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AIER Contributing Authors document the calamitous impact of the tyrannical Covid-19 lockdowns. A slice:

The present Covid-inspired forced lockdowns on business and school closures are and have been counterproductive, not sustainable and are, quite frankly, meritless and unscientific. They have been disastrous and just plain wrong! There has been no good reason for this. These unparalleled public health actions have been enacted for a virus with an infection mortality rate (IFR) roughly similar (or likely lower once all infection data are collected) to seasonal influenza. Stanford’s John P.A. Ioannidis identified 36 studies (43 estimates) along with an additional 7 preliminary national estimates (50 pieces of data) and concluded that among people <70 years old across the world, infection fatality rates ranged from 0.00% to 0.57% with a median of 0.05% across the different global locations (with a corrected median of 0.04%). Let me write this again, 0.05%. Can one even imagine the implementation of such draconian regulations for the annual flu? Of course not! Not satisfied with the current and well-documented failures of lockdowns, our leaders are inexplicably doubling and tripling down and introducing or even hardening punitive lockdowns and constraints.

Emma Brockes worries that lockdowns and fear of Covid are eating like acid at human sociability. A slice:

I have watched my kids adapt, with an almost seamless ability, to online learning and no indoor playdates. We have grown accustomed to barely leaving the neighbourhood and not seeing family for over a year; and, on the rare occasions when we have a babysitter, to wearing masks inside the house. Meanwhile, we are unmoored from all but a handful of close friends. If it is fine – and it is largely fine, or at least it is this week – I also wonder if some social muscle has atrophied and we have become weird. A year ago, it was weird having to stay in all the time. Now the idea of going out, going anywhere, seeing anyone or doing anything, fills us in the first instance with dread.

Robert Wright defends South Dakata governor Kristi Noem from a biased attack on her by the New York Times.

Dr. John Lee writes about the uncomfortable reality of death. A slice:

It is uncomfortable to think about, but it seems quite clear to me that when you examine the “quality of life years” lost as a direct result of lockdowns, and compare them to those which would have been lost to the virus had we done nothing at all (which, for clarity, I am not advocating), the former is far greater. This is because you don’t have to die to lose quality of life. Being unable to function properly because of depression, for example, or untreated cancer, or a postponed operation, still results in loss of quality of life – as does merely being confined to your house. Surely no reasonable person can disagree that this loss must be considered when evaluating the appropriateness of society-wide measures that affect all individuals?

David Seedhouse explains that the only intelligent option is skepticism. A slice:

Quite contrary to the name-blackening from people and organisations who really should know better, scepticism IS science. Scepticism is a thoughtful, open-minded approach to life. It does not deny truth, it seeks it. It categorically refuses to accept handed-down authority, no matter how powerful the authority and no matter how personally dangerous it might be to question its validity. Scepticism is the exact opposite of carefree denial. It is faith in the importance of thinking for oneself, of coming to one’s own conclusions about the evidence, as a free person.

Here’s the third thread of Phil Magness’s fisking of the CovidFAQ.co website. Phil’s opening:

In our continued fisking of the http://CovidFAQ.co website being pushed by MP Neil O’Brien, one gets the distinct impression that its authors either (a) think “younger people” means age 55+, or (b) don’t actually read the stats they cite in support of their claims.

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… is from page 203 of Donald Devine’s new (2021) book, The Enduring Tension:

Most of the novel ideas for regulating the market come from politicians playing the good fairy, or from intellectuals trying to perfect society, or from bureaucrats thinking they can solve every problem given sufficient power.

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Here’s a letter to a Café Hayek reader:

Mr. T___:

Impressed with Oren Cass’s performance against Scott Lincicome in the Soho Forum debate over industrial policy, you wonder why I, in this earlier letter, “ignore Cass’s point that market don’t account for the country’s future needs.” (I listened again to the debate. You accurately report Cass’s position, which he stated like this: “If we want to have a strong industrial base we need to make sure our economy is one that is, in peace time as well as war time, maintaining a strong domestic capacity in a whole host of areas. Obviously, that’s not something that markets are going to take into account. That’s not something price signals are going to ensure. And so if we want it to happen, there’s going to have to be a role for policy.”)

