Posted on 04/24/2020 10:48:20 AM PDT by Kaslin
In the clashing commentary about whether lockdowns and stay-at-home orders should continue, or whether businesses and stores should be reopened, one senses a yearning for consensus. Why can't everybody just agree?
One reason is that we continue to be ignorant on many important points. How many people have been infected with the disease? Some fragmentary evidence has come in, but since many infected people are asymptomatic, no one knows the death rate per infection.
How is the virus disseminated in different environments? No one really knows. Some attribute the high number of deaths in New York to transmission in the subway. Others disagree. One governor is blocking superstore shoppers from buying garden equipment and seeds.
The yearning for definitive information and the assumption it will produce policy consensus are understandable but deeply wrongheaded. In this crisis, as in the other unanticipated, regime-shaking crisis of the post-Cold War era, the financial crisis of 2008-09, the facts are unclear and change so rapidly that even the most experienced experts cannot be sure what's happening. In such circumstances, mistakes are not just possible but inevitable.
Consider the financial crisis. The Federal Reserve chairman then was Ben Bernanke, the leading economist historian of the Great Depression of 1929-33. Yet even he did not predict the crisis.
Neither did the Treasury secretaries of 2008-09 -- Hank Paulson, former head of the premium investment bank Goldman Sachs, and Timothy Geithner, former president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Impeccable credentials, imperfect foresight.
President Donald Trump's leading infectious disease expert is Dr. Anthony Fauci, who filled similar roles in the administrations of former Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. No one has superior credentials or greater accomplishments. Yet in February, relying as he had to on Chinese government information, he said COVID-19 wasn't a pandemic.
It's possible to argue further that these two crises were the product -- perhaps the inevitable product, in retrospect, though unrecognized at the time -- of public policies enjoying broad bipartisan consensus.
The policy behind the 2008 financial collapse was encouraging homeownership by easing requirements for obtaining mortgages, especially for Hispanics and blacks supposedly barred from the market by racial discrimination. Clinton and Bush administration regulators rewarded firms that issued such mortgages and sanctioned the packaging of the often-shaky results in mortgage-backed securities that became worthless when, contrary to consensus expectations, housing prices crashed nationwide.
The COVID-19 pandemic can be seen as resulting from the policy followed by the United States and other Western nations for almost half a century: opening up trade with China, interlacing our economy with China's, integrating China into a keystone position in the world economy. A key moment came in 2000 when Congress, urged on by then-President Clinton and then-Gov. George W. Bush, voted for normal trade relations with China.
The consensus argument -- the hope -- was that China would embrace free markets, the rule of law and ultimately some form of democracy. Unfortunately, that hasn't happened. China concealed and lied about the virus and let it spread around the world.
In this crisis, experts at centralized government agencies have failed at their tasks.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for example, failed to develop working tests for the coronavirus, as has been documented by extensive Washington Post and New York Times reporting.
The Food and Drug Administration rigid bureaucracy prevented private firms from developing tests. Its nitpickers delayed approval of antibody tests by, as Wall Street Journal columnist Andy Kessler noted, requiring that a copy be submitted "by paper mail with a CD-ROM with the files burned on it."
It's easy to criticize such bureaucratic incompetence, just as it's easy to criticize what in retrospect seems to be the failure, in February and into March, of President Donald Trump, Gov. Andrew Cuomo and many others to recognize the potential of the pandemic. Not many experts got it right either.
But private profit-making firms and nonprofit research institutions have stepped into the lurch, researching and developing tests and vaccines. "Part of the genius of America," as Bush administration official and advocate of many consensus policies Robert Zoellick recently wrote, "is not what comes out of the White House, it's what comes out of the private sector and our institutions."
And part of that genius is a recognition that one-size-fits-all consensus policies don't always work well in a nation that has always been economically, culturally and ethnically diverse. We don't need a consensus on when to move from lockdown to reopening. We need, as Trump seems to recognize, to let states and governors grapple with the question and learn from the results.
Well lets be honest, there is plenty of intellectual dishonesty here. If you are a liberal chances are you don’t want the country to re-open any time soon. If you are conservative the sooner the better, carefully of course. Because you wonder why this is the first time in history we closed half the nation down over something that pales in comparison to heart disease deaths.
Honestly, I can remember no time when there has been so much BS flung around, so thick, so heavy, and in so many directions as regarding this current item.
Well said.
And now it seems as if the Liberals and the media, would like the country to stay shut down until we have a vaccine and or have completely eradicated this virus.
The liberal or media narrative is evolving to where Trump will be criticized if the country is opening up and we still see virus cases and deaths.
The criteria which are being used by the leftists and media are impossible to achieve. We are never going to completely eradicate this virus. And a vaccine is probably still a year away, assuming that they can create a vaccine in the first place.
