Author Archives: eehines

Resistance to Change

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Matthew Hennessey, writing in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal commented extensively on the current Wuhan Virus (my term, not his) situation and its impact on education, specifically the forced switch to a measure of home schooling.

Many families have found themselves running pop-up homeschools. Most students will return to traditional classrooms when the crisis passes. But some families—perhaps many—will come away from this involuntary experiment with a new appreciation for home-based education. They may even decide that homeschooling is not only a plausible option, but a superior one.

It’s that last bit, coupled with the article’s subheadline, that drew my attention. That subhead was

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Making the Case

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Senator Marco Rubio (R, FL) decried journalists’ touting America’s Wuhan Virus death rates as being greater than the People’s Republic of China’s.  “Grotesque,” he tweeted about it.  And he’s being generous, I say.

Naturally, journalists’ feelings were hurt by that, and they bellyached loudly.  Michelle Goldberg, for instance:

Journalists are concentrated in cities that are being ravaged by a plague that could have been better contained with a competent president. They’re lonely and scared and reporting while homeschooling their kids. No one feels glee or delight. Some of us feel white hot rage[.]

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State Governments and Socialism

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A current government move to control the means of production—classic socialism when the controls are widespread—is this, involving what’s left of our nation’s insurance industry, at the State level.

In at least three states, lawmakers have proposed legislation to force insurers to pay billions of dollars for business losses tied to government-ordered shutdowns.

Never mind what already agreed policies say. To Hell with signed contracts. Government men Know Better, and being above petty commitments themselves, can’t conceive the idea that commitments actually matter in a free society, in a free market economy.

Some regulators have declared moratoriums on cancellations and nonrenewals of policies.

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Progressive-Democrats and the Law

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And contracts.  Since the SARS epidemic of some years ago, insurers have declined to cover losses related to virus or bacteria damage, and they wrote their policies to that effect. State regulators—who controlled and still control the structure of insurance policies and the premiums allowed to be charged for those policies outside Obamacare—agreed.

However.

New Jersey Assemblyman Roy Freiman, a Democrat, introduced a bill that would retroactively rewrite interruption coverage contracts and force insurers to foot some losses for any policyholder with fewer than 100 full-time employees.

Contracts be damned. They don’t fit the Progressive-Democrat agenda, so by Progressive-Democrat-run Government fiat, they must be tossed.

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In Defense of an Election Defeat

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Ex-Congressman Dan Lipinski (D, IL) lost his State’s primary election largely—almost entirely—because of his pro-life position on abortion.  He wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal explaining how that loss came about:

I faced it [the question of whether he should have changed his abortion stance to win the primary] head-on in my statement. I defended my pro-life position, which is rooted in both my Catholic faith and science. “I could never give up protecting the most vulnerable human beings in the world, simply to win an election,” I said. “My faith teaches, and the Democratic Party preaches, that we should serve everyone, especially the most vulnerable. …”

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FDA’s Drug Approvals

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Charles Hooper and David Henderson are on the right track.

The Federal government requires pharmaceutical companies to prove that their drugs are both safe and effective before putting them on the market. Before 1962, companies needed to prove only safety. While there is some appeal to this two-hurdle approach, evidence suggests that there is only a slight benefit and a tremendous cost. With the COVID-19 pandemic sweeping the world, there has never been a better time to revoke the Food and Drug Administration’s efficacy requirement.

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Joe Biden’s…Politics

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Karl Rove had a piece in The Wall Street Journal, and he had this comment about the situation in which Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden finds himself:

Mr Biden must also decide soon whether to keep moving left or emphasize that he’s a more centrist [Progressive-]Democrat. Picking the first course would suggest that he believes victory this fall depends on mobilizing Senator Bernie Sanders’s [I,VT] backers by agreeing with many of the Vermonter’s views.
Picking the second would indicate that he thinks the key to victory lies with suburbanites who swung to Democrats in 2018, and that he’ll get the Bernie vote by being the alternative to Mr Trump, not the instrument to enact a socialist agenda.
But Mr Biden may already have moved too far left for some suburbanites….

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America’s Olympic Sports Organizations are Losing Money?

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In spades, according to the US Olympic & Paralympic Committee:

…America’s amateur sports organizations stand to lose as much as $800 million from coronavirus-driven cancellations, including the postponement of the 2020 Tokyo Games until next year.

Color me unsympathetic. At least not until after the various civil and criminal cases over the women and girl athlete sexual and child abuses so rampant in our sports scamps—especially our Olympic and Olympic-prep camps—have finished their trek through our courts, and convicted miscreants are paying their compensatory damages and/or are serving their times in jail.

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It Depends

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors are stewing about the Wuhan Virus relief bill that just passed the Senate. To an extent, the WSJ is justified in its concern; $2 trillion isn’t chump change (the editorial was written before the Senate voted the bill up, so details at the link might differ from Senate-passed reality). Couple things about the paper’s concern, though.

The bill includes $250 billion for $1,200 payments to Americans whether or not they’re affected by the virus. The cash will do little or nothing to help an economy closed by government fiat.

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Supply Chain Disruption at the Source

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Retailers are beginning to suspend, or cancel outright, orders from their Asian factories and other suppliers.  So far, it’s intended to be temporary; for example:

Ulrika Isaksson, an H&M spokeswoman, said “our long-term commitment to suppliers will remain intact, but in this extreme situation we need to respond fast.”

The suspensions and cancelations might—might—seem warranted regarding Asian suppliers, but the temporary nature of them, to the extent they’re warranted at all, should be limited to South and East Asia—in the main, Vietnam, Republic of Korea, and Japan.

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