Tweet

I’m honored that the Australian political philosopher and historian of ideas David Hart expanded so wisely and so fruitfully on my recent post on Covid-19 and the presumption of liberty. I share below, in full, David’s essay, which he sent to me my e-mail.

*****

The Presumption of Government Failure

I would add a few more conditions to the very useful list Don drew up yesterday. These are

1. the principle of proportionality

2. the principle of consistency

3. the principle of the “unseen” and unintended consequences of this intervention

4. the principle of the impossibility (or great unlikelihood) of rational economic calculation by government planners

5. the “precautionary principle” concerning state intervention

The principle of proportionality is that all risks should be treated according to the degree of their severity and their likelihood of occurring. One of the things that became clear very early on in the covid epidemic was that different age groups were affected very differently by the virus, and that some groups’ risk of serious illness or death was statistically insignificant (children and young adults), while others were at considerable risk of death (those over 70 who had other severe health problems). As with every other government regulation, a one-size-fits all policy is crude and unjust and usually causes more harm than good. Hayekian “local knowledge” is needed in order to address this issue and this is something government is most unlikely to be able to provide. Furthermore, the effort and cost we should spend to counter a risk should be proportional to that risk, and in the case of old and sick people near the end of life, they and their families should make that decision not the state.

The principle of consistency is that like risks are treated alike. It has struck me as absurd that people would overreact to a risk which is less dangerous than other things the risk of which they have accepted for years or have only taken minimal steps to mitigate or avoid. In the case of covid, for most people it does not rank at the top of risky activities (such as driving a car, or walking down a dark street in the inner city) or the most common causes of death (over eating and drinking, lack of exercise, suicide) which they routinely engage in or accept. To be consistent, if the state is allowed to ban risky behaviour it should start at the top of this list and work its way down. If more people will die from heart disease or car accidents, for example, than covid, then the state should start by regulating or banning what food we can eat or liquids we can drink, or how much exercise we should have each week; or impose a “lockdown” on car usage to reduce car accidents; only then should it address the problem of covid by making the wearing of masks compulsory and imposing draconian “lockdown socialism” to restrict movement or public gatherings.

The principle of the “unseen” and unintended consequences of this intervention. According to this principle, it is almost certain, though not entirely predictable in all its details, that there will be Bastiat-ian “unseen” consequences to any state intervention. These may range from “economic” (increased costs, distortions in production and consumption), to “political” (the politicians who enact the legislation come to like their increased power and may well become corrupted as Acton predicted), or “moral” (individuals become increasingly used to and dependent upon government to “do something” to make them “safer”, and voluntary solutions are not undertaken as a result), to “medical” (resources which would have been devoted to assisting those who will die in large numbers of other diseases such as malaria, TB, diarrhea, or aids, are now diverted to finding a rushed vaccine for the new corona virus), and the now increasingly recognized “domestic” consequences (lockdowns increase death and injury within the home from depression, drug abuse, domestic violence, suicide).

The principle of the impossibility (or great unlikelihood) of rational economic calculation by government planners applies just as much to government public health and hygiene planners as it did to Stalinist central planners. Thus, it is up to advocates of government intervention to demonstrate how the central planning of the health economy in particular and the broader economy in general can avoid the fatal problems identified exactly 100 years ago by Mises in his essay “Economic Calculation under Socialism” (1920). For example, how is the distinction between “essential” and “non-essential” economic activity even possible in an economy as complex as ours? How do you avoid the problem of the overproduction of ventilators (which turned out not to be needed and in fact harmed the patients who were forced to use them), or the overproduction of temporary “Nightingale hospitals” in England or the underused naval vessels in New York harbor?

