In my previous Defining Ideas article, “An Unnecessary ‘Stimulus’ ” (March 5), I laid out why the about-to-be-passed $1.9 trillion federal spending bill was unnecessary. I also pointed to a few major spending items in the budget that were clearly unjustified, such as the unneeded bailout of state and local governments. But I didn’t point out that the bill will also cause harm in the long run. The harm will be of two kinds. The first is in the realm of ideas: many people will learn the wrong lessons from the spending. The second is in the realm of policy and the effects of policies: dependence on government and irresponsibility will increase, and economic freedom and long-run economic growth will fall. This is from David R. Henderson, “The ‘Stimulus’ And The Damage Yet to Come,” Defining Ideas, March 18, 2021. At a distance, the $1.9 trillion measure is awful; up close, it’s ugly. Another segment: A major piece of the spending bill is a $3,600 annual tax credit for each child under age six and a $3,000 tax credit for children ages six to seventeen. The credit is, in tax speak, “refundable.” Normally one can get a refund only of something one has paid. But the term “refundable” is now widely used to describe a tax credit that goes to someone who otherwise would have a tax liability that is less than the credit. For some people, these tax credits will amount to a huge increase in their income. And the tax credit is granted regardless of whether the recipients work. Thus, the measure undoes, to some extent, the highly successful welfare reform of the mid-1990s, passed by a Republican Congress and signed into law by Democratic President Bill Clinton. Economist Scott Winship of the American Enterprise Institute points out that a non-working mother with three children could get $10,800 a year, as well as food stamps and Medicaid. That’s not a lot, but it would reduce her incentive to get married and/or to get a job. Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent, in an op-ed titled “The GOP scam is getting worse—for Republican voters. A new study shows how,” March 8, 2021, finds puzzling the fact that all Republicans in Congress voted against the bill even though the tax credit would help a lot of low-income people in the states they represent. I don’t find it puzzling at all. In fact, given how dismal the performance of Republicans in Congress has been this century, it’s slightly heartening. Why would so many Republicans vote against a bill that helps so many of their constituents? Could it be that they actually believe some of their own rhetoric, the rhetoric about keeping people off welfare and not having them depend so much on the federal government? Maybe. Read the whole thing.     (0 COMMENTS)

An interesting working paper was published this month by economists Rik Chakraborti (Christopher Newport University) and Gavin Roberts (Weber State University), “How Price-Gouging Regulation Undermined COVID-19 Mitigation: Evidence of Unintended Consequences.” These price controls created shortages, which, according to economic theory, would have been more severe in the 42 states that already had price-gouging laws on the books or (inexplicably for an economist) rushed to legislate them after Covid hit. The federal Defense Production Act, invoked by Donald Trump, added more biting price controls on pandemic-related supplies (such as personal protection equipment) but is not considered in the Chakraborti-Roberts paper. The authors used a database of cellphone-tracked mobility to calculate “average exposure of smartphones to each other within commercial venues.” Comparing states with and without price-gouging laws between January 22 and May 3, 2020, the econometric study confirmed that these laws were associated with more physical visits to commercial venues (especially from individuals in the lowest income quartile), as people were frantically looking for sanitizer and other goods in shortage. This increased shopping is likely to have increased contacts and infections. After controlling for state population density (which can have a compounding effect on infection), lockdown orders, and other factors, the econometric estimates suggest that price-gouging laws explain at least 25% of the early-April, first-wave Covid deaths in states with such laws. We’ll have to see if these results are confirmed by other studies but they make economic sense. The regulatory welfare state may not be as nice as we thought, at least in its consequences. As for intentions, an old saying in many languages suggests that the road to hell is paved with them. (0 COMMENTS)

