Monthly Archives: March 2020

Reusable Grocery Bags

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…and reusable shopping bags, generally. These are supposedly better for our environment than nominally single-use plastic or paper bags (though both, until they wear out, can serve other purposes than holding food or other goods—usually two or three reuses until they’re truly ready for the trash or the recycling bin).

The serious questions, though, and ones that have been missed until the current COVID-19 situation has exposed them empirically, are:

For whose environment, exactly, are reusable shopping bags better?

Who, exactly, are the ones doing the reusing?

The answer to the first is…germs.

The answer to the second is…germs.

And today, the threat to us short-sighted humans is COVID-19, right along with our old foes, bacteria. CDC has said that COVID-19 can remain viable on a large variety of surfaces for hours to days—surfaces like the burlap or canvas of some reusable bags—and especially on the plastic linings of many more reusable bags.

Researchers at the University of Arizona and Loma Linda University surveyed grocery shoppers and randomly tested their reusable bags. “Large numbers of bacteria were found in almost all bags and coliform bacteria in half,” they wrote in their 2011 study….

And this datum:

In 2013 millions of American piglets died amid an outbreak of novel swine enteric coronavirus disease, and after an investigation the US Department of Agriculture concluded that reusable feed totes were the most likely root cause.

This has been a problem of which we’ve been aware for some years.  And yet….

Does anyone really think these reusables aren’t harboring today’s COVID-19? Or the bug du jour of tomorrow’s outbreak?

Reusable bags have become strongly illustrative of unintended consequence.

A Lesson Learned?

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Our pharmaceutical companies have decided to bring back to the US some critical drug production capabilities in view of the People’s Republic of China’s current role in that manufacturing supply chain, the interference the Wuhan virus has caused in the PRC’s ability to produce those critical intermediates, and the separate threat of some ranking PRC officials to cut us off from those intermediates.

The dramatic proliferation of the coronavirus, also termed COVID-19, has US officials on an accelerated mission to bring the production of life-saving medicines back to US shores and away from the control of the Chinese government.
“The US is uncharacteristically over-reliant on drugs from China, and it’s not a sustainable model,” Das Nobel, founder and CEO of the New York-based product-and-supply service MTX Group. “The US government must prioritize its strategic planning to incentive the US Manufacturing organization and assist in bridging the gap in manufacturing cost versus gross profit.”

Such a move would violate the purely economic Ricardian principle of putting production of goods and services where that production can be done most efficiently and cheaply, even if that means some production goes to another nation. Maximizing efficiency, after all, lowers prices—whether to intermediate manufacturers and assemblers or to us consumers—the farthest.

However, national security demands some level of inefficiency in purely economic matters.  What is the value, after all, of those cheapest goods and services if we’re cut off from them altogether, as the present virus situation threatens with badly needed medicinal drugs? What’s the value of those low-costs if we don’t have our own production facilities and human skills with which to begin/ramp up our own production as quickly as needed in a crisis?

So it is, too, with moves to bring at least some aluminum and steel production back home. It’s not that Canada, Germany, or Japan are enemies or potential enemies of ours; of course, they are not. Nor is it that the PRC is an enemy of ours with whom we can get away with trading in peaceful times.

No, it’s that having facilities for a complete production chain, from ore in the ground to all of the industrially critical final products of aluminum and steel is a Critical Item for our national security: with a domestic complete chain, we can rapidly ramp up our own capabilities in the event of a cut-off from overseas, whether from war or natural cause.

So it should be with all of the goods and services critical to our national security (viz., medical equipment, computer chips).

Understand, though, that this does not, and should not, mean the end of international trade or of globalization of our economics. Trade under free trade principles should continue and be expanded: Ricardo remains correct, and following that principle remains—in the main—the soundest move. It just means that for those relatively few national security-level items, a complete chain of production capability needs to be maintained at home even as we continue to trade the bulk of those critical items under Ricardian principles. The cost delta between maximal efficiency of purely Ricardian free trade and the lesser efficiency of maintaining a core domestic production capability is simply part of the necessary cost of national security.

Whether our government should assist in bridging the gap in manufacturing cost versus gross profit or, if so, to what degree, certainly should be debated and worked out. However, as with anything else in a free society, in a free market economy, government’s role should be kept to a bare minimum, and that minimum should rest on a foundation of sunset clause included temporary measures and not on permanent subsidies or credits.

