Author Archives: lawofmarkets

Why would they do this?

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From Instapundit.

ANDREW CUOMO’S reckless choices. “Bill de Blasio made terrible decisions as mayor of New York City. But as more reporting emerges about the catastrophic decisions made by New York’s governor, it’s possible Andrew Cuomo deserves even more blame than de Blasio for what the coronavirus has done to the tri-state area and consequently the nation. New York and New Jersey combined have suffered more COVID-19 deaths than any other country being tracked by researchers who run the Johns Hopkins crisis dashboard. Cuomo made three breathtakingly bad moves in March that in retrospect amounted to catastrophe. First, Cuomo failed to call for, and even actively discouraged, informal social-distancing measures in early March. Next was the delay in mid-March in ordering formal closures when the virus started rampaging through his state. Third was his March 25 edict to long-term care facilities that they must accept infected patients, which caused a mass deadly outbreak among helpless, trapped, elderly New Yorkers. Only in the last few days have some corners of the media begun to call attention to just how badly Cuomo has failed us.”

Related: NYC vs. San Francisco: the stark failure of Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio.

UPDATE: Cuomo refuses accountability in nursing home scandal, says vulnerable people were going to die anyway. Quoth Cuomo: “Older people, vulnerable people are going to die from this virus. That is going to happen despite whatever you do. Because with all our progress as a society, we can’t keep everyone alive. Despite what everything you do and older people are more vulnerable. And that is a fact. And that is not going to change.”

Maybe, but they die faster when you send infectious people into nursing homes full of older and vulnerable people.

There are also these from the same source.

WITH DOCTORATES IN COMPUTER SCIENCE AND MEDICAL BIOMETRY HE CAN’T POSSIBLY HAVE GREATER EXPERTISE THAN KAREN:  YouTube censors epidemiologist Knut Wittkowski for opposing lockdown.

THIS IS WHY THE CHINESE WANTED HIM, I GUESS: NYT 2017: Candidate to Lead the W.H.O. Accused of Covering Up Epidemics. “A leading candidate to head the World Health Organization was accused this week of covering up three cholera epidemics in his home country, Ethiopia, when he was health minister — a charge that could seriously undermine his campaign to run the agency. The accusation against Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was made by a prominent global health expert who is also an informal adviser to Dr. David Nabarro, a rival candidate in the race for W.H.O. director general.”

Say’s Law and economic revival

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Here’s an article worth your time: There Will Be No Recovery Without Production. To understand what needs to be done to get recovery going, you need to start with Say’s Law. Or as Richard Eberling puts it, you need to understand that ‘Our Ability to “Demand” Arises from Our Capacities to “Supply”’. This is from the text:

What the government lockdown policy response to the coronavirus has highlighted is the fundamental and inescapable truth of what the 19th French economist, Jean-Baptiste Say (1767-1832), called “the law of markets.” Contrary to the reawakened Keynesian mindset that all of our economic troubles are “aggregate demand failures” arising from a lack of spending due to people not having enough money in their pockets, the dramatic collapse in production, the massive rise in unemployment, and the falling off in people’s spending on final goods and services are all due to governments shutting down the “supply-side” of the economy.

As Jean-Baptiste Say, and those who followed his reasoning, argued, there is always work to be done, since there are always human wants that are as yet not fully satisfied; and as soon as one such human want has been significantly fulfilled to one degree or another, the human mind looks ahead and imagines other things that seem attractive and desirable to have. As a result, work merely of different sorts is there to be taken up in even greater amounts.

People may satisfy their wants and desires in one of two ways, Say explained. They may directly work and produce the goods they want for their own purposes. Few of our desires, however, can be fulfilled through our own personal efforts. So, the other way is to work and produce something that others might consider worth buying from us in exchange for what they can offer in trade; that is, goods that we want that either we do not have the ability to make for ourselves or only at higher costs than at which that potential trading partner can sell them to us.

