Cafe Hayek — where orders emerge

Some Covid Links

by Don Boudreaux on November 29, 2021

in Country Problems, Current Affairs, Philosophy of Freedom, Risk and Safety, Seen and Unseen

The Wall Street Journal reports that “[e]vidence grows that infections provide as much protection as vaccines.” A slice:

Immune memory, however, appears to be stronger following infection. The Rockefeller research group found in an earlier study, also published in Nature, that the antibodies produced by memory B cells—which quickly multiply in subsequent encounters with the virus—continued to evolve at least a year after infection. The study on vaccinated people found that the antibodies produced by their memory B cells didn’t change much over time.

One possible reason for the difference, they said, was that pieces of virus remain in the body for weeks after infection, whereas vaccine particles fade away faster. The upshot: The immune memory of people who have been infected is ready to produce a broader array of antibodies than of people who have been vaccinated.

The above WSJ report prompted Jeffrey Singer, M.D., to quip on Facebook: “You mean everything I learned about immunity in medical school is correct?”

Here’s the Times of India on the omicron variant. (HT Jeffrey Singer) Two slices:

The new Omicron variant of the coronavirus results in mild disease, without prominent syndromes, Angelique Coetzee, the chairwoman of the South African Medical Association, told Sputnik on Saturday.
…..
“It presents mild disease with symptoms being sore muscles and tiredness for a day or two not feeling well. So far, we have detected that those infected do not suffer loss of taste or smell. They might have a slight cough. There are no prominent symptoms. Of those infected some are currently being treated at home,” Coetzee said.

The official noted that hospitals have not been overburdened by Omicron patients and that the new strain is not been detected in vaccinated persons. At the same time, the situation might be different for the unvaccinated.
“We will only know this after two weeks. Yes, it is transmissible, but for now, as medical practitioners, we do not know why so much hype is being driven as we are still looking into it. We will only know after two to three weeks as there are some patients admitted and these are young people aged 40 and younger,” Coetzee added.

Why can’t all world ‘leaders’ – as they are comically called – be like Madrid’s Isabel Díaz Ayuso? Three slices:

Madrid’s rising star leader on Friday attacked “paternalistic” Left-wing governments for confining people to their homes as she warned that any return to a Covid lockdown would be remembered as a “historical error”.

Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the president of Madrid’s regional authority, defied Spain’s socialist government to free her city from a lockdown she believed was doing more harm than good.

Ms Ayuso was able to use devolved powers to apply the loosest set of restrictions to business and leisure in Spain before abandoning all limits last month.

“The economy is also a health question,” said Ms Ayuso in her imposing offices in the centre of Madrid.

“Playing off health and economy against each other is a lie, because what happens to the people who are ruined? What about their health? And the people who commit suicide or suffer depression?”

…..

“What is happening is an abuse of power, and lockdowns are a failure – even in health terms. Many governments around the world go straight for lockdowns without trying all the alternatives, whether it is because they lack creativity or courage.”

The 43-year-old was catapulted to star status after reopening the Spanish capital for business. “Ayusomania” transformed her into a political phenomenon, as well as a hate figure for the Left, and she is tipped to one day be Spain’s first female prime minister.

…..

The streets bustle in a capital famous for its 24-hour lifestyle, with cafes and restaurants now doing a roaring trade into the small hours of the morning. Things were very different in the dark early days of the pandemic, when Spain instituted one of Europe’s strictest lockdowns.

“We have shown that lockdowns are not the answer. We have gone on the attack against the virus and not against businesses,” said Ms Ayuso, who added that people needed to take “individual responsibility” to fight the pandemic.

She said she had weathered “unprecedented pressure” after going against lockdown. Her stance brought her into conflict with some senior figures in her Right-wing Popular Party (PP) as well as the ruling socialist coalition, for whom she reserves trademark scorn.

“Paternalistic Left-wing governments think that citizens are better off locked-up in their homes and living off subsidies,” she said. “We have shown in Madrid that you can fight the virus without destroying people’s personal hopes and dreams.”