A Misstatement of the Case

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Gerald Seib opened his Monday Wall Street Journal piece with this bit:

…Americans have learned they can’t really count on Washington to deal with this crisis for them. Local leaders, businesses, churches, sports leagues—all have taken up the task, and done so more effectively than the political leadership in Washington.

That’s as it should be. Responsibility is individual, personal; we cannot wish any of that off onto others, much less government. All government can do—and it should do this much—is help us satisfy our own obligations.

That help, also, needs to come from the bottom up, with the Federal government’s help coming last. That top tier of our American government hierarchy has national responsibilities, and even with the present COVID-19 situation, conditions on the ground vary widely from locale to locale, State to State. Responses need to be similarly local or unique to each State.

The Federal government can spur development of medical treatments—the public-private partnerships with medical enterprises, for instance—and short-term (I’ll repeat that: short-term, with sunset clauses built in to guarantee shortness) economic measures to mitigate the stresses on our businesses, small and large. It can deploy military mobile hospitals and shelters to particular hot spots, and it can take other such temporary nation-wide steps to mitigate the situation.

Necessary mitigation, even control, of the situation, though, must begin with us as individuals. That mitigation begins with stopping our panic-buying and hoarding of necessary supplies. They continue with looking out for our most vulnerable neighbors: the elderly, the less or non-mobile, the poor among us.  They go further: avoiding large gatherings for the duration (which is not the same as not going out at all, not giving our custom to the mom and pop businesses in our neighborhoods and city regions), seeing to the welfare of neighbors with early grade school-aged children whose schools have been closed for the duration, checking on the older kids.

We need, also, to consider a mantra from a war we fought four generations ago: Is this trip really necessary? (And yes, it is, within the context of continuing to do at least occasional business with those mom and pops.)

In the end, we must revive and live by the words a man spoke some 60 years ago (which I’ll rephrase here): Ask not what your government can do for you. Ask what you can do for yourself and your neighbor.

Nationalizing our Economy

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A city mayor wants the Federal government to nationalize critical parts of our economy.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is arguing that the best way to tackle the coronavirus outbreak is for the federal government to take over critical private companies in the medical field and have them running 24 hours a day.
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“This is a case for a nationalization, literally a nationalization, of crucial factories and industries that could produce the medical supplies to prepare this country for what we need,” de Blasio told MSNBC‘s Joy Reid on Saturday, calling for “24/7 shifts” during what he called a “war-like situation.”

Just like the Progressive Theodore Roosevelt, who wanted to nationalize one-sixth of our then-economy, the railroads, because—presaging a later President—they’d made enough money and grown (in his personal view) too powerful.

Just like the Democrats Woodrow Wilson and Harry Truman, under the excuse of war that de Blasio is bastardizing—Wilson nationalizing all the factories east of the Mississippi until the Supreme Court overruled him and Truman trying to seize the steel industry until the Supreme Court blocked him.

Just like Progressive-Democrat Barack Obama, who nationalized a current sixth of our economy, our health insurance industry, in order to turn it into a Government mandated, privately funded welfare program.

Now the Progressive-Democrat Bill de Blasio is grasping at his excuse for Government to seize control of our economy.

What’s the Progressive-Democrats’ limiting principle on such nationalizations? Nor they nor their forebears have ever been willing to say. That leaves us to conclude that their limit is the natural limit: complete nationalization of all of our economy—rank, pure socialism.

Remember this power grab attempt in November.

Precision and COVID-19 Rates

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Holman Jenkins had a piece last Friday on the relationship between recessions and the end of infectious disease epidemics. His central thesis was that Covid-19 Can’t Spread if You Stay Home.  From that, folks are neither buying things nor working at the production of goods and services for others to (not) buy, and that’s the stuff of recessions.

But he closed with this comparison, which missed a larger point about what it is that we need to target in order to end an infectious disease epidemic, particularly one like the current coronavirus epidemic which has such skewed outcomes.

[N]otice that South Korea, one of the hard-hit countries, reports 0.6% [fatality rate]. When it comes to such degrees of precision, you probably would want to tune out if you knew just how fuzzy the underlying flu extrapolations are.

And they are fuzzy, with relatively large error bars, especially when only the overall affected population is considered.

It’s also useful, though, to consider the demographics: who actually becomes symptomatic, who has other medical conditions (and what those are), who gets seriously sick, who dies.

It’s also useful to put those demographics in the context of the quality of medical care available in the affected nation.