My column for the September 22nd, 2011, edition of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review was inspired by Robert Higgs’s important insight about regime uncertainty. You can read my column beneath the fold (link added).
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It is bad enough that administrative agencies do most lawmaking in America pursuant to sweeping delegations of rulemaking authority from Congress. Such delegations are not blank checks but depend on intelligible limiting principles. Yet in Chevron and City of Arlington, the high court abandoned that requirement, letting adventurous agencies invent self-serving interpretations to justify using their delegated authority in ways far removed from what Congress intended.
Agencies aren’t impartial participants in these cases but have an interest in interpreting the law in ways that expand their powers. Last week Justice Gorsuch sounded exasperated by yet another example of the “government’s seeking deference for a rule that advantages it.” He seemed sympathetic to Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s observation that AHA presented a “classical problem of statutory interpretation that a court should resolve” without judicial deference. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito both bluntly asked if Chevron should be overruled.
Chipping away at Chevron won’t by itself solve the larger problem in the rise of the administrative state, which as James Madison warned, is that “the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” But curbing abuses in agency rulemaking by returning to the Administrative Procedure Act would be a good start.
Phil Magness busts a myth about the alleged “adjunctification” of higher education (so-called). A slice:
Even when it affords some protection to faculty speech, tenure also creates a barrier to faculty hiring and promotion. It raises the stakes of new faculty hiring and introduces multiple opportunities for other faculty to veto or obstruct a potential candidate’s progress through an academic career. Ideological bias and discrimination are well-documented features of the higher education job market, particularly as academia has shifted sharply to the political left in the last 15 years. In these circumstances, tenure can also become a weaponized tool for excluding minority political perspectives from the hiring and promotion process.
Maria Servold decries the rot that now infects most schools of journalism (so-called).
My GMU Econ colleague Dan Klein continues to write insightfully about Adam Smith’s insights.
Jacob Sullum criticizes the regulation of vaping.
Sally Satel, M.D., decries the “Indoctrinologists” who are taking over the medical profession. (HT George Leef) A slice:
The latest manifestation of Indoctrinology is a 54-page document from the American Medical Association called Advancing Health Equity: A Guide to Language, Narrative, and Concepts. The guide condemns several “dominant narratives” in medicine. One is the “narrative of individualism,” and its misbegotten corollary, the notion that health is a personal responsibility. A more “equitable narrative,” the guide instructs, would “expose the political roots underlying apparently ‘natural’ economic arrangements, such as property rights, market conditions, gentrification, oligopolies and low wage rates.” The dominant narratives, says the AMA, “create harm, undermining public health and the advancement of health equity; they must be named, disrupted, and corrected.”
One form of correction that the AMA recommends is “equity explicit” language. Instead of “individuals,” doctors should say “survivors”; instead of “marginalized communities,” they should say, “groups that are struggling against economic marginalization.” We must also be clear that “people are not vulnerable, they are made vulnerable.” Accordingly, we should replace the statement, “Low-income people have the highest level of coronary artery disease,” with “People underpaid and forced into poverty as a result of banking policies, real estate developers gentrifying neighborhoods, and corporations weakening the power of labor movements, among others, have the highest level of coronary artery disease.”
A silver lining around the black-hole-dark Covid cloud is that the hysterical overreaction to the disease gave parents a glimpse into what goes on in K-12 schools (so-called). Fortunately, most K-12 government-school educucrats are a singularly myopic and unintelligent bunch, so – as J.D. Tuccille reports – they are, fortunately, “causing irreparable harm to themselves” (and, hence, unintentionally providing a happy escape for children). A slice:
Such social-justice-y pissiness was difficult to sustain when it turned out that the most enthusiastic converts to homeschooling were African-Americans, among whom DIY education went from 3.3 percent of students pre-COVID to 16.1 percent in the fall of 2020. Nevertheless, teachers unions, control-freak politicians, and their allies continue to insist that anybody who wants to let families guide their kids’ education instead of forcing them to subsidize government institutions is hell-bent on ending public schools.
That narrative also becomes difficult to sustain, or maybe just irrelevant, when public schools set about ending themselves. But instead of having the good grace to exit the scene in a planned way, they self-immolate in abrupt increments (one day here, a few days there, one-fifth of the school week elsewhere) with little provision made for transitioning to something else.
Here’s more from Scott Lincicome and Ilana Blumsack on America’s infrastructure.
Colin Grabow bemoans the Biden administration’s hypocrisy.
Here’s Kyle Smith on Peter Jackson’s three-part series about the Beatles, Get Back.
George Selgin explains how Canada ended up ensuring bank deposits. A slice:
That the failure of so many U.S. banks during the early 1930s should have prompted calls for some sort of major reform is hardly surprising. Not for the first time, many argued that U.S. banks should be given greater freedom to branch, like their Canadian counterparts. But as had happened on previous occasions, and would continue to be the case for some decades, their efforts were thwarted by established unit bankers, who instead lobbied for federal deposit insurance. To say that the FDIC was established at the start of 1934 to serve as a crutch for a crippled unit banking system to lean on would not be at all inaccurate.
More than 100 years ago the great journalist and pundit H.L. Menken observed that the “whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” The threat of terrorism served that purpose for the last 20 years, and we still tolerate removing our shoes at airports and limiting liquids to three ounces as a result.