Here’s Professor Ellen Townsend’s written evidence, submitted to Parliament, on “[t]he human rights implications of long lockdown and the damaging impact on young people.” (HT Jay Bhattacharya) Two slices (footnotes deleted):

The rights and needs of young people have been ignored in this crisis and this is a national and global disaster in the making. The future of our youngsters has been sacrificed in order to protect adults which goes against the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (article 3) states: “In all actions concerning children, whether undertaken by public or private social welfare institutions, courts of law, administrative authorities or legislative bodies, the best interests of the child shall be a primary consideration”. The lockdown measures taken are not proportionate to the risks posed by the virus to young people and below I outline some of the evidence demonstrating the disproportionate impact of lockdowns on young people. Lockdowns deprive young people of the right to education, to normal psychological development, to good mental health and wellbeing.

Lockdowns and school closures disrupt our normal functioning and social interaction – we are fundamentally social beings. For young children, face-to-face play is essential to wellbeing. For some children, playtime at school is the only time they are able to interact with other children. Playing closely with peers protects against mental ill health and without this essential contact young people have felt very lonely and isolated in lockdown with deleterious and long-term impacts on mental health: the impact of loneliness on mental health can be seen up to nine years later. The social and emotional benefits of playing together cannot be understated.
…..
There are other areas which impact on children which are beyond my professional scope which include missed health checks, screening, operations, treatments and vaccinations. Moreover, poverty, hunger and homelessness are increasing the more lockdown policies are implemented.

The long-term consequences of harms to young people (or indeed people of any age) have not been accounted for in policy making. All other harms are being trumped by Covid-19 which is not how a holistic and compassionate public health system should operate. We must name and account for the harms caused by lockdowns in robust cost-benefit analyses and impact assessments which must be transparent and published.

It is time to prioritise the rights and needs of young people in this crisis and weigh the harms caused by social restrictions and lockdowns. We are letting down a generation of young people who may never for forgive us for the harms we have caused.

Robert Higgs on Facebook:

Run, Chicken Little, run! The omicron variant is coming.

“Fauci says U.S. should prepare to do anything and everything to fight the omicron variant.” (DBx: Well of course he does. Tyrants – especially those who arrogantly believe themselves to be humanity’s saviors – always concoct reasons for why their powers must be exercised without limit.)

For those of you who doubt that Fauci’s self-importance and arrogance are out of control, check out this statement of his when asked about criticisms leveled at him by Senators Rand Paul and Ted Cruz: “They’re really criticizing science because I represent science. That’s dangerous.” …. In response to which Newman Nahas tweeted: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

I and The Science are one. He who has seen me, has seen The Science. No man comes to The Science but through me. He who criticizes me, criticizes The Science.

(DBx: Who will be to Anthony Fauci what Robert Caro is to Robert Moses? There are, of course, differences between these two career government bureaucrats, but the parallels between them are daily becoming more numerous – and ominous. Indeed, Fauci already is responsible for more destruction, and has already – in pursuit of his grand designs – ignored and crushed far more life-on-the-ground details and vitality, than did Moses.)

Speaking of ominous parallels, Marko Strinic describes the frightening similarity of the real-world Covidocracy with the fictional villains in Anthony Burgess’s 1962 dystopian novel, A Clockwork Orange. Two slices:

Moreover, this is also a time when authoritarianism is seen as a viable alternative to free societies. Even though the Soviet Union’s moral bankruptcy is plain for all to see, there are still those who look to repressive methods to help society function.

There are those who believe that to reach full vaccination, we must resort to authoritarianism and coercion to get as many people as possible on board. By pushing objectors to the margins and threatening their livelihoods, those in power believe we achieve a utopian society where illness is eliminated.

This is as ridiculous today as it was in Burgess’s day.

…..

Freedom today is seen as a quaint anachronism by some and a byword for gun-loving (read stupid) Americans by others. A luxury that must be trampled on to achieve the greater good of keeping others safe.

Freedom is not an obstacle to the greater good. It is the greater good. Without freedom of choice, we are nothing more lobotomised bodies, incapable of thinking and ripe for manipulation.

As Burgess puts it: “If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange—meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil.”

The idea of a whole nation of dutiful and unthinking drones lining up to do exactly what they’re told for fear of destitution is far scarier than any virus.

