Tweet

… is from page 154 of John Mueller’s excellent 1999 book, Capitalism, Democracy, & Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery:

But it must be acknowledged that democracy is, and will always be, distressingly messy, clumsy, and disorderly, and that in it people are permitted loudly and irritatingly to voice opinions that are clearly erroneous and even dangerous.

DBx: Indeed. Mueller here very nicely summarizes a key part of the democratic ethos.

People who wish to silence – to “cancel” – those with whom they disagree are enemies of democracy regardless of how loudly they might scream in support of it. Equally enemies of democracy are those who would silence – and who, disgustingly, are silencing (as here documented by Jeffrey Tucker) – the voices of those who dissent from Covidocratic dogma.

Democracy is about much more – much, much more – than the exercise by today’s majority of raw power.

Tweet

Art Carden celebrates the 50th birthday of my great, warm, brilliant, and amazingly creative colleague Bryan Caplan. A slice:

Poverty: Who’s to Blame? promises to be controversial. As he has argued in lectures he has given on the book’s themes, we can blame third-world governments for lousy policy and first-world governments for immigration restrictions. So far, so good. The most controversial part of the book will be where he argues that if someone could have taken reasonable steps to prevent their plight, then they themselves are to blame. I expect this part of the book to be just as popular with the “personal responsibility” right as it is unpopular with the “you’re blaming the victim!” left.

Bryan reminisces about his 40s.

And Bryan’s talent is evident also in his children. Identical twins, Aidan and Tristan Caplan – who are seniors in high school – have their first referred-journal publication. Congrats to them!

And here’s Bryan on his forthcoming book, Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing. A slice:

Chapter 1: The Home that Wasn’t There. Here I explain why the supply-and-demand story for rising housing prices, though true, is deeply misleading.  Why?  Because regulation is strangling housing supply, especially in desirable locations.  In a free market, housing would be very affordable throughout the country because building up and in is easy.  We have the technology; what we lack is permission to use it.

Chapter 2: The Manufacture of Scarcity.  Now I go over the empirical work that measures the effect of housing regulation on housing prices.  Standard estimates of the effect are massive.  It is very plausible that U.S. housing would be 50% cheaper under laissez-faire.

As Eric Boehm reports, Joe Biden continues to tell “Progressive” fairy tales.

And as my intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy reports, Biden also continues, good “Progressive” that he’s become, the nightmare of fiscal recklessness.

Also from Vero is a proposal for a better form of unemployment insurance. A slice:

Personal Unemployment Insurance Accounts (PISAs) were pioneered by Chile in 2002. The accounts are financed through a payroll‐​tax contribution from both the employer and employee and are individually owned by workers. During spells of unemployment, idled workers can make withdrawals to compensate for the loss to their incomes, but when employed they continue to build their balances. At retirement, workers can use the balances in these accounts to bolster their retirement income or transfer the funds to their heirs. The program includes a solidarity fund — a public safety net — financed by employers and the government. Unemployed workers can receive payment from the solidarity fund when their own savings are insufficient to cover their period of employment.

These accounts provide insurance while keeping strong incentives for people to return to work. Several studies have confirmed that under this system, workers are motivated by a desire to keep their own savings for retirement, so they are careful about tapping into this money during their working years. On net, workers seem as well off with PISAs as they were under the old UI system.

Mark Jamison writes that “Biden’s broadband plan would waste $100 billion.”

Scott Lincicome reports on American industrial policy in action!

Chris Edwards is right: Janet Yellen is wrong.

Tweet

Bari Weiss talks with Good Fellows about the irrationality now rampant in the academy and in the media.

Tweet

“The Brooklyn Variant of the Coronavirus: Fuggedaboutit.” A slice:

There are many deviant and unprecedented aspects of the Covid religion, starting with the fact that for the first time in history, healthy, asymptomatic people of all ages were “quarantined” and placed under virtual house arrest for long periods of time. Lockdowns and “reopenings” are also deviant and unprecedented, not to mention the fact that they constitute blatant theft of property, services, and economic, personal, and religious liberty. The infectious disease experts who have imprisoned us are lionized by the media and bedwetting politicians who claim to “follow the science.” From the perspective of an infectious disease expert, you and your family are not individuals with rights and liberties. Instead, you are germ factories, whose movement and social interaction must be severely limited.

In case you think that the use of the term imprisonment is hyperbolic, please note that the official definition of lockdown is “the confinement of prisoners to their cells for all or most of the day as a temporary security measure.” A more recent form of deviance in the Covid religion is the edict that those who are fully vaccinated must wear a mask. For the first time in history, we are wearing a mask after being inoculated. For example, no one has ever worn a mask after receiving a measles, flu, or polio vaccine.