There was then this I came across a couple of weeks ago: The COVID Stimulus is the Government’s Latest Rejection of Say’s Law. This is the final para:

Say’s timeless contribution to economics reveals that no matter what levers are pulled by the fiscal and monetary authorities, stones will not be turned into bread. The longer this economic shutdown lasts, the more critical it becomes to end it.

All this lost economic knowledge, available only on the fringes. The point is, if you hear any political leader discussing the need for an economic stimulus consisting of increased public spending, however bad things have been so far, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

The NYT likes Australia’s approach to the CV

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Australia made it to the New York Times: Did the Coronavirus Kill Ideology in Australia?. The sub-head: “How a government both sectarian and divisive learned (briefly) to become inclusive”. It’s by Richard Flanagan, about how the federal government melded with the state governments to find a unified approach, which is their version of saying what I think, that by doing everything sought by Daniel Andrews, we ended up with a single agreed approach. I’ll just highlight this:

Could it be that Australia’s record somehow embarrasses commentators of both the left and the right? The left, because the Australian government is in every other respect Trumpian in its male-led, climate-denying, nationalist tub-thumping and authoritarian sentiments; the right because a conservative government has succeeded only by very publicly abandoning ideology. And if ideology, and the culture wars, are nothing when everything is at stake, the inevitable question arises: Did they ever mean anything at all?

Which is followed by this:

Now, with the beginning of a return to normalcy, the strange miracle of this Australian consensus already is starting to vanish, with old habits renascent.

That is, as the pressure to end the lockdown grows, Daniel Andrews and others of his kind, are resisting all efforts to return to a market-based economic structure, rather than the public-sector driven quasi-command-economy of the moment. And this is even more revealing of the mentality of the author as well as the NYT:

Presented with growing doubts about democracy’s ability to deal with the pandemic on the one hand, and the seeming ability of a totalitarian China to address the crisis on the other, Australia unexpectedly, if only briefly, returned to its best traditions of communality and fairness.

So there we are, a paragon of pandemic virtue at the NYT. And then there was also this I found mentioned, which perhaps everyone already knows: Trump says he takes hydroxychloroquine to prevent coronavirus infection even though it’s an unproven treatment.

“I happen to be taking it,” Trump said during a roundtable event at the White House. “A lot of good things have come out. You’d be surprised at how many people are taking it, especially the front-line workers. Before you catch it. The front-line workers, many, many are taking it.”

He added: “I’m taking it, hydroxychloroquine. Right now, yeah. Couple of weeks ago, I started taking it. Cause I think it’s good, I’ve heard a lot of good stories.”

Naturally the entire story is about how reckless the President has been because of its side-effects and because it has not been approved by any medical experts. Contrast their attitude with this: Hydroxychloroquine.

If you’ve watched the news lately, you might be under the impression that a medicine President Trump touted as a possible game changer against coronavirus — has been debunked and discredited. Two divergent views of the drug, hydroxychloroquine, have emerged: the negative one widely reported in the press and another side you’ve probably heard less about. Never has a discussion about choices of medicine been so laced with political overtones. Today, how politics, money and medicine intersect with coronavirus.

Here’s some of the positive story.

Dr. O’Neill is now leading a study to find out if hydroxychloroquine can serve a critical role as a medicine to prevent coronavirus. But he says the bad press is making it difficult.

Dr. O’Neill: Now people are scared to use the drug without any scientifically valid concern. We’ve talked with our colleagues at the University of Minnesota who are doing a similar study, and at the University of Washington. We’ve treated 400 patients and haven’t seen a single adverse event. And what’s happening is because of this fake news and fake science, the true scientific efforts are being harmed because people now are so worried that they don’t want to enroll in the trials.

The one certainty in the media is that if Donald Trump is for it, they are against it, truth and evidence be damned.

Fear and the modern socialist politician

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A range of comments following WHY NO SPIKE AS STATES REOPEN?

