On the Versailles Palace, transformed into a museum in the 1830s by the “King-Citizen” Louis Philippe, stands the inscription À toutes les gloires de la France (“To All the Glories of France”). Many rulers in history have illustrated, some more savagely than others, a truth that American conservatives seem to ignore: “national greatness” is a propaganda device for subjecting individuals to the reigning power. On Law & Liberty, our sister website, James Patterson described a “conflict of vision within conservatism” that transpired from a conference held by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. Although some conferees defended libertarianism and classical liberalism, it appears that most stood for a statist, interventionist, and European sort of conservatism. Patterson reports: The insurgent “National Conservatives” like Josh Hammer and Julius Krein made a splash. … They insisted that conservatives must let go of their anxiety over crony capitalism because, they believe, genuinely free competitive enterprise is a fantasy. Since a level playing field is not possible, America should protect its firms from foreign competition. They viewed the idea that this might interfere with international gains from trade as irrelevant—it is simply a cost of national greatness. “Happy peoples have no history,” says a French proverb (les peuples heureux n’ont pas d’histoire). Individuals are not forced to sacrifice their own happiness for a history of national greatness. They can just live in peace and prosperity. National greatness entails individual misery because ordinary individuals have to pay, in taxes, submission, and blood, the cost of the rulers’ glory and of the privileges granted to their supporting clienteles. Leviathan charges a high cost for some to feel national greatness emotions. Some individuals benefit at the cost of other individuals. National greatness is not a public good to which each individual contributes in proportion to his benefits; it is one form of organized discrimination. If, on the contrary, all individuals are equally free, many of them will bring “greatness” to the country; others will be great in their own personal way. The objection that an individual cannot be great without his country “as a whole” being great brings us to President Barack Obama’s saying that “you did not build this.” It is for sure easier for an individual chosen at random to be great in a great country if that means a country that is great in individual liberty—where, for example, individuals are free to trade with whoever is willing and able to trade with them—than under a tyranny. But such is not the meaning of “national greatness”; otherwise, it would be called “generalized individual greatness” or free pursuit of happiness. In this view, the ideal would be a country whose national greatness consists in having none. Of course, the absence of imposed national greatness is a necessary but not sufficient condition for individual liberty. It was in this spirit, I suppose, that Adam Smith wrote: Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things. All governments which thwart this natural course, which force things into another channel, or which endeavour to arrest the progress of society at a particular point, are unnatural, and to support themselves are obliged to be oppressive and tyrannical. (0 COMMENTS)

Once it was The Shadow radio show; now it’s the podcast Serial. Is every old storytelling medium new again? Frank Rose, author of The Sea We Swim In, concedes that some things remain sacred–from the power of a great hook to the hope that great stories never end. But he also thinks the Internet has […] The post Frank Rose on Internet Narratives appeared first on Econlib.

