I’m not even going to bother to link to Melinda Gates’s Washington Post op-ed. She thinks more money needs to be spent which is facile and that there needs to be a nationally coordinated plan for dealing with COVID-19 which is worse. Short of declaring martial law the federal government does not have the authority to compel state and local governments to do anything.

IMO one of our gravest problems is that the legislatures of the various states are mostly sitting on their hands, content to let the states’ governors do the heavy lifting and, coincidentally, bear the political costs.

Under our system of government legislators represent the people. It is vital for the state legislatures to act since it represents the assent of the people to the measures being taken and, further, motivates the legislators themselves to advocate the policies to the people of their districts. The present passive-aggressive stance being taken is actually impeding the responses.

We need to stop thinking of ourselves as consumers of government policy and start thinking of ourselves as producers of the policy.

I do think that there are things that should be done and should have been done from Washington. I’ve mentioned some of them before. They involve powers that the Congress has granted to the president. That I don’t think the Congress should have delegated those powers to the president is an issue for another time.

It is vitally important that the Congress exercise its authority in acting in response to COVID-19 for the reasons I have outlined. Idleness is reprehensible.

In their op-ed in the Wall Street Journal John S. Baker Jr. and Robert T. Miller don’t like the idea of bankruptcy for states at all:

With tax revenue crashing and expenditures soaring, states face severe financial problems. Illinois has already requested a federal bailout of its pension system, and last month Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell suggested that Congress should enact legislation allowing states to go bankrupt.

Thankfully, Mr. McConnell appears to have dropped the idea. Allowing states to declare bankruptcy would fundamentally contradict the federal structure of our constitution. In that structure, the states are self-governing entities. But as anyone who’s endured the bankruptcy process knows, bankruptcy protection means the bankruptcy court is in charge. Federal bankruptcy protection would greatly constrain a state’s sovereignty, or power to govern itself, which the Constitution guarantees.

But if states are free to govern themselves, they’re also free to make poor choices. Decades of fiscal mismanagement left some states in a precarious financial position before the pandemic. Before Congress grants hundreds of billions of dollars to states—a step Mr. McConnell now says he’d entertain in exchange for legislation guaranteeing liability protection for businesses—it should consider an alternative grounded in prudence and reflection on American history.

but I find their proposed alternative cold comfort:

Covid-19 isn’t the states’ fault. But the states least able to weather its financial consequences got that way through decades of profligate spending and confiscatory taxation. Borrowing and timely repayment, not default or bankruptcy, is the best way for states to deal with the current crisis while getting their financial affairs in order. The essence of sovereignty is self-government, which entails a measure of responsibility.

Illinois is teetering on the brink of a completely inability to borrow at any rate of interest and there is no realistic prospect of the state’s corrupt, incompetent, do-nothing legislature taking the steps necessary to mend Illinois’s fiscal house. Gov. Pritzker’s preferred solution, a graduated income tax, requires ratification by direct popular vote (because the legislature is too cowardly to enact it on its own). What would it accomplish, anyway, other than encouraging rich people to leave Illinois?

I proposed solutions yesterday. Understandably, those will not be put in place voluntarily because elected officials don’t want to commit political seppuku.

The shooting spree which has been going on for the last several weeks in Chicago continues. The Chicago Sun-Times reports:

Five people were killed and nine more were wounded Thursday in shootings across Chicago.

A 16-year-old boy was killed Thursday morning in Ashburn on the Southwest Side by a man who said he was firing back at another shooter.

The boy was a passenger in a vehicle when someone shot him in the head about 10:35 a.m. in the 3900 block of West 83rd Street, Chicago police said. A female driver took him to Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, where he died.

The shootings are primarily taking place in a handful of neighborhoods (Garfield Park, Austin, Englewood, Humboldt Park) on the South and West Sides of Chicago. Thursday’s death toll follows a Wednesday in which nine people were shot, three fatally, mostly in the same neighborhoods.

I don’t know whether it’s boredom, the release of prisoners from Cook County, or not letting a crisis go to waste but Chicago is on track to near the high body count in 2017 after two years of declines.

Maybe the reason for the difference in the outcomes of COVID-19 in China, South Korea, and Japan isn’t as much due to difference in their responses but in differences between the virus they’re fighting and the one we are. From the Jerusalem Post:

A coronavirus study by several researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where the atomic bomb was invented, claims that a new strain of the novel COVID-19 is more contagious than the original form of the virus.
The study, which has yet to be peer-reviewed, looked at 14 mutations in the “spike protein,” which mediates the infection of human cells and is therein targeted by most attempted vaccines for the virus. Of those mutations, one stood out, according to the study, for spreading much more aggressively than the original strain of the virus.

