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In my latest column for AIER I continue to lay out some foundational principles of international trade. A slice:

Some protectionists concede that a policy of free trade at home can be beneficial to citizens of the home country. But, these protectionists insist, free trade is advisable only if a policy of free trade is followed also by other governments. If the government of, say, Chile obstructs its citizens’ freedom to trade with Americans, we in America – or so protectionists assert – will be economically damaged if our government doesn’t likewise obstruct our freedom to trade with Chileans.

An entire book could be written on the salvo of sophistries that incite the belief that free trade is beneficial only if all trading partners follow a policy of free trade. But getting a clear picture of the core flaw in this belief is easy: Ask yourself if you are harmed by your government failing to obstruct your freedom to purchase goods or services from merchants who aren’t your employer. For example, if you don’t work for Target, ask if you’re harmed by your government leaving you free to shop at Target.

If you answer ‘no,’ then you grasp, if only intuitively, the reason why you and your fellow citizens are not harmed if your government leaves you free to trade with foreigners whose governments prevent them from trading freely with you. Your gain from purchasing whatever products are offered for sale by Target depends in no way on your selling anything to Target.

This reality remains true even if you applied for a job at Target – that is, even if you offered to export from your household to Target some of your labor services – and were rejected. While you might indeed have been made better off had Target chosen to hire you, you would be made worse off still if your neighbor took it upon himself to obstruct your ability to shop at Target. This fact would not be altered if your neighbor explained sincerely that his wish is to retaliate on your behalf against Target for its refusal to purchase your labor services.

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… is from page 174 of Bas Van Der Vossen’s and Jason Brennan’s excellent 2018 book, In Defense of Openness:

When free people choose to interact in mutually advantageous ways, justice demands that we leave them be.

DBx: Van Der Vossen and Brennan had in mind when they wrote these words – which appear in the Postscript of their book – mostly trade and immigration. They obviously were not writing in response to the Covid-19 lockdowns. Yet many of the lessons from their book apply to the state of our world today.

Lockdown proponents and tolerators will immediately assert that many of Van Der Vossen’s and Brennan’s lessons don’t apply when a contagious pathogen that is lethal to many people is on the loose. But I caution against such a hasty conclusion.

While the costs of openness might rise in the face of such a pathogen, the benefits of openness don’t disappear or even diminish. Indeed, these benefits might even rise as there is a more-urgent need for cooperation to find cures and vaccines.

Yet what reason have political “leaders” and public-health “experts” given you to believe that they take the loss of such benefits of openness adequately into account when proposing and implementing lockdowns? The correct answer isn’t “none,” but it surely is “far too little.” Politicians and pundits are unusually attuned, always, to opennesses’s costs; they are almost universally blind to the full range of opennesses’s benefits.

The benefits of openness on the international front – that is, mostly involving trade and immigration – were, before the pandemic, inadequately appreciated by most people regardless of ideology or political affiliation. The benefits of openness internally were simply taken for granted; very few people thought about these benefits. And so at least I am not surprised at the widespread failure to comprehend the huge losses that humanity is now suffering because the world today, internationally and domestically, is far less open than it was at 2020’s dawn.

The juvenile simplicity of most intellectuals’ and politicians’ view of modern reality – their easy talk of the likes of “supply chains,” “the American economy,” “aggregate demand,” “strategic industries,” and “unfair trade” – both revealed and furthered their pre-pandemic blindness to the benefits of greater openness. This same juvenile simplicity blinds them now to the costs of closing open societies in the name of fighting Covid.

As an empirical matter in this complex reality of ours, one cannot rule out the theoretical possibility of a threat so great and sure that draconian restrictions on openness might find legitimate justification both economically and ethically. But if we are to preserve the free society, the burden of persuasion must rest squarely and heavily upon those who propose even temporary restrictions on that openness.

Was such a burden met in the case of Covid-19? No. Hell, there wasn’t even the recognition that those who proposed Covid restrictions even have a burden to meet beyond simply saying “It’s contagious!” (or, in econospeak, “It’s an externality!”). But because the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 is hardly the only contagious pathogen among humans – and, more generally, because nearly every action in society has unintended consequences that spillover onto others – surely the burden of persuasion that must be met by those who would close our open society must involve something more than their having to shout “It’s contagious!”

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We need more such peaceful yet passionate resistance to Covid-19 lockdown tyranny. (HT David Henderson)

DBx: Too many Americans, like so many other people, have tragically come to accept that the only goal worth pursuing now is avoiding Covid-19. All other goals that might even potentially conflict with the supreme goal of Avoiding Covid are to be ignored until Covid-19 is wiped from the face of the earth.

