Tag: hit&run

Challenge to L.A. Closure of Gun Stores as Part of General “Non-Essential Business” Closure

It’s Brandy v. Villanueva (C.D. Cal.), just filed today by the Second Amendment Foundation, the NRA, the California Gun Rights Foundation, and the Firearms Policy Coalition.

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How Much Is $2.3 Trillion? More Than Even Obama Could Imagine

In 2009, the last time Washington aimed a trillion-dollar firehose at the distressed U.S. economy, the president, a Democrat, repeatedly coupled that act of temporary profligacy with the rhetorical aim of long-term budgetary sobriety.

“One of the central goals of this administration is restoring fiscal responsibility,” Barack Obama asserted back then. “Even as we have had to spend our way out of this recession in the near term, we’ve begun to make the hard choices necessary to get our country on a more stable fiscal footing in the long run.”

There were plenty of reasons for contemporaneous skepticism about Obama’s claims, but even insincere nods toward a presumed virtue can contribute to a mild braking on vice. Policy battles over deficits, debt ceilings, and old-age entitlements dominated national politics through the end of 2013, and not merely because of then-ornery, now-quiescent Tea Party Republicans. Erskine Bowles, after all, was a Democrat.

But the twin rise of President Donald Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), along with the strains of populism they channeled, chased deficit hawks to the despised corners of polite society by 2015. After that, the main questions left were how many zeroes would end up on the federal check when the next crisis inevitably hit.

George W. Bush’s Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of October 2008 came with a $700 billion price tag. Add in Obama’s $833 billion American Recovery and Reinvestmenty Act in February 2009, and we’re talking a bailout/stimulus combo of $1.53 trillion, or $1.84 trillion in 2020 dollars.

By comparison, the bipartisan stimulus that was very temporarily held up by the near-universally despised Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.), totals around $2.3 trillion, according to the bean-counters at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. Even accounting for population increase (the U.S. had 307 million residents in 2009, around 331 million today), that’s an inflation-adjusted per capita increase from around $6,000 11 years ago to $6,950 today.

How much is $2.3 trillion? In nominal terms, it’s the same as the entire federal budget for Fiscal Year 2004. Adjusting for inflation gets you back to the federal government’s $1 trillion outlay for 1987. Inflation and population together take you back to 1974. In short, Congress just approved a bailout/stimulus of $6,950 per person, which is more than the $6,600 per person in constant dollars that the entire federal government spent in Richard Nixon’s final year in office.

The accumulated national debt in 1974 was $475 billion, or around $2.5 trillion in today’s money ($11,700 per U.S. resident). George W. Bush inherited we-owe-yous of $5.67 trillion (which adjusts to $8.52 trillion and $30,200 per capita), and left for Obama a present of $10 trillion ($12 trillion/$39,600). As Trump readies his black sharpie for the rescue package, the debt clock stands at $23.6 trillion ($71,300 per person)—and it was being goosed by trillion-dollar annual deficits even before COVID-19 hit the fan.

And unlike Obama in 2009, Trump doesn’t currently feel the need to even rhetorically hint at future tradeoffs. The president reportedly said in late 2018 about any future fiscal crisis: “Yeah, but I won’t be here.” Add in the likelihood of future bailouts and stimuli, and basically we’re all Modern Monetary Theorists now.

The annual budget deficit, which snapped an entire generation of conservatives into attention when it crossed the $1 trillion threshold a decade ago, is likely to top $2 trillion before the fiscal year is out. The Government Accountability Office and Congressional Budget Office were calling the country’s long-term fiscal outlook “unsustainable” back when the good times were still rolling. Now revenues are taking a massive hit, demand for government service is going through the roof, and the U.S. Mint’s going brrrrr.

Libertarians back in 2008-09 tended to make four types of predictions about the bailout/stimulus. One—that the unpredented swooshing of cash and Federal Reserve intrusion into the economy would trigger long-dormant inflation—did not come to pass, and so many policy enthusiasts have taken that as a cue to ignore libertarians.

But there were three other forward-looking objections to socializing the failures of deep-pocketed losers during the financial crisis: that the ensuing debt load would unduly dampen the eventual recovery, that failing to fix the underlying government distortions that caused malinvestments in the first place would make bailouts an eternally recurring phenomenon, and that papering over problems with money would create new, even more dangerous bubbles.

With today’s Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, Congress has cemented what we already suspected: that the federal government does not care about learning from directly relevant mistakes it made in the recent past.

There is no more politics of fiscal prudence in America, just a competition to see who can wag the biggest firehose. While the bodies begin to pile up in New York City and elsewhere, Washington has responded with a massive course of experimental economics. May we respond better than rats in a cage.

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No, Cuba Is Not Exactly the Cancer Pioneer Nova Attempts to Present

Nova: Cuba’s Cancer Hope.  PBS. Wednesday, April 1, 9 p.m.

