Chuyện bình thường

kinh tế là khan hiếm mà,

thị trường ko thể giải quyết hết các vấn đề cũng bình thường như việc y học hiện đại không thể chữa hết tất cả các bệnh tật vậy...

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trích dẫn hôm nay… is from page 210 of University of Notre Dame philosopher James Otteson’s superb 2021 book, Seven Deadly Economic Sins:

It is no more a failure of markets that resources are scarce than it is a failure of engineering that I cannot travel faster than the speed of light. Similarly, the fact that markets do not solve all problems is no more a problem with markets than the fact that modern medicine cannot cure all diseases is a problem with modern medicine.

Bài trước: Bạn biết rồi đấy

Bạn biết rồi đấy

quyền lực tuyệt đối của nhà nước...

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trích dẫn hôm nay… is from page 130 of Deirdre McCloskey’s and Alberto Mingardi’s superb 2020 book, The Myth of the Entrepreneurial State (original emphasis; footnotes deleted):

After 1848, liberalism (or, as we call it not, classical liberalism) began to come under attack (bị tấn công, chỉ trích) from enthusiasts for State action – by the nationalists (người theo chủ nghĩa dân tộc) from the right and the socialists from the left. The anti-liberals, inspired on both sides by Hegel, have this in common: they substitute for human action by individuals in society a single path ordered by the State. Said Lord Acton in 1882, “Whenever a single definite object is made the supreme end of the State, be it the advantage of a class, the safety or the power of the country, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, or the support of any speculative idea, the State becomes for the time inevitably absolute.” And you know what he said about absolute power.

Bài trước: Bảo hộ phương hại tới an ninh quốc gia

Bảo hộ phương hại tới an ninh quốc gia

làm suy yếu nền kinh tế và ngành sản xuất,

phân tán nguồn lực khỏi các ngành thiết yếu đối với an ninh quốc gia...

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trích dẫn hôm nay… is from page 23 of Scott Lincicome’s excellent, data-rich January 2021 study, “Manufactured Crisis: ‘Deindustrialization,’ Free Markets, and National Security“:

Protectionism often undermines national security by weakening a country’s economy and manufacturing sector, thus making it less resilient in the face of war or other shocks. Restrictions on international trade and investment not only reduce economic growth (and thus tax revenue) and output but also can distort the economy and divert resources from sectors (e.g., high-tech, high-productivity industries such as information technology) that are also essential to national security.

Bài trước: Vì sao cần bảo hộ?

Vì sao cần bảo hộ?

có phải vì thâm hụt thương mại, giữ việc làm trong nước đâu...

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trích dẫn hôm nay… is from page 83 of Daniel Oliver’s essay, “Protectionism,” which is Chapter 18 in the 1987 collection Trade Policy and U.S. Competitiveness (edited by Claude E. Barfield and John H. Makin):

To sum up, protectionism is not justified by a trade deficit, and protectionism does not save jobs. Trade restrictions will always be special-interest policy, the sacrifice of the general welfare for the benefit of a politically powerful minority.

Bài trước: Hiệu ứng đám đông

Hiệu ứng đám đông

hành động ngay hôm nay :D

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trích dẫn hôm nay… is from page xi of the 2002 Dover Publications edition of the 1896 English-language translation – The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind – of Gustave Le Bon’s 1895 La psychologie des foules:

Little adapted to reasoning (hành động hoặc quá trình sử dụng lý lẽ của mình; những lý lẽ đưa ra khi làm việc đó; lập luận; tranh luận), crowds, on the contrary, are quick to act.

Bài trước: Muốn giúp mình

Muốn giúp mình

hãy giúp người...

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trích dẫn hôm nay… is from page 185 of University of Notre Dame philosopher James Otteson’s important 2021 book, Seven Deadly Economic Sins:

Cooperative market behavior … allows individuals to seek to improve their own conditions only by simultaneously improving the conditions of others. In markets, we compete with each other to find ways to cooperate with and benefit one another.

Bài trước: Xin cho tôi tự do

Xin cho tôi tự do

đừng trông chờ nhà nước...