The “precautionary principle” concerning state intervention is that great caution should always be applied to permitting any acts of intervention by the state. We as libertarians and free market economists know that government intervention is coercive and thus violates individuals’ rights to liberty and property, that it often fails to achieve its objectives or even produces results the opposite of those it intended, that by the “ratchet effect” the state increases in size and power with every crisis and never returns to its previous level, that its actions often produce “collateral damage” including loss of life, etc. Thus, according to my new libertarian “precautionary principle” we should avoid at almost any cost allowing the state to intervene to “solve” problems. That is of course, if we value liberty, peace, and prosperity, and this gets to the nub of the problem, since it is now quite obvious that most people rank “safety” far ahead of liberty in their list of preferences. This has been the tragedy of 2020 which has made this preference abundantly clear.

I would argue then that all of the above “principles” inevitably leads us to conclude that there should be “the presumption of government failure” to complement “the presumption of liberty” when assessing whether or not the state should intervene in public health, or in any other matter.

Tweet

… is from page 62 of Eric Mack’s excellent 2018 book, Libertarianism (reference deleted; original emphasis):

Adam Smith pointed out that no one plans the enormously complex network of cooperative interactions that leads from the miner who mines the ore that becomes the shepherd’s shears to the shepherd to the wool cloth manufacturer to the urban worker’s wool coat. Nor does anyone plan the network of production, exchange, and distribution that brings every sort of footwear that anyone in your city might want to wear to some outlet in (or virtually in) your city. Such chains of coordination arise through a multitude of individually planned actions; but the chains as a whole and the larger networks of such chains are not intended by, and could not be successfully planned by, anyone.

DBx: The economic insight described here by Mack is foundational. It is central to the works of Adam Smith and of F.A. Hayek. Ignorance of this insight poisons the roots of most proposed schemes, small to large, for using state-sponsored coercion to improve the economy. Ignorance of this insight discredits the analyses and proposals offered by proponents of industrial policy. Ignorance of this insight ensures the emergence of negative unforeseen consequences from schemes meant to “bring home supply chains,” to “promote the jobs of tomorrow,” and to “protect strategic industries.”

Tweet

Here’s a letter to a personal friend:

Mr. P____

P____:

Thanks for your e-mail in which you dissent in part from the position I take in my letter to Matt Zwolinski. You write that “Closing bars, for e.g., does impair freedom, but appears to be effective. If effective, the rights of uninfected people are at risk when all bars are open. When the evidence is strong enough, one freedom may have to be impaired temporarily to protect another freedom. There is no ironclad law here.”

I fully agree that we ought not here be bound by an ironclad law – as in, by a law with no exceptions under any circumstances. As I said in my letter to Matt, the question is whether or not a burden of persuasion to overcome a presumption of liberty has been met. One way to express my dismay at the events of 2020 is that so many true liberals and libertarians seem to have rejected, or at least forgotten, the presumption of liberty.

What is ironclad for me is starting with this presumption, one that imposes the burden of persuasion always on those who would restrict liberty.

To meet this burden, restrictionists must show, as you note, that general restrictions such as the closing down of bars and nightclubs actually reduce the risks of noninfected people becoming infected. I’m willing here to concede that this condition holds.

But this condition alone is insufficient to justify the sorts of general restrictions on liberty that have been imposed in the name of fighting Covid-19. Each of three additional conditions must be persuasively shown to hold in order for these restrictions to be justified in the face of a presumption of liberty. These three additional conditions are:

(1) Lockdowns are likely to reduce total premature deaths, and not only during the lockdown period but after lockdowns are ended. On this matter, as I said in my letter to Matt, the evidence is murky. A large number of studies show that lockdowns actually don’t work. Of course pro-lockdowners dismiss these studies as being flawed, preferring those studies that show that lockdowns save lives. But many of the ‘anti-lockdown’ studies are done by prominent researchers with no obvious ideological axes to grind. I believe that these studies deserve attention.

(2) There are no less-restrictive plausible means of achieving the same or similar reductions of mortality and morbidity as are achieved by lockdowns. In the case of Covid-19, because the risks fall overwhelmingly on the very elderly and ill, it seems to me that responsibility for remaining isolated falls on them, as opposed to compelling everyone to stay home and out of public places.

