Visitors to the New York Department of Labor are turned away at the door by personnel due to closures over coronavirus concerns on Wednesday. (photo: John Minchillo/AP Photo)
Turn on the tv, go online, or listen to the radio and the drumbeat is the same: “We are up against the wall with this virus and must do all that we can to defeat it.” Left out of the harangue is the presence of another wall. It is just as real. It is the societal one containing 99% of life. We are about to crash headlong into it as we avoid the illness and any accompanying deaths.
Is it wise to put the social and economic part of life – our society – in an induced coma for a prolonged period, till the utopian near-zero infection rate is attained? The goal, like the communist one of a classless society, is a destructive impossibility; one fraught with social and economic collapse. In a real coma, muscles and body systems atrophy. Bans on funerals, weddings, prayer services and communion, Little League, outings to the park, everything that makes us fully human, will leave a scar. Zoom is no substitute for flesh and blood interaction, as some of us may grow too accustomed to the social isolation. Will social isolation become the new normal for more of us?
In addition, a months-long timeout from work is a headlong dash into an economic wall. Skills and the work ethic atrophy. Businesses close, many forever. Many of us will be thrown into a long period of unemployment. The single-minded avoidance of a disease will mean the defeat of the illness at the cost of the livelihoods of millions. What are the health effects of wrecking the personal lives of millions? Imagine it.
Looking to the federal government to paper over the growing hole in production (the stuff of business) with, literally, make-believe money is an excursion into the mind of a child. You can’t divorce the growth of the money supply from the growth in the production of wealth. Dumping truckloads of money to fill a hole in production will only make the money worthless, if it doesn’t break the financial back of future generations. We replace the virus monster with two other monsters: a gargantuan national debt and Venezuelan inflation. Now that’s another real, unavoidable wall for you.
German children build a pyramid with stacks of inflated currency in 1923.
Even the economic guru of the Democratic Party, John Maynard Keynes, counseled against what Democrats, and the collective wisdom (?) of DC, habitually do: spend, spend, spend. Keynes advised governments to save in good times and spend in bad. We don’t save; it’s spend, spend, spend regardless. We’ve got the back end of his advice down pat, and pretend he didn’t say anything else.
The situation has taken on the characteristics of totalitarianism. My wife and her sister were returning a couple of days ago from California (for a very good reason, trust me) and confronted a sign on the door of a gas-‘n-shop in a lonely quarter of the California desert near the border with Nevada. It read, “Anybody shopping without wearing a mask will be arrested.” Stopping the coronavirus means complimenting the Communist Party of China with the adoption of their approach to governance.
Paramilitary officers wearing face masks to contain the spread of COVID-19 coronavirus walk along a street in Beijing, China, March 18, 2020. (photo: Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters)
The wall of illness and death isn’t the only one that we face. Crashing into the wall of our social life and economic realities is just as real. Those economic cinder blocks, in particular, can’t be made to magically disappear in the same manner as the first half of Keynes’s advice. Apparently, I was wrong in thinking that the belief in magic was on its way out with the Scientific Revolution.
On a 2 ½ hour trip to Missoula (Mt.) to pickup a gun that I ordered – oh how that might send some cosmopolitan types to the safe space of their prejudices – I was listening to Fox News on XM Radio. It was wall-to-wall coverage of the coronavirus … and how many different ways to spin dread. No matter where you go, CNN or MSNBC or the legacy networks, it’s the same ridiculously excessive treatment. Is there any serious audit of the proof to justify either the over-the-top monopoly of airtime or the extraordinary step of shutting down American society? From where I sit, I haven’t heard much questioning of the base reasons. So, I slashed my watching and listening to news channels and turned to entertainment offerings. I’m happier.
What do you get for all the coverage? You get a Freddy Krueger script from dusk to dusk. Mind you, The Nightmare on Elm Street was fiction, but so might be much of the newsroom chatter that makes its way to our tv screens. Horror is manufactured with numbers from a process similar to the one at Bingo Night at the senior center and plugged into predictions of a resurgence of the 14th-century Black Death, only later within the blink of an eye having to ratchet down the apocalypse from DEFCON 5 to DEFCON 1. The whipsaw has become so routine that a person is left in a constant state of bewilderment. I’m skeptical about anyone claiming to know the state of play.
