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California Governor Gavin Newsom on Sunday said there could be a potential third wave of the coronavirus and policymakers need to be “humbled” by what they do not know about SARS-CoV-2.

Posted by M. C. on May 18, 2020

So says the head policy maker.

He does a lot of talking for someone who admits he doesn’t know much.

Woe is Kalifornia.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/05/17/gavin-newsom-worried-about-potential-third-waves-of-coronavirus/

Gavin Newsom Worried About ‘Potential Third Waves’ of Coronavirus

by Tony Lee

…“But, look, I’m a father of four kids, and deeply anxious about their health and safety, as every parent watching is as well. And so it’s just another proof point. Those that claim we know what we know about this pandemic, it was 90 days ago no one even knew the word Covid, let alone what corona actually meant,” he continued. ” And so we are in a situation where, every day, we have to be humbled by what we don’t know, and we have to be open to argument, interested in evidence. You cannot be ideological about this disease, and nor — forgive me for belaboring — can we be naive.”…

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Rent Control Is Nuts – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on May 18, 2020

And according to Assar Lindbeck, a Swedish economist, “In many cases, rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city except for bombing.” Almost as a follow up, Vietnamese Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach averred: “The Americans couldn’t destroy Hanoi, but we have destroyed our city by the very low rents.”

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/05/walter-e-block/rent-control/

By

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY, 14th District) has called for nation-wide rent control. AOC’s plan is to not allow rent increases larger than 3% per year. This is somewhat surprising, given that she majored in economics at prestigious Boston University. I – along with virtually every other economics professor in the country — am always at great pains to present in my introductory to micro-economics courses the familiar supply and demand diagram. It demonstrates that rents below equilibrium levels create shortages. I suppose she missed that lecture. If so, she really should have obtained the class notes from someone else, and/or perused her introductory textbook.

Senator Bernie Sanders has, if anything, done her one better: he is calling for a national rent control policy. California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed into law a policy along similar lines: rent increases shall be limited to 5% annually, in addition to any inflationary increases; this is coupled with making it more difficult to evict tenants.

Present New York City policy is very much in keeping with Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s plan. It has recently worsened its previous rather Draconian rent control legislation. The presumed aim is to help tenants. But, there is something in economics called “unintended consequences.” Translation: “the plans of mice and men often go astray.”

Suppose, instead of exacerbating its rent control regulations, that the city council of this great city had tried this sort of thing with a different consumer good. Suppose the Big Apple had passed a law placing a ceiling of $1 on a fast food meal.The obvious result would be that McDonalds, Burger King, Wendy’s and their ilk would pretty much vacate the entire city. Posit that the city council mandated that gas stations charge no more than $1 per gallon. A similar result would ensue. Denizens of the New York City would be greatly inconvenienced.

Mr. DeBlasio would never institute any such ridiculous initiative. He would be laughed out of office if he did. Why, then, does the mayor think he can get away with inculcating analogous rules for residential real estate? This is because while burger and gas emporiums can easily locate elsewhere, the same is not true for buildings. If the owners had their ‘druthers, and this were economically and legally possible, they would hoist their real estate holdings upon onto giant wheeled vehicles, and roll them out of the city as soon as possible. New York City would then have no more accommodation for tenants than it would have fast food outlets or gas stations, under our hypothetical contrary to fact scenarios.

Of course, landlords can do no such thing, much as they would like to; heck, they would give their eye teeth to be able to cock a snook at the politicians in this manner.

But this inability of landlords does not mean that rent controls have no adverse effects upon local residents. They can certainly build less new capacity than would otherwise be the case. They may be legally compelled to upkeep and maintain presently existing apartments, but they will do so only reluctantly. “The customer is always right” which prevails in most industries, and will continue to do so for commercial and industrial real estate, which lack such unwise price controls, but will not apply to residential units. They will fight like the dickens to convert their holdings to condominiums and cooperatives. They will have incentives to – how can I put this delicately – not to be too unhappy if their buildings accidentally catch fire. Do we really want to promote such incentives, whether or not they actually become implemented?

Vacancy rates will plummet even further, with these new dispensations. This will have negative repercussions on labor mobility, when occupants fear to give up their rent controlled units. There will be a tendency to convert apartments to stores, to industrial and commercial uses. New laws will have to be enacted to prevent this, and will not be totally successful. Landlord – tenant relations will plummet even further (not of course for non-controlled, non-residential units.) New York City already has special courts charged with solving these confrontations. This is something not at all needed in any other industry. These costs are substantial, and the money misallocated in this direction could have been far more wisely spent.