A common observation is that, when confronted with even what should be convincing evidence contrary to a strongly held belief, especially a long-held one, most people will “double down” on their original belief. While this is true across the political spectrum, in my opinion, this effect is stronger on the left because of their solid belief in their own good intentions vs what they see as the “selfish” or even “evil” belief system of those to their right. The right understands that “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.”

The left judges on intentions that they believe they “know”. The right judges on results. So for the left, people with bad intentions are always wrong, even if what they did is objectively good. People with good intentions are always right, even if what they did is objectively bad. Of course your intentions are determined by how closely you follow leftist orthodoxy. It’s the only way to explain things like their reaction to an amazingly weak sexual allegation against Kavanaugh versus a much stronger one against Biden.

The smallest book in the world is the list of Liberal Programs that actually work. The largest book in the world is the book which lists the excuses of Liberals of why their programs did not work.

The biggest problem isn’t just that liberal programs don’t work—it’s that the programs make the problems far worse than they would be without them. They cost a fortune and make the problem worse, but they continue forever.

To me, conservatism means above all skepticism–about grand plans to build utopia, and also about speculative projections of impending disaster. Lefties are always peddling both of these, because that’s how they gain power. We’re supposed to bat them down with reason and cool resolve. Too many on our side failed. Maybe to some extent also Trump, although I think he might have been committing political suicide if he’d not gone along at least to some extent, in light of all the hysteria, including from his own team.

You are very reasonable. I appreciate it. So much irrationality! I’ve been very disappointed by so many people’s willingness to panic. But I see a couple silver linings, one of which is our current experiment in federalism. Now we can observe 50 laboratories to try out varying degrees of Liberty vs. tyranny. Lockdown vs pandemic. Nice to see the Liberty-minded states getting good results. And crazy to see the Dem governors and their authoritarian tendencies! Their constituents seem to be getting fed up. I predict more defections from the Left. This could redound to Trump’s, and Liberty’s, advantage. Another house-cleaning. I’ve been saying it for the last few years: With every episode of Leftist freakout, a few more people leave their side.

The idiotic “experts” will be totally unrepentant and brazenly declare millions would have DIED without their “expert” warnings.

When all the drama is past we should have a national discussion about what is referred to as out “unalienable rights”. The term requires some explaining to a lot of elected officials.

The shutdowns have proven to be disastrous both for saving lives and for fueling the panic. Trying to keep the hospitals from being overwhelmed should have ended the lockdowns once hospitals started laying people off. The fact that the lockdowns took on “mission creep” is the surest sign that the WuFlu became a virus too-good-to waste, benefiting the socialists of all parties. The problem with the insane Howard Hughes-style virus suppression strategies is that people need to eat. Howard Hughes had a billion dollars or so, along with elaborate procedures for his underlings to follow to get the food he needed. Most of the Non-essential Deplorables don’t have many underlings and hardly any of them have a billion dollars–all they have is twelve hundred. Thus the flu spreads even to those “locked down.” Thus minimal or no “spikes” after lockdowns are eased.

Not knocking Taiwan’s excellent record in dealing with the Wuhan Pneumonia (as it is referred to here in Taiwan), but, Taiwan was also very fortunate in that (i) the Chinese, in a petty attempt to punish Taiwan for exercising its democracy and holding presidential elections last year, prohibited Chinese tourists from visiting Taiwan, (ii) Taiwan is an island with essentially only one international airport of entry, thus making tracking and quarantine measures relatively simple, (iii) Chinese is the language and thus Taiwanese were watching and understanding reports coming from China very early on, giving careful attention to reports from Taiwanese business persons and Chinese civilians on the ground there and being skeptical of official CCP reports. Of course, there are also the advantages here that taiwanese people were receptive to the idea of wearing masks (and masks have been available throughout) and Taiwanese people are generally not nearly as heavy as Americans, so, escape many of the problems associated with being overweight. Unfortunately, the incidence of lung cancer is quite high in Taiwan, and the population density is also very high. Taiwan had little choice but to close the island to nearly all visitors and to implement the measures that it did. Taiwan has as of yesterday (17 May), gone 35 days with no community spread and 10 days with no new imported infections. The vast majority of Taiwan’s infections are imported. Total cases = 440. Imported cases = 349. Local community spread = 55. 7 deaths. 395 cases of recuperation.