Back in July or August, I was walking along Alvarado Street minding my own business. Suddenly, someone with a Monterey city government worker logo on his shirt came up to me and told me I had to wear a mask. I asked him to show me in the regulations where it said that. The sign above admits of no exceptions but the regulatory document is pages long. A local lawyer friend only a few days earlier had explained to me that one wasn’t legally required to wear a mask if one were exercising. I was on my daily quick walk. So he pulled out the regulations to show me that there wasn’t such an exception. I walked over to look over his shoulder so I could show him the exception. He told me he was uncomfortable with my being so close without a mask. That’s fair, I thought, so I donned my mask. Neither Bill (his name) nor I could find the exception that my lawyer friend had told me about. For that reason, I wore my mask for the rest of my walk. But when I got back to my office and got on line, I did find a 6-foot exception but not the exercise exception. I printed out the regs and started carrying them with me on my daily walk. A couple of days later, I was starting out on my walk with no other pedestrians nearby when I saw a car with the Monterey city government logo drive by and turn the corner on the one-way street I had just crossed. I thought it might be Bill, the guy who had stopped me a few days earlier, but I couldn’t tell because he had had his mask on when he was walking. I figured I was safe because he was turning down a one-way street. Not wanting another confrontation, I ignored the fact that he was shouting out his window at me as he turned the corner, but I put on my mask just in case. Then something amazing happened. Even though I couldn’t see him because it was a blind corner, I heard his car back up. He backed up all the way the wrong way on a one-way street and then turned to follow me in the road. He lowered his window to tell me that he had checked the regulations on line after having stopped me and that there was no exercise exception. I waved and thanked him. But notice what happened. Bill thought that informing me of the absence of the exercise exception was so important that it was reasonable for him to risk backing up the wrong way when a car easily could have come around the corner and rear-ended him. This was a microcosm of what’s so wrong with the regulatory mindset that so many bureaucrats bring to the Covid issue. Don’t worry about causing an accident because it’s so important to tell this pedestrian (me) what he had already told me a few days earlier: that there was no exercise exception to the Covid regulations. (0 COMMENTS)

As the Wall Street Journal reports, “Danone SA’s Chief Executive and Chairman Emmanuel Faber has stepped down from the yogurt maker after a clash with investors, marking a rare victory for activist funds in France’s rigid corporate landscape.” This is an interesting piece of news, for two different reasons: First of all, this is happening in France. CEOs and managers are entrenched all around the world, but all the more so in France, where the ranks of the ruling class are more close-knit than in most places. Second, by ousting Monsieur Faber, those activist investors have actually signaled their lack of satisfaction with Danone’s performance under his tenure. Yet Monsieur Faber was a champion of “stakeholder capitalism,” and the press is seeing his ouster as a dispute between champions of stakeholder capitalism and a few nostalgic for shareholder capitalism. The fact that the latter simply exist in a world in which corporate social responsibility, sustainability, and stakeholder capitalism dominate the public discourse, is in a sense surprising. Or it could simply be that, given Monsieur Faber’s public profile, the press has unjustly described his critics as enemies of stakeholder capitalism, as a way to take sides with the CEO against the shareholders. The New York Times writes: Danone, which reported $28 billion in sales in its latest fiscal year, was the first public company to adopt the French legal framework of “Entreprise à Mission,” which allows companies to take greater consideration of social and environmental issues in their business model. Some 99 percent of shareholders, but not Artisan Partners, approved the move in June last year. The turmoil raises the question whether business models that take all stakeholders into account can survive resistance from activist investors focused primarily on shareholder returns. Danone said in a statement announcing the management changes that it “believes in the necessity” of combining “high economic performance” with Danone’s “unique model of a purpose-driven company.” This is an interesting way of framing the issue: “whether business models that take all stakeholders into account can survive resistance from activist investors focused primarily on shareholder returns”. Let’s try another version: whether public insistence over the need for a company to pursue goals other than profits isn’t a way for managers to be less transparent and accountable to their shareholders. I have long thought that most of the stakeholder capitalism rhetoric was, whatever its left-leaning nuances, mostly conducive to further empowering managers against shareholders. The fact that you’re busy saving the world is a good excuse for a disappointing stock performance. But for a market economy to work properly, we do need a market in property rights, and we do need shareholders unwilling to drink the managers’ Kool-Aid. Let’s see how things go with Danone. The fact that such a corporate dispute is happening in France, as I said above, makes it all the more interesting. (0 COMMENTS)