The economics profession is not unified on too many issues, but this one is an exception. Opposition to rent control stretches all the way from Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek on one stretch of the political spectrum, to several scholars on the very opposite side. For example, in the view of Nobel Prize winner in economics Gunner Myrdal, “Rent control has in certain western countries constituted, maybe, the worst example of poor planning by governments lacking courage and vision.” And according to Assar Lindbeck, a Swedish economist, “In many cases, rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city except for bombing.” Almost as a follow up, Vietnamese Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach averred: “The Americans couldn’t destroy Hanoi, but we have destroyed our city by the very low rents.”

It is urged in favor of this policy that tenants are poorer than property owners, and, often, are compelled to spend an inordinate percentage of their salaries on rent. But, with fewer buildings being constructed, and more of them falling into disarray due to reduced maintenance, upward pressure on rent levels, paradoxically, will tend to be the result. It is an economic truism that the less supply, other things equal, the higher the price. There are no exceptions for housing, or based on the fact that this expenditure plays a large role in the budgets of poor and middle class householders.

In any case, we do not single out textile manufacturers and insist they alone help clothe the impoverished, that only grocers and restaurants feed them, that automobile, air conditioner and television purveyors all on their own make these products available to those who cannot afford them. All of these income transfers come out of general funds. I do not at all favor any of these policies, but fair is fair. Why should housing be any different? Why should landlords, alone, have to bear the entire burden of housing the poor?

Not only should these latest violations of private property rights be rescinded, but the entire notion that rent control can alleviate housing shortages and high fees should be confined to the dust bin not only of history, but of economics too. From a legal point of view, this is a taking. Landlords should be compensated for this seizure of the (value of) their property.

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Ground Control to Planet Lockdown: This Is Only a Test — Strategic Culture

Posted by M. C. on April 4, 2020

The absolutely key issue is how the West was caught completely unprepared for the spread of Covid-19 – even after being provided a head start of two months by China, and having the time to study different successful strategies applied across Asia.

There are no secrets for the success of the South Korean model.

South Korea was producing test kits already in early January, and by March was testing 100,000 people a day, after establishing strict control of the whole population – to Western cries of “no protection of private life”. That was before the West embarked on Planet Lockdown mode.

Forced vaccination and ID implants

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/04/02/ground-control-planet-lockdown-only-test/

Pepe Escobar

As much as Covid-19 is a circuit breaker, a time bomb and an actual weapon of mass destruction (WMD), a fierce debate is raging worldwide on the wisdom of mass quarantine applied to entire cities, states and nations.

Those against it argue Planet Lockdown not only is not stopping the spread of Covid-19 but also has landed the global economy into a cryogenic state – with unforeseen, dire consequences. Thus quarantine should apply essentially to the population with the greatest risk of death: the elderly.

With Planet Lockdown transfixed by heart-breaking reports from the Covid-19 frontline, there’s no question this is an incendiary assertion.

In parallel, a total corporate media takeover is implying that if the numbers do not substantially go down, Planet Lockdown – an euphemism for house arrest – remains, indefinitely.

Michael Levitt, 2013 Nobel Prize in chemistry and Stanford biophysicist, was spot on when he calculated that China would get through the worst of Covid-19 way before throngs of health experts believed, and that “What we need is to control the panic”.

Let’s cross this over with some facts and dissident opinion, in the interest of fostering an informed debate.

The report Covid-19 – Navigating the Uncharted was co-authored by Dr. Anthony Fauci – the White House face of the fight –, H. Clifford Lane, and CDC director Robert R. Redfield. So it comes from the heart of the U.S. healthcare establishment.

The report explicitly states, “the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%) or a pandemic influenza (similar to those in 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had case fatality rates of 9 to 10% and 36%, respectively.”

On March 19, four days before Downing Street ordered the British lockdown, Covid-19 was downgraded from the status of “High Consequence Infectious Disease.”

John Lee, recently retired professor of pathology and former NHS consultant pathologist, has recently argued that, “the world’s 18,944 coronavirus deaths represent 0.14 per cent of the total. These figures might shoot up but they are, right now, lower than other infectious diseases that we live with (such as flu).”

He recommends, “a degree of social distancing should be maintained for a while, especially for the elderly and the immune-suppressed. But when drastic measures are introduced, they should be based on clear evidence. In the case of Covid-19, the evidence is not clear.”

That’s essentially the same point developed by a Russian military intel analyst.

No less than 22 scientists – see here and here – have expanded on their doubts about the Western strategy.

Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi, Professor Emeritus of Medical Microbiology at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, has provoked immense controversy with his open letter to Chancellor Merkel, stressing the “truly unforeseeable consequences of the drastic containment measures which are currently being applied in large parts of Europe.”

Even New York governor Andrew Cuomo admitted on the record about the error of quarantining elderly people with illnesses alongside the fit young population.

The absolutely key issue is how the West was caught completely unprepared for the spread of Covid-19 – even after being provided a head start of two months by China, and having the time to study different successful strategies applied across Asia.

There are no secrets for the success of the South Korean model.

