I think a lot of libertarians used vaccine skepticism as an excuse not to pick a side.
*No vaccine skeptic ever stopped me from getting a vaccine.* The only people who stopped me from getting a vaccine were the DEM elected officials that gave it to 30 year old teachers who weren't teaching months before they allowed my sick 75 year old father to get it.
Libertarians should have strongly opposed vaccine mandates because even if this vaccine is safe, the breadth of medical interventions that the powers that be may advocate is not necessarily safe. You can see this with the trans stuff.
Since the vaccine didn't stop transmission there was no case to be made for mandates. We also found out that vaccination rates didn't do anything to get rid of NPIs, so that idea was a non starter too.
Finally mandates make approval of vaccines controversial. If everything not forbidden is mandatory, then there is an incentive to forbid things were one otherwise wouldn't care what others do.
What does the data reveal about the mortality risk of Covid? What does the data reveal about vaccine outcomes?
It seems to me the greatest obstacle to understanding is lack of agreement on what is accepted data. For the data I accept shows Covid is not a high risk disease and that the vaccine has little to no personal benefit and it yields a disastrous population impairment.
Government policy on Covid and the government and corporates policy on the jab has been disastrous. Only ignorance and pride - belief in the dogma - sustains a defense of these policies.
Can you elaborate on what constitutes a "kook" in regards to vaccine skepticism? I've found a number of libertarian, vaccine skeptical folks who are clearly more data driven than any of our public health mouthpieces. I defy anyone to read El Gato Malo' substack (or humbly, my own) and label us a kook. You may disagree with us, but there is nothing kooky about our analyses.
Rather than say "next pandemic" I would just say "next crisis". It's probably too soon to re-run the same script.
But that there will be another crisis within 10 years I'm confident of. And I do think the broad outline of government overreach, moral panic, and budget busting emergency spending will all be on the table again with a new set of justifications.
When that crisis comes do you want people like De Santis calling the shots or Gavin Newsome.
That's really the only question of relevance. We can't predict the crises, but we can predict if a default attitude towards freedom will be in play. Curtailing the power of the laptop class that did this too us is the #1 issue.
There's a lot about this post that I find unsatisfactory. Bryan posits two "camps," and says one is represented by Cowen and Tabarrok and the other by Klein, Magness, and Boudreaux. I think that those two sets of individuals can be used to distinguish two different character types or outlooks, but I think that Bryan's characterizations of those two character types are both highly unsatisfactory, even misleading, and in multiple ways.
A better title for the post: Covid Policy: Hindsight on the Reaction of Four of My GMU Econ Colleagues and Phil Magness.
COVID tyranny was what started me down the path to libertarianism from conservatism. I always had a distaste of government, but thought it was a necessary evil that did important things. COVID restrictions opened my eyes to the immense power of government to completely ruin lives in an instant though. What made my freedom being instantly revoked even worse though was the fact that I could see it was completely political in nature. You could take a cursory glance at COVID deaths per million data and see that NPIs didn't make any noticable difference at all. Even conceptually masks made no sense and there are numerous pre-COVID RCTs that showed they didn't work (which is why we were told they didn't work at the start).
When inflation started to happen I became interested in the truth about why, because obviously the MSM isn't truthful. I started reading about economics and found Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell. Since then I've probably read about 20 books, Basic Economics being the first. Once I found out that not all libertarians are purple haired weirdos screaming about normalizing hookers and heroin (cough, cough Reason) I was on board.
I agree with the tech freedom people as well, and I think vaccine skeptics are incorrect (although I see how they could easily be led to believe the things they do because of their anger at the NPI people). Any "libertarian" who supports lockdowns and forced masking isn't actually a libertarian. They are the same as a Normie from either party who vociferously pushes freedom for things they like and rationalizes why freedom for things they don't like are bad. In fact their "libertarianism" is just pure virtue signaling to show how wonderful and tolerant they are. I guess they're consistent in that at least while they virtue signal in their masks.
A lot of libertarians dropped the ball when it came to COVID. Many of us (including me) initially fell for the panic, and I am incredibly grateful to the contributors at AIER who helped me understand the errors in my thinking.
While leading libertarian thinkers tend to have a firm grasp on economics and philosophy, it seems very few have a good understanding of health and immunology. Gaining greater understanding of these subjects is what convinced me to go from pro-NPI to anti-NPI to “kook”. Understanding the subject and then hearing contradictions from the “experts” in government and academia only increased my skepticism of it all, and led me to value freedom more and trust government less.
I think libertarians didn't take a strong enough stand against moral panic.
