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… is from page 39 of Steven Landsburg’s superb 2019 volume, The Essential Milton Friedman:

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Here’s a letter to Al Arabiya English:

Editor:

I respectfully dissent from my former colleague Omar Al-Ubaydli’s case that Covid-19 lockdowns will perhaps boost innovation (“How coronavirus lockdowns can boost innovation,” Dec. 23).

Omar grounds his conclusion on a new paper whose authors examined the impact of U.S. city lockdowns during the 1918 flu epidemic. Some U.S. cities back then imposed more stringent restrictions than did other cities. The paper’s authors find, as Omar writes, “that innovation rates in the long-lockdown cities were approximately equal to those in the short-lockdown cities during the pandemic…. Moreover, in the long-run, the long-lockdown cities fared considerably better than the short-lockdown cities; patent applications increased by 12 percent following the pandemic’s conclusion.”

Following the paper’s authors, Omar speculates that lives saved by the strictest 1918 lockdowns not only ensured a greater supply of future inventors, but also preserved “intangible and organizational assets, such as the knowledge embedded in successful companies.”

Without questioning this paper’s conclusion about the 1918 pandemic, that conclusion contains no lesson for today. Unlike the far-more-lethal Spanish flu, Covid reserves its damage overwhelmingly for the elderly. Nearly a third (32 percent) of Covid deaths in the U.S. are of people 85 years old or older, while a whopping 80 percent of Covid deaths in the U.S. are of people 65 years or older.

Covid, in short, almost exclusively kills retirees, and especially ones who are very old and frail. Therefore, any lives that are saved by Covid lockdowns are not those of individuals who will be filing applications for patents.

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

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… is from page 99 of John Mueller’s excellent 1999 book, Capitalism, Democracy, & Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery (original emphasis):

The remarkable economic expansion of the past has taken place substantially by accident or default: it was not notably guided by government policy – indeed, it frequently took place despite government policy.

DBx: Of course, by “accident or default” Mueller here means that the rate of economic growth and overall breadth of improvement in living standards were not not the result of any conscious plan or design. But, of course, each individual actor – each entrepreneur, each business manager, each financier, each worker, each consumer – acted purposefully. Each individual intended his or her own gain, guided by what Mueller would want me to emphasize as enlightened self-interest (which is emphatically not greed). One important overall, emergent result – undesigned and undesignable – was our modern, enormously high standard of living.

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… is from page 110 of the 2009 edition of the incomparable H.L. Mencken’s 1926 book, Notes on Democracy (link added):

Under democracy, says [Émile] Faguet, the business of law-making becomes a series of panics – government by orgy and orgasm.

DBx: Indeed. Behold the lockdowns. Behold the various ‘Covid stimulus’ bills. Behold the cruel comedies taking place in most state capitals across America, in many locales, and on the Potomac.

What a disgusting spectacle.

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… the pure Orwellian tyranny at the root of the Covid-19 lockdowns.

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Russ Roberts EconTalks with Jay Bhattacharya, a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration.

David Henderson observes that, while hypocrisy by politicians generally knows no party lines, hypocrisy over the Covid-19 lockdowns in the United States is overwhelmingly Democratic.

Art Carden decries one of the many Orwellian aspects of the tyranny unleashed in the name of fighting Covid. Here’s his conclusion:

Do the aristocrats want hoi polloi to heed their dire warnings? They should lead by example. Politicians, rule thyselves. If you can’t or won’t, at least acknowledge your guiding principle, which seems to be that some animals are more equal than others.

Joakim Book is correct: In 2020, populists were more reliable (and, hence, less dangerous to civilization) than were the so-called “experts” and the elites who pride themselves in being guided by such “expertise.” A slice:

And the ordeals got worse and worse and worse, while the virus did its own thing, entirely unperturbed by whatever measures the experts invented to conquer it. The longer the farce went on, the more the people started to ignore them: almost as many Americans travelled for Thanksgiving as usual, despite our overlords publicly chanting against it. Societies developed this game where officials made grandstanding speeches before they themselves cheated the very rules they imposed; the rest of us cheated the rules too, whenever we got a chance: ignore masks when nobody sees; go outside even when we’re not allowed to; have friends over when nobody noticed; visit the park or the countryside even when prohibited; hold mass protests if your woke issue is important enough.

In the face of overwhelming evidence against their pandemic policies, the establishment stuck to their story, misinterpreting reality as the cases and deaths came down in the late spring and summer ‒ an outcome that seemed to prove that the public campaigns against the virus worked. Never mind that the curves reversed themselves before policies started “working” and that they didn’t do so more rapidly in jurisdictions that tighten the noose the most.

Deep down 2020 has taught us that officials don’t have a clue, that they don’t control what they pretend to control, and that their measures aren’t targeted to or calibrated for stopping the spread of a virus.

I’m honored to have been a guest on Michael Schaus’s podcast to discuss Covid Derangement Syndrome and its hideous consequences.

Jeffrey Singer reveals the lethal connection between a pandemic and drug prohibition.