The politicians and health bureaucrats will use each new variant of COVID-19 to keep us alarmed and infringe our freedom until we become accustomed to and passively accept these infringements — if we let them. Enough is enough. It’s time to demand the freedom for people, and the businesses that serve them, to determine for themselves which health precautions they would like to take and which hassles they’d rather avoid.
Reason‘s Liz Wolfe rightly criticizes New York City strongman Bill de Blasio’s vaccine diktats.
The most nonsensical aspect of de Blasio’s mandate is that it is targeted at employers and their employees. In the age groups that make up most of the workforce (18 to 25; 26 to 34; 35 to 44; 45 to 54; 55 to 64), the percentage fully vaccinated ranges from 75 to 89 percent, and 85 to 96 percent have received at least one dose. No mandate is necessary for a workforce so highly vaccinated and well protected.
And the Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal joins in to criticize strongman de Blasio’s vaccine mandates. Two slices:
Mayor Bill de Blasio has done enormous damage to New York City over his eight years in office, and most New Yorkers will be elated to see him leave on Dec. 31. True to form, however, on Monday he announced one more progressive parting gift: A coercive and counterproductive Covid vaccine mandate.
The mayor is requiring that all private workers in the city be vaccinated by Dec. 27, which he called “a pre-emptive strike” against a virus surge this winter. The mandate is a strike against the city, not the virus. It will yield diminishing public-health benefits while making it harder for the city to recover economically from his and former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s destructive lockdowns.
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Hospitalizations are increasing mostly upstate where vaccination rates are lower and fewer people have natural immunity. While vaccines are protective against severe illness, they don’t prevent infection or transmission. Unvaccinated workers are mainly a threat to themselves. Mr. de Blasio’s mandate threatens small businesses struggling under the city’s tax burden and expensive labor regulations.
Kathryn Wylde, CEO of the Partnership for New York City, said businesses “were blindsided” by the mayor’s announcement, adding “there’s no forewarning, no discussion, no idea about whether it’s legal or who he expects to enforce it.”
The mandate—the first nationwide, as far as we know—is a nasty and needless infringement on liberty. There’s also this contradiction: Mr. de Blasio wants to punish law-abiding workers who have done nothing wrong, while his anti-police policies have encouraged a surge of violent crime and made major public areas of the city dangerous again.
The constitutionality of Mr. de Blasio’s mandate will turn primarily on Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905), in which the Supreme Court upheld a smallpox vaccination law. The justices held that state governments have the power to exercise “self-defense” against infectious disease on behalf of the community, so long as the measures were “reasonable” and not “arbitrary.” But Mr. de Blasio’s measure goes far beyond the holding or reasoning of the precedent, to say nothing of the past century of constitutional doctrine.
Jacobson involved smallpox, which before its eradication was one of the most fearsome diseases known to man. It killed 30% of those infected. It disproportionately affected children and commonly left them disfigured by lesions. Covid-19 is serious, but it’s in a different league.
Now to the policy question: what sense does it make to exclude kids who don’t meet this vaccination requirement from NYC restaurants? I have to say it is crazy. Both James [Lim] and Marty [Makary] are correct: focusing on this age group, and ignoring natural immunity, and using the brute force of the state to impose such a draconian restriction is a terrible policy decision.
Karol Markowicz decries the Covidocracy’s abuse of children. Three slices:
It’s no mystery why kids are having a hard time. After a year-plus of schools in blue areas being semi-open at best, we’ve brought kids back into classroom settings only to have them take insane, unnecessary precautions that actively harm learning.
Last week, my son’s class presented projects. The kids were masked and in their classroom while the parents watched the presentations on Zoom. To sum up the presentations by 6-year-olds: “Skjnskjngpnw kngiwnk plplwoje!” The Zoom featured a bunch of parents leaning in and listening intently to try to catch a word or two of what their kid was saying. I was fully unsuccessful.
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The “Now It Can Be Told” pieces are there to cover up the fact that the teachers unions ran the show and spineless politicians did their bidding to needlessly keep schools shut. We broke children because Randi Weingarten said so. But it’s not just her. The rot is deep. The unions sat down with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to craft policies to keep schools shut. Anthony Fauci went from saying schools should be open to saying they could only open once President Joe Biden’s stimulus plan passed. Every force on the left aligned against children.
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In a year we’ll be seeing the articles about how, actually, masks were bad for kids all along, with no apology for having gotten it wrong. Already a Brown University study tracking cognitive development in small children attributes a dramatic drop in verbal and nonverbal development to masking.
I’m going to do what I must to save my kid. But it’s long past time those in charge should have to answer for what they’ve done to so many kids who will be left behind.
A mayor who professes to defend bodily autonomy is doing the opposite, forcing everyone to take the shots, regardless of personal qualms. This is the same de Blasio who warned at a recent Brooklyn pro-choice rally that “you cannot have your government attempt to take away your right to control your body. It cannot happen in America.”
My GMU Econ colleague Bryan Caplan believes, plausibly, that he’s identified a Covid asymmetry. Here’s his opening:
During Covid, the U.S. reverted to our old tradition of federalism – and then embraced gubernatorial dictatorship. As result of this strange and shocking institutional revolution, the U.S. witnessed a dramatic rise in policy variance. Some parts of the U.S., like Florida and Texas, returned to near-normalcy in a matter of months. Others, like California and New York, became and remain soft police states.
