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Settle in, shelter-in-placers, we’ve got another super-sized (and shall we say, impassioned) edition of the Ricochet Podcast. In addition to the robust debaters, we’ve got Deb Saunders (self-quarantined from an undisclosed location) and Arthur Brooks who provides some much needed optimism in these dark days.
Music from this week’s show: Life During Wartime by Talking Heads
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More Arthur Brooks please.
Stay tuned…
Thanks for this recommendation, @annefy!
I disagree. Every time Peter asked Rob to justify his position, Peter would interrupt Rob two words in and start screaming,Including, “You’re wrong, you’re wrong”. He always monopolizes the podcasts, but this is absolutely the worst and rudest I have heard him be. @peterrobinson
Yes, and even if it wasn’t his intent, it sure sounded to me like Peter was basically obsessed with the employment difficulties being presently faced by his own children. Well, LOTS of people have LOTS of problems, especially now.
I am still rather annoyed about it. @peterrobinson came across as arrogant, impatient and self-absorbed. He appeared to be completely oblivious to the fact that we are all suffering. Or indifferent.
It’s a rare rico flagship podcast I have missed in the past. I do believe I’ve been put off for future ones.
You’re welcome. He’s a good follow on Twitter, also.
I don’t understand the criticism of @peterrobison at all.
He was using his family’s experience as an illustration of what’s happening times millions all across the country.
We just did curbside pickup for dinner, and the restaurant owner told us he’d laid off 80 of his employees, some of whom had worked for him for almost two decades, and he’s just hoping he can keep his head above water until this passes….
When he shared this personal pain, should I have said, “Hey, dude. Suck it up, man. Don’t you know all the other restaurants on this same street are experiencing the same thing? Do you think you’re entitled somehow to revenue? Do you know what this business looked like in the 70s? Did you think people would buy food from you forever?”
Ummm….
Peter has a perspective, and Rob has a perspective.
I personally align more with Peter’s views, but I don’t think that Rob doesn’t care about other Americans or is some entitled butthead because he pushed back with a different position.
This is why I think the media has at times been ridiculous when splicing and dicing the Trump press conferences.
While he hasn’t been perfect in every response in what are very long back and forths, what person is perfect? Especially in this sort of situation? There’s a lot of stress. Of course there will sometimes be some snapping at your co-host or some snapping at journalists. Everyone is a bit frayed. (My poor, poor husband can tell you about the not-so-perfect Lois he’s stuck with!)
I thought the exchange was, actually, quite civil considering the emotion involved, and both simply held on until their views were clear, and they brought it around to do the rest of the show with a lower temperature.
Arthur Brooks is, also, always great. I agree with that!!! I’ve long found listening to him soothing.
Finally, the Ricochet Podcast is my favorite one on Ricochet. I think they are fair, which is all I want. And funny.
Anyway, I just felt like defending those guys just a little bit.
While I have disagreed with some people in this thread, there is no acrimony. I intend no ill will at all. I’m pretty sure Peter and Rob are good friends.
I actually hope all of you are well in your homes.
Me? I just finished watching the president’s latest update while drinking a glass of wine.
I liked his defense of federalism, the pushback against nationalizing industry, and the stress on 15 days, even if they won’t totally commit to changing strategy in that timeframe….
I am 100% with Lois Lane’s post. The flagship is always good. Almost every guest is excellent. On the weekends I want to hear something different from regular talk radio, and it always delivers. When they complain about Trump I never feel like my intelligence is insulted. People freakout over and over as if it’s David Frum or Mona Charen wigging about Trump and I just can’t relate.
I simultaneously think Peter was using his own experience to extrapolate out what others in the country might be experiencing rather than obsessing about his own children AND didn’t give Rob enough room to talk. (It might be that they’ve had this argument before off air but we didn’t get to hear that.)
Great podcast.
It looks to me like @adamhousley has a very good source about what is going on with the virus drugs.
Fair enough!!!! (You are a diplomat!) :)
Apparently only here. Thank you!