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trích dẫn hôm nay… is from pages xxii-xxiii of Thomas Mackay’s Preface to the 1891 collection he edited titled, A Plea For Liberty; specifically it’s from the 1981 Liberty Fund edition (Jeffrey Paul, ed.) of this collection:

Each addition to the responsibility of the State adds to the list of ill-contrived  (sáng chế, thiết kế) solutions of difficulty, and to the enlargement of the sphere of a stereotyped regimentation of human life. Inseparable from this obnoxious growth is the repression of private experiment and of the energy and inventiveness of human character. Instead thereof human character is degraded to a parasitic dependent on the assistance of the state, which after all proves to be but a broken reed (người không thể nhờ cậy được, vật không thể dựa vào được).

Bài trước: Lời dạy "đừng tin người lạ" có còn đúng?

Lời dạy "đừng tin người lạ" có còn đúng?

trong xã hội tự do, những gì chúng ta được hưởng lợi, mỗi phút giây, là kết quả nỗ lực của hàng triệu người lạ...

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trích dẫn hôm nay… is from page 1 of Vol. II (“The Mirage of Social Justice” [1976]) of F.A. Hayek’s great work, Law, Legislation, and Liberty:

In a free society the general good consists principally in the facilitation of the pursuit of unknown individual purposes.

DBx: This insight is profound – as can be understood by reflecting on how very many benefits you enjoy, in every minute of your life, that are the results of strangers each pursuing their own individual, specific purposes that are unknown to you and that were unknown (and were unknowable) to government officials at the time these pursuits were undertaken.

You and I benefit whenever someone profits from implementing a new and better way to produce existing products, or profits from producing new products. Such profit arises from doing that which is novel – from doing that which no one, in the past, had the foresight to do. Economic (as opposed to accounting) profits earned in markets reveal quite well the monetary value of seizing opportunities that, until the profits were earned, had yet to be seized – opportunities that, indeed, in most cases had yet even to be noticed.

You and I benefit from Henry Ford’s innovative idea to manufacture automobiles using an assembly line. We benefit from Malcolm MacLean’s creative idea for container shipping. We benefit from Steve Jobs’s insistence on driving innovation and high-quality at Apple. We benefit from Fred Smith’s innovative idea for overnight package delivery. We benefit from Ron Zappe entering the potato-chip market. We benefit from Jeff Bezos’s innovations in retailing, just as we benefitted from Sam Walton’s – and, long before him, from Richard Warren Sears’s – earlier innovations in retailing.

Each of these individuals – like each of literally millions of other entrepreneurs over the past few hundred years – pursued his and her own goals in ways that would have been inconsistent with any plan for the economy.

Unless proponents of industrial policy discover a way to impart near-omniscience to the government officials charged with the task of consciously directing the economy in ways that improve the masses’ living standards over time, all industrial-policy schemes are doomed to fail.

Bài trước: Thế thì chết

Vách ngăn nhà hàng: Liệu đã đúng?

lớp học cũng thế, khiến nói chuyện cần phải nói to hơn, hành động khiến gây ra nhiều giọt bắn hơn...

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Liz Wolfe reports that the ubiquitous plexiglass barriers are likely useless for reducing the spread of the coronavirus and perhaps are even counterproductive. A slice:

It would be one thing if this form of hygiene theater was limited to restaurants. But school districts across the country have forced children to try to learn while encased in plexiglass desk dividers—that is, if they’ve allowed kids to return to full-time in-person schooling at all.

Not only does this make it harder for children to connect with their friends and teachers, but forcing them to learn this way may lead them to speak up louder to be heard—an act that increases aerosol production and is more likely to spread COVID than speaking at a quieter volume. Given the incredibly low risk of death to children posed by COVID, and the mounting evidence that Plexiglass barriers do not make people safer, it’s past time to remove them; a kindergarten classroom shouldn’t be filled with thick, see-through partitions like a convenience store in a bad part of town.

Some might counter that if they make people feel safer, that ought to be reason enough to keep plexiglass barriers in place. But this is misguided. Hygiene theater gives people a false understanding of how this virus actually works and which preventative measures to take. Pervasive COVID anxiety should not be used to justify silly rituals, especially when there’s good evidence a ritual may hurt us in the end.