The possibility that much of the coverage could be facetious might be due to the distortions from geographic isolation by our top-drawer media organizations. Many of their denizens look outside their New York City, or Acela corridor, offices and see coronavirus hell. No doubt, the situation has developed as an urban – more than that, cosmopolitan – phenomena. Yet, it is through these highly susceptible locations for pandemics that we receive our window to the world.
Conversely, people in the rest of the country look around and see restaurants shuttered, workers at home without work, their hospitals not teeming with the sick and dying but veritable ghost towns, people who venture out wearing N95 masks or looking like bank robbers, and eerily empty streets. Everyone is made to be spooked by a view of the world from New York. Should, though, everyone be scared to that degree in that manner? I am beginning to doubt it. To borrow from a Las Vegas ad, what happens in New York should stay in New York.
A health worker carries a dead body of a COVID-19 victim to container morgues in Brooklyn, New York.(TAYFUN COSKUN/ANADOLU AGENCY)
These purveyors in the concentrated epicenters of the epidemic have at their disposal the new bane of rational thought: statistical modeling. Not that statistical modeling isn’t useful. The problem lies in the raw data that’s shoved into them and the conclusions without profound qualifications that will accompany them. Back in 1979, I took a data processing class – yes, such a thing existed in 1979 – and was introduced to the acronym GIGO, garbage in and garbage out. Models are formulas put in lines of computer code. Sometimes the models are cracked, but more times than not it’s the numbers that are fed into them. Math doesn’t have a mind. It just does what we tell it do, and if we ask it to crunch bad numbers, it will do it. Models don’t peer into the mind of God. They are a reflection of our imperfect mind.
Mental garbage (in and out) is driving our public conversations. The embroidering that surrounds the talk on climate change is fed by the rubbish. The mangled logic goes forward in time as well as backwards. Either the barkers are captives of recent and present temp readings to put future global temperatures on an exponential rocket trajectory, or they’re soothsayers reading the entrails of ice cores, tree rings, or rock strata going back millennia to defend their preconceived future rocket trajectory. Probably both. Models don’t correct for the flaw; they exacerbate it. It’s done all the time now that we are powered by “Intel inside”. It’s still the same though: garbage goes into the chip and garbage comes out. The pronouncements are accepted by the mathematically illiterate as God speaking through the burning bush.
The virus from China breeds quickly in particular conditions, and so does loosey-goosey modeling during pandemics. In the case of the current illness, we have cases and deaths. What qualifies as a “case” and “death” varies from place to place. It varies according to the honesty in official places and the availability of honest-to-God and modern clinics in every village. Do you think both exist in adequate quantities everywhere on the globe? We shouldn’t take to heart any “global” numbers.
We shouldn’t take to heart Germany’s, Italy’s, especially China’s, and many numbers coming out of the US. Disaggregating the cause of death from a patient with multiple life-threatening conditions can be as complicated as unraveling the Gordian Knot. I don’t know if all nations even conduct a COVID-19 test upon death. I suspect many don’t. Some nations might be just plain promiscuous in assigning deaths to the virus. Some places test more people as others assess only those who walk into the hospital; therefore, morbidity rates bounce around like flubber (“The Absent-Minded Professor”, 1961). Then, the “experts” average the flubber and plug it into the “model”. Out of the formula comes the ski slope on graph paper at press conferences. And we have a shutdown of world society and an end to respect for the concept of livelihoods.
The professionals in white smocks then tell us that livelihoods must take a back seat to an all-out effort to prevent us from getting sick, as if nothing else matters. It’s another sign of the myopia of the professional. The “expert” may be a great doctor of medicine but understandably more limited in passing judgment in the social and economic realms. Doc may be great at treating your fever but don’t ask him or her about advice on adjusting your investment portfolio. Nonetheless, for the medical master, it’s a siren call to stop the virus at all costs, with one of those costs being our livelihoods.
The professional has a mental reflex to ignore the recognition of different levels of risk that accrue to people according to their varying personal circumstances. The self-employed plumber needs to generate income each week and is willing to take more risk. No, he mustn’t be allowed, the medical pro tells us. A single all-encompassing risk of zero is imposed on everyone, everywhere. Of course, the salaried, the whizzes with degrees, and jet-set crowd are much more financially secure and occupationally situated to handle zero-risk at little loss. Not true of anyone else. Yet, it’s the blinkered and biased view of the medical poohbah that counts.