The mindset now approaches this:

– No fate is as horrible as contracting Covid.

– Every Covid death is an unspeakable tragedy that could have been, and should have been, avoided, while every non-Covid death is a mere statistic the significance and sadness of which doesn’t begin to compare to that of any Covid death.

– No illness is as horrifying, as threatening, as gruesome as is Covid. To repeat: Contracting Covid is the worst fate that today can possibly befall any human being.

– No cost is too high to pay – no cost is too high to compel millions of people to pay – for even the tiniest reduction in the risk of some individual somewhere contracting Covid.

– And so for as long as anyone anywhere has a chance of testing positive for Covid that is higher than 0.000 percent, society must have one and only one goal: reduce this risk to zero. And, therefore, that supreme goal – the complete elimination of Covid-19 – is worth whatever its achievement might cost. To eliminate Covid, no amount of resource expenditure is too high; no amount of freedom is too much to crush; no amount of tyranny is too much to tolerate. Nothing – nothing – matters as much as doing all we can to keep Covid deaths to a minimum. It’s all that humanity now exists to do.

…..

Covid derangement and the tyranny that it enables frighten me magnitudes more than has any other combination of public attitudes and government actions that I’ve ever experienced.

Covid itself scares me – a reasonably fit and life-long health-conscious 62 year old – not one bit more than I am scared by the seasonal flu, by my mild hypertension, or by driving in an automobile on rain-soaked roads. In contrast, Covid Derangement Syndrome – which is highly contagious and potentially very lethal on a massive scale – literally keeps me awake at night, terrorized by fear. The precedent that the Covid reaction has set will prove to be a terrible curse.

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Phil Magness details twelve significant instances in which pro-lockdowners were mistaken. A slice:

The name Neil Ferguson, the lead modeler and chief spokesman for Imperial College London’s pandemic response team, has become synonymous with lockdown alarmism for good reason. Ferguson has a long track record of making grossly exaggerated predictions of catastrophic death tolls for almost every single disease that comes along, and urging aggressive policy responses to the same including lockdowns.

Covid was no different, and Ferguson assumed center stage when he released a highly influential model of the virus’s death forecasts for the US and UK. Ferguson appeared with UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson on March 16 to announce the shift toward lockdowns (with no small irony, he was coming down with Covid himself at the time and may have been the patient zero of a super-spreader event that ran through Downing Street and infected Johnson himself).

Across the Atlantic, Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx cited Ferguson’s model as a direct justification for locking down the US. There was a problem though: Ferguson had a bad habit of dramatically hyping his own predictions to political leaders and the press.

The danger that Neil Ferguson poses to humanity comes not exclusively from his scientific quackery; it comes from his quackery mixed with his enchantment with totalitarian policies.

(DBx: Few individuals not at the head of any government have been as responsible for causing as much human misery and suffering as has this mad ‘scientist’ Neil Ferguson.)

Bruce Pardy rightly decries how in 2020 science was abused in order to justify tyranny. A slice:

Yet the scientific establishment has come to stand on consensus and authority. It, not the Church, is now the despot. “Obey the science” is an anti-scientific sentiment wielded to achieve public compliance with political agendas. As C.S. Lewis wrote, “In every age the men who want us under their thumb, if they have any sense, will put forward the particular pretension which the hopes and fears of that age render most potent. … It has been magic, it has been Christianity. Now it will certainly be science … Let us not be deceived by phrases about ‘Man taking charge of his own destiny.’ All that can really happen is that some men will take charge of the destiny of others.”

What Lord Sumption says about the British public in 2020 applies with equal strength to the American public in 2020 – and, indeed, to the public of most countries in this year of Covid Derangement Syndrome.

Here’s more valuable information from Phil Magness:

Google mobility data (averaged) for the 7 non-lockdown states and the 7 most heavily restricted states + DC.

Aside from the initial drop between 3/12 and the end of March, the two have dramatically diverged. This suggests the lockdowns, and not the virus, are the primary reason for the economic harm of the last last 8 months.

And here again is Phil Magness, this time on the quackery of the so-called ‘scientist’ Neil Ferguson:

With Ferguson in the news again and – apparently – back on one of the key advisory panels behind the UK lockdowns, it seems like an appropriate time to remind everyone that the Neil Ferguson pandemic model *specifically* excludes nursing homes from its projections. If you want to assess its COVID forecasts against reality, you need to also remove nursing home deaths from the count.

And since nursing homes conservatively account for at least 40% of COVID deaths, that means every single modeled scenario he published drastically exaggerated the level of general-population deaths.

