Category: reason

Trump’s Tariffs Weakened America’s Hospitals. Then Coronavirus Hit.

It hasn’t been talked about at any of the White House’s almost-daily coronavirus press conferences, but the Trump administration acted twice this month to reduce tariffs on imported medical equipment.

It won’t be talked about, of course, because those quiet maneuvers amount to an admission of guilt. President Donald Trump’s trade policies made it more difficult and expensive for American hospitals to buy the equipment they needed to confront a pandemic like the one now facing the world.

“In the last two years, Trump’s policy has forced China to divert the sales of these products—including protective gear for doctors and nurses and high-tech equipment to monitor patients—from the United States to other markets,” says Chad Brown, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE), “and now the U.S. medical establishment faces looming trouble importing these necessities from other countries, which may be hoarding them to meet their own health crises.”

Before the trade war, tariffs on medical equipment imported from China were low or non-existent. More than a quarter of all medical equipment imported to the U.S. came from China, according to PIIE’s data.

Trump’s tariffs certainly put a dent in those imports. The first round of tariffs on Chinese imported goods, imposed in July 2018, put a 25 percent import tax on hand sanitizer, patient monitors, thermometers, oxygen concentrators, and more. The subsequent rounds of tariffs, imposed in September 2019, added 15 percent to the cost of imported surgical gloves and other types of medical protective gear.

According to PIIE data, American imports of those Chinese-made medical products fell by 16 percent between 2017 (the last full year before Trump’s tariffs) and 2019.

The Trump administration had ample warning that tariffs on imported medical gear and equipment would leave America less prepared for a major public health crisis. At the August 2018 hearings that evaluated the necessity of Trump’s proposed China tariffs—hearings that, as I reported at the time, consisted of hundreds of American business owners pleading with the government to spare them from this supposed “protection”—multiple members of the American medical community warned about exactly what is now happening.

“Any disruption to this critical supply chain erodes the healthcare industry’s ability to deliver the quality and cost management outcomes that are key policy objectives of the country,” Matt Rowan, president of the Health Industry Distributors Association, told the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative at the time.

“These products are essential to protecting healthcare providers and their patients every single day,” he continued. “The healthcare products on the proposed list are used widely, throughout healthcare settings and are a critical component of our nation’s response to public health emergencies.”

At a hearing on additional proposed tariffs in June 2019, more warnings were issued. Lara Simmons, president of Medline Industries, told the tariff committee that it was not possible to quickly find alternative suppliers of many health care items imported from China. That meant hospitals and healthcare providers would have little choice but to pay the higher prices created by tariffs—and, therefore, would likely buy less.

“Starting production in the U.S. or any third country would be a time consuming and expensive process due to the FDA [Food and Drug Administration] regulatory procedure that is required for these products,” she said.

Trump’s so-called “phase one” trade deal with China resulted in the lifting of a few tariffs, but the tariffs on medical equipment and gear remained in place. That Trump has lifted those tariffs now is good, but not imposing them at all would have been far better.

“It reveals the foolishness of the administration’s shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later approach,” Scott Lincicome, a trade lawyer and scholar with the Cato Institute, tells Reason. The practical (and obvious) consequences of the tariff policy should have been addressed from the start, he says, like the fact that tariffs created an incentive for hospitals and other importers to rely on their existing inventories and put off making additional purchases in the hopes that the tariffs would be reduced before supplies ran out.

“There was clearly no thought given to how this would actually work in practice,” Lincicome says, “and now you’re seeing the consequences.”

Some on the neo-nationalist right are using the coronavirus outbreak and the stressed supply chains it has caused as evidence that a national industrial policy is necessary to ensure America has adequate supplies to counter a pandemic. But autarky would result in less efficient markets and more expensive products. It would leave America with the same results—higher prices and lower supply—that the tariffs did. That’s not a good solution.

We need more free trade, not less, to be better prepared for future pandemics.

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Trump’s Tariffs Weakened America’s Hospitals. Then Coronavirus Hit.

It hasn’t been talked about at any of the White House’s almost-daily coronavirus press conferences, but the Trump administration acted twice this month to reduce tariffs on imported medical equipment.