No knowledgeable person denies that the coronavirus is contagious. No knowledgeable person denies that Covid-19 is somewhat more lethal to adults than is seasonal flu. But the dominant public attitude – as expressed by the media and by politicians – is that the only feasible means of limiting the personal contacts that spread the virus lethally are general restrictions imposed on everyone, rather than focusing protection on the most vulnerable. This attitude strikes me as mistaken.

When the three co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration proposed the latter course in October – a course they call “Focused Protection” – they were immediately ridiculed out of hand. There was no reasoned discussion of the matter. These authors were dismissed as quacks and much worse.

One of these “quacks” is on the faculty at Oxford, another at Harvard, and the third at Stanford. All are accomplished scientific researchers. (And, by the way, none is a libertarian.) Their august affiliations and previous accomplishments, of course, do not prove these scholars here to be correct. But these affiliations and accomplishments are sufficient added reason to give these scholars’ argument a respectful hearing. Yet no such respectful hearing was forthcoming from the mainstream media and high political circles. The fact that these scholars’ argument was dismissed so quickly, with such scorn, and with heavy helpings of ad homimem innuendo tells me something – something not flattering – about the pro-lockdown crowd.

This treatment of the recommendation of the Great Barrington Declaration more than any other single action by pro-lockdowners opened my eyes to the reality that alternatives to general restrictions were simply off the table because of mass hysteria rather than because of any reasoned analysis.

(3) A third bit of additional persuasion that pro-lockdowners must achieve in order to overcome the presumption of liberty is that the means of lockdowns are unlikely to create precedents for the abuse of power in the future.

People on the political left, of course, don’t much worry about this third factor, as they generally don’t fear power as long as it is in the hands of Progressives. But those of us who cherish liberty do so in part because we fear power regardless of whose hands grip it. For us to ignore the likely precedents created by today’s increased use of power would be irresponsible of us.

I have, to my distress, seen very little reservation expressed by pro-lockdowners about the power precedents that are likely being created by the Covid lockdowns.

As an empirical matter, I don’t deny that humanity might one day be struck by a disease so contagious, so insidious, so indiscriminate, and so lethal that measures as draconian as we’ve suffered in 2020 might be justified even from a pro-liberty perspective. But I’m now convinced that Covid-19 doesn’t remotely come close to being such a disease.

Governments’ responses to Covid-19 have been, and continue to be, massively out of proportion to this danger. And apologists for the lockdowns continue to ignore the strongest arguments against their position. These lockdown apologists repeatedly slay straw men – theatrical feats falsely portrayed by the media as decisive victories against quacks and goofy clowns. None of this gives me even small confidence that lockdown policies come from a rational and well-considered place.

Don

Tweet

My column for the February 23rd, 2011, edition of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review was a follow-up to my column of February 16th, 2011. You can read the February 23rd column beneath the fold.

[continue reading…]

Tweet

Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins – one of the few prominent American journalists to avoid Covid Derangement Syndrome – writes again wisely on Covid-19, officials’ and media’s misleading statements about it, and the resulting calamitous response. A slice:

Inexplicably, authorities, including the World Health Organization, insisted on promoting a fatality rate they knew was exaggerated because of the failure to account for mild infections. To this day, U.S. officialdom and the media dwell on a nearly meaningless “confirmed” case count, knowing full well that doing so is innumerate and unstatistical. It’s a mystery and my only explanation is that they are afraid to stop because it portrays the disease as more deadly than it is (supporting the case for urgency) and also less prevalent than it is (supporting the case that it can somehow be contained).