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… is from pages xiv of Philipp Blom’s 2010 book, A Wicked Company:

Their morality was not one of wild orgies, unrestrained greed, and heedless indulgence, but of a society based on mutual respect, without masters and slaves, without oppressors and oppressed.

DBx: Blom here refers to, and corrects a common misunderstanding of, the morality of the French enlightenment thinkers of the 18th century – thinkers such as Denis Diderot and Thiry d’Holbach. But Blom’s description applies also to modern libertarians and classical liberals, who are frequently mischaracterized as proponents of libertinism and greed.

We classical liberals / libertarians might be mistaken to argue that social harmony and maximum possible prosperity for all is possible only when individuals are allowed a great deal of freedom to choose as each sees fit within a system of secure private property rights. But it is slanderous to accuse us – because we reject both the utility and ethics of any system that compels everyone to join in a consciously chosen and state-enforce centralized plan – of effectively advocating a Hobbesian war of all against all in which to the victors go the spoils.

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In his latest short video, J.P. Sears continues his valiant efforts to use humor to convey serious warnings against the tyranny now running rampant in response Covid Derangement Syndrome.

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The latest post by Swedish physician Sebastian Rushworth on Covid-19 and humanity’s deranged reaction to it is a must-read. A slice:

Now, I don’t want to give the impression that the Emergency Room was being overwhelmed, because that would be false. I went from seeing eight or more patients per shift to seeing two or three. While a very large proportion of the patients were covid positive, there were in total many fewer patients than usual. All the usual suspects in the Emergency Room were gone.

Official statistics bear this out. They show, for example, that hospital admissions for heart attacks in Stockholm were down 40% during the spring covid peak. Presumably people were choosing to stay home rather than go to the hospital and risk getting covid. And presumably this was resulting in unnecessary deaths – indirect deaths, not due to the virus itself, but rather due to the hysteria surrounding the virus.

This continued for about a month, and then the covid patients started to disappear. More and more of the tests came back negative. I noticed that the official statistics were telling the same story. From mid-April until early August there was a continuous decline in the number of people dying of covid in Sweden.

Jacob Sullum reports that Americans are getting sick of Covid restrictions. (I hope he’s correct; in my view, Americans aren’t yet sick enough of these restrictions.) A slice:

COVID-19 restrictions are equally capricious in other states. New York Gov. Cuomo last week banned indoor dining in New York City even though his own data showed that restaurants accounted for just 1.4 percent of infections, while Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz banned both indoor and outdoor dining at a time when 1.7 percent of cases were linked to restaurants.

When the Great Barrington Declaration was released in early October, many people dismissed it in part by ridiculing its express opposition to lockdowns as being opposition to a straw man – as opposition to policies that, while these might have been used in Spring, were now proposed by no one and were not going to be used again in response to Covid. Well, this Straw Man – as Phil Magness might say – is now stalking the land.

GMU Econ alum Byron Carson explains the importance of thinking and acting at the margin – including when thinking about, and acting in response to, contagious pathogens.

This comparison, shared on Twitter by Ivor Cummins, of real science with what is worshipped today as science is pretty close to accurate.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) rightly decried, earlier this week, the GOP’s hypocrisy and fiscal irresponsibility. A slice:

To so-called conservatives who are quick to identify the socialism of Democrats, if you vote for this spending monstrosity, you are no better. When you vote to pass out free money, you lose your soul and you abandon forever any semblance of moral or fiscal integrity.

So the next time you see Republicans in high moral dudgeon claiming and complaining about spending of Democrats and socialism, remind them—remind them if they supported this monstrous spending bill, that really the difference between the parties is less Adam Smith vs. Marx and more Marx vs. Engels.

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… is from page 3 of Virginia Postrel’s 2020 book, The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World (footnote deleted):

But, to reverse Arthur C. Clarke’s famous adage about magic, any sufficiently familiar technology is indistinguishable from nature. It seems intuitive, obvious – so woven into the fabric of our lives that we take it for granted.

DBx: Indeed so. This reality, I believe, helps explain why so many people fail to recognize the benefits of modern capitalist modernity: these benefits are so woven into the fabric of our lives that they seem indistinguishable from nature.

Prosperity appears simply to happen. Supermarket shelves remain filled (at least when nature isn’t harassing us with pandemics). Flicks of fingers fill homes with light (at least when nature isn’t harassing us with windstorms). Nature seems to ensure that gasoline stations always have on hand gasoline (at least when nature isn’t harassing us with hurricanes).