Okay, okay, a health crisis demands the centrality of the medical professional. It’s not the importance of the doctor in a situation like this in question here. It’s the tendency not to temper their counsel with other voices. An epidemic has many implications and their acknowledgement should also have a role in the sausage-making of a government response. We should balance the concern about the spread of the disease with the quality of life after it. Yeah, we will have our life after the contagion, but will it be a life worth admiring?
Is this a scene we want to repeat after the pandemic?
Should an epidemic – one in which we don’t have an accurate picture of its extent and severity – be an excuse to destroy your job, your ability to make your way in the world? Is everything reduced to a risk level compatible to a person comfortable with zero, and with the outsized influence to impose it? Is it proper to stampede the populace with erroneous numbers, models, and projections, only to destroy occupations that made life worth living for millions? Surely, the pile of lost livelihoods will mightily surpass the body count the longer the Great American Shutdown persists. There are alternatives.
What should be done? Open up American life now, with caveats. Implement the measures of testing, masks, social distancing where practical, while recognizing locational differences. Start by loosening the shackles in geographical areas less affected and in critical industries. From there, phase in the opening of society as the severity warrants. The goal should be a resumption of life, sooner rather than later, even as we acknowledge that doing so involves risk. “Bending the curve” should apply to livelihoods as well as the infected.
Risk is part of life. Zero risk is utopian, and “utopia” is translated from the Greek to mean “no-place”. In other words, zero risk in unattainable. And when it is pursued, catastrophe is the result. Keep this in mind as you watch the parade of color commentators of the medical profession in the wall-to-wall coverage on COVID-19.
The Duomo di Milano (Cathedral of Milan) before the pandemic and after. (Business Insider)
Most of the pundits in my universe seem to be predicting an end to the virus shutdown in most places by the end of summer at the earliest. I don’t know. For many of those heavily populated blue states with big balance sheets and paper-thin operating margins, the shutdown would be hard to survive past three weeks. They are in a tug-of-war between bloated spending and deflating revenues on the one hand and an epidemic on the other. They may be stuck in a conundrum of bankruptcy or deaths.
Looking past the peril of fiscal calamity facing blue states, what started in Wuhan, China, ought to begin a rethink about life after the pandemic. Here’s my list of what “ought” to be under consideration – not what will be considered – as we look past the Great American Shutdown.
First, the social ramifications. Living in cities has always carried the risks – to go along with all the positives – of crime, family disruption, many vices, and pollution. We are experiencing the lightning spread of a communicable disease as another of them. A teeming critical mass of people is a breeding ground for disease. Recently, the big cities have experienced a renaissance of popularity at the expense of small towns and rural areas. Well, 20-somethings, you might want to reconsider. A cheek-by-jowl existence in a densely packed area radiates infectious diseases at the speed of a tidal wave.
Visually compare a US map of H1N1 infections with a map of coronavirus infections. Infections concentrate in metropolitan and coastal areas.
H1N1 of 2009
The coronavirus of 2020.
Furthermore, our cities are meccas for immigration – jobs being the powerful magnet. A diverse and globalized population is one with the most interactions with large swaths of the outside world. Many conduits exist for the entry of pathogens into these crowded places of people with many foreign relations. If we are to have large-scale immigration, it must come with large-scale screening. If we lack the means to screen the influx, we ought to reduce the number to a manageable level.
A large caravan of migrants from Central America, trying to reach the U.S., walks along a road Oct. 21, 2018, in Tapachula, Mexico. (CNS photo/Reuters/Ueslei Marclino)
Second, the economic ramifications. Free trade, with modifications, is too good a deal to pass up. We need it to discipline our unions (public and private sector), rent seeking, and crony capitalists. But free trade with a totalitarian regime that recognizes no private sphere of life comes close to being a non sequitur. Free trade becomes impossible, unless you are committed to a prostrate position before Chinese Communist imperial ambitions. Our free trade orthodoxy should make more allowance for national security and economic viability. The virus should remind us of the CCP’s nature and our past complicity in boosting them. End the complicity, boost the skepticism.
In this vein, “decoupling” is the talk of the town. Some economic distancing from the CCP is warranted if for no reason than our wish to not run out of Advil.
Reducing our economic interactions with the CCP also means the construction of a strategic cordon of nations around them. Strategic alliances often begin as commercial ones. Draw to us the nations most at risk of being swallowed up in a Chinese version of Japan’s Southeast Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere of the 1930’s and 40’s. The TPP (Trans Pacific Partnership), far from Trump’s claim to be one of the “worst trade deals ever”, was an essential step in the pivot to Asia to counter Red Chinese hegemony. However Trump wishes to pursue it, he needs to stop the barroom philosophy and resurrect the concept with a vengeance. Our experience with the China’s virus, and the CCP’s secretive response to it, demands a rethink of our relationship.
