You don’t learn much in college.  You endure insipid brainwashing.  And don’t me get started on the dehumanizing Covid theater.  Signaling is the only good reason to go.  Still, once you’re on campus, you might as well make the most of it.  I’ve been in college non-stop for the last 33 years, and I’ve been paying close attention.  Here is how I advise you to get good value for all the time and money you’re spending. 1. Read teaching reviews before you pick your classes.  Teaching ability varies widely, so even though the average is low, you rarely need to suffer with a mediocre teacher. 2. Always sit in the front row.  Ask questions.  Talk to the professor before and after class.  Even if they seem like crazy ideologues, you can learn a lot by asking thoughtful questions.  If only at the meta level. 3. Type your professors’ names into Google Scholar to see what they’ve been doing with their lives.  Then go to office hours and talk to them about their work.  Come with questions that clearly won’t be on the test. 4. Crucial: Start doing this when you’re a freshman!  At that stage, no one will wonder if you’re just trying to suck up for a future letter of recommendation. 5. Go to the Faculty webpage for every major you’re seriously considering.  Look at everyone’s research specialties.  If you think there’s a 5% or greater chance that you would find a professor interesting, type his name into Google Scholar.  If you still think there’s a 5% chance you would find the professor interesting, go to their office hours and ask him some questions about his work. 6. Don’t be shy.  Most professors are bored and lonely.  Even at top schools, they almost never meet anyone who knows and cares about their work.  They want you to show up… even if they don’t know it yet. 7. If you and a professor hit it off, keep reading their work and keep visiting their office.  Ask them to lunch.  Becoming a professor’s favorite student is easy, because the competition is weak. 8. Be extremely friendly to everyone.  Always give a good hello to everyone in your dorm every time you see them.  “Good hello” equals eye contact + smile + audible. 9. Never eat alone!  If you don’t know anyone in the cafeteria, find a small group of students that looks promising and politely ask to join them.  Almost everyone will say yes. 10. See if your school has an Effective Altruism club.  If it does, attend regularly.  Even if you have zero interest in philanthropy, EA is a beacon of thoughtful curiosity. 11. Be a friendly heretic.  Openly regard official brainwashing with bemusement.  This will generate propitious selection: Many students are as skeptical of the orthodoxy as you.  If you’re good-natured about it, they will reveal themselves to you. 12. During Covid, live your life as normally as possible.  Bend every rule you can, and associate with the most non-compliant students you can find.  Because your school is trying to dehumanize you, you must strive to retain your humanity. 13. Avoid drunken parties.  They really are grossly overrated.  Just counting hangovers and accidents, the expected value is probably negative.  Strive to be uninhibited without artificial assistance.  And remember: The people who really enjoy alcohol are also the people most likely to ruin their lives with alcohol. 14. While you’re avoiding drunken parties, try to find true love.  Despite the Orwellian propaganda, you are extremely unlikely to be persecuted just for asking someone out on a date.  Remember: You will never again have such an easily-accessible candidate pool.  In the modern world, dating co-workers is dead, but dating co-students lives.  For now. (0 COMMENTS)

A regular commenter on this site, Kevin Corcoran, sent me the writeup below. I thought it was so good that I asked his permission to post it. He granted it. Here it is. I was thinking the other day about how people prefer to frame issues, and how that can either clarify or distort our thinking. People can react very differently to statements or suggestions depending on how you frame them, so getting the framing right matters both rhetorically in making your case persuasive and intellectually in making your case honestly and accurately. One common framing device that the left uses is to use “taking less” as the literal equivalent of “actively giving.” How common is it to hear, for example, a statement like “This tax plan will give billions of dollars to the top 1% and to giant corporations”? This is certainly phrased that way for rhetorical effect, to make the case against the hypothetical tax plan seem more persuasive. The government is going to give money to already wealthy people!? Who could support that? And in some scenarios, there’s even an element of truth. Corporate welfare is a real thing, and the government often does give large amounts of taxpayer money directly to wealthy corporations. That is something libertarians and leftists can jointly oppose. But describing cases of sending someone a lower tax bill as the literal equivalent of cutting them a check is egregiously misleading. Am I tilting at a windmill, because obviously everyone knows the difference? No. At least one member of Congress does not. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was very vocal in opposing the building of a second Amazon HQ in her district, in part because of the tax breaks Amazon would have gotten. These were tax breaks, not direct subsidies or cash transfers. If Amazon had always existed there, it would have generated $30 billion in state and local taxes. But the government, as an incentive for Amazon to establish a new headquarters in her district, was offering to cut Amazon’s taxes by $3 billion out of the $30 billion. According to leftist rhetoric, this means New York would have engaged in the outrageous act of “giving” $3 billion to Amazon, one of the wealthiest companies in the world. When Amazon eventually decided not to locate there, AOC had this to say: “If we’re willing to give away $3 billion for this deal, we could invest those $3 billion in our district if we wanted to. We could hire out more teachers, we can fix our subways. We can put a lot of people to work for that money if we wanted to.” But “that money” she’s talking about didn’t actually exist. She seemed to genuinely believe that by keeping the Amazon HQ out of her district and, therefore, not “giving” Amazon $3 billion, the state will now have an extra $3 billion available to provide all these services. But that’s not true. By keeping Amazon away, it will now have 27 billion fewer dollars to do all of these things. Achieving your goals requires an accurate understanding of how the world works, and by inaccurately framing “taking away less” as the literal equivalent of “actively giving,” leftists make it more difficult for themselves to achieve the goals they claim to seek. Anyway, those are just some Monday morning musings. It’s back to work for me – this SQL code will not write itself, much to my chagrin. Well said, Kevin. The AOC example drives home the point that framing can mislead even the framer. (0 COMMENTS)

When I complain that the Fed has seemed to abandon average inflation targeting (FAIT), people sometimes respond that the Fed doesn’t seem to interpret the new policy in the same way that I do. After all, the first letter in the acronym “FAIT” stand for flexible.My problem with this is that I cannot think of any reasonable interpretation of FAIT that is consistent with recent statements by Jerome Powell. Yes, the policy does not require an exact mathematical average for the inflation rate. But if the term “average” is to mean anything, it must mean that there are periods where you’d want to overshoot 2% to make up for past undershoots, and vice verse.  And a recent Dallas Fed paper by Enrique Martínez-García, Jarod Coulter and Valerie Grossman seems to confirm my assumption: By comparison, average inflation targeting means that policymakers would consider those deviations and can allow inflation to modestly and temporarily run above the target to make up for past shortfalls, or vice versa.  [Emphasis in original] So “vice versa” it is.  The policy is symmetric.  The term “average” really does mean something.  Still, I am haunted by nagging doubts that I have missed something.  Maybe FAIT is like one of those ancient mystery cults, where only a few are initiated into the secrets of the temple.  Perhaps the Fed refuses to spell out a clear definition for FAIT because they don’t want the public to know; they’d prefer that only top Fed officials understand how the regime is supposed to work.  In that case, any criticism of Fed policy can be easily deflected by Fed officials who insist that we outsiders just don’t understand the nuances of FAIT. Chicago Fed President Charles Evans is clearly an insider, one of the top officials at the Federal Reserve.  And he has a radically different view than Martínez-García, Coulter, and Grossman.  Here’s Evans: With flexible average inflation targeting (FAIT), the FOMC allows for greater discretion as they aim for their average goal of 2%. The window over which the average is taken is not specified yet. Furthermore FAIT is asymmetric: If the FOMC finds themselves undershooting for any extended period of time, they are prepared to overshoot to compensate, but without the same worries for combatting high inflation. Excessively high inflation in the past is not compensated by low inflation in the near future. The reason is that we do not know how to deal with low inflation because of the effective lower bound. There is a second asymmetry depending whether the shock comes from the supply or demand side. Now there’s no longer a vice versa.  The policy has gone from being symmetric to asymmetric. So what’s going on here? I suspect that Martínez-García, Coulter and Grossman were never initiated into the secrets of the temple.  Like me, they are looking at things from the outside.  They read the Fed’s new policy directive adopting average inflation targeting, and assumed that average meant average.  But if Evans is correct, then average doesn’t mean average.  (Perhaps the FTC should investigate the Fed for misleading advertising.)  Evans seems to be suggesting that the Fed adopted something closer to temporary price level targeting. In any case, it’s now pretty clear that whatever the Fed was trying to do, they adopted the wrong form of FAIT.  A serious commitment to undo the effects of inflation overshooting would have largely prevented the sort of excess inflation that we’ve recently experienced.  To be clear, I am not claiming that they need to commit to undoing 100% of excess inflation.  I agree with the “flexible” part of the mandate.  There’s no need to offset supply shocks.  But surely the Fed should offset at least the portion of the recent inflation overshoot that is due to excessive NGDP growth.  Alas, they don’t even seem to be willing to do that, which is a minimal requirement for “average” inflation targeting to have any coherent meaning at all. HT:  Jeff (0 COMMENTS)

