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The COVID-19 Class War
Just a heads up about a Peggy Noonan column that’s right on the money:
It’s not that those in red states don’t think there’s a pandemic. They’ve heard all about it! They realize it will continue, they know they may get sick themselves. But they also figure this way: Hundreds of thousands could die and the American economy taken down, which would mean millions of other casualties, economic ones. Or, hundreds of thousands could die and the American economy is damaged but still stands, in which case there will be fewer economic casualties—fewer bankruptcies and foreclosures, fewer unemployed and ruined.
They’ll take the latter. It’s a loss either way but one loss is worse than the other. They know the politicians and scientists can’t really weigh all this on a scale with any precision because life is a messy thing that doesn’t want to be quantified.
The deep state denizens, or overclass, or whatever you want to call them, are reverting to type. Coddled all their lives, they want to hide under the bed when things get tough. Ordinary people want to carry on because they know what hardship is.
Published in Domestic Policy
A few points. First, sadly Jonah is not on this podcast.
Second, the cost of testing is nominal compared to the cost of having productive people be idle.
Third, those who test positive, would be offered essentially a free hotel room and food for two weeks.
Fourth, what is your better idea?
Go to West Texas, where there are maybe 1,000 residents per county, and you find that every other store front in a small town is a government agency of some kind. It’s like a major industry there.
Fort Stockton, Texas, has 5 or 6 agencies with offices on Main Street and more off of Main. The population of the town is about 8000. The VA clinic, the post office, state representative’s office, federal housing authority, state agricultural extension, state assistive and rehab, city offices, county authorities, and federal road construction and engineering, are some examples.
As a pond shrinks the infestation of turtles becomes more obvious.
I don’t see universal frequent testing and total shutdown as the only available options.
My favorite line for Ms. Noonan’s column
Too many of our professional class have an unrealistic view that we can eliminate all risks and still live real fulfilling lives.
Risk aversion has to be one of the most damaging aspects of prosperity and secularism. Societies don’t advance without taking risks, and all of life is a risk.
Acceptance of risk is why men have been the ones to advance civilization, and women come along later and fill in the professions they established (teachers, doctors, veterinarians, . . .) once the risks are known/mitigated. And, also why, as I noted to Mr. C last night, women shouldn’t be elected to high office (Whitmer (MI), Brown (OR), . . .) unless they’re Margaret Thatcher.
I can tell you from personal experience Fort Stockton spent the past 40 years sucking up state and federal agency offices, as part of an effort to become the regional government hub for the Big Bend/Trans-Pecos area (Need a Texas Ranger, have questions about a federal crop management subsidy or are planning a large-scale controlled burn? Call Fort Stockton). They sort of changed 15 years ago when Phase I of the fracking boom hit, but it turned out their area had less shale oil and more lower-priced natural gas, so they’ve lagged other area oilfield towns lately.
How ’bout on dates with Trump-voters?
I think the garbage bag thing was a bit of a myth, wasn’t it?
Anyway, I feel—miraculously!—as if I actually understand the ideas and motivations of people on both/all sides of this problem. Maybe because, on some level, we all understand what the problem is. “Politicizing” it—that is, making the care and feeding of the Wuhan Woo-Hoo—into a polarized political issue isn’t really going to work, because (dare I say unlike climate change?) the problem(s) are real. And this is becoming more and more obvious to everyone: yes, the virus is slippery, strange and probably scary as hell. And at the same time, yes: locking down is untenable. For everyone.
Even those with a reasonably safe and entertaining home, no medical issues that are, or will be, painful if treatment is delayed, no immediate fear of loss of income or devastating loss of a business…even for the luckiest ones (I’m one), this is getting old. And it will only get less pleasant as the weeks pass.
Even people who are in government service are now beginning to wonder (at least the smart ones are) whether, given the effect the lock down will have on tax revenues, their jobs will be cut? It’s happened before, under far less potentially disastrous economic downturns than the one that now looms.
The canaries are already flapping and gasping their last in the coal mine: When no one can pay his fees, it won’t matter whether Gary can work from home. It might take longer for some of us to really grasp the scale of the problem, but sooner or later, the problem is going to grasp the bajeesus out of all of us.
If you click the link apparently not.
How about near universal testing, and NO shutdown? Instead of shutting down for months, you take a few minutes every two weeks to get tested.
Nope.
Those you breathe on?