It won’t be talked about, of course, because those quiet maneuvers amount to an admission of guilt. President Donald Trump’s trade policies made it more difficult and expensive for American hospitals to buy the equipment they needed to confront a pandemic like the one now facing the world.

“In the last two years, Trump’s policy has forced China to divert the sales of these products—including protective gear for doctors and nurses and high-tech equipment to monitor patients—from the United States to other markets,” says Chad Brown, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE), “and now the U.S. medical establishment faces looming trouble importing these necessities from other countries, which may be hoarding them to meet their own health crises.”

Before the trade war, tariffs on medical equipment imported from China were low or non-existent. More than a quarter of all medical equipment imported to the U.S. came from China, according to PIIE’s data.

Trump’s tariffs certainly put a dent in those imports. The first round of tariffs on Chinese imported goods, imposed in July 2018, put a 25 percent import tax on hand sanitizer, patient monitors, thermometers, oxygen concentrators, and more. The subsequent rounds of tariffs, imposed in September 2019, added 15 percent to the cost of imported surgical gloves and other types of medical protective gear.

According to PIIE data, American imports of those Chinese-made medical products fell by 16 percent between 2017 (the last full year before Trump’s tariffs) and 2019.

The Trump administration had ample warning that tariffs on imported medical gear and equipment would leave America less prepared for a major public health crisis. At the August 2018 hearings that evaluated the necessity of Trump’s proposed China tariffs—hearings that, as I reported at the time, consisted of hundreds of American business owners pleading with the government to spare them from this supposed “protection”—multiple members of the American medical community warned about exactly what is now happening.

“Any disruption to this critical supply chain erodes the healthcare industry’s ability to deliver the quality and cost management outcomes that are key policy objectives of the country,” Matt Rowan, president of the Health Industry Distributors Association, told the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative at the time.

“These products are essential to protecting healthcare providers and their patients every single day,” he continued. “The healthcare products on the proposed list are used widely, throughout healthcare settings and are a critical component of our nation’s response to public health emergencies.”

At a hearing on additional proposed tariffs in June 2019, more warnings were issued. Lara Simmons, president of Medline Industries, told the tariff committee that it was not possible to quickly find alternative suppliers of many health care items imported from China. That meant hospitals and healthcare providers would have little choice but to pay the higher prices created by tariffs—and, therefore, would likely buy less.

“Starting production in the U.S. or any third country would be a time consuming and expensive process due to the FDA [Food and Drug Administration] regulatory procedure that is required for these products,” she said.

Trump’s so-called “phase one” trade deal with China resulted in the lifting of a few tariffs, but the tariffs on medical equipment and gear remained in place. That Trump has lifted those tariffs now is good, but not imposing them at all would have been far better.

“It reveals the foolishness of the administration’s shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later approach,” Scott Lincicome, a trade lawyer and scholar with the Cato Institute, tells Reason. The practical (and obvious) consequences of the tariff policy should have been addressed from the start, he says, like the fact that tariffs created an incentive for hospitals and other importers to rely on their existing inventories and put off making additional purchases in the hopes that the tariffs would be reduced before supplies ran out.

“There was clearly no thought given to how this would actually work in practice,” Lincicome says, “and now you’re seeing the consequences.”

Some on the neo-nationalist right are using the coronavirus outbreak and the stressed supply chains it has caused as evidence that a national industrial policy is necessary to ensure America has adequate supplies to counter a pandemic. But autarky would result in less efficient markets and more expensive products. It would leave America with the same results—higher prices and lower supply—that the tariffs did. That’s not a good solution.

We need more free trade, not less, to be better prepared for future pandemics.

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Russia’s State Duma Votes To Reset Putin’s Current Term, Allowing His Re-election in 2024

Vladimir Putin officially solidified his grasp on power last week when the State Duma, Russia’s lower legislative chamber, voted unanimously to pass a constitutional amendment modifying the structure of presidential term limits. Putin will be allowed to once again run for office in 2024, when his current term is set to expire, and stay in power for two consecutive six-year terms.

