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Some Covid Links

Ivor Cummins talks with James Linden about Covid-19 and the deranged response to it. (HT Dan Klein)

Dan Klein has a deep take on humanity’s response to Covid. A slice:

To ignore the ill consequences of frenzy and restrictions is to fall in line with the simplistic intentions heuristic. To do so is irresponsible. To be responsible, one must have regard for the total effect. Coase wrote: “[T]he total effect…in all spheres of life should be taken into account.” The consequences are social, psychological, moral, political, cultural, and spiritual.

Are you minding the ill consequences? Again, some are treated here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Arnold Kling is correct: governments’ response to Covid is to restrict supply and to subsidize demand. What could go wrong?

J.D. Tuccille rightly decries the hypocrisy of the Covid clerisy. A slice:

That attitude is obvious in Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, whose wife and daughter visited properties in Florida and Wisconsin even as he ordered state residents to stay at home except for “essential” activities. “My official duties have nothing to do with my family,” Pritzker huffed when a reporter called him out about his family’s wanderings. “So I’m not going to answer that question. It’s inappropriate, and I find it reprehensible.”

Reprehensible might more accurately describe government officials who penalize the common folk for behavior in which they themselves indulge. The word also could be applied to officials and hangers-on who try to leverage their positions for special advantage.

Also rightly decrying the hypocrisy of the Covid clerisy is Douglas Murray. A slice:

Since being outed for his hypocrisy [CA governor Gavin] Newsom has made a public apology of the predictable kind. He seems to be hoping that people will forgive his actions because of a miscalculation by him about the precise size of the gathering. He claimed that when sitting down at the table he realised that “it was a little larger group than I had anticipated. And I made a bad mistake. Instead of sitting down I should have stood up”. He acknowledged that the “spirit” of what he was telling everyone else to do had been broken.

And he also acknowledged that what he was “preaching” all the time had been contradicted “because I need to preach as well as practise”. It is questionable whether a politician should be into any sort of “preaching” at all, let alone preaching an ideal they then self-confessedly cannot live up to. But more than any other Covid scandal so far, Newsom’s lobbyist supper is deeply telling about a divide which is emerging between rulers and ruled.

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