Matt Ridley, writing in the Telegraph, decries the “hasty over-reaction to the arrival of a new variant.” Two slices:

Here we go again, fighting the last war. Because governments are perceived to have moved too slowly to ban flights when the delta variant arose in India, we jumped into action this time, punishing the poor South Africans for their molecular vigilance. But nothing was going to stop the delta going global, and the latest set of government measures to stop the spread of the new omicron variant are about as likely to succeed as the Maginot line was to stop General Guderian’s tanks. The cat is already out of the bag. Just because we can take action does not make it the right thing to do.

This pandemic has mocked public-health experts. They told us to wash our hands and then realised it was spreading through the air. They told us masks were useless and then made them mandatory. They sent covid cases to ordinary hospitals where they infected patients.

…..

With luck omicron will prove to be not only more infectious but also milder than delta. According to the doctor who diagnosed it, omicron “presents mild disease with symptoms being sore muscles and tiredness for a day or two… They might have a slight cough.” This, plus the effect of the vaccines, means that Britain’s policy of opening up in July, defying the modellers’ apocalyptic obsessions, proved sensible. The virus did not spiral out of control, or overwhelm the NHS, but a series of small waves came and went, as society inched towards an endemic truce with the enemy.

Jay Bhattacharya retweets NYC Angry Mom:

We should be measuring everything in this pandemic by years of life lost, and this measurement should include quality of life decline from containment measures.

The youngest people in the country are having their life experiences stolen from them to protect the oldest.

I, too, pledge what Phil Magness pledges (at Facebook):

I fully intend to reject, ignore, and – if necessary – defy any lockdown measure that may come about because of the “Omicron variant” scare. They did not work the last time, and will not work this time. Their purpose is not to control the disease, but to assert political power. You should reject them as well.

Add a Comment Share

Quotation of the Day…

by Don Boudreaux on November 29, 2021

in Philosophy of Freedom

… is from page 105 of the late Richard Pipes’s excellent 2001 book, Communism: A History:

The totalitarian state aims at obliterating all distinctions between itself and the citizenry (society) by penetrating and controlling every aspect of organized life.

Add a Comment Share

Some Non-Covid Links

by Don Boudreaux on November 28, 2021

in Budget Issues, Crony Capitalism, Education, Energy, Environment, History, Property Rights, Seen and Unseen, Trade

David Henderson has an excellent take on Kyle Rittenhouse’s actions.

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy remains, even after an especially difficult year for her and her family personally, thankful to be an American.

If Democrats were intelligent, they’d heed George Will’s advice to “temper their expensive enthusiasms.”

Clemson University’s Brad Thompson ponders “the fundamental issue of our time.” (HT George Leef) Two slices:

On September 28, Terry McAuliffe shocked voters in Virginia and around the country when he said in a gubernatorial debate with his Republican opponent, Glenn Youngkin, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

Virginia voters understood immediately the meaning of McAuliffe’s statement. The aspiring repeat Governor seemed to be saying that parents do not and should not have a “right” to determine what their children are taught in school, which means that America’s Education Establishment (i.e., the state and federal departments of education, teachers’ unions, teacher-training institutions, school board associations, textbook and curriculum companies) has the “right” to determine the content of your child’s mind.

The moment was clarifying. In an instant, all of the particular education issues that Americans have been debating for the last few years (e.g., mask mandates, online learning, Common Core, CRT, transgenderism, pronouns, bathroom policies, and pedophilic pornography, etc.) became secondary to a more fundamental question: Who should determine the cognitive content of America’s children, parents or government officials? More to the point, the question is: Do parents have an unalienable right to determine how, in what, and by whom will their children be educated, or should the government have that right?

There is no more important question in American politics than this one. Our answer to it will determine the fate of the republic.

The American Left (aided and abetted by some conservatives) believes that the government, not parents, should determine the content of a child’s mind—their ideas, their principles, and their values. A few weeks after McAuliffe’s tone-deaf faux pas, two authors writing in The Washington Post summed up the Left’s position in the title of their op-ed: “Parents claim they have the right to shape their kids’ school curriculum. They don’t.” Parents should have neither the right nor the authority, according to the Post’s writers, to determine the ideas taught to their children. This task should be left to the “experts”—to the experts of the Education Establishment. The authors go on to claim that “education should prepare young people to think for themselves, even if that runs counter to the wishes of their parents.” The question never addressed by the authors, however, is what happens when young people want to think for themselves and learn about ideas different from those taught by the government?!?! This option is, of course, strictly verboten.

