SCOTUS overturns Chevron deference rule

The U.S. Supreme Court has overturned the Chevron rule, a 40-year precedent under which lower courts had to defer to regulatory agencies when interpreting the laws the agencies enforce.

SCOTUS Takes on Chevron Deference | Reason | Peter Suderman:

April 2024 - "Separation of powers is a core concept of America's Constitution. In the Founders' scheme, Congress, the courts, and the executive are independent branches of government, with their own roles and duties, intended to check one another. But since 1984, the Supreme Court has hamstrung its own ability to act independently in the face of executive power. In Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, the high court adopted a blanket presumption of deference to statutory interpretations put forth by regulatory agencies in any case where the statute was ambiguous, so long as the interpretation was reasonable.... In practice, the Chevron deference undermined the Court's independence, since it forced courts to just accept executive branch interpretations in many tough cases.

"The doctrine also creates perverse incentives for the other two branches. For example, by giving deference to agencies in ambiguous cases, it gave executive branch regulators incentive to hunt for ambiguities in order to expand their own power. This led to decades of executive overreach, as administrations used convoluted readings of statutes to pursue agendas Congress never imagined. By the same token, Chevron deference shifted the burden of making well-written and fully thought-out laws away from Congress. Empowering regulators meant that, at the margins, Congress had less reason to write clear, consensus-based legislation.

"The result, over 40 years, has been a shift away from the intended constitutional order, in which Congress writes laws, the executive branch implements them, and the courts rule independently on matters of dispute. We now live under an often dysfunctional system in which Congress is less inclined to compromise and legislate on tough issues, regulators are more inclined to take matters into their own hands, and courts have less power to tell executive branch officials when they have overreached. The system lends itself to politicized regulatory pingponging, as courts are generally required to defer to the differing and even dramatically opposed interpretations put forth by shifting Democratic and Republican administrations.

"This was what was at stake in January, when the Supreme Court heard oral arguments that put the legacy of Chevron on trial. In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, a group of herring fishermen from New Jersey objected to a federal rule requiring them not only to host government monitors on their boats but to pay the cost of those monitors—about $700 a day. That requirement was based on the 2007 Magnuson-Stevens Act (MSA), which does require some types of fishing operations to host and pay for government monitors. But the fishermen in this case weren't explicitly covered by that requirement, so when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) decided to expand the purview of the MSA in order to cover a budget shortfall, the fishermen went to court."

Read more: https://reason.com/2024/03/07/scotus-takes-on-federal-regulators/

SCOTUS overturns Chevron decision, taking weight away from federal agency regulations | WKOW 27 NEWS | June 28, 2024:

The Supreme Court's Decision Overruling Chevron is Important— But Less so than You Might Think | Reason | Ilya Somin, Volokh Conspiracy: 

June 28, 2024 - "Today's Supreme Court decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo overturns the important 1984 precedent of Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, which required federal judges to defer to administrative agencies' interpretations of federal laws, so long as Congress has not addressed the issue in question, and the agency's view is 'reasonable.' It's an important reversal, and I think the Court was right to do it. Chief Justice John Roberts' majority opinion lays out a compelling critique of Chevron, including explaining why it should not be retained out of respect for precedent. But, contrary to the hopes of some and fears of others, today's ruling will not end the administrative state or even greatly reduce the amount of federal regulation....

"Despite the likely limited scope of its impact, I still think today's ruling is a valuable step. While it won't lead to large-scale deregulation, it can help strengthen the rule of law. It could also limit the aggrandizement of power by the executive. Liberals who lament Chevron's demise may be happier about it if Donald Trump returns to power and his appointees try to use statutory ambiguities to advance his ends....If Trump returns to power, do left-liberal Chevron fans believe his appointees will scrupulously 'follow the science' when they interpret statutes? Or will they have a political agenda that will usually trump (pun intended!) science when the two conflict? The answer seems pretty obvious, at least to me.

"The same question can be posed in reverse to the dwindling band of conservative defenders of Chevron. Even if they think GOP administrations will 'follow the science,' they probably don't have equal confidence in Democratic ones.

"Partisan and ideological bias aside, many issues handled by agencies are simply impossible to resolve through technical expertise alone. They also involve questions of values. And even the most expert of government planners have severe limits to their knowledge, which is one reason why it's usually best to rely on markets, which aggregate information better than planners do."

Read more: https://reason.com/volokh/2024/06/28/the-supreme-courts-decision-overruling-chevron-is-important-but-less-so-than-you-might-think/

The hidden dangers of the WEF's 'Great Reset'

The World Economic Forum's "Great Reset" may not be the crazy conspiracy that some claim. However, that does not make it any less dangerous.

Why it isn’t mad to oppose the World Economic Forum | The Spectator - Samuel Gregg, Coffee House:

December 11, 2022 - "The World Economic Forum (WEF) and its long-serving founder and Executive Chairman, Professor Klaus Schwab, are the subjects of many insane conspiracy theories.... It isn’t mad, however, to regard the WEF as a dangerous force in global politics. The WEF is a dangerous force in global politics. To adapt Joseph Heller, just because you are paranoid, doesn’t mean the WEF isn’t after you.... 