Ryan Warner: We often ask listeners to submit questions and for the last few months, the majority have asked why you won’t impose a statewide mask mandate. We’ve recently seen a surge in cases and a shortage of hospital beds. Is there anything that would prompt you to return to a statewide order? Gov. Jared Polis: Our top goal is always to follow the science, and there was a time when there was no vaccine, and masks were all we had and we needed to wear them. The truth is we now have highly effective vaccines that work far better than masks. If you wear a mask, it does decrease your risk of getting COVID, and that’s a good thing to do indoors around others, but if you get COVID and you are still unvaccinated, the case is just as bad as if you were not wearing a mask. Everybody had more than enough opportunity to get vaccinated. Hopefully it’s been at your pharmacy, your grocery store, a bus near you, [or at] big events. At this point, if you haven’t been vaccinated, it’s really your own darn fault. Warner: It has been about a year since the first doses of vaccine arrived in Colorado. You see the arrival of the vaccine as the end of mask mandates statewide. That’s your position? Gov. Polis: We see it as the end of the medical emergency. Frankly, people who want to be protected [have gotten vaccinated]. Those who get sick, it’s almost entirely their own darn fault. I don’t want to say that nobody [will get the virus if they’re] vaccinated, but it’s very rare. Just to put it in perspective, of the about 1400 people hospitalized, less than 200 (or 16 percent) are vaccinated. And many of them are older or have other conditions. Eighty-four percent of the people in our hospitals are unvaccinated, and they absolutely had every chance to get vaccinated. We’re talking, as you indicated, a year since the vaccines [became available]; everybody has had the chance to get vaccinated. And at this point, I think it’s almost like they made a deliberate decision not to get vaccinated. I still encourage everybody who hasn’t been vaccinated to get protected. And for those who are, make sure to get that booster after six months. The data shows it’s important and very likely even more so with this omicron variant. This is from Michelle P. Fulcher, “Interview: Gov. Polis leaves mask mandates to local officials, says the state shouldn’t ‘tell people what to wear’” CPR News, December 10, 2021. I remember in the late spring of 2020 when Democratic Governor Polis opened up Colorado to about the extent Republican Governor Brian Kemp opened up Georgia. The media attacked Kemp but hardly said a critical word about Polis. The whole interview is worth reading. (0 COMMENTS)

At least on one issue. A hearing-aid disruption is under way, with inexpensive hearing aids heading to drugstores and other retailers sometime next year. But if you’re experiencing hearing loss, doctors and hearing experts say it isn’t wise to just wait for them to arrive. The Food and Drug Administration is expected in the next few months to finalize a rule it proposed in October allowing people to buy hearing aids without getting a medical exam first. The rule would take effect 60 days after it’s published, following a public comment period that ends next month. This is from Julie Jargon, “Over-the-Counter Hearing Ads are Coming. Here’s How to Get Ready,” Wall Street Journal, December 11, 2021. People would be allowed to buy something based on their own judgment? Watch for chaos to follow. Jargon goes on to say that this could reduce the price of hearing aids from thousands to hundreds of dollars. It’s not clear from her article why this is so. For that, you need to go to her link to the FDA news release. Here’s one excerpt from that release: Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued a landmark proposal intended to improve access to and reduce the cost of hearing aid technology for millions of Americans. The agency proposed a rule to establish a new category of over-the-counter (OTC) hearing aids. When finalized, the rule would allow hearing aids within this category to be sold directly to consumers in stores or online without a medical exam or a fitting by an audiologist. The proposed rule is designed to help increase competition in the market while also ensuring the safety and effectiveness of OTC and prescription hearing aids. Today’s action follows President Biden’s July Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy, which called for the FDA to take steps to allow hearing aids to be sold over the counter. This effort also builds on the Biden-Harris Administration’s goal of expanding access to high-quality health care and lowering medical care costs for the American public. Score one for Biden. I still wonder, though, why this would lead to such a substantial decline in price. Google “hearing aids” and you find lots of choices already available now for just hundreds of dollars. This one at Amazon is priced at under $100. When I post on FDA restrictions on people’s freedom to choose their own health care, I often get pushback from defenders of FDA’s tight regulations. I’m wondering if they would say that the FDA should have had those restrictions on hearing aids as long as they did and if they would say that even if the FDA restrictions should be eliminated, the rule should take 60 days to take effect. HT2 regular reader Mark Barbieri.   (0 COMMENTS)