…..

Over the course of the last year or two, recalcitrant American parents have been resisting the government’s efforts to usurp their authority. Ironically, it was the school COVID -19 lockdowns and online (non)learning that gave parents an opportunity to peak beneath the hood to see how the education machine actually works, and what they saw horrified them. All over the country, parents have risen up and stormed their local education Bastille. School board meetings from Savannah to Los Angeles have been taken over by parents exposing and denouncing the various forms of cultural Marxism being taught in the schools. These parents are outraged and they’re angry. What’s taken place around the country in school board meetings is akin to a grassroots intifada of ordinary people demanding accountability, sanity, change, and, most importantly, control over the education of their children.

GMU Econ alum Dan Sutter explains that “government control over supply chains would help make shortages permanent.”

The Cato Institute’s Colin Grabow rightly criticizes the U.S. government’s stubborn refusal to ease what many regard as the world’s most restrictive cabotage regulations.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Magatte Wade decries “the COP26 plan to keep Africa poor.” A slice:

If the U.S. and the European Union refuse to support an increase in Africa’s power supply, China will. Already 30% of new power plants in Africa are built by Chinese contractors controlled by the Communist government. Some of these are heavily polluting coal plants.

Africans deserve prosperity as much as everyone else, but we can’t get there without significant increases in power generation. A forced and hasty shift away from fossil fuels would cripple the continent’s economies. Not long ago, it was popular to discuss whether trade or foreign aid would help Africa most. The world’s activists now focus on climate instead of inequity, and serious concern about the condition of African people has vanished.

John Stossel recounts how the first Thanksgiving was made possible by private property rights.

Add a Comment Share

And Here I Spread More “Terrible Misinformation”

by Don Boudreaux on November 28, 2021

in Current Affairs, Myths and Fallacies, Risk and Safety, Seen and Unseen

Here’s a letter to a medical doctor who accuses me of spreading, on my blog, “terrible misinformation.”

Dr. M__:

You assert two “facts that discredit” my endorsement of the Great Barrington Declaration’s counsel to reject lockdowns and use instead Focused Protection. The first fact is that, unlike you, I “have no medical expertise.” The second is that I allegedly “ignore that focused protection unfairly loads the cost of covid protection to a subset of society when justice demands everybody share it.”

You’re correct that I have no medical expertise. But this fact carries little weight given that (1) two of the GBD’s three co-authors (Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff) are on the faculties of prestigious medical schools (Stanford and Harvard), while the third co-author (Sunetra Gupta) is a world-renowned epidemiologist on the faculty of the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford – each, in short, is a prominent and highly credentialed public-health expert; (2) the GBD is endorsed by many other persons who do have medical expertise; (3) just as I have no medical expertise, the same is true of many of the GBD’s detractors – including most of the government officials who reject this document; and (4) also relevant when evaluating the wisdom of the GBD’s counsel to use Focused Protection rather than lockdowns are political and economic consequences – about which (to play your game of ‘expertise trumps’) I have more expertise than you.

Your second claim that “justice demands everybody share” the cost of dealing with Covid features at least three flaws. The first is that it overlooks the fact that the key advantage of Focused Protection is that it would save more lives, and at a lower cost, than was achieved by lockdowns. Surely you’d not prefer what you call “equitable cost sharing” if among the consequences of achieving this ‘equity’ are more death and suffering.

The second flaw in your claim is that, contrary to your supposition, sharing the cost of dealing with Covid doesn’t require that everyone endure the same physical restrictions and mandates. For example, to acquire more resources for Covid mitigation, taxes can be raised on everyone without forcing the majority of persons – for whom Covid’s risks are small – to undergo whatever amount of quarantining, masking, and medicating are advisable for vulnerable groups.

The third flaw in your claim is revealed when it’s generalized. For example, according to your logic for rejecting Focused Protection, because it’s advisable to deal with dementia or extreme frailty by putting afflicted elderly people into nursing homes, we must not focus protection on members of this vulnerable group, but instead – to ensure that “everybody share” this cost – we must also put into nursing homes not only all elderly people, regardless of health, but everyone, including young adults and children. Clearly, such a policy would be madness.