I feel moved to poetry by the latest episode of Nova, the PBS science documentary science series. Perhaps you remember the classic lines about the little girl with the little curl in the middle of her forehead: “When she was good/she was very, very good/But when she was bad, she was horrid.”

That’s perfect description of Cuba’s Cancer Hope, which is partly an absorbing exploration of the use of immunology in the treatment of cancer, and partly an embarrassingly puffy ode to the Castro brothers’ totalitarian island. Watching it might trigger your latent schizophrenia; or maybe just induce you to write a pleading letter to TiVo encouraging them to get to work on that long-promised button that allows to automatically skip through communist drivel with a single click. Let me know how it turns out.

As recently as the 1970s, researchers who tried to figure out why the human body’s own immune system didn’t attack cancer cells were derided in medical textbooks as believers in witchcraft. (Seriously: Cuba’s Cancer Hope shows an example, a useful reminder to those who think that Science [cap S is deliberate] speaks with one immutable and eternal voice are quite daft.) The prevailing belief was that T-cells and other warrior elements of the immune system would never attack tumors because they were part of the body itself.

The witches—er, researchers—kept chipping at the cancer-as-self theory until scientists in the United States and Japan won a Nobel prize in 2018 for showing that two proteins that act as brakes on immune cells were being tricked into action by cancer cells. If those proteins could be reined in, the conventional wisdom now goes, the human body itself could be a potent weapon against cancer. Cuba’s Cancer Hope, with sharply illustrative prose and graphics, gives a lucid account of this part of the story.

But when the tale turns to Cuba’s development of a lung-cancer vaccine called CIMAvax that enhances the immunological approach with genetic engineering, the show goes off the rails. Cuba, where the national obsession with cigars has triggered a serious lung cancer problem, began experimenting with the drug in the early 1990s. But it wasn’t until President Obama restored U.S. diplomatic relations with Cuba in 2015 after a 54-year break, making it easier for Americans to visit the island, that CIMAvax attracted much international interest.

On the Internet, it quickly acquired the mythic status once held by laetrile, another supposed cure for cancer suppressed by The Man. Several hundred Americans traveled to Cuba to take CIMAvax, and Cuba’s Cancer Hope is full of testimonials from them—tinged with bitter recriminations against the Trump administration for reviving some of the restrictions on travel to Cuba and forcing them to “break the law” to keep from dying. (Actually, seeking health care in Cuba was never on the list of approved reasons to visit Cuba, and would-be patients can get away with it now the same way they did under Obama: By lying about it to U.S. Customs inspectors, who unless there’s an AK-47 in your suitcase, have no way to check what you were doing there.)

Their stories go unchallenged by Cuba’s Cancer Hope. In fact, the only question the show has about anything is, “How is it possible for a county as poor and isolated as Cuba to come up with cutting-edge medicines like this?” The answer, of course, is the resplendent humanitarianism of Fidel Castro, who raised Cuba from a pestilent sinkhole into a model of public health that rivals anything in the First World. Though the United States gets a little credit for imposing that nasty embargo that forced Cuba to become heroically self-reliant.

A much more accurate answer would be: Cuba did nothing of the kind. It was anything but isolated—its top immunology researchers learned their trade at the University of Texas. Its supposed advances in public health under Castro are imaginary; it ranked near the top of Latin America in life expectancy, infant mortality and a variety of health statistics before Castro took power, a fact that PBS once knew. (As for current health-care data from Cuba, about the only person who believes any of it is Bernie Sanders.)

And most of all, CIMAvax is far from a “cutting-edge” medicine. The truth is that it barely works at all. As Cuba’s Cancer Hope admits in a single throw-away line, “Cuban clinical trials show that it extends life three to five months on average.” The five-year survival rate for its users is about 15 percent, roughly the same as that for patients treated with approved U.S. cancer therapies. American oncologists hoot in frustration at patients who want help getting to Cuba to obtain CIMAvax. Says one, quoted in a recent report by Public Radio International: “Without seeing new stats, it’s not that impressive… . I am not too worried about people not being able to go to Cuba.”

Some American medical authorities think CIMAvax shows promise, and a clinical study of the drug is underway at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo. Perhaps it will someday be proven effective. The same could be said of about 200 other clinical studies of various lung cancer treatments being carried out at the moment, but there’s no sign of Nova doing an episode on “Norway’s Cancer Hope” or “The Mayo Clinic’s Cancer Hope.” Of course, none of them would invite any discussion of the genius of Fidel Castro.

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New Jersey Allows, Then Blocks, Deliveries From Breweries and Distilleries

One of the few heartening trends to emerge from America’s battle against the COVID-19 outbreak has been the sweeping aside of rules that never made much sense in the first place. Like the prohibitions that kept licensed workers from doing the same job in a different state, or the regulations that limited telemedicine.