"For many WEF critics, the vileness of the organisation can be encapsulated in one word: ‘neoliberalism.’ It’s a term that conjures up images of plutocrats and untrammelled markets ravaging the planet and exploiting blue-collar folk in the name of profit. Funnily enough, Chairman Schwab agrees with that assessment of the world’s ills.... In October 2020, Schwab stated that: '[S]hibboleths of our global economic system will need to be re-evaluated with an open mind. Chief among these is the neoliberal ideology. Free-market fundamentalism has eroded worker rights and economic security, triggered a deregulatory race to the bottom and ruinous tax competition'....

"Precisely how and where ‘free-market fundamentalism’ has run amuck remains a mystery. After all, we live in a world in which most governments in developed nations routinely control 40 per cent or more of their nation’s GDP. Nor does the regulatory and welfare state’s relentless growth in, say, the European Union, Britain and America suggest that free market radicals have been in charge.... Ignoring these inconvenient facts, Schwab believes that the world needs a ‘Great Reset.’ Covid, according to the WEF’s website explaining the global reboot awaiting the world, revealed all the ‘inconsistencies, inadequacies and contradictions of multiple systems – from health and financial to energy and education.’ The entire planet needs a new ‘social contract’ to reshape ‘the future state of global relations, the direction of national economies, the priorities of societies, the nature of business models, and the management of a global commons’....

"A key concept for Schwab’s vision of a reset world is ‘stakeholder capitalism.’ In his 2021 book Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy that Works for Progress, People and Planet, Schwab defines it as ‘a form of capitalism in which companies do not only optimise short-term profits for shareholders, but seek long-term value creation, by taking into account the needs of all their stakeholders, and society at large’.... So who are the stakeholders who will collaborate to usher in the four Ps? For Schwab, they are ‘governments,’ ‘companies,’ and ‘civil society’ (NGOs, unions, etc.). At this point we arrive at the essence of Schwab’s grand redesign. For all his invocation of the predictable woke pieties, Schwab’s core commitment is to political and economic arrangements which used to be known as corporatism. Schwab is quite explicit about this.... 

"Corporatism is a broad concept. It can run the gamut from the hyper-authoritarian version embraced by Mussolini’s Italy to worker-boss structures of the type described by Schwab in postwar western Europe. All forms of corporatism, however, share some common themes. One is the necessity of limiting market competition in order to preserve social cohesion. Another is mandating cooperation between representative groups of different social and economic sectors – a process overseen and, if necessary, enforced by government officials for the sake of the common good. What, you might ask, could be wrong with this? The answer is: plenty. 

"For a start, corporatism – including its Schwabian expression – isn’t big on freedom. It’s all about forming and then maintaining a consensus on economic and social policies. For this reason, corporatism doesn’t cope well with dissent. Indeed, it discourages any questioning of the consensus, whether the issue is tax-rates or climate change.... Not only does this generate groupthink. It encourages the marginalisation of those who dispute the consensus. Another problem is the collusion and cronyism fostered by corporatism. Corporatist structures facilitate client-patron relations between businesses and governments. That in turn produces insiders and outsiders. Insiders are those companies who sign up to the consensus, play the corporatist game, and consequently do very well out of their cosy relationships with governments. Outsiders are those who lack the resources to grease the wheel.... 

"Lastly, corporatist-style stakeholder capitalism is decidedly ambivalent about democracy. The emphasis is upon insiders negotiating with each other, and then presenting the populace with a series of faits accomplis about anything ranging from fossil fuels to ESG. There’s not much room for contributions from the wider populace to the decision-making process in Schwab’s stakeholder capitalist model, let alone popular assent to decisions taken.... On an economic level, corporatism discourages innovation, produces inflexible labour markets dominated by unions whose priority is maintaining the status quo, and riddle the marketplace with privileges for well-connected businesses. In political terms, even mild forms of corporatism significantly disenfranchise voters and put an ever-growing number of important decisions in the hands of unaccountable bureaucracies. In many ways, the EU’s [European Union's] governance structures – and the democratic deficit which they personify – exemplify such arrangements.

"Which brings us back to the WEF. It wields no formal political power... Nonetheless, since its founding in 1971, the WEF has become an organisation which embodies supreme confidence in the imperative of a particular type of person running the world from the top-down. In his famous 2004 essay entitled Dead Souls, the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington called this prototype ‘Davos Man’.... Davos Man was Huntington’s short-hand description of ‘academics, international civil servants and executives in global companies, as well as successful high-technology entrepreneurs’ who thought alike and tended to view national loyalties and boundaries ‘as residues from the past.’ Davos Man also looked with undisguised disdain, Huntington suggested, upon those who weren’t getting with the programme – whatever the content of the programme happened to be.

"Therein lies the deepest problem with the WEF. It’s one thing for people to come together in international settings to discuss problems, share insights, and network....It’s another thing for an outfit such as the WEF to decide that the time has come to rearrange the world from the top-down and remake the planet in a corporatist image. The ideal for which Schwab is aiming, judging from his speeches and writings, is something akin to a globalised EU, with its supranational and ingrained bureaucratic ways being transposed to an international level, and the levers of power vested in the hands of reliable Davos men and women....[T]he agenda ... is sufficiently alarming that anyone who believes in preserving things like liberty, sovereignty, and the decentralisation of power should be concerned."

Read more: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-davos-man-cometh/

Forget the Great Reset. Embrace the Great Escape | Reason TV - Zach Weismuller | February 23, 2022: 

New book on libertarianism's founding mothers

Timothy Sandofur's new book on the founding mothers of libertarianism: Rose Wilder Lane, Isabel Paterson, and Ayn Rand.