And now the battle begins , the Real Battle for the History of this Debacle /The Great Mistake. On the one hand will be the Heroic Governors making Hard Choices assisted by Science and The Experts. On the other will be the economic train wreck which will be blamed on !!Trump!! and knuckle dragging Deniers , And worstest is that whatever might have been learned will be buried in the finger pointing the retribution and the I told You Sos . That and the data ( deaths and co-morbidities ) is already corrupted and worthless. So it was all for nothing , GD Nothing

1. We do not know how the virus is transmitted. The assumption it was spread by aerosol or respiratory droplets was based on the original concern that the virus was leading to pneumonia, types of which are disease spread by respiratory droplets (from coughs and wheezes.) But we no longer hear about pneumonia, just as we no longer hear about treating patients with ventilators: it was incorrect.
If instead the likely transmission route is on surfaces and then into eyes, nose, throat, then there is far more chance of transmission at home or in hospital, where you touch the same door knob, toilet handle, keyboard and cell phone as other infected people. In that case, the emphasis on handwashing and staying home when sick and huge emphasis on wiping down surfaces and cleaning in stores is enough to prevent transmission except at home/in hospital.
2. We don’t know how much viral load is needed to get sick. If you need to come into close personal contact with sick people for hours to have enough viral load to get sick, again, hospitals and home and other tight quarters over hours are the sources. Shopping, state parks, beaches, even restaurants and movies don’t involve close contact with people (other than the ones you already lived with.) With workplaces closed, no one is in close quarters differently than they were under lockdown.
3. Wuhan flu makes very few sick, so the only reason for giant numbers of sick with wuhan flu was because they had comorbidities, including with influenza like illnesses. They were sick enough to be ill and already hospitalised (and contracted in hospital or ltcf) or already had flu, and also got covid testing. But now that flu is gone, healthy people may have covid but have no reason to get tested.
4. many of us are already immune because we were never susceptible or we got infected before lockdown anyway.

“I Told You So, You F’n Fools”

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I had a friend, as far to the left as they come, who was thrilled to see the Soviet Union fall in 1991 since there would no longer be the bad example of socialism in action to deter others from joining the cause. We manage now to dissuade people from joining the Nazi Party, although we do not seem to be able to warn anyone about the dangers of any authoritarian system which are always of the left, no matter what name we given them. After all, Nazi means National Socialist in German. What has brought all this to mind is this: Inhuman power of the lie: “The Great Terror” at 40. It’s now been around 90 years since the start of the Great Terror itself; the 40 years only refers to the date of the publication of Conquest’s book in 1968 while the commemorative article was written in 2008. The story itself never grows old although fewer and fewer see its relevance.

The Great Terror refers to the purges that took place in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. To give this more statistical accuracy, between 1937 and 1938, about seven million Russians were arrested, one million executed, and two million more or less murdered by the inhuman conditions of the Gulag. Throughout the entire period—roughly 1934 to 1939—there were not fewer than 15 million victims, overall. These are conservative estimates, and it’s worth bearing in mind that this abattoir system was invented, operated, and maintained “in detail” from the top, as against revisionist claims that Stalin and his cadre were unaware of the death count of their gruesome mechanism of state repression.

The article is really about Robert Conquest whose books should be read by anyone who wants to understand why every obstacle to political power is essential if you want to preserve your freedom, your prosperity, and ultimately in far too many cases, your life.