Third, the political ramifications. Low-and-behold, federalism works. Top-down control from DC, covering America’s 3.8 million square miles, is a farce. Democrats love the idea especially when they sit atop the 3 branches in DC, even though it’s insane for a country that stretches across a continent and ocean. This isn’t France (7% of the land area of the US) or the Isle of Britain (2%).
In our system, this is recognized in the parceling of the country into sovereign states. Yes, they are “sovereign”, meaning that they have constitutionally established powers. An important one in this moment is the “police powers”. When most of us think of crime, I’ll bet that 90% of the time we are thinking of the kind passing through our local PD’s, DA’s, and local/state courts without realizing it. Charles Manson and his sick and murderous “family” experienced the justice of the state of California, not the kind issued from federal headquarters in DC. Get the point?
Charles Manson is escorted to court for preliminary hearing on December 3, 1969 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by John Malmin/Los Angeles Times)
Three Manson Family murderers: Leslie Van Houten, Susan Atkins, and Patricia Krenwinkel. 1971.
The dispersal of power in our federalism system reaffirms Tip O’Neill’s (D, Mass., Speaker of the House in the 70’s and 80’s) “all politics is local”. Not every state wants a looney-bin government as in California. That thing was chosen by the sovereign residents of that sovereign state — and maybe some foreign nationals as well. Other states have chosen to be less inclined to flout the 2nd Amendment, be so tax-happy, and be so bewitched by the science fiction of apocalyptic global warming. States can adjust to their circumstances … and craziness. Thus, a near-quarantine in New York shouldn’t be copied in Kansas, a state with few coronavirus cases.
Crises are thought to be prime opportunities for the centralization of power. Well, maybe that is more empty legend than anything else. Right now, people are seeing their governors taking action and sharing equal time with Trump’s daily briefing. It’s a visual reminder of the Civics education that many didn’t get in high school for many reasons having little to do with the classroom (lack of parental oversight being one). It’s an excellent counterpoint to the adolescent elevation of the president to demigod status.
The president doesn’t rule by divine right. He’s constrained by separation of powers as everyone is – or should be – in the federal Leviathan. The public got another Civics lesson when Congress was debating the virus relief bill, which the Democrats tried to change from “relief” to their favorite of “social engineering”. In addition, they got a huge dose of the sloppy sausage-making that is natural to any gathering of people who don’t agree. A White House Caesar has to wait for the butchers to deliver the sausage – i.e., money. His powers to throw money at the problem are quite limited. The power of the purse, after decades of progressive/socialist erosion, still has a heartbeat.
As for the Democrats in DC (the hypothetical “loyal opposition”), the word for their state of mind is not so much “cooperation” as “revolution”. The crisis has smoked them out as revolutionary opportunists. They seem to be following the historical precedent of Lenin and his Bolsheviks. Lenin wanted the War (WWI) to continue to go badly for Russia to create anarchy and more misery. Sound familiar? The House Dems tried to jam down the throats of the American public elements of the Green New Deal, many gambits of rabid wokeness, and slush funds for lefty sacred cows (PBS and NPR, etc.). I have doubts regarding the appetizing nature of this sausage to a broader audience.
In fact, the metaphor of sausage is very apropos when thinking about our whole polity from Anchorage to Miami. It’s an affront to the neat, tidy, and sterile designs of people like Woodrow Wilson, our first PhD social scientist president. For him, efficiency in government meant corralling our elected representatives into a corner in order to carve out more power for a clerisy of “experts” who are ensconced in the executive branch and courts. The scheme only makes sense to a progressive if they are in charge, something not completely true today. Still, ever since, every so-called “progressive” is wrapped in the same mental straitjacket all the way down to Obama and Pelosi and company. It won’t work, and oughtn’t work.
The virus should be a wake-up call. The free market sausage should contain more than meat. The immigration policy sausage should recognize that too much isn’t good for you. The city sausage might profit from shorter dimensions, and more production of the rural and town kind. The federal sausage could benefit from a dispersal of manufacturing from DC to the hinterland. In these ways, we can avoid a singular and all-encompassing sausage supply chain infecting all of us with contaminated meat, there being no alternatives after the attainment of Wilson’s dream.
