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Some Links

Posted: 25 Jun 2022 11:23 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
David Henderson understandably is flabbergasted by the obliviousness of a
university president.

John O. McGinnis argues that the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in
Carson v. Makin will further energize the movement for school choice. Heres
his conclusion:

Carson is not only important for what it does for Establishment Clause
jurisprudence but what it does for the school choice movement. That
movement already has political momentum. First, many public schools have
been heavily criticized for closing for too long during the pandemic with
substantial losses of learning, particularly for the poorest students.
Second, many parents are furious with what their public schools are
teaching, viewing commonly used history curricula in particular as
tendentious and unpatriotic. Many also worry about an emphasis on equity
over excellence. As a result, a parental rights movement is emerging as a
powerful electoral force.

School choice is the logical institutional manifestation of parental
rights. A parent who can choose the school his or her child attends has
more influence on the child’s education. At a traditional public school, a
parent can only vote in a school board election, and once the school board
is elected, he or she retains no substantial leverage at all. School choice
provides the invaluable right of exit.

Carson assures those who want to send their children to religious schools
that religious choices can never be excluded from a choice program. Thus,
it energizes parents who want a religious alternative to the traditional
public school to join with parents who want alternatives for secular
reasons. The ruling thus contributes even more energy to one of our most
important contemporary social movements.

Chris Freiman explains that vouchers for religious schools don’t threaten
the separation of church and state.

Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley reports on Betsy DeVoss important
efforts to free the hostages held by teachers unions. A slice:

As the teachers unions continue to throw their weight around the Democratic
Party, Mrs. DeVos said their behavior during the pandemic has hurt their
standing with Americans. “There’s a real tone-deafness to the kind of
damage their politicized agenda and decisions have inflicted on kids, and
we won’t know the full extent of it for years.” she said. “It’s the kids
who could least afford to be locked out of school who were out the longest.”

Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins decries the malignant mission
creep of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Oodles upon oodles of excessive, useless government are foisted on us by
enterprising appointees building résumés for an afterlife as an influence
peddler “of counsel” at a D.C. law firm. Examples are legion, but consider
the recent initiatives of Joe Biden’s Securities and Exchange Commission
chief, Gary Gensler.

Mr. Gensler would ordain that publicly traded companies, as part of their
disclosure obligations, report their financial vulnerability to climate
change and climate regulation. A fatuous New York Times headline declares
that investors “deserve” such information. No, investors want such
information, and diligently seek it out, if it bears on the expected value
of their investments. Why not require disclosures about the financial
impact of every conceivable tax-law change, man-made disaster or asteroid
strike? Because markets already price securities in view of all the
possible calamities that could cause them to go to zero. Collectively,
investors are in a better position to judge such nonproprietary matters
than is management, which has a daily business to run.

Chelsea Follett talks with GMU Econ alum Rosemarie Fike about the
importance for women of economic freedom.

Juliette Sellgren talks with Dan Klein about Adam Smith and justice.

Writing at The Hill, the great Bruce Yandle explains that inflation is
putting a price tag on past political actions that only sounded free at the
time.

Mark Oshinskie writes about the oppressions of forced solitude. Two slices:

Those whom I knew were sure the lockdowns were for our collective benefit
and would only last for two weeks. They stridently said we should all be
nice and embrace this temporary disruption. I think many of the lockdowners
perversely enjoyed being part of some (overblown) historical crisis and
thought it was cool that humans could be so savvy and modern as to crush a
virus; though they turned out to be wrong about that second part. Others
just liked the time off from work.

I was dumbfounded, not only by the numbers of people who supported locking
down but also by their certainty that doing so made sense; they expressed
no doubt about this approach.

..

The Urban Dictionary defines a “tool” as “someone who is not smart enough
to realize that he is being used.” I decided that my ex-friend, and anyone
else who was going along with the “Stay home” and “We’re all in this
together” was a tool. Of course, like the other lockdowners I knew, he
could afford to be a tool because he could work from home and loved to
watch TV.

