The Latest from Cafe Hayek

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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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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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GMU Econ student Dominic Pino, writing at National Review, is doing a splendid job debunking Oren Cass’s latest call for protectionism. Here’s one of Dom’s 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 here’s Dom’s response to Cass’s reaction to Dom’s 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 aren’t 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 administration’s apparent cluelessness of economics.

Also decrying Biden’s economic cluelessness – and his penchant for cronyism – is my intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy. Here’s her conclusion:

So here you have it: Once again, Washington is giving us every reason to believe it’s 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 Pinker’s 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.

Here’s part 17 of George Selgin’s marvelous series on the New Deal.

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In the Wall Street Journal, GMU Law professor Eugene Kontorovich explains, with Anastasia Lin, that not until China’s 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.” Here’s 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 Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.)

The New York Post‘s 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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… 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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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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… 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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Finally, New York City’s youngest schoolchildren are being freed from the CDC’s absurd guidance on masks.

Thankfully.

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

Also reflecting on Britain’s 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 isn’t impressed with Biden’s 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 don’t 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 [Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of Health]

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… 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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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 Caucus’s 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. Isn’t that the whole point of the State of the Union dog and pony show we had to sit through last month?

“It’s 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 Trump’s one-term output.

It’s a shame that George Will isn’t 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?

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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?

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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?

Here’s part 16 of George Selgin’s brilliant series on the New Deal.

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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. Here’s 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.

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Martin Kulldorff tweets:

Surprising choice of @ashishkjha [Ashish K. Jha] as @JoeBiden‘s 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.

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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.

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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.

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… 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.