South Korea was producing test kits already in early January, and by March was testing 100,000 people a day, after establishing strict control of the whole population – to Western cries of “no protection of private life”. That was before the West embarked on Planet Lockdown mode.

South Korea was all about testing early, often and safely – in tandem with quick, thorough contact tracing, isolation and surveillance.

Covid-19 carriers are monitored with the help of video-surveillance cameras, credit card purchases, smartphone records. Add to it SMS sent to everyone when a new case is detected near them or their place of work. Those in self-isolation need an app to be constantly monitored; non-compliance means a fine to the equivalent of $2,800.

Controlled demolition in effect

In early March, the Chinese Journal of Infectious Diseases, hosted by the Shanghai Medical Association, pre-published an Expert Consensus on Comprehensive Treatment of Coronavirus in Shanghai. Treatment recommendations included, “large doses of vitamin C…injected intravenously at a dose of 100 to 200 mg / kg per day. The duration of continuous use is to significantly improve the oxygenation index.”

That’s the reason why 50 tons of Vitamin C was shipped to Hubei province in early February. It’s a stark example of a simple “mitigation” solution capable of minimizing economic catastrophe.

In contrast, it’s as if the brutally fast Chinese “people’s war” counterpunch against Covid-19 had caught Washington totally unprepared. Steady intel rumbles on the Chinese net point to Beijing having already studied all plausible leads towards the origin of the Sars-Cov-2 virus – vital information that will be certainly weaponized, Sun Tzu style, at the right time.

As it stands, the sustainability of the complex Eurasian integration project has not been substantially compromised. As the EU has provided the whole planet with a graphic demonstration of its cluelessness and helplessness, everyday the Russia-China strategic partnership gets stronger – increasingly investing in soft power and advancing a pan-Eurasia dialogue which includes, crucially, medical help.

Facing this process, the EU’s top diplomat, Joseph Borrell, sounds indeed so helpless: “There is a global battle of narratives going on in which timing is a crucial factor. […] China has brought down local new infections to single figures – and it is now sending equipment and doctors to Europe, as others do as well. China is aggressively pushing the message that, unlike the U.S., it is a responsible and reliable partner. In the battle of narratives we have also seen attempts to discredit the EU (…) We must be aware there is a geo-political component including a struggle for influence through spinning and the ‘politics of generosity’. Armed with facts, we need to defend Europe against its detractors.”

That takes us to really explosive territory. A critique of the Planet Lockdown strategy inevitably raises serious questions pointing to a controlled demolition of the global economy. What is already in stark effect are myriad declinations of martial law, severe social media policing in Ministry of Truth mode, and the return of strict border controls.

These are unequivocal markings of a massive social re-engineering project, complete with inbuilt full monitoring, population control and social distancing promoted as the new normal.

That would be taking to the limit Secretary of State Mike “we lie, we cheat, we steal” Pompeo’s assertion, on the record, that Covid-19 is a live military exercise: “This matter is going forward — we are in a live exercise here to get this right.”

All hail BlackRock

So as we face a New Great Depression, steps leading to a Brave New World are already discernable. It goes way beyond a mere Bretton Woods 2.0, in the manner that Pam and Russ Martens superbly deconstruct the recent $2 trillion, Capitol Hill-approved stimulus to the U.S. economy.

Essentially, the Fed will “leverage the bill’s $454 million bailout slush fund into $4.5 trillion”. And no questions are allowed on who gets the money, because the bill simply cancels the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) for the Fed.

The privileged private contractor for the slush fund is none other than BlackRock. Here’s the extremely short version of the whole, astonishing scheme, masterfully detailed here.

Wall Street has turned the Fed into a hedge fund. The Fed is going to own at least two thirds of all U.S. Treasury bills wallowing in the market before the end of the year.

The U.S. Treasury will be buying every security and loan in sight while the Fed will be the banker – financing the whole scheme.

So essentially this is a Fed/ Treasury merger. A behemoth dispensing loads of helicopter money – with BlackRock as the undisputable winner.

BlackRock is widely known as the biggest money manager on the planet. Their tentacles are everywhere. They own 5% of Apple, 5% of Exxon Mobil, 6% of Google, second largest shareholder of AT&T (Turner, HBO, CNN, Warner Brothers) – these are just a few examples.

They will buy all these securities and manage those dodgy special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) on behalf of the Treasury.

BlackRock not only is the top investor in Goldman Sachs. Better yet: Blackrock is bigger than Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank combined. BlackRock is a serious Trump donor. Now, for all practical purposes, it will be the operating system – the Chrome, Firefox, Safari – of Fed/Treasury.

This represents the definitive Wall Street-ization of the Fed – with no evidence whatsoever it will lead to any improvement in the lives of the average American.