This Yahoo article made me smile: And so simply put, the Fed does not believe any pricing pressures in the economy will warrant a change in its interest rate policy for the next three years. To help explain this thinking, Fed Chair Jay Powell cited dinner norms in his press conference on Wednesday afternoon. “There very likely will be a step-up in inflation as March and April of last year drop out of the 12-month window, because they were very low inflation numbers,” Powell said. “Those will be a fairly significant pop in inflation, but those will wear off quickly because [of the way] the numbers are calculated.” “Past that,” Powell added, “as the economy re-opens, people will start spending more. You can only go out to dinner once per night, but a lot of people can go out to dinner. And they’re not doing that now, they’re not going to restaurants, they’re not going to theaters…and travel, and hotels, that part of the economy is really not functioning at full capacity.” (Emphasis ours.) And while the Twitter commentariat had fun with Powell’s exact phrasing — apparently the kind of person who watches the entirety of a Fed press conference is also a multiple-dinner enthusiast — the point the Fed chair makes is economically sound. I’m actually not sure what point Powell is making.  Is it a point about aggregate demand (which can rise at trillions of percent per year, as we saw in Zimbabwe), or aggregate supply, which is limited by labor, capital, and technology? Yahoo continues: The anticipated increase in growth, inflation, and a recovery in the labor market is all part of a one-time recovery story in the U.S. economy. A demand surge against stressed supply chains or understaffed restaurants and bars that results in higher prices this year will not last. The dinner is a metaphor. No one thinks the economy will grow at 6% for years to come. No one thinks the 7 million or 8 million jobs added back to the economy this year will be repeated next year. And Powell does not think any inflation pressures that result from this unlocking of activity will re-set the current inflation regime. This is the Keynesian fallacy on steroids—the idea that inflation is caused by fast RGDP growth.  In fact, it is precisely because economies can’t grow at 6% forever that inflation is a threat if NGDP grows too fast.  I don’t currently fear high inflation, but not because of the reluctance of people to eat two dinners.  In 2008, Zimbabweans often lacked even one dinner.  Rather, I don’t currently fear high inflation because I expect the Fed to limit growth in aggregate demand to a path consistent with 2% long run PCE inflation. Inflation is caused by too much money chasing too few goods—NGDP growth minus RGDP growth. (0 COMMENTS)

A commenter directed me to a Noah Smith post that begins as follows: One of the most important questions in macroeconomics is one that economists have curiously chosen not to study. That question is: “How much can the government safely borrow?” In my view, this is the wrong question.  The right question is: How much should the government borrow? The term “safely” is quite vague.  Safe from what?  From default?  From hyperinflation?  From future tax rates that are punishingly high? In contrast, we have a great deal of research on the optimal level of public borrowing.  In a 1979 JPE paper, Robert Barro argues that the budget deficit should fluctuate in such a way as the minimize the long run deadweight cost of taxation.  Here is the abstract: A public debt theory is constructed in which the Ricardian invariance theorem is valid as a first-order proposition but where the dependence of excess burden on the timing of taxation implies an optimal time path of debt issue. A central proposition is that deficits are varied in order to maintain expected constancy in tax rates. This behavior implies a positive effect on debt issue of temporary increases in government spending (as in wartime) a countercyclical response of debt to temporary income movements, and a one-to-one effect of expected inflation on nominal debt growth. Debt issue would be invariant with the outstanding debt-income ratio and, except for a minor effect, with the level of government spending. Hypotheses are tested on U.S. data since World War 1. Results are basically in accord with the theory. It also turns out that a small set of explanatory variables can account for the principal movements in interest-bearing federal debt since the 1920s. Can we safely borrow as much as we are currently borrowing?  I’d say yes.  Should we be borrowing as much as we are currently borrowing?  I’d say no.  After all, I don’t think anyone in their right mind expects a “constancy in tax rates” in the coming decades.  Tax rates are going to increase. PS.  If you don’t believe that tax rates are set to increase, consider today’s news: House Republicans voted to allow their members to request dedicated-spending projects, known as earmarks, following that same move by Democrats, in a positive sign for President Joe Biden’s hopes for a bipartisan infrastructure bill. So remind me, which one is the party that favors small government? (0 COMMENTS)

