Tag Archives: political economy

Wuhan Virus Delta Variant

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With the panic-mongers in full, baying throat over the Delta variant’s spread, here’s a graph from The New York Times showing new reported cases in Great Britain up through 1 August.

Although the graph is for all variants of the Wuhan Virus extant in Great Britain, the Delta variant has become the dominant strain, and it plainly has shot its bolt and is on the wane.

Scroll down the page at the link for a similar graph on the Wuhan Virus-attributed death rate trend (mostly Delta variant since the start of summer). The mortality rate from the Delta variant never has been high, and it already as plateaued. Although the text in the graph above indicates, via snapshot, a sharp increase (from an extremely low rate to a still very low rate), the mortality rate graph down the page gives a truer picture of the trend.

We care because, in addition to Great Britain being a friend of ours, they’re generally a few weeks ahead of us in the progression of the virus. Our own panic-mongers (As Delta Variant Rages screams even a Wall Street Journal headline) have no rational basis for their hype.

The NYT took these data from Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University.

Back Rent

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On the day the moratorium on rent paying, enacted during the Wuhan Virus situation, expired, the aggregated back rent owed as a result of that moratorium amounts to some $15 billion.

There is broad concern for the renters who owe the money, and that’s appropriate as far as it goes. But the concern doesn’t go far enough. What’s lacking is any concern regarding the other side of that coin: to whom all that money is owed.

“To whom” are the landlords, most of whom are mom and pop businesses and individual moms or pops who own a house, or two, that they rent out. Those $15 billion are owed to far fewer landlords than they are owed by renters.

Absent the rent payments, those small-time landlords are unable to pay their own mortgages on the rental properties for which they’re responsible, and in many cases, without that income they’re unable to pay their mortgages on their own homes.

Where’s the concern for them? Where’s the help for them?

The silence deafens.

“We stand for what is right across the world”

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In a virtual Congressional hearing last Tuesday—Corporate Sponsorship of the 2022 Beijing Olympics—there was this exchange between Senator Tom Cotton (R, AR) and Paul Lalli, Coca-Cola’s Global Vice President for Human Rights and corporate representative at the hearing:

SEN. TOM COTTON (R-AR): So your company said at the time that we will continue to stand up for what is right in Georgia and across the United States. So are we to take from your statement at the time that Coca Cola will not stand up for what is right outside the United States? Because that’s what it sounds like this morning in this testimony.
PAUL LALLI, COCA-COLA’S GLOBAL VICE PRESIDENT FOR HUMAN RIGHTS: No, Senator, we stand up for what is right across the world. We apply the same human rights principles in the United States that we do across the world.
COTTON: Do you believe that the Chinese Communist Party is committing genocide against the Uyghur people?
LALLI: We’re aware of the reports of the State Department on this issue as well. There are other departments of the US government. We respect those reports. They continue to inform our program, as do reports from other from civil society.

Think about that deliberately vapid non-response. Coca Cola stands for what’s right across the world, and Coca Cola doesn’t object to the People’s Republic of China’s abuse, much less genocide, of the Uyghurs in the PRC’s Xinjiang province.

Nor was it just Cotton that the Coca-Cola rep refused to answer. Progressive-Democrat Tom Malinowski (D, NJ) pressed Lalli specifically on whether Coca-Cola would condemn any Chinese government abuses against Uyghurs. Lalli’s carefully empty response:

We respect all human rights.

It seems pretty clear: Coca Cola considers that abuse, that genocide, to be part of what’s right across the world. Because Uighurs, in Coca-Cola’s august consideration, don’t count as human or otherwise worthy of human rights.

Union Political Spending, Union Political Power

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A couple of numbers illustrate the matter.

Organized labor spent more than $1.8 billion on political activity and lobbying in the US during the 2020 election cycle, according to a new study published by the National Institute for Labor Relations Research (NILRR). The majority of the money spent by labor, $1.4 billion, came straight from union dues taken from workers who can legally be fired if they refuse to fund union activities[.]

Those two numbers also emphasize the need for even more right-to-work laws, laws that not only allow workers to work for an employer without joining a union whose members also work for that employer, but also allow those non-union workers to decline to pay any form of dues or tribute to that union.

It’d Be All Right

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The USPS is planning on raising their first class mail rates to 58¢ from the current 55¢ and raising the rates on their other mail classes by 6.8%-8.8%.

This is another example of price-fixing by the Federal government. Maybe the increases are legitimate, maybe they’re not. But we can’t tell because market forces aren’t at work here, only government bureaucrats’ impressions are at work.

It’d be all right if we privatized all of mail delivery. Let a free, competitive market determine prices. Recognize the ubiquitousness of email, texting, Skype, Zoom, etc, etc, etc as competing communications techniques, and let a privatized snail mail system compete in that same free market.

It’s doable; our Constitution only says that

The Congress shall have Power…To establish Post Offices and Post Roads

It doesn’t require Congress actually establish Post Offices, much less have the Federal government run them. The establishment (and operation) are easily done by letting free enterprise do them.

All it takes is the political will to do so.