Free-market purists err in that they disregard (or, at least, discount) the importance of factors that both they and the market have a hard time factoring into their equations. Even relatively unadulterated free-marketers recognize the problem of externalities and the tragedy of the commons. We should arguably go a little farther than that and recognize that a community may want to do something for completely non-economic reasons (like morality) and that has a real economic cost.
Even in that case, though, decision-makers have to acknowledge that the free-market calculations help them understand what the cost really is.
Looking at the Pay Equity Act in Canada (of which, Rhode Island unfortunately has a version), Isaac Teo gives a good explanation of how this principle relates to the idea of forcing companies to prove that they pay men and women equivalently. Economist Matthew Lau points out that, even at the most basic level, this creates disincentive to hire women. If you’ve got women in your workforce, you face a constant need to prove you’re not paying them less. That’s a cost with no offsetting benefit, which means that the policy creates pressure not to hire women.
For the classic explanation of this sort of policy, however, Teo turns to Milton Friedman:
Friedman responded that “the actual effect of requiring pay for equal work will be to harm women.”
He explained that “if women’s skills are higher than men’s in a particular job or are recognized to be higher, the law does no good, because then they will be able to compete away [anyway] and can get the same income.”
And “if their skills are less for whatever reason … and you say the only way you are able to hire them is by paying the same wage, then you are denying them the only weapon they have to fight with,” he said, referring to the weapon of competition.
Such laws also make it easier and cheaper for employers who are sexist to discriminate against women, Friedman added.
“If you say to them, you have to pay the same wage no matter whether you hire women or men, and here is Mr. sexist pig—it doesn’t cost him anything to hire men instead of women,” he said, noting that what you actually want is “to make it costly to him to exercise his prejudice.”
“When you try to get equal-pay-for-equal-work laws, what you are doing is reducing to zero the cost imposed on people who are discriminating for irrelevant reasons,” said Friedman.
That last point is worth unpacking a bit. If Mr. Sexist Businessman refuses to hire women, then his competitor can hire women who are as talented as the sexist’s male employees, but at a lower price, because that’s the market rate. This gives the non-sexist a competitive advantage, and the sexist will go out of business or find he has no choice but to hire women (or give the company’s board a reason to get rid of the sexist executive). If the government forces the non-sexist company to pay women the same as men, then there’s no competitive advantage to hiring women, and women have no tool to make themselves more attractive as employees.
The fundamental question, then, is whether the idea that an employer can pay women less is so abhorrent that it’s worth making women’s professional position worse, on average, in order to forbid it. That’s a tough case to make.
Featured image by Kraken Images on Unsplash.
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Writing for Accuracy in Media, I note how similarly NowThis (an online video news source with deep Democrat ties) frames its climate-change alarmism to Biden’s vaccine mandate language on the same day:
What makes this different from the typical cynical exploitation of disaster by climate alarmists is that NowThis released its video on the very same day Biden announced his vaccine mandate. According to his announcement, mandates are necessary “to combat those blocking public health.” Vaccine refusal “has cost all of us.”
The same elements are present in both cases, insisting that the government must take action to protect Americans from bad actors whose behavior threatens public health and the economy. Biden says: “The evidence is clear. Climate change poses an existential threat to our lives, to our economy.” Meanwhile, he’s insisting his COVID plan “protects our economy and will make our kids safer.”
This is a very important point to keep in mind as Americans come to conclusions about government’s response to COVID-19: Whatever you tolerate in order to battle back COVID, you’ll certainly find the powerful pressing further in the future, often in ways you don’t anticipate.
The issue is never really the issue. Power is the issue. The progression that progressives pursue plugs topics into the machine, whether the pandemic, the climate, racial discord, or tax policy. As different as the issues may be, your relationship with government is the common theme.
Featured image by Luca Signorelli on Wikipedia.
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Periodically, I’ll come across a headline from Dr. Andrew Bostom, who has been a prominent contrary voice in Rhode Island going after the diktats of the public health establishment. We’re on the same side, generally, and I often agree with his overarching points, but every time I look into his arguments, I find he’s seems to be misrepresenting something. So, for example:
… July, 2021 SARS-CoV-2 (covid-19) infection data collected by the Rhode Island Department of Health, with presentation of the findings by both vaccination, and prior infection status, provide independent validation of these NNT/NNH results (4,5). While 30% of these total (n=2127) new SARS-CoV-2 infections occurred among persons fully covid-19 vaccinated (639/2127), only 3.4% of those with a prior infection, regardless of vaccination status, were infected in July (73/2127). Fully vaccinating those with a prior covid-19 infection did not lower this percentage at all (22/639=3.4% fully vaccinated; 51/1488=3.4% not fully vaccinated).
