Peter Suderman explains that Kamalacare is nothing other than Bidencare.
GMU Econ alum Lawrence McQuillan applauds a rare victory for sanity in housing policy in California.
Vance Ginn is correct: “Counting on FEMA is a second disaster.”
Almost everyone, other than libertarians, thinks that if you disagree with them about policy, it’s not because you think the policy doesn’t work, but because you don’t share their goals or values. For instance, if you tell leftists you oppose the minimum wage, they presume you hate the poor, even though the empirics show the minimum wage hurts the poor. If you tell conservatives you support increased economic immigration (not refugees), they presume you don’t care about crime, even though economic migrants (again, not refugees) commit crime at lower rates than most Americans. This is because most people think in vapid and immature ways about politics, and indeed, get rewarded for doing so. (Being stupid about your political team is a sign of loyalty, just as with sports team loyalty.) The bad news is that almost everyone has these flaws, but the good news is that you don’t have to take their anger seriously, because it doesn’t deserve any respect.
Arnold Kling ponders world policing versus world perfecting.
Matt Ridley writes informatively about the chances of another global pandemic. A slice:
Future pandemics as bad as Covid are ‘a certainty’, says Sir Chris Whitty. He is right in one sense. So many people gained so much money, power or fame out of the pandemic that they will be all too willing to declare another one soon. The WHO is trying to vastly increase its budget and its powers on the back of Covid.
But if he means that we face more outbreaks of new infectious diseases that go global, then no, Whitty is wrong. The chances of another new virus spreading through the human race at a terrifying rate, burning through every barrier we erect – lockdowns, school closures, social distancing, vaccines – as happened in 2020, are small. The enthusiasm with which epidemiologists have tried to scare us about monkey pox and bird flu are cases in point: they are very nasty diseases but are unlikely to go global if we are careful.
There is one special exception: if the virus has been ‘trained’ in the lab to infect human cells.
That is why it is so vital to understand whether the Covid pandemic began as a lab leak or as a natural spillover from a mammal in a market. The evidence points strongly to a lab accident, Wuhan being the only city in the world where exactly the right kind of experiments were being done on exactly the right kind of bat virus. We now know that infected animals did not turn up in its markets.