The Founding Mothers of Libertarianism | Reason magazine - Marcus Witcher: 

Freedom's Furies: How Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand Found Liberty in an Age of Darkness, by Timothy Sandefur, Cato Institute, 500 pages, $19.95

March 2023 - "With Freedom's Furies, Timothy Sandefur shows how Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand defended individualism and free markets while America was in the grips of Depression and war. Although these three furies have long been identified as the founders of modern American libertarianism, Sandefur treads new ground by exploring their relationships with each other and by tracing the evolution of their thought. All three women offered their own unique defenses of individual liberty, and their disagreements anticipated the differences among libertarians and classical liberals today.

"Sandefur, the vice president for legal affairs at the Goldwater Institute, begins with the trio's literary influences, particularly the novelist Sinclair Lewis. All three, he writes, appreciated how Lewis' books 'expressed the way modern mass culture penalized originality and integrity, and rewarded obedience and cravenness.' Each joined Lewis in rejecting conformity, but they resisted his dismissal of all bourgeois virtue—and Rand also rejected his pessimism.

"The New Deal and World War II had a tremendous influence on the three thinkers. Sandefur describes the historical context well, with particular attention to the authoritarian side of President Franklin Roosevelt's administration. Indeed, professors looking for a book to assign classes studying American history from 1920 to 1950 should seriously consider Freedom's Furies. It masterfully details the causes of the Great Depression, the federal government's overreach during the New Deal, and the wartime attacks on political, economic, and civil liberties. Not only was individual freedom under assault, Sandefur notes, but it was 'almost impossible to find any published material that made a strong, intellectual case for free markets.' The furies realized they would have to produce their own.

"And so Paterson's The God of the Machine (a philosophical treatise), Lane's The Discovery of Freedom (a pop history crossed with a manifesto), and Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead (a didactic novel) were published in 1943. All three writers believed that the morality of self-sacrifice should be rejected. Rand and Paterson both argued for a form of ethical egoism, and they would long debate who influenced whom. But the two differed greatly in their style: Rand was deeply influenced by 19th-century Romanticism while Paterson was committed to naturalism. For her part, Lane argued that human energy produced human flourishing and that 'every human being, by his nature, is free.' Humanity simply needed to discover this truth; hence her book's title.

"All three authors independently developed some of the most important insights of classical liberal academics. Paterson's criticism of the New Deal, for instance, included the argument that central planning was impossible because bureaucrats 'would have to know "absolutely all the factors of present and past out of which the future must proceed, and to anticipate inerrantly all the possible new discoveries which may be made."' These arguments capture some of the insights of Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek, who were not well-known in the U.S. at the time. Likewise, The God of the Machine anticipated Karl Popper's critique of 'the arrested society,' which he wrote two years later. Paterson recognized that all utopias 'are final…they are static societies'; as such, she suggested, they could not adapt, because 'creative processes do not function to order.' In short, 'To live, people must think, and to think, they must be free.'

"Lane anticipated Hayek's critique of government planning in a short 1936 book titled Give Me Liberty. She argued, in Sandefur's words, that 'to truly organize an economy…government bureaucrats would, in principle, need infinite knowledge.' Lane also hit on some important insights later associated with the economics of public choice. The idea that bureaucrats could better manage the economy than individuals was, she wrote, the 'dominant fallacy' of the 1930s. Instead, Lane insisted that 'there was no reason to think government officials would be exempt from the shortsightedness, corruption, or ignorance that plagued the decisions of private citizens.'

"Sandefur also details the trio's views on religion and how those related to their defense of liberty. While all three believed that natural rights existed independently of government, they arrived at this conclusion in different ways. Lane and Paterson both argued that the existence of a deity was necessary. Rand, an atheist, disagreed; she believed that human beings could reason our way to a justification of natural rights.

"Lane irritated the other two women with her insistence that Christian ethics could be reconciled with a robust defense of individual liberty. Her argument that people have a moral sense that leads us, by nature, to care for our neighbor annoyed Rand and Paterson, who felt that man should look after his own happiness and had no moral obligation to others. Paterson took umbrage at the vagueness of Lane's 'all men are brothers' thesis and retorted, 'Stalin is no brother of mine.' This helped end Lane and Paterson's friendship. Lane's religious views and Rand's atheism likewise made any deep friendship between the two women difficult, and they met in person just once....

"Although this is an exceptional book, it is not flawless. The most striking shortcoming is the lack of attention to the ways the furies applied their individualism to minorities. Sandefur does note that 'on matters of race relations, freedom of speech, and sexual autonomy, they were decades ahead of their time in embracing views later classified as "liberal"' [but] ... it is frustrating that the book doesn't delve into that point in more detail. Sandefur mentions, for instance, that Lane was hired by the Pittsburgh Courier (one of the largest black newspapers in the country) in 1942, but he doesn't detail any of the arguments she made in her essays there.... For more than two years at the Courier, Lane applied the ideals of individual liberty and her unique conception of human energy to black Americans and their struggle....

"Still, this book's flaws are small compared to its contributions. Freedom's Furies offers hope to a new generation of classical liberals and libertarians living through the threat of authoritarianism abroad and illiberalism at home. Compared with the domestic overreach of the 1930s and '40s and the rise of fascism and communism abroad, our own troubles don't seem quite as bad.... Individual liberty and self-reliance are still the keystones, and the furies' successors will surely continue to promote liberty in the face of the darkness today.'

