RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/04/not-merely-wrong-but-265-times-wrong/

Years ago, Paul Kelly noted the striking irrelevance of academic economists to Australia’s 1980s and ’90s reform era. Contributions like Monday’s “Open letter from 265 Australian economists: don’t sacrifice health for ‘the economy‘” show that nothing has changed. What insights do the authors believe are so important they must be urgently put to leaders dealing with multiple critical decisions every day? With its straw-man arguments and vagueness, the letter offers none.

The authors reject as “a false distinction” that there is “a trade‑off between the public health and economic aspects of the crisis”. This is so absurd that it is astonishing any serious economist (let alone 265 of them) could suggest it. If an extra $1 billion – let alone hundreds of billions – were spent on, say, the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, some lives would undoubtedly be prolonged. Likewise for spending on highway “black spots”, homelessness, and hundreds of other programs. Trade‑offs between fiscal, economic and health effects (current and future) are properly endemic to all public policy issues.

Moreover, the authors do not even mention that an ongoing lockdown inducing deep recession will itself have large negative health effects – damage that will be definite, not merely possible, in the event of a so-far unseen second-wave outbreak. These impacts will be felt by hundreds of thousands of additional long‑term unemployed, by thousands of small business owners whose firms are destroyed, and through lower future health spending as we repay massive additional public debt.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/no-break-islamist-hate-raymond-ibrahim/

Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow.  This article originally appeared on Coptic Solidarity

At a time when the lives of the people of Egypt have been, like the lives of most people around the world, disrupted by coronavirus; at a time when Egyptians, like others, are wearing masks, staying indoors and social distancing—a group of undeterred Islamic terrorists were preparing to launch a major terror strike on Egypt’s Coptic Orthodox churches during their holiest day of worship, this past Sunday, April 19, 2020.

On Tuesday, April 14, Egyptian security forces were involved in an hours-long gunfight with an Islamic terror cell ensconced in an apartment building in Cairo’s Amiriyah district, which is known for holding a large Christian population and several churches.  Some television stations aired footage of the firefight; many gunshots could be heard in the background.  In the end, seven would-be terrorists and one police officer were killed in the shootout.  Several ammunitions and automatic weapons were found and seized from their apartment.

Initial news reports presented the cell as takfiri—a reference to Muslim extremists who accuse, attack, and sometimes kill other Muslims for not being Islamic enough.  Others protested that the cell’s primary if not exclusive purpose was to murder Christians in their churches.

The Egyptian ministry has now confirmed that “the suspects were planning attacks on the country’s Coptic Christians during the Holy Week and Easter Sunday. Egypt’s Coptic Orthodox Christians, one the world’s oldest Christian communities, would celebrate Easter on April 19.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/un-secretary-generals-mother-earth-day-message-joseph-klein/

“On this International Mother Earth Day,” United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres proclaimed, “all eyes are on the COVID-19 pandemic – the biggest test the world has faced since the Second World War.” He issued this proclamation under the banner “Climate Action” in an attempt to link the devastating health and economic crisis wrought by the coronavirus pandemic to the UN’s radical climate change agenda. “We must act decisively to protect our planet from both the coronavirus and the existential threat of climate disruption. The current crisis is an unprecedented wake-up call.”

The UN Secretary General is following Rahm Emanuel’s advice to “never allow a crisis go to waste.” He is in sync with Democratic Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), a leading champion of the Green New Deal. She tweeted recently that “it’s the right time for a worker-led, mass investment in green infrastructure to save our planet.”

The International Monetary Fund has predicted that the global lockdown will create an economic crisis not seen since the Great Depression. Job losses are already catastrophic, with far more job losses to come. With a combination of fiscal and monetary policies, governments are trying to rescue businesses that are willing to save the jobs of their workers. But as far as Secretary General Guterres is concerned, only “green jobs” are worth the expenditure of taxpayers’ money to support. He said that “as we spend huge amounts of money to recover from the coronavirus, we must deliver new jobs and businesses through a clean, green transition.”  He is pressing for an end to fossil fuel subsidies.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tented-canopy-is-not-a-city-set-upon-a-hill-covid-19-has-made-it-even-less-likely-that-canada-can-get-its-house-in-order/

Despite the stalling tactics of certain Democrat governors, the U.S. is gradually moving toward restoring business as usual and rebooting the economy after a much-overrated “pandemic.” Canada, however, remains in lockdown, printing money it does not have to offset the closing down of industry and commerce, and sinking ever deeper into the economic doldrums. The mint is working overtime in the U.S. as well, but America is a dynamic nation with vast manufacturing capacity, fewer regulations and a pro-active president, giving it a high survivability index.

Canada is a different kettle of piranhas. Its fiscal condition even prior to the onset of the COVID epidemic was already in red alert with mounting debt, a supine economy, an oppressive and totally unnecessary carbon tax superposed upon an already taxed-to-death population, the flight of both capital and manufacturing to the U.S., steadily increasing unemployment, an idle petroleum industry, a stupefying narcissist for a prime minister, and a government policy directed toward “social justice” initiatives rather than toward a sober and robust effort to revive a moribund country.

