Category: reason

“It’s Only Quarantine If It’s in the Quarante province of France.”

Apparently created by @VikramParalkar. He adds, further enhancing my admiration:

Before I posted this tweet, I fleetingly pondered the incongruity of embedding an Italian-origin word in a French-geography-format joke. Now that it’s gone, ahem, viral, I’m haunted by that choice.

 

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“Prominent Ultra-Orthodox Rabbi Ordered His Hundreds of Thousands of Followers … to Defy the Health Ministry’s Coronavirus Restrictions”

The Times of Israel (Jacob Magid) reports:

After a prominent ultra-Orthodox rabbi ordered his hundreds of thousands of followers in the Lithuanian sect to defy the Health Ministry’s coronavirus restrictions by keeping schools open, senior police officials were seen heading into his home on Sunday in a reported attempt to convince him to walk back the directive.

The group of officers entering the home of Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky in the Haredi Tel Aviv suburb of Bnei Brak was accompanied by senior members of Hatzalah, an ultra-Orthodox emergency volunteer service, according to the B’hadrei Haredim news site….

Kanievsky had also issued an edict on Sunday telling followers that the best ways to defeat the virus are to avoid lashon hara (gossiping about one’s peers), to strengthen their humility and to place the needs of others before their own.

Yeshiva World reports that the rabbi “said that bittul Torah [neglect of Torah study] is more dangerous than the coronavirus”; no word on whether he has changed his mind after the police visit.

Reminds me of the old Duck’s Breath Mystery Theatre song, “Jesus Drives My Semi When I’m Sleeping”—I couldn’t find either audio or lyrics, but the title pretty much says it all. Thanks to Larry Seltzer for the pointer.

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“It’s Only Quarantine If It’s in the Quarante province of France.”

Apparently created by @VikramParalkar. He adds, further enhancing my admiration:

Before I posted this tweet, I fleetingly pondered the incongruity of embedding an Italian-origin word in a French-geography-format joke. Now that it’s gone, ahem, viral, I’m haunted by that choice.

 

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“Prominent Ultra-Orthodox Rabbi Ordered His Hundreds of Thousands of Followers … to Defy the Health Ministry’s Coronavirus Restrictions”

The Times of Israel (Jacob Magid) reports:

After a prominent ultra-Orthodox rabbi ordered his hundreds of thousands of followers in the Lithuanian sect to defy the Health Ministry’s coronavirus restrictions by keeping schools open, senior police officials were seen heading into his home on Sunday in a reported attempt to convince him to walk back the directive.

The group of officers entering the home of Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky in the Haredi Tel Aviv suburb of Bnei Brak was accompanied by senior members of Hatzalah, an ultra-Orthodox emergency volunteer service, according to the B’hadrei Haredim news site….

Kanievsky had also issued an edict on Sunday telling followers that the best ways to defeat the virus are to avoid lashon hara (gossiping about one’s peers), to strengthen their humility and to place the needs of others before their own.

Yeshiva World reports that the rabbi “said that bittul Torah [neglect of Torah study] is more dangerous than the coronavirus”; no word on whether he has changed his mind after the police visit.

Reminds me of the old Duck’s Breath Mystery Theatre song, “Jesus Drives My Semi When I’m Sleeping”—I couldn’t find either audio or lyrics, but the title pretty much says it all. Thanks to Larry Seltzer for the pointer.

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Trump Gets What He Wants as Federal Reserve Interest Rate Target Drops to Zero

The Federal Reserve announced Sunday afternoon that it will shift its target interest rate to the zero to 0.25 range, as well as launching a new shades-of-2008 phase of “quantitative easing”—injecting $700 billion of new money into the economy via buying financial assets.

The idea, along with their announcement earlier this week of over a trillion of rotating repo loans to financial institutions with a wide variety of bonds for collateral, is intended to keep the financial end of the economy rolling as other sectors are brought to a halt by COVID-19 safety measures.

A wide variety of financial instruments are being accepted at the discount window for such loans from the Fed, including everything from Treasury bonds to state and city obligations to commercial, industrial, and agricultural loans to corporate bonds to commercial real estate and consumer loans.

In addition, as CNBC reports:

The Fed also cut reserve requirement ratios for thousands of banks to zero [and] said the Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, the European Central Bank, the Federal Reserve, and the Swiss National Bank took action to enhance dollar liquidity around the world through existing dollar swap arrangements…The actions by the Fed appeared to be the largest single day set of moves the bank had ever taken…The quantitative easing will take the form of $500 billion of Treasurys and $200 billion of agency-backed mortgage securities. The Fed said the purchases will begin Monday with a $40 billion installment.

