Shaken but steadfast, Dr. Bhattacharya, who is an economist as well as a physician, continued to oppose lockdowns, on Oct. 4, 2020, with the Great Barrington Declaration, of which he was one of three principal co-authors. (The others were Sunetra Gupta, a theoretical epidemiologist at the University of Oxford, and Martin Kulldorff, a statistician who has since been fired from Harvard for refusing a Covid vaccine.) The declaration dissented from the Anglo-American scientific establishment and argued for focused, age-based protection from Covid instead of universal and indiscriminate lockdowns.
Dr. Bhattacharya’s life was “completely overturned” in the months leading up to, and just after, Great Barrington. “I couldn’t eat or sleep for months,” he says. Not a big man, he lost 30 pounds. He received death threats. “There were some very, very nasty attacks.” Once-friendly colleagues stopped talking to him: “They crossed the street to avoid me.”
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Dr. Bhattacharya says a major task he faces is to help restore the trust that the American people have lost in health experts and the scientific establishment, “primarily because they utterly failed during Covid.” Scientists embraced ideas that “failed to actually protect Americans, led to countless people losing their jobs, and of course the harm to children from school closures.”
He enumerates the wrongs the scientific elite committed: “Denial of basic scientific facts like immunity. Denial of basic human rights—the rights to bodily autonomy, to informed consent, to free speech.” All of these violations, he says, were “embraced by scientists as necessary to control the pandemic, and they weren’t.” Neither were they sufficient—these draconian measures failed to prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths. Americans came to see “the scientific establishment as essentially an authoritarian power sitting over them, rather than as a force for good.”
Scientists set themselves up as “the most important arbiters of how people should live their lives during the pandemic. And they’re not very good at that.” The goal of science, Mr. Bhattacharya says, “isn’t to tell you how to live your life, it’s to discover truths about nature so that we can develop, in biomedical sciences, better ways to care for human health.”
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Any reform of America’s scientific institutions, Dr. Bhattacharya says, must ensure that they “work for the people again.” Instead of “this haughty relationship, where the scientists sit above the public and say, ‘Look, you can’t think that,’ or ‘You’ll be censored if you say that,’ they need to remember that they are servants of the American people. The people are the ones paying the bills. They’re the ones giving the $50 billion a year. We scientists serve the people, not the other way around.”
Republicans regained the White House and Senate on a promise to beat inflation, but now they’re rallying around President Biden’s plan to make it harder to buy affordable goods. Their behind-the-scenes push to raise the tariff on low-cost imports would do little to fight China, but it would squeeze American businesses and families.
Some House Republicans want to end what is known as the de minimis tariff exemption, which lets U.S. buyers import up to $800 a day of duty-free goods. Congress first passed the exemption in the 1930s, and nearly every country in the world allows certain small shipments to enter below some price threshold.
Congress raised the U.S. exemption to $800 from $200 in 2016. And in a letter to U.S. trade rep Robert Lighthizer in 2019, Sens. Chuck Grassley and Ron Wyden wrote “our higher threshold has helped to make the United States a leader in global e-commerce—a position that we should not cede to countries, like China, that are vying for that role.”
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Smaller manufacturers would be hurt the most, as would lower-income Americans looking for affordable clothing and consumer goods. The National Association of Manufacturers, whose members compete with Chinese producers, wants to keep the $800 threshold, saying it helps American companies import specialized components without overpaying.
Most opposition to the exemption is from clothing, shoe and textile makers, and related labor unions. Yet closing the de minimis exemption would do little to revive U.S. textile production, which dropped by 47% in the two decades before Congress enacted the current threshold.
Lawmakers have been angling to sneak repeal into must-pass, last-minute bills this month, but we now hear they may wait until tax reform next year. It’s still a bad idea, especially after voters last month gave Republicans a mandate to focus on reducing prices.
“Trump vs. Cleveland: A Tale of Two Tariff Strategies.”
Arnold Kling reviews Michael Huemer’s 2024 book, Progressive Myths. Two slices:
Progressives believe that racism is a significant problem in contemporary America. Huemer points out that a number of myths bolster this belief. For example, he examines the cases of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, who according to the mythology of Black Lives Matter, were killed solely because they were black. Careful investigation shows that purported witnesses were not present and/or lied, so that the details that many BLM supporters believe are false.
Why do progressives perceive racism as so important? Huemer says that the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, which he praises, could not let go of the need to have a cause.
They ramped up their demands, and they developed increasingly sensitive racism detectors and increasingly sophisticated accounts of how one facet or another of American life… was really a form of “white supremacy” or other bigotry. p. 197
I disagree with the diagnosis that the Civil Rights movement was too filled with righteous pride to declare victory and go home. As I interpret the history, people expected that once discrimination became illegal, racial tension would vanish and racial inequalities would fade. Instead, we had urban riots from 1965-1968, and gaps persist between the black and white population in the United States with respect to average educational attainment, income, and wealth. If we are not seeing the outcomes that were expected when racism ended, then progressives infer that racism has not ended.
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Similarly, I would advise people who express opinions to show your work, giving the sources for your claims and the logic of your thought process; and debate fairly, showing an awareness of the weaknesses in your position and the best points that could be made by the other side.
Throughout the book, Huemer models these behaviors. That may be the best reason to recommend reading it.
Ivan Osorio remembers CEI founder, Fred Smith. A slice:
Fred’s passion for ideas went beyond intellectual exercises. He was always interested in how ideas mattered to people’s lives. In his work, that translated into applying the ideas of liberty to public policy in practical and principled ways by reaching people on their own terms. “People don’t care what you know,” he’d often say, “until they know you care.”
