
congressional grants of discretion to executive agencies that are
unconstitutional delegations of legislative power. Is the separation of
powers compatible with Congress’s constantly giving administrative state
entities vast powers to write rules regulating private conduct? Should
courts or Congress decide whether Congress violates the non-delegation
doctrine? Is consent — democracy’s foundational concept — attenuated almost
to disappearance if it means merely consenting to Congress consenting to
administrative agencies regulating our lives?

..

In 2004, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit upheld an Oklahoma
law forcing online casket retailers to have (expensive, time-consuming)
funeral licenses. The court acknowledged that the law punished one faction
(online retailers) to enrich another (funeral directors) but breezily said
“dishing out special economic benefits” is “the national pastime” of state
and local governments. Should there be some judicial supervision of such
practices? Should courts take cognizance of obvious rent-seeking (wielding
the law for private economic gain by abridging the liberty of competitors)
motives? Randy Barnett and Evan Bernick, authors of “The Original Meaning
of the 14th Amendment,” say the guarantee of “due process of law” (emphasis
added) proscribes “legislative action that deprives people of life,
liberty, or property without a permissible legislative purpose.” Is
gratifying rent-seekers such a purpose? So, do Oklahoma’s law and a zillion
other rent-seekers’ delights violate the 14th Amendment?

James Madison said the powers delegated by the Constitution to the federal
government “are few and defined.” If, however, Congress “finds” that
broccoli enhances public health, and that health has a “substantial effect”
on interstate commerce, may Congress constitutionally mandate buying
broccoli? If not, why not?

Heres part 16 of George Selgins brilliant series on the New Deal.




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The Julian Simon Supply Curve

Posted: 22 Mar 2022 08:10 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
In this just-published paper available here to read free of charge I
explain how one of Julian Simon’s most important insights might be
incorporated into an ECON 101 course. Heres my opening:

Very few ideas shift paradigms. Yet what’s remarkable about many
paradigm-shifting ideas is how simple they are revealed to be once they
come to be widely understood and incorporated even into introductory
textbooks. Consider a few chronologically listed examples:

– Adam Smith explaining that money is not wealth.
– David Ricardo explaining that specialization according to comparative
advantage is mutually advantageous.
– Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection.
– William Stanley Jevons, Carl Menger, and Leon Walras identifying
economic value as being determined by the subjective evaluation of the
importance of the ‘marginal’ unit.
Ronald Coase pointing out that externalities are always bilateral.
Richard Dawkins explaining that the truly selfish creature in nature isn’t
the organism – the individual human, horse, housefly, or hyacinth – but,
instead, each of the genes out of which each organism is built.


Each of these ideas, once grasped, is simplicity itself. And it’s not
terribly difficult to grasp any of these ideas. Even the principle of
comparative advantage – often described as counter-intuitive – becomes
intuitive when explained correctly.

Julian Simon’s identification of the human mind as “the ultimate resource”
is one such paradigm-shifting idea, or at least potentially so. This idea
is at once so pro- found as to be paradigm-shifting, yet it’s also
simplicity itself.

Of course nothing – no raw material, no labor service, no unit of time, not
even land – is useful unless and until some human being figures out not
only how to use it technologically, but also how to make its use worthwhile
economically. While nature has mashed atoms together in countless varieties
and forms, nothing formed by nature becomes a resource until it is
transformed into one by the creative human mind.

Once you grasp Simon’s insight, you can never again see the world in the
same way that you saw it before your enlightenment.




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

Posted: 22 Mar 2022 03:23 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
Martin Kulldorff tweets:

Surprising choice of @ashishkjha [Ashish K. Jha] as @JoeBidens new Covid
coordinator. Not only was he wrong promoting lockdowns, school closures and
vaccine passports, he mischaracterized and bullied other scientists by
calling them clowns. A clown would do a better job as Covid coordinator.

David Henderson and Ryan Sullivan explain that the kids are not alright. A
slice:

Once these earning losses take hold, they lead to lower life expectancies.
This connection was highlighted most prominently in a paper published in
the Journal of the American Medical Association that analyzed data on
school shutdowns early in the pandemic. The authors found that missed
instruction in the United States could be associated with an estimated 13.8
million years of life lost.