Western corporate media, en masse, have virtually ignored the myriad, devastating economic consequences of Planet Lockdown. Wall to wall coverage barely mentions the astonishing economic human wreckage already in effect – especially for the masses barely surviving, so far, in the informal economy.

For all practical purposes, the Global War on Terror (GWOT) has been replaced by the Global War on Virus (GWOV). But what is not being seriously analyzed is the Perfect Toxic Storm: a totally shattered economy; The Mother of All Financial Crashes – barely masked by the trillions in helicopter money from the Fed and the ECB; the tens of millions of unemployed engendered by the New Great Depression; the millions of small businesses that will simply disappear; a widespread, global mental health crisis. Not to mention the masses of elderly, especially in the U.S., that will be issued an unspoken “drop dead” notice.

Beyond any rhetoric about “decoupling”, the global economy is already, de facto, split in two. On one side, we have Eurasia, Africa and swathes of Latin America – what China will be painstakingly connecting and reconnecting via the New Silk Roads. On the other side, we have North America and selected Western vassals. A puzzled Europe lies in the middle.

A cryogenically induced global economy certainly facilitates a reboot. Trumpism is the New Exceptionalism – so that means an isolationist MAGA on steroids. In contrast, China will painstakingly reboot its market base along the New Silk Roads – Africa and Latin America included – to replace the 20% of trade/exports to be lost with the U.S.

The meager $1,200 checks promised to Americans are a de facto precursor of the much touted Universal Basic Income (UBI). They may become permanent as tens of millions of people will be permanently unemployed. That will facilitate the transition towards a totally automated, 24/7 economy run by AI – thus the importance of 5G.

And that’s where ID2020 comes in.

AI and ID2020

The European Commission is involved in a crucial but virtually unknown project, CREMA (Cloud Based Rapid Elastic Manufacturing) which aims to facilitate the widest possible implementation of AI in conjunction to the advent of a cashless One-World system.

The end of cash necessarily implies a One-World government capable of dispensing – and controlling – UBI; a de facto full accomplishment of Foucault’s studies on biopolitics. Anyone is liable to be erased from the system if an algorithm equals this individual with dissent.

It gets even sexier when absolute social control is promoted as an innocent vaccine.

ID2020 is self-described as a benign alliance of “public-private partners”. Essentially, it is an electronic ID platform based on generalized vaccination. And its starts at birth; newborns will be provided with a “portable and persistent biometrically-linked digital identity.”

GAVI, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, pledges to “protect people’s health “ and provide “immunization for all”. Top partners and sponsors, apart from the WHO, include, predictably, Big Pharma.

At the ID2020 Alliance summit last September in New York, it was decided that the “Rising to the Good ID Challenge” program would be launched in 2020. That was confirmed by the World Economic Forum (WEF) this past January in Davos. The digital identity will be tested with the government of Bangladesh.

That poses a serious question: was ID2020 timed to coincide with what a crucial sponsor, the WHO, qualified as a pandemic? Or was a pandemic absolutely crucial to justify the launch of ID2020?

As game-changing trial runs go, nothing of course beats Event 201, which took place less than a month after ID2020.

The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in partnership with, once again, the WEF, as well as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, described Event 201 as “a high-level pandemic exercise”. The exercise “illustrated areas where public/private partnerships will be necessary during the response to a severe pandemic in order to diminish large-scale economic and societal consequences.”

With Covid-19 in effect as a pandemic, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health was forced to issue a statement basically saying they just “modeled a fictional coronavirus pandemic, but we explicitly stated that it was not a prediction”.

There’s no question “a severe pandemic, which becomes ‘Event 201’ would require reliable cooperation among several industries, national governments, and key international institutions”, as spun by the sponsors. Covid-19 is eliciting exactly this kind of “cooperation”. Whether it’s “reliable” is open to endless debate.

The fact is that, all over Planet Lockdown, a groundswell of public opinion is leaning towards defining the current state of affairs as a global psyop: a deliberate global meltdown – the New Great Depression – imposed on unsuspecting citizens by design.

The powers that be, taking their cue from the tried and tested, decades-old CIA playbook, of course are breathlessly calling it a “conspiracy theory”. Yet what vast swathes of global public opinion observe is a – dangerous – virus being used as cover for the advent of a new, digital financial system, complete with a forced vaccine cum nanochip creating a full, individual, digital identity.

The most plausible scenario for our immediate future reads like clusters of smart cities linked by AI, with people monitored full time and duly micro-chipped doing what they need with a unified digital currency, in an atmosphere of Bentham’s and Foucault’s Panopticum on overdrive.

So if this is really our future, the existing world-system has to go. This is a test, this is only a test.