The amendment was introduced by Valentina Tereshkova, former astronaut and current Duma member of the United Russia Party. She implored the Duma to reset Putin’s previous presidential terms, allowing him to seek re-election without the restrictions of constitutional law.

Additionally, the amendment would give the president stronger veto power and the authority to appoint different members of the cabinet at will, without altering the government’s overall structure. The president could also gain the ability to become a lifelong senator if he chooses not to run again for office.

Russian policy experts have speculated how exactly Putin will retain his authority in the coming years. Some thought that Putin’s new placeholder might be former tax chief Mikhail Mishustin, who was appointed as the new prime minister in January after Dmitry Medvedev resigned. Shortly after news of the resignation broke out, Putin had proposed a constitutional amendment that would shift some power from the executive branch to the Duma.

Yet it looks like Putin decided to forego democratic formalities altogether, seizing power in the most direct way possible. The Russian constitution is written not to give power to the people but to give power to the people who already have it, prominent libertarian activist Mikhail Svetov wrote on Twitter.

The Kremlin has reached the finish line on formalizing Russia’s corporate state, Yabloko Party Leader Grigori Yavlinsky wrote on Facebook. By nullifying Putin’s current presidential term and altering how constitutional amendments are passed, Putin can overcome any remaining legal obstacles to permanent rule.

The proposed amendment contradicts the basic tenets of the Russian constitution, said Kirill Rogov, a senior research fellow at the Gaidar Institute for Economic Policy, in an interview with Echo of Moscow Radio. The Duma is illegally trying to implement it, he said, making Putin’s move an effective coup d’etat.

A coalition consisting of Russian opposition leaders, human rights activists, and constitutional law experts submitted an appeal to the European Union asking for advice on how to move forward. The appeal’s authors urged Russian citizens to publicly express their dissent towards the amendment, which would “strengthen the undemocratic vertical of power…and narrow down the autonomy of local self-government.”

If Putin stays president until 2036, he will have been in power for 36 years, longer than even Stalin’s rule. Russia’s constitutional court continues to spurt out legal jargon designed to confuse the public, but the underlying message remains clear: Putin’s autocracy has no further need to continue even the illusion of democracy.

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Russia’s State Duma Votes To Reset Putin’s Current Term, Allowing His Re-election in 2024

Vladimir Putin officially solidified his grasp on power last week when the State Duma, Russia’s lower legislative chamber, voted unanimously to pass a constitutional amendment modifying the structure of presidential term limits. Putin will be allowed to once again run for office in 2024, when his current term is set to expire, and stay in power for two consecutive six-year terms.

The amendment was introduced by Valentina Tereshkova, former astronaut and current Duma member of the United Russia Party. She implored the Duma to reset Putin’s previous presidential terms, allowing him to seek re-election without the restrictions of constitutional law.

Additionally, the amendment would give the president stronger veto power and the authority to appoint different members of the cabinet at will, without altering the government’s overall structure. The president could also gain the ability to become a lifelong senator if he chooses not to run again for office.

Russian policy experts have speculated how exactly Putin will retain his authority in the coming years. Some thought that Putin’s new placeholder might be former tax chief Mikhail Mishustin, who was appointed as the new prime minister in January after Dmitry Medvedev resigned. Shortly after news of the resignation broke out, Putin had proposed a constitutional amendment that would shift some power from the executive branch to the Duma.

Yet it looks like Putin decided to forego democratic formalities altogether, seizing power in the most direct way possible. The Russian constitution is written not to give power to the people but to give power to the people who already have it, prominent libertarian activist Mikhail Svetov wrote on Twitter.

The Kremlin has reached the finish line on formalizing Russia’s corporate state, Yabloko Party Leader Grigori Yavlinsky wrote on Facebook. By nullifying Putin’s current presidential term and altering how constitutional amendments are passed, Putin can overcome any remaining legal obstacles to permanent rule.