Among all of the other obvious nonsense, saying that by staying home, we’re
together is perhaps the most plainly Orwellian. Plus, in clearly observable
ways, we weren’t “all in this together” during the pandemic; its logistical
and economic impacts varied widely across the population. And in our
pluralistic society, we had never all been in anything together. Why should
a respiratory virus suddenly unify everyone. I still can’t believe that
people bought such cheesy Madison Avenue slogans.

K. Lloyd Billingsley accuses Fauci of white coat supremacy.

Harriet Sergeant reports on the devastating toll of lockdowns on children.
(HT Toby Young)

Adam Brooks tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

When will everyone finally admit that the cost of living crisis is down to
Lockdowns, the printing of money to pay for Lockdowns & the supply chain
issues caused by them here and around the world?




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Extra! Extra! Read All About It! The Court Bucks Majority!

Posted: 25 Jun 2022 04:42 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
Here’s a letter to the Washington Post, but from it nothing should be
inferred about my opinion on abortion or about the quality of the reasoning
in, or the conclusion of, Dobbs.

Editor:

Your headline this morning – “Supreme Court goes against public opinion in
rulings on abortion, guns” – says less about the Supreme Court than it does
about the poorly informed state of today’s journalists. The very reason for
having a judiciary the members of which are not elected but, instead, are
appointed to lifetime terms – and whose charge is confined to settling
disputes that arise under the law, including that of the Constitution – is
to insulate the judiciary from fickle and often-dangerous political
passions. According to Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 78, a great benefit
of an independent judiciary is that it will protect the Constitution
against perils that arise “whenever a momentary inclination happens to lay
hold of a majority incompatible with the provisions in the existing
Constitution.”

One may legitimately criticize a court for its particular interpretation of
the Constitution. But it’s never legitimate to suggest that a court errs
whenever it “goes against public opinion.” As a headline, then, “Supreme
Court goes against public opinion” makes no more sense than would the
headline “Dog bites man.”

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

..

I understand, of course, that justices and judges are human; they often do
succumb to majoritarian political pressures. But the design, of course, is
for the federal judiciary to be insulated from, and hence resistant to,
such pressures.




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Quotation of the Day

Posted: 25 Jun 2022 01:30 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
is from page 50 of the first edition of University of Washington economist
Eugene Silberberg’s excellent 1995 textbook, Principles of Microeconomics
(original emphasis):

The law of demand is the central behavioral proposition in economics. Its
veracity is not really open to debate; to deny this proposition is to deny
economics. The phrase economic explanation to a large extent means an
explanation based on the law of demand. In Chapter 1 we outlined the idea
that people respond so as to reduce the impact of changes in constraints.
This proposition is given operational significance, that is, an
interpretation in terms of the observable phenomena of prices and
quantities, in the form of the law of demand. Consuming less of a good
after its price has risen is one way in which we mitigate the deleterious
effects of an increasingly severe constraint.

DBx: Indeed so.

And yet much public policy is built on the presumption that the law of
demand does not apply universally. Perhaps the best example of such denial
is the widespread support for minimum-wage legislation. The belief of many
minimum-wage proponents is that raising the minimum wage will simply cause
employers to pay workers higher wages, without any further adjustments.
Employers’ incomes (profits) will fall while workers’ incomes will rise.

Disappointingly, it’s easy today to find professional economists who twist
themselves into intellectual knots to lend apparent justification to this
popular, fallacious belief. Yet the only theoretically possible scenario in
which a rise in minimum wages will not reduce or worsen at least some
low-skilled workers’ employment opportunities requires employers to possess
both monopsony power in labor markets and monopoly power in output markets.
(And the combination of such powers is a necessary, but not sufficient,
condition for the minimum wage to work. Another necessary condition is that
the legislated minimum wage not be set too high.) Of course, the likelihood
in reality that there will prevail in a market-oriented economy this
combination of monopsony and monopoly is so minuscule as to be ignorable.




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On Dobbs and the Ninth Amendment

Posted: 24 Jun 2022 12:46 PM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
Below is a letter Reason. Please note that this letter is exclusively about
Constitutional interpretation and implies nothing about my views on the
morality of abortion, or about what I believe states should or should not
do now that Dobbs has been decided. (Without implicating them, I thank
Roger Meiners and Adam Pritchard for feedback on an earlier version of this
letter.)