This anecdote yields quite a lot, I think, about more than Conquest’s winning personality (Kingsley Amis to Philip Larkin: “Bob just goes on as if nothing has happened”). It also speaks ably of what has made him, apart from his groundbreaking research, such a powerful historian: irony and a wry sense of humor have offset some of the most tragic passages committed to print in the last hundred years. (“The sequence Lenin-Stalin-Khrushchev-Brezhnev was like a chart illustrating the evolution of the hominids, read backward.”) As Amis plausibly, but inventively, tells it, when the publisher of The Great Terror asked Conquest what he’d like to re-title the book in its second edition, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and new archival material from Moscow vindicated almost all of its key judgments: “Well, perhaps, I Told You So, You Fucking Fools. How’s that?”

I hope you will forgive the title.

It’s just like politics

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It’s actually just like everything where someone can come in second. This is about Michael Jordan. And this is what Jordan said, and while you read it, think about all those people who oppose the American President because he’s not a nice man:

“Winning has a price. And leadership has a price. So I pulled people along when they didn’t want to be pulled. I challenged people when they didn’t want to be challenged. And I earned that right because my teammates came after me.

“They didn’t endure all the things that I endured. Once you join the team, you live at a certain standard that I play the game, and I wasn’t going to take anything less. Now, if that means I have to go out there and get in your ass a little bit, then I did that. You ask all my teammates, the one thing about Michael Jordan was, he never asked me to do something that he didn’t f..kin’ do.”

He pauses as if he could not continue, and then he does: “When people see this, they’re going to say, ‘Well, he wasn’t really a nice guy. He may have been a tyrant’. Well, that’s you. Because you never won anything. I wanted to win, but I wanted them to win and be a part of that as well … That’s how I played the game.

“That was my mentality. If you don’t want to play that, don’t play that way.”

Not just basketball, but everything is that way. Politics especially. Anyone who makes it to the top anywhere – even Miss Congeniality – has a ruthless streak that firstly seeks to learn the rules of the game and then to dominate and win. Most of us cannot do this ourselves and for our values to dominate leaders who can in-fight on our behalf are essential.

“The facts that we know for sure”

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Pompeo tells Salena Zito the world must ‘impose costs on China’ for coronavirus. More specifically he said this:

Let me start with the facts that we know for sure. We know this. We know that the virus originated in Wuhan, China. We don’t know precisely where inside of that, but we know that the Chinese Communist Party has been ruthless in denying us the ability to determine that very fact. Whether that began with their failure to provide information in a timely fashion to the World Health Organization. Whether that was them coercing the World Health Organization to be quiet about the scope and nature of this pandemic or taking doctors who were prepared to talk about what they were seeing in their offices and in their laboratories and denying them the ability to speak publicly, essentially disappearing them. Those are all things we know for sure. And then, we know that there were cases as far back, for sure, as December.

And there is more after that, lots more, including this.

This week, I was on the phone with a group of democracies that represent a significant piece of the globe’s GDP with my Indian counterpart, my South Korean counterpart, Brazil … I said India. Goodness. Japan, Australia. These are countries who all are staring at the same problems, that recognize that for decades, we ignored the threat from the Chinese Communist Party. That’s not partisan, that was both political parties ignored the risks connected to the Chinese Communist Party, who now are coming to recognize that the world needs to take a different path as we move forward from this current pandemic.

Their “last chance to destroy Trump and the economy”

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Limbaugh asks VP Pence about blue states with ‘political desire to inflict pain’ by not opening. Obvious beyond obvious, deniable as a serious possibility only among those who would like to see PDT lose the next election.

As for Democrats utilizing the pandemic to their political advantage, Limbaugh said in March it was their “last chance to destroy Trump and the economy.”

“That’s where we are right now because the Democrats, the bottom has fallen out of their presidential campaign,” he said, noting that the party has had to ‘settle’ on Joe Biden as their nominee.

“So … they’ve got the way they’re looking at this. They’re the ones talking about this could be an opening for the Democrats,” Limbaugh said. “And when you call them out on this, ‘Oh, no, no, no, no, we’re not hoping people get sick. We’re talking about the economy.’