This just gets more and more bizarre. Test everyone every two weeks, which is LITERALLY physically impossible. Then to prove you’re negative, you’d need a certificate, right? Imagine the black market that will arise for that, especially when you’d need one EVERY TWO WEEKS. Virginia had 705 new positive tests yesterday, so that’s 705 hotel rooms, right? In addition to the 1,011 the day before and the 859 the day before that. So 2,500-plus free hotel rooms in 3 days. Oh, yeah.
There’s theoretical human beings…and then there’s actual human beings.
I read an article the other day that made me laugh hysterically—why not laugh?So, apparently—huge surprise here— SF and LA have had a tough time figuring out how to persuade the “homeless” to do the whole social-distancing thing. You can threaten normal people with fines and imprisonment, and they’ll give up surfing, shopping and dining out, and stay indoors and watch Netflix. Junkies gotta score, and mentally ill people are, y’know, mentally ill.
Prior to the Wuhan thing, the big public health crises were diptheria and typhoid being spread by the rats who accompany the homeless, and all manner of disgusting diseases spread by homeless people pooping on the sidewalk. Various projects to house the homeless over the years have failed in large part because the homeless won’t follow rules like “don’t smoke except in designated smoking areas” and “don’t poop on the sidewalk” and “don’t rape the person in the next cot.”(I have it on good authority that they will also use plastic straws…as if global warming wasn’t even a thing!?!)
But this is the Corona Virus and We’re All Going To Die. So some bright person got the idea to house the homeless, at $200/night taxpayer expense, in the cities’ mostly-empty hotel rooms. (If the hotel wasn’t empty before the homeless were moved in, it would certainly be afterward). But what about those wandering, jonesing junkies and alcoholics? I know! Let’s bring the drugs, booze and cigarettes to them!
So…yes. It is illegal for a normal person to light up a cigarette in a hotel bar (or, for that matter, use a plastic straw) but if you’re homeless, you get all-you-can-drink-smoke-or-inject by room service. Yes, the cities are also attempting to provide “services” for people who want to quit, but not everyone wishes to make that lifestyle change and so… The part that really made me laugh was when the government official in charge of this project confessed publicly to being “mystified” by the influx of large numbers of brand new homeless citizens who—literally— call 9-1-1 on arrival to make their hotel reservations. (“And I’d like some crystal meth and Jamison’s delivered to my room, put it on the tab, please and thank you.”) Officials in other cities and states have been solving their homeless problem by telling their street people about the luxury suites awaiting them in San Francisco.
So California city officials toyed with the idea of declaring that “only persons with deep roots in L.A. will be included in the program…” but that brought the predictable objections from advocates for the Undocumented… ‘Okay, if you’ve just arrived from Mexico, we’ll give you a hotel, a crack pipe and some tequila, but if you’re from Kansas City…” My husband thought my laughter was unseemly, and it probably was…But yeah. Sure. Let’s test everyone, every two weeks. That’ll work.
I just want a sunny, inclusive, optimistic Reagan girl who sees Trump as a perversion of the Republican Party just as Joe McCarthy was a perversion of Ike’s Republican Party.
Okay, imagine the following: In an open GM plant, there are tests on site. The employees rotate so that every two weeks they are tested.
For a small employer, the employer has a rule that until the R-naught is below .5, all employees must show that they have been tested.
You ask a girl out on a date. Sure, she says, if you have your certificate that you were tested within the last week.
Say, I have a client who wants to come in an see me. I ask if they have a certificate of testing. If they do, I see them in the office. If they don’t I won’t let them in the door without a certificate.
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I suggest that you invest the 50 minutes and listen to the podcast.
See, now, when my husband married me, he thought he was getting a sunny, inclusive, optimistic Democrat woman who saw the Republican Party more or less as already perverted and dreadful. You know what he’s got now? A Trump voter.
And he still loves me.
None of that is practical or possible in a free society. Except maybe you consciously restricting your business opportunities.
No, it wouldn’t be free. It would be paid for by the taxpayer. That’s not the same as free.
A better idea? Rip the bandaid off. Let life get back to normal as people are ready to do so. Let those who feel vulnerable continue to take the protective measures they feel they need, then let the chips fall where they may.
That’s what we do with every other respiratory illness; it’s what we should do with this one as well. Testing only gives you a snapshot of your condition at that particular moment – a condition which could potentially change the moment after the test has been taken.