Ryan M. is understandably dismayed by the current state of the world. A slice:
There is a hellish tyranny sweeping across the world. There is a hellish tyranny sweeping across the United States. It doesn’t wear uniforms or jackboots, and it isn’t dropping bombs. It is the same tyranny that we neglected to defeat 80 years ago; the one that finds enemies at home and puts them into camps for their own safety and for that of their countrymen; the one that asks to see your papers; the one that promises to keep you safe by protecting you against your neighbor, and even yourself.
Jim Bovard exposes several of Biden’s Covid whoppers.
Brian Pottinger warns of South Africa’s “looming vaccine revolt.” A slice:
In common with the rest of the world, South African epidemiological estimates of fatalities at the outset of the coronavirus outbreak verged on the fantastical. Initial predictions were for between 87,000 and 350,000 fatalities in the first phase. There were 103. Two years later, with the virus in retreat, fatalities attributed to Covid (but by no means vouchsafed) are only now beginning to touch the lowest initial estimates.
Yet the South African Government imposed one of the longest and most severe lockdowns, supported by a baying national and social media. The decision has proved inappropriate in nature, premature in timing and catastrophic in impact. In a country where many depend on ad hoc daily or weekly subsistence wages, the sudden cessation of economic activity wreaked havoc amongst the poor and self-employed. A failing state was unable to deliver on its promise of subsidies, responsible policing or effective containment.
Rapidly accumulating data strongly suggest prior covid-19 infection, “natural immunity,” is more robust, flexible, and enduring than exclusive covid-19 vaccine-acquired immunity. Pfizer’s covid-19 booster trial data confirm boosters afford no benefit in preventing covid-19 infections among those with natural immunity.
Given these overall randomized trial findings regarding covid-19 vaccine boosters—absence of even a short- term reduction in mild covid-19 infections in those with natural immunity, and no data establishing that boosters prevent covid-19 hospitalizations, deaths, or SARS-CoV-2 transmission—there is no rational, evidence-based justification for covid-19 vaccine “booster mandates.”
Glenn Greenwald sarcastically tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
People who have only received two COVID vaccine shots are gross, and I’m grateful that the Atlantic stepped and bestowed them with a shameful new name — the Unboosted — while suggesting they perhaps must be shunned along with their even more filthy brethren: the Unvaccinated.
… is from page 295 of Thomas Sowell’s May 29, 1998, column titled “The Insulation of the Left,” as this column is reprinted in Sowell’s 2002 collection, Controversial Essays:
One of the reasons why government absorbs so much money and takes on ever-increasing powers is that it is home to so many people whose beliefs could not withstand the draconian tests of science, the marketplace or a scoreboard. What we the taxpayers are ultimately paying for is their insulation from reality, as they pursue the heady pleasures of power.
How could public officials vowing to “follow the science” on Covid-19 persist in promoting ineffective strategies with terrible consequences? In a memoir of his time on the White House Coronavirus Task Force, Scott W. Atlas provides an answer: because the nation’s governance was hijacked by three bureaucrats with scant interest in scientific research or debate—and no concern for the calamitous effects of their edicts.
Atlas’s book, A Plague Upon Our House, is an astonishing read, even for those who have been closely following this disaster.
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Vice President Mike Pence chaired the Task Force, but Atlas says that Pence and the other members were regularly cowed into submission by three doctors who dominated from the start: Deborah Birx, the Task Force’s coordinator, along with Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control.
Atlas calls them “the troika” because of their strategy for presenting a united front, never disagreeing with one another during the meetings in the White House Situation Room. (Reporting later revealed that they had made a pact to resign in unison if any of them was fired.) These veterans of the federal bureaucracy had worked closely together during the AIDS epidemic, and their track record was hardly reassuring. Their long and costly quest to develop an AIDS vaccine ultimately failed, but they did manage to persuade the public that AIDS would spread widely beyond gay men and intravenous drug users. Redfield, with some help from Fauci, was the chief prophet of a “heterosexual breakout,” a threat that terrified Americans for more than a decade but never materialized.
The troika stoked more needless fears during the Covid pandemic, continually emphasizing worst-case scenarios—the computer models, for example, that wrongly forecast millions of American deaths in the summer of 2020. Surveys showed that most Americans, especially young people, vastly overestimated their risk of serious disease. Yet Fauci still wasn’t satisfied, as Atlas discovered when Fauci complained during one meeting that Americans didn’t take the virus seriously. “I challenged him to clarify his point,” Atlas writes, “because I couldn’t believe my ears. ‘So you think people aren’t frightened enough?’ He said, ‘Yes, they need to be more afraid.’ To me, this was another moment of Kafkaesque absurdity. . . . Instilling fear in the public is absolutely counter to what a leader in public health should do. To me, it is frankly immoral, although I kept that to myself.”
Fauci got the most media attention of the troika, but Atlas thinks that Birx did the most damage.
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The troika also ignored dozens of studies showing the ineffectiveness of lockdowns, and the data showing that places that avoided lockdowns, like Florida and Sweden, did as well as or better than average in preventing Covid deaths. “I never fully understood why there was no admission, even internally by the Task Force, that the Birx-Fauci strategy did not work,” Atlas writes, concluding that it wasn’t simply because the media was eager to champion anyone who questioned President Donald Trump’s desire to reopen schools and businesses. “Disagreeing with Trump, especially in this election year, ensured near idolatry on cable TV and in the New York Times or Washington Post. But I never thought politics was the main driver of those on the Task Force. Perhaps it was an unstated fear that they were in way too deep to admit their errors.”