My company implemented a number of COVID hysteria measures, some of which cost people their jobs. Once the moral panic subsided they reversed all of them, but many peoples lives were still permanately effected.
There seems to be an idea in libertarianism that "private entities" should be able to do whatever they want and not get judged. I think libertarians should just acknowledge that any institution with an HR department is de facto a government agency. They are functionally bound by the CDC guidance as any government department. I would have liked to have seen more pushback against this, even if merely moral, not just some blanket "they can do whatever they want".
What you got during the pandemic was essentially a purge of anyone who won't follow the rules, no matter how absurd. That isn't going to make society more libertarian.
What got rid of COVID NPIs was protests and elections.
Officials kept them in place until some external event made it politically untenable. The less subject to political pressure a person or institution was, the longer they kept it in place. Protests helped end the initial western lockdowns and most importantly China's lockdowns, and the elections in Nov 2021 basically sealed the deal on pandemic restrictions generally in the west (left leaning areas waited until Omicron was over in March to save face, but the second Youngkin got elected COVID in schools was on the way out).
Libertarians were out to lunch on this. Even where their opinions matched those of protestors or potentially helpful elected officials they were derisive. COVID protestors were seen as prole rubes unworthy of support and probably counter productive. And electoral politics....how drole. GMU is located in Virginia and basically every single libertarian issue (COVID, academic freedom, etc) was front and center in the Nov 2021 election and nobody had the balls to participate.
GMU libertarianism was ineffective because it focused on the one thing it want to focus on (which is the least costly personally for GMU academics), making blog posts and tweets and hoping that it convinces progressives to do what they want them to do. Insane progressives kept on being insane though, so this was pissing into the wind. COVID ended when outside forces (protestors, right wing voters) forced it to end.
And I know you guys are going to hate me for this, but COVID should have ended in 2021 with the vaccine and instead we got another year of NPIs because a DEM was president and wanted to prove that Fauci-ism was right the entire time unlike Drumpf, then lost the battle with Delta/Omicron.
Like in so many other issues, there was a clear socio-economic class split among libertarians on this issue. More affluent, highly educated CATO, Tabarrok, Cowen types were quite happy with lockdowns, vaccine mandates, vaccine passports, and basically with most other things pro-establishment on covid. These people were probably personally pretty scared of covid, and were minimally adversely affected by these policies (e.g. they didn't miss a paycheck, they had comfy homes and stable relationships, I'd venture to guess, etc.). The more "poorly educated", less affluent, libertarian unwashed masses were vehemently against all of these policies, in no small part because they were much more likely to be adversely affected by them (losing their jobs because of lockdowns or for not wanting to take the vax, their kids dropping out of school, their relatives succumbing to addiction, etc.).
Like in so many other issues, the unwashed rabble got this mostly right, the elites mostly wrong (including on the issue of the efficacy of the vaccines, which was wildly oversold, to put it mildly). It's almost like we're selecting our elites specifically for their lack of critical thinking & questioning skills.
I'm completely confused at why this was even a split in the first place. If you believe that paranoia hypochondriacs banned vaccines and tests for no reason, why allow them to ban social gatherings? Similarly, if you don't trust the state to mandate vaccines, you shouldn't trust them to ban them either. I guess the latter can still believe that a vaccine is not effective in some ways, but someone like that should still be ok with others choosing to take the vaccine for themselves.
I'm sympathetic to both camps. More so to the "freedom from the fight" camp after the vaccines than before. My biggest issue with them (the NPI skeptics) though is that few will admit to the tradeoff they are making. You are one of the few exceptions Bryan. I know it's not good PR to say "Yes, we may have a few hundred thousand more deaths, but full freedom is still better and worth it.", but it would be the truth at least. What I instead saw is massively underestimating the risk of Covid constantly until it was no longer tenable (people insisting on death rates of <0.1% when already more than that had died; also insisting every time that no future Covid waves would come).
This camp was just full of motivated reasoning like that. There is no way to actually do "Focused Protection". The only way that would actually work is creating full on bubbles (like the NBA did) for all nursing homes. That would not have been done. So it was again not admitting to the trade-off.
Your predictions for the next pandemic seem to assume it will be about the same level of infectiousness/deadliness as Covid. What makes you so optimistic? The next pandemic could well have a lethality rate of over 25% (like if bird flu becomes human to human transmissible) and then the personal freedom position will just be silly.
I think a lot of libertarians used vaccine skepticism as an excuse not to pick a side.