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On April 24, a month after Dallas County’s initial “lockdown” orders, the Dallas Morning News stated:
On May 13th, the anticipated furloughs arrived. They seem to have occurred basically in departments that had been closed since the middle of March. Other cities in Texas have begun furloughing workers as well. So yes, governements are beginning to wake up to the effects of the lockdowns and realize that they’re going to be effected by the fallout too. I think anticipated budget problems more than anything else is what has some officials rethinking the shutdown strategy.
I am happy for you and for him. But seriously, if you had a choice between having Reagan or Trump as President, who would you choose? Please consider that Trump is toxic in the suburbs, and Reagan won not only New York State, but New York City!
Or women are consciously restricting their dating choices by requiring that men have been tested.
Our county Board of Supervisors in semi-rural Virginia has already come up with $4+ million in budget reductions, including more than $2 million to the school budget.
In other words: not free.
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And five minutes after that client was tested and received his health clearance, he became infected. A week before he’s scheduled to be retested, he comes to your office. You ask him for his health certificate; he presents it. He’s not symptomatic and he has a clean-bill-of-health certificate, so you let him in. The next time you’re tested, you show up positive because your client’s status wasn’t really negative.
And that’s a scenario with someone who’s actually gone through the testing and has a legitimate certificate. There will probably be plenty who will choose to get a fake certificate instead of being stabbed with a cotton swab every two weeks. (The reports I’ve read have said the testing itself is not a pleasant experience.)
That should read affected not effected. I hate when I misuse words like that. Sigh.
It’s too early to tell between Reagan and Trump, for me. Reagan did great things — tax cuts, strong defense, confronting the Commies. Trump also did these. Reagan ran a big deficit, as has Trump, about the same size as a percentage of GDP. Reagan made a mistake by agreeing to amnesty for illegal aliens, which Trump has thus far avoided.
For me, the big difference will be SCOTUS appointments. Reagan gave us one good justice, Scalia (actually the greatest of all time, in my estimation). But he gave us two bad ones, O’Connor and Kennedy. (Gary, my friend, I know that you worked for O’Connor, but she and Kennedy were the key votes that upheld Roe, and she was weak on ending reverse racism.)
We still don’t know how Gorsuch and Kavanaugh will turn out, but it looks very good so far. If he gets a second term, Trump will probably appoint 1-3 additional justices. If this happens, and his picks are solid, the long-term effects may be transformative.
There is something of a post hoc prompter hoc assumption about the effectiveness of the lockdowns. Given the overwhelming similarity in the rate rise and fall of the incidence of the bug across jurisdictions with disparate policies and given that there was never a true lockdown anywhere (especially in NYC), the notion that the hospitals are not overwhelmed because of the lockdown policy is a stretch.
The lack of masks and equipment was due less to the bug per se than to panic-buying and hoarding, dependence on Chinese suppliers and idiot government interference with any increase in domestic production.
My better idea is to end the lockdown. Tell people the risks, which are minimal for most of the population, and encourage them to live without fear. Explain how important it is for everyone to get back to normal, so that we can minimize the economic damage. Rely on people to be sensible, and to take precautions if they get sick. Encourage testing for people who are actually sick — a good way to do this would be to make it free, and not institute draconian quarantines for those who test positive.
As to your second point, I agree that the cost of testing is probably much lower than the cost of the continued lockdown, but that assumes that the lockdown can’t just be repealed. It should be.
I like your third idea, if you really mean “offered” rather than “required.” It might be a good idea to offer more than a free hotel room and food, but also to offer income replacement.
I also agree with the comments about the practical difficulties of biweekly testing for 330 million people. How are you even going to track this? Are we all going to have to report to a government-approved testing center every 2 weeks, and stand in line to be tested? Are we going to be sanctioned if we do not?
Come on. We can’t even get people to floss, or brush their teeth for the proper period (myself included). Free advertising — buy a quip toothbrush today!
Good one. This reminds me of a Russian joke. I think that it is from Peter Hitchens’ book The Rage Against God.
At school, a little Russian boy hears the news that the price of vodka is going to be increased. When his father gets home, he tells him and asks: “Daddy, does this mean you’re going to drink less?” The father responds: “No. It means you’re going to eat less.”
That is very possible. But with repeated testing, that incidence will decrease.
Why do you expect it to decrease? (Serious question. It doesn’t seem like it would necessarily decrease to me, so I’m wondering what you’re seeing that I’m not.)