Keeping in mind that we’re early; the stock market isn’t the underlying economy, just linked to it; and there’s room to fall further.
And keeping in mind that the Wuhan Virus situation will abate in the not too distant future, and the economy will rebound strongly, and so will that linked stock market.
A buying opportunity is developing, but paraphrasing Rothschild, there’s no blood in the streets yet.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (D) has discovered that there is quite a bit of medical equipment (ventilators, for instance) scattered around the State that is going unused. He intends to…take control of…that equipment and “reallocate” it and is issuing an Executive Order to facilitate the process.
A reporter asked him whether he was serious about the matter and really was going to seize the equipment. Cuomo objected.
“First of all, don’t use the word ‘seize.’ I didn’t use that word. It’s a harsh kind of word,” Cuomo said….
“It’s a sharing of resources[.]”
Right. And Willy Sutton was only insisting that the banks share resources.
In truth, though, the State does have, under our Constitution’s Takings Clause of and Supreme Court rulings, authority to take the property, given just compensation is made. Cuomo intends that, although what he’ll offer is an open question.
Within all of that, it’s just stupid to quibble over the label applied to the taking. Government snatches, often for an agreed good cause; pays something for it; and it’s done. The quibble is just Cuomo’s CYA effort, made the more silly by the lack of need for it in the present circumstance.
Daniel Henninger worries about the next Wuhan Virus war (he refers to it with the more press’ saccharine, more politically correct label, “coronavirus” war). This is a political war between the American Left and the rest of our American nation.
In the course of his piece, though, he had a couple of remarks that I’m not sure he really understood.
A federally led policy is appropriate in a national crisis like this.
Indeed, but federally led, not centrally led.
But once it passes, the issue will be whether to revert to the freest private economy we had in a generation or whether deeper, explicit social direction and economic protections by the national government are justified.
This depends entirely on whether Americans in general understand the difference between “federal government” and “central government.” That’s a distinction Progressives, Progressive-Democrats, and their “education” divisions of teachers unions have been working so hard for so long to muddy.
We’ll need to turn out in force in the coming election to prevent Progressive-Democrat destruction. Yes, that’s part of the war which worries Henninger—but the answer to Progressive-Democrats’ divisiveness and destruction cannot be, at this crossroads for our nation, simply to turn the other cheek or otherwise ignore attacks on our freedoms and our personal responsibilities.
Many nations are using cell phone data and/or apps installed on cell phones to track folks known to be infected in order to identify those persons’ contacts and to build up anticipatory data of pending and developing hotspots. This is intended to facilitate more efficient targeting of medical resources, to more efficiently target more limited populations, and so to more quickly free up economic resources and activity.
The US Federal government, working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is creating a portal that will compile phone geolocation data to help authorities predict where outbreaks could next occur and determine where resources are needed, though the effort faces privacy concerns.
… Alphabet Inc’s Google said Thursday it would share a portion of its huge trove of data on people’s movements.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have developed an app to track Covid-19 patients and the people they interact with, and are in talks with the federal government about its use, The Wall Street Journal has reported.
The EU is going even further, developing and propagating apps that track individuals, ostensibly with their permission.
These moves are being sold as necessary for the present situation, even though they badly risk individual privacy—cue Ben Franklin.
Such sales pitches would be believable—and stipulate arguendo that the tradeoff might be minimally acceptable—if these surveillance moves had sunset clauses in them. Such surveillances need to be automatically terminated after some specified period of time or at some easily measurable milestone—Wuhan Virus infection rate drops below a particular threshold, for instance. Sunset clauses also must include destruction of the surveillance databases, with that being verifiable by anyone who asks—the present FOIA procedures would provide an example of how that would work.
Unfortunately, sunset clauses are notably absent from these moves toward government surveillance of us citizens—the danger of which is emphasized by the example of the People’s Republic of China and by our own FBI’s abuse of its surveillance authorities, along with our own FISA Court judges’ cynical acceptance of those abuses.
Or, perhaps, an additional one. The editors at The Wall Street Journal have an idea.
The Administration could quietly push a narrow Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) that gives Mr Trump power to strike Iran-backed Shiite militias in Iraq as needed.
That’s too narrow; any new AUMF should authorize the President to strike Iran-backed militias—not just Shiite ones, and not just in Iraq.
More than that, though, the Pentagon…drawing up plans to eliminate Kataib Hezbollah and such an AUMF are not mutually exclusive. Both should be done.
Neither is it necessary for this targeted AUMF to replace the AUMF in place; whether that’s a good or bad idea is a separate question.
The editors also pointed out the opprobrium likely to flow from administration critics as a result of going after this or that terrorist organization, those objections centering on the fear that we would only provoke terrorists.
Administration critics would object to the administration turning up heat on terrorists wherever they are, though. The only reason these should be taken seriously is the political power they wield in Congress. That’s something We the People need to correct in November.