That same mutation was originally seen spreading in Europe, after which it spread to the rest of the world. That is currently the most common strain. This was found through a computational analysis of thousands of coronavirus sequences found around the world by the Global Initiative for Sharing All Influenza Data, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The report claimed that people who catch this strain are at an increased risk of catching the illness a second time, which is why the authors felt that an early warning was necessary so that vaccines and drugs that are in development may be effective against the mutated strain, according to the LA Times.

Because of the rate at which this new strain is spreading, it is possible that it is more infectious than the previous strains of the virus. The reason is not yet known.

That could also explain the tremendous differences between what’s happening in New York and in the Pacific Northwest. Earlier genetic studies suggested that the strain of the virus in New York originated in Europe while that in the Pacific Northwest was closer to the original strain that began in China.

Different effects from different strains could also explain some of the wildly varying symptoms that are being reported.

I have been following the statistics reported at the site of the Illinois Department of Public Health on a daily or nearly daily basis. What I am seeing there may not comport with anything else you’ve read.

What I see is that the number of diagnosed cases has been going up by roughly 2,100 every day for the last two weeks. Over the last month the utilization of hospital beds, ICU beds, and ventilators by COVID-19 patients has been roughly flat. Increases in utilizations of all three are mostly due to increased utilization by non-COVID-19 patients.

I was very disappointed with Charles Fain Lehman’s piece in the Washington Free Beacon, “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Illinois?”. It stated the problem well enough but offered nothing in the way of a solution. I will note, sarcastically, that the federal government is fine with extracting rents from the state. Illinois has perhaps the worst ROI on taxes sent to Washington of any state.

I will, however, step up to the plate. Here’s my modest proposal for solving Illinois’s fiscal problem:

1. Illinois’s legislature must enact a constitutional amendment empowering the legislature to renegotiate the pensions of public employees at will.
2. The legislature should enact a second constitutional amendment stripping it of the power to amend or repeal the previously mentioned amendment.
3. That power must be used to convert all present public employees to a defined contribution program rather than the present defined benefits programs.
4. The pay of present state employees would be cut to balance the budget. Start with the legislature’s pay.
5. Then and only then would the federal government give Illinois $7 billion to get over the hump.

Treat it as an opportunity for dealing with decades of misfeasance, malfeasance, and nonfeasance on the part of Illinois’s legislature.

I have a number of reservations about Brian Wesbury’s post at RealClearPolitics about the havoc that the measures adopted in reaction to SARS-CoV-2 is wreaking on the U. S. economy including his analogy of “mark to market” during the late financial crisis with the reliance on models of likely mortality due to COVID-19 and that the financial crisis reenforced the notion of “government as savior” but I think this is a good, succint description of the likely aftermath of the lockdowns:

Millions of small businesses will never reopen. Hospitals, universities, and state and local governments are all facing damage that will take years to overcome. Our children missed graduations, proms, sporting events, and more. The mental damage could last them a lifetime. And when their parents lose their jobs and must go on the government payroll, it will cause even more pain. What is more “essential” than taking care of your children? But, that doesn’t matter because the government has decided what is essential and non-essential. And this has all been caused by models that most experts now agree were wrong.

I don’t think, however, that he has come to terms with the implications of a fiat currency:

There is not enough money in the Treasury to fix all this. Every dime the government spends ultimately comes from the private sector. If we shut the private sector down for just a couple of weeks, let alone months, the cost will take generations to repay.

The Treasury is in no danger of running out of money. It can merely extend credit to itself (or, more precisely, the Federal Reserve can issue the credit and buy up the Treasury’s bonds). And repay? It will never be repaid. We haven’t repaid the money that was borrowed to finance the War of 1812.

However, there is a risk. If the money is used to spur consumption rather than to increase production and we simultaneously try to reduce our reliance on overseas supply chains, there is an increased risk of hyperinflation. For the time being we’ll be so worried about deflation that the idea of hyperinflation won’t even occur to most.

There’s one thing that should never be forgotten. COVID-19 isn’t wrecking the economy. The government response to COVID-19 is wrecking the economy. That’s at all levels.

Whether you support President Trump, oppose him, or neither, I think you owe it to yourself to read Joseph Nye’s piece at Project Syndicate. Here’s its opening:

CAMBRIDGE – Leadership – the ability to help people frame and achieve their goals – is absolutely crucial during a crisis. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill demonstrated this in 1940, as did Nelson Mandela during South Africa’s transition from apartheid.