Salena Zito wonders why we Americans have so sheepishly obeyed the wolves who pose as our protectors. A slice:

Years from now, when we walk past the graves of the restaurants, shops, and gyms that didn’t make it, will we ask ourselves how we let this happen? Or will we have accepted that we laid down our liberties one day to flatten a curve and never fought to get them back?

Appropriately quoting Patrick Henry, Eli Steinberg – writing in Newsweek – eloquently protests the Covid lockdowns as well as the obsessive focus, by the media and politicians, on Covid risks as if these differ categorically from any of the countless other risks that attend being alive.. (HT Reuvain Borchardt) A slice:

But the Founders ultimately recognized that it is not enough to just stay alive. For life to have meaning, it needs to be worth living. And what that means—by definition—is that we must take some risks and make some sacrifices. Think about it—if your life as lived is not worth any chance of dying for, is it worth living for?

Are we just running out the clock? What sort of existence is that? No wonder the projections for deaths of despair due to COVID keep rising, well beyond 150,000.

While this risk-averse approach has come to typify the way we first approached COVID, it is the spirit of America that will ultimately pull us out of it.

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… is from page 106 of John Mueller’s superb 1999 book, Capitalism, Democracy, & Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery:

Moreover, there is very often a political dilemma in the fact that the people who will benefit in the long run from the economists’ advice don’t know who they are while those who will be disadvantaged in the short run know this only too well and are quick to scream.

DBx: Yes

The notion that government officials specifically, and political processes generally, take a longer-run perspective than do private-property-based free markets is more absurd than is the belief that reindeer – some of whom have shiny red noses – can fly. Tell the tale if you wish; it does have a certain childish charm. But you’re a fool to actually swallow it.

Armen Alchian often wrote of his belief that the free-market system is called “capitalism” because the anticipated long-run consequences of today’s decisions made regarding the uses of private property are capitalized in the prices of the different units of private property. The share price of Apple, Inc., would plummet immediately if Tim Cook were to announce that in June he will liquidate half of Apple’s assets simply to make a huge cash distribution to Apple shareholders because of the financial distress that many of these shareholders suffered as a result of the Covid lockdowns.

Government is not about doing or dispensing justice. Nor is it about improving the allocation of resources. (Ha!) It’s overwhelmingly about power. Raw, venal, nasty power – the work of Satan camouflaged as the work of Santa.

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In this new, short video, economist Antony Davies rightly insists on assessing the consequences of the Covid-19 lockdowns in context. (Beneath the video, I here write a bit more about it.)

I see in this video only two small negatives (beyond the distracting background noise near the end).

First, Antony says nothing, save for one brief allusion, to the fact that Covid is dangerous overwhelmingly to the elderly. Covid doesn’t take lives randomly, and (hence) whatever lives are saved by Covid lockdowns are not saved randomly.

Second, Antony doesn’t mention the “dry tinder” point – that is, the fact that Sweden last year had an unusually low number of deaths of vulnerable people. Sweden’s light-touch approach early on to Covid is even more impressive when the dry-tinder point is taken into account.

I call these points “negatives” rather than criticisms. Antony’s understandable wish to use the Yankee Stadium metric likely prevented him from being nuanced about just who was killed by Covid and who might have been saved by lockdowns. And I’m not sure how he could have worked in, to his discussion of Sweden, the dry-tinder point.

…..

For alerting me to this video I thank Hans Eicholz.

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In my latest column for AIER I applaud some of the heroic people who stood up to the tyranny that exploded onto the scene in 2020. A slice:

• David Henderson. Calling as early as mid-April for an end to the lockdowns, Henderson has consistently been a crystal-clear source of sanity amidst the Covid madness. Writing principally at his blog, EconLog, but also in the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal and for the Hoover Institution’s Defining Ideas, he is characteristically very generous to those with whom he disagrees while he never refrains from taking a principled and untrimmed – and economically informed – stand against lockdown tyranny.

• Dan Klein. My colleague in George Mason University’s Department of Economics, Dan – who lives for much of the year in Sweden – co-wrote an important paper (with Joakim Book and Christian Bjørnskov) explaining why Sweden’s unusually high death rate in 2020 is not the result of the Swedish government’s generally much lighter approach to Covid. This paper is, I believe, the source of the term “dry tinder.” Unfortunately, the findings of Dan and his co-authors are simply ignored by those who are intent on keeping humanity infected with CDS-20. In addition, Dan courageously challenges even his close friends when any of them publicly pronounce on Covid in ways that he believes to be mistaken or misleading. And I must also express my appreciation for an important three-part distinction that Dan draws. It’s between persons who support lockdowns, persons who refuse to oppose lockdowns, and persons who actively oppose those of us who oppose lockdowns.

• Phil Magness. Impressively active on Facebook – in addition to publishing elsewhere – Magness can be counted on to be at the forefront of correcting any of the many errors du jour that emerge from the Covid-hysteria crowd.

• Matt Ridley. Although in the Spring his fear of Covid prompted him to support lockdowns, Ridley has since used his prominent voice to speak out lucidly against them.