Read more: https://reason.com/2023/02/11/the-founding-mothers-of-libertarianism/

Timothy Sandofur on Freedom’s Furies: Three Women Who Sparked a Revolution, Goldwater Institute, March 9, 2023:

Order Freedom's Furies at Amazon.com.

"China-worship" runs in the Trudeau family

Admiration for totalitarian Communist regimes including China is a Trudeau family affair.

The Trudeau family's love of tyrants | Maclean's - Mark Milke:

February 28, 2018 - "Back in the summer of 2006, Pierre Trudeau’s youngest son, Alexandre (Sacha) Trudeau wrote a fawning  happy 80th birthday column in the Toronto Star in praise of then Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.... Castro, Trudeau claimed, was 'an expert on genetics, on automobile combustion engines, on stock markets, on everything'. Alexandre pressed upon his readers ... to think of Cubans as children and Castro their father. Trudeau then fondly recalled his late brother, Michel, who when they were young kids complained to their mother that he had fewer friends than his brothers. Margaret Trudeau replied that unlike his brothers, Michel 'had the greatest friend of all: he had Fidel.'

"I thought of Alexandre Trudeau’s fawning 2006 tribute recently given it was 10 years ago this month that Fidel Castro resigned.... But the anniversary also brings to mind Alexandre Trudeau’s brother — the prime minister, and his weird, fantasy belief that another autocracy, China, is somehow efficient on economic and environmental matters.... Having a soft spot for tyrants prompts multiple blind spots, whether on democracy, the economy or, more recently, on the environment. All have been on display in the Trudeau family’s ongoing infatuation with tyrannies and autocracies.... [I]n the comments from Alexandre, Margaret and Justin Trudeau ... [w]e see evidence of the Trudeau family’s long love affair with the world’s autocrats and tyrants.  But the problem started with Pierre.

"Bob Plamondon, author of a 2013 biography of  Pierre Trudeau recounts how Trudeau the Elder visited the Soviet Union in 1952 to discuss economics, this accompanied by four Canadian communists. 'It was there that he remarked to the wife of U.S. chargé d’affaires that he was a communist and a Catholic and was in Moscow to criticize the U.S. and praise the Soviet Union,” Plamondon writes....

Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau meets Mao Zedong
in Beijing, 1973. Credit: Government of Canada.

"Similarly, in 1960, Trudeau accepted an invitation from the Chinese government to visit along with Jacques Hébert, a friend whom Trudeau would appoint to the Senate. They travelled around China for six weeks on a state-sponsored tour. 

"And they did so smack dab in the middle of a wrenching state-imposed famine courtesy of Chairman Mao’s Great Leap Forward 'reforms', which began in 1958 and would last until 1962 ... [and]  would take the lives of 'somewhere between 20 million and 42 million people' as French authors Jean-Louis Margolin and Pierre Rigoulot recounted in the Black Book of Communism.....

"[T]he father and son Trudeau approach to China then and now is revealing....  Canadians, then as now, are treated to an over-eager approach which mirrors Justin’s father’s mindset and reveal his enduring influence on his son.... As an example, from economics and the environment, recall Justin Trudeau’s unguarded comments made in 2013, where he expressed 'a level of admiration I actually have for China' with his reasoning that 'their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime and say "we need to go green fastest, we need to start investing in solar"'.... 

"These comments reveal a modern Trudeau fascination with autocracies; in particular, the notion that China’s severely polluted environment can be helped by central, top-down planning from Beijing. Beijing can announce all the windmills and solar panels it wants. But recall the politically-centralized model in existence since Mao which forestalls the political consequences of issues (pollution in China today as a severe example), which would explode in a liberal democracy.

"The very Chinese model of governance, which represses dissent, was not only unsuited to economic growth before the 1979 reforms by Deng Xiaoping, it has been deadly to Chinese health. That’s because public pressure cannot swap sub-par politicians out for accountable ones. In an economy of state-owned companies, no one is responsible for pollution, or to enforce pollution laws in the private sector.... In China, public pressure at the ballot box and even by consumers is either nonexistent or feeble. And Chinese government statistics are unreliable, a fact which additionally complicates environmental reform. Anyone, including the prime minister, who thinks China has an effective or enlightened policy on the environment is unaware or blithely ignoring just how corrupt, ineffective and inefficient autocracies are....

"The father-son reunion on China is not mysterious. Nor are their basic flawed assumptions about how political power can solve all problems if only the rulers somehow have enough control. The Trudeau family’s dewy-eyed approach to tyrants has always been unfortunate. Their family-tyrant friends were economically illiterate and, just as often, deadly to their own populations. Central planning was of no use and was of much harm to Russians, Chinese and Cubans.

"The elder Trudeau’s acolytes always thought of him as a 'philosopher king' — that he knew better than markets and ordinary mortals and business owners how to manage the economy efficiently from the top down. His son has imbibed the same conceit. Justin has continued in that tradition in his own political life, with his fawning Castro comments and his weird China-worship on environmental matters."

Read more: https://macleans.ca/opinion/the-trudeau-familys-love-of-tyrants/

Sweden shows futility of lockdown experiment

How Sweden swerved Covid disaster | Unherd - Johan Anderberg:

November 8, 2021 - "Until recently, prohibition remained the largest experiment in social engineering a democracy had ever undertaken. And then, in early 2020, a new virus began to spread from China. Faced with this threat, the world’s governments responded by closing schools, banning people from meeting, forcing entrepreneurs to shut their businesses and making ordinary people wear face masks. Like prohibition, this experiment provoked a debate. In all the democracies of the world, freedom was weighed against what was perceived as security; individual rights versus what was considered best for public health.