Editor:

Long an admirer of Damon Root, I worry when I find myself disagreeing with
him. But disagree I do with his conclusion that Justice Alito’s ruling in
Dobbs “is an insult to the 9th amendment” (“Alitos Abortion Ruling
Overturning Roe Is an Insult to the 9th Amendment,” June 24).

Like Damon, I hold the 9th amendment in high regard and wish that it were
used more often to safeguard Americans’ unenumerated rights. Further, I
agree both with Damon’s account of the history of this sadly neglected
amendment, as well as with his observation that, when the Bill of Rights
was ratified, the common law recognized a right to abortion until
“quickening.”

But I don’t see how a ruling – Dobbs – that returns to the states the power
to restrict access to abortion runs afoul of the 9th amendment. That
amendment reads in full: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain
rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the
people.” This wording – along with the very history that Damon recounts –
clearly indicates that the 9th amendment is meant to protect unenumerated
rights from being violated by the national government, which is the
government that’s created and governed by the Constitution. The 9th
amendment neither applies to the states nor enlists the national government
to protect unenumerated rights from being violated by state and local
governments.

While the 9th amendment would protect the right to abortion before
quickening from being violated by the national government, this amendment
in no way constrains state and local governments.

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: 24 Jun 2022 08:15 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
is from pages 135-136 of Scott Atlas’s important 2021 book, A Plague Upon
Our House: My Fight at the Trump White House to Stop COVID From Destroying
America:

This conclusion was inherently nonscientific modeling that something might
occur, and then because it did not occur with a given intervention,
concluding that the intervention was effective. That was not proof of
anything at all; it was circular reasoning. Why couldn’t the explanation be
that the model’s prediction was wrong? Indeed, modelers had concocted a
scenario in which [covid] cases would keep spreading as if everyone was
equally susceptible, without regard for increasing immunity or seasonal
effects all known to have occurred in every respiratory virus pandemic
over the past 130 years.

DBx: I say again that few academics have fueled as much destruction of
life, liberty, property, and prosperity as has the reckless Imperial
College modeler Neil Ferguson. Not to be excused, of course, are the
legions of politicians and bureaucrats who took his and his team’s
model-predictions seriously and without regard for collateral damage from
lockdowns.




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Some Links

Posted: 24 Jun 2022 05:26 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
Kyle Smith, writing at National Review, decries the CDCs peddling of fake
news about covid child mortality. A slice:

The CDC displayed a slide at a conference that falsely claimed Covid-19 was
the fourth or fifth leading cause of death for all pediatric age groups. A
writer who is publicly known only by the name Kelley immediately saw that
the claim was “completely and utterly false.” Among several errors, which
are so blatant as to seem like intentional massaging of the numbers, Kelley
discovered that all data from a 26-month period were being crammed into one
year, and that deaths were attributed to Covid, regardless of whether the
death was caused by Covid, if the disease was mentioned on the death
certificate. The CDC slide, which cited a pre-publication British study
that is now being re-examined, also bumped up the numbers by altering the
definition of pediatric (ordinarily understood to mean under 18) to include
18- and 19-year-olds.

The danger to children from Covid is very, very low. For instance, babies
and toddlers are 25 times likelier to die of an accident than of Covid. And
all-cause pediatric mortality in the pandemic era for young children (up to
12) is 30 percent lower than it was a generation ago, in 1999. All-cause
mortality for children over 12 has spiked in the pandemic era because of
accidents, drug abuse, and other factors unrelated to disease. Covid barely
registers as a cause of death for teens or small children.

Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger writes that [t]he Covid
pandemic revealed how complicated the private economy is — and how easy it
is to wreck it. A slice:

The current global discontent with economic life is overwhelmingly a
function of one other word: lockdown. Lockdowns are normally associated
with prison riots, not the world’s economies. One may admit that the first
months with the mysterious Covid-19 virus were a time of generalized panic,
and governments defaulted to the epidemiologists’ standard fix of social
quarantining. But then leadership essentially let the public-health
bureaucracies take over their countries’ economic life.