It is not what others in the country “might be experiencing”. It’s exactly what just about everyone in California who can’t work from home IS experiencing.
I had a friend complain bitterly about her stock portfolio and how much she’s lost. I finally stopped her and said “everyone with money in the market has lost. Stop complaining”. She replied it was harder for her because she had bigger investments than me.
I am trying to figure out a way that I can convince her mandatory social distancing applies to phone calls …
Well.. In that case… that was pretty self-centered, bone-headed thing for your friend to say. I mean… wow.
It’s good to have a sense of humor. :)
Of course, if she doesn’t sell her stocks, she really hasn’t lost anything.
What I keep waiting to hear, but have not yet heard, is that the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes CoViD19 is going to die – and soon. SARS-CoV-2 is a genetic mutation of the virus that caused SARS in February-March 2003. That 2003 virus ceases to exist, and has been dead and gone since summer of 2003. SARS 2003 was far more deadly than is COVID19.
Add to SARS-CoV-2’s inevitable demise the apparent effectiveness of the proven safe drug chloroquine (I took chloroquine for what must have been a month in 1987 while traveling through the southern Caribbean and Venezuela, with no side effects and no malaria), I see no justification for a government mandated, Great Depression-inducing, national economic shutdown.
Well over 80% of the potential victims of SARS-CoV-2 are easily identifiable: primarily the elderly with underlying health issues, especially weakened respiratory and immune systems. We can isolate them with little to no loss of productivity.
Finally, remove the requirement for a prescription to obtain the proven safe chloroquine.
This “crisis” is already over if we want it to be, at very little cost. Now that the Saudis have dropped gasoline prices to $1.409/gallon, we can go zero-to-GDP in 3 months.
In a way, whether Peter was only – or mostly – really concerned about his own children, or about “the children” in general, is less important than his apparent attitude that these measures to try and deal with a deadly virus aren’t justified Because The IPOs, or whatever.
This seems like a pretty sensible interview with an actual pandemic scientist. One of the things he says you have to do is smash the curve and then figure out which healthcare workers have developed immunity. The same amount of people get sick or die but it allows the system to manage it better.
https://www.wired.com/story/coronavirus-interview-larry-brilliant-smallpox-epidemiologist/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=onsite-share&utm_brand=wired&utm_social-type=earned
I thought this was quite good but you could say the same thing about the federal government and most state and local governments. Fed policy generates too much leverage and debt. What good are artificially inflated assets? Three minutes.
http://maggiesfarm.anotherdotcom.com/archives/34742-Why-you-cant-believe-illness-statistics-right-now.html
I heard a very interesting fact related to this. It’s obvious, but I have never thought of it before.
When the Federal Reserve forces down interest rates, it makes junk debt more viable i.e. it makes fracking more viable. The oil price is the biggest issue in the inflation calculation because of the way it goes through the cost chain. When they lower the interest rate, it lowers the cost of government debt interest and it doesn’t create inflation like you would normally expect because of fracking. It’s absolutely diabolical. The fake low interest rates make the economy look more viable than it actually is. You also get an asset bubble instead of inflation.
Maybe they will central plan their way out of this or maybe they won’t.
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This is what is going on. Trump doesn’t know as much as many about all the levers and Diles in government but I will never believe what she is saying hereTrump doesn’t know as much as many about all the levers and daily in government but I will never believe what she is saying here. The technocrats don’t net out. They have been doing too much for too long and nobody pays a price like in the private sector.
***https://twitter.com/ClaireBerlinski/status/1241999229691756547?s=20*** EDIT I just realized this tweet has a standards violation. It’s Clair Berlinski quoting Trump.
—–
One last thing about the structure of the economy. When junk debt implodes, this destroys money which creates deflation which our system of government and finance can’t handle any more. Supposedly we have double the prior record amount of debt just above junk. The Fed is already buying commercial paper. They keep floating trail balloons about buying stocks like the Japanese. Central banks are going to embarrass themselves.