In many places, some of the last vestiges of Prohibition are disappearing, as states and cities legalize the sale of beer, wine, and cocktails to-go. With restaurants, bars, and breweries under mandatory shutdown orders, it’s really the least that officials could do to give those establishments a fighting chance to survive until the pandemic passes.

But in New Jersey, breweries and distilleries have been left out of the newfound coronavirus-induced booze freedom. When Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat, issued an executive order on Saturday ordering all non-essential businesses in the state to close, the order allowed restaurants, bars, and liquor stores to remain open as long as they only serve customers with takeout and delivery orders. Breweries and distilleries initially believed they would be allowed to operate in the same fashion, but officials clarified on Wednesday that they weren’t. The governor’s order, NJ.com reports, allows alcohol deliveries only by businesses that were already licensed to deliver food.

That might doom New Jersey’s 115 craft breweries.

“The fact that the state of New Jersey is allowing us to do pickups and deliveries is the only reason that we’re still in business right now,” Mike Jones, owner of Hackensack Brewing Company, tells NJ.com. “If we can’t deliver, we’re going to be shutting our doors.”

Part of the issue is a question about the limits of a governor’s emergency powers. Alexis Degan, executive director for the New Jersey Brewers Association, tells Forbes that Murphy is trying to find a way to keep breweries open and that the state legislature may need to be called into session to enact a quick fix.

That’s a good reminder that even during emergencies, executive action should be subject to the constitutionally mandated balancing of powers. But it’s also evidence of the damage that nonsensical regulations can do. If breweries had been allowed to sell carry-out beer all along, lawmakers wouldn’t have to scramble to fix those rules now.

“In an era where you can get nearly any product under the sun delivered to your door within a few hours, it makes little sense to exclude alcohol,” writes C. Jarrett Dieterle, an alcohol policy expert with the R Street Institute. “Even in a pandemic-free world, allowing alcohol delivery would be a win-win that helps both producers and consumers.”

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No, British Epidemiologist Neil Ferguson Has Not ‘Drastically Downgraded’ His Worst-Case Projection of COVID-19 Deaths

Contrary to what you may have read or heard, British epidemiologist Neil Ferguson has not suddenly reduced his worst-case projection of COVID-19 deaths in the U.K. by a factor of 28. To the contrary, he says the policies adopted by the British government, which are in line with the aggressive control measures recommended by a highly influential March 16 paper that Ferguson and other researchers at Imperial College wrote, should keep the number of deaths below 20,000.

“We assessed in that report…that fatalities would probably be unlikely to exceed about 20,000 with effectively a lockdown, a social distancing strategy,” Ferguson, who is himself recovering from COVID-19, told a parliamentary committee on Wednesday. “But it could be substantially lower than that.”

In other words, it is not true that Ferguson “is presenting drastically downgraded estimates,” as The Daily Wire claimed, or that he “just walked back the apocalyptic predictions,” as The Federalist asserted. But Ferguson did revise one of his key estimates in a way that suggests a lower case fatality rate (CFR) than his group assumed in their modeling.

“What we’ve been seeing in Europe in the last week or two is a rate of growth of the epidemic which is faster than we expected from early data in China,” said Ferguson, who testified from his home via video link. “So we are revising our central, best estimate of the reproduction number [i.e., the number of people the average carrier can be expected to infect] to something on the order of 3 or a little bit above rather than about a 2.5 level.” In his view, that revision “actually adds more evidence to support the more intensive social distancing measures applied this week, because the higher the reproduction number is, the more intensive the controls need to be to achieve suppression of the epidemic.”

A substantially higher reproduction number implies that the COVID-19 virus can be expected to spread more quickly than the Imperial College group imagined. But it also means that many more people in the U.K. already have been infected, which implies a bigger gap between known cases and the actual number of infections. That, in turn, implies that the true CFR is lower than the 0.9 percent rate that Ferguson and his colleagues used in their projections.

The Imperial College CFR estimate is far lower than the crude CFR for the U.K., which is currently about 5 percent. The difference reflects the understanding that the true number of infections is bound to be much larger than the official numbers reflect, because many people with mild or nonexistent symptoms (as is typical of COVID-19) will not seek medical treatment or testing. The size of that group is a crucial question in estimating the true CFR.

Ferguson believes the number of undocumented infections is not nearly as high as a recent estimate by researchers at Oxford University, who suggested that half of the British population is already infected. If that were true, the CFR for COVID-19 in the U.K. would be something like 0.002 percent, making the disease much less deadly than the seasonal flu, which has an estimated CFR of 0.1 percent.