The proposed amendment contradicts the basic tenets of the Russian constitution, said Kirill Rogov, a senior research fellow at the Gaidar Institute for Economic Policy, in an interview with Echo of Moscow Radio. The Duma is illegally trying to implement it, he said, making Putin’s move an effective coup d’etat.

A coalition consisting of Russian opposition leaders, human rights activists, and constitutional law experts submitted an appeal to the European Union asking for advice on how to move forward. The appeal’s authors urged Russian citizens to publicly express their dissent towards the amendment, which would “strengthen the undemocratic vertical of power…and narrow down the autonomy of local self-government.”

If Putin stays president until 2036, he will have been in power for 36 years, longer than even Stalin’s rule. Russia’s constitutional court continues to spurt out legal jargon designed to confuse the public, but the underlying message remains clear: Putin’s autocracy has no further need to continue even the illusion of democracy.

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Ohio Releases 28 Low-Level Offenders To Reduce Spread of Coronavirus

An Ohio county is minimizing the spread of coronavirus in its corrections system by releasing inmates from its jail.

Overcrowding, poor sanitary conditions, and the presence of elderly inmates contribute to the fear that American jails and prisons are ill-prepared for the spread of coronavirus. Leonard Rubenstein, a senior scientist at Johns Hopkins, told Axios that prisons are the “perfect environment for the spread of COVID-19” because of these factors.

To reduce the risk to its county jail, the Cuyahoga County Court conducted hearings on a Saturday (something that happens rarely). They processed multiple cases that ended in plea deals, sentencing, court-supervised treatment, probation, or jail time at a state facility. By the end of the day, 28 low-level offenders were released. Officials have a goal of releasing 300 offenders before the situation worsens.

Reporter Cory Shaffer tweeted that one of the inmates released was arrested after a lack of bus fare prevented him from appearing in court.

As of Monday, Cuyahoga County reported 24 confirmed coronavirus cases. Dr. Amy Acton, the director of the Ohio Department of Health, estimated last week that 100,000 Ohioans, one percent of the state’s population, was carrying the virus.

The concern for inmates is a national matter. Some states have canceled visitation, public defenders are calling for the release of non-violent offenders, and district attorneys are reconsidering bail policies. Reason‘s Scott Shackford reported in 2018 how America’s bail system keeps poor people behind bars despite not being convicted of a crime. The Prison Policy Initiative also found in 2018 that most people sitting in jail have yet to be convicted.

Some parts of the legal system are only implementing half-measures. A Baltimore youth defender tweeted that a judge denied a motion to release a 15-year-old charged with a misdemeanor while citing coronavirus as a reason to delay his trial.

Last week, Democratic and Republican senators submitted letters inquiring the Bureau of Prisons and Immigration and Customs Enforcement about their plans to keep inmates and detainees healthy during the pandemic.

Other countries are facing similar issues. Iran, which currently has the third-highest number of confirmed cases worldwide, temporarily freed 70,000 prisoners earlier this month to curb the spread of COVID-19 in jails.

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Ohio Releases 28 Low-Level Offenders To Reduce Spread of Coronavirus

An Ohio county is minimizing the spread of coronavirus in its corrections system by releasing inmates from its jail.

Overcrowding, poor sanitary conditions, and the presence of elderly inmates contribute to the fear that American jails and prisons are ill-prepared for the spread of coronavirus. Leonard Rubenstein, a senior scientist at Johns Hopkins, told Axios that prisons are the “perfect environment for the spread of COVID-19” because of these factors.

To reduce the risk to its county jail, the Cuyahoga County Court conducted hearings on a Saturday (something that happens rarely). They processed multiple cases that ended in plea deals, sentencing, court-supervised treatment, probation, or jail time at a state facility. By the end of the day, 28 low-level offenders were released. Officials have a goal of releasing 300 offenders before the situation worsens.

Reporter Cory Shaffer tweeted that one of the inmates released was arrested after a lack of bus fare prevented him from appearing in court.

As of Monday, Cuyahoga County reported 24 confirmed coronavirus cases. Dr. Amy Acton, the director of the Ohio Department of Health, estimated last week that 100,000 Ohioans, one percent of the state’s population, was carrying the virus.

