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Writing in today’s Wall Street Journal, Dave Seminara rightly criticizes the media bias against Florida governor Ron DeSantis. A slice:

Yahoo News at least nodded to reality, publishing a piece with the headline “Florida now has America’s lowest COVID rate. Does Ron DeSantis deserve credit?” “The answer is no,” wrote Andrew Romano, the site’s West Coast correspondent, who is based in Los Angeles, not Tampa. “The virus we’ve known for some time, comes in waves—waves that ascend, peak and ultimately recede on a remarkably consistent timeline.”

Tell that to ABC News, which on Oct. 24 informed its website’s readers that California Gov. Gavin Newsom “managed to flip the script as the former epicenter of the pandemic” with “forward-thinking” policies that included “some of the strictest mask and vaccination mandates in the country.”

I moved to Florida from Oregon in 2019, and I’m grateful to live in a state where personal freedom is still respected. I’m vulnerable to infection because I have two autoimmune diseases, and I got vaccinated in March. But I support Mr. DeSantis’s approach because we can’t live in fear forever, and it’s wrong to force our children to do so.

Also writing about Ron DeSantis – and about resistance to this governor’s policies by “anti-authoritarian authoritarians” – is Florida State University economist Randy Holcombe.

Martin Kulldorff is the now the Senior Scientific Director at the Brownstone Institute.

David Henderson understandably holds no high opinion of Dr. Deborah Birx.

No surprises here.

Ilya Somin, of GMU’s Scalia School of Law, explains why pandemic migration restrictions should be lifted.

Here’s a report of yet another of the countless instances of Covidocratic inhumanity.

The Babylon Bee depicts what many people surely regard as a genuinely terrifying Halloween mask.

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… is from pages 221-222 of the American jurist James Coolidge Carter’s remarkably profound, yet unfortunately neglected, (posthumous) 1907 book, Law: Its Origin, Growth and Function:

Nothing is more attractive to the benevolent vanity of men than the notion that they can effect great improvement in society by the simple process of forbidding all wrong conduct, or conduct which they think is wrong, by law, and of enjoining all good conduct by the same means; as if men could not find out how to live until a book were placed in the hands of every individual, in which the things to be done and those not to be done were clearly set down.

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… is from page 251 an op-ed titled “There’s Only 1 Cause for Inflation” that the late Armen Alchian had in 1979 in the Los Angeles Times, as this op-ed is reprinted in The Collected Works of Armen A. Alchian (2006), Volume 1 (“Choice and Cost Under Uncertainty”; Daniel K. Benjamin, ed.):

To make more respectable their unwillingness to restrain the creation of more new money, the Fed argues (and they even have official committees of economists to lend credibility) that (1) restraint would cause a depression and unemployment, and (2) the inflation is necessary to maintain full employment.

The latter point is simply false, but I won’t explain why here. And the first is a cop-out. Restraint will cause a depression only because the promise of restraint would not be believed by the public, given the past record of the Fed.

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Matt Welch calls out the deplorable media bias for “Progressive” superstitions. A slice:

There is something revealingly incongruous about a news organization [CNN] that in one breath conducts hair-splitting fact-checks deferring to the government’s of view (“In fact, there’s no mention of ‘parents’…at all in the memo, none,” [Anderson] Cooper said triumphantly Wednesday, about the controversial October 4 Justice Department directive to have federal agents be on the lookout for anti–school board violence), then in the next being content to nod along when a colleague accuses citizen participants in democracy and a major political party of being primarily motivated by white supremacy.

Eric Boehm explains that Sen. Josh Hawley’s (R-MO) proposed ‘fixes’ for supply-chain web woes will, if adopted, only make those woes permanent. A slice:

One must assume that if the lights in his home went out due to a storm, Hawley would respond by declaring electricity to be a mistake and demanding that the government require homes to be lit with candles and gas lamps. After all, what is the electrical grid but a complicated supply chain that leaves Americans woefully dependent on production and distribution systems (power plants, substations, and lines) that they do not fully control? Better to produce your own lighting, right? If that means you have to live without television or the internet, well, those are just the trade-offs required to achieve self-sufficiency.