The most deviant aspect of the Covid religion is that like other barbaric religions, it involves child sacrifice. Ancient religions engaged in child sacrifice in order to appease a deity or supernatural beings. Under the Covid religion, the educational development, physical health, and mental health of our children have been sacrificed in order to reduce “cases” and appease the great deity: public health police state officials. These officials and their allies in the media constantly predict “impending doom” if children and their parents do not continue to sacrifice their freedom and social development.

GMU Econ grad student Peter Hazlett is among those who, in the Wall Street Journal, reason well about Covid-19 vaccine passports. A slice:

The feedback mechanism of profit and loss signals whether a business is meeting the demands of its customers and workforce. If businesses that don’t use vaccine passports suddenly earn lower profits than competitors that do, customers may be demanding safer environments. The market is a discovery process that will find the most desired vaccine-passport policy.

If private enterprises are denied the liberty to set their own policies, the market can’t fulfill this function. Since the government isn’t omniscient and can’t obtain all the knowledge necessary to determine the right policy for every business, we should avoid illiberal, one-size-fits all policies that restrict economic freedom.

Nick Gillespie talks with California-based chef Andrew Gruel.

Here’s an interview with British MP Desmond Swayne.

Ramesh Thakur accurately describes lockdowns as “the opiate of champagne socialists.” A slice:

On 1 February, BBC’s India business correspondent Nikhil Inamdar reported: ‘Covid-19 has ravaged the country, shrunk its GDP, sent unemployment soaring and added to the distress of a banking sector that was already in crisis’. Actually, no, Covid-19 doesn’t possess such omnipotent powers. Rather, lockdown measures to combat the disease proved deadlier than the disease itself. Meanwhile on 23 December, Forbes published a list of fifty doctors, scientists and healthcare entrepreneurs who’ve became pandemic billionaires. Covid business has boomed for cabinet cronies in the UK and for consulting firms in Australia. Amazon, Facebook and Google increased their share of US advertising dollars to more than half in 2020. The increased time and money spent on these platforms in turn fattens the consumer data collected by them and increases their market appeal for advertisers. This just might influence their decisions on censoring lockdown-critical commentary.

Yet millions of Covidians are brainwashed enough to believe that opposition to all this is ‘right-wing claptrap’. Sigh.

Jade Norris decries the “creeping authoritarianism of the Covid-19 restrictions.” A slice:

I am seriously concerned that we may already have fallen too far down the slippery slope. The latest incarnation of this recurring authoritarian nightmare comes in the form of vaccine passports, with government propping this up as the ‘final’ way to ‘get out’ of the pandemic (I am losing count of how many of those have been posited to date). Not only would vaccine passports ignore the fact that coercion is widely regarded as bad practice in public health, it would once again leave behind the most vulnerable in society, branding many as outcasts. Groups who lack trust in authorities are most likely to reject vaccines, and coercing them to take one is unlikely to improve that trust. In 2004, Boris Johnson said that if an ‘arm of the state’ ever asked him to produce an ID card, he would eat it in front of them. But vaccine passports now seem to be a foregone conclusion, and it’s hard to see what the PM actually stands for – his ‘liberal at heart’ platitudes are just not believable. The man seems to simply be a vessel for the opinions and ideas of others. Doubly concerning, one backbench conservative MP told me last week that he has recently come to believe that government’s ‘no return to lockdown’ promise is built upon mandatory vaccinations and vaccine passports.

Those of you who continue to doubt the terribleness of the tyranny to which many in the Covidocracy wish to subject humanity might wish to consult this terrifying document.

Jonathan Sumption tells Brendan O’Neill that “lockdown is an assault on our humanity.” He, of course, is correct.

Also from Jonathan Sumption is this new essay, “It’s inhuman that we’ve been left at the mercy of Sage’s garbage Covid models.” A slice:

What seems to be going on is that every one is covering their backs. Ministers want to pass the buck to the scientists. They want to be able to say “What a triumph for our policies” if things turn out fine; and “We followed the science” if they turn out badly. The scientists don’t like being made to carry the can for what is basically a political judgment. They want to be able to say “These were only scenarios, not predictions” if things turn out fine; and “We told you so” if they turn out badly. Each group is trying to manipulate the other. Balanced assessments based on actual evidence are sadly missing.

