Not that long ago, the expectation was that older folks would take on additional risk in order to reduce the risks to children. As with much else, this principle appears to have inverted with COVID. Thus, I’ve got to say that I’m pretty much on the same page as Paul Alexander:
Why vaccinate our children for this mild and typically non-consequential virus when they bring protective innate immunity towards SARS-VoV-2, other coronaviruses, and other respiratory viruses? Why push to vaccinate our children who may well be immune due to prior exposure (asymptomatic or mild illness) and cross-reactivity/cross-protection from other coronavirus (common colds)?
Many children are likely COVID-recovered and as such are immune, so why not consider assessing their immune status? Between their young age and robust innate immunity and this possibility of being COVID-recovered, it should be hands-off regarding the vaccine.
“Follow the science” has been a catch phrase, not an applied principle from the beginning. The people who most tend to proclaim it really don’t behave as if they believe in it.
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I’ve said it again and again over the years: Rhode Island government is structured such that the state is the center of everything, and various committees, associations, chambers, and other organizations that people think represent the interests of various segments of civil society do not. They are there to represent the state government’s interests to their constituencies and to allow politicians to claim that the groups and people they represent are actually onboard with this or that thing that the politicians want to do.
This is very evident in the backup that Erika Sanzi offers in her take-down of the RI School Committee Association’s president, Tim Duffy. Scroll down to where she contrasts his contribution to a chain email among his counterparts from other states with those counterparts’ offerings.
She’s slightly wrong about one thing. It’s not that he doesn’t care about parents so much as that he doesn’t care about any constituencies, even the ones he represents. These are all patronage and/or machine jobs to fill a role that a civilized society tends to have, but it’s all show in the Ocean State.
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During a conversation with Blake Masters on a recent episode of his podcast (go to 48:40 at that link), Andrew Klavan mentioned the contra-regulation argument he sometimes hears that government is simply too slow and legislators too old and out of touch to regulate fast-moving technology. The only response Masters and Klavan offered (per my memory, having not relistened to the whole thing) was that we just need new legislators who can keep up.
I’m not sure that’s the whole answer, or even really a necessary part of the right answer. Of course, that doesn’t mean I’m against electing new legislators. That’s needed for other reasons. I just think it’s important to identify the core of solutions to our problems if we’re actually going to solve them.
The irreducible part of any solution involving government is to simplify. Klavan is on the right track, in my view, when he points to the part in the Declaration of Independence explaining that the reason governments are “instituted among Men” is to “secure [our] rights.” The rights come from elsewhere than government, and so can the attacks on our rights. A government “deriving [its] just powers from the consent of the governed” protects us from those attacks, whether they come from tyrants or tech moguls.
That focus on rights can be a trap, however, if it implies jacking up government to the size of the giants.
We need to simplify the response as well as the goals. Preventing companies from taking away our rights does not require government to micromanage the companies. It just requires government to say, “You can’t do that.” You can’t encourage people to build their entire movements on your platform and then wipe them out when they become significant enough that they might affect some political outcome that you like. You can’t market yourself as a one-stop shop for all published material in the universe and then block certain books.
Such language shouldn’t be too difficult to draft, and it needn’t be too detailed. Granting users some sort of rights to their information and to consistent service would be sufficient, then the users could enforce their own rights. There could even be pro-competitive thresholds that increase limits on corporate discretion the greater their market share.
Much of the necessary framework was developed to cover phone carriers. That is why one often hears about eliminating the Section 230 exemption that protects the tech giants from being sued for content on their sites. Sweeping that one provision away might be sufficient: If the companies are going to appoint themselves arbiters of what can be said on their sites, then they have to be accountable for what they allow.
Whatever mixture of polices might emerge from public and legislative debate, we must get back to a more foundational understanding of how this process works. We don’t have to put government in charge of a sector and assume that it will be benevolent and work in the people’s best interests. It won’t (at least not for long). We just have to remember that the role of government is to safeguard our rights and freedoms.
Featured image by Chris Yang on Unsplash.
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If her analysis in the news is essentially Democrat spin, what does she teach in the classroom?
[Open full post]Schiller also said Biden brings a restoration of “stability” and “predictability” to the presidency: “He seems to me to have a moral fortitude where he is really certain that what he’s trying to do is the right thing to do for as many people as possible.” She added the longtime Delaware senator’s “multiple [life] tragedies […] impact the way he leads.”