  Michael Oakeshott was born 120 years ago today. I posted last year on the 30th anniversary of his death, providing some links hopefully useful for those who are not familiar with his work. The question asked by the title of that post (“Michael Oakeshott: A Hero for Whom?”) is perhaps all the more pertinent these days, with “conservatism” becoming “nationalism” and often furiously in favor of bigger government (see, on that, this report on a recent ISI conference by James Patterson. A very good piece but quite a depressing read, at least to me). For this anniversary, I would like to point to a true jewel among Oakeshott’s works, though a not particularly well known one. I am referring to the selection from his Notebooks published in 2014, edited and with a beautiful Introduction by Luke O’Sullivan. Oakeshott himself compared his notebooks to “a sort of Zibaldone: a written chaos”. The selection O’Sullivan edited and published is quite that; it emphasizes Oakeshott’s literary sensibility and presents his notes on thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle, but also Montaigne and Schopenhauer. That would be quite something on its own merit. But Oakeshott also wrote a large number of aphorisms, which are, most of them, simply magnificent. The topics range from the nature of politics to love (and women), from the “balance” between the bohemian and the bourgeois, to the character of literary men. They are, evidently, notes taken during a life of reflections, scintillating thoughts which flashed in his mind and he put on paper. Some of them are little sentences you could spend hours in pondering. Others are formidable bon mots. Some give you a glimpse into his wider thinking. Others just make you crack up laughing. Here are a few (in no particular order). If you want to make yourself a nice Christmas present, buy the book and dig into it, from time to time. Curious as a concierge. The awful spectacle of the contempt of small minds for those a little smaller! Human fulfillment is not another state, following upon the conduct of life, as wages follow work. To treat each day as it were our life and not a prologue. The bourgeois holds the world together for the poet. Power makes men stupid. It corrupts because it intoxicates. Fear his its own father and a most prolific self-propagator. The real grievances of mankind are incurable; politics consists in manufacturing curable grievances. Revolutions design to demolish cathedrals, but like earthquakes, they are apt also to fracture the main drain. To have a head so full of ideas that there is no room for sense. Perhaps the greatest principle in politics is that people love to be frightened. (0 COMMENTS)

Matt Yglesias has a new post that explains his views on monetary policy. Overall, Yglesias’s views are to the left of mine.  For instance, he favors the aggressive use of fiscal policy, whereas I am skeptical. But on monetary policy our views align in quite a few areas. Readers of my two blogs are familiar with arguments similar to the following:1. No “wait and see”: Now there are lags here, but they are lags in the sense that financial investments (the price of copper going up) happen faster than physical investments (because copper is more expensive now, the copper mines increase production). But the proximate mechanism is essentially instantaneous. If your goal in an inflationary environment is to reduce expectations of future nominal growth, then you can tell more or less immediately whether or not that happened by looking at financial markets. And critically, while doing things can and does influence expectations, so does talking about doing things. 2. Beyond hawks and doves: Another implication of my view is that when you have clearly overshot, it’s time to pivot hard. This is why after over a decade of being one of the most dovish figures in the macroeconomic debate, I’m now very much on the hawkish side. Economy-wide nominal spending and nominal income have fully recovered to their pre-pandemic trends. Whatever economic problems we have today are not problems of inadequate demand 3. Do “whatever it takes”: What we need is for Powell and company to say clearly, and repeatedly, that they are proud and excited that nominal income has fully recovered but that since it has fully recovered, they want it to grow more slowly in the future than it did this year. . . . What will they do to accomplish that? Well, they will accelerate tapering. They will do an interest rate hike or two. If necessary, they will do three or however many are needed to hit their target. They could do 17! They won’t, of course, but they could. And the point is that if people believe they will do whatever it takes, then it won’t actually take much doing — the markets do it themselves. I strongly encourage people to read Yglesias’s entire substack post.  PS.  Of course expectations must be about something.  Keynesians would argue that they are about the future path of short-term interest rates (relative to the time-varying natural interest rate if you are a sophisticated Keynesian.)  I say they are about future expected changes in the supply and demand for base money. (0 COMMENTS)