This, alone, is sufficient reason to believe that it is all political.
ML/NJ
The virus was NEVER the issue. The goal was cratering the economy by use of a worldwide panic.
So you’re saying this is just a plot to get rid of Trump? If that’s the case why bother to kill off all those Italians and Spaniards as well? They cannot vote for Trump even if they wanted to. If the Chinese wanted to get rid of Trump why not just infect him directly?
Creating the panic was the plot, not the Wuhan Flu. Trumps crowning achievement was the economy. The panic and corresponding shutdown stopped that, and gave the Marxists another shot at selling their plans to the world.
Still don’t see the point of spreading it to Europe. Most Americans don’t care about what happens in Europe so it would be a lot simpler just to infect America. The terrorists who perpetrated 9/11 didn’t waste resources doing the same thing to other countries.
One more time.
The PANIC and the corresponding ECONOMIC DISLOCATION was the goal, the virus was merely the vehicle that happened to come along to facilitate it. Once a whiff of panic was in the air, it wasn’t hard for the MSM/Dem axis to whip it into a frenzy.
That’s silly !!
who wants the virus to live and kill people??
Bump
Yes, we know people who have not left their house for weeks. Not just the BS but the rate at which such BS is absorbed by the public. The media has always been full of crap, so I give credit to health leadership. My wife insists there is no way that Fauci and others would create this environment of fear if there was not a good reason for it. She is the type of person that always sees the good in people first I guess. So we have various health opinion some of which think we shouldn’t open up the economy for 18 months. What the hell are they smoking?
So you and I and many of us see through the BS, but I can’t quite figure out why so much is coming from our health leadership. Just covering their butt?
Of course they say that. The Liberal establishment at least wants this to hurt the current administration so they are going to fight tooth and nail to keep the economy closed.
As for liberal minded Americans in general who are not particularly political, I don’t know what they think. I mean many liberals in New York must be unemployed. Are they really not that concerned about getting their jobs back?
I’m in Canada where we have a liberal government so liberals here are quick to give credit to how Trudeau is handling it. In all honesty I think he is doing okay. Not much he can do anyways because healthcare and shut down issues are decided by each province, and their hair lit on fire before Trudeau even said a word.
Even more silly for Canada as we have one quarter the death rate the USA even has. In our jurisdiction of 400,000 people there has been ONE single COVID 19 death. I feel like I’m in a crazy dream and yet to wake up.
I have said from the beginning of this that the more lethal and more far reaching effects of CV-19 would arise from government “do-gooders” looking to burnish their images by appearing to look out for the public good than from the disease itself. This was when the majority opinion was “ho-hum, just another Chinese virus that will pass in time, and yeah, there will be excess deaths among weakened members of society and that, too, will be fairly quickly forgotten”. Remember, this started out with the general optimism of a new year and the stock market was screaming higher at all time highs, with no end is sight. Meanwhile, the early news from China from non-mainstream sources was alarming in terms of the draconian measures they took (the 5 day hospital build, grabbing people off the streets, spraying neighborhoods with disinfectant, mobile crematoria) even though the Chinese (meaning the CCP) cannot be assumed to care much about 6 figures of casualties for any given cause, they *MUST* have been alarmed at the apparent lethality when it came to the widespread commercial shutdown of the source zone.
They knew what this was from the beginning and they knew where it came from. Whether it was a deliberate or accidental release is something we cannot discuss, because it would be an act of war for it to have been deliberate. Yet the evidence to me suggests it was on purpose: Why the Chinese shut down all internal travel while allowing 400K people to visit or return to the US during the “what is this?” stage. The co-opting of the WHO. All in communist character, witness Chernobyl.
I think the Dems like the idea of damaging the economy as a way to defeat Trump 2020. Here is CA, they have put that goofball Tom Steyer in charge of restarting the economy. Lotsa green jobs coming.
Not being an epidemiologist, it seems to me that the only solution to this is to slowly develop the herd immunity and that means that lots of people have to catch this.
The specific area I refer to when it comes to my “rampant BS” observation is on the topic of a potential cure. The crazy optimism over a potential cure, as a salvation. The stock market rose 90 SP points (DJIA +800-900) on news of that semi-controlled trial of the Gilead drug at the Chicago hospital where only 2 patients died and most of the rest had speedy and complete recoveries. That trial has since been shown to be a flop. Did the market give those points back? Nope. Is the economy in better shape with everyone hopeful that the end of this is near? With 6% of all mortgages now in technical default, arguably worse than the financial crisis of ‘08? And 20% unemployment and PMIs in single digits? Google cuts its ad budget by 50%? Yeah, I know, the market looks past the present but the effects of this are bound to be rather long lasting, by any estimation.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.