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… is from page 81 of George Will’s superb 2019 book, The Conservative Sensibility (original emphases):

Today, wise people, remembering a European nation galvanized by the slogan “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer” flinch from [Woodrow] Wilson’s trope about “the heart-blood of one people.” It is one thing to postulate that history will produce ever increasing social harmony; it is another and ominous thing to speak of society as “one people” in an organic sense. If society is supposed to be an organic unity because the laws of history’s unfolding say so, and if society is, as a matter of morality, supposed to be as united as the human body, then behold: Disagreements and factionalism become symptoms of bodily diseases. Such language greases society’s skid toward virulent intolerance of dissent, the sort of intolerance that gripped America during World War I and tarnished Wilson’s second presidential term. Wilson was, however, so thoroughly wedded to the conception of society as a single organism, his thinking could not accommodate even a flicker of the Founders’ anxieties about government being inherently dangerous, especially governments wielded by majorities. Such anxieties, which were present at the creation of classical liberalism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, seemed to Wilson not merely misplaced but illogical.

DBx: Indeed.

What is truly illogical, of course, is the notion that the people of a nation really are either a single sentient creature, such as a human body, or an extended family. As George Will suggests, this false belief creates hostility toward individuals whose peaceful, voluntary activities are regarded as being at odds with “society’s goals.”

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There’s a reason why I never had a Twitter account:

Mr. D___:

Although I’m not on Twitter, I was able to read the Twitter thread on Bryan Caplan’s favorable tweet of my most-recent AIER column. Thanks – I think! – for sending it to me. While many of the criticisms of my position are very harsh, none is very strong. Indeed, many of the critics seem not to have read my column at all.

At least when I last looked (about fifteen minutes ago), no critic takes seriously the possibility of better containing Covid by focusing prevention (as recommended by the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration) on the vulnerable rather than by wholesale lockdowns of society. No critic considers the strong evidence that lockdowns are not very effective at controlling Covid. No critic deals with Bryan’s argument that our response to Covid is vastly out of proportion to the greater danger that Covid poses to us than is posed by the flu.

I could list other of the critics’ relevant omissions. But I want here to mention one critical commission: the point about alleged hospital overcrowding. Even if, contrary to much evidence, lockdowns significantly reduce Covid’s transmission, and even if there were a case to be made in the past that lockdowns were necessary to prevent hospital overcrowding, the data now show that this issue is no longer live.

At this Department of Health and Human Services link you’ll find hospital-occupancy data, as of February 1^st, 2021, for each U.S. state and territory. Specifically, you’ll find state- and territory-level data on “% Inpatient Beds Used (Estimate)” and “% ICU Bed Utilization (Estimate).” Only one state or territory – Rhode Island – had inpatient-bed occupancy of more than 81 percent. That state’s rate was 91%. Of all 59 states and territories, 53 had inpatient-bed occupancy rates of less than 80 percent.

A similar pattern holds for ICU bed utilization. In only two states or territories was this rate in the 90s (Rhode Island at 91 and Delaware at 90). Of all 59 states and territories, 46 had ICU bed-utilization rates lower than 80 percent.

I understand that these data do not necessarily capture the situations of individual hospitals or of locales within each state and territory. Perhaps some individual hospitals are still pressed for capacity. But at least at the state level as of February 1^st, there is little evidence of American hospitals being overcrowded. (By the way, the situation was not much different in December.)

And because daily reported Covid cases have been falling now for four weeks, the situation today, on Feb. 8^th, is likely even better than it was on Feb. 1^st.

I stand by what I wrote in my AIER essay and am thankful to Bryan Caplan for sharing it on Twitter.

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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In my latest column for AIER, I again express my mystification at so many people’s disproportionate fear of Covid-19 – disproportionate fear that fuels disproportionate, destructive, deranged responses. A slice:

And so here’s a feature of Covid that I do incessantly wonder about: What’s so special about this communicable and dangerous disease that causes humanity to treat it as differing categorically from the countless other communicable and dangerous diseases that we regard with utter blasé-ness?

It won’t do to answer that Covid’s lethality is higher than normal. Such an answer, strictly speaking, implies that lockdowns, masks, “social distancing,” and all the other arbitrary exercises of massive government powers and antisocial behaviors that are justified as necessary to fight Covid-19 become appropriate the moment we encounter a disease that is even slightly more dangerous than ‘normal.’

How much higher than normal must rise the lethality of a communicable pathogen in order to justify the sort of wholesale rearrangement of human existence, and crushing of human freedom, that we’ve suffered over the past eleven months? Pro-lockdowners ignore this question. They simply assume that Covid’s dangers are so much higher than normal as to make Covid unquestionably a categorically different threat, one that justifies categorically different responses.