Mainstream media were the chief weapon the troika wielded against Atlas and scientists who opposed lockdowns and instead advocated a policy of “focused protection” that would concentrate testing and related resources on the elderly or other high-risk populations. (Atlas invited Birx to a meeting in the Oval Office with some of these eminent researchers, but she refused to attend.) Journalists caricatured their proposals as a callous “let it rip” strategy, portraying Atlas as an unqualified ideologue, unconcerned about the spread of the virus. Some of the false accusations in the press came from anonymous sources on the Task Force—presumably Fauci and Birx, Atlas writes, though Fauci denied it when Atlas confronted him. On the record, Fauci dismissed Atlas as an “outlier,” an assessment that journalists reinforced by repeatedly noting that he was “not an epidemiologist,” as if that were the only relevant qualification for determining overall public-health policies.
Fauci, Birx, and Redfield were not epidemiologists, either, but they were enshrined as “the science” because they provided what mainstream journalists craved: scare stories that boosted ratings and made Trump look bad.
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The politician who comes off best is Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who had, Atlas observes, “a far more detailed understanding of the pandemic than anyone I had encountered in the Task Force.” Trump comes off fairly well, too, in his conversations with Atlas, as he frets about the harms of the lockdowns and instinctively recognizes the futility of the troika’s strategies. But Atlas lays the ultimate blame for the lockdowns—“a crime against humanity”—on Trump himself, because he allowed Birx and her allies to remain in charge. “This president, widely known for his signature ‘You’re fired!’ declaration, was misled by his closest political intimates,” Atlas writes. “All for fear of what was inevitable anyway—skewering from an already hostile media.”
K. Lloyd Billingsley rightly decries the hubris-drunk, narcissistic tyrant Fauci. A slice:
When the virus that causes COVID-19 arrived on these shores, Dr. Fauci was the man most responsible for the lockdowns that cause untold suffering for millions of Americans. As confirmed, Dr. Fauci wields executive-level power but in more than 50 years in government, he has never once faced the voters.
Anthony Fauci earned a medical degree in 1966 but if he ever practiced medicine it was only for a short time. In 1968, Fauci took a job with the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Fauci’s bio shows no advanced degrees in molecular biology or biochemistry, but Fauci has headed NIAID since 1984 and is now the highest-paid bureaucrat in the federal government.
The late Angelo Codevilla pegged Fauci as a deep state fraud, and the NIAID boss is under fire for lying about funding for gain-of-function research at the WIV. Dr. Fauci has reversed himself on many aspects of the pandemic but now claims his critics are “really criticizing science because I represent science.” Embattled Americans have to wonder.
“There comes a time,” Dr. Fauci recently told a McGill University audience, “when you do have to give up what you consider your individual right of making your own decision, for the greater good of society.” Dr. Anthony Fauci represents white coat supremacy, ruled by unelected bureaucrats.
Christos Makridis reports on some interesting research on Covid and social capital.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Marc Siegal counsels, about omicron, to keep calm and carry on. Here’s his conclusion:
The media is out for ratings, and politicians use fear to gain votes. If we give them neither we will find that fear begins to fade.
Alberto Mingardi asks if compulsory vaccination works. A slice:
A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of compulsory vaccination.
In the face of the Omicron variant, European governments are escalating in their anti-Covid measures. Compulsory vaccination is on the table, but so is the idea of going back to at least partial lockdowns. It is interesting that by now shutting down at least part of social life is sort of a default option, happily embraced by governments and experts as a first resort application of the precautionary principle. “When in doubt shut down”. Who would have predicted this, say, two years ago?
One of the reasons for this is a particular belief which has been circulated since Sars-Cov-2 reached us from Wuhan: the idea that “closed societies” are better at protecting people and fighting epidemics than open societies. Interestingly enough, those holding this belief do not waste their time in producing any evidence in support of their contentions. The idea that individual liberty is a nuisance in a pandemic is sort of taken for granted. This meant and still means that the tougher things get, the less justification is apparently needed to curtail older liberties.
[NYC health commissioner, Dave A.] Chokshi said the city will also require those aged 5–11 to have at least one vaccine shot in order to enter restaurants and other public venues. The city will also now require people aged 12 and up to get at least two doses of the vaccine to enter these places. Previously, people aged 12 and over only needed one shot to go to restaurants, gyms, and entertainment venues, and anyone younger didn’t need to be vaccinated at all.
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That’s an incredibly troubling approach to COVID-19 and one that will get more coercive the fewer unvaccinated people are left. Will a 95 percent vaccination rate be enough for the city to ease off the mandates? Or will that small remaining rump of the uninoculated necessitate a general vaccine requirement to finally get to universal vaccination?
It’s not clear what the off-ramp is for de Blasio and his ilk. Increasingly, it seems like there isn’t one.