I have recently heard from a valued friend who runs a B&B. He is thinking of selling his business and leaving the country, possibly for the Dominican Republic (where, as it happens, another Canadian friend now cheerfully makes his home). The entrepreneurial spirit does not thrive in Canada.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-coronavirus-could-imperil-putins-presidency-11587682524?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

The path of the coronavirus pandemic in Russia has been similar to that of other countries: Denial gives way to fear, even despair. Covid-19 has exacerbated tensions and exposed political and economic inadequacies, testing the strength and legitimacy of institutions as well as confidence in national leadership. In this regard, the pandemic could hardly have come at a worse time for the Kremlin.

The days when an overconfident Russia dispatched planeloads of medical supplies to Italy, Serbia and the U.S. now seem like ancient history. As of Thursday there have been more than 57,999 confirmed cases, up more than 5,000 from Wednesday, and 57 more deaths for a total of 513. Those numbers are proportionate to about 131,731 infected and roughly 1,165 dead in the U.S.—numbers America hit before the end of March.

The independent Russian medical union Alliance of Doctors charges that the government is covering up the actual number of infections, so worse may be coming. Even officials are saying it. “I can tell you for sure that there has been no peak [in Covid cases] yet whatsoever,” said Mayor Sergei Sobyanin of Moscow, where more than half the infections and deaths have occurred. “We are at the foothills of the peak, not even in the middle.”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15914/erdogan-approval-coronavirus

One of the laws Turkey’s rubber-stamp parliament passed before the recess allowed the release of tens of thousands of common criminals to ease overcrowding in jails and protect inmates from the coronavirus pandemic. The amnesty, however, excluded hundreds of political prisoners including journalists, writers, academics and social media users critical of Erdoğan’s authoritarian regime

In 2020, the collective fear is the coronavirus pandemic. And just as in the previous instances based on fear, it seems to be working in Erdoğan’s advantage.

“The people tend to unite behind strong leaders in times of national crisis like war, terror, security threats, disasters or pandemic.” — Özer Sencar, president of Metropoll, non-partisan pollster, Hurriyet, April 16, 2020.

When a group of military officers attempted a putsch to overthrow Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in July 2016, the Islamist strongman replied with two reflexes: survival, and a vigorous political campaign to make political gains from the failed coup. He succeeded in both.

Most Turks, including Erdoğan’s opponents, weary of decades of military coups, united behind him to resist the putsch that ended up killing 250 people and wounded more than 2,000. Erdoğan’s approval rating rose sharply from 45% before the failed coup to 67.6% in its aftermath. For many observers, that was not a surprise. Only a year earlier, Erdoğan had gambled over the Turks’ collective security concerns and won.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15923/iran-struggle-oil-price

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has tried to put a brave face on the latest setback to hit the regime, claiming that Iran is unlikely to suffer as much as other countries from the oil price drop because it is less reliant than others on crude exports.

If that were truly the case, then Tehran would not be asking the IMF for a bailout, and Mr Rouhani, together with Javad Zarif, Iran’s Foreign Minister, would not be begging Washington to remove sanctions.

The truth of the matter is, for all the regime’s attempts to claim it has everything under control, that the country is teetering on the brink of collapse, and the ayatollahs are fast running out of options to save themselves.

At a time when Iran’s Islamic regime is already facing unprecedented pressure over its handling of the coronavirus outbreak, as well as its disastrous handling of the economy, the global slump in oil prices could well prove to be the final straw for the ayatollahs.

Even before this week’s dramatic collapse in global oil prices, which saw the key gauge of U.S. crude prices, the West Texas Intermediate benchmark, tumble into negative territory for the first time in history, the mullahs were already under intense pressure over their catastrophic running of the country during their four decades in power.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/04/facing-new-crises-macron-repackages-old-bad-ideas/

The French president sees COVID-19 as yet another opportunity to deepen European integration.

At the end of last week, the Financial Times published a lengthy interview with French president Emmanuel Macron in which Macron referred no fewer than nine times to humility and may, occasionally, have meant it:

I don’t know if we are at the beginning or the middle of this crisis — no one knows. . . . There is lots of uncertainty and that should make us very humble.

Macron’s humility only goes so far, and will not have been encouraged by his starstruck interviewers, who write that he is “overtly intellectual [and] always brimming with ideas.”

They are right, but unfortunately, Macron’s ideas are old ideas, if sometimes repackaged.

In his view, the interviewers report, COVID-19 represents an opportunity to put an end to the “hyper-financialized world,” a phantom that exists mainly in the fevered imaginations of communitarians, academics who refer to “late capitalism,” and European politicians. (Recall that, shortly after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, an earlier French president, Nicolas Sarkozy — seemingly oblivious to the political and economic developments of the previous hundred years — announced that laissez-faire capitalism was “finished.”)