Ever since her book The Entrepreneurial State, Mariana Mazzucato has been engaged in a “discursive battle”. A fight for the control of the meaning of words. Claiming that the big problem of big government was the bad press it was saddled with, she strove to redefine, for instance, the meaning of some key words: such as innovation. In her last article for Project Syndicate, Mazzucato reacts to the the annual letter to CEOs by BlackRock Chairman and President Larry Fink. In that letter, Fink offered an interpretation of “stakeholder capitalism”. His starting point is the following: At the foundation of capitalism is the process of constant reinvention – how companies must continually evolve as the world around them changes or risk being replaced by new competitors. The pandemic has turbocharged an evolution in the operating environment for virtually every company. It’s changing how people work and how consumers buy. It’s creating new businesses and destroying others. Most notably, it’s dramatically accelerating how technology is reshaping life and business. Innovative companies looking to adapt to this environment have easier access to capital to realize their visions than ever before. And the relationship between a company, its employees, and society is being redefined. COVID-19 has also deepened the erosion of trust in traditional institutions and exacerbated polarization in many Western societies. This polarization presents a host of new challenges for CEOs. Political activists, or the media, may politicize things your company does. They may hijack your brand to advance their own agendas. In this environment, facts themselves are frequently in dispute, but businesses have an opportunity to lead. Employees are increasingly looking to their employer as the most trusted, competent, and ethical source of information – more so than government, the media, and NGOs. Confronted by a reputational challenge which he sees as investing the whole of the business world, Fink expects corporations to lead a change. In part, his letter suggests that capitalist enterprises are the best venue for innovation, and many contemporary challenges (like decarbonization) are technological ones and hence should see corporations at the forefront. In part, his letter embraces the rhetoric of stockholder capitalism, emphasizing the need for partnership of businesses with politics and society at large. Now, as always with stakeholder capitalism, it is hard to distinguish what is simply a description of reality (it is unlikely for a corporation to achieve success if people are unhappy to work there) and what is actually a normative program. But Fink’s letter is a testimony to the power of the words that Mazzucato and many politically committed social scientists like her have crafted and pushed in the agenda. Larry Fink speaks their same language, literally. For Mazzucato, that is not quite enough: consider climate change. Fink celebrates progress in dollar terms, stating that sustainable investments have reached $4 trillion. Yet the aim should not just be to invest trillions more in sustainable development; rather, those trillions should be coordinated democratically, by stakeholders, to support ambitious missions like global decarbonization. A carbon-neutral economy is what would maximize the benefits for all stakeholders. For missions to motivate action, generate momentum, and inject purpose into the economy, the gap between stakeholders and shareholders must be closed. In practice, that means empowering stakeholders. Workers, citizens, trade unions, community groups, state institutions, and NGOs must have strong financial and political stakes in the capitalist economy’s operations. Such a paradigm shift begins with recognizing the inherently collective process by which value is created in the first place. Value is co-created by producers and consumers, workers and managers, inventors and administrators, and regulators and investors. It does not simply spring from the heads of heroic entrepreneurs, risk-taking venture capitalists, and corporate leaders. It is the result of organizational and institutional configurations that enable all these actors to work together. Here Mazzucato hints at her dream of going back to the labour theory of value. She thinks society should look back, look at who *actually* originated inventions that later on come to be of use in other products or services, and reward them properly. As Deirdre McCloskey and I point out in The Myth of the Entrepreneurial State, Mazzucato confuses economics with past accounting. But production decisions are forward looking. Such decisions are matters of expected marginal utility or marginal product and expected opportunity cost. Any other way of deciding what to pay for present inputs will result in inefficient use of the inputs and smaller production of the outputs. For a critic of intellectual property, Mazzucato seems to conceive rewards in an economy pretty much like a version of copyright which extends way back in time. Her final stab at Fink is worth reading: For all the attention it has received, Fink’s vision of stakeholder capitalism focuses far too narrowly on intra-organizational corporate governance. In failing to address the wider landscape of extra-organizational, institutional relations between different domains and sectors of society, Fink maintains the traditionally stark distinction between stakeholders and shareholders. In short, Fink focuses too much on private companies as agents of change — but they can be such only and insofar they are properly led from above, by government institutions. So, if companies prioritize shareholder value, they are greedy and putting the future of the world at risk. But if they claim they are thinking of stakeholder value, insofar as they are not ready to become mere instruments in a planner’s hands, they are actually not serious about stakeholder value: it is only putting lipstick on a pig. Surrendering the vocabulary, Mister Fink, is not enough. (0 COMMENTS)

Why do people eat too much even when they don’t want to? Why are there so many bad managers? And why might anti-vaxxers be useful? Luca Dellanna, author of The Control Heuristic, thinks the answers to all of these questions are in our heads, or rather in our basal ganglia. Dellanna talks to EconTalk’s Russ […] The post Luca Dellanna on Compulsion, Self-deception, and the Brain appeared first on Econlib.