“I don’t think it’s consistent with the observed data,” Ferguson said of the Oxford estimate, citing the results from comprehensive testing of Italian villages and the Diamond Princess cruise ship’s passengers and crew. Raising the reproduction number from 2.5 to 3 or more nevertheless implies that the number of undocumented infections is higher than Ferguson’s group originally thought.

In last week’s paper, Ferguson and his co-authors, writing on behalf of the Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team, projected COVID-19 deaths in the U.K. and the United States based on a range of policies and a range of reproduction numbers. In their worst-case scenario, which assumed a reproduction number of 2.6 and “the (unlikely) absence of any control measures or spontaneous changes in individual behaviour,” they projected 550,000 deaths in the U.K. and 2.2 million in the United States. Although those horrifying numbers got a lot of attention, they were never plausible, as the paper itself said, because they were based on the clearly unrealistic premise that “nothing” is done to contain, suppress, or mitigate the epidemic.

In Ferguson et al.’s best-case scenario—based on a reproduction number of 2 and isolation of people with symptoms, home quarantine of everyone else in their households, and early implementation of school closures, coupled with “social distancing of [the] entire population”—they projected just 5,600 deaths in the U.K. But when they raised the reproduction number from 2 to 2.6, the number of deaths more than doubled. They projected 12,000 deaths in that scenario.

Ferguson now says the reproduction number is probably “a bit above” 3, nearly as big a change as the shift in assumptions described in the paper. Yet he thinks the number of deaths is “unlikely to exceed” 20,000 and “could be substantially lower than that.” Although it certainly seems that Ferguson has become more optimistic about the fatality rate, he denies that. “Our lethality estimates remain unchanged,” he said on Twitter yesterday.

Another difference between last week’s projections and Ferguson’s testimony this week is the expected peak of COVID-19 cases in intensive care units. The report projected that those cases would peak in late November or early December if the U.K. adopted the combination of policies that the authors deemed most effective. But on Wednesday, Ferguson said he expects that the peak will be reached by mid-April.

“If the current measures work as we expect them to,” Ferguson said, “we will see intensive care demand peak in approximately two and a half to three weeks.” Because of those policies and increased ICU capacity, Ferguson said, he is “reasonably confident” that British hospitals will not be overwhelmed by COVID-19 cases, although their capacity will be strained in some parts of the country. He emphasized that the main goal of the suppression strategy favored by his group is to avoid a hospital crisis that “will have unintended consequences on health for the entire nation.”

Ferguson also seemed to take a different stance this week on the question of how long aggressive COVID-19 control measures should remain in place. The Imperial College projections assumed that enforced social distancing of the entire population, which the British government is trying to achieve by ordering everyone to stay home except for essential purposes, would be maintained “for 5 months or longer.” The authors added, rather alarmingly, that “to avoid a rebound in transmission, these policies will need to be maintained until large stocks of vaccine are available to immunise the population—which could be 18 months or more.”

On Wednesday, Ferguson acknowledged that such a policy is not feasible. “We clearly cannot lock down the country for a year,” he said. Even with a lockdown of relatively short duration, he observed, “we’ll be paying for this year for decades to come.”

The question, Ferguson said, is how the government should “allow the economy to restart,” a process that “is likely to rely on very large-scale testing [and] contact tracing,” along the lines of what South Korea has done. “We are looking at that as a model,” he said. “The U.K. does not have the testing capability to replicate South Korea right now, but I think it’s likely in the next few weeks we will.” Widespread testing would also help clarify the lethality of COVID-19.

The Imperial College paper acknowledged that “the social and economic effects of the measures which are needed to achieve this policy goal [of suppressing the epidemic] will be profound.” But the authors expressly did not “consider the ethical or economic implications” of choosing an aggressive “suppression” strategy rather than milder measures aimed at “mitigation.”

In his testimony, Ferguson conceded that the economic impact of a nationwide lockdown is “a very important consideration”—”one that the government and scientists are grappling with.” And he noted an important aspect of the epidemic that should inform any attempt to weigh costs and benefits.

“We don’t know what the level of excess deaths will be in this epidemic,” Ferguson said. In other words, we don’t know the extent to which COVID-19 will increase annual deaths above the level that otherwise would have been expected. “By the end of the year, what proportion of those people who’ve died from COVID-19 would have died anyhow?” Ferguson asked. “It might be as much as half to two-thirds of the deaths we’re seeing from COVID-19, because it’s affecting people who are either at the end of their lives or in poor health conditions. So I think these considerations are very valid.”

Although a cost-benefit analysis that considers not just deaths but years of life lost “sounds very utilitarian,” Ferguson said, the issue is obviously relevant. An epidemic that primarily kills healthy children, teenagers, young adults, and middle-aged people will result in a much bigger loss than an epidemic that primarily affects the elderly and people with serious pre-existing medical conditions.