First, let’s start with a thrilling observation of how wonderful our country and civilization are.
Progressive candidate for the RI Political Cooperative, Mike Niemeyer’s daughter has severe brain damage, but as Katherine Gregg reports in the Providence Journal, modern life is full of miracles:
In a telephone interview on Friday, Niemeyer described the invaluable help a team from Easterseals has provided his daughter Maeve, who was born without the natural ability to swallow. With help, she was taught to swallow and provided with equipment to keep her neck in a position to lessen the risk of choking.
A while back, I watched the first few seasons of the History Channel show, Vikings. At one point the tribe leader’s wife gives birth to a son with deformed legs. Per the standard practice, he takes the child into the forest and leaves him there to die of exposure (although his wife saves him). Such reminders of the brutality of ancient life always draw my attention, because I was born with deformed legs that a surgeon was able to correct reasonably well when I was an infant. Another family member with the same issue had even better results not very long after. Meanwhile, modern medicine has been rapidly solving other formerly devastating puzzles, like cystic fibrosis.
These are the sorts of advances I worry about losing when progressives make political gains. A political ideology that seeks to consolidate power and also makes “disrupting our system” a central priority is going to undermine what our system has accomplished. The incentives and motivation of those who take control point away from progress in any sense other than giving progressives power. Consider this bit of Gregg’s article:
Niemeyer said the [early intervention] help continues on a regular basis, but he was told: “They would close by June of 2022 due to chronic under-staffing due to chronic under-funding if they were not able to secure additional funding by December.”
Susan Hawkes, early intervention director for Easterseals Rhode Island, told The Journal: “We have no intention of closing.”
In a subsequent conversation, Niemeyer said he “may have misspoken.”
I have a little direct knowledge about the ins and outs of early intervention as a business, and while more funding can always help, under-funding has not been the central challenge. These professionals go into people’s homes, so organizations have found it extremely difficult to manage not only the government’s heavy-handed regulations, but also their employees’ reactions to the news media’s narrative of fear and mandates for things like masking and vaccination.
Money isn’t the core of the problem. Regulations and social pressure have made the job untenable and bear the hallmarks of big, progressive government: Broad decisions are made for the entire society from a centralized clique of “experts” (who have incentive not to admit and correct errors) and the public is “guided” with emotion-driven propaganda. That’s how progressives maintain and exercise power, as we see with Niemeyer’s “misspeaking.”
In his explanation for why he’s running for office, Niemeyer cites the “greed” and “overwhelming cruelty” of an insurance company that denied coverage for some medication and devices for his daughter. The thing is, the role of insurance in our medical system is a progressive imposition. Government created the incentive to tie healthcare with employment (with politicians’ promising to give voters health coverage from their employers), and insurance became not insurance against unusual circumstances, but total healthcare management. Now politicians regularly promise to give voters new benefits by mandating that insurers cover them.
Guess what: when you centralize power, the powerful have incentive to be in control, and they have the power to accomplish that end. Moreover, the resources for mandates have to come from somewhere, and in a progressive system, it doesn’t come from the place that makes the most sense, but the place that can exert the least political influence.
As everybody in a progressive system struggles to figure out how to accommodate impossible demands made for ideological reasons, the system is, indeed, disrupted, and we all miss out on economic advancement, including continued innovation.
Featured image by the National Cancer Institute on Unsplash.
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Mike Tuttle, a member of the State of the State production team, shares this episode of his own show, Tuttle’s Travels. During this episode, he takes us to the Newport Cliff Walk and shares with us the beautiful adjacent scenery and bits of Newport history and facts pertaining to the vistas.
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John talks with Rhode Island Veterans Affairs Director Kasim Yarn, Steve Evangelista, author of, Our Story: The Lives and Legacy of Those who Served in Battery B First Rhode Island Light Artillery, and New England VA Director of Outreach Michael McNamara involved with Veterans’ Waterfire.
Featured image by Sydney Rae on Unsplash.
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Some news stories, even ones where “my side” wins, so to speak, gives me a how-did-we-get-to-this-place headache. The somewhat autonomous British island of Guernsey nearly passed an anti-discrimination law that would have forced all organizations, including Catholic schools, to ignore their belief systems when hiring employees, even in leadership positions. Even local Protestants spoke up on behalf of the Catholics:
“We simply urge you, and your fellow deputies, to recognise that, for the Roman Catholic Church, it is essential that the exception is extended ‘to allow religion or belief to be taken into account in the recruitment to senior leadership positions in religious schools’,” said [Protestant leaders] Barker and Stringer.
