I think I’ve identified the issue that’s driving public policy with respect to COVID-19, at least in the State of Illinois. It came to me as I was reading this article in the Chicago Tribune:

Gov. J.B. Pritzker took his admonition that parts of Illinois could be headed for a reopening reversal downstate on Thursday, as the state continues to see elevated levels of COVID-19 cases and other key metrics.

State officials on Thursday reported 1,772 newly confirmed cases of the coronavirus over the prior 24 hours. That’s the first time the count has climbed above 1,700 since Memorial Day.

“Every region has increasing positivity rates and increasing cases. This is hugely problematic,” Pritzker said Thursday at a news conference in downstate Ottawa. “It means that we’re going to have to take a hard look at what do we need to do, what mitigations do we need now in order to get us back in line with the direction that we were going, which was reducing those positivity rates.”

I think he’s assuming a fixed relationship between the morbidity and mortality rates for COVID-19. Is there actually any evidence of that? The “morbidity” means the prevalence of a disease. The “mortality” means the death rate due to it. I think we can all agree that if there are no new cases of COVID-19 there won’t be any deaths among those non-existent cases, either.

I think it’s reasonable to assume that as the number of cases increase, the number of deaths will, too, but not necessarily in any fixed relationship. It might actually be true that as the number of cases increase, the proportion of those cases that lead to death will decrease. Go back and take a look at my post of a day or so ago. Isn’t that what the numbers seem to be saying?

Until there’s a safe, effective, affordable vaccine for SARS-CoV-2, we’re not going to reduce the number of new cases to zero. We should be prepared that may never happen. And as long as there are any cases, unless there’s a safe, effective, affordable treatment, there’s a risk that the disease will lead to death. We need to be prepared for that possibility, too.

Here’s Walter Russell Mead’s Wall Street Journal assessment of the prospects for U. S. policy with respect to the Middle East:

For now, the muddled Middle East is a place where no one is happy but American interests are reasonably secure. Oil flows freely to the world’s markets; Israel is as safe as a country in the region can be; and the defense of this messy status quo doesn’t depend on large-scale deployments of U.S. power.

The American withdrawal from the Middle East began under President Obama as his administration’s hopes for democratic Islamism faded away. Interrupted briefly to fight ISIS, the withdrawal has continued under President Trump. A President Biden might try a reset with Iran and engage more diligently in peacemaking in Libya and Syria, but barring major new challenges, his administration would likely continue on the basic Trump-Obama course.

I think he’s underestimating the influence that VP Biden’s pick as running mate might have on prospective policy, whether as a signal or in presumably her own right.

I found most of the commentary on the testimony before Congress of the CEOs of Facebook, Amazon, Alphabet, etc. terribly claustrophobic, focusing only on one narrow aspect of antitrust law, for example this article at Politico. There’s really little question that these organizations are monopolies which is not illegal. The issue is whether they’re acting illegally. They are. They are using their monopolies to extend their monopolies. Indeed, attracting the attention of one of the tech giants enough that they’ll acquire you is actually a business model.

I would have thought we might have learned our lesson during the financial crisis. Too big to be allowed to fail is too big to be allowed to exist. The companies cannot be barred from meddling in politics. The Supreme Court has seen to that. They can’t be compelled to be even-handed in their politics. That is very, very dangerous.

I have worked for and with very big companies enough to know two things about them. The first is that any economies of scale due to size evaporate at much smaller sizes than you might think, especially in companies that don’t require enormous, expensive physical plants and capital investment. Today’s robber barons aren’t like the 19th century variety. Facebook is little like Ma Bell, Standard Oil, or the New York Central Railroad. We need to adjust our attitudes to today’s reality rather than that of a century ago.

The other is that big companies have inherent inefficiencies and inevitably stifle competition.

I don’t think that Facebook or Google should be broken up. I think that their business model, dependent as it is on selling information that doesn’t actually belong to them, should be made impractical which isn’t hard to do. Amazon is another story. I think it should be made to choose between retail and web services. I honestly don’t know why Amazon’s operations were allowed to continue unimpeded while brick and mortar retailers were forced to shut down. Are Amazon’s warehouse workers not susceptible to COVID-19? Are UPS or FedEx drivers immune? Rather little of Amazon’s retail operations rely on selling food or pharmaceuticals. But that’s another story.