I began blogging for EconLog in 2005.  I hadn’t even published my first book, but Liberty Fund took a chance on me and made me a regular blogger.  After seventeen years and thousands of blog posts, I’m supremely grateful to Liberty Fund, my fellow bloggers, and of course you, dear EconLog readers. Starting on March 1, however, I have accepted a position running an all-new blog, Bet On It, hosted by the Salem Center for Policy at the University of Texas.  I will be the chief blogger as well as the editor.  As you may know, I’ve spent about four months of Covid as a visiting scholar at the University of Texas.  It’s been a great home away from home, thanks to Executive Director Carlos Carvalho.  And since the Salem Center is energetically expanding, this was a natural move.  Part of the deal is that I’ll be continue to spend several weeks in Austin every year – and work with Salem to recruit other visiting scholars, hold public events, and much more. The upshot is that this will be my last week as an EconLog blogger.  I sincerely hope you all keep following EconLog, but I’m also hoping that you’ll add Bet on It to your regular reading.  The thousands of posts I’ve written for EconLog since 2005 will of course remain in the Archives.  And Liberty Fund and I plan to continue working together on other projects.  But February 28, I’ll post my last piece for EconLog.  Starting March 1, expect all of my new blog posts to appear on Bet On It. The format for Bet On It is still evolving.  Since I run the website, I will have full power to respond to your suggestions and requests.  If the blog is perfect on day 1, please let me know.  Otherwise, though, please let us know how to craft the look and functionality to your liking.  Dwarkesh Patel, a great and enthusiastic programmer, is helping me out – and there’s little he can’t do.  (Check out our podcast interview). When I joined EconLog in 2005, it really was a different era.  Though the War on Terror was ongoing, the world looked brighter to me. Intellectually, while the economics profession continued to be mired in dull-yet-technical dead ends, there was still a strong consensus against the biases I criticize in The Myth of the Rational Voter: anti-market bias, anti-foreign bias, make-work bias, and pessimistic bias.  Although the Survey and Americans and Economists on the Economy has never been redone, I have little doubt that less rational people are gradually taking over the profession.  Even correcting for my own pessimistic bias, more younger economists than ever really do seem like they never learned the economic way of thinking.  A shocking share of top research is mere causal inference with no economic reasoning to guide it.  And most new Ph.D.s are casually woke at heart.  They’re oblivious to economics’ multi-century war on Social Desirability Bias and demagoguery.  Earlier generations of left-leaning economists spent a lot of energy curtailing the left’s excesses.  By and large, the latest generation of left-leaning economist is now part of the left’s excesses. Politically, while the rationalist and libertarian ideals that I cherish were never close to dominant, the landscape still looked markedly better in 2005.  With the collapse of the Soviet bloc still recent, socialism remained beyond the pale where it belongs.  And at least in the U.S., free-market economics seemed to have a place at the table.  George W. Bush even called for quite radical deregulation of immigration, albeit with little persistence.  Putin did not yet seem like the dictator of Russia.  China still looked like it was liberalizing.  Globally, it was not yet obvious that after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, political progress was practically over.  I never thought the War on Terror would end successfully or even smoothly, but the rise of the ISIS and the return of the Taliban startled me.  And while I was not shocked by the Covid vaccine – much worse has happened before – I remain horrified by the reaction.  In 2005, I would have predicted a shutdown of two weeks before life returned to normal.  So far, I’m off by a factor of fifty. Despite economic and political decay, we have enjoyed continuing economic and technological progress.  But continuing economic and technological progress was just what I expected when EconLog started.  I’m grateful for what we got.  My optimism was on-target.  Yet even there, I can’t help but muse that if telework technologies had developed more slowly, the Covid moral panic would have ended long ago. The good news: By the power of selective non-conformism, you can live a good life even when your society and subculture are in decline.  Since 2005, I’ve focused ever more strongly on doing the kind of work that means the world to me.  I’ve written big books of big ideas.  I’ve spoken to audiences all over the world.  I’ve even published a successful graphic novel, with more to come.  And I’ve blogged the topics that matter to me, while steering clear of ephemera.  It was the path of selective non-conformism that brought me to spend so much Covid time in Texas, which in turn inspired my new project with UT’s Salem Center.  As I keep saying, self-help is like a vaccine.  It works if tried. Liberty Fund has treated me extremely well over the years.  Extremely well.  I’d especially like to thank my long-term co-blogger David Henderson, who joined in 2008, and webmaster Amy Willis.  What fine people!  It’s been my privilege to work with them, and with the whole EconLog team. Soon after I started blogging, Tyler Cowen joked, “You’re not really a blogger.”  His point: Unlike most of the competition, I wasn’t reacting to the latest news or whatever’s hot.  My goal as a blogger has always been to write think-pieces that stand the test of time.  I hope I’ve done that during my seventeen years at EconLog.  At my new blog, starting March 1, I plan to stay the course.  Bet on it! (5 COMMENTS)