These statements do not accurately reflect the numbers he presents. It is not true that “3.4% of those with a prior infection, regardless of vaccination status, were infected in July” because his denominator is wrong. 2,127 is not the number of people with prior infection, but the number of people infected in July total. Likewise, as far as I can tell, the fact that his ratios produce 3.4% for both the vaccinated and unvaccinated is an entirely meaningless coincidence. All it means is that 3.4% of vaccinated people who were infected in July had previously been infected, and 3.4% of unvaccinated people who were infected in July had previously been infected. This might be interesting but for the fact that breaking people up by vaccination, on one hand, and previous infection, on the other, does not produce equally sized groups.
That said, in making this error, Bostom dramatically understates the protection that previous infection provides. I’d need more-detailed data to fine tune this, but roughly speaking, only 0.048% of all people who had been infected with COVID-19 by the beginning of the month caught COVID again in July. This compares with 0.108% of all people who had been vaccinated, which is in keeping with various findings recently reported that natural immunity is better than vaccinated immunity.*
It’s important to note, however, that vaccination improves outcomes across the board. Very roughly, these numbers suggest that being vaccinated cuts your risk in about half whether you’ve had COVID before or not. Unvaccinated people who caught COVID for the first time in July were 0.16% of all people who had not yet caught it, while vaccinated COVID-virgins were 0.07%. Looking at those who had already had COVID and caught it again in July, the percentages are 0.034% unvaccinated and 0.014%.
The effect gets more pronounced when you look at people in the hospital. Of all people who had not yet been infected with COVID, 0.007% were not vaccinated and wound up in the hospital with COVID in July. The percentage for those who had been vaccinated was 0.002%, so less than a third. Of all people who had previously been infected, the percentages are 0.008% and 0.001%. So, again, vaccination improves outcomes.
This holds true if we change the denominator to people who caught COVID in July. Based on these numbers, being vaccinated makes it much less likely you’ll end up in the hospital if you do catch COVID, whether or not you’ve had it before. Of particular note, almost one out of every four unvaccinated people who had already had COVID and caught it again in July was hospitalized. If they’d been vaccinated, it was less than one in 10. In short, no matter your situation, being vaccinated makes it less likely you’ll test positive for COVID, and if you do test positive, it makes it less likely you’ll find yourself in the hospital.**
Finally, turning to the worst outcome, we find that only six people died while testing positive for COVID in July, and they were all unvaccinated people who had not had COVID before and were over 30.
While making decisions about your own health, though, remember that these numbers remain small. If you’ve had COVID before, if you’ve been vaccinated, or if you’re young, the possibility that you’ll have a severe experience with COVID in any given month are miniscule. (And, frankly, the odds are small for most people anyway.) This is why at the very least, any government, employer, or other organization considering a vaccine mandate should also allow proof of natural immunity, and also why we should be leaving young children alone.
Bostom’s point does remain valid, though, that the vaccines have risks, which should make mandates even less acceptable. However, I’m not confident that his specific numbers are truly relevant to the decision for three reasons.
First, I can’t confirm his numbers from the study that he cites for vaccine risks, although it’s definitely possible I’m simply missing something. He claims that “the proportion reporting one moderate to severe symptom was higher in the previous SARS-CoV-2 infected group (56% v 47%),” but these numbers aren’t anywhere I can find, so it’s not clear what they really signify. (Indeed, it’s hard to see how they can reconcile with the percentages shown in Figure I.)
Second, his calculation of the number needed to treat people with the vaccine is based on any positive test, which isn’t really the number we should care about. We know going into vaccination that there might be some side effect. The question is how well it protects against outcomes from the virus that are worse.
And third, his mixing and matching of studies to measure the benefits of vaccines against the harms comes with complications. The study of vaccine side effects, for example, comes from the United Kingdom and specifically states that the mRNA vaccines (Pfizer and Moderna) produced more side effects, but fewer serious side effects than the alternatives. This is relevant to the study out of Israel because nearly everybody there received mRNA.
* A key number we don’t have is how many people were both vaccinated and previously infected. If people who had been previously infected were much more likely to be vaccinated, too, then these numbers would equalize. Intuitively, that seems unlikely, but it does possibly have some effect.
** Important reminder: These numbers are for people who test positive while in the hospital, whether or not they’re there because of COVID. It’s possible, therefore, some other variable (like obesity) is playing a role.
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The story of Ray DeMonia is floating around social media. The short version is that the Alabama man had a heart attack, but it took so long for his family to find a hospital with a cardiac ICU bed (because they were all occupied by people who hadn’t gotten the COVID vaccine) that he died.
An NPR story clarifies that this was the explanation his family wrote into his obituary. What’s remarkable is that this was left to the very end of a relatively long news article:
A Cullman Regional Medical Center spokesperson, who declined to give specifics of DeMonia’s case citing privacy concerns, confirmed to NPR that DeMonia was transferred from CRMC, but said the reason was that he required “a higher level of specialized care not available” at the hospital.