 

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A Coronavirus Counterfactual: What If Government Had Done Nothing? | RealClearMarkets

Posted by M. C. on March 21, 2020

Free people naturally prosper, and they do precisely because their individual wellbeing means so much to them. Had governments done nothing in response to the Coronavirus, individuals and businesses would have done much more, and done so without going out of business. The Ruling Class overseeing this crack-up deserves the mother of all comeuppances that goes well beyond losing in the next election cycle. The architects of this wholly avoidable debacle need to be publicly shamed and ridiculed.

The restaurant smoking ban laws in PA are a great example. Restaurants become mostly smoke free on their own. PA then passed laws and took the credit.

https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2020/03/21/a_coronavirus_counterfactual_what_if_government_had_done_nothing_487172.html

By John Tamny

“The Pothole” is the title of episode 16, season 8 of the classic television series Seinfeld. In this one Jerry accidentally knocks girlfriend Jenna’s toothbrush into the toilet, only for Jenna to use it before Jerry can tell her about his accident. This rated a plotline given Seinfeld’s known aversion to germs. Readers can imagine where the story went. Seinfeld was surely a comedy defined by manufactured situations “about nothing,” but one reason the show was so popular (and still is) is that people could relate.

Certainly they could relate to Seinfeld’s obsessive aversion to germs. We all know people like this, or we are those people. These individuals never open doors by the door handle, wipe down tray tables and armrests on airplanes, and particularly if they have young kids, they require all visitors to wash or disinfect their hands upon entering their house or apartment.

In a work sense, most readers can probably remember their first job, or jobs. They paid hourly. If so, no doubt some can remember how holiday work paid double the hourly wage, or sometimes more. Eager to remain open for customers whose wants and needs didn’t and don’t cease on holidays, businesses pay workers extra to make sure they’ll serve their customers on days when most aren’t working.

These anecdotes have come to mind a lot while witnessing the mass shutdown of the U.S. economy on the city, state, and national level.  As this is being written, California’s 40 million residents are on lockdown per the order of Governor Gavin Newsom. The mayor of Hoboken (NJ) banned restaurants and bars from serving food, plus instituted a 10 pm to 5 am curfew. As all too many already know, Austin’s mayor canceled South by Southwest, thus devastating local businesses. On the national level, President Trump has ascribed to himself “wartime” powers, plus the federal government he leads is in the process of voting itself over $1 trillion to hand out to individuals and businesses.

About this extraction of enormous wealth from the U.S. economy, it barely rates mention that the Founders wrote the Constitution to severely limit the power of the federal government to do anything. Where then, is the outrage over a federal government set to spend $1 trillion? In fairness to the American people, it’s arguable they’re too stunned to protest after seeing politicians on all levels so rapidly take from them their ability to work and enjoy the fruits of their work. They’re told the crushing of the economy by the political class is “for their own good,” and that they should respect the “science” informing their decisions. Don’t the American people get it, politicians are fighting to save our lives! Since they are, we apparently must forfeit our liberty and prosperity.

Seemingly lost in all this alleged governmental beneficence is that people broadly get it. See once again Seinfeld. The episode was relatable because we yet again know all-too-many people who are exceedingly careful about being around the sick or those they presume to be germ carriers. This is true even in times free of viruses like Covid-19. Translated, people are self-regulating when it comes to their health. They don’t need a law.

That they don’t raises at this point a counterfactual question: what would have happened on the city, state and national levels if politicians had quite simply done nothing in response to the spreading virus? If so, does anyone seriously think that the death rate would be substantially higher, and that information about this potentially lethal virus wouldn’t have reached a population increasingly connected to the internet all day, and every day?

To the above, some might reply that rural types don’t always have internet access similar to that which cityfolk do, but then per demands of politicians around the world, they’re already isolated or socially distant. If our political minders are to be believed, their chosen isolation would make their being exposed to the virus highly unlikely assuming what’s even less likely: that they wouldn’t have been informed of the spread of a health-sapping virus well ahead of time.

So what of cities, and suburbs of cities? No doubt the risk of exposure would be greater for a variety of reasons, but then it’s safe to say that germaphobes in the best of times would be positively OCD in times like this. Not needing a law, they would socially distance themselves simply because that’s what they already do when viruses aren’t spreading.

Some will respond that others wouldn’t or won’t do as politicians demand. Yes, that’s true. And your point? Heroin is illegal, so is cocaine, but people still consume both. Lockdowns or none, some will disregard the risks that come with contracting Covid-19 much as they disregard the much-reported-on risks of heroin and cocaine use. Laws don’t factor with these individuals, at which point their interactions with one another, and potential infection with the virus, would have and realistically will provide crucial information about how rapidly the virus spreads, how lethal it is, etc.

What about businesses? What if there had been no lockdowns? It’s safe to say that many would have operated short-staffed as is with germaphobes top of mind. Rather than forced furloughs, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that a good percentage of workers on all levels of the economic food chain would have voluntarily opted out. Others fearful of contracting the virus would have used this time to take a well-needed and rather isolated vacation somewhere, including one of the “staycation” variety.

