Category Archives: regulation

Suicide Pact

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The Thomas More Society has filed suit in Federal court against Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s (D) edict barring gatherings of more than 10 people indoors and more than 100 people outdoors.

[T]he nonprofits Election Integrity Fund and One Nation Michigan [plaintiffs in the Thomas More case] argue that Whitmer’s order functions as an abridgment of their right to free speech and assembly under the US Constitution.
Whitmer’s orders “constitute direct restrictions on [the groups’] right to engage in protected speech and assembly and therefore violate the First Amendment,” the suit argues, stating that any restrictions on constitutional rights “must be narrowly tailored to achieve a compelling government interest.”

Lower (State) courts have ruled that the Wuhan Virus situation is sufficiently important and dangerous that Government restrictions on Constitutional freedoms and rights must be overruled.

However, there is no clause in our Constitution that allows the Government to restrict individual liberties whenever it thinks something is more important than those liberties. In particular, the 1st Amendment says this in pertinent part:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…or the right of the people peaceably to assemble….

Hence the need for narrow tailoring of any intended restriction and the need even then—especially then—for that restriction to achieve a compelling government interest, not just one convenient to it. The Government has no interest, compelling or otherwise, in restricting these basic freedoms because of the virus, especially since it’s increasingly apparent that such restrictions cause more medical and economic harm than the virus itself.

Along these lines, Supreme Court Justices Robert Jackson (Terminiello v City of Chicago) and Arthur Goldberg (Kennedy v Mendoza-Martinez) have argued that our Constitution “is not a suicide pact.” Indeed, it is not. However, deviation from our Constitution would lead quickly to national suicide.

The Thomas More case would be a slam-dunk were it not for a collection of self-serving politicians and a similar collection of activist judges.

An “Apology”

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Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney (D), after having been caught dining indoors in a restaurant in violation of Wuhan Virus restrictions in the restaurant’s city, has pretended to apologize.

Let’s look at his words of apology as quoted at the link.

“I’m sorry if my decision hurt those who’ve worked to keep their businesses going under difficult circumstances,” he wrote on Twitter. “Looking forward to reopening indoor dining soon and visiting my favorite spots.”

“If my decision hurt those….” Kenney doesn’t even believe his decision, his behavior, necessarily caused harm. It plainly did; his equivocating is a plain lie.

It gets worse, though. Kenney expressed regret for an outcome of his misbehavior—an outcome, mind you, he’s not even convinced actually occurred—but he had not a syllable of apology for his actual misbehavior.

Masquerading those words as an apology is a very large lie.

A Bilateral Trade Agreement

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Antony Phillipson, Great Britain’s Trade Commissioner for North America, offered an assessment of the current state of the trade negotiations occurring between the US and the UK in a recent Wall Street Journal Letter.

Among other things, Phillipson had this:

US tariffs on UK steel, aluminium, and significant exports like Scotch whisky raise prices for US consumers and are an unhelpful backdrop to negotiations. We are pushing for a settlement to the Airbus-Boeing disputes and removal of all retaliatory tariffs.

The Brits, along with the EU at large when they still were a member state, the OECD, and the G-7, were offered a completely tariff-free regime, years ago, by President Donald Trump.

The Brits, along with the rump EU, the OECD, and the G-7, have yet to respond to that offer.

So, Commissioner Phillipson, what is your answer?

Safety and Efficacy

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Scott Gottlieb and Mark McClellan had some thoughts on drug trials in the context of the current Wuhan Virus (my term, not theirs) situation. For the most part, they’re right. There’s one aspect of their op-ed, though, that I want to comment on.

…if we don’t know what works, and what doesn’t, we’ll waste time and money on treatments that won’t help and may harm. Even if a vaccine is discovered and approved, the pandemic won’t end unless most Americans get vaccinated, which will require confidence in the product’s safety and efficacy.

The FDA currently must determine both safety and efficacy. That’s misplaced, though, and it misuses both time and money, and it misidentifies the money involved.

The FDA should be intimately involved in determining a drug’s or vaccine’s safety; we don’t need a market of snake oil salesmen claiming the safety of their wares.

But we don’t need Government involved in free markets. The free market here is that of patients and their doctors; they should be free to use—an extension of the Right to Try concept—drugs to mitigate the virus’ infection or likelihood of infection, and they should be free to use vaccines to achieve longer-term protection from the virus as soon as those chemicals have been shown safe.

The right to try given safety also would answer one of Gottlieb’s and McClellan’s concerns about numbers of trials and trial size: there are lots more patients and doctors in the market than would be participating in FDA-supervised trials, every one of those patients and doctors would be volunteers, and their data would be both more broadly based and available much faster than via an FDA-supervised trial or the series of them that might be necessitated by questions arising from a given trial.

Another of Gottlieb’s and McClellan’s concerns is that waste of money. Their concern proceeds from the assumption that it’s the government’s and pharmaceutical companies’ money being wasted. In Gottlieb’s and McClellan’s paradigm, that’s true. But in a free market—those patients and doctors—it’s the patients’ money being spent; it’s their assessment of whether their money is being wasted. Pharmaceutical companies will recoup much, if not all, of their expenses through their sales, and Government need not be involved at all.

The Size of the Drift

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ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos is the latest member of the media to portray Senator Kamala Harris (D, CA) as a moderate choice for Joe Biden’s running mate.

Stephanopoulos went on to add

Kamala Harris comes from the middle of the road, moderate wing of the Democratic party….

Harris’ positions include

  • supporting vastly raising tax rates, beginning with—but not ending there, rescinding the 2017 tax rate cuts
  • eliminating private insurance altogether and replacing it with Senator Bernie Sanders’ (I, VT) Medicare for All
  • limiting, in contravention of the 2nd Amendment, Americans’ access to weapons of which she personally disapproves
  • legalizing marijuana, never minding the damage marijuana chemicals do to developing brains
  • pushing for the Green New Deal
  • supporting far more open borders than currently exist—no more wall
  • canceling outright up to $20,000 in student loans for selected groups of students
  • heavily limiting the ability of oil and gas companies to produce the energy our economy needs
  • raising the minimum wage to $15/hr
  • “studying” reparations
  • eliminating the Electoral College
  • removing most of the existing limits on abortion.

She’s likened police departments to the KKK.

She’s also the most liberal and least inclined to bipartisanship of all the Progressive-Democrats in the Senate according to GovTrack.

It’s a strong measure of how far left the Progressive-Democratic Party has gone that a person with those positions is considered a member of the moderate, middle of the road wing of the party.