I’ve been going to physical therapy for my left hip and leg and realized that pretty much everything I do there I can do at home if I get just a few more relatively cheap pieces of equipment. I’ll save time and money and I’ll save my insurance company even more money. Of course I don’t value a dollar saved for the insurance company at a dollar, but I value it more than zero. I care about others, after all, whether they be the insurance company or other beneficiaries. So I went on the web and looked for 2 kettle ball weights. Sure enough I found a good deal on Amazon, especially when you consider that Amazon eats the shipping cost. That got me wondering: “What don’t they have?” I’m sure there are many things: cars and houses, for example. But a huge percent (over 50?) of consumer goods seem to be available on Amazon. Somehow that reminded me of the following joke that either Mr. Peel in middle school or Mr. Jasper in high school told the class. A guy goes into a restaurant and sees a big sign: “If we can’t provide the food item you want, we’ll give you a check for $500.” Wanting to make the money, he orders an elephant ear sandwich. He waits and waits, and finally the manager comes to him with a check for $500. “You didn’t have elephant ears, did you?” asks the customer triumphantly. “Oh, no sir, that wasn’t the problem,” answers the manager. “We’re well stocked with elephant ears. It’s just that we ran out of the right size bread this morning.” I love Amazon and I love free markets. (0 COMMENTS)

Pundits often criticize the US government for overreacting to Covid, especially the excessive mandates for masks, vaccines, etc. I share their concern. But I also wonder where some of these people have been. On a list of regulatory overreaction, these mandates don’t even make my “top 100”. For decades, overreaction to tiny safety risks has been getting worse, with no end in sight.Have you ever wondered why we must wear those annoying seat belts on full size airliners? Here’s a list of fatalities on US airline flights:Notice only 2 deaths in the past 11 years.  And even that overstates the risk of flying modern full size airliners, because (AFAIK) almost all the deaths over the past 20 years occurred in smaller commuter planes, with fewer than 5 people dying on full size airliners.  So why the seat belts?  We don’t wear seat belts on buses, trains, boats, etc.  Why full size airliners, which almost never crash?  And if they were to crash, are seat belts actually likely to save your life?  (Yes, they might help you when the plane hits an big air pocket, but you aren’t even required to wear a seatbelt in mid-flight.) BTW, People sometimes say the human mind cannot visualize astronomical distances.  But the distance from the Earth to the Sun (93 million miles) is small compared to the number of safe passenger flights each year (nearly a billion).  Airline safety is far, far beyond human comprehension.  Analogies such as lightning strikes no longer apply: A long-term average of 41 people die from lightning strikes each year in the United States, but that number has been continuing to trend downward thanks in part to increased awareness, safety campaigns, and growing accessibility of weather forecasts and warnings. A 10-year average is closer to 20 people killed by lightning. As I got older, I saw one freedom after another taken away from me due to our hysterical overreaction to risk.  In the 1980s, a group of us used to swim after playing volleyball, but then the pool was closed to us because it was too dangerous to allow 20 healthy young adults to swim in a small pool for an hour in broad daylight.  A bar at our volleyball site was closed due to panic over potential lawsuits from people drinking too much and getting in an accident.   I’m glad I got to live at least a portion of my life before the safety fanatics took over America; I can’t even imagine what it’s like to be young today.  I could cite dozens of similar examples. I don’t disagree with those who point to excessive fear of Covid, but why is anyone surprised?  I’m surprised the regulations aren’t far worse.  Given our history of overreaction, I would have expected us to emulate Australia.  Unlike airline crashes, Covid has killed roughly 800,000 Americans, despite all sorts of social distancing, of which nearly 200,000 are less than 65-years old.  Yes, we are overreacting, but it’s not like with airline crashes where the risk is entirely imaginary.  Covid really is somewhat dangerous; not in absolute terms, but at least relative to the almost absurd safety of modern America. Personally, I find the TSA to be 10 times more annoying than all the Covid regulations combined.  Why aren’t senators speaking out on that issue?  And as far as personal freedom, what about the 400,000 people in prison for violating drug laws?  How many are in prison for violating mask and vaccine mandates? The disproportionate outrage over Covid regulations combined with almost total silence in dozens of other areas of wildly excessive safety regulation makes me wonder whether there is some sort of hidden agenda here. PS.  Admittedly, for small businesses the lockdowns were pretty big issue, which did not affect me personally. In this post I focus on mask and vaccine mandates. (0 COMMENTS)