Bài trước: Ai giết bà tôi?

Ai giết bà tôi?

không được xét nghiệm trước khi chuyển từ bệnh viện ra nhà dưỡng lão, who?

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Also from Laura Dodsworth is this summary of how the British government “used behavioural science to scare a nation into submission.” A slice:

Using fear is ethically dubious (đáng ngờ về đạo đức) at best. If psychologists were provoking fear in a laboratory experiment they would need the consent of the people taking part. Yet we never signed consent forms, and this huge social experiment has not been through any ethics committee.

We didn’t notice, maybe we didn’t even care, when behavioural psychologists were ‘nudging’ us into paying taxes on time, or cutting down smoking, but their underhand (lừa lọc, dối trá, dấu giếm, lén lút, không cởi mở, nham hiểm) tactics have certainly got our attention now. You could argue that frightening people to make them follow the rules during an emergency was in our best interests. But what about the opposing arguments that it affected our personalities, our mental health and our agency?

The insufficiently fearful were deliberately alarmed. Horror film styled advertising, laws to manage the minutiae (chi tiết vụn vặt) of our daily lives, the most punitive fines since the Dark Ages, encouraging social conformity and the alarmist use of statistics were just some of the government’s tactics during the pandemic, signalling their lack of trust in the public’s ability to understand risk and behave sensibly.

Even children were not exempt from such blame. Indeed, they were explicitly targeted with messaging warning “Don’t kill granny.” This shocking slogan looks even more abhorrent given the allegations that the elderly were not tested before being transferred from hospital to care homes – who killed granny, exactly?

Bài trước: Các biện pháp mạnh để chống dịch Covid-19

Các biện pháp mạnh để chống dịch Covid-19

các dịch bệnh khác có đẩy lùi được đâu, HIV, sốt rét... và cũng có cần "biện pháp mạnh" đâu...

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Covidocratic authoritarianism is real: Scott Shackford reports on the unfortunate but unsurprising fact that California strongman Gavin Newsom refuses to surrender his emergency powers. A slice:

“We’re still in a state of emergency (tình trạng khẩn cấp),” Newsom said Friday. “This disease has not been extinguished (dập tắt). It’s not vanished (biến mất). It’s not taking the summer months off.”

Many diseases have not been extinguished or vanished, but it would be absurd for a governor to take near-complete control to respond to all of them. New COVID-19 cases and deaths in California have plunged to levels that can be managed without the governor’s intrusive involvement.

Bài trước: Mâu thuẫn lợi ích quá rõ

Mâu thuẫn lợi ích quá rõ

các công ty công nghệ, mạng xã hội, nền tảng streaming, ủng hộ "phong tỏa" là điều hiển nhiên rồi...

như bọn buôn rượu lậu ủng hộ chính phủ cấm rượu thôi...

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David McGrogan applies Bruce Yandle’s ‘bootleggers and Baptists’ insight to explain the pattern of support for lockdowns. A slice:

In light of this, are we at all surprised that it is very often the big social media firms, streaming services and the like that have been most strongly in favor of restrictions? There is nothing conspiratorial (thuyết âm mưu) about this, nor probably even anything intentional. It is just the straightforward application of one of the most fundamental lessons of classical economics (bài học căn bản nhất của kinh tế học cổ điển): incentives matter, and the incentives of these actors just tend to point in the same direction. It’s not that these businesses consciously support lockdowns due to a naked profit motive, in other words; it’s simply that their incentives to reject lockdownism are not strong, or are lacking entirely, because their interests are not in conflict with it.

One of the most important, helpful, but least well-systematized concepts in the study of regulation is the ‘bootleggers and Baptists’ phenomenon, coined by Bruce Yandle. Yandle observed that political activism in favour of the prohibition of alcohol sales and Sunday closing laws in the US was often a combination of high and low motives. Baptists are in favor of restricting the selling of alcohol because it is ‘good for society.’ Bootleggers are in favor of it because, for their purposes, the less alcohol that is lawfully available the better. The two groups do not conspire with one another, openly or otherwise. But the alignment of their interests is a kind of pincer movement which regulators find difficult to resist.