The concern for inmates is a national matter. Some states have canceled visitation, public defenders are calling for the release of non-violent offenders, and district attorneys are reconsidering bail policies. Reason‘s Scott Shackford reported in 2018 how America’s bail system keeps poor people behind bars despite not being convicted of a crime. The Prison Policy Initiative also found in 2018 that most people sitting in jail have yet to be convicted.

Some parts of the legal system are only implementing half-measures. A Baltimore youth defender tweeted that a judge denied a motion to release a 15-year-old charged with a misdemeanor while citing coronavirus as a reason to delay his trial.

Last week, Democratic and Republican senators submitted letters inquiring the Bureau of Prisons and Immigration and Customs Enforcement about their plans to keep inmates and detainees healthy during the pandemic.

Other countries are facing similar issues. Iran, which currently has the third-highest number of confirmed cases worldwide, temporarily freed 70,000 prisoners earlier this month to curb the spread of COVID-19 in jails.

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Maybe Doctors Shouldn’t Need the Government’s Permission To Fight Coronavirus

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced Monday that it would permit states to create laboratories for designing COVID-19 tests, and that two private companies—LabCorp and Hologic—had won approval to provide manufacturing and distribution, according to Stat. The FDA has also decided to permit pharmacists to make their own alcohol-based hand sanitizers.

This is great news that nevertheless raises an obvious question: Why do the people who are working hardest to fight the coronavirus have to ask a slow federal bureaucracy for permission to save lives?

We are just beginning to understand the extent of the damage done (and lives lost) because the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) actively thwarted private-sector efforts to produce coronavirus testing.

A German company run by a man named Olfert Landt, for instance, was able to produce more than a million tests for the World Health Organization in late February. Over the same period of time, the U.S. had access to merely 4,000 tests—largely due to a bottleneck created by the CDC and FDA, according to The Washington Post:

“The United States’ struggles, in Landt’s view, stemmed from the fact the country took too long to use private companies to develop the tests. The coronavirus pandemic was too big and moving too fast for the CDC to develop its own tests in time, he said.

‘There are 10 companies in the U.S. who could have developed the tests for them,’ Landt said. ‘Commercial companies will run to an opportunity like this.’

As the coronavirus continues to spread across the United States, causing more than 80 deaths and over 4,000 confirmed cases, the struggles that overwhelmed the nation’s testing are becoming clearer.

First, the CDC moved too slowly to tap into the expertise of academia and private companies such as Landt’s, experts said. For example, it wasn’t until last week that large companies such as Roche and Thermo Fisher won approval from the Food and Drug Administration to produce their own tests.

Moreover, while FDA and CDC officials have attributed some of the testing delays to their determination to meet exacting scientific standards they said were needed to protect public health, the government effort was nevertheless marred by a widespread manufacturing problem that stalled U.S. testing for most of February.”

Every time a rule is relaxed during a crisis, we should ask whether the rule was necessary in the first place. (For example, if oversized bottles of hand sanitizer are suddenly safe enough for the Transportation Security Administration, they were probably fine all along.) We should ask whether it is really necessary—or even desirable at all—to give a giant federal bureaucracy the power to single-handedly derail private efforts to combat a global pandemic.

It’s important to remember that bureaucracy is not some mere inconvenience. Jumping through government-mandated hoops is expensive and time-consuming. It destroys value. And dealing with red tape makes people more likely to get frustrated and give up.

When the country’s very fate depends upon government forces getting out of the way of non-government forces so that they can create better testing, and eventually a cure for COVID-19, toiling under powerful and incompetent regulatory agencies is quite literally a health hazard. That’s the case for shrinking them, even when we’re not in the midst of a crisis.

Time for some permissionless innovation.

FREE MINDS

President Donald Trump vowed to offer “powerful support” to industries affected by COVID-19.

This is a bad idea. It doesn’t make much sense to give specific bailouts to airline companies. Americans everywhere, and in all employment sectors, are reeling from the economic impacts of the epidemic.