Independent-No-to-Groupthink tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
Yes. sarscov2 infected, caused covid in some-but the larger scale impact of sarscov2 has been to transform a small set of humans into irrational, unscientific, dangerous tyrants who imposed their iron will on us- and still refuse to see the harm they inflicted on the world’s poor
But perhaps most importantly, measures targeted against the unvaccinated would cross several important moral lines. Compulsory jabs are dehumanising in the sense that they undermine human agency. Taking their cue from mandatory child vaccinations, they infantilise the public, endorsing the idea that the state must protect people for their own good.
Some wrly suggest that the state could nudge anti-vaxxers in a way that encourages greater self-responsibility by charging them for Covid-related hospital treatment, as in Singapore. While this is a potentially clever way to square the circle, it would be ethically repugnant to single out the unvaccinated, but continue to indulge the obese or heavy drinkers, who put strain on the NHS as well.
If we were to introduce discriminatory measures against the unjabbed, we would also surely be setting a worryingly low bar for the circumstances in which the social good is deemed to outweigh the freedom of the individual in the future. For all the worries about the omicron variant, Covid now has an estimated fatality rate of 0.085 per cent (not dramatically greater than flu, which is believed to be 0.04 per cent), and deaths have continued to fall.
Writing in National Review, Alex Story decries Austria’s Covidocratic authoritarianism. Two slices:
Indeed, this process has already begun, with a classic bureaucratic “roundtable” that will bring all the right stakeholders together. The outcome, Soviet-style, has already been determined. As constitutional-affairs minister Karoline Edtstadler said, different opinions are not required, as it would “not suggest a constructive contribution.”
The unvaccinated and partially vaccinated are already barred from participating in normal life. The Austrian government announced a lockdown for the “unvaccinated” two weeks ago before imposing one for all last week. As reported by the Salzburger Nachrichenten, the lockdown for all currently in force was extended to December 11. However, health minister Wolfgang Mückstein, a member of the Greens, added that “the lockdown for the unvaccinated will be extended.”
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A vaccine mandate will mean inevitable job losses for those unwilling or unable to submit. Those who do lose their jobs won’t easily have access to unemployment aid. After all, they will be outlaws. In addition, they will be physically constrained, stopped from leading a normal life, and fined.
As people are barred from earning an honest living, many of the fines levied will go unpaid. Arrests, bankruptcies, and more incarcerations will follow. The Austrian state is set to create a new generation of martyrs.
“Italy begins lockdown of the unvaccinated.”
Brendan O’Neill argues, quite compellingly, that “[m]andatory vaccination spells the violent end of European liberalism.” Three slices:
Europe is on a precipice. It has marched, blindly, towards something very much resembling tyranny. Austria will shortly criminalise those who refuse the Covid vaccine. Germany looks set to follow. Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, is wondering out loud if every member state should do likewise and make offenders of those who reject this form of medication. In Italy you are deprived of your livelihood rather than your liberty if you say no to vaccination: the unvaxxed are not permitted to work. Anywhere. In Greece, everyone over the age of 60 must pay the government 100 euros for every month they remain unvaxxed. As if the Greek government, in cahoots with its masters in Brussels, had not immiserated Greek pensioners enough already.
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What is happening in Europe right now is nothing short of terrifying. We are not merely witnessing another round of Covid restrictions. This isn’t just the introduction of another set of emergency measures that some people believe are necessary to stave off the latest Covid wave and the Omicron threat lurking on the horizon. No, we are living through a chilling overhaul of the entire relationship between the state and the individual, with the state empowered to such an extraordinary degree that it can now instruct its citizens on what to inject into their bodies, and the individual so politically emaciated, so denuded of rights, that he no longer even enjoys sovereignty over himself, over that tiny part of the world that is his own body and mind. We are witnessing the violent death of European liberalism and the birth pangs of a new and deeply authoritarian era.
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Strikingly, there is very little pushback from the so-called human-rights lobby against the proposed new regime of forced medication. Europhiles in the UK and elsewhere – the kind of people who assured us the EU was the great modern defender of the dignity of the individual – are meek as mice in the face of these state threats to strongarm citizens into medical compliance. It wasn’t meant to be like this, you see. It was Brexit Britain, they said, that would become a hotbed of deranged authoritarianism, while the EU would hold a candle for the modern principles of rights and respect. And now that the opposite has proven to be the case, they look the other way, or they subtly give their nod to what amounts to a tyranny of the state over the souls and flesh of individual human beings. European liberalism is dying, the European Union stands exposed as a seat of extreme authoritarianism, and the future of this continent looks very uncertain indeed. Covid will look like a blip in the affairs of man in comparison with the fallout from this political and moral crisis of the European continent.
(DBx: Why are so few voices protesting this hellish tyranny that is now sweeping across the globe? If – and this “if” is big – humanity recovers its senses and liberalism survives Covid hysteria, our children and grandchildren will look back on today’s goings-on with much the same mix of revulsion and “How could human beings have done that?!” with which we today look back on the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre and other brutal religious persecutions.)