*No vaccine skeptic ever stopped me from getting a vaccine.* The only people who stopped me from getting a vaccine were the DEM elected officials that gave it to 30 year old teachers who weren't teaching months before they allowed my sick 75 year old father to get it.
Libertarians should have strongly opposed vaccine mandates because even if this vaccine is safe, the breadth of medical interventions that the powers that be may advocate is not necessarily safe. You can see this with the trans stuff.
Since the vaccine didn't stop transmission there was no case to be made for mandates. We also found out that vaccination rates didn't do anything to get rid of NPIs, so that idea was a non starter too.
Finally mandates make approval of vaccines controversial. If everything not forbidden is mandatory, then there is an incentive to forbid things were one otherwise wouldn't care what others do.
What does the data reveal about the mortality risk of Covid? What does the data reveal about vaccine outcomes?
It seems to me the greatest obstacle to understanding is lack of agreement on what is accepted data. For the data I accept shows Covid is not a high risk disease and that the vaccine has little to no personal benefit and it yields a disastrous population impairment.
Government policy on Covid and the government and corporates policy on the jab has been disastrous. Only ignorance and pride - belief in the dogma - sustains a defense of these policies.
Can you elaborate on what constitutes a "kook" in regards to vaccine skepticism? I've found a number of libertarian, vaccine skeptical folks who are clearly more data driven than any of our public health mouthpieces. I defy anyone to read El Gato Malo' substack (or humbly, my own) and label us a kook. You may disagree with us, but there is nothing kooky about our analyses.
Rather than say "next pandemic" I would just say "next crisis". It's probably too soon to re-run the same script.
But that there will be another crisis within 10 years I'm confident of. And I do think the broad outline of government overreach, moral panic, and budget busting emergency spending will all be on the table again with a new set of justifications.
When that crisis comes do you want people like De Santis calling the shots or Gavin Newsome.
That's really the only question of relevance. We can't predict the crises, but we can predict if a default attitude towards freedom will be in play. Curtailing the power of the laptop class that did this too us is the #1 issue.
There's a lot about this post that I find unsatisfactory. Bryan posits two "camps," and says one is represented by Cowen and Tabarrok and the other by Klein, Magness, and Boudreaux. I think that those two sets of individuals can be used to distinguish two different character types or outlooks, but I think that Bryan's characterizations of those two character types are both highly unsatisfactory, even misleading, and in multiple ways.
A better title for the post: Covid Policy: Hindsight on the Reaction of Four of My GMU Econ Colleagues and Phil Magness.
COVID tyranny was what started me down the path to libertarianism from conservatism. I always had a distaste of government, but thought it was a necessary evil that did important things. COVID restrictions opened my eyes to the immense power of government to completely ruin lives in an instant though. What made my freedom being instantly revoked even worse though was the fact that I could see it was completely political in nature. You could take a cursory glance at COVID deaths per million data and see that NPIs didn't make any noticable difference at all. Even conceptually masks made no sense and there are numerous pre-COVID RCTs that showed they didn't work (which is why we were told they didn't work at the start).
When inflation started to happen I became interested in the truth about why, because obviously the MSM isn't truthful. I started reading about economics and found Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell. Since then I've probably read about 20 books, Basic Economics being the first. Once I found out that not all libertarians are purple haired weirdos screaming about normalizing hookers and heroin (cough, cough Reason) I was on board.
I agree with the tech freedom people as well, and I think vaccine skeptics are incorrect (although I see how they could easily be led to believe the things they do because of their anger at the NPI people). Any "libertarian" who supports lockdowns and forced masking isn't actually a libertarian. They are the same as a Normie from either party who vociferously pushes freedom for things they like and rationalizes why freedom for things they don't like are bad. In fact their "libertarianism" is just pure virtue signaling to show how wonderful and tolerant they are. I guess they're consistent in that at least while they virtue signal in their masks.
A lot of libertarians dropped the ball when it came to COVID. Many of us (including me) initially fell for the panic, and I am incredibly grateful to the contributors at AIER who helped me understand the errors in my thinking.
While leading libertarian thinkers tend to have a firm grasp on economics and philosophy, it seems very few have a good understanding of health and immunology. Gaining greater understanding of these subjects is what convinced me to go from pro-NPI to anti-NPI to “kook”. Understanding the subject and then hearing contradictions from the “experts” in government and academia only increased my skepticism of it all, and led me to value freedom more and trust government less.
I think libertarians didn't take a strong enough stand against moral panic.
My company implemented a number of COVID hysteria measures, some of which cost people their jobs. Once the moral panic subsided they reversed all of them, but many peoples lives were still permanately effected.