Also writing sensibly about Covid – specifically, about the attempt to wrap political values in the cloak of science – is Jonah Goldberg. (HT Steve Conover) Here’s his conclusion:

Scientists are free to make such arguments, but these aren’t scientific arguments. They are political opinions, and they don’t become any more legitimate simply because you wear a lab coat at work. So by all means, listen to the scientists, but listen very carefully, because they might be saying things that aren’t very scientific.

Caroline Breashears, inspired by some great early-18th-century philosophers of freedom, warns of how government rulers seize more power by misleading the public with “loud words.” A slice:

As Trenchard argues, “Even in countries where the highest liberty is allowed,” certain men “mislead the multitude; who are ever abused with words, ever fond of the worst of things recommended by good names, and ever abhor the best things, and the most virtuous actions, disfigured by ill names.”

The good word “science,” for instance, has been abused to recommend the worst of things, from the closure of businesses to the disruption of worship services. “Follow science,” one congressperson insisted when a Catholic archbishop criticized Covid-19 restrictions on services. And so many followed the “science,” resulting in the isolation that has severely undermined the mental health of many citizens, including students.

Conversely, the most virtuous actions have been misrepresented in the popular press. The Great Barrington Declaration, with its scientific, compassionate, and thoughtful approach to Covid-19, was repeatedly misrepresented by newspapers. “Experts,” The New York Times insisted, dismissed it as “unethical” and “utter nonsense.”

“If The New COVID-19 Strain is More Transmissible, Why Isn’t It Taking Over in Every Region?”

Tom Woods interviews Ivor Cummins.

Rob Slane describes 2020 as “the year we sold our liberties for a medical tyranny.” A slice:

And here’s US President Dwight Eisenhower saying much the same thing in his farewell address in 1961: ‘Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.’

Sound familiar?

The irony of all that has happened this year is that in our apparent attempt to eliminate risk, we have given up our lives. That is, we have placed apparent safety so high up on the list of priorities that it has become a god, governing how we are to live, breathe and have our being, and it so dominates our everyday lives that it makes normal life impossible, sucking out joy, meaning and purpose.

My mind is just as blown as is Matt Gubba’s.

Finally, for those of you still clinging to the ridiculous notion that government officials can be trusted to “follow” the very science that they insist must be followed, Phil Magness has some information that you might wish to consult.

Tweet

… is from page 198 of George Will’s 1992 book, Restoration:

The dissolution of political, cultural and constitutional restraints on Congress obviously has served the interests of legislative careerists. They have a permanent, inherent vocational incentive to borrow to finance current expenditures.

DBx: Yes.

And to all deficit doves I say this: Because government borrowing today must be repaid by tomorrow’s citizens-taxpayers, today’s citizens-taxpayers have incentives to spend irresponsibly. After all, those who must repay the funds borrowed today are, in many cases, not yet born and so they are not around to ensure that their interests are responded to when fiscal decisions are made.

Deficit financing allows today’s citizens-taxpayers, and the political class who ‘represent’ them, to free ride on the fruits of other-people’s labor and resources. Government will thus spend too much and spend even more foolishly. And so such a method of government financing is economically damaging, as well as ethically corrupt.

Tweet

Here’s a letter to University of San Diego philosopher Matt Zwolinski:

Matt:

I write with what I trust you know is enormous and rock-solid respect for you and your scholarship, from which I’ve learned so much over the years. Yet I must push back against this recent tweet of yours:

Lots of libertarians believe that lockdowns are a) immoral restrictions of liberty, and b) unnecessary because COVID has a relatively low fatality rate.

Q: how high would the fatality rate have to be before some form of lockdown was permissible? 5%? 10%? Is there any number?

By asking this question you make two implicit assumptions, each of which, I think, is unwarranted.

The first such assumption is that the burden of persuasion is on lockdown opponents. But at least among those of us who cherish liberty, both for its instrumental qualities and as an end in itself, the burden of persuasion clearly ought to be on lockdown proponents.