Here’s the abstract of a new paper by Ari Joffe and David Redman:
The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has caused tragic morbidity and mortality. In attempt to reduce this morbidity and mortality, most countries implemented population-wide lockdowns. Here we show that the lockdowns were based on several flawed assumptions, including “no one is protected until everyone is protected,” “lockdowns are highly effective to reduce transmission,” “lockdowns have a favorable cost-benefit balance,” and “lockdowns are the only effective option.” Focusing on the latter, we discuss that Emergency Management principles provide a better way forward to manage the public emergency of the pandemic. Specifically, there are three priorities including the following: first, protect those most at risk by separating them from the threat (mitigation); second, ensure critical infrastructure is ready for people who get sick (preparation and response); and third, shift the response from fear to confidence (recovery). We argue that, based on Emergency Management principles, the age-dependent risk from SARS-CoV-2, the minimal (at best) efficacy of lockdowns, and the terrible cost-benefit trade-offs of lockdowns, we need to reset the pandemic response. We can manage risk and save more lives from both COVID-19 and lockdowns, thus achieving far better outcomes in both the short- and long-term.
… is from page 125 of the original 1960 Harvard University Press edition of Frank Knight’s collection of lectures, delivered in 1958 at the University of Virginia, titled Intelligence and Democratic Action:
Human society is basically a phenomenon of more or less stable beliefs and patterns of conduct. The principle of [classical] liberalism is that these are not fixed once and for all – historically through prescription by some supernatural (or charismatic) authority – but are always subject to question, discussion, and alteration by agreement. Free society thus stands for progress, and also allows for and approves of much variety in both belief and conduct.
David Henderson reminds us why we’ll miss the late Rick Stroup. (DBx: The first textbook out of which I taught was the second edition of Gwartney and Stroup – from which I myself learned much. Also, I’ll miss Rick in part because he always called me, whether in person or by e-mail, “young man” – a designation that men my age don’t believe but nevertheless get a kick out of hearing.)
I’m saddened to learn of the death of Phil Harvey.
Johan Norberg explains that “[t]he ‘good old days’ weren’t all that good – but they’re still messing with politics.” A slice:
In a wonderful podcast episode, Build for Tomorrow host Jason Feifer explored nostalgia throughout history. If you want to make America great again, you have to ask yourself when America was great, he thought. The most popular answer seemed to be the 1950s. So then he asked scholars of the ’50s whether people in the ’50s thought they were the good old days. Definitely not. People were worried about race and class, the impact of television, and the very real threat of instant nuclear annihilation. There was anxiety about rapidly changing family life and especially the new youth cultures and mindless, consumer-oriented students on campus. American sociologists warned that rampant individualism was tearing the family apart.
But there must have been exceptions. For example, being an autoworker in Detroit must have been amazing, considering how often this group is featured in current labor market nostalgia. Or was it?
When historian Daniel Clark launched an oral history project to find out how the autoworkers themselves experienced it, he fully expected to hear stories about a lost Eden. However, as Clark wrote, “hardly anyone, male or female, white or African American, recalled the 1950s as a time of secure employment, rising wages, and improved benefits.”
Instead, Clark was told about economic volatility, precarious employment, and recurring unemployment. In 1952, one-tenth of all U.S. unemployment was concentrated in the city of Detroit. Impressive hourly wages don’t say much about annual incomes if you are only called in temporarily and quickly let go. Most of the workers Clark spoke with recounted how they had to take secondary gigs (cab driver, trash hauler, janitor, cotton picker, moving company worker, golf caddy) to pay the bills.
Gary Clyde Hufbauer and Euijin Jung examine 50 years of industrial policy. (HT Timothy Taylor)
Tyler Cowen is rightly impressed with the entrepreneurial drive of Paul McCartney.
Pierre Lemieux decries the FTC’s “supply chain witch-hunt.”
The last few years have seen a proliferation of “open letters” by academics in politics and the humanities in favor of progressive causes. The hard sciences are different, and when mathematicians, physicists and engineers speak up to defend the integrity of their fields, Americans should pay attention.
The latest example is a new public statement from hundreds of the country’s top quantitative scientists warning about the assault on math in schools. “We write to express our alarm over recent trends in K-12 mathematics education in the United States,” the statement begins. The social-justice wave of 2020 accelerated efforts to eliminate standardized testing and lower standards in math to give the appearance that achievement gaps don’t exist.
The scientists delicately describe the politicized erosion of standards as “well-intentioned approaches to reform mathematics education.” They zero in on the California Department of Education’s proposed new math framework, which encourages math teachers to take a “justice-oriented perspective.” The signatories say the course roadmap will reduce the “availability of advanced mathematical courses to middle schoolers and beginning high schoolers” and discourage students from taking calculus.
George Will remembers the late Bob Dole.
Kevin Williamson relates tales from the “Carbon Cult in Glasgow.” Two slices:
The climate movement likes to wear the cloak of Science!, but here on the streets of Glasgow, inevitably described as “gritty,” it is a movement of slogans — fruity and loopy and hippie and New Agey inside the Scottish Exhibition Center, where the U.N.-approved activists and critics and RINGOs and QUANGOs and YOUNGOs offer up their predictable maxims (“We Have a Right to Climate Education” and “The Future Is Female” and the inevitable “Black Lives Matter”), but they get angrier and ragier and a good deal less grammatical as you move outward through the concentric circles of Serious Power, centered today on the most sacred person of Barack Obama, paying a surprise visit and upstaging the official U.S envoy, haughty private-jet enthusiast John Kerry, which is plainly part of the former president’s extended “Hey, Joe Biden Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time!” tour. And the mottos and calls to arms and such grow positively hostile as you land on the actual Glaswegian street, outside of the barricaded zone of U.N. approval, where there is talk of Nuremberg-style trials for “climate criminals” and naked anti-humanism (“Love the Planet: Hate Children!”) and graffiti scrawled either by some quasi-illiterate climate warrior with approximately Greta Thunberg’s education or by some ingenious and nihilistic street philosopher offering up Plato-by-way-of-N.W.A.:
“F*** the Polis!”