A storm—or a pandemic—can create temporary problems in the highly complex systems that run so much of the modern world. That’s hardly a reason to abandon them. If Hawley is imagining a world in which the United States is wholly self-sufficient, then he’s asking you to accept a scenario in which the United States is significantly poorer than it is today.

Here’s George Leef on Charles Murray and “two truths about race in America.”

In the Wall Street Journal, Tunku Varadarajan profiles Randy Barnett and Evan Bernick and their important new work on the 14th amendment. A slice:

The most significant misinterpretation of the 14th Amendment, as Messrs. Barnett and Bernick see it, is the judicial disregarding of the Privileges or Immunities Clause. Judges see it as an impenetrable “inkblot” (to borrow a metaphor Robert Bork used in a different constitutional context), the recognition of which would serve as a license to judges to invent new rights. In its original conception, Mr. Barnett says, the Privileges or Immunities Clause “protects rights that are fundamental to what we call ‘republican citizenship’—citizenship that’s grounded in natural rights and civil equality.”

Those include rights guaranteed by the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which extended citizenship to all persons born in the U.S. “without distinction of race or color, or previous condition of slavery or involuntary servitude.” They also include rights that are deeply rooted in tradition and history, as evidenced by the laws of the states.

The Cato Institute’s Chris Edwards identifies ten downsides to the Democrats’ spending ‘plan.‘

Speaking of reckless and irresponsible Democratic economic proposals, here’s my intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy, writing at National Review.

Also from Veronique is this clear-eyed appraisal of Comptroller of the Currency nominee, Saule Omarova.

Here’s Peter Van Doren and David Kemp on ‘Big tech and antitrust. A slice:

In the current issue of Regulation, Jonathan Klick argues against the use of antitrust laws against the tech companies because their social networking services are free to consumers. As our colleague Ryan Bourne has argued, Facebook’s market is not social networking but advertising. And in selling advertising space and competing for consumer attention, Facebook faces stiff competition from other tech and non-tech companies, such as radio and television.

If market power in advertising isn’t the problem, what is? Critics argue that tech companies’ size and prominence give them advantages in other markets that they enter. Whatever they touch turns to gold. But relatively unknown Zoom and GoToWebinar have captured about 60 percent of the teleconferencing market during the pandemic while services from tech giants, such as Microsoft Teams, Amazon Chime, and Facebook Messenger, have failed miserably among consumers.

University of Chicago geophysical-sciences professor Dorian Abbot shares, in the Wall Street Journal, the views that managed to get him cancelled at M.I.T. A slice:

I care for all of my students equally. None of them are overrepresented or underrepresented to me: They represent themselves. Their grades are based on a process that I define at the beginning of the quarter. That process treats each student fairly and equally. I hold office hours for students who would like extra help so that everyone has the opportunity to improve his or her grade through hard work and discipline.

Similarly, I believe that admissions and faculty hiring at universities are best focused on academic merit, with the goal of producing intellectual excellence. We should not penalize hard-working students and faculty applicants simply because they have been classified as belonging to the wrong group. It is true that not everyone has had the same educational opportunities. The solution is improving K-12 education, not introducing discrimination at late stages.

Let’s hope that Janet Daley, here talking with Steven Edginton, is correct in her prediction that “[l]ike McCarthyism, America will soon wake up to wokeism.”

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New Zealand’s Covidocracy vows to arrest those who peacefully gather to protest its tyranny. (The ‘reasoning’ of pro-lockdowners seems to be that there’s no amount of freedom – no amount, really, of anything else – that isn’t worth sacrificing for the flimsiest prospect of even the slightest reduction in the risk of exposure to the Worst Monster Ever to Threaten Humanity, Covid-19.)

Speaking of protesting tyranny, el malo gato shares some videos of recent gatherings of people who are demanding an end to Covidocratic rule.