The main thing is that as opposed to businesses shutting down, it’s not unreasonable to contend that in concert with certain workers opting out or vacationing during the period of greatest Covid uncertainty, patronage of bars, restaurants, movie theaters, amusement parks, stadiums, arenas, hotels, motels, casinos and everything else would similarly decline naturally, thus shrinking the need for fully staffed operations. This would once again materialize not by law, but based on the germ-obsessed and virus-averse choosing to stay at home, or away from crowds. An informed citizenry, one that is better informed than ever thanks to the internet, would revert to relative isolation in a numbers sense to mitigate the close interactions that doctors and scientists say are problematic.

And what if some businesses stayed packed no matter what? If so, high customer demand would have given businesses fearful of morphing into contagion zones a reason to limit customer inflow by yes, charging higher prices for said food or service. Assuming broad aversion on the part of the public to being in public, other business entities would have advertised their adherence to strict customer limits in order to bring in consumers who would have otherwise studiously avoided public places for fear of big crowds.

Still other businesses, perhaps newly opened, would have used this period of uncertainty to stay open while gaining market share that would be harder to attain during periods of normalcy. And if the newer, suddenly busier businesses were to find it challenging to staff for relatively larger customer inflow, they might offer holiday style or hazardous duty pay to attract quality help. The crucial point here is that as opposed to a one-size-fits-all shutdown of businesses that is wrecking the finances and dreams of tens of millions, market forces and market fears would have made it possible for many more businesses to stay open; albeit in a way that wouldn’t imperil workers or customers.

Mentioned earlier were movie theaters, stadiums and sports arenas. Unknown is the why behind the mass shutdown. Here, perhaps absent politics, those staging events and films might have used prices, and in particular high prices, to limit the size of crowds as opposed to canceling events altogether. If the game plan is distance, let price signals arrived at in the marketplace shrink crowd sizes not just in restaurants and bars, but in all manner of venues.

Turning to the federal level, one imagines in a perfect and rather sane world the president doing much less than nothing. It’s shooting fish in a barrel, but government cannot produce abundance. At the same time, it can provide the personal and economic freedoms that lead to abundance. It’s been said before in this column, but President Trump was going to be vilified by the major media no matter what. And precisely because they were going to make him out as the devil no matter what, Trump should have made plain that the federal government’s only Coronavirus plan was freedom on the correct assumption that creative, free, profit-motivated minds matched with capital would arrive at a virus vaccine quite a bit quicker than would a team led by Mike Pence.

Trump might have also made plain that his DOJ would file lawsuits in defense of private businesses around the country being shut down by local and state governments. To the latter some might reply something along the lines of “abuse of power,” that states are where policy should be enacted, but it seems these shutdowns amount to a “taking”? Yes or no, the Trump administration could have at least slowed down the horrid vandalism of the economy rather than his administration vandalizing it on its own with a $1 trillion spending plan that, while perhaps good cosmetics in the eyes of some, will logically weaken a U.S. economy already devastated by command-and-control.

To all of this some will yet again respond that a “business as usual” approach doesn’t work in the face of that which is potentially lethal. Such a view is insulting. Implicit there is that absent the guiding hand of government, people would approach what some say has the potential to kill by the millions with no regard for their own individual wellbeing. That’s not serious. In fact it’s obnoxious to presume that Americans need to be forced to protect themselves.

No, there’s a strong incentive for Americans and those of any other nationality to do what’s in their best interest. That this is true speaks to what a tragedy we’re in the middle of, both in terms of liberty and prosperity.

Free people naturally prosper, and they do precisely because their individual wellbeing means so much to them. Had governments done nothing in response to the Coronavirus, individuals and businesses would have done much more, and done so without going out of business. The Ruling Class overseeing this crack-up deserves the mother of all comeuppances that goes well beyond losing in the next election cycle. The architects of this wholly avoidable debacle need to be publicly shamed and ridiculed.

Be seeing you

 

 

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Editorial: California can’t account for billions of education dollars

Posted by M. C. on December 7, 2019

Expand that concept to a national level.

We are probably better off not knowing where that Kalifornia money went.

Safe rooms and Play Doh maybe.

Then think about what is taught. That is the scary part.

Government is the last thing we need in the education system.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/12/04/editorial-california-cant-account-for-billions-of-education-dollars/

By Stephen Frank

Want to waste tax dollars? Give it to your failed government schools. Want quality education? LAUSD is a holding action, no longer an education facility—so few graduate with real diploma’s earned. Now we find the government schools can not even keep accurate the money given to them…

Inexcusable that, six years after K-12 spending revamp, audit finds needy kids aren’t getting help they should

By Mercury News & East Bay Times Editorial Boards, 12/4/19   |

It’s been six years since California lawmakers revamped the state funding formula for local schools.