I was talking to someone on the phone a few days ago and we got into a side discussion about masks. I told her that I hate wearing them. It was hard to tell her attitude. Then she told me that she had recently taken her 3-year-old grandson into a fast food restaurant in another state. When they got to the door, her grandson realized that he didn’t have his mask and he panicked. She reassured him that he could borrow one of hers. Then she told me that basically as long as he can remember, he’s had to wear a mask when going out. She said that he basically regards it as part of his wardrobe. That’s scary and tragic. How long will it take him to recover? And what has he missed in the meantime? (0 COMMENTS)

The Wall Street Journal reveals that the small risk of Covid-19 vaccines has translated into serious health consequences in 11 cases in 100,000 thousand vaccine doses. To give an idea of this order of magnitude, it is more than twice the homicide rate in America. Some people have died from the vaccine in the United States. In the U.S. and elsewhere, governments are preparing to pay statutory “compensation” to the victims or their survivors. (Jenny Strasburg, “Covid-19 Vaccines Were Deadly in Rare Cases. Governments Are Now Weighing Compensation,” Wall Street Journal, February 19, 2022.) Aren’t these costs low compared to the benefits of vaccination, as some cost-benefit analysis would arguably have shown (had governments done any such analysis)? By raising this question, one puts one finger on the basic problem of cost-benefit analysis is that it aims at calculating the benefits to some individuals compared with the costs to other individuals. The intellectual exercise would be innocuous, except for the false impression of making an accurate calculation, if the purpose were to inform each individual of his own risk. But even then, isn’t this what each individual does before making a decision: he weighs his own expected (ex ante) costs and benefits. It is argued that government economists can better calculate these future costs and benefits, but this is forgetting that they are largely subjective, dependent on individual circumstances, and unknowable by any external observer (see James Buchanan, Cost and Choice [1969] [Liberty Fund, 1998]). Cost-benefit calculations, then, can only be useful if the government intends to force the estimated lower costs on some individuals in order to confer some estimated higher benefits to other individuals. These ideas are not easy to grasp. (It took me several decades to realize their import.) They undermine a structural pillar of what has been the reigning political culture of the past century and a half—that the role of government is to help some individuals by imposing costs on others. An alternative approach in economic theory is not to “impose” anything except according to a rule that each and every individual would consent to. This was the approach of James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock in their seminal 1962 book, The Calculus of Consent; my anniversary review for Econlib tries to give an idea of the intellectual force of this argument. (Note that this approach does not necessarily justify a minimal state.) Perhaps I can illustrate the problem with own intuitive calculations regarding the Covid-19 vaccine. Given my preferences, my circumstances, and my probabilistic guesstimates, I determined that the benefit of a the vaccine was higher than its cost—for me. I also hypothesized that the principle of portfolio diversification must be a constant of the universe (like, say, π) and decided to mix a Pfizer booster, which I could choose at Walmart, with a previous two-dose Moderna, the only choice I had at the time under the government allocation system. I don’t pretend I can decide for any other adult, but I can certainly, and did, make similar recommendations to my friends and loved ones. The quote marks I put around “compensation” at the beginning of my post may now be easier to understand. A compensation must be accepted in a voluntary trade or transaction (even if ex ante and in a probabilistic context), or it is not a full compensation. The problem of weighing the benefits of some against the costs to others is related to attempts at comparing and adding up preferences across individuals. The opinion of the economic analyst or of the committee of bureaucrats writing the cost-benefit analysis is of no more