Tag: virus

The Wisdom of Freedom

“Salon À la Mode owner Shelley Luther was sentenced to seven days in jail for criminal and civil contempt and a $7,000 fine,” the Dallas-Ft. Worth CBS affiliate reported Tuesday, “for defying Governor Greg Abbott’s stay-at-home rules.”

She dared to open her beauty salon … and tore up a county judge’s related and official-looking cease and desist order.

Another judge offered to spare her jail if she would confess that her “actions were selfish” and, the judge lectured, “putting your own interest ahead of those in the community in which you live.” Luther responded decisively: “Feeding my kids isn’t selfish.”

Calling for Luther’s “immediate release,” Attorney General Ken Paxton articulated smart policy: “The judge should not put people in jail like her who are just trying to make a living.”

That should be written in law — sans the “like her” part.

The agile Governor Abbott, the rule’s originator, ducked responsibility with “surely there are less restrictive means to achieving [public safety] than jailing a Texas mother.”

Then, governor, why the command?

“I am modifying my executive orders,” Abbott declared yesterday, “to ensure confinement is not a punishment for violating an order.”

The Lieutenant Governor paid her fine.

Shelley Luther was “free” — and on Fox News last night.

But have we learned anything?

Why not provide the public with the best information available and allow people to make their own decisions? No orders. Businesspeople would be free to do what they think is best. At-risk folks would be free to be very careful.

Obviously, governments can help. But best through persuasion, remembering they work for us.

Free people.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: In The Wisdom of Crowds (2004), James Surowiecki posited that “a diverse collection of independently deciding individuals” can make complex decisions better than the experts. Exactly.

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Tags coronavirus, freedom, lockdown, pandemic, virus

international affairs media and media people

Soft on China

China, Washington Post, virus, Covid, coronavirus, totalitarian, freedom,

Last Saturday’s Washington Post editorial blasted both President Donald Trump and his presumptive Democratic challenger Joe Biden for a “sleazy stratagem” — namely, “accusing the other of being a stooge for Communist China.”

At issue are dueling advertisements from each campaign and a pair of SuperPACs.

The Trump ad features Fox Business’s Stuart Varney declaring that “Biden’s son inked a billion-dollar deal with a subsidiary of the Bank of China,” followed by Biden telling an audience that the Butchers of Beijing “aren’t bad folks, folks.”

“For 40 years, Joe Biden has been wrong about China,” warns the America First Actiom PAC spot. “I believed in 1979 and I believe now,” offers Biden, “that a rising China is a positive development.”

Biden’s campaign responded with an ad charging that “Trump rolled over for the Chinese” — uttering their praises “as the coronavirus spread across the world.”

“Trump trusted China,” claims an American Bridge PAC spot, noting that “everyone knew they lied about the virus.”

While acknowledging “that China’s government contributed to the global spread of the coronavirus by covering up initial reports” and “has tried to use the pandemic to advance its authoritarian political model globally at the expense of democracy,” The Post nonetheless bemoaned the “irresponsible” “rhetoric” that “could complicate cooperation with China.”

What the Post’s editors did not make clear — while explaining that China should be “pushed for greater transparency” and “its propaganda … rejected” — was the inconvenient fact that the paper has for a decade published reams of Chinese government propaganda.

For an undisclosed sum, likely in the millions, as I wrote last week.

So let the campaign heat up. Americans are far less interested in cooperating with totalitarian China than is our nation’s compromised newspaper of record.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture

The Great Divide

Virus, corona virus, Covid, epidemic, pandemic, authoritarianism,

The current pandemic panic and crisis, Brian Doherty noted in Reason, “is a harshly vivid example of Americans’ inability to understand, fruitfully communicate with, or show a hint of respect for those seen to be on other side of an ideological line.”

Mr. Doherty, who profiled me in his book Radicals for Capitalism, calls the two major positions “Openers” versus “Closers.”

They do not trust each other, and their respective policy prescriptions — opening up society to normal commerce versus keeping it closed, under lockdown — are poles apart.

Doherty doesn’t mention how we treat experts. Virologists, medical doctors and epidemiologists also form ranks on both sides, and these experts sure seem to be talking past each other, too.

Which seems neither professional nor scientific.

Doherty concludes by asserting that, even after obtaining answers to questions regarding “the disease’s spread, extent, and damage” or coming to an eventual conclusion regarding “the long term damage to life and prosperity the economic shutdown is causing,” we must admit that “human beings of goodwill and intelligence might come to a different value judgment about what policy is best overall.”

Sure. But, looking over the divide as he presents it, I am afraid I see one side — the Openers — concerned about a broad number of possible disasters (economic dislocation and even mass starvation in addition to illness and death) while the other — the Closers — obsessing about fighting a disease about which there remains limited knowledge and little agreement.

The Openers seem a whole lot more open to diverse considerations.

Including the possibility that freedom might result in a better collective response than orders issued by mayors and governors and the president.

Which strikes me as more like Common Sense.

I’m Paul Jacob.

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government transparency national politics & policies responsibility

America Unmasked

For weeks, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Health and Human Services told us not to wear face masks. The Surgeon General even warned that mass use of masks could “increase the spread of the coronavirus.”