By these historical standards, the leaders of the world’s two largest economies have failed abysmally. US President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, both initially reacted to the coronavirus outbreak not by informing and educating their publics, but by denying the problem, thereby costing lives. They then both redirected their energies toward assigning blame rather than finding solutions. Owing to their failures, the world may have missed the window for responding to the crisis with a “Sputnik moment” or a “COVID Marshall Plan.”

Leadership theorists make a distinction between “transformational” and “transactional” leaders. The latter try to steer through situations with business as usual, whereas the former try to reshape the situations in which they find themselves.

Of course, transformational leaders do not always succeed. Former US President George W. Bush tried to remake the Middle East by invading Iraq, with disastrous consequences. By contrast, his father, former President George H.W. Bush, had a more transactional style; but he also had the skills to manage the fluid situation that the world found itself in after the collapse of communism in Europe. The Cold War ended, Germany was reunited and anchored firmly to the West, and not a shot was fired.

I don’t think that there’s any question but that Xi Jinping has been a disastrous leader for the entire world but, importantly, for China. The future, of course, has not been written yet but I suspect he has ended the project that his predecessors began 40 years ago and ended it in failure.

I and practically anyone else who’s even marginally informed can tell you what President Xi should have done differently. What should President Trump have done differently? Be specific. I wish he had begun using the Defense Production Act earlier and were wielding it more now and I wish that he had organized a national program of epidemiological testing so we had some notion of the scope and reach of the disease but I suspect that Dr. Nye’s objection to Trump is less what he has done than who he is. Trump is not a Roosevelt or a Churchill. He cannot rally the people of the United States behind him and encourage them. That just isn’t who he is. Regardless of what he has said or may think he does not have the authority to issue orders to the governors of states or local leaders without declaring martial law which I don’t believe anybody wants. And absent a time machine bringing the supply chains of protective gear and pharmaceuticals within the United States is going to take time. It should be done but it won’t happen instantaneously or painlessly.

I would date the failure of leadership in the U. S. much, much earlier to the Joint Communiqué on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations between the U. S. and China. Offering China anything of value without requiring liberalization or, indeed, much of anything was an error. That error was aggravated by granting China MFN status and its admission to the World Trade Organization.

That failure wasn’t the failure of a single president. It was bipartisan. It was the failure of an entire class. Trump was elected in large part as a reaction to that failure. If you want less Trump, make fewer persistent errors of that scope, mitigate the risks, and reverse the harm that has already been done.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal weigh in on the “Wuhan Lab theory”, the notion that the virus spread from a biosafety lab in Wuhan, China outside the lab to Wuhan and from there to the entire world:

The evidence is clear that the Chinese Communist Party covered up for weeks the extent of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, but what we don’t know is why. One emerging theory is that the virus originated in a Wuhan lab. Beijing denies it, but the world deserves a full accounting of what China knew and when.

President Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have both said in recent days that they’ve seen evidence the coronavirus did come from a Wuhan lab. Mr. Trump said it appears to be an accidental release. If they don’t want the issue to be dismissed as an anti-China campaign ploy, they should make the evidence public.

Scientists think the virus was carried naturally in horseshoe bats and jumped to humans for the first time in Wuhan late last year. The question is: Under what circumstances did that happen? It could have happened at the city’s wet market, though that theory is complicated by a changing timeline and the fact that the bats don’t appear to have been sold there.

It could also have jumped from bats to another animal like a pangolin before infecting a person, or patient zero could have encountered a bat in the wild. The “lab theory” isn’t that it was a bioweapon gone wrong. It’s that a lab worker was inadvertently infected at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) or Centers for Disease Prevention and Control, both of which are located near the first reported cases.

I have no idea whether COVID-19’s Patient Zero was a lab worker in Wuhan or not and, honestly, I don’t really care. I don’t believe that SARS-CoV-2 is an escaped bioweapon. It has practically no characteristic of a good bioweapon. If it’s a bioweapon it’s the world’s worst. It makes a darned good terror weapon, however, as we have learned.

Every shred of evidence we have right now suggests that the virus did originate in China has practically every pandemic of the last four centuries has. And that the Chinese authorities lied about it and covered up which can be as well explained by hypersensitivity as by malice. That China presents a repeated risk of contagion and its leaders will lie about the risks, at least as long as the Chinese Communist Party as in charge, are more than enough reason to adopt strenuous measures to mitigate the risks that presents.

The financial risk is in the trillions of dollars, more than any conceivable benefit of trade with China, and in the millions of lives which is enough to point to the sort of mitigation that is needed.