Writing in the New York Post, Karol Markowicz argues, very sensibly, that Covid in America would have been handled much more humanely and effectively had more ‘leaders’ done what Florida governor Ron DeSantis wisely has done. (Note, for the record, that while I loudly applaud most of DeSantis’s handling of Covid, I oppose his use of government power to restrict the abilities of private entities to choose their own Covid policies.) A slice:

It’s a lesson that we need to quickly learn. Encouraging vaccination is important, but ultimately COVID will be something we need to handle with less hysteria going forward, and DeSantis has been a model for that.

Well, at least the New Yorkers who’ll die unnecessarily in fires or because ambulances have no drivers won’t die of Covid-19 – and Covid-19, as we all now know, is the only cause of suffering and death that really counts.

Christos Makridis reports on his research that reveals that “[p]andemic restrictions were a blow to religious liberty.” A slice:

In a newly released paper of mine, together with new data made available through the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, I quantify the effects of state restrictions on houses of worship on individuals’ subjective well-being. Using data from Gallup between March 2020 and June 2021, I compare measures of well-being among religious adherents and their counterparts before versus after the adoption of restrictions within their states.

I find that pandemic restrictions significantly reduced religious peoples’ well-being. These effects persisted even after controlling for a wide array of demographic features, such as age and education, and other characteristics, such as income and industry. For example, the restrictions led to a 4.1 percentage point rise in self-isolation among the religious, relative to their counterparts. And they reduced life satisfaction by 0.09 standard deviations, an effect nearly twice as large as the male-female difference in the same measure.

“There are no arguments for masks in schools… there are so many harms that are caused by masks.”

Jay Bhattacharya tweets:

The destruction wrought by lockdowns on the poor worldwide is staggering. It was an immoral and heartless policy imposed out of fear without thought of the collateral harms.

Nearly 13 months after the world was told that the great Great Barrington Declaration was aimed at slaying a straw man, that straw man appears to be readying for a visit to Tonga.

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… is from page 555 of the 1988 collection of Lord Acton’s writings (edited by the late J. Rufus Fears), Essays in Religion, Politics, and Morality; specifically, it’s a note drawn from Acton’s extensive papers at Cambridge University; (I can find no date for this passage):

There should be a law to the People besides its own will.

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I continue to catch up on listening to the vast library of EconTalk podcasts. The next one that I recommend is this one from November 2006 with Sam Peltzman.

Here’s one of the many lessons you’ll learn by listening to this podcast: All people who love to hate “Big Pharma” should join the ranks of those of us who wish to abolish, or at least to severely curtail the powers of, the Food and Drug Administration. (I myself would completely abolish the FDA and its powers.)

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Simon Evans rightly praises the courage and eloquence of Jonathan Sumption, who steadfastly defended freedom in face of Covid hysteria. A slice:

[Sumption] was an extraordinarily important figure to those who were alarmed by the speed with which the Maginot Line of traditional Britannic liberty collapsed in spring of 2020, yet were equally aware that the resistance seemed to be comprised chiefly of a motley, often dispiriting assembly of professional provocateurs, recidivist attention junkies and outright cranks. I had a number of friends who shared my serious concern as ‘three weeks to flatten the curve’ became an ever-more comprehensive constraint of ancient individual rights. Yet we felt little inclination to join forces with Piers Corbyn, David Icke nor even to be honest Desmond Swayne, even to do battle with an elected government which had literally stood on the issues of independence and sovereignty at almost any cost.

Sumption was able to articulate our concerns without recourse to words like ‘plandemic’ and ‘pre-conditioning’. He eschewed talk of the New World Order, of 6uild 6ack 6etter, and as comedian Rich Hall put it, of the idea that the vaccine was a ‘liquid sim card’ developed by Bill Gates to track your every move. The vocabulary of conspiracy in other words – and a scenario our digital Cassandras shared urgently on their location-enabled smartphones behind the enemy lines of Facebook and Twitter whenever they could get a signal.

Instead, he reminded us forcefully of the stickiness of authoritarian measures, and the illusion that a bath plug can and will be pulled when the emergency has passed and the filthy waters of the state will simply drain away. He reminded us that, as well as corrupting, power ratchets, and measures once granted in extremis are rarely shrugged off in tranquillity.