Pace New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, that observation does not mean the lives of the people who are most vulnerable to COVID-19 are “expendable” or that “we’ll just sacrifice old people.” But it does, or at least should, figure in policy decisions that may be economically ruinous, imposing severe burdens on millions of innocent people who are vulnerable for different reasons.

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Attorney General Expands Home Confinement for Some Federal Inmates Facing Coronavirus Threat

Attorney General William Barr announced Thursday that the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) will transfer some elderly and at-risk inmates into home confinement. This, he hopes, will mitigate potentially deadly coronavirus outbreaks inside federal prisons.

“We are now in the process of trying to expand home confinement as part of the process of trying to control the spread of this infection,” Barr said at a press conference.

On Tuesday, a bipartisan group of 14 senators, led by Dick Durbin (D–Ill.) and Chuck Grassley (R–Iowa), urged Barr and BOP Director Michael Carvajal to expand use of compassionate release or the Elderly Home Detention Pilot Program.

“Conditions of confinement do not afford individuals the opportunity to take proactive steps to protect themselves, and prisons often create the ideal environment for the transmission of contagious disease,” the senators wrote.

A provision in the Senate’s coronavirus relief package would also expand BOP’s discretion to move inmates into home confinement.

According to the most recent information from the BOP, 10 federal inmates and eight BOP employees are currently infected by COVID-19. There are roughly 20,000 federal inmates over the age of 55.

“There are particular concerns in this institutional setting. We want to make sure our institutions don’t become petri dishes and it doesn’t spread rapidly through an institution, but we have protocols that are designed to stop that and we are using all the tools we have,” Barr said.

Civil liberties groups applauded the move, but many urged the Justice Department to take additional steps. Inimai Chettiar, legislative and policy director for the Justice Action Network, a criminal justice advocacy organization, said in a press release that Barr’s directive places “significant restrictions on which individuals would be eligible to return home.”

A memo issued by Barr on Thursday directs BOP to exclude all sex offenders from early transfer into home confinement and gives discretion to consider other factors besides age and risk of complications from COVID-19, such as the seriousness of their crimes, whether inmates have had any disciplinary infractions within the last year, and whether they have a verifiable re-entry plan.

“This memo appears to further weaken a provision Congress included in the Phase III coronavirus response package, which expanded the Bureau of Prisons’ ability to transfer non-violent prisoners to home confinement during this emergency,” Chettiar said. “We hope both the President and Congress are vigilant about ensuring the Department of Justice does not slow-walk the dire and immediate need to reduce the overcrowding in federal prisons, because any delay here could have disastrous and life-threatening consequences to people in prisons, correctional officers, and everyone in their surrounding communities.”

There is also the question of how eager the BOP will be to use its newfound discretion. The BOP has suspended all visitations and is quarantining all new inmates for 14 days to try and keep the virus from spreading. However, several inmates at FCI Aliceville, a federal women’s prison in Alabama, told Reason yesterday that the warden is ignoring their applications for compassionate release and home confinement. 

Meanwhile, the BOP and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Maryland are fighting a judge’s order to transfer an inmate into home confinement earlier than scheduled. The order was prompted by coronavirus concerns.

“We hope that the action being taken by DOJ and BOP will flatten the curve in our federal system,” American Civil Liberties Union Senior Legislative Counsel Kanya Bennett said in a press release. “We urge them to take additional steps to reduce the federal prison population, including decreasing requests for pretrial detention. These steps will have a significant impact on protecting those living and working in our prisons.”

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Los Angeles Might Force Broke Businesses To Keep Paying Workers During Coronavirus Outbreak

As businesses across the country are roiled by the uncertainty caused by Covid-19, many are forced to make difficult and complicated decisions to stay afloat. Some have already been forced to close permanently. Others, including some in the delivery sector, have been faced with the prospect of onboarding hundreds of thousands of new workers overnight to keep up with demand.

The reality is that the pandemic-triggered economic crisis we find ourselves in affects different businesses in different ways, which is why it is paramount that government’s maintain hyper-flexibility and a general deregulatory posture during Covid-19 to allow businesses the flexibility to adapt on the fly. The many jurisdictions that have enacted temporary waivers to allow traditionally dine-in restaurants and bars to deliver food and alcohol to customers is an example of government getting out of the way and enhancing business flexibility.

Unfortunately, rather than enacting positive change like many locales, the Los Angeles City Council seems determined to move in the opposite direction. The Council plans to vote on several workplace related resolutions during an emergency session today. Among other things, the council is asking the city attorney to draft an ordinance  that would only allow employees to be terminated for just cause, which could potentially complicate layoffs made for financial reasons; require any layoffs to be made in order of seniority; require any re-hired workers after the crisis to also be based on seniority; and give workers a right of retention if their employer sells its business to a new firm.