Although we don’t name it such, we use various forms of Focused Protection, in lieu of general lockdowns and mandates, to treat all other diseases, including contagious ones such as flu, norovirus, meningitis, tuberculosis, and HIV. I see no good reason why this wisdom of the ages – which was, until early last year, reflected in the consensus among public-health experts – should be abandoned for Covid-19.

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

Add a Comment Share

Some Covid Links

by Don Boudreaux on November 28, 2021

in Books, Country Problems, Current Affairs, Hubris and humility, Myths and Fallacies, Philosophy of Freedom, Risk and Safety, Science, Seen and Unseen

Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins continues to write wisely about Covid-19. A slice:

All of us, including the vaccinated and previously infected, will also have to realize we’re playing a role in circulation even if the unvaccinated dominate hospital admissions. A rational vaccine strategy, it will be more obvious than ever, would prioritize the vulnerable rather than the Biden approach of prioritizing anyone who works in a company of 100 employees regardless of infection history.

But then, as the White House prolifically leaked at the time, its vaccine mandate was always more about protecting the Biden presidency from the vicissitudes of Covid than protecting anyone from disease.

First, where we are: The administration’s leakers didn’t go deeply into the political calculation but I will. Older voters, understandably, have been terrified of Covid and also unstinting in their willingness to impose costs on young people for steps that lack any real benefit. As wonderful as the jabs are, these same voters have been inundated with unrealistic expectations about what universal vaccination can accomplish. A case in point is the Aaron Rodgers hysteria. Whatever the Green Bay quarterback was thinking, he could expect to be infected eventually and expect a good outcome without his vaccination status mattering a great deal to him or anyone else. Sure enough, he’s back playing alongside numerous NFLers who recovered from Covid whether or not they were vaccinated.

More insidious is how the media’s Covid ideology is influencing decisions made for children, where the risk-benefit trade-offs are an even narrower squeak. Only muddle exists concerning the perhaps half of kids who’ve already acquired some natural immunity. In their agonizing decision to recommend shots for the 5-to-11s, federal officials also had to run a gauntlet of subtle pressure to weigh the benefit to third parties—teachers, grandparents, the economy, the Biden administration—against the risks to children.

The same is true of masking in elementary schools: unlikely to be effective, possibly deleterious socially and developmentally. It’s done mostly to placate older people. Even if successful, there’s a question of whether you do kids any favor by delaying their inevitable first encounter with Covid when their young immune systems are best primed to cope with it.

The Wall Street Journal‘s Editorial Board opines sensibly on the omicron variant. Two slices:

Markets sold off worldwide on Friday after South Africa raised alarm about the new “variant of concern” that the World Health Organization named Omicron. The panic may be driven more by the fear of new government lockdowns and social distancing than by the variant itself.

…..

Americans and the rest of the world need to learn to live with an ever-mutating virus. So do our politicians.

Here’s el gato malo on news of the emergence of the omicron variant. Two slices:

this is not history rhyming.

this is maybe even past history just repeating.

i’m starting to worry that we’re caught in some kind of groundhog day time loop.

just in time for the holidays and the real start of seasonal covid expression, here’s the same exact pollyannas prophesying the same exact doom using the same exact tactics of “super scary new variant.”

as it so often seems to, our new chapter starts once more at imperial university, the proud pants wetting capital of britain whose hopelessly inept and inapt prognostications and models have been wreaking havoc upon that sceptered isle and the rest of the world alike since early 2020.

and once more, a gleeful UK press is ready and willing to play up the terrors.

…..

we’re not being threatened by a new plague of virus, just the same old plague of incompetent hysterics determined once more to drive the world into a ditch because it gets them power and grant money.

the world has had enough of these clowns.

it is LONG past time we shut this circus down.

And here’s el gato malo on the newly declared “State of Emergency” in New York State – a State of Emergency alleged to be caused by the omicron variant but, in fact, caused by mandated vaccination of health-care workers.

Vinay Prasad:

We truly do not know if the actions taken in Austria, the Netherlands, Portugal etc. will result in a long term net health benefit to the community. The lockdown critics have been unfairly silenced and demonized. As we keep re-instituting these draconian measures some better evidence is needed, or we must abandon these as tools. A politician looks strong when they use these tools, but do they merely bring more misery on the citizenry?….