It was heralded by then-Gov. Jerry Brown as a way to simplify K-12 education spending and close the state’s achievement gap by giving more money to districts that disproportionately serve needy kids.

Since then, state spending on schools has increased about 50%. But, as state Auditor Elaine Howle explained in a troubling report last month, there is no way to track whether money is being spent as it should.

School officials across California have co-mingled billions of dollars of state money that was supposed to be used for children who fall into one of three categories: English learners, low-income or in foster care.

Howle’s findings confirm what critics have been saying for years: Rather than specifically helping needy kids, the money has simply been used to boost general spending.

That partially explains why California students’ test scores continue lagging the national average and the state has failed to close the achievement gap that divides along racial and economic lines.

If California has any hope of narrowing that divide, legislators and Gov. Gavin Newsom should require accountability for the $63 billion of state money currently spent annually on K-12 education.

It’s time to end this reckless spending. As we enter the state budget cycle for the 2020-21 fiscal year, lawmakers must stop doling out money without a meaningful tracking system for how it’s spent.

Brown’s original plan made sense. State spending for schools had become far too complicated, with more than 110 special “categorical” programs that had different funding and eligibility requirements.

The plan was to eliminate the categorical programs and give local school districts more control over the money. Hence, the Local Control Funding Formula was created.

LCFF is pretty simple. School districts receive a base amount determined by students’ attendance figures and grade levels. In addition, they receive a supplemental 20% for students falling into one of the three needy categories. And in districts with concentrations of more than 55% needy students, per-pupil funding increases 50% for each kid beyond the 55% threshold.

The so-called supplemental and concentration funding is supposed to be spent to provide additional help for those targeted children. But when Howle audited a sample of three school districts — Oakland, Clovis and San Diego — only Clovis tracked how the money was spent.

That’s because there are no state regulations to ensure districts separately account for the extra funds. Moreover, if the districts don’t spend the money on those needy students the year they receive the funds, they can spend it on anything the following year.

Hence, there are no rules to ensure Brown’s law is being followed. Indeed, while he was in office, Brown repeatedly resisted such a requirement. Consequently, there is no way to determine whether the additional funding is producing measurable student performance improvements.

The idea behind LCFF was to provide more local control. Parents were supposed have input into how the money is spent — something that’s meaningless if they’re not provided useful data — and school districts were supposed to be freed from the restrictions of hundreds of categorical spending programs.

But LCFF was never intended to be a giveaway of funds without obligations. Our neediest students were supposed to be better served. There’s no way to know whether that’s happened.

The lack of accountability — for how the money is spent and whether it’s producing results — is no longer acceptable.

Be seeing you

teachers

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EconomicPolicyJournal.com: California Governor Signs Law to Prevent Easing of Housing Crisis

Posted by M. C. on October 12, 2019

https://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2019/10/california-governor-signs-law-to.html

Yes, that is exactly what he did.

California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a law that limits rent increases to 5% each year plus inflation until Jan. 1, 2030. It bans landlords from evicting people for no reason, meaning they could not kick people out so they can raise the rent for a new tenant. And while the law doesn’t take effect until Jan. 1, it would apply to rent increases on or after March 15, 2019, to prevent landlords from raising rents just before the caps go into place.

This will have serious impact whenever the limitation prevents the rental market from clearing. The state has 17 million renters.

As Dr. Walter Block explains in The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics:

Rent control, like all other government-mandated price controls, is a law placing a maximum price, or a “rent ceiling,” on what landlords may charge tenants. If it is to have any effect, the rent level must be set at a rate below that which would otherwise have prevailed. (An enactment prohibiting apartment rents from exceeding, say, $100,000 per month, would have no effect since no one would pay that amount in any case.) But if rents are established at less than their equilibrium levels, demand will necessarily exceed supply, and rent control will lead to a shortage of dwelling spaces. Absent controls on prices, if the amount of a commodity or service demanded is larger than the amount supplied, prices rise to eliminate the shortage (by both bringing forth new supply and by reducing the amount demanded). But controls prevent rents from attaining market-clearing levels and shortages result…

Economists are virtually unanimous in the conclusion that rent controls are destructive. In a late-seventies poll of 211 economists published in the May 1979 issue of American Economic Review, slightly more than 98 percent of U.S. respondents agreed that “a ceiling on rents reduces the quantity and quality of housing available.” Similarly, the June 1988 issue of Canadian Public Policy reported that over 95 percent of the Canadian economists polled agreed with the statement. The agreement cuts across the usual political spectrum, ranging all the way from Nobel Prize winners Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek on the “right” to their fellow Nobel Laureate Gunnar Myrdal, an important architect of the Swedish Labor Party’s welfare state, on the “left.” Myrdal stated, “Rent control has in certain Western countries constituted, maybe, the worst example of poor planning by governments lacking courage and vision.” Fellow Swedish economist (and socialist) Assar Lindbeck, asserted, “In many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city—except for bombing.”
Economists have shown that rent control diverts new investment, which would otherwise have gone to rental housing, toward other, greener pastures—greener in terms of consumer need. They have demonstrated that it leads to housing deterioration, to fewer repairs and less maintenance. For example, Paul Niebanck reports that 29 percent of rent-controlled housing in the United States is deteriorated, but only 8 percent of the uncontrolled units are in such a state of disrepair. Joel Brenner and Herbert Franklin cite similar statistics for England and France.