It would be nice to get some specifics. For example, how much more lethal than the flu must a contagious disease be in order to justify lockdowns? Five hundred percent? One hundred percent? Five percent? Exactly where does Covid sit on the spectrum of less-than-normal to more-than-normal lethality? And where on that spectrum does a disease’s danger transform it categorically from less-dangerous ones?

According to the OhioHealth blog, whose proprietors recently compared Covid-19 to the flu, Covid kills 1.6 percent of the people who contract it while the flu kills 0.1 percent of its carriers. This difference is significant. But does it put Covid into an altogether different category of diseases? Does it justify the hysteria of the past year and the resulting lockdowns?

Because on these numbers Covid is 16 times more likely to kill its victims than is the flu, a tentative answer of ‘yes’ might be given. Yet it’s fair to wonder – as does Bryan Caplan – why the response to Covid isn’t more proportional to Covid’s dangers. While I know of no credible quantification of society’s defensive reaction to Covid compared to society’s defensive reaction to the flu, my sense is that the Covid lockdowns and other unprecedented measures undertaken in the name of prevention are magnitudes more than 16 times greater than are the measures that humanity regularly undertakes to avoid the flu.

If you doubt my sense, consider the measures taken to avoid the flu. At the collective level, almost no such measures are taken – this despite the flu’s contagiousness and lethality. CNN doesn’t offer daily counts of flu infections and deaths. Schools don’t close despite children being at greater risk from the flu than from Covid. And neither Neil Ferguson nor Anthony Fauci scare us with descriptions of worst-case scenarios of the flu’s spread.

What few measures are taken in response to the flu are taken voluntarily by individuals. People get flu shots and stay home when they’re ill. Some die, are grieved by their loved ones, and are buried without their funerals being filmed and shown sensationally on TV.

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John McWhorter writes wisely about the pretenses and dangers of the hyperwoke. (HT Arnold Kling) A slice:

Ibram Kendi is someone who, in the role of social scientist, proposes a “Department of Antiracism,” in neglect of a little something called the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. Kendi’s insight on education, untethered to any engagement with pedagogical or psychometric theory, is that we should evaluate students on the basis of their “desire to know” rather than anything they actually do. This is a person whose most ready counsel to the public about interracial adoption is that white adopters might still be racists even if they don’t think they are.

Kendi is a professor who, in the guise of being trained in intellectual inquiry, bristles at real questions. He dismisses them as either racism or as frustrated responses to envy, as if he bears not proposal but truth. His ideas are couched in simple oppositions mired somewhere between catechism and fable, of a sort alien to what intellectual engagement in the modern world consists of, utterly foreign to exchange among conference academics or even Zooming literati. And on that, let us remember that he is also someone who, into the twenty-first century, was walking around thinking of whites as “devils” à la Minister Farrakhan.

Here’s the rub: The people who sit drinking all of this in and calling it deep wouldn’t let it pass for a minute if he were white.

There is, in short, a degree of bigotry in how this man is received by people of power and influence.

Matt Welch reports on the latest eruption of self-destruction at the New York Times.

Here’s Wall Street Journal columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady on Pres. Biden’s troubling agenda for Latin America. A slice:

When developed countries support equality before the law and property rights in poor countries, the left labels them imperialists. But use U.S. taxpayers’ resources to promote the termination of unborn life in poor countries, and progressives call it “health” spending. A similar language game is played when international socialists organize political factions under the banner of “democracy” to consolidate power.

Abortion and democratic socialism are two causes the Biden administration plans to champion in the Northern Triangle of Central America—Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. Sovereignty, respect for local cultural norms, and the economic aspirations of millions of have-nots have never been high ideals in Washington. But now the condescending ideologues are resupplied. The problem is likely to get worse

My colleague Dan Klein writes on David Hume writing on the ancients.

Joakim Book writes insightfully about that hip word and concept “sustainability.” A slice:

Human beings are the organism that has been the most successful at removing nature’s obstacles from our path, and protecting ourselves from its damaging forces. Even though there are six billion more of us today than in 1900, fewer people die at the hand of nature’s powers. That’s us impacting the environment and it is cause for celebration. Impact away!

James Pethokoukis talks with GMU Law professor Joshua Wright about antitrust – and about the dangers of weaponizing it.

Scott Lincicome writes about anti-dumping, deindustrialization, and China. Here’s Scott’s opening paragraph:

Whether it’s due to the “China Shock” or “deindustrialization,” a common refrain from those seeking to support American manufacturers and workers via U.S. trade restrictions and subsidies is that these groups have been the helpless victims of “unfettered trade” and “free‐​market fundamentalism.” As I’ve explained in a series of recent papers, however, this narrative ignores (among other things) the panoply of U.S. laws that already exist to boost the manufacturing sector — laws that, despite their frequent and continued use, just haven’t worked very well in terms of increasing U.S. manufacturing jobs (and, in fact, have likely harmed the U.S. economy, domestic manufacturers, and blue‐​collar workers).