There are more important things at stake than the reputation of ministers or their advisers. Human beings are social animals. Interaction with other people is not a luxury. It is a basic human need. It is also the foundation of our mental health, our social organisation, our leisure activities and our economy.

There is a breed of public health officials who are indifferent to these things. They have never reflected, at any rate in public, on what makes life worth living. As far as they are concerned, human beings are just instruments of government health policy. They will be lining up to tell us that it is dangerous to return to normal life because we cannot be absolutely sure that normal life will be risk-free. They will quote the gloomier speculations of modellers as evidence of what “might” happen if the Government stops treating us like caged animals or inert specimens in some ghastly sociological laboratory.

Bridget Phetasy rightly detests the very notion of vaccine passports. A slice:

And before you come running into my mentions waving your yellow ‘International Certificate of Vaccination or Prophylaxis’ card bragging about how many countries you’ve been in where you needed to show your vaccinations (you didn’t) and how all of us dumb, ignorant rednecks need to leave our bubble — I’m not talking about international travel. What a country demands for entry in is completely up to that country. A digital domestic passport system to partake in society is very different than needing to show physical proof that you got your yellow fever shot before you enter Uganda.

Here’s Wall Street Journal columnist James Freeman on the media’s treatment of Florida governor Ron DeSantis. Two slices:

It’s hard to find silver linings in this era of expanding government authority and contracting individual opportunity for free expression. But at least the media establishment can no longer pretend that its abandonment of journalistic standards was necessitated by the unique character of Donald Trump. “Resistance journalism” is now industry standard, judging by a story on Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis by the formerly prestigious television newsmagazine “60 Minutes.”

Tweet

… is from pages 86-87 of University of Notre Dame philosopher James Otteson’s marvelous and hot-off-the-Cambridge-University-Press book, Seven Deadly Economic Sins (2021) (footnote deleted):

In [Adam] Smith’s view, most decent people would recoil at the thought of superintending the private decisions of their fellow citizens. But not all people would recoil at the thought of it; some would embrace and even relish it. Which type are more likely to avoid such an authority, and which are more likely to seek it out? Smith’s argument is that the people who get themselves into such positions of power over others are often those we would least want in those positions – because they will tend to wield their power as extensively as they possibly can.

Tweet

We need much more of the kind of spontaneous, peaceful resistance to the Covidocracy as you’ll see here in this short clip. It’s glorious! Watching it lifted my spirits immensely. (HT Yevdokiya Zagumenova)

Tweet

Here’s a letter to a new correspondent:

Ms. H___:

Thanks for your e-mail.

Unhappy with my recent criticism of Tyler Cowen, you defend his insistence on treating as largely irrelevant the fact that Covid-19 reserves the overwhelming bulk of its dangers for very old people. You write that in my criticism of Tyler’s stance I “dodge Professor Cowen’s very appropriate comparison of Covid-19 to Pearl Harbor and 9/11.”

With respect, I disagree.

Here’s what Tyler says on this matter: “But, ultimately when bad things happen on a certain scale – you know, Pearl Harbor, 9/11 – you don’t worry too much how many young people died, how many old people died.”

Even ignoring the reality that coronaviruses, unlike bomber pilots and airplane hijackers, aren’t sentient creatures, his comparison fails. Military invasions and terrorist attacks are far less discriminatory than is Covid in choosing victims.

Suppose (contrary, of course, to fact) that intelligence on the morning of December 8^th, 1941, had revealed that the Japanese military was hellbent on targeting a significant majority of its fire power only at American retirees and wasn’t much interested in inflicting harm on the young or even the middle-aged. That is, suppose that intelligence had revealed about the Japanese-military’s targets what we have long known about Covid – specifically now, that Covid ‘targets’ 81 percent of its lethality in the U.S. at people 65 and older – surely we in the 1940s would have focused a great deal of our defensive efforts on protecting older Americans. Had government leaders ignored this feature of Japanese military strategy – had these leaders acted as if children and even middle-aged adults were at no less risk than were retirees – had these officials sent everyone equally into a fright and then indiscriminately corralled children, young adults, and the middle-aged into bomb shelters along with the elderly – history would today regard these ‘leaders’ as having acted with criminal recklessness for failing to focus protective efforts on those who were clearly at disproportionate risk.

Ditto, of course, if we had good reason to believe that terrorists are intent on aiming nearly all of their evil at retirees.