What’s impossible not to notice is how the lockdowns exposed the
intricacies of the world’s market economy. We are hearing a lot now about
long Covid, the physical aftermath of the virus. As debilitating is long
economic Covid.

Long economic Covid is why anyone you sit next to at dinner can dilate on
the arcana of interrupted global supply chains. We’re now coming to realize
how the market economy’s performance and benefits are taken for granted.
All those goods—made, purchased, packed and shipped—were as reliably
available as turning on a light. Actually, one of the things we’ve learned
during this time is that even turning on a light isn’t like turning on a
light. Disrupt the always-on but complex power grid, as in Texas and
California, and the lights stop coming on.

This persistent post-pandemic disruption is the result of government
choices. In 2020, the public sector told the private sector simply to stand
down. When the pandemic lockdowns were extended deep into 2021—in the U.S.,
France, U.K. and elsewhere—the global economy’s extraordinarily complex
grid of relationships fractured at every level.

Layoffs were widespread, ending paychecks overnight. Trucking hasn’t
recovered. Airlines are struggling with flight-canceling staff shortages.
Manufacturers can’t fill orders for lack of basic parts, workers or a
reliable transport system.

We have arrived at stupid.

David Stockman describes the spasmodic chaos of the post-lockdown US
economy. Two slices:

Accordingly, the business sector is flying blind: It can’t forecast what’s
coming down the pike in the normal manner based on tried and true rules of
cause and effect. In many cases, the normal market signals have gone
kerflooey as exemplified by the recent big box retailers’ warnings that
they are loaded with the wrong inventory and will be taking painful
discounts to clear the decks.

Yet it is no wonder that they stocked up on apparel and durables, among
others, after a period in which the Virus Patrol shutdown the normal social
congregation venues such as movies, restaurants, bars, gyms, air travel and
the like. And than Washington added fuel to the fire by pilling on
trillions of spending power derived from unemployment benefits that reached
to a $55,000 annual rate in some cases and the repeated stimmie checks that
for larger families added up to $10,000 to $20,000.

Employed workers didn’t need the multiple $2,000 stimmie checks because in
its (dubious) “wisdom” the Virus Patrol forced them to save on social
congregation based spending.

..

When it comes to Washington-induced whipsaws, however, there are few
sectors that have been as battered as the air travel system. During April
2020, for instance, passenger boardings were down a staggering 96% from the
corresponding pre-pandemic month, as in dead and gone. Moreover, this deep
reduction pattern prevailed well into the spring of 2021.

The airline shutdowns were not necessitated by public health
considerations: Frequent cabin air exchanges probably made them safer than
most indoor environments.

But between the misbegotten guidelines of the CDC and the scare-mongering
of the Virus Patrol, even as late as January 2022 loadings were still down
34% from pre-pandemic levels.

The industry’s infrastructure got clobbered by these kinds of operating
levels. Baggage handlers, flight attendants, pilots and every function
in-between suffered huge disruptions in incomes and livelihoods—-even after
Washington’s generous subsidies to the airlines and their employees.

And then, insult was added to injury when pilots and other employees were
threatened with termination owing to unwillingness to take the jab. The
result was an industry to turmoil and sometimes even ruin.

Jay Bhattacharya tweets:

The people who constitute World Health Network are repackaged zero-covid
zealots, many in the discredited iSAGE group. I guess since they could not
scare the world into perpetual Shanghai style lockdowns with covid, so they
are trying again with monkey pox.

Heres some good news reported by Will Jones: South Africa Ends All
Remaining Covid Restrictions Including Vaccine and Testing Entry
Requirements.

Phil Magness, writing on his Facebook page, is correct:

It turns out that the reason plagiarism is such a widespread problem in
academiais that an alarming number of academics will excuse or even defend
plagiarism when one of their friends does it.

Damon Root argues that Alitos leaked abortion opinion misunderstands
unenumerated rights.

Jeffrey Singer laments this unfortunate reality: The FDA is on a quest to
snuff out tobacco harm‐​reduction.

GMU Econ alum Nathan Goodman compares Austrians and Marxists on imperialism.




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