The economic reasons are straightforward. One effect of government oversight is to retard investment in residential rental units. Imagine that you have $5 million to invest and can place the funds in any industry you wish. In most businesses governments will place only limited controls and taxes on your enterprise. But if you entrust your money to rental housing, you must pass one additional hurdle: the rent-control authority, with its hearings, red tape, and rent ceilings. Under these conditions is it any wonder that you are less likely to build or purchase rental housing?…
Rent control has destroyed entire sections of sound housing in New York’s South Bronx. It has led to decay and abandonment throughout the entire five boroughs of the city. Although hard statistics on abandonments are not available, William Tucker reports estimates that about thirty thousand New York apartments were abandoned annually from 1972 to 1982, a loss of almost a third of a million units in this eleven-year period.

–RW

Rent control: Does it work? - BBC News

I bet Londonstaners would like tax control even better.

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Trump Takes Back $1 Billion from California; Gavin Newsom Complains: ‘Political Retribution’

Posted by M. C. on February 20, 2019

Me thinks Kalifornia needs to divert your tax dollars to pay it’s bills.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/02/19/gavin-newsom-trump-takes-back-nearly-1-billion-from-california-after-high-speed-rail-canceled/

by Joel B. Pollak

The Trump administration announced Tuesday that it was canceling a federal grant to California worth nearly $1 billion after Gov. Gavin Newsom announced the cancelation of the state’s high-speed rail project last week.

Newsom used his “State of the State” address Feb. 12 to cancel the San Francisco-to-Los Angeles project, saying it “would cost too much and, respectfully, would take too long” to complete.

However, he told legislators he wanted to complete the portion of the bullet train under construction in the rural Central Valley, lest the state lose federal dollars granted to California by President Barack Obama as part of the 2009 stimulus: “I am not interested in sending $3.5 billion in federal funding that was allocated to this project back to Donald Trump,” Newsom said.

The president had other ideas, and took to Twitter to demand that California return the money. Newsom rejected that demand, insisting: “This is CA’s money, allocated by Congress for this project. We’re not giving it back.”

But on Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) sent a letter to the California High-Speed Rail Authority, informing it that it was terminating its agreement with the state and therefore would refuse to provide the state with $928,620,000 allocated to the high-speed rail project.

The FRA listed several factors informing its decision, including the likelihood that the high-speed rail would not be completed by 2022, as contemplated by the original agreement. The state’s high-speed rail authority had also failed, according to the FRA, to provide “timely and satisfactory financial reports” to the federal government…

Be seeing you

Gov. Gavin Newsom in drag

 

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California Governor Proposes Tax on Water

Posted by M. C. on January 15, 2019

Taxing water to make it more affordable. This guy could be more dangerous than Bill DiBlasio.
If the guv ever hears about past attempts to buy Great Lakes water, look out Erie.
CA drains dry anything it can get it’s hands on. To the detriment of it’s surroundings.
As a friend once said about CA and the desert it inhabits, there is plenty of water, just too many people.
Here is an idea, let’s open the border and massively increase the strain.

http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2019/01/california-governor-proposes-tax-on.html

There was never any question that the new California governor, lefty Gavin Newsom, would propose some nutty programs during his reign but, in the first few days of his administration, he is certainly trying to outdo expectations of how wacko he would get.

His just-released budget, titled “California for All,” calls drinking water a “fundamental right,” and adds: “The budget includes short-term measures to bring immediate relief to communities without safe drinking water and also proposes an ongoing sustainable funding source to address this problem into the future.”

This is unadulterated central planning for the type of “problem” that the free market solves on a daily basis. (Note: I outlined how private sector water would work in: Dear Fellow Health Club Member, Please Leave Me the Hell Alone: An economic analysis of the water “shortage)

Specifically, he wants new taxes on water, fertilizer and dairy to provide this “fundamental right.”

From the budget:

 Safe and Affordable Drinking Water Fund—Establish a new special fund, with a dedicated funding source from new water, fertilizer, and dairy fees, to enable the State Water Resources Control Board to assist communities, particularly disadvantaged communities, in paying for the short-term and long-term costs of obtaining access to safe and affordable drinking water.

–RW

Be seeing you
water crisis

Solution: Open the borders to anything with a pulse.

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