That is, it’s not the responsibility of those of us who oppose lockdowns to justify our opposition by specifying when a pathogen’s lethality and pattern of impact become such as to overcome the presumption of liberty. That obligation instead falls properly on those who would suppress liberty in the name of fighting Covid-19. It is an obligation that, in my opinion, hasn’t come close to being met.

By the way, pointing out that the coronavirus is contagious and lethal to many people who become infected is not sufficient to shift the burden of persuasion to us lockdown opponents. The ordinary flu virus is contagious and lethal to many people who become infected – indeed, it’s more lethal than is the coronavirus to children – yet we don’t lock down society every flu season.

The second unwarranted assumption is that lockdowns are sufficiently effective at improving public health. But evidence in support of lockdowns on this score is, at best, weak. And while reasonable people might disagree over the finer points of the many studies of lockdowns’ effectiveness, before we submit to such a draconian policy the presumption of liberty surely requires that evidence of lockdowns’ effectiveness at saving lives be overwhelming – yet it is not.

The policy since mid-March has been worse than “lock down first, ask questions later.” It’s instead been “lock down first, and anyone who later dares to question this policy will be publicly accused of being anti-science and indifferent to human life.” I need not spell out the problems with this attitude.

Wishing you and yours a Happy New Year.

Sincerely,
Don

Tweet

Ethan Yang asks if Dr. Deborah Birx and other lockdown hypocrites should be forgiven. A slice:

Dr. Birx and the countless politicians like her should be forgiven under the following condition: That they learn from their mistakes and empathize with the average American’s struggle with their policies. To understand the eternal lesson that policy intentions do not equal policy results. If we could have more people in power who understand this truth then society would be better off. Lockdowns are a classic example of a policy that seemed to have benevolent intentions but wound up having lethal consequences. There are laws that work and those that don’t. Lockdowns and all the arbitrary restrictions that come with them promote contempt for the rule of law while doing little to control the virus. They have not only done little to prevent the spread of Covid-19, but they have wrecked society as a result. Part of the process of leadership is having the humility to admit that you were wrong and understanding that you can’t force a square peg through a round hole. Likewise, you cannot drastically shut down society and prohibit everything it means to be human without expecting terrible results.

Stacey Rudin on Twitter:

I was first confused by the lockdowners. I felt sure I could make them see the error of their ways.

After a few months of strenuous effort, I grew frustrated. Then angry. Then downright disgusted.

Now, I am terrified. THEY KNOW. And they don’t stop.

Anthony Fauci – who admits to lying to the American public about Covid – now expresses his unhappiness with American federalism. He wants the central government, manned by power-drunk liars such as himself, to have yet more control. Jacob Sullum has more on this dangerous man. And, by the way, when Fauci (probably) isn’t lying, he still spreads misinformation. Here’s a slice from Sullum’s essay:

Incidentally, the U.S. is not, as Fauci claimed, “the hardest-hit country in the world.” While our COVID-19 numbers are certainly nothing to brag about, the United States currently ranks 14th in deaths per capita, according to Worldometer’s tallies. Developed countries such as the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, and Belgium—all of which imposed sweeping restrictions on social and economic activity at the national level—are doing worse by that measure. The U.K., where Fauci’s interview slamming federalism was broadcast, has imposed national lockdowns repeatedly, but its death rate is still somewhat higher than the U.S. rate. Sweden, which eschewed such measures, ranks 27th in per capita COVID-19 deaths, much higher than its Scandinavian neighbors but lower than many other European countries.

Shared by Ivor Cummins:

Unfortunately, this latest by David Stockman is behind a paywall. But here’s a slice:

Worse still, Fauci has utterly failed—and surely deliberately so—in explaining to the public that the problem is not one of contagion or spread of the Covid among the general population, but of identification of the very small sub-set of the population which is susceptible to a severe course of the disease.

That is to say, the job of the public health authorities should have been to help the 5% discover who they are— based on medical, physical and genetic factors—so that they can seek shelter and treatment, not ordering the 95% how to live and where to spend Christmas.