Parsing the responses on Twitter, many people who disliked the tweet were angrier about Trump calling coronavirus “the Chinese virus” than they were about the possibility of corporate cronyism. It is quickly becoming a rule for the progressive left and media liberals that acknowledging coronavirus’s Chinese origins is de facto racist. This rule has materialized just recently, which means that some people who are now condemning the term as problematic had themselves used it only weeks before. For instance, CNN’s Jim Acosta accused Trump of xenophobia for using similar phrasing, when he called COVID-19 a “foreign” virus. But Acosta himself called it “the Wuhan virus” earlier this year.

Similarly, The New York Times recently pondered whether politicians’ use of the term “Wuhan virus” was opening up a debate that “health experts want to avoid.” Never mind that it was not politicians but the Times itself that opened up this debate.

FREE MARKETS

As for the substance of Trump’s tweet about bailing out the airline industries, Rep. Justin Amash (I–Mich.) put it best in his response: “There’s lower demand for air travel because of COVID-19. Giving corporate welfare to a few big companies cannot revive demand. We should provide relief to all Americans during this pandemic. When the emergency ends, demand will revive. When demand revives, air travel will revive.”

To that end—relief to all Americans—Sen. Rand Paul (R–K.Y.) has a good idea:

QUICK HITS

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Maybe Doctors Shouldn’t Need the Government’s Permission To Fight Coronavirus

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced Monday that it would permit states to create laboratories for designing COVID-19 tests, and that two private companies—LabCorp and Hologic—had won approval to provide manufacturing and distribution, according to Stat. The FDA has also decided to permit pharmacists to make their own alcohol-based hand sanitizers.

This is great news that nevertheless raises an obvious question: Why do the people who are working hardest to fight the coronavirus have to ask a slow federal bureaucracy for permission to save lives?

We are just beginning to understand the extent of the damage done (and lives lost) because the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) actively thwarted private-sector efforts to produce coronavirus testing.

A German company run by a man named Olfert Landt, for instance, was able to produce more than a million tests for the World Health Organization in late February. Over the same period of time, the U.S. had access to merely 4,000 tests—largely due to a bottleneck created by the CDC and FDA, according to The Washington Post:

“The United States’ struggles, in Landt’s view, stemmed from the fact the country took too long to use private companies to develop the tests. The coronavirus pandemic was too big and moving too fast for the CDC to develop its own tests in time, he said.

‘There are 10 companies in the U.S. who could have developed the tests for them,’ Landt said. ‘Commercial companies will run to an opportunity like this.’

As the coronavirus continues to spread across the United States, causing more than 80 deaths and over 4,000 confirmed cases, the struggles that overwhelmed the nation’s testing are becoming clearer.

First, the CDC moved too slowly to tap into the expertise of academia and private companies such as Landt’s, experts said. For example, it wasn’t until last week that large companies such as Roche and Thermo Fisher won approval from the Food and Drug Administration to produce their own tests.

Moreover, while FDA and CDC officials have attributed some of the testing delays to their determination to meet exacting scientific standards they said were needed to protect public health, the government effort was nevertheless marred by a widespread manufacturing problem that stalled U.S. testing for most of February.”

Every time a rule is relaxed during a crisis, we should ask whether the rule was necessary in the first place. (For example, if oversized bottles of hand sanitizer are suddenly safe enough for the Transportation Security Administration, they were probably fine all along.) We should ask whether it is really necessary—or even desirable at all—to give a giant federal bureaucracy the power to single-handedly derail private efforts to combat a global pandemic.

It’s important to remember that bureaucracy is not some mere inconvenience. Jumping through government-mandated hoops is expensive and time-consuming. It destroys value. And dealing with red tape makes people more likely to get frustrated and give up.

When the country’s very fate depends upon government forces getting out of the way of non-government forces so that they can create better testing, and eventually a cure for COVID-19, toiling under powerful and incompetent regulatory agencies is quite literally a health hazard. That’s the case for shrinking them, even when we’re not in the midst of a crisis.

Time for some permissionless innovation.

FREE MINDS

President Donald Trump vowed to offer “powerful support” to industries affected by COVID-19.