Working on my taxes recently reminded me of a fun discussion I had with the late Stephen Williams, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. (He’s pictured above.) I never met him and we mainly corresponded by email. After I told him that in December 2017 I had doubled my usual charitable contribution to the Institute for Justice so that I could get the tax deduction one last time (due to the 2017 tax cut law), we went back and forth. Here’s the email thread with Steven in box quotes: Last chance for taking deduction because of increase in the standard deduction/exemption? Steve   Yes on both. My state and local tax deduction is limited to $10K, our mortgage balance is so low that our annual mortgage interest is less than $3K, and my normal charitable deductions are around $2K. So I don’t come close to $24K. Best, D. So here’s the big question on the tax-elasticity of donations:  Will you maintain your historic level?  (Of course one swallow doesn’t make a summer, or one donor a supply curve.) Steve Dear Steve, Hey, I thought I was talking to a judge, not a literate economist. 🙂 That IS the question, isn’t it. I’m not sure of the answer. 2019 will tell. One little difference I’ve noted already: In 2018 I’ve given small amounts (I think $50 in each case) to 2 go fund me sites (one a woman who is a friend of a friend of a friend facing cancer with few financial resources and one a state employee in Montana who quit his job rather than cooperate with ICE in turning in workers). I probably would have given to neither of those causes but instead would have looked around for a tax-deductible charity that mimicked, as close as possible, the same ends. Not worrying about the tax consequences felt strangely liberating. Best, David I especially like your last sentence! Steve As it turns out, I was back a little higher in 2019 than in my normal pre-2017 charitable contributions. I said time would tell. Well, 2020 shouted. Going through our charitable that can be deducted, I found a little over $3,000. But my wife and I each gave between $3,000 and $4,000 to various people who suffered hardship because of the lockdowns. And yes, it was strangely liberating to do it with no thought of tax consequences.     (0 COMMENTS)

Now here’s the story of how Social Desirability Bias has haunted my life. The two earliest centers of Social Desirability Bias in my life were Beckford Elementary and Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic church.  In school, they told us an endless stream of absurdities – things like, “We’re all going to be great at X!,” “We all take great pride in our school!,” “No one works harder than our teachers,” and so on.  I don’t think it bothered me at first.  But even in kindergarten, I couldn’t help but notice that not everyone was great at everything.  By the time I was in third grade, I knew there were plenty of students who didn’t take pride in the school, and knew of several notoriously lazy teachers. In catechism, similarly, our Catholic instructors talked a lot about how “We all love each other” even though standard cruel childhood behavior was much in evidence.  I noticed the disconnect almost immediately.  Once I had my first communion in third grade, I attended weekly Sunday mass, and heard the priests talk at length about “Devoting our lives wholly to God,” “Loving everyone,” “Turning the other cheek,” and “Taking everything you own and giving it to the poor.”  Normally, of course, the priests were exhorting us to repent and heed this advice, but they never pointed out that zero parishioners – themselves included – literally complied with any of these exhortations. As I grew older, I became ever more cynical about school and church.  Nobel Junior High School was full of apathetic students, with a noticeable presence of stoners (or at least stoner-wannabees).  But the teachers and administrators talked as if we were all eagerly learning together.  The P.E. teachers were a notable exception; they openly sneered at the trouble-makers who refused to dress for gym, and freely berated poor athletes like myself – not just for lack of effort, but lack of talent as well.  Church, similarly, was agonizingly boring; even now, Morrissey’s “Everyday is Like Sunday” resonates with me.  And I obviously wasn’t alone; sitting in the pews, I saw bored children and adults in all directions.  But everyone from the priest to my mom spoke as if we were all sharing spiritual ecstasy.  And no one acknowledged the cavernous gap between the Sermon on the Mount and the behavior of every person we knew. By high school, I was loudly and aggressively pointing out the sugar-coated lies of educational and religious authorities.  If the principal droned, “I am sure that all Highlanders will try their very best on this week’s standardized exams” over the P.A., I couldn’t wait to sneer, “And I’m sure that the vast majority of Highlanders will barely try at all!”  If the priest sanctimoniously announced, “In this coming week we will devote our thoughts entirely to Christ,” I couldn’t wait to scoff to my mom, “More like devote our thoughts entirely to watching t.v.”  My friends tended to find my remarks amusing but repetitive.  My mom didn’t like them one bit, but she didn’t punish me as long as I sullenly accompanied her to church.  By now, I called myself a “cynic.” At the time, I was an aspiring English professor, or possibly novelist.  While fantasy was my go-to genre, I also loved literature that candidly described the world as it really was, instead of sugarcoating.  Works like Huckleberry Finn and Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar come to mind.  It was only in 11th-grade, however, that I heard of authors who were… gasp… atheists.  And the name I kept hearing whispered was… Friedrich Nietzsche.  At the library, I discovered a dog-eared yet strangely beautiful edition of Thus Spake Zarathustra; this very translation, if I’m not mistaken. Zarathustra was a revelation.  