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The downside, of course, is that transforming environmentalism into a religion — a religion with creeds, rituals, and infidels — has made widespread international cooperation on meaningful environmental goals, including meaningful climate goals, all but impossible. As the graffiti around Glasgow denouncing “climate criminals” and the jeremiads of Greta Thunberg et al. have made perfectly clear, the true-believing environmentalists have very little interest in common ground or a middle ground, insisting instead that “climate justice” requires a complete transformation of both the individual and society.
As politics, that is totalitarianism; as religion, it is fanaticism. And the sweet smell of incense is not enough to mask the stink of it.
My most-recent column for AIER is the first of a two-part series on my favorite of all of F.A. Hayek’s lesser-known papers – namely, his 1964 paper “Kinds of Order in Society.” A slice from my column:
Among the assumptions at the foundation of this article is that we human beings extend our ability to achieve our goals by cooperating with each other. And the greater is the number of individuals with whom we cooperate, the greater is the number of goals that we can successfully pursue.
This fact explains the omnipresence of human cooperation. Such cooperation began eons ago in small hunting and gathering bands in which each individual personally knew those with whom he or she cooperated. Today, this cooperation literally spans the globe and occurs among billions of people, nearly all of whom are strangers to each other.
When the cooperation is only among individuals who know each other personally – that is, only among a very small number of persons – it’s easy for each person to comprehend the nature of the cooperative arrangement. For example, John, Steve, and Sven agree to go out together at dawn to hunt, while it’’s understood by all that Sarah, Sally, and Sue will remain by the tents and prepare a fire for cooking.
No prehistoric social scientist was necessary to discover and reveal the nature of such simple cooperation – to theorize about how it arose and what purposes it serves.
But cooperation on such a small scale doesn’t allow individuals to achieve as much as each can achieve by including in the cooperative effort more individuals. The inclusion of more individuals brings to the cooperative effort not only additional muscle power but, far more importantly, additional and more diverse brain power – that is, more human creativity. The inclusion of more individuals also encourages greater specialization, which in turn results in each task being done more expertly, more uniformly, and faster.
The human mind, however, isn’t evolved to be able to know more than a few hundred individuals. If we cooperated only with individuals we know, the span of our cooperation would remain extremely narrow and, hence, the results of our cooperative efforts would be correspondingly meager.
Fortunately, our inability to personally know more than a handful of fellow human beings is offset by our instinct to adopt and follow rules. By following rules we can, and do, increase the number of individuals with whom we cooperate beyond the number that we personally know.
An example is trade, which has at its base this rule: Each person is entitled only to what other people voluntarily give to him or her. No one gets to take other people’s stuff without their permission. Under this rule, if Jones wants some item, say an axe, owned by Smith, Jones understands that he can get this axe only by persuading Smith to give it to him. And especially if Smith is a stranger to Jones, the most obvious way for Jones to persuade Smith to give him the axe is for Jones to agree to give some other item – say, a barrel of beer – to Smith in exchange.
By following this simple rule – “Each person is entitled only to what other people voluntarily give to him or her” – each of us can cooperate with strangers. Jones doesn’t have to know Smith, or to personally work with Smith to produce the axe, in order to gain (to “profit”) from Smith’s ability to produce axes. Likewise, by following this rule, Smith doesn’t have to know Jones, or to help him brew beer, in order to gain from Jones’s ability and willingness to brew beer.
Trade allows each of us to tap into the unique talents, interests, and endowments of our trading partners, be they neighbors across the street or strangers across the ocean. And trade is possible because its most basic rule is easily understood by every human being regardless of cultural background.
They are trying to save grandma, but grandma’s fate is sealed. What is actually happening is they are paving the way to routine universal mandatory vaccination. The political establishment intends to make “the unvaccinated” second-class citizens, to dehumanize them and deny them basic rights many generations have taken for granted. This conditions the population to movement restrictions based on behavior. Compliance gets you rights, like a dog earning treats.
Reason has been stalwart over the past year in combating Covid Derangement Syndrome.
el gato malo reminds us that “health agencies were not always deranged.” A slice:
never forget this.
they knew before 2020 than none of these interventions worked, that their prices were insanely high, and that they should never be undertaken.
they knew the dangers of vilification and polarization.
standing pandemic guidelines vehemently warned against any of this and especially against making pariahs of the infected and cultivating exaggerated fear to drive compliance.
this has NOT been “following the science” is has been the abrogation of a century of evidence based epidemiology and social mores in order to take a devastating and self-serving joy ride with the world’s populace like it was some sort of video game.
TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.)
Edward Hadas digs deeply to uncover the cause(s) of lockdowns. Four slices:
There are two possible families of explanations for this litany of fearful failure, which has continued for almost two years.
i) It was justified. The threat to public health from Covid-19 was in fact so great and continues to be so great that it is worth sacrificing everything else for the effort to fight it.
ii) Neither the system nor the social values were as strong as previously believed.