"Few now remember that for most of 2020, the word 'experiment' had negative connotations. That was what Swedes were accused of conducting when we — unlike the rest of the world — maintained some semblance of normality. The citizens of this country generally didn’t have to wear face masks; young children continued going to school; leisure activities were largely allowed to continue unhindered. This experiment was judged early on as 'a disaster' (Time magazine), 'the world’s cautionary tale' (New York Times), 'deadly folly' (the Guardian).... The hypothesis of the outside world was that ... absence of restrictions, open schools, reliance on recommendations instead of mandates and police enforcement would result in higher deaths than other countries. Meanwhile, the lack of freedom endured by the citizens of other countries would 'save lives'. At this stage, it was not unreasonable to conclude that Sweden would pay a high price for its freedom. Throughout the spring of 2020, Sweden’s death toll per capita was higher than most other countries.

"But the experiment didn’t end there. During the year that followed, the virus continued to ravage the world and, one by one, the death tolls in countries that had locked down began to surpass Sweden’s. Britain, the US, France, Poland, Portugal, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Spain, Argentina, Belgium — countries that had variously shut down playgrounds, forced their children to wear facemasks, closed schools, fined citizens for hanging out on the beach and guarded parks with drones — have all been hit worse than Sweden. At the time of writing, more than 50 countries have a higher death rate.... If Sweden was a part of the US, its death rate would rank number 43 of the 50 states. 

Graph courtesy CTV News

"This fact is shockingly underreported. Consider the sheer number of articles and TV segments devoted to Sweden’s foolishly liberal attitude to the pandemic last year.... Suddenly, it is as if Sweden doesn’t exist.... 

"From a human perspective, it is easy to understand the reluctance to face these numbers. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that millions of people have been deprived of their freedom, and millions of children have had their education gravely damaged, for little demonstrable gain. Who wants to admit that they were complicit in this? But what one American judge called the 'laboratories of democracy' have conducted their experiment — and the result is increasingly clear.

"Exactly why it turned out this way is harder to explain, but perhaps the 'noble experiment' of the 1920s in the US can offer some clues. Prohibition didn’t win because the freedom argument prevailed. Nor was it because the substance itself had become any less harmful.... The reason for the eventual demise of the alcohol ban was that it simply didn’t work. No matter what the law said, Americans didn’t stop drinking alcohol.... The mistake the American authorities made was to underestimate the complexity of society. Just because they banned alcohol did not mean that alcohol disappeared. People’s drives, desires and behaviours were impossible to predict or fit into a plan. 

"A hundred years later, a new set of authorities made the same mistake. Closing schools didn’t stop children meeting in other settings; when life was extinguished in cities, many fled them, spreading the infection to new places; the authorities urged their citizens to buy food online, without thinking about who would transport the goods from home to home.

"If the politicians had been honest with themselves, they might have foreseen what would happen. For just as American politicians were constantly caught drinking alcohol during the prohibition, their successors were caught 100 years later breaking precisely the restrictions they had imposed on everyone else. The mayors of New York and Chicago, the British government’s top advisor, the Dutch Minister of Justice, the EU Trade Commissioner, the Governor of California all broke their own rules.

"It isn’t easy to control other people’s lives. It isn’t easy to dictate desirable behaviours in a population via centralised command. These are lessons that many dictators have learned. During the Covid pandemic, many democracies have learned it too. The lesson has perhaps not yet sunk in, but hopefully it will eventually. Then perhaps it will be another 100 years before we make the same mistake again."

Read more: https://unherd.com/2021/11/how-sweden-swerved-covid-disaster/

The fallacies behind state Covid mandates

No ‘rule of six’, please, we’re British. We can make our own decisions | The Times - Jonathan Sumption:

September 13, 2020 - "The prime minister has declared that he will do 'whatever is necessary' to stop the spread of the coronavirus. One of the things that is necessary, apparently, is to stop us enjoying the company of our friends and family in numbers above six. There are at least three fallacies behind these bossy declarations. One is that the spread of an endemic virus is amenable to government control. The second is that legal coercion is a good way of doing it. The third is that stopping infections is all that matters, so that one does not have to count the human cost.

"If one thing has become clear over the past six months, it is that aggressive measures of social distancing make little difference in the long run. They buy time, but reduce deaths only if they last indefinitely. Even buying time comes at a heavy price in depression, mental illness and misery.... Spain took the most extreme and brutally enforced measures in Europe. Sweden had the mildest measures: no lockdown or school closures and only moderate measures of social distancing. Yet Spain now [i.e., September - gd] has the worst second spike on the Continent and Sweden none at all.

"There are many variables that affect the long-term progress of the disease, including the population’s state of health and age balance. But one thing that does not seem to affect it is government policy. The reason seems tolerably clear. People can spread Covid-19 before their symptoms appear — and even if they have no symptoms. So isolating known cases is always too late. Whatever distancing measures you take, short of shutting everyone indefinitely in a box and feeding them through a tube, the virus will still spread, but more slowly....

"Of all the ways of buying time, legal coercion is the most inefficient. Legal coercion is indiscriminate, whereas this virus discriminates. It attacks the old and clinically vulnerable. Across Europe and the UK, the upsurge of infections is heavily concentrated among healthy people under 50. 