I agree in principle with Zachary Karabell’s plea in Time that the next round of federal “stimulus” should be smarter:

What’s needed is not just large stimulus but smart stimulus. That means supporting incomes, maintaining jobs and bolstering state budgets until tax revenue recovers, which will only happen when activity resumes, which can only happen if the virus is controlled. That then necessitates money for enhanced testing and money for school openings. And the final piece is money not just to address the immediate crisis but funds that can only be used for longer-term investment. That could mean not just the short-terms loans to businesses meant to keep them afloat but longer term loans earmarked for long-term growth. Biden recently proposed a massive “Buy America” program; Trump has long advocated reshoring. It would seem a perfect opportunity for all sides to support a multi-trillion plan to boost American businesses for the long term.

but doesn’t “smarter” smack a bit of “no true Scotsman”? I don’t think any strategy would truly be smarter without two features. The first necessary feature is certainty. He’s right that people will avoid spending anything they don’t need to without more certainty. The most serious defect of the CARES Act was that its horizon was so short and people quickly became convinced that it was just the first of several successive “stimulus” packages.

The second feature is that it should include a risk mitigation strategy. We very greatly need a way of dismounting the fiscal stimulus tiger without assuming a cure or even a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2. That the price of gold is rising sharply is a signal that people believe that present policy encourages inflation. I hope that’s all it encourages.

The editors of the Chicago Tribune reject the Illinois legislature’s argument that the state should receive a bailout from the federal government:

Give Illinois money, and the politicians will mismanage it.

It’s time to give state government its own hard lesson, for the future benefit of everyone who lives and works here, and for taxpayers around the country who shouldn’t have to pay for our mistakes: No bailout. Lots of strings attached to any federal aid. Don’t enable Illinois leaders with a blank check.

I don’t believe that the State of Illinois should receive any sort of bailout from the federal government without being required to go into a sort of receivership which removes the decisionmaking from the hands of the governor or legislature and I don’t see any constitutional way of doing that. Paraphrasing Jean-Claude Juncker I think that Illinois politicians know what they need to do. They just don’t know how to hold onto their jobs if they do it.

In his regular weekly column in the Wall Street Journal William Galston sees the risks and opportunities for Joe Biden in the present situation:

If Mr. Trump had wanted to improve the situation, not pick a fight, he would have worked with mayors. Instead, he demonized them as weak, left-wing Democrats while dispatching federal personnel without their consent.

Still, lighting fires in a federal courthouse goes well beyond the bounds of peaceful protests, as does hurling projectiles against police. By failing to acknowledge and denounce these acts, Mr. Biden has left himself exposed to the charge that his presidency would not draw a forceful line against violence.

This fits into a line of attack that the Trump campaign is determined to press. No one believes that Joe Biden is a dangerous radical. But the president and his advisers charge that Mr. Biden will be a tool of leftists because he is beholden to them and too befuddled to stand up to them. The former vice president needs to show that this is not the case.

closing

Despite the country’s dire circumstances, few Americans are in a revolutionary mood. They are tired of the tumult of the Trump years, and they yearn for a return to normal life. The Covid-19 pandemic and ensuing economic downturn have bred insecurity and a sense that events are spiraling out of control.

Americans are open to a counteroffer that seems reasonable. But Mr. Biden will jeopardize his standing as a credible alternative to the incumbent if he is seen as denying the reality of violence Americans can see for themselves.

There’s another risk that Mr. Galston hasn’t seen: following the approach he’s outlined would put VP Biden in opposition to the Congressional leadership which appears to be doubling down on the notion that what is happening in Portland consists of peaceful protests. And Mr. Biden may need the “few Americans who are in a revolutionary mood” in November.

The first two graphs are from Worldometer.info. The second two are from the Illinois Department of Public Health.

What’s the right policy?

At Bloomberg columnist Andreas Kluth, after a hat tip to Graham Allison’s “Thucydides trap” metaphor for the situation between the United States and China, about which I have already expressed my skepticism, says that the situation is really like that in which the United Kingdom and Prussia were in the lead-up to World War I:

But in the case of the U.S. and China, there’s a much better analogy, as these historians and economists have described. It is the struggle between the British Empire and the up-and-coming German Empire after its unification in 1871.