The first type of explanation is completely unpersuasive. In March 2020, there was no good reason to ignore the established procedures of dealing with pandemics. The disease was undoubtedly frightening, but those procedures were created exactly to help the responsible officials respond calmly and realistically to frightening diseases.
Even if the panicked emulation of Chinese repression could initially have been justified, it was clear by June 2020 that such measures were disproportionate to the danger posed by Covid-19. By then, deaths in the first wave had peaked and were declining in most countries. Calmer scientists were persuasively arguing that Covid-19 would settle into the typical pattern of infectious viruses – becoming less dangerous as the population’s immunity increased and evolution led to more contagious but less severe variants.
In addition, treatments for all sufferers improved significantly and estimates of the case fatality rate steadily fell. Initial panic cannot explain the continued copying of formerly unthinkable policies. Something more was going on.
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Among non-traditional liberals (non-libertarians in the American vocabulary, non-neoliberals in the European discourse), enlightened despotism has often been considered the most appropriate form of rule for the development of positive freedom. The imposition of oppressive public health rules for the good of the people whose lives are being disrupted can be described as supposedly enlightened despotism.
The “supposedly” is needed, because the enlightenment is imaginary. Indeed, the fervent commitment to anti-Covid lockdowns suggests an all too typical authoritarian inability to use available knowledge wisely and an equally typical tendency to exercise more force than any outside observer would consider enlightened.
There is the second political explanation. Rather than thinking of intrusive restrictions as manifestations of the desire for authoritarian rule and rulers, the anti-pandemic expansion of government bureaucracies into everyday private life can be explained as the latest step in the expansion of what can be called the Intrusive State.
States have increasingly subsumed and tamed rival authorities (churches, families, businesses), while encouraging subjects/citizens to consider the State to be the ultimate judge of the people’s good. They exercise their power primarily through rational, extensive, and basically competent bureaucracies, in which moral standards are optional. (For people interested in social philosophy, the idea of the State’s seemingly expansion is Hegelian, the preeminence of bureaucracy is Weberian.)
The Intrusive State is generally quite popular with the people whose lives it increasingly controls. Most people seem to crave the State’s protection, especially when they feel threatened. Indeed, their respect for their governments is so extreme that they readily believe that the State should and can control natural phenomena, including highly contagious viral respiratory infections. The intrusively ruled people are very happy to participate in the processes of control, so they willingly obey the State’s commands to suspend their normal economic and social lives.
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The mastery of nature: Hubristic modern cultures are to some extent based on the premise and promise of achieving every greater human control over nature. From that perspective, it is easy to believe that the inability to keep people from dying in a viral pandemic is a sign of scientific and governmental failure. Because “saving” lives carries so much cultural weight, it appears reasonable to destroy the quality of many lives in order to delay the deaths of even a relatively few people.
The campaign for Zero-Covid is bad science, but it fits well the desire to treat the virus as a military-style enemy that is expected to surrender unconditionally to human willpower. Lost years of school, deaths of despair, emotional distress, and even deaths from untreated conditions are mere collateral damage in the battle to ward off this natural disorder.
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Perhaps the worst aspect of the response to Covid-19 is the precedent it sets. Barring a revulsion of the scale that produced Germany’s multi-decade reeducation programme after the fall of the Nazi regime, most people in the Western world will accept that the authoritarian-biopower-purification responses were reasonable in 2020-2021 and will remain reasonable in the future.
Such a grand revulsion is improbable, as there seem to be no brakes on any of the deep historical, cultural, and spiritual forces that lead to authoritarian governments, random exercises in bio-power, and anti-scientific purity cults.
This time last year, Professor Neil Ferguson observed how China’s draconian anti-Covid restrictions had influenced the response to the virus across the Western world – not least the UK. “We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought,” said the epidemiologist, dubbed Professor Lockdown. But after Italy shut down “we realised we could”.
When Covid-19 first emerged as a global pandemic in early 2020, Prof Ferguson had assumed, like the vast majority of government advisers, that severely restricting freedoms would be deemed unacceptable by the British public. Controlling where people go and who they meet was seen as a non-starter in a liberal democracy. How wrong that turned out to be. Not only did people accept the lockdowns, but there was a level of enthusiasm for them – and a level of derision for those who questioned them – that astonished those of us who had thought that the UK was a nation committed to liberty.
…..Meanwhile, the costs of lockdowns have become far harder to ignore. The fact that GPs made hundreds of thousands fewer suspected cancer referrals during the pandemic, in part due to fewer face-to-face consultations, was last week highlighted in a National Audit Office report. The impact has been “devastating”, says Macmillan Cancer Support, given related delays in the treatment of life-threatening conditions, including among the young. The relentless focus on Covid, the NAO concluded, means that by March 2025, some 12 million people – around a fifth of the UK population – could be on an NHS waiting list, caught in the lockdown-related treatment backlog.
The “lives versus livelihoods” debate which characterised previous lockdowns – in which those who opposed restrictions were damned as selfishly concerned solely with the health of the economy – is therefore being exposed as the nonsense it always was. The damage done to children’s mental health and education when schools close is now undeniable – which is why Children’s Commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza yesterday pleaded with ministers to keep schools open. The tragedy of six-year-old Arthur Labinjo-Hughes, murdered by his stepmother, has also highlighted the pressure lockdown puts on vulnerable households.