"The increasingly absurd health secretary Matt Hancock gets cross about this being pointed out. But, with a handful of exceptions, the infected young will experience only mild symptoms or none. What matters is not infections but hospital admissions and deaths, which have increased relatively little, both here and in other European countries. This suggests that, while the young and healthy are getting on with their lives, the vulnerable are sheltering themselves. It is happening spontaneously.

"What is more, it is exactly what ought to be happening. People are making their own judgments, guided by their own vulnerabilities and their own tolerance of risk. The result is a far more discriminating approach than the government’s regulatory blunderbuss. Left to themselves, people can manage this virus better than Boris Johnson and Hancock because they can fine-tune their precautions to their own situation and that of the people around them. Taking the decisions out of their hands and imposing one-size-fits-all measures is despotic and ineffective....

"To justify their policies and command submission, ministers have to resort to fear, the classic tool of despotic regimes.... Will the public take it seriously?... Why should they? No one can respect laws made with no achievable objective or coherent plan. There is a limit to what people can be expected to put up with from a government that thinks hyperactivity is a substitute for thought, that seems incapable of matching the measures to the problem and has nothing but crocodile tears for the collateral damage to people’s lives."

Read more: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/no-rule-of-six-please-were-british-we-can-make-our-own-decisions-9j8zbh5nh

How not to revive the economy

Be Serious, You Don't Solve Lockdowns With More Central Planning | Real Clear Markets - John Tamny:

September 18, 2020 - "To read the lofty coronavirus relief proposals from Democrats and Republicans is to detect confusion about what powers economic growth.... Why the call for Congress to spend with abandon? This question ... answers itself, but for those still half awake, politicians on the city, state and national levels imposed lockdowns on economic activity beginning in March.... Even though economic growth has long been the greatest enemy of virus, disease and ill health more broadly, politicians decided that the answer to the coronavirus was to force an economic contraction that destroyed tens of millions of jobs, millions of businesses, and that otherwise created economic desperation.... 

"Even though wealth creation has long expanded the resources necessary for scientists and doctors to cure disease and elongate life, politicians decided in 2020 to freeze wealth creation given their belief that Americans are too stupid to avoid sickness and death on their own. Translated for those still half awake, your political leaders think you’re intensely dumb; so much so that you’re incapable of protecting yourself without politicians forcing you to do just that. But to make sure you would stay at home, they imposed job and business destroying lockdowns that kind of gave you no choice....

"[T]he insults to common sense didn’t stop with the economic contraction politicians forced on what was previously the world’s most dynamic economy. Having wrecked millions of lives and businesses, they proceeded to extract trillions more from the economy, only to blindly throw money at their countless errors. Yes, you read that right: the instigators of misery somehow got it into their heads that they were the ones who should deliver you from it....

"Governments can’t stimulate economic activity, nor can they offer relief, simply because they only have wealth to redistribute insofar as it was created first in the private sector. Governments can only move previously created wealth from one set of pockets to another. Politicized allocation of precious wealth is a consequence of economic growth, not an instigator of it. The 'relief' proposals promoted by left and right will in no way generate new economic activity.

"In truth, the trillions Congress is set to spend will logically delay recovery. Simple as that. It’s sad that something so basic requires explanation, but we’re living in a time of remarkable confusion within the policy establishment. Since we are, it’s useful to remind readers that central planning failed in miserable, murderous fashion in the 20th century. In the 20th politicians around the world tried their hand at command-and-control economic planning that placed those same politicians in control of the economy’s resources. It didn’t work ... because with government spending, there is no failure. There’s instead relentless spending on what doesn’t work.... 

"Economic growth is a consequence of intrepid allocation of limited resources to higher and higher uses. Economic growth is about investment in wealth that doesn’t yet exist. By contrast, governments can only fund the known, or what’s already known as a bust. If what’s a bust employs people, politicians will fund it forever. Medicare began as a $3 billion program. It’s rushing toward $1 trillion annually even though it still can’t meet its mandate over fifty years after its creation....

"Politicized allocation of resources is the path not just to stasis, but to decline. Central planning that failed in total in the 20th century doesn’t succeed when tried on a limited basis in the 21st. What didn’t work then still doesn’t work now. Politicians can’t play investor. Period.

"Readers should remember this as they see left-of-center thinkers ... join hands with right-of-center thinkers ... in their call for more government to fix today’s sagging economy. The simple truth is that government actions caused the contraction.... Stated simply, the economy is weak because politicians imposed command-and-control lockdowns, and having done that, they poured gasoline on a fire of their own making with trillions more in spending. Let’s not vandalize common sense with more of what’s already failed. The only economic relief is an end to the lockdowns."

Read more: https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2020/09/18/be_serious_you_dont_solve_lockdowns_with_more_central_planning_577838.html

Bad COVID-19 models led to bad policy decisions, says epidemiologist

Modelers Were ‘Astronomically Wrong’ in COVID-19 Predictions, Says Leading Epidemiologist — and the World Is Paying the Price | Foundation for Economic Education - John Miltimore: 

July 2, 2020 - "Dr. John Ioannidis became a world-leading scientist by exposing bad science. But the COVID-19 pandemic could prove to be his biggest challenge yet. Ioannidis, the C.F. Rehnborg Chair in Disease Prevention at Stanford University, has come under fire in recent months for his opposition to state-ordered lockdowns, which he says could cause social harms well beyond their presumed benefits. But he doesn’t appear to be backing down. In a wide-ranging interview with Greek Reporter published over the weekend, Ioannidis said emerging data support his prediction that lockdowns would have wide-ranging social consequences and that the mathematical models on which the lockdowns were based were horribly flawed.