On so many topics, Nietzsche poetically scoffed at crowd-pleasing nonsense.  I loved it – and antagonized friends and family by incessantly quoting it.  A century earlier, Nietzsche had declared war on SDB, without knowing the name.  When he said, “I love the great despisers, because they are the great adorers, and arrows of longing for the other shore,” I gushed, “He’s talking about me!” Nietzsche on religion: “On mine honour, my friend,” answered Zarathustra, “there is nothing of all that whereof thou speakest: there is no devil and no hell. Thy soul will be dead even sooner than thy body: fear, therefore, nothing any more!” Nietzsche on democracy: A state? What is that? Well! open now your ears unto me, for now will I say unto you my word concerning the death of peoples. A state, is called the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly lieth it also; and this lie creepeth from its mouth: “I, the state, am the people.” Nietzsche on government generally: But the state lieth in all languages of good and evil; and whatever it saith it lieth; and whatever it hath it hath stolen. Nietzsche on his own followers: Ye venerate me; but what if your veneration should some day collapse? Take heed lest a statue crush you! Ye say, ye believe in Zarathustra? But of what account is Zarathustra! Ye are my believers: but of what account are all believers! Ye had not yet sought yourselves: then did ye find me. So do all believers; therefore all belief is of so little account. In hindsight, I freely admit, Nietzsche was also playing fast and loose with the truth.  To call him a “philosopher” is a misnomer; he barely offered arguments and made minimal effort to anticipate or respond to thoughtful criticism.  Nietzsche was a great poet, but a poet nonetheless.  Still, his odes against SDB spoke to me; a brilliant, famous man saw the same disconnect between popular platitudes and harsh reality that I did. Later that year, I was excited to hear about another atheist author who had only died a few years earlier.  Her name was Ayn Rand, and the first piece of hers I ever read was Francisco d’Anconia’s speech on money.  It started off with a critique of Christian ethics: “So you think that money is the root of all evil?” said Francisco d’Anconia. “Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil? […] “Or did you say it’s the love of money that’s the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It’s the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money–and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it.” At root, though, d’Anconia’s speech is a flamboyant attack on Social Desirability Bias itself.  The self-appointed champions of the down-trodden are power-hungry would-be tyrants. “Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another–their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.” My teachers’ heroes were left-wing politicians like FDR.  My priests’ heroes were Christian zealots like St. Paul.  Rand rolled her eye at both – and said that her heroes were businesspeople. “To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money — and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man’s mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being — the self-made man–the American industrialist. Within a year, I read almost every word she wrote.  Nietzsche was long-forgotten.  Rand defied SDB on virtually every issue – and I loved her for it.  My lingering worry was that she was economically confused.  Could laissez-faire capitalism actually work in practice? To resolve these doubts, I started study economics.  I began with the Rand-approved Austrians, then moved on to mainstream neoclassical economics and behavioral economics.  And within each of these intellectual traditions, I discovered novel defiance of Social Desirability Bias. Austrians broadly shared Rand’s commitment to laissez-faire capitalism.  Mainstream economics, in contrast, helped me see many of Rand’s inadequacies and errors.  But carefully interpreted, even left-wing interpretations of mainstream economic theory damn the status quo as a parade of counter-productive and grossly suboptimal policies.  Neoclassical economics’ slogan that “Actions speak louder than words” is an intellectual vaccine against SDB.  And while social scientists often use behavioral economics to intellectually retrofit standard SDB rationales for government intervention, you can easily use the same framework to criticize government intervention itself.  And of course public choice theory, which imputes properly cynical motivations to politicians, is another sharp stake in the heart of SDB.  That’s right, you can’t trust politicians to use power for the good of society; instead, you can count on politicians to use power to get more power. What public choice failed to say loudly and clearly is that voters’ SDB is the key ingredient that makes democracy so inefficient.  SDB drives a wedge between public policy and ugly truths about trade-offs and incentives.  SDB is what makes people prefer evil controlling politicians to pragmatic live-and-let-live businesspeople.  This is basically what I said in my first book, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies, though I was still unfamiliar with the psych research and terminology of SDB.  