This is a bad idea. It doesn’t make much sense to give specific bailouts to airline companies. Americans everywhere, and in all employment sectors, are reeling from the economic impacts of the epidemic.

Parsing the responses on Twitter, many people who disliked the tweet were angrier about Trump calling coronavirus “the Chinese virus” than they were about the possibility of corporate cronyism. It is quickly becoming a rule for the progressive left and media liberals that acknowledging coronavirus’s Chinese origins is de facto racist. This rule has materialized just recently, which means that some people who are now condemning the term as problematic had themselves used it only weeks before. For instance, CNN’s Jim Acosta accused Trump of xenophobia for using similar phrasing, when he called COVID-19 a “foreign” virus. But Acosta himself called it “the Wuhan virus” earlier this year.

Similarly, The New York Times recently pondered whether politicians’ use of the term “Wuhan virus” was opening up a debate that “health experts want to avoid.” Never mind that it was not politicians but the Times itself that opened up this debate.

FREE MARKETS

As for the substance of Trump’s tweet about bailing out the airline industries, Rep. Justin Amash (I–Mich.) put it best in his response: “There’s lower demand for air travel because of COVID-19. Giving corporate welfare to a few big companies cannot revive demand. We should provide relief to all Americans during this pandemic. When the emergency ends, demand will revive. When demand revives, air travel will revive.”

To that end—relief to all Americans—Sen. Rand Paul (R–K.Y.) has a good idea:

QUICK HITS

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Congratulations to Steve Sachs!

Were it not for the pandemic, last weekend would have been the Federalist Society’s annual student symposium at the University of Michigan. But in an admirably quick adaptation to the circumstances, the Federalist Society instead hosted the entire symposium online via videoconferencing. One key event of the symposium is the awarding of the Joseph Story Award (previously the Paul M Bator Award), which is given annually to “a young academic (40 and under) who has demonstrated excellence in legal scholarship, a commitment to teaching, a concern for students, and who has made a significant public impact in a manner that advances the rule of law in a free society.”

This year’s winner was my friend and co-author, and our co-conspirator, Stephen Sachs of Duke. Steve’s award marks a four-year streak of awarding this prize (and the Bator award before it) to members of the Volokh Conspiracy, and brings the total number of Conspiracy awards up to eleven. (I’m not aware of a law school that has more than three.)

You can read/watch the presentation of the award here. My favorite part of his remarks were his comments about the Federalist Society itself:

Third, I’m honored to receive this award from the Federalist Society, which similarly combines a commitment to intellectual discovery with real-world accomplishment.

I wanted to become a lawyer, partly from my dad’s example, but also because, as a lawyer, you could go into a library, do some research, make an argument—and the hope is, at the end of it, the world would be different. This is the ideal that Hamilton described in the very first paragraph of The Federalist No. 1—that societies might be capable of “establishing good government from reflection and choice,” and not “forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”

I don’t know of any other organization, in America or elsewhere, whose members are simultaneously at the forefront of serious scholarship and at the forefront of government in quite the same way.

Finally, I’m particularly honored to receive this award because it shows something very special about FedSoc, something that’s unfortunately in diminishing supply today.

When I was a student, I wasn’t sure about joining FedSoc. I was still figuring out what I thought about things; I would have never attended one of these symposia; and I would never have expected to receive an award like this one.

But one of FedSoc’s true advantages, and the point I want to leave you with tonight, is that this openness, this willingness to bring people in to think things through and get to better answers, is its extraordinary strength.

By current standards, FedSoc’s politics are wildly diverse: they run the whole gamut from conservative to libertarian! That might not seem like much. But what it means is that, on any one issue, you can find someone in FedSoc who passionately but respectfully disagrees with you.

That’s true for controversial issues, like abortion or same-sex marriage or presidential candidates.

And it’s true for even more controversial issues, like economic liberty or industrial policy or the unitary executive or whether Erie Railroad v. Tompkins should be overruled. (Which it should.)

FedSoc has made the choice, and it’s a deliberate choice, not to make endorsements or write manifestos or establish litmus tests. There are no Thirty-Nine Articles which every one of you had to sign. Instead, there are just broad commitments—including a commitment to discussion, to reasoning together, as the way to get things right.