He was one of a few, if not a happy few – among the others I would include Peter Hitchens, whom no one would accuse of being happy nor indeed activated by any thought of banding with brothers. But Sumption and Hitchens seemed to see something distinctly unwelcome in the clouds that were massing on our horizon. Massing over our rights to freedom of assembly, freedom of association, freedom of passage. All these have seemed at one time or another, to many millions of people, natural laws, too big and too fundamental to repeal even should the state deem it necessary. Until one day, suddenly, they weren’t.

Quoting extensively from Yasmeen Abutaleb’s and Damian Paletta’s 2021 book, Nightmare Scenario: Inside the Trump Administration’s Response to the Pandemic That Changed History, Jeffrey Tucker describes Deborah Birx’s reckless role in persuading Trump to lockdown. (HT Jay Bhattacharya)

About this new study from the CDC, Martin Kulldorff tweets:

This @CDCgov study in @CDCMMWR has a major statistical flaw, and the 5x conclusion is wrong. It implicitly assumes that hospitalized respiratory patients are representative of the population, which they are not. Trying to connect with authors.

Writing in Reason, Robert Jackman reports that Britain is finally (hopefully) ending its mandatory hotel quarantines. Two slices:

Having originally criminalized all “non-essential” foreign travel in January, the U.K. government hoped that hotel quarantine would form part of a traffic light system intended to ease the borders open. Countries would be designed either green (quarantine-free), amber (home quarantine required), or red (hotel quarantine). In practice, the scheme was confusing, with changes often announced at short notice—leaving travelers scrambling to get back to avoid quarantine restrictions.

The government was unapologetic about any disruption or confusion. As Britain entered its summer vacation season, Boris Johnson was warning that he would not hesitate to move a country from green to red. Anyone who lied about visiting a red list country after traveling back indirectly could face 10 years in prison.

Through late September, about 200,000 people were forced to endure hotel quarantines.

What were the quarantines like? Within weeks of coming online, the system faced routine complaints from residents who blasted the poor quality of food, the lack of fresh air, and the uncomfortable rooms. In August, the BBC broadcast footage recorded by quarantine residents showing slugs and mold in their room.

…..

The end of this miserable policy will be welcomed by many critics of COVID authoritarianism. But don’t breathe a sigh of relief just yet: Even as he announced the change, Transport Secretary Shapps stressed that the scheme would remain on ice, ready to be reenacted if another COVID variant of concern emerges.

Andrew Orlowski reports on the enormous cost, impracticality, and (shock!) failure of Britain’s “test and trace” effort.

Andrew Lilico is correct: “Lockdown fanatics should be ashamed of themselves.” Here’s his conclusion:

Maybe other things might threaten our health soon. A new flu epidemic is a possibility. Covid will become endemic, after a bumpy transition over the next year or so. Tens of thousands of people will catch it every day, for ever. All of us will get it many times. But the epidemic is over and it’s time for those whose predictions have been so wrong to lick their intellectual wounds and learn some badly needed lessons in humility.

But the important thing – the only thing of any importance, as we now know – is that these people will not die of Covid-19. That’s all that matters!

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… is from pages 129-130 of Ludwig von Mises’s 1952 essay “Economic Teaching at the Universities,” as reprinted in the 2008 Liberty Fund edition of Mises’s 1952 collection, Planning for Freedom:

Many “progressive” professors have for some time served in one of the various alphabetical government agencies. The tasks entrusted to them in the bureaus were as a rule ancillary only. They compiled statistics and wrote memoranda which their superiors, either politicians or former managers of corporations, filed without reading. The professors did not instill a scientific spirit into the bureaus. But the bureaus gave them the mentality of authoritarianism. They distrust the populace and consider the State (with a capital S) as the God-sent guardian of the wretched underlings. Only the government is impartial and unbiased. Whoever opposes any expansion of governmental powers is by this token unmasked as an enemy of the commonweal.