Italy has a terrible banking system and their citizens hate the EU more than any other large European country. When the European monetary union starts printing all the other central banks will have to go crazy as well.
Supposedly all this chaos is going to jam money into American treasuries and stocks.
The Federal Reserve freaked out.
Look at the list of stuff the Fed is going to buy. A ton of that are loans that have almost no collateral. Auto loans. Credit card loans. They are going to buy municipal bonds of communities that are falling apart or didn’t plan / probably getting killed by pensions. Bond ETFs you would buy on the stock exchange.
Remind yourself to vote and work hard. lol
The title of the podcast should have been “Showdown in the Octagon”. Wow! What a fiery exchange!
Then when I heard Rob Long and Debra Saunders actually say something good about Trump, I had to look out the window to see if the Four Horsemen were riding by . . .
Rob demonstrates that 20/20 vision is a miraculous thing. We should have taken extraordinary measures in January? You can go look at the curves for China but he is proposing we start taking strong measures when the Chinese had only 1000-2000 cases and we had almost no data. Political and realistically as a future policy plan that’s crazy. Trump actually made the smart move to close the borders to China. But if after the last epidemic we made a “plan” for the next one we would be updating it maybe every 10 years and it would still have things like double the frequency of getting horse dung out fo streets. Rare events should have rare responses based on guiding principles. I think we are actually doing ok (I am an epidemiologist by training).
Testing is terrible in the US and I think that is because the CDC wanted to be too involved. Lifelong bureaucrats like Faulci are best are promoting their fiefdom not doing their job protecting health. When testing becomes more common than we will be better able to target things who should stay home in addition to social distancing.
Asian countries are more successful because of different culture. Our vaunted independence has hurt western countries.
National solutions are bad policy. The population density in the US varies from Alaska at 1.1 per/sqmile to 28,491 in NY. Having the same epidemic response in those two places is crazy.
Many people are talking about a treatment for Wuhan flu. The data is garbage data. Literally could not be published except in a crisis. This is not to say we should not implement this – garbage data is still data and more data will come out on chloroquine. But Trump actually took exactly the right view on this – be hopeful it works and implements and see what results. Might work/might not but lets be hopeful.
The good news is that it is an old drug and needs no approval for anything. Doctors can prescribe approved drugs for anything they want for any reason. If its an old cheap drug no one cares. The question the FDA and regulatory boards are trying to address is different.
One of his points was that the reduction in IPOs in general, and the failure of the WeWork IPO in particular, have had nothing to do with the current Wuhan Coronavirus issue, which is manifestly true. The current economic troubles might further dampen interest in IPO activity, but I did not l hear Peter lamenting that or trying to make that case.
You mean 20/20 hindsight, right?
But the job of a lifelong bureaucrat like Fauci is to promote his fiefdom, not to protect health. This is a direct analogy to the “health” commissars in China, who intentionally hid – and likely still conceal – the data on SARS-CoV-2 and the resulting disease, COVID19.
This is in my opinion Fauci’s biggest single offense against humanity, and it is grave. Fauci (who sounds too much like Charlie Rangel for comfort) was a wet blanket on anything and everything positive that Trump or anyone else wanted to say about the promise of chloroquine as both a treatment and a preventive – which it has been for decades with respect to malaria.
Fauci should have Trumpeted the FACT that after BILLIONS of doses, the safety of chloroquine is proven, and the only unknown is effectiveness preventing SARS-CoV-2 infection and treating COVID19. Preliminary (garbage) data are consistent: it’s remarkably effective. If it turns out it’s only moderately effective, so the heck what? Why is a prescription required for chloroquine?
Government sucks. Drain the swamp.
I don’t know about Fauci, but when there is less going on, public health has gotten more and more politicized. They haven’t stuck to the basics. Like the stuff they do with gun policy.
I would really hope that every state had good people making non-politicized decisions. I forget the guy’s name but the leading one in Minnesota was really going crazy on Trump when he started the travel ban. I think he was a professor and not a part of the government.