With 20/20 hindsight, however, I can say that all of my books revolve around the rejecting of specific expressions of SDB – as well as the whole underlying mentality. Take my second book, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids.  While twin and adoption research affirms the power heredity over upbringing, that doesn’t sound good.  Neither does economic reasoning about the relationship between parental effort and optimal family size.  SDB says nonsense like, “Kids can do anything they set their minds to!” and “Just follow your heart.” The Case Against Education, published in 2018, was my first book to explicitly use SDB to explain the global dominance of education subsidies and the intellectual dominance of the human capital model.  Writing it brought me back to elementary school, when I first noticed the chasm between official school rhetoric and actual school experience.  Teachers, parents, and politicians all speak as if kids are learning useful skills from dawn to dusk.  The actual evidence, in contrast, confirms that education is mostly signaling.  As I often say, education is not so much job training as a passport to the real job training, which happens on the job. My last book, Open Borders, challenges SDB more directly.  Most pro-immigration “arguments” focus on emotionally-charged vignettes about particular immigrants.  Instead of actually responding to criticism about the broader social effects of immigration, they offer bittersweet biographies of immigrants.  I have nothing against such biographies, but what do they really show about optimal immigration policy?  Next to nothing.  Open Borders, in contrast, focuses almost entirely on arguments. While writing these books, I’ve also been raising four kids.  And I’m proud to say that I’ve successfully raised them without SDB.  When my kids ask me questions, however uncomfortable, I either tell them the unvarnished truth or shrug, “I’ll tell you when you’re older.”  I love without lies, and as a result my kids trust me and distrust society.  As well they should. (0 COMMENTS)

Logical impossibilities make rational discourse impossible. A and non-A cannot both be true. Everybody cannot have an income higher than the median or the average. Nobody can consume if nobody produces (including do-it-yourself). Everybody cannot consume more if everybody produces less. You can’t be inclusive without admitting the non-inclusive in your inclusive set. And so on. There also exist praxeological impossibilities which make any rational discourse about society impossible. I take “praxeology” to mean the logic of human action in relation to individual incentives. For example, you cannot consume something that you want but cannot produce yourself, except if somebody else is motivated to produce it for you through exchange or out of benevolence. Another example of praxeological impossibility—this one relevant to the current predicaments of a certain American governor: If anybody accused of “inappropriate behavior” by somebody must immediately resign, it would be impossible for anybody to hold a “position” for any predetermined length of time longer than the time it takes to formulate an accusation. The reason is that anybody who wants somebody to resign would only have to accuse him of inappropriate behavior. (On the other hand, of course, if charges of real assault, as opposed to the chameleonic “inappropriate behavior,” were not investigated and, if revealed founded, prosecuted, potential criminals would have incentives incompatible with a free and peaceful society.) (0 COMMENTS)

Millions of people in dozens of countries have received the AstraZeneca Covid vaccine with few reports of ill effects, and its prior testing in tens of thousands of people found it to be safe. But recently, blood clots and abnormal bleeding in a small number of vaccine recipients in European countries have cast doubt on its safety, although no causative link has been found between the patients’ conditions and the vaccine. The reports have prompted more than a dozen countries to either partly or fully suspend the vaccine’s use while the cases are investigated. Most of the nations said they were doing so as a precaution until leading health agencies could review the cases. This is from Denise Grady and Rebecca Robbins, “Should You Be Concerned About Blood Clots, Bleeding and the AZ-Vaccine?,” New York Times, March 15, 2021. The countries that have paused include Germany, Italy, France, Spain, Denmark, Ireland, Norway, the Netherlands, and Iceland. This makes no sense, but it is, unfortunately, not so unusual for governments to substitute their own risk assessments for those of their sheep citizens. There’s such an obvious solution: have the governments of those countries warn people that there might be blood clots, tell them the data, and leave them free to choose. I guarantee that millions of Europeans would be willing to take the small risk of blood clots and go ahead and get vaccinated. Oh and, by the way, my solution applies to the United States, whose government is even worse: the Food and Drug Administration has not yet allowed people to take the AstraZeneca vaccine. Economist Thomas Sowell is famous for saying “There are no solutions. There are only tradeoffs.” I don’t agree. I’ve just given a solution, one that lets people make their own tradeoffs. (0 COMMENTS)