We denizens of the eve of 2021 swim daily in an amount of material prosperity that would be remarkable to our parents of 30 years ago, jaw-dropping to our grandparents of 60 years ago; stunningly unbelievable to our great-great grandparents of a century ago; and apparent proof to any of our pre-industrial ancestors that finally earth has been transformed by some spectacular god into paradise.

Yet to us it’s meh. It’s just what is. Grass grows. Rain falls. Birds fly. Dogs bark. Cats purr. Squirrels scamper. Cows moo and dispense milk, some of which nature makes appear as yogurt flavored with vanilla or blueberries or peaches in those oh-so-natural, nothing-at-all-remarkable-about-them supermarkets.

The sun daily rises in the east and sets in the west. Gravity is incessant. Automobiles are affordable for nearly everyone, as are hard floors and hard roofs in homes – and as are also toothpaste and scientific dentistry, cellular telephony, harnessed electricity, air-conditioning, antibiotics, stylish clothing the fabrics of which are woven so tightly and dyed so well that they withstand being washed with detergents in the automatic (!) washing machines that are also among the many things that are supplied in abundance by nature.

Capital itself, we are told by some famous economists, grows automatically and according to a scientifically determinable formula – rather like bamboo.

We humans no more have to take cognizance of whatever are the complex processes that put toasted slices of bread spread with butter on our breakfast tables than we must worry about whatever are the complex processes undergone by the atoms in trees that cause trees to grow the leaves that deliver comforting shade on summer afternoons.

It just happens.

Or so it seems.

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My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy rightly decries the fiscal insanity associated with Covid-19 derangement – and gives us yet further reason to recognize the sheer folly of trusting politicians with the powers that so many politicians worldwide have exercised under the excuse of fighting Covid.. A slice:

Given that the priority of policy-makers should be dead-set on reopening our economy and overseeing a rapid recovery from the pandemic, you might be naïve in thinking that much of the $908 billion was prioritized for COVID-19 mitigation and the rollout of vaccines. You would be wrong. In fact, 94.4 percent of “COVID relief” spending has nothing to do with pandemic mitigation, vaccine distribution, or vaccine procurement. Clearly, the priority of policymakers is elsewhere.

George Will is among those who are disgusted with Washington’s fiscal incontinence.

And Eric Boehm adds his clear voice to those who decry today’s fiscal incontinence.

My Mercatus Center colleague – and GMU Econ alum – Rosolino Candela celebrates the enormous prosperity of modernity.

Thank capitalism and commercialization for saving Christmas. A slice:

“As soon as Santa Claus entered the picture,” says Prof. Nissenbaum, “people had to go shopping.” Santa Claus was part of a broader movement to domesticate the holiday by creating a warm, comforting family event centered around giving gifts to children. Mayors, merchants and the middle class all wanted to get the violent Christmastime gangs off the streets.

“There’s a general taming of the holiday that goes on throughout the 19th century,” says Penne Restad, author of “Christmas in America” and a retired historian at the University of Texas, Austin. The mass marketing of Christmas gifts, she says, was “a way of creating boundaries.”

As the holiday became about giving gifts to family and friends, rather than about seizing food and drink from strangers, the seasonal street gangs faded away. The rise of department stores in the mid-19th century enabled even the poor to become consumers by giving—and receiving—gifts.

Newspapers, eager to attract advertising, rhapsodized about the virtues of Christmas giving.

I enthusiastically applaud any and all persons who peacefully disobey any and all of today’s Covid-19 lockdown orders. These civilly disobedient individuals are heroic for defying the arbitrary edicts of brutes in suits.

Although much worse than simply not issuing tyrannical mandates, failure to enforce tyrannical mandates is better than enforcing such mandates.

Jeffrey Tucker looks back with justified dismay and disgust at 2020’s derangement and tyranny. A slice:

The hubris of the disease planners has been appalling to behold. They could not bring themselves to admit failure. So they kept doubling down. No amount of social and economic carnage seemed to shake them. Cancer screenings and vaccinations collapsed, dentistry services fell 70%, suicide ideation and drug overdoses soared as predicted, the arts fell apart, 100,000 businesses are dead, and even the murder rate reversed its decades-old declining trajectory and shot up. That’s right: when you destroy the basis of civilization, you become uncivilized.

It was a year in which we were all invited to experience the dismantlement of the good and free society in real time and by force of government power. Folly is too weak a term. Calamity and catastrophe – these terms are more suitable. And yet it was all caused by the institution that so many for so long claimed was a machinery of compassion, justice, equality, fairness, and high regard for human dignity, the essential bulwark that keeps civilization afloat. These values were tossed out this year. And let’s eschew the passive voice here and speak more pointedly: governments tossed them out.