“My nose tells me,” I posted on Facebook weeks ago, “that all the info about how we don’t need face-masks is to cover up for the lack of face-masks.”

My family is very grateful to a Taiwanese friend, who mailed me masks — not the N95 masks, which the Taiwanese government is donating in large quantities, but masks of excellent non-medical quality.

Last Wednesday, CBS News anchor Norah O’Donnell noted that a large percentage of people spreading the virus are asymptomatic, meaning they don’t know they have it. She asked Dr. Anthony Fauci with the White House Coronavirus Taskforce: “Should we be advising people to wear masks?”

“The primary people who need masks are healthcare workers,” the doctor replied, before admitting that if supplies weren’t so limited, wearing a mask was “a potentially good way … you could have an impact with preventing transmission.”

Days later, President Trump passed on a CDC advisory to the same effect.

Americans had figured out the initial lie, and were already making their own and posting how to do so on social media. Now that’ll ramp up.

Initially, our leaders didn’t level with us. They could have. Americans seem amazingly cooperative, to say the least.

Government folks need to stop masking the truth from the public. That way they might earn more public trust.

Which sure can be useful during a crisis.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies too much government

Name Your FDA Poison

We’re dealing with a pandemic, here, and the Food and Drug Administration insists upon poisoning us.

Or, more accurately, the FDA sticks to Prohibition-Era poisoning schemes, no matter how unreasonable or counter-productive.

Private enterprise is stepping up to the plate. “Local distilleries like Restorative Republic and rum-maker Cotton & Reed are making artisanal hand cleaner, the primary ingredient in which is high-proof alcohol,” writes Peter Suderman at Reason. “And anyone who buys a bottle of their booze also gets a small bottle of what you might call hipster Purell.”

This should be a feel-good story. But government regulators are not in the feel-good biz.

What is the FDA saying to the 500 or so distilleries across the country who want to pitch in, making up for the supply crunch?

The regulatory agency insists that they denature the alcohol in the sanitizer.

Denatured alcohol is, Wikipedia succinctly states, “ethanol that has additives to make it poisonous, bad-tasting, foul-smelling, or nauseating to discourage recreational consumption.”

The feds thus carry on the old prohibitionists’ tradition of poisoning products to discourage drinking.

It’s an idiotic practice: Preventing children from destroying themselves with alcohol by making the easiest-to-access alcohol unpalatable. But kids have been known to sneak drinks even those they find disgusting and vile, just to get the alcohol buzz. So: let’s kill the kids! That’ll teach ’em.

And insisting that distilleries denature their alcohol means that distilleries would ruin their equipment for making drinkable alcohol.

Though some liquor distillers are trying to up hand sanitizer production, ten times more could be produced were the FDA to change its rules, Suderman explains.

Get out of the way, government.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Accountability national politics & policies too much government

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to a Quorum

Post author By Redactor
Post date March 30, 2020
8 Comments on A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to a Quorum

Thomas Massie, Coronavirus, pandemic, virus, House of Representatives, Congress,

On Friday, the talking heads and Twitterati excoriating Rep. Thomas Massie (R‑Kent.) were so scandalized that they couldn’t quite get to telling us what terrible thing he had done.

“GOP’s Massie outrages House,” screamed The Washington Post headline. The paper informed that “the Republican from northern Kentucky has frequently voted no on issues large and small, even against the wishes of GOP leaders.”

Wow, is that allowed?

With Congress poised to shovel $2.2 trillion to citizens and businesses by unanimous consent, i.e., without a recorded roll call vote, Mr. Massie balked, thereby requiring a quorum to physically come to the capitol to vote on the relief package.

“I came here to make sure our Republic doesn’t die by unanimous consent in an empty chamber,” Massie declared on the House floor, “and I request a recorded vote.”

President Trump urged the “third rate Grandstander” be tossed out of the Grand Old Party. And former U.S. Senator and 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry noted — of all things — his complete agreement with Trump, tweeting that “Massie has tested positive for being an a**hole. He must be quarantined to prevent the spread of his massive stupidity.”

Rep. Max Rose (D‑N.Y.) offered that Massie was “disgusting” and “inhumane,” and that if the vote was pushed “back 24 hours there will be blood on [his] hands.”

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D‑Calif.) boasted of having asked the congressman, “Why don’t you just back off?”

Facing the biggest spending bill of all time, Massie’s notion of Congresspeople voting on the record? Hardly radical. But in the face of the COVID-19 threat, bringing legislators back to the capitol entailed real risk.

Yet come back they did. And just to show Massie how wrong he was in alleging a cover-up, they agreed to a roll-call vote so that there was full accountability.

Take THAT, Massie!

Wait … Congress didn’t go on the record?!

They came back and yet, as Massie pointed out, “they still refused to have a recorded vote.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: One spending item, which Massie had specifically complained about, was $25 million for the Kennedy Center. Then, mere hours after President Trump signed the legislation, the Kennedy Center honchos fired the National Symphony Orchestra, informing them “that paychecks would end this week.”

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