New York’s Gov. Cuomo – a self-proclaimed “progressive” – is misleading when he says that the country after the pandemic will experience a “new normal”. The “new normal” ought not be so much a new outlook on life as the realization of the bankruptcy of his ideology and its policy proscriptions.
I can be accused of wanton speculation but I wonder if the pandemic and other matters of alleged existential threat – like climate change – have much to do with the fact that we know too much and don’t handle the information very well. In my mind, the thought needs to be taken seriously.
And we throw these not-very-well digested factoids into the combustible environments of our politics, resulting in a double whammy: little perspective and political mud-slinging, making for political sludge. No wonder we are throttled from one extreme to the next at any cry of “crisis”. Don’t expect much help from our blinder- and bubble-induced media to calm the nerves.
The thought came to me as I was ruminating on the coronavirus situation. I previously stated my belief that raw numbers with little context or perspective can be misleading. The fact that the US has so many coronavirus cases, for instance, is a result of the fact that we are better able to uncover them. Though, I am curious about the effect on the average flu season if we marshaled the same financial resources and powers of all levels of government on this single matter. Would a “pandemic” be in the offing? Would we be on a near-war footing?
The Leonardo da Vinci airport in Rome on Tuesday, March 17. Thousands of flights worldwide have been cancelled as governments impose travel bans (photo:AP)
“But people are dying!” is the cry in the land. Yes, and it’s the same response about climate change. Regarding climate change, at no time in history are we better able to monitor the condition of the earth with the plethora of satellites, ocean buoys, and land stations at our disposal, producing a mountain of data. To make the numbers meaningful, we try to make comparisons with the past from ice cores, tree rings, geological strata, etc, since Baylonian astrologers didn’t have the advantage of a GEOS-8 (weather satellite).
But let’s face it, the concomitant conclusions from a tree’s rings are extrapolations and, to put it bluntly, lack the oomph of a satellite reading of the temperature at the thermosphere. Today, once our attention is drawn to a subject, it is put under a microscope to feed anything from sensible proposals to hysteria.
What draws our attention to a subject? Frequently, sadly, it’s politics. Progressives are constantly on the lookout for the next moral equivalent of war as the excuse to put more of government in the hands of “experts”. It’s in their ideological DNA. What better way to expand the reach of the administrative state than a pandemically-induced lockdown of a people’s entire way of life? It’s the fulfillment and finest expression of their long-sought dream.
From Carter’s “moral equivalent of war ” speech to deal with the oil shortage, which will worsen from his cap on oil prices for domestically produced crude.
But are we really experiencing a pandemic? Probably yes. Yet, a proper understanding of the numbers might mitigate the response to it. We might refrain from shutting down life in a region with none or few cases and concentrate our efforts on the places and populations most at risk. Instead of sending everyone home for 3 weeks, we might implement and enforce rigorous personal sanitation, testing, and sending home anyone sick. That way we don’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs as we deal with the problem. Impoverishment is an insane cost for an illness that 90+% of the infected will experience as a cold.
We are experiencing a far more serious epidemic in the insertion of political shenanigans into any manufactured or real problem. Take a look at the Democrats’ wish list in the $2 trillion relief bill. It’s socialist egalitarianism run amok, and has very little to do with addressing the illness. Don’t tell me this isn’t about politics.
The problem, and the numbers, are soiled by considerations about November 2020. The media are a megaphone for it.
Mark Twain popularized this phrase of unknown origin: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Much of the talk about the pandemic is proving him right. CNN reports that the US has the highest number of coronavirus cases in the world at 82,000. Such isn’t all that surprising since we are the home of top-flight and broad-based health care and research. We are rich and capable enough to uncover the instances. I’m sure that CNN meant this to be an indictment of Trump, but it should be less surprising given our capabilities.
The above isn’t the only instance of our media making a muddle of our public discussions. Take for example the talk about “risk factors”. Yes, there are genuine physical risk factors such as age and the notorious “underlying conditions”. Completely left out, though, are the social risk factors. Just look at a map to see what I mean.
The areas most vulnerable are fronting onto the global economy, with globalized populations (“diverse” in today’s woke parlance), and with a critical mass of compacted dwellers. In addition, these places are politically captured by the cultural and political Left. So, they are ripe for infection due to the pipeline for pathogens from tourism and the to-and-from travel of residents with foreign relatives. Many of these cities are ports to boot. The governing personalities are enthralled with the mistaken notion of the bigger the government, the better — an idea born to disappoint. Need I say more?