Furthermore, the Council is planning to have these mandates apply retroactively to the beginning of March, which could lead to businesses facing lawsuits or fines for violating rules they did not even know existed.

During economic turmoil, there’s always a high likelihood that employers will need to make tough decisions about their workforce. While no one likes to see someone lose their job, the reality is that businesses—not bureaucrats—are the ones best positioned to make decisions for their future. These businesses need to be able to dynamically react and evolve to sudden revenue declines or other unanticipated situations, and implementing onerous rules about what order they can reduce or increase their workforce prevents them from doing so.

If these rules are implemented, the result will not be less layoffs, but rather more. If they are not given the flexibility to adapt, businesses could be forced to close completely, ensuring that none of their workers will have a job. If anything, now is a time to relax labor laws—such as re-thinking California’s controversial AB5 legislation that limits the use of independent contractors—not implement new ones.

The future of California businesses—and workers—may depend on it.

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Pandemic-Related Unemployment and Shutdowns Are a Recipe for Social Unrest

Could the stalled economy we’ve inflicted on ourselves in our frantic efforts to battle the COVID-19 pandemic lead to civil disorder? History suggests that’s a real danger.

Around the world, high unemployment and stagnant economic activity tend to lead to social unrest, including demonstrations, strikes, and other forms of potentially violent disruptions. That’s a huge concern as forecasters expect the U.S. unemployment rate in the months to come to surpass that seen during the depths of the Great Depression.

“We’re putting this initial number at 30 percent; that’s a 30 percent unemployment rate” in the second quarter of this year as a result of the planned economic shutdowns, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard told Bloomberg News on March 22. Gross Domestic Product, he adds, is expected to drop by 50 percent.

Unlike most bouts of economic malaise, this is a self-inflicted wound meant to counter a serious public health crisis. But, whatever the reasons, it means businesses shuttered and people without jobs and incomes. That’s risky.

“Results from the empirical analysis indicate that economic growth and the unemployment rate are the two most important determinants of social unrest,” notes the International Labour Organisation (ILO), a United Nations agency that maintains a Social Unrest Index in an attempt to predict civil disorder based, in part, on economic trends. “For example, a one standard deviation increase in unemployment raises social unrest by 0.39 standard deviations, while a one standard deviation increase in GDP growth reduces social unrest by 0.19 standard deviations.”

Why would economic shutdowns lead to social unrest? Because, contrary to the airy dismissals of some members of the political class and many ivory-tower types, commerce isn’t a grubby embarrassment to be tolerated and avoided—it’s the life’s blood of a society. Jobs and businesses keep people alive. They represent the activities that meet demand for food, clothing, shelter—and that develop and distribute the medicine and medical supplies we need to battle COVID-19.

President Donald Trump may be overly optimistic when he hopes to have the country, including areas hard-hit by the virus, “opened up and just raring to go by Easter,” but he’s not wrong to include the economy in his calculations.

By contrast, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s insistence that “if it’s public health versus the economy, the only choice is public health,” sounds fine and noble. But it reflects an unrealistic and semi-aristocratic disdain for the activities that make fighting the pandemic possible at all—and that keep social unrest at bay.

While the ILO has tried to quantify the causes of social unrest, its researchers certainly aren’t the first to make the connection between angry, unemployed people and trouble in the streets.

At the height of the Great Depression, when U.S. unemployment hit a peak of 24.9 percent, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration saw make-work programs such as the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) as a means of getting the jobless—especially young men—safely into “quasi-military camps often far from home in the nation’s publicly owned forests and parks,” Joseph M. Speakman wrote for the Fall 2006 issue of Prologue Magazine, a publication of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.

“Bringing an army of the unemployed into ‘healthful surroundings,’ Roosevelt argued, would help to eliminate the threats to social stability that enforced idleness had created,” Speakman added.

The program mostly worked—at least, it confined revolts to the camps themselves, where they were suppressed by Army officers. Those same officers commanded the men when they were drafted and dispatched to even more remote destinations with the coming of World War II.

In fact, the connection between unemployment, stagnant economies, and social unrest is so clear that an important indicator for a large underground economy is relative peace prevailing alongside a chronically high unemployment rate.

If 21 percent of the workforce “were jobless, Spain would not be as peaceful as, barring a few demonstrations, it has so far been, say economists and business leaders,” the Financial Times noted in 2011. Sure enough, researchers found that off-the-books businesses and jobs thrived in Spain—accounting for the equivalent of a quarter of GDP at one point—keeping people employed and defusing tensions.

Bullard of the Fed doesn’t propose shipping the jobless off to the wilderness—at least, not yet—and he doesn’t seem inclined to rely on the black market to keep people fed, warm, and healthy. Instead, to defuse the impact of the social-distancing shutdowns of normal economic activity, he calls for lost income to be replaced by unemployment insurance and other payments that would make displaced workers and business owners whole.