What makes these outcomes even more tragic is that they were experienced by
children who, as was known early on, never had a significant risk of dying
from COVID-19. As of the first week of March 2022, out of the nearly
950,000 Covid-19 deaths, only 865 were children under the age of 18. That
amounts to about 433 children annually. This is comparable to a bad flu
season in the US. For example, the CDC estimates that the actual number of
flu deaths for children in the 2017-18 flu season was about 600.

Moreover, the school closings and lockdowns have led to a noticeable loss
in children’s mental health. This was apparent early in the pandemic. In a
CDC report released in November 2020, researchers reported that the
proportion of mental health-related visits from April to October 2020 for
children aged 5-11 and 12-17 years had increased by approximately 24
percent and 31 percent, respectively in comparison to 2019 data. In a
follow-up CDC report, researchers found that emergency department visits
due to suspected suicide attempts were 51 percent higher among girls aged
12-17 years during early 2021 in comparison to the same period in 2019;
among boys aged 12-17 years, suspected suicide attempt emergency department
visits increased 4 percent.

Craig Eyermann asks if the Covid aid showered on schools by the U.S.
federal government is setting schools up to fail.

The mental health of young people is almost visibly unravelling. (HT Jay
Bhattacharya)

Alex Washburne decries the irrational rejection of scientific debate and
openness that was both fueled by and that, in turn, added more fuel to
Covid hysteria. Three slices:

However, after we released the ILI paper on the preprint server, the paper
got picked up by a brilliant team of data journalists at the Economist and
went viral. As the paper went viral, the onslaught reputational and
professional threats I’d feared began to materialize.

Colleagues said I risked being “responsible for the deaths of millions” (a
crime on par with genocide, if the comment is taken literally), that I had
blood on my hands, that I was “disrupting the public health message,” that
I was “not an epidemiologist,”  and more. The verbal stones came from all
sides, from people who were once colleagues and friends to members of the
scientific community I’d never heard of before saying I killed thousands.

..

By creating a research environment hostile to evidence of a lower-severity
pandemic, the science people read on the news to inform their beliefs and
actions of overestimated Covid risk. That science was not the result of a
fair competition of ideas won by evidence and logic, but a silencing of
ideas by federal officials coordinating devastating takedowns of competing
views, by biased social/mass-media amplification of one theory, and by a
norm of private and public hostilities enforcing a particular theory of
Covid-19.

..

Throughout 2020, I witnessed how social media platforms and mass-media
became tools to manufacture the consent of the public to agree with a
powerful clique of epidemiologists. These epidemiologists claimed their
science was uncontested and protected their scientific theories from
contest by public broadcasting of sanctions against fellow scientists.
Shame, criticism, ridicule, disapproval, and other checks on deviance from
norms and values of publishing work in agreement with this clique of
epidemiologists, or from experts they approve of.

Such informal social control on scientific findings has no place in any
reasonable ideal of science in a society. If we allow scientists to take
down other scientists through personal attacks, if we fail to disentangle a
complex of close associations between scientists and the mass media they
use to manufacture belief in their own theories, then what we call
“science” would be battle over belief mediated not through the peaceful and
cooperative ideals of evidence and reason, but by the savage violence of
cultural warfare. It becomes a barbaric media battle to achieve scientific
dominance by ridiculing dissidents and suppressing dissent through informal
social control.

Zach Weissmueller talks with Vinay Prasad about how science, in the Covid
era, was corrupted by politics.

Many Germans, alas, prefer unfounded fear to freedom.

Jay Bhattacharya tweets:

That Anthony Fauci mischaracterized the @gbdeclaration as akin to AIDS
denialism shows his fundamental misunderstanding of the idea of focused
protection of the vulnerable, his blindness to lockdown harms, and his
ignorance of the basic principles of public health.




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

Posted: 22 Mar 2022 01:30 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
is from page 299 of David Boaz’s excellent 2015 volume, The Libertarian
Mind:

The libertarian solution starts with renewing our effort to build a society
based on the virtues of choice, responsibility, and respect for self and
others. Government needs at least to give all people, regardless of color,
as much opportunity for choice and responsibility in schools, housing,
neighborhoods, and so on as possible, and then society should grant all
people the dignity of being held responsible for the consequences of their
actions.




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