We have become de-sensitized to these interventions (Lockdown & travel bans), and accordingly we use them more and more.

If Covid hysteria didn’t impose enormous negative externalities on non-consenting third parties, the peddlers of this hysteria would be comical. Here’s Phil Magness, at Facebook, on one such peddler:

Would you believe that the lead author of one of the most heavily cited pro-mask articles in a top tier medical journal also sticks panty liners on the inside of her own mask to create an additional “filter” for stray covid particles?

UnHerd‘s Freddie Sayers writes wisely in Britain about responding to the omicron variant. A slice:

By contrast, the decision to reimpose mandatory facemasks in shops is effective immediately. Is there a single scientist that believes upgrading the advice on reusable cloth facemasks in shops from recommended to mandatory for the entire population is a meaningful response to two new cases of a new variant on our shores? As Boris Johnson himself said, the protocols we had in place already were adequate for the previous variants, so any new strategy for the “Omicron” variant is, in theory, all about containment.

But what percentage of Covid transmission events have ever happened in shops? What percentage of those would be cases of the “Omicron” variant? And what percentage of those would be prevented by the return of mandatory advice? We are into a very small fraction of 1 percent at this point.

Meanwhile, masks are not mandatory in hospitality settings, or public events — or, obviously, homes and workplaces, where most transmission actually occurs after prolonged exposure.

So it’s utterly tokenistic. But worse, it suggests the return of restrictions as a form of gesture politics. In exchange for a theoretical gain so marginal as to be entirely irrelevant, the Government is choosing to impose a daily inconvenience that is a notorious source of division on its entire population. This is a bad bargain, and a continuation of a blinkered policy mindset that has bedevilled this pandemic.

Andrew Lilico decries Boris Johnson’s new mask mandate. A slice (link added):

Absent any emergency justification, the imposition on the public is simple tyranny. If the government had suddenly declared, in mid-2018, that it was making masks mandatory in all shops for no better reason than this might cut down on respiratory illness a bit, would you have complied? Of course not!

It is not legitimate to restrict our liberties in this way ‘just in case’

In Britain it has long been understood that there is a basic threshold of natural justice or necessity for something to be a law. There can be good laws and bad laws, but if a purported law does not meet a required threshold of justice or necessity, it is not truly a law at all.

A key reason Britain has not fallen victim to the tyrannical governments seen in other countries is that Britons have refused to accept laws that lacked sufficient natural justice or necessity. By refusing to comply with them, and being backed in that to a greater or lesser degree by the courts, they have forced the government to back down.

A famous example of that is the case of Clarence Harry Willcock – the last man the government attempted to prosecute for refusing to carry an ID card. Mr Willcock said he did not believe in such things. The judges heavily criticised the government for maintaining ID cards long after their initial justification (the second world war) had ended. And the government backed down and abolished them.

Jeffrey Tucker praises the new book by Scott Atlas. A slice:

Atlas’s book has exposed a scandal for the ages. It is enormously valuable because it fully blows up what seems to be an emerging fake story involving a supposedly Covid-denying president who did nothing vs. heroic scientists in the White House who urged compulsory mitigating measures consistent with prevailing scientific opinion. Not one word of that is true. Atlas’s book, I hope, makes it impossible to tell such tall tales without embarrassment.

Anyone who tells you this fictional story (including Deborah Birx)deserves to have this highly credible treatise tossed in his direction. The book is about the war between real science (and genuine public health), with Atlas as the voice for reason both before and during his time in the White House, vs. the enactment of brutal policies that never stood any chance of controlling the virus while causing tremendous damage to the people, to human liberty, to children in particular, but also to billions of people around the world.

…..

Throughout the book, Atlas points to the enormous cost of the machinery of lockdowns, the preferred method of Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx: missed cancer screenings, missed surgeries, nearly two years of educational losses, bankrupted small business, depression and drug overdoses, overall citizen demoralization, violations of religious freedom, all while public health massively neglected the actual at-risk population in long-term care facilities. Essentially, they were willing to dismantle everything we called civilization in the name of bludgeoning one pathogen without regard to the consequences.