Bài trước: CGV có thật sự quyết liệt khi khởi kiện?

CGV có thật sự quyết liệt khi khởi kiện?

tỷ phú Andrew Lloyd Webber - nhà soạn nhạc và bầu sô nhạc kịch người Anh - nói sẽ vẫn cứ mở nhà hát của ông ấy, chính quyền thích thì đến mà bắt...

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Andrew Lloyd Webber will, if necessary, defy the British government’s lockdown and ‘social-distancing’ diktats in order to open his theaters. A slice:

The world premiere of his £6 million Cinderella depends on social distancing being lifted, in accordance with the Government’s “roadmap”, on June 21, a promised milestone that looks increasingly in doubt. Yet, Lloyd Webber tells me, his voice bristling with defiance (thách thức), “We are going to open, come hell or high water”. What if the Government demands a postponement? “We will say: come to the theatre and arrest us.”

Bài trước: Mãi mãi à?

Mãi mãi à?

Úc - áp dụng chính sách "0 ca nhiễm" nào - đã cách ly hơn một năm, giờ lại tiếp?

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The straw man will simply not leave Australia. (That which is alleged to be imaginary is really battering a country that is alleged to have wisely used draconian policies to escape the alleged continuing need for that which is allegedly imaginary. It’s all terrifying in reality.) Here’s more from James Bolt:

We Melburnians know the reality of Zero Covid: we are currently locked in our homes 22 hours a day for another week because of six new local cases. This is no way to live. But, unfortunately, it is the way we will have to live for a long time to come.

A Zero Covid strategy is foolish. It involves confining people to their homes over a handful of cases. It involves closing schools, workplaces and churches. It involves cutting off people from friends and family at a moment’s notice. On Wednesday 25 May, Melburnians could be with 30 people in public. The next day they could not meet any.

This is how we live in Melbourne. We are trapped in a seemingly never-ending cycle of lockdowns. Whenever we get some freedoms handed back to us, we know they are only loaned – and could be seized back again at any time.

Bài trước: Thế kỷ 21 rồi...

Thế kỷ 21 rồi...

mà cách phòng chống covid-19 vẫn như thời Trung cổ...

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Jeffrey Tucker writes of the lockdowns’ inequity. A slice:

And that is precisely what happened in 2020. In the name of all these strange new practices – ‘Nonpharmaceutical Interventions’, ‘Targeted Layered Containments’, or, in the words of Dr. Fauci “public health measures,” all of which are euphemisms (uyển ngữ, nói trại) for lockdowns – many governments sliced and diced the population. The ruling class cobbled together its own Medieval-style system for beating disease through an expectation that the people who do not matter much will be on the front lines while the rest stay home and stay safe.

Lockdowns are not just a brutal and failed form of disease mitigation. They were the replacement of a social system (thay thế hệ thống xã hội) based on freedom and equality with another based on income, class, and the worthiness to stay free of, or be exposed to, disease. That is the meta analysis of what happened to us in these last 15 months, whether intended or not.

Bài trước: Đọc báo ít thôi

Thế thì chết

cứ muốn dịch vụ "miễn phí" từ chính phủ, thì họ càng có cớ phình to bộ máy thôi...

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trích dẫn hôm nay… is from page 143 of Thomas Sowell’s 1980 magnum economic opus, Knowledge and Decisions:

A government bureaucracy (bộ máy quan liêu), which can dispense (phân phát, phân phối) its goods or services below cost – including at zero price, in some cases – can always demonstrate a large “need” for its output, and therefore a “justification” (biện minh, lý do, cớ) for a large staff and budget (ngân sách).

Bài trước: Ai sẽ hiệu quả hơn?

Ai sẽ hiệu quả hơn?

tất nhiên là ông chủ tư nhân rồi, tiền nhà nước tiền chùa...