Now, FedSoc isn’t just a debating society: there really are positions that most people in it share. And these ideas matter.

The point of FedSoc is not just to have a good time talking (though we do).

And it’s not just to find people you agree with (though that can be a comfort).

It’s actually to reach the truth, talking it over with those with whom you share enough to make your disagreements meaningful.

In an age when disagreement is often treated like disloyalty, and when curiosity is often confused with cowardice, a commitment to open discussion and truth is like water in the desert.

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Pandemics Don’t Kill Compassion. Actually, They Bring It Out.

“Pandemics Kill Compassion, Too,” is the headline over a David Brooks column in the New York Times predicting that the coronavirus is about to “inflame class divisions.”

Well, if The New York Times editorial page is going to use the pandemic to confirm its prior assumptions, let me seize it to confirm mine, which is that news organizations can take the same set of facts and spin them in radically different ways.

Where Brooks sees a heightening of class divisions and a death of compassion, I see a narrowing of class divisions and an amazing outbreak of compassion.

On the class division front, for sure, it’s better to be quarantined, or socially distanced, in a mansion than in a small apartment or in a homeless shelter. But the billionaire with floorside Final Four seats and a private plane to get him there and back is almost precisely as out-of-luck as the low-wage worker who was planning to watch it on television. The basketball game is equally canceled for both of them.

All those trillions of dollars of stock market wealth “incinerated” over the past few weeks did more to decrease inequality in this country than torrents of rhetoric from Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) about never-to-be-implemented “wealth tax” plans. Those who took the largest losses are the people with the biggest retirement accounts.

I’ve seen the argument that white-collar professionals who can work from home and will keep getting paid are advantaged over, say, bartenders or waiters who find themselves suddenly unemployed, or over small retail business-owners who are seeing customers disappear. There’s probably something to that. But we have a choice about how to view that. One can, like Brooks, focus on, and magnify, the “class divisions.” Or one can observe that this pandemic is one of the few things left that leaves no one at all truly untouched, even those who avoid being infected by the virus.

The same depends-on-how-you-look-at-it approach applies to the compassion questions. Plenty of people have chosen to focus, negatively, on young, healthy people who went ahead and socialized in bars and restaurants on the theory that the virus was unlikely to affect them seriously. In so doing, they acted in callous disregard for how their action might speed the spread of the virus and thus potentially contribute to overwhelming the health care system, consigning elderly or previously sick individuals who get COVID-19 to death.

But many, many individuals and institutions—businesses, houses of worship, schools, governments—have chosen dramatically to modify their normal routines, at great cost, precisely for the purpose of slowing the spread of the virus, preventing the health care system from being overwhelmed, and making sure doctors and hospital beds are available for elderly or previously individuals who get Covid-19 and need the care.

Many other necessary employees—the checkout clerks at Walmart and Trader Joe’s, the gas station attendant, police officers and firefighters—are showing up for work, notwithstanding that by doing so they are exposing themselves to a greater risk of infection. Whether that amounts to “compassion” or simply professionalism is an interesting question, but it is less bleak than the Brooks headline would have it.

If there is a “division” that stands to be heightened by the novel coronavirus or by Covid-19 it seems less likely to me to be the class one and more likely to be a generational one. As 70-something-year-olds President Donald Trump, former vice president Joe Biden, and Sanders compete in a presidential campaign, young people are being asked to stay home and contract the economy in part so that their elders don’t die. Cue the “OK, boomer” comments. So far, the youngsters are taking it with, all told, minimal grumbling and remarkable good cheer.

How long that is sustainable is an open question. But if history is any guide, the pandemic may reduce polarization rather than accentuate it. It may add to a sense of common purpose and compassion, rather than destroy it. At some point, we may all even be nostalgic together for the moment not so long ago when people were bitterly complaining about class divisions and income inequality rather than singlemindedly focused on fighting disease and death.

Ira Stoll is editor of FutureOfCapitalism.com and author of JFK, Conservative.

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