“OK, fine, chance to destroy the U.S. economy for the benefit of the Democratic Party,” Limbaugh added. “And this is what they’ve got going for them.”

Right on cue, Politico reported in early April the Democrats are planning to pin the tanking economy on Trump, even though, as is now evident, a number of blue-state governors and mayors continue to extend lockdown orders, keeping many businesses closed or opened only on a limited basis.

“We think the economy is central to what working people need to hear from candidates and elected officials up and down the ballot,” Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union, told the news site.

The virus does not know the political affiliation of state leaders, but it still seems to make a difference. In the US especially, the more to the left the leader is, the harder the lockdown has been and the more deaths that have been recorded as due to the corona virus.

Socialist distancing

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Part of a note to members from John Roskam discussing a video the IPA has just been released.

We Want To Work is a four-minute video we’ve released at the same time to both IPA Members and the public. It puts a human face to the jobs tragedy befalling Australia. Four Australians – Nathan from Central Coast in New South Wales, Phil from Townsville, and Richard and Julia from Melbourne explain what’s happened to them because of the lockdown and why they want to work.

Nathan and Richard each own and operate a small business, while Julia worked in a small business, and Phil was a pilot working for an airline. Small business has borne the brunt of the COVID-19 lockdown. Because so many politicians and journalists are now so removed from the real economy, this video is a feature of what is happening and what is only now starting to get the attention it deserves. It is noteworthy that on the executive board of the Prime Minister’s advisory panel to help business recover from the lockdown there are four people from big business, three public servants, and one former trade unionist. If ever there was a demonstration of how far the Liberal Party has moved from its base that’s it.

There’s no-one from small business. No-one. Literally no-one. Out of a committee of eight people.

Yet according to the PM “the creation of a new National COVID-19 Coordination Commission…will coordinate advice to the Australian Government on actions to anticipate and mitigate the economic and social effects of the global coronavirus pandemic.” In Australia, small business is 35% of the economy and employs 44% of the workforce.

The importance of small business to the economy and the community rests on many factors including the fact that small business is what drives employment growth in a way that big business doesn’t, small business is what gives the vast majority of people their first experience of the dignity of work, and small businesses and their owners and employees have a stake in society that big business doesn’t have.

I’ve mentioned to you before the work of an American author and demographer, Joel Kotkin. He’s a Presidential Fellow at Chapman University in California, and two weeks ago he wrote a brilliant piece entitled ‘The Death of Small Business is a Tragedy for Jewish community and democracy’. What he said about America applies equally to Australia.

This is some of what Kotkin said about the impact of the lockdown on small business:

“Small-scale commercial production is, every moment of every day, giving birth spontaneously to capitalism and the bourgeoisie…wherever there is small business and freedom of trade, capitalism appears.”— V.I. Lenin

A great connoisseur as well as sworn enemy of the free market, Vladimir Lenin might smile a bit if he witnessed what is now happening to small businesses in the current Covid-19 pandemic.

The longer the shutdown continues, the tougher things could become for many of the estimated 30 million small businesses that employ roughly half of all Americans. The prospects are particularly bleak for restaurants, small retail establishments and “personal service” establishments like salons and gyms whose primary selling point against larger firms has been their scale and familiarity with customers. According to the JP Morgan Institute, 50% small businesses have a mere 15 days of cash buffer or less.

If the shutdown lasts much longer, as many as three-quarters of independent restaurants simply won’t make it. In the end, once the fog of the pandemic dies down, we are likely to see a great deal more empty storefronts and many of our beloved local businesses abandoned….

If you get the chance read the whole piece. The significance of what Kotkin talks about is that it reveals that in the discussion about reopening the economy we’re talking about something much bigger than ‘the economy’ – we’re talking about the future of our democracy. Which is the reason why the IPA made We Want To Work.

They’re all socialists now.