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.

An Illustration

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A businessman in the People’s Republic of China, Ren Zhiqiang—who also is a member of the Communist Party of China—has been for some time an outspoken critic of PRC President Xi Jinping’s handling of the nation’s COVID-19 epidemic, a mishandling that allowed an early infection to blow out of control within the PRC and to become a global pandemic.

Outspoken critic: among other things, Ren wrote a widely disseminated essay that took issue with a 23 Feb speech by Xi. He wrote of a

“crisis of governance” within China’s Communist Party and blamed restrictions on freedom of speech and the press for slowing down the response to combat the novel coronavirus, thereby worsening the outbreak.

And

…after analyzing the President’s [Xi’s] speech he “saw not an emperor standing there exhibiting his ‘new clothes,’ but a clown stripped naked who insisted on continuing being emperor[.]”

Then Ren posted on Weibo

When does the people’s government turn into the party’s government? … Don’t waste taxpayers’ money on things that do not provide them with services.

Then his post was deleted, his Weibo account blocked. Ren also has been put on “probation” from the CPC.

And now he’s gone missing, making his point beautifully.

Proportional Responses

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Last week, Iran-backed terrorist organizations in Iraq fired rockets into an Iraqi military base that housed, among others, American and British soldiers, killing two American soldiers and one British soldier, a medic.

In response, we struck some of those terrorists’ operating locations.

The US strikes targeted five separate weapons storage facilities in Iraq associated with Kataib Hezbollah, a Shiite militia group operating in Iraq that US officials said has frequently targeted bases where American service members are based.
The strikes aimed to degrade the group’s ability to conduct future attacks against US and coalition forces….

And this:

The strikes were “defensive and proportional,” the Pentagon said….

On this, “the Pentagon” is dead wrong.

Tit-for-tat is not proportional; it just facilitates action-reaction cycles with mounting damage, casualties, collateral casualties, and collateral damage. This is demonstrated by a subsequent terrorist rocket attack on the same base Saturday, this one wounding three of our soldiers and two Iraqi soldiers.

A proportional response isn’t a tit-for-tat one, it doesn’t aim to degrade anything. It is an overwhelming one that destroys our enemy’s ability to act further in hostility. That is what stops the action-reaction cycle and holds down the totality of damage and casualties.

Proportionality must be considered against the overall, long-term situation, not against any single event.