He better be right that government checks—drawing on money from the thin air and not generated by an economy that has largely halted, I’ll note—can offset the pain of lost jobs and businesses, because the first wave of the unemployment he predicts is already here.

“In the week ending March 21, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 3,283,000, an increase of 3,001,000 from the previous week’s revised level,” the United States Department of Labor announced on Thursday, March 26. “This marks the highest level of seasonally adjusted initial claims in the history of the seasonally adjusted series.”

Those disturbed by such economic collapse include public health professionals who take COVID-19 very seriously.

“I am deeply concerned that the social, economic and public health consequences of this near total meltdown of normal life—schools and businesses closed, gatherings banned—will be long lasting and calamitous, possibly graver than the direct toll of the virus itself,” wrote David L. Katz, former director of Yale University’s Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center, in The New York Times last week. “The stock market will bounce back in time, but many businesses never will. The unemployment, impoverishment and despair likely to result will be public health scourges of the first order.”

Unemployment, impoverishment, and despair are frightening outcomes in themselves. They’re also a recipe for social unrest that will afflict even those of us who weather both the pandemic and the accompanying economic storm.

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Massie, and That Pesky Constitution, Hold Up COVID-19 Bailout Bill

Massie’s big move? The House of Representatives is poised to vote on the $2 billion COVID-19 relief bill that the Senate passed yesterday. But there’s a snag: Rep. Thomas Massie. The Kentucky Republican reportedly wants colleagues back in D.C. for a regular, recorded vote this morning instead of the voice vote that was expected to take place today.

“Members are advised that it is possible this measure will not pass by voice vote,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer’s office wrote in a Thursday advisory memo to members.

Massie tweeted out a link last night to Article I, Section 5, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution, which dictates the rules of engagement in the House of Representatives.

A quorum requires 216 members of the House be present for the vote.

“The senate did some voodoo just like with Obamacare,” Massie added. “Took a House Bill (HR 748) dealing with taxes, stripped every word, and put their bill in it. The House is just as responsible for killing the origination clause as the Senate. It’s the House’s job to reject the process.” 

Some members of Congress have been lashing out at Massie on Twitter. 

Rep. Pete King (R–N.Y.) called Massie’s move to make House members respect the Constitution “disgraceful” and “irresponsible.”

“If you intend to delay passage of the #coronavirus relief bill tomorrow morning, please advise your 428 colleagues RIGHT NOW so we can book flights and expend ~$200,000 in taxpayer money to counter your principled but terribly misguided stunt,” tweeted Rep. Dean Phillips (D–Minn.). 

Rep. Ruben Gallego (D–Ariz.) declared that he was “jumping on the red eye tonight” back to D.C., adding a (presumably sarcastic) “thanks Massie.”

Despite some theatrical reactions, “passage isn’t in jeopardy,” NBC News notes. The vote could “be delayed for as long as it takes for 216 members to arrive in Washington.” 

“Pelosi called him selfish,” writes the left-populist pundit Matt Stoller, research director for the American Economic Liberties Project. “Reality is more complex. She just doesn’t want to lose power and do remote voting.” 

“Pelosi has kept the entire House in their districts, and is hoping to get the bill through without any formal debate or any hearings at all,” Stoller suggested. 

Trump’s cynical calculation? As the U.S. surpasses Italy and China to have the most confirmed cases of COVID-19, the Trump administration is still dragging its fee on ventilators and promising America will be open for business again by Easter (April 12).  Meanwhile, more and more state leaders are telling residents to stay home and ordering “non-essential” businesses closed.

Politically speaking, the president might be making a brilliant move: Allow other people to make the difficult decisions, then point to the inevitable-either-way economic devastation as something that could have been prevented if only we had gone to work sooner. 

Or maybe that’s just the best-case scenario. President Donald Trump could try to interfere with states’ ability to impose social distancing rules. No, he’s not going to send the military to reopen bars and movie theaters. But financial aid to state governments gives Washington all sorts of carrots and sticks. 

For now, though, that doesn’t seem to be on the horizon. In a letter to state leaders yesterday, Trump announced that “new guidelines for State and local policymakers to use in making decisions about maintaining, increasing, or relaxing social distancing and other mitigation measures” would be coming soon. Using “data-driven criteria, we will suggest guidelines categorizing counties as high-risk, medium-risk, or low-risk,” he said. 

That might not be a bad idea. As J.D. Tuccille wrote this week in Reason, we need to recognize that different areas of this country have very different risk profiles. 

COVID-19 and criminal justice. Another Trump-admin move that is heartening to see: embracing home detainment for nonviolent offenders in federal prisons. 