So, what are we to make of this after-the-fact finger pointing? Not much. Neither Trump nor de Blasio is to blame. These things are black swan events with very little warning, especially if the country of origin is an even bigger-government state with every reason to hide the truth. We could bankrupt the country in the futile effort to prepare for unknown unknowns, to borrow a bit from Donald Rumsfeld.
Then, what are we to do? Get back to work, except for the intensely infected cities and a few other areas. The one-size-fits-all approach to public policy is ridiculous. The places most affected need to be treated differently. Lockdown and quarantine them. Everywhere else should carry on … and be leery of migrants from de Blasio’s Eden.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D, Ca.) briefly facing reporters on March 23, 2020.
The phrase “Not wasting a crisis” really means to “exploit” the crisis. Do you have any doubts about this? Well, to borrow another cliché, the other shoe dropped this past Sunday night.
Pelosi returned from her hiatus on Sunday and quickly put the kibosh to Senate Democrats working with their Republican colleagues on a rescue package to deal with the Great American Shut Down. She abruptly introduced a competitive measure which is larded with the Green New Deal, attempts to reverse the Supreme Court’s Janus decision, Sovietizing health care, and wokeness run amok. For her and the party’s left, the panic is the perfect vehicle to force down the people’s throats what a large majority of them wouldn’t tolerate in their right minds. This ain’t about the fight against a pandemic. It’s about a lefty jam-down.
The longer the shut down persists, the deeper the social and economic damage, and the greater likelihood of the emergence of a different kind of panic. It’s the stampede to the omni-competent state; everything else being laid waste. We are teetering on the precipice of losing the very basis of our way of life — a possibility heartily desired by the Antifa, the Squad, and the activist base of the Democratic Party.
U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., left, joined at right by U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., July 15, 2019. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
The medical situation is what it always was: a health care challenge that arises every few years. Some threats are more serious than others, but this one is no excuse to shut down a way of life.
The sensible response involves a reliable test, and all those obviously sick and those who test positive staying home. We don’t need any more task forces, other than the search for a reliable test, vaccine, and treatments. For everyone else, go to work and get on with your life. Go to church. Get your kids ready for soccer. Visit a restaurant; go see a movie; go shopping. Stop this social and economic strangulation of a people, and reacquaint yourselves with the fact that life comes with risks — always has.
Who’s not letting the pandemic go to waste for ideological ends? A Dem leadership enthralled to its extremist base, that’s who.
The rescue package of $1.5 trillion was held hostage by Pelosi and Schumer who want moneys for their political hobby horses of new labor union powers, an increase in emission standards for the airlines, and giveaways for the money pits known as windmills and solar panels. This extortion was demanded to qualify for the aid in the package. What does this mean? Many suffering employers will not participate and force them into layoffs.
Airlines will face increased costs to keep their employees working; employers will confront tricks to impose unionization on the work floor; and we get a chance to relive Solyndra. Most issues have at least two sides with legitimate arguments. The two sides in this episode are victim and victimizer. The vicitmizers are the crazy Democrats and the victims are the many Americans trying to survive the pandemic.
It’s despicable. Leveraging the misery to make political points is outrageous.
California governor Newsom announced the closure of bars and other “nonessential” businesses in the state on March 15.
My oldest son fled California to our place in northwest Montana after Gov. Newsom’s shut down of the state. Of course, the conversation turned to the topic of the pandemic. I expressed my doubts about the wisdom of some of the extreme means to confront the virus. He said that I may be taking the threat too lightly. I said, “No, the threat is real but you can’t make idle a sizable portion of a labor force of 160 million people for any length of time. A shutdown even for a month is unsustainable. ” More to the point, as Harry Callahan of “Dirty Harry” fame said, “A man’s GOT to know his limitations.” Translation: A shut down has its limits … real, concrete-bridge-abutment-style limits.
Regardless, shutting down a population’s need to produce for any length of time and expecting no serious repercussions because you’re going to paper over the induced economic coma with “paper”, literally, as in paper money and bonds, is pure fantasy. Think about it. Squashing the livelihoods of the hospitality industry, suppressing production of anything bureaucratically defined as “nonessential”, eradicating a good slice of the transportation industry, etc., etc., will make the 25% unemployment rate of 1933 look small. Moreover, piling debt obligations onto the backs of the grandkids smacks of something pretty close to immoral, and economically suicidal.