Cass is wrong. Understanding neither the role of financial markets nor of prices – and apparently ignorant of economic history – he swallows the pedestrian fallacy that markets serve only the short run while government serves the long run. The truth is the opposite.

Today’s asset prices reflect expectations of these assets’ future uses: the more productive these assets are expected to be, and the longer the time horizons over which this productivity is expected to last, the higher are the market values of these assets today. This reality explains, for example, why homeowners who know that they’ll soon move out of their current homes nevertheless often pay big money to repair and refurbish their homes. They pay these sums not out of any sense of generosity to the future buyers but because such expenditures raise the values of the homes today by making them nicer homes over the course of many years to come. These future values are captured by current homeowners in the higher prices for which they’re able to sell their homes.

Likewise, investors and entrepreneurs, seeking returns as high as possible, invest in those projects and businesses that they believe have the highest net present values – that is, the highest expected net productivity over time. They don’t always get it right, but because they spend their own resources, they have powerful incentives to do the best they can, which includes taking sufficiently long-run views.

The situation with government officials is quite different. Those charged with executing industrial policy neither spend their own resources nor have ownership stakes in the results of their decisions. Their personal wealth doesn’t rise if they make good decisions; it doesn’t fall if they make poor ones. Therefore, government officials are much more likely than are private investors to be guided in their decisions by today’s short-run political fads and fancies, or even by their own idiosyncratic whims and notions, however detached these might be from reality.

Many more errors are packed into the above-quoted remarks by Cass. Not least of these is his unsupported presumption that government officials can know what are the ‘best’ industries to support with tariffs, subsidies, and other special privileges, and can know what are the most cost-effective ways of providing such support. Remember that all resources used by industry A are resources that could have been, but aren’t, used by industries B, C, and D. By intentionally overriding the market’s price, profit, and loss signals, industrial policy – guided chiefly by political exigencies – is like a blind, lame, and drunk donkey.

A final point: This new paper by Scott Lincicome shows that many of Cass’s factual claims about the current state of the American economy are mistaken.

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

…..

The late, great Armen Alchian often wrote that the name “capitalism” comes from the fact that, in free markets, expectations of future productivity are capitalized into today’s prices of assets. As a matter of the history of the name, Alchian was mistaken; as a matter of economics, he was spot-on correct.

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For those of you who continue to ignore or excuse the Stasi-like tendencies of lockdown officials, you might wish to read this report out of the U.K.

And see also this report from Reason‘s Billy Binion. (DBx: You must stop fooling yourself into believing that it can’t happen here. It can. The rabid wolf that is tyranny is not at first recognized as such by those who are to become its victims. This recognition comes always too late, only after the beast’s victims have its fangs dug into their throats.)

Writing in the Financial Times, Camilla Cavendish understandably worries about the battering that personal liberty is now taking in the U.K. A slice:

So why, then, do I feel queasy? When the UK home secretary declares she will make unnecessary foreign travel illegal, she looks as if she is enjoying herself too much. When parliament can only debate restrictions every six months, it is not holding the government to account. At the same time, many of us have got surprisingly used to doing what we’re told, even if we’re not always sure why. That is not a sentiment commonly associated with the UK, where citizens are so stroppy that Downing Street massively underestimated the levels of compliance at the crisis’s outset. True, not everyone co-operates. But the UK government has been going with the grain of public opinion. Polls consistently show that the majority are in favour of restrictions.

The strength of consensus, however, has had strange effects. Opposition parties have pushed ministers to double down on health protection — and focused less on holding government to account over the efficacy of lockdowns or the backlog of cancer cases.