My Hoover colleague and friend Alvin Rabushka writes: An example of the authority of local control is Sara Cody, the health officer and public health director of Santa Clara County.  She dictated Stanford’s response to COVID, a “shelter-in-place” lockdown.  The evidence Atlas assembled and presented contradicted her instructions to Santa Clara County residents, firms, and institutions.  For this reason and others, 85 percent of the members of the Stanford Faculty Senate in late November 2020 voted to condemn him, only the second instance in Stanford history.  The intervention of the former provost, worried about academic freedom, persuaded the Senate against  recommending that Stanford discipline Atlas.  Only two of his Hoover Institution colleagues publicly defended him. In private communication, Alvin informed me that I was not one of the two. I was surprised. I thought I had. I certainly did so with my doctor and with my friends. And I did write this, which was an implicit public defense of Scott Atlas, but it was not even an implicit defense of his academic freedom. So, on the record, I do defend Scott Atlas’s academic freedom. This defense is independent of any advice he gave to President Trump. But from what I have read, his advice was generally quite good. It’s easy to defend the academic freedom of someone that you 90+ percent agree with, as is the case with Scott. But even if I had totally disagreed with Scott’s advice, I think the Stanford Faculty Senate was totally out of line. (0 COMMENTS)

Heather Mac Donald’s 2011 piece on Wikipedia’s gender bias only makes Wikipedia as an afterthought.  But it should have been the heart of the article.  Highlights: Most observers blame media gender imbalances on “gatekeeper biases,” but the actual bias goes the other way: The idea that these gender imbalances represent gatekeeper bias was demonstrably false even before the Wiki reality check. Any female writer or speaker who is not painfully aware of the many instances in which she has been included in a forum because of her sex is self-deluded. Far from being indifferent—much less hostile—to female representation, every remotely mainstream organization today assiduously seeks to include as many females as possible in its ranks. If gatekeeper bias explains gender imbalances, then getting rid of the gatekeeper should get rid of the bias.  In fact, it makes the imbalance bigger: Famously, Wikipedia has no gatekeepers. Anyone can write or edit an entry, either anonymously or under his or her own name. All that is required is a zeal for knowledge and accuracy. (The desire to share knowledge and the drive to correct errors are the top motivations of contributors, the Wikimedia study found.) Wikipedia provides a naturally occurring control group to test the theory that females’ low participation rate in various public forums is the result of exclusion. It turns out that without gatekeepers, women’s representation drops—which makes sense, given the constant quota-izing by gatekeepers on women’s behalf. The barely 13-percent-female participation to Wikipedia is less than the 15-percent-female participation in “public thought-leadership forums” which the OpEd Project has calculated (and which the Times cites), let alone the 27-percent-female participation rate VIDA calculated at TheNew Yorker. More: Rather than using barrier-free Wikipedia as the benchmark for measuring discrimination in the by-invitation-only world, the Times uses the invitation-only-world as the benchmark for Wikipedia. Since we already know that the low female participation rate in gatekeepered forums is the result of bias, the low female participation rate in Wikipedia must also be the result of bias. And here’s a succinct statement of what ought to be the default position: The most straightforward explanation for the differing rates of participation in Wikipedia—and the one that conforms to everyday experience—is that, on average, males and females have different interests and preferred ways of spending their free time. These differences include, on average, the orientation toward highly “fact-based realms” as well as the drive to acquire and expand abstract knowledge… While there are some females who track baseball statistics with as much zeal as males, they are in the minority. Subjects of disproportionately female interest, such as celebrity fashion flubs, have not generated the same bank of shared knowledge as sports records. Wikipedia articles will, of course, reflect this disparity. An inspiring ending I’ll share with my daughter when she’s older: Wikipedia’s gender imbalance is a non-problem in search of a misguided solution. It would do a lot less damage to equality to acknowledge that men and women are not identical in their interests than to suggest that “freedom, openness, [and] egalitarian ideas” are inconsistent with female self-realization.   (0 COMMENTS)