The fake science of population-wide “models” drove policy instead of following the known information about risk profiles. “The one unusual feature of this virus was the fact that children had an extraordinarily low risk,” writes Atlas. “Yet this positive and reassuring news was never emphasized. Instead, with total disregard of the evidence of selective risk consistent with other respiratory viruses, public health officials recommended draconian isolation of everyone.”

“Restrictions on liberty were also destructive by inflaming class distinctions with their differential impact,” he writes, “exposing essential workers, sacrificing low-income families and kids, destroying single-parent homes, and eviscerating small businesses, while at the same time large companies were bailed out, elites worked from home with barely an interruption, and the ultra-rich got richer, leveraging their bully pulpit to demonize and cancel those who challenged their preferred policy options.”

…..

We all owe Atlas an enormous debt of gratitude, for it was he who persuaded the Florida governor to choose the path of focused protection as advocated by the Great Barrington Declaration, which Atlas cites as the “single document that will go down as one of the most important publications in the pandemic, as it lent undeniable credibility to focused protection and provided courage to thousands of additional medical scientists and public health leaders to come forward.”

Add a Comment Share

Quotation of the Day…

by Don Boudreaux on November 28, 2021

in Innovation, Seen and Unseen, The Economy, Trade

… is from page 98 of Arthur Diamond, Jr.’s, excellent 2019 book, Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism (footnotes deleted; links added):

An exciting development from the computer revolution, the iPod innovation, created low-paid manufacturing jobs, mostly abroad, and “high-paid professional and engineering jobs,” mainly in the United States. Over two-thirds of the total value of wages paid to create an iPod were paid to workers within the United States.

UPDATE: And as Tony Gill adds (at Facebook): “And if one compares the wages of the overseas workers to their next best opportunity of employment, methinks they would be big winners in the capturing a portion of the gains from trade too.”

Add a Comment Share

Government-Imposed Vaccine Mandates are Tyranny

by Don Boudreaux on November 27, 2021

in Current Affairs, Philosophy of Freedom

(HT el gato malo)

Add a Comment Share

The Key Is to End the Obsession

by Don Boudreaux on November 27, 2021

in Country Problems, Current Affairs, Myths and Fallacies

Here’s a letter to the Washington Post:

Editor:

Megan McArdle wisely counsels that, in responding to the omicron variant of the Covid virus, we use measures other than lockdowns (“The U.S. must defend itself from the omicron variant – without resorting to lockdowns,” November 27). Yet while many of the measures she does recommend make sense – for example, speedier FDA approval of antiviral treatments – she disappoints by failing to mention the “Focused Protection” recommended in the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD). This failure is curious given that the recommendation offered by the three public-health experts who in late 2020 wrote the GBD reflects the public-health consensus that prevailed until early 2020 – when China’s authoritarian government then blazed the terrible trail of locking down large populations.

Heeding the counsel of the GBD would of course free us from the specter of lockdowns. But it would also free us from a flawed mindset, as well as an unnecessary ordeal, that Ms. McArdle mistakenly treats as unavoidable in the Covid age – the mindset being that each of us, regardless of age, health status, or personal circumstances, is at serious risk of suffering from or dangerously spreading Covid, and the ordeal being incessant testing for Covid.

Life cannot return to normal as long as everyone is obsessed with avoiding exposure to this one pathogen – a pathogen that, fortunately, focuses the overwhelming bulk of its dangers on the elderly and very ill. In response, we should in turn follow the advice of the GBD’s authors and focus our efforts on protecting this vulnerable group while encouraging the great bulk of the population to return to life normally, without fear and the debilitating anxiety about Covid that is bound to be fueled by incessant testing.

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

Add a Comment Share

Further Evidence of the Deformity Spawned Since Early 2020

by Don Boudreaux on November 27, 2021

in Country Problems, Current Affairs, Education, Not from the Onion

Just to the left here is a screen shot of an actual op-ed in an actual newspaper. The author is serious (I think).

I leave to readers the responsibility of drawing their own conclusions, but here I can speak with first-hand, professional knowledge: Teaching over Zoom is pathetic, deformed, and utterly inadequate relative to teaching in person. Everything in my nearly 40-year-long career of teaching at the collegiate level – and for nearly two years now teaching chiefly over Zoom (well, Blackboard; but same thing essentially) – runs counter to what this op-ed writer reports.

Add a Comment Share