Today in Fascism

In today’s Wall Street Journal are two letters-to-the-editor by Australians expressing their dismay over the dystopia that now exists down under. Here’s one of the letters:

Sadly, Mr. Morrow is spot on when he refers to Australia turning itself into a nation of prisoners as a result of Covid mania. From our self-imposed cages, it is very strange to watch the rest of the world opening up while our businesses go bust and millions of our kids are kept out of school.
Through my questioning of ministers and bureaucrats in the state parliament of Victoria, I have discovered that very little time is spent weighing the costs of lockdowns. As a result, we have a new division of people—those who can afford to work from home and those who cannot.
Guess which class makes the decisions?
David Limbrick
Melbourne, Australia
Mr. Limbrick is a member of the Parliament of Victoria in Australia.
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Vinay Prasad correctly writes: “When the history books are written about the use of non-pharmacologic measures during this pandemic, we will look as pre-historic and barbaric and tribal as our ancestors during the plagues of the middle ages.”
 
Sherelle Jacobs is correct: Britain’s “failure to confront the autocratic implications of Covid rules is a devastating mistake.” A slice:


Yet any hope of a decisive return to normal seems dead. Boris Johnson has missed his moment to rally the country around the cause of freedom, with a turbocharged reopening of Global Britain. Instead, even in a best-case scenario, the coming months are set to be a misery of border restrictions, variant angst and creeping bio-surveillance.

Most dispiriting perhaps is that there is no sign of a popular backlash to this dereliction of leadership. The Labour Party is set to back vaccine passports (as long as negative Covid tests are also permissible), and militates for Australia-style closed borders. Liberty is increasingly being derided as a Right-wing fetish, with agitation limited to a few Tory backbenchers, a smattering of civil rights groups and a fringe assortment of conspiracists and anti-vaxxers.
 
Writing in Spiked, Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya decry the smear campaign against the Great Barrington Declaration. Two slices:


In October 2020, along with Professor Sunetra Gupta, we authored the Great Barrington Declaration, in which we argued for a ‘focused protection’ pandemic strategy. We called for better protection of older and other high-risk people, while arguing that children should be allowed to go to school and young adults should be free to live more normal lives. We understood that it might lead to vigorous and heated discussions, but we did not expect a multi-pronged propaganda campaign that gravely distorted our arguments and smeared us. We are just three public-health scientists, after all. So how and why did this slanderous counterattack emerge?

In his recent book, Spike, Jeremy Farrar – a SAGE member and director of the Wellcome Trust – has provided a helpful hint: the political strategist and the prime minister’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, planned a propaganda campaign against the Great Barrington Declaration. Farrar’s exact words are that Cummings ‘wanted to run an aggressive press campaign against those behind the Great Barrington Declaration and others opposed to blanket Covid-19 restrictions’. Cummings and Farrar preferred a blanket lockdown strategy, believing it would avoid a winter Covid wave.

…..

[Matt] Hancock, Anthony Fauci, Jeremy Farrar and prominent journalists also mischaracterized the Great Barrington Declaration as a ‘herd-immunity strategy’, even though any strategy will lead to herd immunity sooner or later. Yes, the Declaration discussed herd immunity. It would be irresponsible to ignore such a basic biological fact. But to characterize the Great Barrington Declaration as a ‘herd-immunity strategy’ is like describing a pilot’s plan to land a plane as a ‘gravity strategy’. The goal of a pilot is to land the plane safely while managing the force of gravity. The goal of any Covid pandemic plan should be to minimize disease mortality and the collateral harms from the plan itself, while managing the build-up of immunity in the population. Shockingly, some politicians, journalists and even scientists denied the very existence of herd immunity. Some even questioned the existence of natural immunity from Covid, which is a bit like denying gravity.
 
Covid-19 and the Inefficiency of State Coercion

By Pierre Lemieux
An article by legal scholar Richard Epstein published in the Hoover Institution’s Defining Ideas defends George Mason University professor Todd Zywicki who is challenging his university’s Covid-19 vaccine mandate (“The Uneasy Case for Universal Vaccinations,” July 27, 2021). Epstein presents economic and constitutional arguments against this sort of mandate, at least those imposed by a public institution. Epstein explains the gist of the economic case, based on individual incentives:
A final consideration is that it might be wise not to impose any mandate at all. This view argues that the social case for vaccine mandates is not there. Most individuals will probably get the vaccine because it is in their self-interest to do so. Free riding is not an enticing option, given that it is highly unlikely that everyone else will get the vaccine. At the same time, high-risk individuals have every incentive to make the right choice for themselves, undercutting the need for paternalism. And anyone else who fears exposure will also provide implicit protection to others if they get a vaccine to protect themselves. …
In close cases like this one, there is much to be said for respecting the presumption of liberty.
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I defended similar arguments in my Reason Foundation paper “Public Health Models and Related Government Interventions: A Primer” (March 2021). It is highly plausible that individual incentives produce the level of protection that individuals want more efficiently than coercive mandates from governments or public institutions.

The presumption of liberty invoked by Epstein is more a moral or political-legal argument than an economic one. Ultimately, however, any government intervention rests on value judgments, even if the latter must be influenced by the ways the social world works (as analyzed with the tools of economics). In my Reason Foundation paper, I also review the history and ideology of the public health movement. On the presumption of liberty, I write:
Translating these ideas in practical policy proposals starts with a general presumption for individual liberty, which should be corrected by government intervention only in the presence of clear market failures and when government failures are not likely to be worse. Expressed differently, coercion should be minimized. This approach is not as radical as it may look. It is related to the idea of economic freedom that led to the Industrial Revolution and the unprecedented explosion of prosperity that followed. From a moral-philosophical viewpoint, it can be thought as implementing John Stuart Mill’s principle that “over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.”
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Suppose that we think that renters and mortgage borrowers are deserving of charity because of the pandemic. The government chose to approach this by breaking their contracts. In effect, government took resources from landlords and mortgage lenders in order to provide charity to renters and mortgage borrowers.

Unlike many other people, I find this approach for providing charity deeply offensive. If the government wants to raise the income tax and use that money to subsidize renters and mortgage borrowers, then that seems to me more ethical than to single out landlords and mortgage lenders to provide this charity.--Arnold Kling
 

1. Venn Diagram of the Day I (above) on those who once supported MLK’s philosophy of judging individuals by their character without considering their melanin or genitals but who today promote identity politics with primary attention to an individual’s skin color and sex.
 
… is from page 148 of F.A. Hayek’s profound 1952 book The Counter-Revolution of Science, as this book appears as part of volume 13 (Studies on the Abuse & Decline of Reason, Bruce Caldwell, ed. [2010]) of the Collected Works of F.A. Hayek:

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Even more significant of the inherent weakness of the collectivist theories is the extraordinary paradox that from the assertion that society is in some sense more than merely the aggregate of all individuals their adherents regularly pass by a sort of intellectual somersault to the thesis that in order that the coherence of the larger entity be safeguarded it must be subjected to conscious control, that is, to the control of what in the last resort must be an individual mind. It thus comes about that in practice it is regularly the theoretical collectivist who extols individual reason and demands that all forces of society be made subject to the direction of a single mastermind, while it is the individualist who recognizes the limitations of the powers of individual reason and consequently advocates freedom as a means for the fullest development of the powers of the inter-individual process.
 
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