This appropriate mission would have also meant using the vast collection of data on the Covid to show its very limited threat to the general public, rather than to foster a “case-a-demic” climate of fear.

Omar Kahn is correct: In 2020 most of humanity lost its mind. Two slices:

And while yelping about the immorality of any “suggestion” that we let our immune systems naturally cope with a new viral strain (the evolutionary strategy we’ve had for billions of years, and quite successful from the looks of it), we will clamor against any suggestion of “herd” immunity, as long as someone else delivers our latte and constitutes, without being so tagged, that aforesaid “herd.”

Then, you take the shocking realization that 99.9% below 60, without serious comorbidities, survive the virus. And then one cannot possibly fathom why protecting the vulnerable, and having everyone else run society, safeguarding our economic vitality, “and” without being at any serious risk, build up an immunological wall so infection cannot be passed on, wouldn’t be the obvious, inescapable, rational route?

In fact, those that promoted this loudly at the beginning, having been routed in the public sphere by the blitzkrieg of craven political mendacity and shameless media hyperbole and panic peddling, and by the unremitting attacks on position and livelihood and more, are less heard these days. How many trips down the road to Calvary is someone going to take? How often do you wish to be crucified? How often will you attempt a “resurrection” of your career and standing after being vilified by sanctified trolls, or “scientists” playing with theological chips and aspiring to a priest class rather than taking up the cudgel of dispassionate inquiry?

…..

German mortality, is barely a blip by five-year standards. Look across Europe, draw on the website Euro Momo, there is nothing that shrieks “asteroid alert!” Not by a long shot. Even alarmists claiming Netherlands has never experienced such impact, confess “well, not since 1973 roughly,” which only confesses it’s not unprecedented. I don’t recall the “great lockdown” of 1973, do you? Leave aside Woodstock, the moon walk and more after the Hong Kong Flu of 1968–9 which smacked a less populous world with close to 4 million deaths in two successive winter waves.

Tweet

… is from page 168 of Tom Palmer’s 2007 paper titled “Twenty Myths about Markets” (which was written for a Mont Pelerin meeting in Nairobi), as this paper is reprinted in Tom’s important 2009 book, Realizing Freedom:

Moreover, there is no “well balanced” middle of the road. State interventions into the market typically lead to distortions and even crises, which then are used as excuses for yet more interventions, thus driving policy one direction or another.

DBx: Tom here identifies yet another danger posed by state obstruction of peaceful activities. People are not pawns on a chessboard which, when moved from here to there by the visible hand, remain obediently in place until moved again by the visible hand. Instead, each of us has desires that we wish to fulfill and, when one path to fulfillment of a desire is blocked, we typically search for, and find, other paths.

These other paths are as numerous as human beings are creative. There is simply no way for the mind that is attached to the visible hand to know which other paths will be discovered or forged. And so the visible-hand’s mind will inevitably be surprised and disappointed to discover that its own scheme for the arrangement of society isn’t working out quite as that mind anticipated. The visible-hand’s mind thus intervenes again, in ways not originally anticipated, hoping to correct for the unanticipated reactions of the willful and unruly pawns.

The sequence repeats, with the results on the ground differing ever-more from the beautiful blueprint that originally motivated the intervention of visible-hand’s mind.

…..

The screenshot above is from this report in today’s New York Times. Of course, the NYT passes this measure off as being caused chiefly by “the pandemic” rather than by the government’s massive crushing of economic, income-earning opportunities. Whatever.

Property owners along with people seeking housing will each respond to this obstruction of property rights in detailed ways that the wielders of visible fists in Albany cannot possibly anticipate. Many of the unruly pawns will be portrayed as enemies of the people for disrupting the goals of Albany’s well-intentioned fists. And the fists will then come smashing down again, this time in response to this unruliness – and in ways that none of the fists originally expected would be necessary.