Speaking of prime minister Boris Johnson and chancellor Rishi Sunak (among other British politicians), the Financial Times notes (“Police Issue 50 More Fines over Westminster ‘Partygate’ Breaches,” May 12):
Johnson, his wife Carrie and Sunak were last month fined £50 each for attending an illegal birthday party held at Downing Street in June 2020.
That politicians or other rulers fall under the laws they have imposed on ordinary citizens should be a cause for celebration as one realizes the size of the spider web these rulers have spun against individual liberty. Even if one grants that the recent pandemic was a special emergency, the very concept of “illegal birthday party,” also enforced on one’s own property or with the permission of the property owner, dramatically illustrates how government power has grown and how monstrous Leviathan has become.
This must be due to “neoliberalism,” the recent decades of deregulation and wild-West liberty that authoritarians (and some mistaken analysts) imagine as a scapegoat for everything wrong in today’s world!
READER COMMENTS
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
May 15 2022 at 7:40am
I think that most of what is wrong with the works is the failure to apply neoliberalism — decision making according to cost-benefit analysis combined with los deadweight loss transfers of incomes.
In principle some restriction on social interactions at a time of high COVID case loads make sense; they should be a way to get people to internalize the negative externality of spreading the disease. In practice this was not very will done. maybe not enough in elder care facilities and too much in many other venues. But there is nothing wrong with having actual penalties for causing externalities.
Jose Pablo
May 17 2022 at 6:43pm
Well, looking at the Chinese way of handling this it seems that the negative externalities of NOT spreading the disease were pretty bad too. Maybe worse.
That’s what happens with “cost-benefit analysis”; you never really know what to count and how to count it.
As a minimum it should be call:
“ex-ante estimated cost according to some people estimating the cost to others vs ex-ante estimated benefit according to this very same people estimating, again, the benefits to others. It should be noted that the “estimators” have, at best, and educated guess on where the cost and benefits will be coming from and are “armed” with some theoretical models that they change from time to time and that should be fed with inputs pretty hard to measure”.
Once you call the analysis by its true full name it became much less enticing.
Pierre Lemieux
May 19 2022 at 8:33pm
Thomas: You write:
The difficult problem is how do find a way to get people to internalize the negative externality of being there to catch the disease. Until you have solved this problem at a theoretical level, you can add up and subtract what you want but it will be meaningless.
If you want to explore a solution that is not meaningless, have a look at Buchanan and Tullock’s, The Calculus of Consent, or at Buchanan’s Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative.
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