There seems to be an idea in libertarianism that "private entities" should be able to do whatever they want and not get judged. I think libertarians should just acknowledge that any institution with an HR department is de facto a government agency. They are functionally bound by the CDC guidance as any government department. I would have liked to have seen more pushback against this, even if merely moral, not just some blanket "they can do whatever they want".
What you got during the pandemic was essentially a purge of anyone who won't follow the rules, no matter how absurd. That isn't going to make society more libertarian.
What got rid of COVID NPIs was protests and elections.
Officials kept them in place until some external event made it politically untenable. The less subject to political pressure a person or institution was, the longer they kept it in place. Protests helped end the initial western lockdowns and most importantly China's lockdowns, and the elections in Nov 2021 basically sealed the deal on pandemic restrictions generally in the west (left leaning areas waited until Omicron was over in March to save face, but the second Youngkin got elected COVID in schools was on the way out).
Libertarians were out to lunch on this. Even where their opinions matched those of protestors or potentially helpful elected officials they were derisive. COVID protestors were seen as prole rubes unworthy of support and probably counter productive. And electoral politics....how drole. GMU is located in Virginia and basically every single libertarian issue (COVID, academic freedom, etc) was front and center in the Nov 2021 election and nobody had the balls to participate.
GMU libertarianism was ineffective because it focused on the one thing it want to focus on (which is the least costly personally for GMU academics), making blog posts and tweets and hoping that it convinces progressives to do what they want them to do. Insane progressives kept on being insane though, so this was pissing into the wind. COVID ended when outside forces (protestors, right wing voters) forced it to end.
And I know you guys are going to hate me for this, but COVID should have ended in 2021 with the vaccine and instead we got another year of NPIs because a DEM was president and wanted to prove that Fauci-ism was right the entire time unlike Drumpf, then lost the battle with Delta/Omicron.
Like in so many other issues, there was a clear socio-economic class split among libertarians on this issue. More affluent, highly educated CATO, Tabarrok, Cowen types were quite happy with lockdowns, vaccine mandates, vaccine passports, and basically with most other things pro-establishment on covid. These people were probably personally pretty scared of covid, and were minimally adversely affected by these policies (e.g. they didn't miss a paycheck, they had comfy homes and stable relationships, I'd venture to guess, etc.). The more "poorly educated", less affluent, libertarian unwashed masses were vehemently against all of these policies, in no small part because they were much more likely to be adversely affected by them (losing their jobs because of lockdowns or for not wanting to take the vax, their kids dropping out of school, their relatives succumbing to addiction, etc.).
Like in so many other issues, the unwashed rabble got this mostly right, the elites mostly wrong (including on the issue of the efficacy of the vaccines, which was wildly oversold, to put it mildly). It's almost like we're selecting our elites specifically for their lack of critical thinking & questioning skills.
I'm completely confused at why this was even a split in the first place. If you believe that paranoia hypochondriacs banned vaccines and tests for no reason, why allow them to ban social gatherings? Similarly, if you don't trust the state to mandate vaccines, you shouldn't trust them to ban them either. I guess the latter can still believe that a vaccine is not effective in some ways, but someone like that should still be ok with others choosing to take the vaccine for themselves.
I have posted
Call for Affirmers of the Safety of the Covid Vaccines
here:
https://dklein780.medium.com/call-for-affirmers-of-covid-injections-safety-92768f324e06
The contention that a mask mandate is a "horror" undermines all your good points. <sigh>
I'm sympathetic to both camps. More so to the "freedom from the fight" camp after the vaccines than before. My biggest issue with them (the NPI skeptics) though is that few will admit to the tradeoff they are making. You are one of the few exceptions Bryan. I know it's not good PR to say "Yes, we may have a few hundred thousand more deaths, but full freedom is still better and worth it.", but it would be the truth at least. What I instead saw is massively underestimating the risk of Covid constantly until it was no longer tenable (people insisting on death rates of <0.1% when already more than that had died; also insisting every time that no future Covid waves would come).
This camp was just full of motivated reasoning like that. There is no way to actually do "Focused Protection". The only way that would actually work is creating full on bubbles (like the NBA did) for all nursing homes. That would not have been done. So it was again not admitting to the trade-off.
Your predictions for the next pandemic seem to assume it will be about the same level of infectiousness/deadliness as Covid. What makes you so optimistic? The next pandemic could well have a lethality rate of over 25% (like if bird flu becomes human to human transmissible) and then the personal freedom position will just be silly.
As an aside, I called for compensation for the takings of people's labor caused by the lockdowns: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3567003