I’m sorry, but I see no merit in Tyler’s case for ignoring, when it comes to policy, the reality that a huge majority of Covid’s victims are old people and that most Americans simply do not suffer a significantly elevated risk of harm from this disease. I believe, indeed, that this fact needs to be trumpeted much more loudly and widely.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Professor of Economics
and
Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

Tweet

Several weeks ago Scott Atlas spoke at Hillsdale College.

Tweet

Alberto Mingardi is understandably unimpressed with Mariana Mazzucato’s new book on industrial policy. Here’s a slice from Alberto’s review:

Mazzucato’s case for industrial policy suffers from selective history and intellectual hubris. It conveniently refrains from investigating countries like Italy that have prided themselves on enacting such a policy, while placing great faith in “visionary” intellectuals (such as herself) to foresee problems and direct resources toward solutions. Yet most problems and solutions are discovered day after day, in the messy endeavors and transactions we call markets. Intellectuals find it hard to understand how to assemble Ikea furniture, let alone what decisions have to be made to bring furniture to the stores. We the learned in economics, the social sciences, or literature are ignorant of how our own computers work and how the paint for our homes is produced. There’s nothing wrong with that—it’s simply a function of the complexity of a modern society, which no single mind, not even the most brilliant, can successfully master. Here another Reagan joke is apt: “The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would steal them away.” As the American proverb puts it, “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” The question is surely relevant to Mazzucato’s bizarre confidence that governmental foresight is easy.

Speaking of industrial policy, my Mercatus Center colleagues Matt Mitchell and Adam Thierer explain that it’s a very old new idea. A slice:

The political benefits of industrial policy are easy enough to spot. Politicians can stand in front of a subsidized factory and proclaim that it would not be there but for their intervention. They can point to the new capital and the new jobs created. They can even proclaim that these benefits will ripple out to the broader economy, thanks to the vaunted multiplier effect.

Targeted privilege has costs, however. Indeed, it often fails altogether. The history of industrial policy and state-based economic development efforts is littered with a long string of costly boondoggles that ultimately did little to benefit growth, jobs, competitive advantage or consumer welfare. Proponents will point to a few “wins” without mentioning the many “losses,” let alone providing a fuller account of all the costs—both direct and indirect—of their planning and spending efforts.

My colleague Dan Klein is very much impressed with Gregory Collins’s new book on Burke. A slice:

The melody is Burke’s liberalism in policy, within the framework of a stable polity. The book is impressive in its thoroughness on Burke on issue after issue, focusing on his words and deeds. Born in 1729, Burke was a member of Parlia­ment for 29 years and died in 1797. Collins delves into the major issues of Burke’s career, involving Ireland, India, the American colonies, and of course France, but also many obscure issues, such as the Butcher’s Meat Bill.

Burke favored liberal policy presumptions, as rang clear in his Thoughts and Details on Scarcity. But of course Burke did things that could reasonably be seen as compromises and feints, as one should expect of any politico, including a true statesman. On the British East India Company, Burke worked to open up market competition, to rein in the company’s political abuses, and to bring greater accountability, while Adam Smith advised bringing an end to its charter altogether.

Juliette Sellgren’s discussion of school choice with Lisa Snell is excellent.

GMU Econ alum Jonathan Klick reviews the evidence on the diversity of corporate boards.

David Henderson reviews Avner Offer’s and Gabriel Söderberg’s The Nobel Factor. A slice:

One of the more interesting Nobel Prize winners they discuss is British economist James Mirrlees, an adviser to the Labour Party, who was co-winner of the 1996 award for his theory of optimal taxation. His famous two results were that because of the damaging effect of income taxes on incentives, the marginal tax rate on the top earner should be zero and most tax rates should be between 20 and 30 percent. As I noted in my October 1996 Wall Street Journal article, “When Economics Rises Above Politics,” Mirrlees was stunned by his own result. “I must confess,” he wrote, “that I had expected the rigorous analysis of income taxation in the utilitarian manner to provide arguments for high tax rates. It has not done so.” Indeed.

Katherine Mangu-Ward calls for the abolition of the FDA.

Ilya Somin explores anti-Asian discrimination.

Here’s the opening of George Will’s latest column:

The essence of progressivism’s agenda is to create a government-centered society by increasing government’s control of society’s resources, then distributing those resources in ways that increase the dependency of individuals and social groups on government. Hence this stipulation in Congress’s just-enacted $1.9 trillion money shower: None of the $350 billion allocated for state governments can be used to finance tax cuts.

So, the federal government is using the allocation of society’s financial resources to state governments to coerce them into maintaining their existing claims on such resources. This illustrates how progressives try to implement a leftward-clicking ratchet.