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Bonus Quotation of the Day

Posted: 08 Jul 2022 09:30 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
is from page 436 of the 5th edition (2015) of Thomas Sowell’s excellent
Basic Economics:

Going into debt to create long-term investments makes as much sense for the
government as for a private individual’s borrowing more than his annual
income to buy a house. By the same token, people who borrow more than their
annual income to pay for lavish entertainment this year are simply living
beyond their means and probably heading for big financial trouble. The same
principle applies to government expenditures for current benefits, with the
costs being passed don to future generations.

DBx: Yes. And when today’s politicians and citizens-taxpayers can pass on
to future generations the obligation to pay for today’s spending, today’s
spending is higher and less carefully considered than it would be if
today’s taxpayers were required say, through a balanced-budget amendment
to pay for this spending.




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You Cant Make This Stuff Up

Posted: 08 Jul 2022 06:41 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
Here’s a letter to the Wall Street Journal:

Editor:

French president Emmanuel Macron wants to fight inflation by drenching the
economy with more money (“Macron Seeks to Step Up France’s Inflation
Fight,” July 8). Mon Dieu! Let’s hope that M. Macron doesn’t become a
firefighter, for were he to do so he’d fight fires by drenching them with
gasoline.

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 Links

Posted: 08 Jul 2022 04:00 AM PDT
[link removed]

(Don Boudreaux)




Tweet
Wall Street Journal columnist Allysia Finley ably exposes the incompetence
of Fauci as she also defends the strategy proposed by Scott Atlas and the
authors of the great Great Barrington Declaration. A slice:

The Great Barrington strategy of “focused protection” helped minimize the
pandemic’s collateral damage until vaccines became available. The Biden
administration then undertook a strategy of herd immunity via vaccination.
But when this strategy failed, it doubled down with vaccine mandates.

From the outset of the pandemic, the mainstream medical establishment and
government bureaucracy were aligned behind a lockdown-at-all-costs
strategy. The Trump White House tapped Scott Atlas, a Hoover Institution
fellow and radiologist, for a contrarian perspective. Dr. Atlas endorsed
the elements of the Great Barrington strategy. The House report criticizes
him for a memo in which he argued that “stopping all cases is not
necessary, nor is it possible. It instills irrational fear into the public.
Non-prioritized testing is jeopardizing critical resources for truly
critical testing and is creating problematic delays in test results for the
most important populations.”

He was right on every point.

Laura Rosen Cohen applauds the courage of those who dissented from the
mainstream covid hysteria. A slice:

Alex Washburne, a Montana-based mathematical biologist and statistician who
has published in ecology, evolution, epidemiology and finance, tried to
sound the alarm bell on the massive collateral damage of lockdowns very
early on. His background in finance and economics led him to believe that
“the COVID response was greatly imbalanced and risked causing harm in the
service of public health.”

Politically independent, but greatly concerned about conservation, climate
change and social liberties, he says it was the Covid response that made
him realize the limits of left-liberalism. Nobody would publish him. He
became a scientific outcast and learned a number of life lessons from the
treatment he received from the scientific community and what he saw as
public health policy disasters.

“Covid showed me ways in which socioscientific inefficiencies…can lead to
an insular expert class that mismanages critical risks our society faces
and, without checks and balances, they can weaponize their myopic expertise
(e.g. epidemiology) to mislead society and cause harm…”

As a result of the backlash he faced, Washburne eventually left academia
and founded Agora, a new scientific startup and incubator ‘safe space’ for
scientists of different backgrounds and divergent political views to
collaborate.

Woman, 19, died in agony from cancer after pleading to see her doctor in
person for more than a YEAR about a painful lump on her back as family say
GPs used Covid as an excuse to see fewer people' so reports the Daily
Mail. (DBx: But, covidians will insist, the all-important fact, the truly
wonderful fact, is that this young woman didnt suffer and die from covid
which, of course, is what matters above all.)

The straw man 21 months after he was declared to be extinct continues to
terrorize China.

The editors of The Telegraph are wise about living with covid. Heres their
conclusion:

Certainly, the latest wave has put more people in hospital; but the real
damage to “our NHS” has been caused by the lockdown measures and the
backlog they caused. We do not need anything like that again.

Newman Nahas is largely correct when he tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

Let’s be clear. Covidians never gave a damn about granny. They used her as
a pretext to urge for policies they thought could keep THEM safe.

Reacting to a photo of ink pens classified as clean or dirty, Jay
Bhattacharya tweets:

Every single one of these transparently useless gestures in covid theater
served to undermine public trust in public health. It is public health that
is responsible for the sorry state it finds itself in, unfortunately to the
detriment of the publics health.

Jeffrey Singer applauds the FDAs decision to allow pharmacists to prescribe
Paxlovid.

Peter Earle weighs in on Bidens absurd recent tweets ordering
gasoline-station owners to lower their prices.

My GMU Econ colleague Dan Klein explores the connection between classical
liberalism and democracy. A slice:

The mythologized democracy, Hayek suggested, in the 20th century
especially, projects a fantasy of consensus—as in the small band of our
ancestors of our Paleolithic past, when there were just 40 of us in a small
band. This is in our genes still, and in our instincts. We decided by
consensus in the small band.

Modern collectivist politics plays upon these Paleolithic instincts by
projecting the nation as a band. On this fantasy, there is no reason to
limit or check the actions of the band as a whole. Its consensus knows what
is good for the band and faithfully advances that good.

If we are the government, by democracy, why would we want to put limits and
checks on ourselves when striving to advance our own common interest?

Tocqueville foresaw the emergence of a quasi-religion of collectivist
politics perfumed by democratic mythology. Big collectivist government now
fully replaces God as a source of meaning and validation. The nightmare
that he warned us of is a continuation of the displacement of God and
religion by temporal powers.

Hayek, too, thought along these lines, and saw that this unlimited
democracy came from thinking about the government as us.

The problem in all of this is that the nation is not a small simple band of
40 people. In the modern complex world, government lacks knowledge,
benevolence, competence. Interpretations are not shared, and accountability
is slight. Government lacks correction mechanisms. It never admits its
mistakes. It breeds an administrative state, the permanent bureaucracy, the
deep state, you might say, and it breeds self-serving ideologies. The
administrative state is staffed mainly by people who support the
[political] parties most eager for governmentalization. They push
incessantly for governmentalization.

Boris Johnson leaves behind a bigger, bloated state.

Reasons Eric Boehm reports that the FDA finally admits that it caused the
baby formula shortage.

GMU Econ alum Dominic Pino, now with National Review, is always worth
reading.




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