Wait for facts, folks. The lost credibility of public health officials and vax advocates is hurting the cause of vaccination.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- McKee’s $5 million ed contract
- Silva’s $53,000 parting gift
- An ultimatum to front-line workers
- Elorza’s strange demand for a non-police major
- Langevin’s proof of abortion belief
- WJAR’s meteorologist misstep
Featured image by Nigel Tadyanehondo on Unsplash.
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Add this to the list of progressive policies’ harmful effects:
According to The Oregonian, people dialing 911 are often left waiting over two minutes for their call to be answered, far longer than the national standard of 15 to 20 seconds.
People calling 911 to report a Sept. 4 shootout at a Pearl District restaurant and other emergencies in the following half-hour waited an average of more than 7.5 minutes before a dispatcher answered, The Oregonian reported, adding that this was just “the latest example of serious problems plaguing the city’s emergency dispatch system.”
More chaos and violence (cough… Antifa… cough) is producing more calls at the same time the ideological sources of that chaos demand less policing, which is also inspiring people to leave law enforcement.
Somehow, this feels related to the New York hospital system closing its maternity unit because it’s losing staff over its vaccine mandate.
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Hank Berrien sounds an alarm that ought to draw the attention of Americans across the political spectrum:
“The proposal would require banks to report gross inflows and outflows to the IRS, including transactions from Venmo, PayPal, crypto exchanges and the like in an effort to fight tax evasion,” the Daily Mail noted, adding, “The IRS would know how much money is in an individual’s bank account in a given year, whether the individual earned income on that account and exactly how much was going in an and out.”
The income tax is already too much of a wedge into people’s economic lives. This provision in the $3.5 trillion Democrat budget plan would take yet another step in changing the people’s relationship with the government.
The presumed need that this policy would fill is to enhance auditing ability. An underlying assumption of this sort of monitoring is that everybody should be assumed to be breaking the law unless constant monitoring proves otherwise.
A related assumption is that the government’s laws must be respected as just, so removing opportunity to cheat a bit is righteous, rather than an important safety valve against tyranny and, in turn, revolution.
Because they’re trying to edge our country toward technocratic rule by a few “experts,” progressives try to define “consent of the governed” as fully ensured by democracy, but it’s much more extensive than that. Freedom and “consent of the governed” require some play in the joints such that the government has a hard time enforcing rules to which people refuse their consent.
Winning an election (especially by the slimmest of fraudulent margins) does not bring with it the implied right to dive into the most personal aspects of people’s lives or to enforce whatever tax schemes can be rammed through Congress.
Featured image by Jan Antonin Kolar on Unsplash.
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How Democrat Governor Dan McKee handled the awarding of a $5 million education-related contract to a group of his friends and allies has been a disaster, giving his opposition a wide-open window through which to pepper him with political arrows, but I’m withholding judgment on the action itself. This paragraph from Patrick Anderson’s Providence Journal article on the topic points to my reason:
The bidding process for the education contract was initiated by the governor’s office and after competing firm WestEd underbid ILO in two rounds of bidding, the procurement process was stopped, WPRI reported. ILO was awarded a $5 million contract and WestEd less than $1 million.
I’ll be writing more about this in the near future, but for the moment, let’s just say that WestEd is heavily steeped in critical race theory (CRT). Adding that dimension to the contract decision brings in a lesson worth considering much more broadly.
The McKee people are not in the main clique of state insiders, and he’s always been seen as a more-moderate, reformist type. The key evidence is his role in introducing mayoral academies as a form of school choice in Rhode Island for which initiative he worked with the state’s free-market think tank at the time, the Ocean State Policy Research Institute (OSPRI).
When somebody is fighting entrenched special interests, like the teachers union, he or she has no choice but to bring in allies, especially when the bureaucracy and news media are largely captured by the Left.
One must make a lot of assumptions to hope that this is the case, but otherwise, I find it explicable that McKee would be allowing so many examples of what appear to be cronyism to stain his time in office when he really needs to appear squeaky clean for the next election. Even in a purely corrupt calculation, one would think a politician could tell his friends to hold on until he’s won the next election.
The problem, however, is something nearly as inexplicable: If the need for internal support to bring real reform to Rhode Island is the motivation for some of the governor’s more-controversial moves, why not say that? He could even hint with somewhat vague statements like: “There are controversies in education today that I want to avoid, and to begin the process of truly improving education in Rhode Island, I thought it was necessary to bring in people in whom I already have a great deal of trust.”
The lack of information is what’s harming McKee, at this point. Whether he’s engaging in cronyism or driving for reform, McKee should have insisted that ILO put together a clear, transparent, and compelling case for its services. They should have gotten out ahead of the news by celebrating the decision to award this contract with clear and measurable metrics that justified the cost.
Featured image of Dan McKee being vaccinated from the governor’s page.
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Priceless. And photos are from two angles, so it’s really unheard of Photoshopping if it’s fake.
[Open full post]And the boy in the red shirt 🤣 pic.twitter.com/oML0EqumNe
— CLE mama 🇺🇸 (@cle_mama) September 12, 2021