“I am confident in our ability to keep inmates in our prisons as safe as possible from the pandemic currently sweeping across the globe,” Attorney General Bill Barr wrote in a Thursday memo to the federal Bureau of Prisons. “At the same time, there are some at-risk inmates who are non-violent and pose a minimal likelihood of recidivism and who might be safer serving their sentences in home confinement rather than in BOP facilities.” 

New coronavirus cases expand around U.S. As Washington obsesses over which of the two ruling parties deserves more blame for the crisis, cases of the new coronavirus in the U.S. are starting to grow rapidly outside such hotbeds as New York and Washington state. 

For state-by-state breakdowns of cases, recoveries, and deaths, check out this tracker from Johns Hopkins University. 

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Beneficence on display. Airbnbs and hotels are offering free housing to COVID-19 first respondents—yet another example of private enterprises stepping up to fill public health voids in this time of crisis. “We shouldn’t lose sight of the exceptional vitality that the private sector is demonstrating during this mess,” as Veronique de Rugy writes.

At USA Today, Alexandra Hudson rounds up more examples of private enterprise stepping in to help ease COVID-19 related hardships. “Adam Smith distinguished between justice and beneficence,” she writes: 

Justice is the bare minimum we owe to others, an obligation to do no harm. Today, this means staying home during the quarantine and not potentially infecting others. But justice is about mere survival. To flourish, we need beneficence—the obligation we have to do good for others. It is a tumultuous time, but we should recognize and celebrate our vibrant ecosystem of civic dynamism that is dedicated to promoting the common good.

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Coronavirus news from around the world: 

QUICK HITS

  • “We need every doctor and researcher we can get right now,” writes Shikha Dalmia. “It’s time to cut H-B1 Visa red tape.”
  • The Environmental Protection Agency is relaxing some rules in the face of COVID-19.
  • New York City outbreak update: 

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Is the CDC to Blame for the Lack of Adequate Coronavirus Testing?

It is generally accepted that widespread testing will be key to successful control of Covid-19. Identifying where the virus has (and has not) spread, who is infected, and who may be immune are all important. The tracing and isolation of infected and potentially infected individuals is essential if quarantine and containment efforts are to be targeted. Yet as ProPublica reports:

The lack of testing continues to be a source of deep frustration across the country, with worried patients unable to find out whether they have the ordinary flu, the coronavirus or something else entirely. The availability of testing in regions that aren’t hot spots still faces an array of bottlenecks, from shortages of cotton swabs to the capacity of the labs processing the tests.

Why isn’t there more testing? And why haven’t we been able to ensure testing occurs where necessary? Among other things, the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) focused on the development of its own test and discouraged the development of alternatives by others. This turned out to be a particularly bad misstep because the CDC’s test was not particularly accurate.

A new investigative report from USA Today paints an even more damning picture of a CDC that simultaneously sought to monopolize testing while deceiving state officials about its capacity, As a consequence, parallel efforts to develop and produce tests in private labs were set back, placing the United States well behind the curve of where we needed to be.

From its biggest cities to its smallest towns, America’s chance to contain the coronavirus crisis came and went in the seven weeks since U.S. health officials botched the testing rollout and then misled scientists in state laboratories about this critical early failure. Federal regulators failed to recognize the spiraling disaster and were slow to relax the rules that prevented labs and major hospitals from advancing a backup.

Scientists around the country found themselves shackled as the disease spread.

“We were watching a tsunami and standing there frozen,” said Dr. Debra Wadford, director of the public viral disease laboratory in California, where some of the country’s earliest patients were identified.

The nation’s public health pillars — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration — shirked their responsibility to protect Americans in an emergency like this new coronavirus, USA TODAY found in interviews with dozens of scientists, public health experts and community leaders, as well as email communications between laboratories and hospitals across the country.

The result was a cascading series of failures now costing lives.

As they say, read the whole thing.

The reality is that if it were not for some of the actions taken by the CDC, and the Food and Drug Administration, the United States would have had a greater number of more reliable coronavirus tests available for use far more quickly. We might have even been ahead of the curve.

Another report from ProPublica further supplements the picture of a CDC that fumbled some of its key responsibilities, revealing some of the problems of trying to quarterback the nation’s entire response from within a few expert offices.

These stories highlight that scientific and technical expertise does not necessarily translate into administrative expertise. Centralized bureaucratic structures face inherent limitations that make them brittle and magnify the costs of failure. No amount of medical expertise can overcome the Hayekian knowledge problem, and the more centralized the government response, the greater the downside risk if someone makes a mistake, such as by underestimating a threat or distributing a botched test.

Institutions such as the CDC and FDA are important, but they also have their limitations. One of the lessons from the Covid-19 outbreak thus far is that giving them to much power and responsibility can have serious negative consequences.

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