scientific value than that of any Blue, Red, or Brown politician down the aisle. Consider the following illustrative question: Would the loss of one dollar by every American adult represent a higher or lower cost than the $250 million transferred to a single one chosen at random among them? And can the answer justify forcing the 250 million individuals pay $1 each in a government lottery ticket? It is true that in most Western countries, there was no legal obligation, sanctioned by legal punishments, to be vaccinated against Covid-19. The coercion, though, was more subtle and worked through several prohibitions and daily hurdles for unvaccinated individuals. We are quite far from benevolent advice or motherly nudging from disinterested politicians and wise bureaucrats; but that’s how Leviathan works. (0 COMMENTS)

There’s been a lot of push from both left and right for the US government to regulate “Big Tech.” On the right, for example, Betsy McCaughey, a former lieutenant governor of New York, proposes two remediesfor censorship by Big Tech. The first is “for Congress to regulate Big Tech like public utilities or common carriers, compelling them to serve all customers without viewpoint discrimination.” The second is for the Supreme Court to “limit Big Tech censorship.” On the left, Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) has a bill titled American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICO) to regulate large tech companies that she thinks suppress competition. And this is just a shallow dive into the regulatory waters. Both left and right have proposed other regulations of Big Tech. I’ve got another option: trust freedom to rein in Big Tech. Let other companies compete to provide services that some critics think Big Tech should provide. Will this sometimes happen slowly? Yes, although it will typically happen way more quickly than any government solution. The freedom solution, moreover, will avoid the unintended consequences that come about when government steps in to regulate. In this article, I’ll focus on the case against what McCaughey advocates. In a subsequent article, I’ll discuss the problems with the kinds of government interventions that Klobuchar and others advocate. These are the opening paragraphs of David R. Henderson, “Let Freedom Rein in Big Tech,” Defining Ideas, February 17, 2022. Another excerpt: In short, the objection to some of Big Tech’s behavior is sound. I don’t think of it as censorship because the term “censorship” has traditionally been used to refer to governments that threaten to use force to prevent people from expressing certain ideas. For example, the Federal Communications Commission, a US government agency, censors. YouTube, by contrast, does not use or threaten force. Instead, it disallows certain viewpoints from being expressed, even if the viewpoints are backed by evidence. That’s troubling and even disgusting, but it’s not censorship. Moreover, YouTube has the right to choose, and should have the right to choose, what content it carries. Another excerpt: Here’s another example of competition solving the problem of information suppression, this time by a major search engine. I had never considered using Microsoft’s Bing. Google has been my browser of choice for years. But recently I saw a talk on Zoom in which the speaker said he had been trying, using Google, to find a paper by a Chinese doctor that argued that the coronavirus resulted from a lab leak. He couldn’t find it using Google. He had heard of Bing. So he went to Bing and put in a few key words and, as he said, “Bing!” There it was. For an article I’m writing, I had been trying to find a quote from Washington state governor Jay Inslee in which he claimed seriously that he was the only person in Washington state who had the capability to save lives from COVID. Using key words, I had tried for almost an hour on Google to find the quote, but to no avail. So I went to Bing, entered a few key words, and then “Bing!” There it was. Read the whole thing. (0 COMMENTS)

Yesterday, a libertarian friend in Ottawa, Janet Bufton, posted an article on the truckers’ protest. It’s titled “Canada’s Freedom Convoy Is Undermining the Cause of Freedom.” She makes some of the points I made in my critique of the protestors closing down the Ambassador Bridge. But she goes into much more detail, probably because she lives in Ottawa, about some of the goings on. She has the advantage of local knowledge. Some of the goings on are not pretty. I recommend that you read her post. Here’s one excerpt: Meanwhile, truckers have taken to blaring their horns in shifts from early morning until late at night. They stopped for four days last week after a court injunction, only to resume again in defiance of the injunction. They’ve heckled pedestrians, harassed homeless shelters, encouraged supporters to overwhelm 911 lines, and closed downtown retail stores and restaurants. And, of course, there have been multiple border blockades, including one where some protesters were heavily armed. Janet argues that a group called Canada Unity planned the convoy even before PM Justin Trudeau imposed a vaccine mandate, which he had said