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trích dẫn hôm nay… is from pages 210-211 of the 1996 Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) edition of Henry Hazlitt’s insightful 1973 book, The Conquest of Poverty (original emphasis):

And unlike a government agency, the private owner is obliged by self-preservation to try to avoid losses (tránh lỗ, tránh tổn thất), which means that he is forced to run his railroad economically (tiết kiệm) and efficiently (hiệu suất). And also unlike a government agency, the private capitalist is nearly always obliged to face competition (đối mặt với cạnh tranh) – which means to make the services he provides or the goods he sells superior or at least equal to those provided by his competitors. Therefore the private capitalist normally serves the public far better than the government could if it took over his property.

Bài trước: Cứ nói "nhà nước khởi tạo" là sao nhỉ?

Cứ nói "nhà nước khởi tạo" là sao nhỉ?

nước Anh là nước đầu tiên trên thế giới công nghiệp hóa cách đây hơn 300 năm có cần "chính sách công nghiệp hóa" đâu?

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trích dẫn hôm nay… is from page 4 of the 1983 second edition of Peter Mathias’s 1969 book, The First Industrial Nation: The Economic History of Britain 1700-1914:

Britain’s was the first industrialization (công nghiệp hóa) of any national economy (nền kinh tế quốc gia) in the world. Even more remarkable, it occurred spontaneously (tự phát, tự sinh), not being the result of conscious (biết được, nhận ra, thấy rõ) government policy (chính sách của chính phủ) sponsoring (tài trợ) industrial progress. Although inevitably the results of state policy were significant in legal processes, taxation policies, tariffs, shipping regulations and the like, it derived virtually no momentum directly from public taxation, or public promotion, or state-guaranteed loans to raise capital for productive investment…. Britain saw an industrial revolution by consent. It owed nothing to planners and nothing to policemen.

Bài trước: Ngu dốt về kinh tế

Đọc báo ít thôi

toàn vống lên về covid-19 ấy mà...

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Laura Dodsworth, writing for Spiked, decries the manufactured hysterical (quá kích động, cuồng loạn) fear (sợ hãi) of Covid-19. Three slices:

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

That is how the media approached Covid. Be afraid of everything, from ice cream to semen. Be afraid of being tall. Be afraid of being bald. Be afraid of going to the shops and accepting home deliveries. And if you’re a man, it’s not just semen you should worry about, but also your testicles, your erectile function and your fertility. Even your toes are in danger.

The fearmongering (gieo rắc sợ hãi) is relentless (không ngừng nghỉ). Be afraid of your pets. Be afraid for your pets. Just be afraid.

…..

The anxious, frightened climate this has helped to create has been suffocating (ngột ngạt). Death tolls were constantly brandished (khua, vung) without the context of how many people die every day in the UK, and hospital admissions were reported while recoveries were not. As a result, Covid often appeared as a death sentence, an illness you did not recover from – even though it was known from the outset that Covid was a mild illness for the majority of people.

…..

Even though the vaccine rollout is proving a success, the media are still fearmongering about Covid. The language in headlines and articles continues to play up the risks and threats on the horizon. As Bloomberg had it recently, ‘We must start planning for a permanent pandemic – with coronavirus mutations pitted against vaccinations in a global arms race, we may never go back to normal’.

And those who do not conform to the safety-first orthodoxy continue to be demonised. It feels as if dangerous times are ahead.

Bài trước: Hướng dẫn cha mẹ đeo khẩu trang cho bé phòng dịch

Hướng dẫn cha mẹ đeo khẩu trang cho bé phòng dịch

5 tuổi trở xuống không bắt buộc mang khẩu trang đâu nhé...

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Donald Siegel and Robert Sauer write insightfully about Covid Derangement Syndrome. A slice:

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, who is also a health economist and therefore familiar with the concept of trade-offs in decision-making (unlike infectious disease experts), notes that studies repeatedly show that children who wear masks completely undermine the very limited benefit masks provide by touching them and repeatedly taking them on and off. Moreover, there are serious repercussions (tác động trở lại, ảnh hưởng, hậu quả) to child social development when children are masked that go beyond “simple” physical irritation and difficulty breathing. Bhattacharya emphasizes that the development needs of young children require them to see other people’s faces. For example, learning to speak requires seeing a person’s lips move. Older children also need to see the face to learn body language and how to appropriately interact socially.

Bài trước: Cẩn thận với "đồng thuận cao"