Nick Gillespie reprises an interview that he did in 2011 with my late, great colleague Walter Williams. A slice:

Q: How did you help build George Mason’s economics department into a hotbed of research from a libertarian perspective?

A: When James Buchanan won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1986, we had 26 faculty members. When I became department chairman [in 1995], we had 18. There was considerable hostility toward our department. I tried to work with the administration to rehire those people, and I had a lot of difficulty, so I just said, “Well, the only way I’m going to improve the department is try to privatize the department and go out and raise money to hire people and subsidize hiring people.” A lot of it was from the result of the generosity of supporters like the Lilly Endowment and the [John M.] Olin Foundation.

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Stanford University’s Jay Bhattacharya talks with Sharyl Attkisson, in this podcast, about the ineffectiveness of lockdowns at controlling the spread of SARS-CoV-2.

“Greens love lockdowns.” Ben Pile explains. A slice:

For Monbiot, the logic of lockdown was simple enough. ‘What we’ve discovered with the pandemic is that when people are called upon to act, they’ll take far more extreme action than environmentalists have ever called for’, he said. In Monbiot’s view, all that was required to elicit the obedience of the population was for the government to make it ‘abundantly clear that we have to do this for the good of all’. But this is not true.

If it were true, there would not have been the need to pass emergency legislation, to force businesses to close, and to abolish gatherings, including protests, all under threat of fines of up to £10,000. Which is far in excess of what most people could afford without serious consequences, including the loss of their home. Moreover, there are countless reports of local authorities and the police failing to understand the regulations they were enforcing and exceeding their authority. People have stayed at home because there was nowhere to go to, and nothing to do, and because they do not want to break the law, and because they have been terrified of the virus. A July survey of British people’s estimation of the deaths caused by Covid found that (excluding ‘don’t know’) they overestimated the number of fatalities by up to 10 times. A third overestimated by 10 to 100 times, and 15 per cent overestimated by over 100 times.

Keith Joyce wonders if many of his friends have been taken over by aliens. A slice:

I am starting to wonder if some similar Wyndham-style phenomenon has affected all but a very few of the population, disabling their critical faculties and making them unquestioningly, even gladly, receptive to every word issuing from ‘authority’. It is hard otherwise to explain how so many previously sensible people have believed the government propaganda and given it the status of holy writ.

Or maybe, at least in the U.K., the explanation is a bit more mundane: government in 2020 has gotten much more influence over the press.

There is much wisdom in this essay by Dan Hannan…

… but, as Phil Magness notes here, the Covid-hysteria-stirring scientists at Imperial College act in ways that seem almost intended to bring discredit to themselves:

Imperial College just put out an absolutely bonkers new model of how they think Covid will evolve in the UK over 2021.

It predicts an additional 130,000 deaths in the next year *with the vaccine,* which is 20K more than what they’ve experienced in the last year without a vaccine.

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… is from pages 169-170 of Steven Pinker’s excellent 2018 volume, Enlightenment Now (footnote deleted):

During the high-crime decades, most experts counseled that nothing could be done about violent crime. It was woven into the fabric of a violent American society, they said, and could not be controlled without solving the root causes of racism, poverty, and inequality. This version of historical pessimism may be called root-causism: the pseudo-profound idea that every social ill is a symptom of some deep moral sickness and can never be mitigated by simplistic treatments which fail to cure the gangrene at the core. The problem with root-causism is not that real-world problems are simple but the opposite: they are more complex than a typical root-cause theory allows, especially when the theory is based on moralizing rather than data. So complex, in fact, that treating the symptoms may be the best way of dealing with the problem, because it does not require omniscience about the intricate tissue of actual causes.

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… is from page 228 of the late Hans Rosling’s wonderful 2018 book, Factfulness:

But now that we have eliminated most immediate dangers and are left with more complex and often more abstract problems, the urgency instinct can also lead us astray when it comes to understanding the world around us. It makes us stressed, amplifies other instincts and makes them harder to control, blocks us from thinking analytically, tempts us to make up our minds too fast, and encourages us to take drastic actions that we haven’t thought through.

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James Bovard unmasks problems with the new mask mandate imposed on visitors to U.S. National Parks. A slice:

Captain Sara Newman, NPS director of Office of Public Health declared, “Getting outside and enjoying our public lands is essential to improving mental and physical health, but we all need to work together to recreate responsibly.” But the latest mask rule will empower legions of zealots to accost, harass, and possibly assault people for failing to obey the latest Pandemic Security Theater mandate.