Instead, debates about the trade-offs between mental health, physical health, jobs and freedom, which should have been conducted in parliament, seem to have been going on largely in the head of the prime minister.

Freddie Sayers talks to Adam Wagner about the lockdowns’ battering of human rights.

Jeffrey Tucker rightly celebrates the recent easing of some lockdown restrictions in the U.S….. But Robert E. Wright warns that this tyranny might well return.

British MP Desmond Swayne has given several passionate speeches in the House of Commons against lockdowns and the stirring up of hysteria over Covid-19. Naturally, he’s come in for criticism from pro-lockdowners. Will Jones ably defends Sir Desmond.

Jacob Sullum asks if lockdowns caused the recent decline in new Covid-19 cases. This paragraph summarizes his answer:

Did government-imposed restrictions help curb virus transmission? A comparison of California, where Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered a new lockdown on December 3, and Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbott has not imposed any new restrictions, does not provide much evidence that such measures make an important difference.

Speaking of California and its strongman Gavin Newsom, Wall Street Journal letter-writer Julian Spratt encourages the effort to recall Newsom to continue:

Regarding Joshua Spivak’s “The GOP Bid to Boot Gavin Newsom Could Backfire” (Cross Country, Jan. 23): Mr. Spivak recounts several recalls that eventually backfired. But in none of the examples cited had the recalled officeholder unilaterally closed businesses and kept them closed for months, a year or more. Did the previous officeholders bankrupt thousands of businesses and destroy small-business people’s lives? Did they fail to provide consistent electricity to thousands of homes? Did they fail to provide a maintenance plan to prevent scores of wildfires destroying thousands of people’s homes?

Yes, many previous officeholders have suffered recalls and then overcame them. California has more Covid cases than any other state in the union, while Gov. Newsom’s decisions have created untold financial ruin for so many people. For the sake of Californians, maybe this recall will stick.

Julian Spratt
Melbourne, Fla.

Peter Earle explains the fallacy of supposing that lockdowns foster creative destruction.

Phil Magness exposes the sloppiness and unreliability of pro-lockdowner Sam Bowman:

As part of the CovidFAQ.co website campaign, Sam Bowman has been running around for the last few weeks claiming that “most” covid hospitalizations in the UK are younger-to-middle-aged people.

In its typical usage, “most” means “a majority” or “the largest share.”
This is an easily debunked claim, as the UK publishes hospitalization stats by age. It turns out that 63% of hospitalizations are age 65+.

After being repeatedly criticized over this claim, Bowman conceded the error…and then promptly blocked the guy on twitter who discovered it. It’s good that he’s made that minor admission. But it’s also telling about the quality of “research” that went into his website. If you’re going to appoint yourself as a fact-checker-in-chief to scold others for their errors (as Bowman, Stuart Ritchie, Mike Bird, Neil O’Brien and others involved with with the covidFAQ site have attempted to do), this sort of sloppiness is inexcusable. Ditto for the juvenile approach this crew has taken when it comes to responding to unambiguous falsehoods on their site and in their public statements.

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… is from page 234 of the 1969 Revised Edition of Lon Fuller’s profoundly important 1964 book, The Morality of Law:

Fidelity to the Rule of Law demands not only that a government abide by its verbalized and publicized rules, but also that it respect the justified expectations created by its treatment of situations not controlled by explicitly announced rules.

DBx: Yes. Law is not confined to the meaning of the words that government inscribes on paper. Indeed, words inscribed by government on paper are not necessarily law (as opposed to legislation) at all, and certainly the law in its fullness can never possibly be written down.

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… is from Milton Friedman’s September 13th, 1970, essay in the New York Times Magazine – an essay titled “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits”:

The political principle that underlies the market mechanism is unanimity. In an ideal free market resting on private property, no individual can coerce any other, all cooperation is voluntary, all parties to such cooperation benefit or they need not participate….