in May 2021 he would never do (go to the 10:00 point in the video), on truckers. She seems to think that this makes the convoy suspect. That might be right. But there’s another way of thinking about it. Imagine truckers and others who really are genuine fans of freedom and are looking for a way to express it visibly. They hear about this convoy. They decide to participate. So their own sincerity is not at issue. A crucial question is “What percent of the protestors are genuine believers in freedom and what percent are people with a very different agenda?” Janet doesn’t address this. She ends by writing: Sticking up for the rights of protesters does not mean giving them a pass on their tactics or their delusions. The Freedom Convoy is actually hurting the cause of freedom. Valorizing it is a mistake. You should never give people a pass on their delusions. But you should give them a pass on their tactics if their tactics are peaceful. Much of what she described in her earlier paragraph I quoted may not be peaceful. Certainly, if they’re physically blocking people from going about their business, they’re not peaceful. That was my point in denouncing the protestors who closed the Ambassador Bridge. But I would bet that a lot of what the protestors are doing is peaceful. I would want more details and I think it’s important to judge people as individuals and not regard them as part of an amorphous group. I think that Janet understates the good effect the protestors have had already. She does give them some credit, writing: Convoy supporters might be right that Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba dropped restrictions as a result of the protests. Likewise, the premier of Saskatchewan has suggested strongly he was responding to the protest. That’s nothing to sneeze at. Those provinces’ populations, added together, are 18% of Canada’s population. But I think she undercounts. Quebec’s government has not only dropped its plan to tax people who are unvaccinated, but also, on February 8, announced easing of Covid restrictions by mid-March. While Quebec premier Francois Legault claims he was not influenced by the protests, that’s hard to believe, given the direction he was going in–taxing the unvaccinated–just a month earlier. Quebec accounts for another 23% of Canada’s population. That’s 41% of Canada’s population living under provincial governments that arguably have been influenced by the protests. Not bad for a few weeks’ work. Janet writes further: But in other provinces across Canada, pandemic measures are being rolled back in line with long-standing plans. Ontario eased some of its provisions before the first trucks even hit the road. Moreover, the province’s announcement this week that it will end its vaccination passport requirements on March 1 is broadly in line with reopening plans set out last fall. Maybe. We’ve seen a lot of “long-standing plans.” How about “2 weeks to flatten the curve?” Or how about mask mandates lifted in Californian and then reimposed? I would want to see more evidence for her confident claim. And notice the timing of the Ontario government’s announcement that it will lift its vaccination passport requirements. Should we really conclude that the protests had no effect on this announcement? Note that Ontario has 38% of Canada’s population. So now we’re up to 79% of Canadians living in provinces that the protests arguably influenced to drop restrictions. I think some readers of Janet’s piece have been uncharitable, by suggesting that she is not against Trudeau’s taking on emergency powers. She doesn’t spend many words on it, but I think her statement “This is all terrifying” puts her squarely on the side of the people who oppose this totalitarian measure. Janet says one thing that I don’t quite understand. She writes: The cure would be to persuade the protesters to abandon the alternate reality they have created for themselves amid a hothouse media environment steeped in conspiracy theories. They need to return to a shared reality with their fellow Canadians. No polity can function without some such common ground and common understanding of basic facts. Unfortunately, this hasn’t proven an easy problem to solve anywhere. I’m not sure that a polity can’t function without “a common understanding of basic facts.” Most people don’t understand the basics of gains from exchange. Most people don’t understand that Jeff Bezos’s wealth comes about largely from helping others and that those others, in total, gain more than he does. And yet our polity functions reasonably well most of the time. I think it would be wonderful to have a shared reality based on understanding of basic facts. But I’ll settle for a government not imposing its understanding of reality, to the point of requiring vaccines and masks, on others. Janet is pessimistic. She writes: Some U.S. commentators believe that if Canada simply dismantled its mandates and restrictions, the protesters would melt away. The problem is with her term “the protesters.” Some would melt away; some wouldn’t. How about trying it and seeing? And even if some protestors remain, the feds would be dealing with a smaller problem.     (0 COMMENTS)