Fauci Is Wrong: New York Did Not Do it “Correctly”
“The deep human costs of this virus and its corresponding policies have been exacerbated by blind hubris and unfounded pride––which, to no small extent, saw their expression in the conceit of rule by models. Though it might be too little too late, diligent reflection and readjustment in future pandemic combat efforts will be the only way to honor those who were lost so unnecessarily.” ~ Fiona Harrigan and Peter C. Earle
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The Models Were Wildly Wrong about Reopening Too
“These flawed models begin with an unproven assumption, namely that lockdowns are effective at combating the coronavirus. The models are therefore automatically calibrated to produce a sharp spike in deaths after the removal of lockdowns or any move toward reopening.” ~ Phil Magness
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Where Did The Wealth Go?
“The cost of the lockdown is the forgone economic activity, all the meals and haircuts and vacations and flights and trips to the theater and the movies and the nightclub. Those things are gone, and they cannot be made up. We had access to fewer desirable things; that’s where the wealth went.” ~ Michael
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Smart Society, Stupid People
“If economies come to be restored, eventually, to their former selves, it will not be because we or our leaders somehow beat a virus. The virus outsmarted everyone. What will fix what the political class has broken is the freedom once again to piece back together the institutions and processes that create the extended order that makes us all feel smarter than we really are.” ~ Jeffrey Tucker
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Professor Lockdown Now Claims to Have Saved 3.1 Million Lives
“Whether used by Imperial College or Trump, this line of argument falters as social science because it assumes the validity of the very same forecast it purports to demonstrate. Rather than testing the causal inference that lockdowns reduced the COVID death rate, it takes their own forecasted death rate as a given and then purports to calculate the number of lives saved by simple subtraction from its own model.” ~ Phil Magness
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Ownership Is Not a Bundle
” If property is a bundle of a finite number of previously separate use-rights, put together by government (the bundler), then in what sense does the government ever tread on liberty?” ~ Dan Klein
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The Simple Logic of Free Markets and Retaliation
“If the U.S. retaliates against Chinese industrial policy with American industrial policy, both countries end up in the box in the lower left-hand corner – for each, the worst possible outcome.” ~ Donald Boudreaux
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The Struggle Over “Basic Economics”
“If any economist in the classical tradition, from Smith to Hayek, ever argued that free markets and competition yielded “perfect” outcomes, I am not aware of it. But the mathematical and graphical modelling of perfect competition and “supply and demand” stand as the gutted remains of basic economics.” ~ Max Gulker
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Good Riddance to “Basic Life Skills”
“We are able to lead fuller and richer lives thanks to the global division of labor, and the “basic” life skills about which so many people fret are, it turns out, not so basic after all.” ~ Art Carden
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How a Free Society Deals with Pandemics, According to Legendary Epidemiologist and Smallpox Eradicator Donald Henderson
“We have a very thin record of writings that make the case that freedom, market forces, and private governance are better than government quarantines and closures in dealing with pandemics. So where do we turn for better arguments and a better case?” ~ Edward Stringham
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There Will Be No Recovery Without Production
An essential purpose of allowing markets to be free and open in all circumstances is precisely to take advantage of what people can imagine, create, and produce to meet changing patterns of demand in their respective corners of society in ways that others might not and, indeed, cannot anticipate.
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We Don’t Need One Big Plan to End the Lockdown
The transition back to normal life involves the coordination of the disparate and often-incompatible plans of billions of minds–and if we wish for that coordination to make the best use of knowledge in society, we are making a mistake if we are looking for a plan.
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