Who would have imagined the possibility? Traffic is light on East First Street after the new restrictions by Gov. Newsom went into effect on March 20, 2020 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by David McNew)
Newsom’s gang in Sacramento – and Cuomo’s in Albany – are already operating on the thinnest of fiscal margins. Crushing the revenue pipeline for any length of time will force these guys to cry “uncle”. When the resultant mobs of the pitchfork brigades descend on the state capitol, the shut down will be in the rear view mirror.
Sure, getting sick has its hazards, but reverting back to hunting and gathering carries its own perils beyond a disease’s mortality rate. Get real. Rich societies – meaning those that produce lots and lost of stuff – make for rich health care. You can’t have the latter without the former. The Mayo Clnic and Johns Hopkins sounds better to me than the village shaman.
Health care after euthanizing a nation’s economy: a female shaman from the Clayoquot region of Vancouver Island.
Walmart, Sandpoint, Id., paper goods isle on Sunday, 5/15/2020.
The photo (above) is of the paper goods isle of Walmart, Sandpoint, Id., on Sunday, 3/15/2020. A young mother with a couple of kids in tow had 2 30-roll bricks of toilet paper in her cart, the only tp that I saw in the entire store. Is this what modern-America panic looks like?
Shoppers at BJ’s Wholesale Club market at the Palisades Center mall in West Nyack, N.Y., March 14, 2020. (Mike Segar/Reuters)
On that same day, we rolled into a gas-‘n-stop for fuel and corn nuts. A fellow customer waiting in line mentioned a wild rumor on social media that Trump is considering the closing of the interstates. Panic, once again, in the age of Trump?
Our eyes and ears are saturated with “pandemic” and doctors on tv with warnings galore. Social interaction has become a dirty word. It’s “coronavirus this” and “coronavirus that” everywhere we look. Is America starting to resemble in thought and deed the America of the 1938 radio broadcast “War of the Worlds” by Orson Welles?
Are we, modern sophisticates, really so “above that”? I doubt it in the age of Trump. Trumpophobes see all external stimuli with real or imagined evil intent as emanating from Trump. “Trump’s Katrina” is bandied about in the same manner as “abortion” and “control of her body” comes off the lips of Madonna.
Maybe what’s at work is something I call “vortex thinking”. Most everything of consequence today goes down two vortices: Trump and climate change. The Polar Vortex of a few years back, with its bone-chilling temps, was blamed on … global warming. A tornado that passes through your backyard is pinned on … global warming. Etc., etc. Regarding Trump, anything that’s bad in your life is due to … Trump. Everything that’s bad to anyone at any given time is placed at the feet of Trump.
George Will – no fan of Trump by any means – calls the phenomena “Caesaropapism”. Our presidents are now accorded demigod status. They are expected to control the tides in the manner of Persian king Xerxes flogging the Hellespont for destroying his pontoon bridge in the advance of his invasion of Greece in 480 BC.
Xerxes’s soldiers flogging the Hellespont.
Depending on the group of boosters, a president is saintly or evil incarnate. He or she is expected to be a master marionette controlling the actions of 330 million individuals. Does “sophistication” now mean thinking like a 5-year-old? Apparently so.
Right now, we are experiencing the first natural disaster to be pinned on the next-Republican-president-in-line. Bush 41 was pasted with the rather mild recession of 1991-1992. Bush 43 had his hurricane. Trump’s is COVID-19.
What separates a hurricane and a virus from an economic downturn is the fact that recessions are, indeed, man-caused. They may occur due to a constellation of actions that were taken earlier in a president’s term, or, more likely, they erupt from the gestation of factors unleashed long before he took the oath. Ditto for the good economic times. For instance, back in 2008-9, the bills came due after many years of easy money and political pressures to extend mortgages to financially insecure people. Obama rode it to the presidency. Ironically, his wing of the Dem Party had a big role in setting up the dominoes.
Now we have the coronavirus. Yeah, it’s unique … like all the previous strains were unique. Sure, take all the practical mitigations available but remember, this thing, like the earlier ones, will have to run its course. We have one thing going for us: we aren’t the Athens of 480 BC, or Constantinople of 541-542, or Europe of the mid-14th century.
The Triumph of Death by Pieter Bruegel, 1562, is a famous painting that relates to the Black Death of the 1340’s.
Please, get some perspective … and stop hoarding the toilet paper!