"Ioannidis also said a comprehensive review of the medical literature suggests that COVID-19 is far more widespread than most people realize. 'There are already more than 50 studies that have presented results on how many people in different countries and locations have developed antibodies to the virus,' Ioannidis, a Greek-American physician, told Greek Reporter.... 'A very crude estimate might suggest that about 150-300 million or more people have already been infected around the world, far more than the 10 million documented cases.'

"Ioannidis said medical data suggest the fatality risk is far lower than earlier estimates had led policymakers to believe and 'is almost 0%' for individuals under 45 years old. The median fatality rate is roughly 0.25 percent, however, because the risk 'escalates substantially' for individuals over 85 and can be as high as 25 percent for debilitated people in nursing homes.... Because of this, Ioannidis sees mass lockdowns of entire populations as a mistake....

"In March, in a widely read STAT article, Ioannidis said it was uncertain how long lockdowns could be maintained without serious consequences. 'One of the bottom lines is that we don’t know how long social distancing measures and lockdowns can be maintained without major consequences to the economy, society, and mental health,' Ioannidis wrote. 'Unpredictable evolutions may ensue, including financial crisis, unrest, civil strife, war, and a meltdown of the social fabric.' Nearly three months after that interview, the world has seen unemployment levels unseen since the Great Depression, mass business closures, spikes in suicide and drug overdose, and social unrest on a scale not seen in the US since the 1960s. 'I feel extremely sad that my predictions were verified,' Ioannidis said. He continued....

Globally, the lockdown measures have increased the number of people at risk of starvation to 1.1 billion, and they are putting at risk millions of lives, with the potential resurgence of tuberculosis, childhood diseases like measles where vaccination programs are disrupted, and malaria. I hope that policymakers look at the big picture of all the potential problems and not only on the very important, but relatively thin slice of evidence that is COVID-19.

"Ioannidis did not spare modelers who predicted as many as 40 million people would die, or those who claimed the US healthcare system would be overrun. 'The predictions of most mathematical models in terms of how many beds and how many ICU beds would be required were astronomically wrong,' Ioannidis said.... 

"Only time will tell if Ioannidis is proven correct in his assessments. But if he’s even half right, it would suggest that the experts did indeed fail again. There’s little question that the lockdowns have caused widespread economic, social, and emotional carnage. Evidence that US states that locked down fared better than states that did not is hard to find.

"Though not yet certain, the COVID-19 pandemic may well turn out to be another example of central planning gone wrong.... During the coronavirus pandemic, experts may have unintentionally brought about one of the most serious human disasters in modern history by removing choice from individuals with superior local knowledge."

Read more: https://fee.org/articles/modelers-were-astronomically-wrong-in-covid-19-predictions-says-leading-epidemiologist-and-the-world-is-paying-the-price/

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Government incompetence unmasked

Governments Have Screwed Up Mask Purchase and Distribution. Maybe Everyone Should Be a Libertarian in a Pandemic | Reason - Brian Doherty:

May 8, 2020 - "As of mid-April, The Wall Street Journal reports, the federal government had for whatever reason dedicated millions in contracts, involving at least 80 percent of the 20 million N95 masks it was trying to procure, from 'suppliers that either had never done business with the federal government or had only taken on small prior contracts that didn't include medical supplies.' Predictably, some of those vendors 'missed delivery deadlines or have backed out because of supply problems'.... At least one would-be contractor has now been nabbed for fraud on such a mask deal.

"ProPublica tagged along with what the Journal called the 'largest N95 mask contract given out by the VA [Veterans Administration], for an initial $35.4 million ... with potential for ... a total of $64.9 million, according to federal contracting data'.... The fiasco ended with no masks delivered — ... Despite months of scrambling, the Veterans Administration was not prepared to keep its hospitals equipped with masks. As of now over 2,000 V.A. employees have tested positive....

"The feds aren't the only ones making bad mask decisions. California is currently trying to get a refund on a $456.9 million wire transfer it sent as a down payment on a $600 million contract for 110 million N95 masks .... to a firm called Blue Flame Medical, which, The Wall Street Journal informs us, was 'founded days earlier by former Republican fundraiser Mike Gula'.... Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times reports that Gov. Gavin Newsom of California is refusing 'to reveal the contents of a $990-million contract for purchasing protective masks from a Chinese electric car manufacturer'.... Even the state's legislators are being blocked from learning details of the deal....

"The Transportation Security Agency decided to hoard more than 1.3 million N95 respirator masks (which it received from Customs and Border Protection) rather than distribute them to hospitals or agencies or people who might lack them — even, as ProPublica reported, 'as the number of people coming through U.S. airports dropped by 95% and the TSA instructed many employees to stay home to avoid being infected.'

"Other wasteful, clumsy, or even macabre stories have arisen from government attempts to help with or procure medical equipment. In Seattle, the county Public Health Department sent a Native American community health board body bags instead of requested medical supplies....

"Before COVID-19 hit, certain pundits were promoting 'state capacity libertarianism'.... The idea was, at best, an attempt to turn libertarian energies toward making government better at what it does. But these not-at-all-shocking snafus show no obvious way the concept could help, other than hand-waving calls to have better people making better decisions.