Every organization must be free to do this, otherwise you effectively have a government religion, and the government is effectively telling you what fundamental purpose your organization must serve. How is this not obvious to everybody?
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We’ve reached the point of lunacy in the Ocean State. Katherine Gregg reports for the Providence Journal:
The Rhode Island Department of Health has slapped violation notices on Landmark Medical Center in Woonsocket and the state-run Eleanor Slater Hospital for failing to comply with the state’s COVID-19 vaccination mandate.
If both Landmark and the state hospital cannot assure the Health Department within 10 days that all of their unvaccinated employees have been barred from entry, they will be fined and “prohibited from admitting new elective or non-emergency patients.”
According to the article, there are only 21 unvaccinated employees at Landmark, which has 1,159 employees. For that slight transgression — during a nursing shortage, during a government-proclaimed health crisis — the state is threatening to take money out of the system via a fine while also preventing the hospital from making money through non-emergency services, thus forcing patients to suffer.
This is what bureaucratic tyranny looks like.
That small number of employees is well within the range in which an organization can make adjustments and consider things on a case-by-case basis. For all we know, all 21 have had COVID and are immune to the disease. Others may be willing to be constantly tested and wear protective gear. Others can perhaps find roles that minimize risks for coworkers, patients, and visitors — coworkers, patients, and visitors, by the way, who have overwhelmingly been vaccinated against the disease anyway.
Again and again, two forces seem to be driving decisions, and neither is the actual threat of COVID. The first is terror among the fearful that when it comes down to it other people might not have to do whatever they say. The second is the need of government officials, whose orders did more damage than they wanted to acknowledge, to craft a narrative path out of the pandemic that doesn’t raise too many questions, and they’ve settled on zero COVID and 100% vaccination as the magic escape. Lockdowns and years-long emergency orders locked them into cracking down hard, and they’ve got to see it through to the end.
Featured image from Google Maps Street View.
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Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on the reason and one’s perspective), Aaron Regunberg deleted the tweet shown in the featured image of this post before the time of this writing. His anti-American and anti-capitalist word-association response, however, is still worth pondering.
The image is of a chart from an article in Financial Times by Alex Kaufman that purports to show that the United States, particularly its top 10% of income holders, far outstrip the planet in their production of CO2. Here’s Regunberg’s reaction:
Wow. Reason #1,000,000,000 why the climate crisis is a crisis of inequality and plutocracy.
Let’s be charitable by giving Regunberg the benefit of the doubt that he deleted the tweet because his brain soon caught up with the complete foolishness of his statement.
Only an ideologue could miss the fact that one of the apparently best performers on this chart is China. You know, the country that is by far the biggest polluter on the planet, and which still has slavery of the direct, not-just-lower-paid-self-deciding-employees kind. I won’t attempt to understand how China’s good performance on his chart (let alone India, which has a massive pollution problem as well as a caste system) could support Regunberg’s contention.
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Since the first and third worst polluters on the planet are the fourth-best and best performers on this chart, it seems extremely likely that the most-decisive factor is that the chart is per capita. That is, the United States looks bad because our average resident is wealthier, and wealthier people do things that generate more CO2 than, say, sifting through garbage piles for edibles. Note that this is true for the top 10% and for everybody else. I’d say, hooray for the U.S.A.!
Another factor that surely plays a role is the size of the country. Notice Canada’s position. In a larger country, people need to travel more to get around. That includes the average commuter as well as Regunberg’s progressive friends, who jet around the world to climate conferences that would be conducted via Zoom if the real purpose weren’t to rub elbows and enjoy the high life.
Regunberg’s tweet and Kaufman’s article are simply attempts to cram climate alarmism into their proven mold of envy-stoking. Rich people are killing the planet! You must vote for policies that restrict them and transfer money to you (and give money and power to us)!
One suspects that restricting the rich and enriching the working class wouldn’t quite be the outcome if progressive achieved their goals, but it’s the pitch. And this chart, along with the message that Regunberg overenthusiastically picked up, shows the level of nuance brought to the discussion by those who would use fear to seize power.
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