The political principle that underlies the political mechanism is conformity. The individual must serve a more general social interest – whether that be determined by a church or a dictator or a majority. The individual may have a vote and say in what is to be done, but if he is overruled, he must conform.

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Enthusiasm for industrial policy has been on the rise for the past few years. Such enthusiasm is rising on the political right and left. Unfortunately but predictably, Covid-19 and the deranged response in the form of lockdowns have only intensified this enthusiasm.

We’ve long heard talk about consciously arranging to ensure that we keep on our shores “strategic industries” and the “industries of tomorrow,” the production of outputs “critical to our national defense,” firms whose operations have positive spill-over effects, and manufacturing jobs for this and that group of workers. Added to this litany in 2020 is the alleged need to “secure our medical supply chains.”

All of these calls are issued by people who mistake their ease of composing or speaking fine aspirational phrases for ease of altering political and economic realities. Each and every industrial-policy advocate has an understanding of political reality that is laughably childish and an understanding of economic reality that is appallingly simplistic.

So in light of the rising fever for industrial policy, I share again this remarkable video produced in 2012 by the Competitive Enterprise Institute. It reveals that the modern economy’s complexity is so great, so unfathomable, as to make industrial-policy schemes a mix of foolishness and dangerousness.

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George Will, inspired by Philip Howard, bemoans the paralysis induced by Progressivism. (I do disagree, though, with Howard who says that the stifling of decentralized decision-making is “not an unavoidable side-effect of big government.” At least, such stifling is unavoidable if government is big in ways other than merely taxing some citizens heavily and then rather mechanically transferring the cash to other citizens.)

My intrepid Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy laughed out loud at a recent essay that criticized Democrats for allegedly being too modest in boasting of their many ‘achievements.‘

Also from Vero is this call on Democrats to reform the criminal-justice system.

Steven Greenhut understands the insidious cruelty of minimum-wage legislation. A slice:

The biggest problem with a minimum-wage boost is that it would hurt the least-skilled workers the most. “These low-skill employees lose their jobs because of increased competition from more experienced and higher-skilled employees attracted to the new wage,” noted economist Craig Garthwaite in congressional testimony. That competition will obliterate entry-level opportunities for those without experience or many skills, he added.

Also writing wisely and informatively on minimum wages is Cato’s Chris Edwards.

Scott Lincicome is rightly critical of Pres. Biden’s embrace of “security nationalism.” A slice:

It’s good that the President isn’t buying into the death of American manufacturing because, as I explain in a new paper out today (executive summary below), the sector not only is still alive, but was actually doing quite well on both a global and historical basis before the pandemic. It’s also booming right now too. Standout industries include the ones most directly tied to national defense (e.g., weapons, aerospace, motor vehicles, and metals) and others often associated with security (e.g., energy, semiconductors, and medical goods). The paper also explains — citing both economic research and ample historical evidence — why “Buy American” and other economic nationalist policies intended to bolster national security and economic “resiliency” often end up backfiring, thus weakening the manufacturing sector and national security. By contrast, market‐​oriented policies, including trade liberalization, can boost the economy, discourage armed conflicts, and help the country mitigate or recover from economic shocks, including pandemics. Thus, if the President is concerned about national security and economic resiliency (instead of, say, politics), he should be eliminating Buy American restrictions, not “strengthening” them.

Simon Lester isn’t optimistic about the prospects of the Biden administration undoing some of the more destructive protectionist measures of the Trump administration. Here’s Lester’s depressing conclusion:

Of course, there is another possibility, which is that we end up with both Section 232 tariffs and these ratcheted up Buy American measures. At that point, for all of Biden’s calm tone and rhetoric, which has been refreshing, it will start to look like Biden is worse on trade than even Trump was.

Paul Cantor wonders if Shakespeare can survive woke.

My colleague Peter Boettke celebrates the great Thomas Sowell.

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This report, from last month, is well worth watching.