Jonathan Sumption is understandably worried about the consequences of Covid Derangement Syndrome. Two slices:

Despite the optimism created by the vaccines, powerful voices are still exploiting public fears to keep us locked up for longer and impose distancing rules indefinitely in pursuit of the mirage of zero Covid.

There is concern that medical scientists are moving the goalposts, changing their objectives in a way that would keep us locked up for longer, perhaps indefinitely.

Those of us who point to the staggering collateral cost of such policies are drowned out by outbursts of emotion and abuse from people who behave as if nothing matters except reducing the Covid death toll.

As a society, we have been urged to suppress the most basic instinct of the human spirit – our interaction with each other. In the process, we turned a public health crisis into something much worse: a public health crisis AND an economic, social and educational crisis.

Our economy is being laid waste, with small businesses snuffed out and job prospects destroyed for a generation of young people. Yet no society ever reduced deaths by making itself poorer.

…..

Panic is infectious. This is the root of most of our current problems. What’s more, as this was not in line with long-standing policy, there was no contingency planning or impact assessment. The Government had no idea of the economic, social or educational consequences, or its impact on mental health or diseases such as cancer.

Generally, it is a sound principle of government not to make drastic decisions without knowing where they might lead. But our Government crashed into the lockdown seemingly blind to everything but the headline Covid death toll.

The most serious consequence has been to make it impossible to concentrate containment measures on the old and clinically vulnerable.

Toby Young replies again to Christopher Snowdon.

Jeffrey Tucker decries the destruction of capital caused by lockdowns. A slice:

In the normal course of economic life, capital structures are constantly adapting to changed conditions. Changes in available technology, consumer demand, labor pools, and other conditions require entrepreneurs to stay constantly on the move. They need the freedom to act based on the expectation that their decisions matter within a market framework in which there is a test for success or failure. Without this ability, writes Ludwig Lachmann, “a civilized economy could not survive at all.”

When governments attack capital by making it less secure, denying its own volition over how it is deployed, or it comes to be depleted through some other shock like a natural disaster, capital cannot do the work of creating wealth. This is a major reason for poverty. Start a business, make some money, employ some people, and a powerful person or agency comes along and steals it all. People get demoralized and give up. Society can’t progress under such conditions. Take it far enough and people end up living hand to mouth.

Lockdowns seem focused on expenditures and consumption but fundamentally they attack capital. The restaurant, the theater, the stadium, the school, the means of transport, all are forced into idleness. They cannot return a profit to the owners. It’s a form of theft. All that you have done to save and work and invest is voided.

One of the best decisions that Karol and I ever made was not to send our son to so-called “schools” run by Fairfax County – “schools” that employ so-called “teachers.”

A German journalist describes the mainstream-media bubble. A slice:

Our newsroom also adopted all these counting methods with a sleepwalking naturalness. Everything that was communicated by the health authorities, the district administration and the regional government was adopted and reported without questioning and without doubt. Almost all critical distance disappeared, and the authorities became supposed allies in the fight against the virus.

I have to point out, however, that I have never been called or written to directly by politicians to influence me in any way. There were only the usual press releases from the ministries and offices, which are of course written from their point of view. Nor have I been pressured by superiors, at least not directly. The whole thing is far more subtle, as will be shown.

March was the start of the first restrictions: major events were banned and soon after the first lockdown was imposed. Almost all journalists of the “mainstream”, so the so-called “leading media”, including my editorial team, seemed to immediately develop an ‘inhibition to bite’ towards politicians and the authorities. Why this uncritical reluctance among journalists?

I can only explain it to myself that particularly the pictures from Bergamo and New York also put the experienced editors and reporters into an emotional state of shock, even if they might not admit it. But they, too, are only people who are afraid of illness and death, or who worry about elderly or sick relatives; this was repeatedly an issue in conversations with colleagues. They rallied around the government, the RKI (Robert-Koch-Institute; the German equivalent of the CDC; S.R.) and the health authorities, as if one really had to stick together now to combat this dire, external threat.

You couldn’t throw a club between the legs of those in charge, who were having a difficult time already, by fundamentally questioning their measures – that was how the attitude seemed to me.

In our conversations, too, it was said more and more frequently that “the government is really doing a good job”. Most were firmly convinced that the lockdown and the restrictions of our fundamental rights were necessary and certainly only temporary. I heard only a few skeptical voices.

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… is from page 266 of Richard W. Duesenberg’s insightful 1962 article “Individualism and Corporations” (available without charge on-line here) as it appears in Liberty Fund’s 1981 single-volume collection of the New Individualist Review:

Acting as though the government were something other than collective coercion, politicians and public alike have ignored its invasion of our private lives as they have given it the power to clip the wings of some and to nourish the power grabs of others.