"Mask procurement is not going awry because government lacks the capacity to do anything. They have plenty of money, essentially as much as they want to have, and they have plenty of staff. It's not because they don't have professional experts and bureaucrats trying to manage things, and it's not because Republicans hate government and want it to fail.

"Even in a relatively free market, fraud and incompetence exist. The government in its mask decisions ha[s] shown a keen ability to find market actors who are very bad (deliberately or not) at what they do and offer them ungodly amounts of money. But government's unique combination of endless money and impunity for messing things up mean that the state is going to get things more wrong, more often. And that's true even, or perhaps especially, when it's urgent that the state get things right. The evidence is in the news every day, even if ideological blinders prevent non-libertarians from acknowledging it."

Read more: https://reason.com/2020/05/08/governments-have-screwed-up-mask-purchase-and-distribution-maybe-everyone-should-be-a-libertarian-in-a-pandemic/

Coronavirus testing failure in Canada, too

The country doesn't have enough testing capacity, and might never get it | CBC News - Kelly Crowe:

April 9, 2020 - "'We're ready, we're prepared.' Those were the confident words from Dr. David Williams, Ontario's chief medical officer of health in a news briefing [January 25]. The province already had a 'specific and reliable' coronavirus test that could deliver results in 24 hours.... 'Folks, it will still be business as normal,' said Peter Donnelly, head of Public Health Ontario, at the same briefing. Through the unforgiving lens of hindsight, they could not have been more wrong....

"One week after the province closed schools, shops and prohibited large gatherings [on March 17] many labs were overwhelmed. By the first weekend, Ontario had a backlog of more than 7,200 tests. B.C. also reported a backlog, as did Alberta, Quebec and Manitoba. Almost immediately, provinces began restricting who could be tested — limiting it to front-line health-care workers, people with severe symptoms and those who work with vulnerable groups.

"Over the past week, the backlogs have cleared, but restrictions on testing still remain in most parts of Canada. And ... testing will continue to be limited, even in Ontario which has just announced it will soon be able to test 19,000 people a day.... 'Even when we're at 19,000 tests a day we're not going to be able to test everybody and that would be the same in every other jurisdiction,' said Vanessa Allen, chief of medical microbiology at Public Health Ontario, the government agency responsible for provincial labs....

"Media reports on Tuesday [April 7] revealed that Ontario's testing rate was dropping to just over 2,500 per day, but the province said it could run about 13,000. Why isn't Ontario testing more?

"The Ministry of Health had the accounting firm KPMG organize all the labs in the province that are capable of microbial testing. That includes 10 hospital networks, six public health labs and three private lab networks. Added up, they can do 13,000 tests per day, and expect to reach 19,000 in three weeks. But that extra capacity was created suddenly, which means there weren't enough patient samples waiting to be tested, because there are still testing restrictions in place....

"One consequence of the low level of testing across Canada is that no one has a clear idea how big the epidemic is in this country ... said Ashleigh Tuite, an epidemiologist with the University of Toronto. The low rate is frustrating Tuite and other epidemiologists who are trying to create models of the disease, which politicians are using to support their decisions.... Right now, the reliability of the models is affected by the under-reporting of cases. 'Until we have a consistent amount of testing in the population I think it's hard for me to say that I have confidence in those projections,' said Tuite."

Read more: https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/coronavirus-covid19-testing-canada-1.5527219

The coronavirus testing failure (video)

How the CDC and the FDA Wrecked the Economy | Reason - Jacob Sullum:

April 8, 2020 - "Public officials across the United States are flying blind against the COVID-19 epidemic. Because of a government-engineered testing fiasco, they do not know how fast the virus is spreading, how many people have been infected by it, how many will die as a result, or how many have developed immunity to it. The failure to implement early and wide testing, which was caused by a combination of short-sightedness, ineptitude, and bureaucratic intransigence, left politicians scrambling to avoid a hospital crisis by imposing broad business closure and stay-at-home orders....

"At first, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) monopolized COVID-19 tests. When the CDC began shipping test kits to state laboratories in early February, they turned out to be defective.

"The CDC and the Food and Drug Administration initially blocked efforts by universities and businesses to develop and conduct tests before relaxing the restrictions ... [and] the CDC set irrationally narrow criteria for testing, which meant that carriers without severe symptoms or obvious risk factors escaped detection.

"The CDC still insists that 'not everyone needs to be tested for COVID-19.' But without testing everyone — or at least representative samples — for both the virus itself and the antibodies to it, we can do little better than guess its prevalence, its lethality, and the extent of immunity among the general public.

"Even now, months after the Wuhan outbreak and the first reported case in the U.S., we have managed to test less than 1 percent of the population, and those tests have been limited mainly to people with symptoms severe enough for them to seek treatment. Since people infected by COVID-19 typically experience mild symptoms or no symptoms at all, that's a real problem....  Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, estimates that 'somewhere between 25 percent and 50 percent' of COVID-19 carriers are asymptomatic. But he cautions that 'right now we are just guessing'....

"Our ignorance about COVID-19 will have profound consequences, potentially leading to an overreaction that wrecks the economy while saving relatively few lives or (less likely, given the current political climate) an underreaction that costs many lives and allows hospitals to be overwhelmed by COVID-19 cases. You can thank the same agencies on which we are relying to guide us through this crisis."

Read more: https://reason.com/2020/04/08/how-the-cdc-and-the-fda-wrecked-the-economy/
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Also read: Coronavirus testing failure in Canada, too