That era, like ours, was one of industrial and technological revolution and uneasy globalization. Like the U.S., Britain was a democracy that largely believed in free markets. And as the U.S. has done since World War II — at least, until the presidency of Donald Trump — the U.K. chaperoned an international order regulating trade and finance, overseeing the so-called Pax Britannica.

On the opposing side, resembling China today, was Germany, an autocratic state that held a grudge for being late to industrialize and was bent on overtaking the leader, with state-directed and nationalist economic policies. Also like China today, Germany did this in part by pilfering patents and technologies, and aggressively pushing alternatives to its rival’s standards.

which I don;’t think actually holds water, either. As I’ve pointed out before, irredentism is basic to Chinese politics and to what’s going on. I don’t believe that Prussia was notably motivated by irredentism in the late 19th and early 20th century. Hearkening back to the glories of the Holy Roman Empire? I don’t believe it.

There are other problems with the piece. For example, Mr. Kluth can’t seem to decide whether the United States is the United Kingdom or Prussia in the analogy. That’s one of the problems with the “Thucydides trap” hypothesis as well. Are we Athens or Sparta?

But wait! There’s more. At the Atlantic Council Frederick Kempe says that the situation is unique:

We’ve never been here before.

The escalating confrontation between the United States and China is so perilous because the world’s two largest economies – and the two defining countries of their times – are navigating uncharted terrain.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s landmark speech at the Nixon Library on Thursday marked the most robust call to action yet against the Chinese Communist Party. It came amid tit-for-tat consular shutdowns in Houston and Chengdu, and the Friday arrest by the FBI of an alleged Chinese military operative in San Francisco.

It’s tempting to brand this a hotter phase of a new Cold War, as this column did just last week. However, that language understates the historic novelty of what’s unfolding and its epochal enormity.

It’s a unique moment because the United States, since its rise to global power, has never confronted such a potent peer competitor across so many realms: political, economic, technological, military and even societal.

Maybe he means to place the emphasis on “we” in his declamation. We have never been here before. That seems facile to me. You can never step in the same river twice.

As someone or other (not Sam Clemens) pointed out years ago, history may never repeat itself but it does rhyme. That’s because history is crafted by human beings and the motivations of human beings are actually pretty limited, frequently mixed but limited.

What impresses me about these analogies is that they’re nearly always posed from what I presume the author believes is the Chinese point of view. I don’t honestly know what the Chinese point of view is but I don’t see much recognition of just how vast both the United States and China are or how reductionist their views are. There isn’t just one “Chinese point of view”.

Let me put it this way. There are many differences between the U. S. and China but one of the biggest is that what President Xi thinks and believes is a lot more important than what President Trump thinks or believes. Does President Xi think that China is in the process of drastically overreaching as Prussia did or does he think that China is an “emerging power” with the U. S. an “existing power” or, as I suspect, he’s a lot more interested in realizing his goals for China whether he sees China as emerging or not.

Apparently, Cancel Culture is coming after Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass:
So, it seems that the general attitude in journalism is that super PACs and dark money are bad, unless of course, they’re operated by wealthy billionaires of the left. Then they’re praised and courted.

All of this is against the backdrop of an America divided into camps, between those who think they can freely speak their minds and those who know they can’t.

Most people subjected to cancel culture don’t have a voice. They’re afraid. They have no platform. When they’re shouted down, they’re expected to grovel. After the groveling, comes social isolation. Then they are swept away.

As a columnist and political reporter, I have given some 35 years of my life to the Chicago Tribune, even more if you count my time as an eager Tribune copy boy. And over this time, readers know that I have shown respect to my profession, to colleagues and to this newspaper.

Agree with me or not — and isn’t that the point of a newspaper column? — I owe readers a clear statement of what I will do and not do:

The left doesn’t like my politics. I get that. I don’t like theirs much, either. But those who follow me on social media know that I do not personally criticize my colleagues for their politics. I try to elevate their fine work. And I tell disgruntled readers who don’t like my colleagues’ politics that “it takes a village.”

I sometimes whether when the dust has settled there will be no American newspapers left standing.