Yahoo! Finance gives some context, noting that:

the Fed said the financial institutions should feel comfortable tapping into the discount window as a tool for addressing “potential funding pressures.” In the past, banks have been hesitant to tap into the direct lines of funding because of the stigma associated with relying on the Fed for emergency funds….The Fed also said firms could use their capital and liquidity buffers to lend, and reduced reserve requirement ratios to zero percent effective on March 26.

President Donald Trump had been jawboning and hectoring Fed chief Jerome Powell to make this drastic interest rate move for a long time to boost “his” economy in an election year.

But under current conditions, the move has a high risk of merely extending unnatural bubbles in certain asset values that will eventually crash, leaving monetary policy powerless to help. It has the additional risk of seeding high overall short-term price inflation of the sort we haven’t seen in America in over three decades. The last time we’ve seen an annual price inflation rate over 5 percent, for example, was 1990.

The Fed says it will likely keep to these policies until it feels the economy is on the other end of the COVID-19 crisis.

 

 

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Trump Gets What He Wants as Federal Reserve Interest Rate Target Drops to Zero

The Federal Reserve announced Sunday afternoon that it will shift its target interest rate to the zero to 0.25 range, as well as launching a new shades-of-2008 phase of “quantitative easing”—injecting $700 billion of new money into the economy via buying financial assets.

The idea, along with their announcement earlier this week of over a trillion of rotating repo loans to financial institutions with a wide variety of bonds for collateral, is intended to keep the financial end of the economy rolling as other sectors are brought to a halt by COVID-19 safety measures.

A wide variety of financial instruments are being accepted at the discount window for such loans from the Fed, including everything from Treasury bonds to state and city obligations to commercial, industrial, and agricultural loans to corporate bonds to commercial real estate and consumer loans.

In addition, as CNBC reports:

The Fed also cut reserve requirement ratios for thousands of banks to zero [and] said the Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, the European Central Bank, the Federal Reserve, and the Swiss National Bank took action to enhance dollar liquidity around the world through existing dollar swap arrangements…The actions by the Fed appeared to be the largest single day set of moves the bank had ever taken…The quantitative easing will take the form of $500 billion of Treasurys and $200 billion of agency-backed mortgage securities. The Fed said the purchases will begin Monday with a $40 billion installment.

Yahoo! Finance gives some context, noting that:

the Fed said the financial institutions should feel comfortable tapping into the discount window as a tool for addressing “potential funding pressures.” In the past, banks have been hesitant to tap into the direct lines of funding because of the stigma associated with relying on the Fed for emergency funds….The Fed also said firms could use their capital and liquidity buffers to lend, and reduced reserve requirement ratios to zero percent effective on March 26.

President Donald Trump had been jawboning and hectoring Fed chief Jerome Powell to make this drastic interest rate move for a long time to boost “his” economy in an election year.

But under current conditions, the move has a high risk of merely extending unnatural bubbles in certain asset values that will eventually crash, leaving monetary policy powerless to help. It has the additional risk of seeding high overall short-term price inflation of the sort we haven’t seen in America in over three decades. The last time we’ve seen an annual price inflation rate over 5 percent, for example, was 1990.

The Fed says it will likely keep to these policies until it feels the economy is on the other end of the COVID-19 crisis.

 

 

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Tired: There Are No Libertarians in a Pandemic. Wired: There Are Only Libertarians in a Pandemic.

Man, it seems like only a few days ago that the smart set was writing off small-government types (again!) in articles with such snarky headlines as “There Are No Libertarians in a Pandemic.”

By now it might be more correct to believe there are only libertarians in a pandemic, including officials who are suddenly willing and able to waive all sorts of ostensibly important rules and procedures in the name of helping people out.

How else to explain the decision by the much-loathed and irrelevant-to-safety Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to allow family-sized jugs of hand sanitizer onto planes? The TSA isn’t going full Milton Friedman—it’s reminding visitors to its website “that all other liquids, gels and aerosols brought to a checkpoint continue to be allowed at the limit of 3.4 ounces or 100 milliliters carried in a one quart-size bag.” But it’s a start.

Something similar is going on in Massachusetts, a state well-known for high levels of regulation, including of the medical sector. Expecting a crush in medical care needs due the coronavirus, Gov. Charlie Baker has seen the light and agreed to streamline the Bay State’s recognition of “nurses and other medical professionals” who are registered in other parts of the United States, something that 34 states do on a regular basis.

