Some Links

by Don Boudreaux on June 21, 2022

Richard McKenzie describes an unseen consequence of student-loan ‘forgiveness’ – indeed, I think, of the very practice of government-subsidized student loans.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Bjorn Lomborg decries “the rich world’s climate hypocrisy.” A slice:

The developed world became wealthy through the pervasive use of fossil fuels, which still overwhelmingly power most of its economies. Solar and wind power aren’t reliable, simply because there are nights, clouds and still days. Improving battery storage won’t help much: There are enough batteries in the world today only to power global average electricity consumption for 75 seconds. Even though the supply is being scaled up rapidly, by 2030 the world’s batteries would still cover less than 11 minutes. Every German winter, when solar output is at its minimum, there is near-zero wind energy available for at least five days—or more than 7,000 minutes.

This is why solar panels and wind turbines can’t deliver most of the energy for industrializing poor countries. Factories can’t stop and start with the wind; steel and fertilizer production are dependent on coal and gas; and most solar and wind power simply can’t deliver the power necessary to run the water pumps, tractors, and machines that lift people out of poverty.

Bryan Caplan makes about government a point that should be obvious to everyone but isn’t.

Pete Boettke remembers the late Steve Horwitz, who died far too young one year ago, on June 27th, 2021.

Eric Boehm explains that “the Defense Production Act has become a license for central planning.”

Mitch Daniels is stepping down as president of Purdue University. That’s too bad for Purdue – and for higher education generally.

Jeffrey Tucker is rightly critical of that staunch advocate of covidocratic compulsion Devi Sridhar.

“Covid lockdowns have caused a ‘global mental health crisis’ in children due to ‘deep impact of school closures’, WHO admits” (HT Will Jones)

Vinay Prasad tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

The other big problem is that many universities have collected millions of dollars in grants for long covid. That guarantees we will have a lot of long COVID.

Every time a hospital opens a center to test people with more tests who might have long COVID, they guarantee more

Martin Kulldorff tweets:

Lockdowns caused enormous collateral public health damage, which we now much deal with.

Lockdowns harmed the economy, which we now must deal with.

Lockdowns exposed ignorance and herd thinking in universities, public health agencies and the media, which we now must deal with.