As Walter Olson of the Cato Institute observes,

That’s a good idea, which should help get medical professionals to where they are most needed, and it is one of many good ideas that should be kept on as policy after the pandemic emergency passes. After Superstorm Sandy in 2012, by contrast, when storm‐​ravaged oceanside homeowners badly needed skilled labor to restore their premises to usable condition, local laws in places like Long Island forbade them to bring in skilled electricians even from other counties of New York, let along other states.

And over at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), bureaucrats have suddenly decided to approve overnight a coronavirus test that its former chief, Scott Gottlieb, has described as a “fairly routine technology.”

The Roche test is 10 times faster than the process currently being used, but the FDA didn’t approve it until this past Friday—and then only for this particular emergency. But even with that delay and that limited application, this is a welcome shift.

As Reason‘s Ronald Bailey has noted, the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “stymied private and academic development of diagnostic tests that might have provided an early warning and a head start on controlling the epidemic that is now spreading across the country.”

You can probably see where I’m going with this: If the policies and decisions above are worth tossing out in an emergency, maybe they ought to be sidelined during normal times too.

Situations like the 9/11 attacks and the coronavirus outbreak often open the door to naked power grabs whose terrible consequences that stick around long after the events that inspired them (looking at you, TSA!). Governments rarely return power once they’ve amassed it. But if you listen carefully, you can hear them telling us what stuff they realize can be safely tossed. When the infection rates come down and the theaters and schools and everything else get back to normal, it may be tempting just to go back to the way we were. Resist the temptation: A lot of the rules we put up with every day are worth reevaluating, and not only during an emergency.

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Tired: There Are No Libertarians in a Pandemic. Wired: There Are Only Libertarians in a Pandemic.

Man, it seems like only a few days ago that the smart set was writing off small-government types (again!) in articles with such snarky headlines as “There Are No Libertarians in a Pandemic.”

By now it might be more correct to believe there are only libertarians in a pandemic, including officials who are suddenly willing and able to waive all sorts of ostensibly important rules and procedures in the name of helping people out.

How else to explain the decision by the much-loathed and irrelevant-to-safety Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to allow family-sized jugs of hand sanitizer onto planes? The TSA isn’t going full Milton Friedman—it’s reminding visitors to its website “that all other liquids, gels and aerosols brought to a checkpoint continue to be allowed at the limit of 3.4 ounces or 100 milliliters carried in a one quart-size bag.” But it’s a start.

Something similar is going on in Massachusetts, a state well-known for high levels of regulation, including of the medical sector. Expecting a crush in medical care needs due the coronavirus, Gov. Charlie Baker has seen the light and agreed to streamline the Bay State’s recognition of “nurses and other medical professionals” who are registered in other parts of the United States, something that 34 states do on a regular basis.

As Walter Olson of the Cato Institute observes,

That’s a good idea, which should help get medical professionals to where they are most needed, and it is one of many good ideas that should be kept on as policy after the pandemic emergency passes. After Superstorm Sandy in 2012, by contrast, when storm‐​ravaged oceanside homeowners badly needed skilled labor to restore their premises to usable condition, local laws in places like Long Island forbade them to bring in skilled electricians even from other counties of New York, let along other states.

And over at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), bureaucrats have suddenly decided to approve overnight a coronavirus test that its former chief, Scott Gottlieb, has described as a “fairly routine technology.”

The Roche test is 10 times faster than the process currently being used, but the FDA didn’t approve it until this past Friday—and then only for this particular emergency. But even with that delay and that limited application, this is a welcome shift.

As Reason‘s Ronald Bailey has noted, the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “stymied private and academic development of diagnostic tests that might have provided an early warning and a head start on controlling the epidemic that is now spreading across the country.”

You can probably see where I’m going with this: If the policies and decisions above are worth tossing out in an emergency, maybe they ought to be sidelined during normal times too.

Situations like the 9/11 attacks and the coronavirus outbreak often open the door to naked power grabs whose terrible consequences that stick around long after the events that inspired them (looking at you, TSA!). Governments rarely return power once they’ve amassed it. But if you listen carefully, you can hear them telling us what stuff they realize can be safely tossed. When the infection rates come down and the theaters and schools and everything else get back to normal, it may be tempting just to go back to the way we were. Resist the temptation: A lot of the rules we put up with every day are worth reevaluating, and not only during an emergency.

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