RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/corporations-can-also-undermine-freedom/

Libertarians have a habit of acting as if the impartial application of rights inevitably yields a morally neutral outcome. Here is Reason’s Stephanie Slade — who I’m probably in philosophical agreement with on most issues — commenting on this week’s demonetization of the Federalist by Google:

Today conservatives are up in arms because Google made a business decision that reflects its moral convictions because they, they conservatives, find those convictions misguided or abhorrent. What am I missing here?

Slade is right that Google can do what it wants. But she misses the fact that marketplace decisions can also be fundamentally illiberal and abhorrent, and that it’s completely reasonable for people to object to them — even if they don’t believe that tech companies should be compelled by the state to change their behavior.

If a bunch of Americans were “up in arms” over an example of industry-wide racism, the modern libertarian’s first instinct wouldn’t be to ask, “why is everyone so mad about these totally legitimate business decisions that reflect the moral convictions of these companies?” Rather, it would be to note that speaking up is the best way to precipitate changes in the marketplace, and that racism, even if it is protected, is antithetical to the ideals of a free nation.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16121/racism-skin-color

We should not allow ourselves to fall into the crude trap of this debilitating racialization.

The first problem is collective responsibility; the idea that responsibility for the crimes of a few extends to all members of a group, both criminals and victims…. As Larry Elder, an American radio host, author and attorney, recently noted: “Reparations are the extraction of money from those who were never slave owners to be given to those who were never slaves.”

The second problem is responsibility through the generations: the idea that the passage of time does not change anything. Children who are not yet born, are, in advance, responsible for the crimes and abuses of their ancestors — and all the ancestors of the “group” to which they belong.

Reducing human beings to their skin color marks the supreme defeat in humanistic and political thought.

The political left in the United States now seems to embrace the most openly racist ideas perhaps since German National Socialism in the 1930s and 1940s.

Their racist view, according to which the color of skin is the measure of all reality, truth, hierarchy and moral values, marks a startling regression.

During recent riots, shop fronts and synagogues in the United States were defaced with antisemitic slogans. It is argued in vain that these threats should not be exaggerated; a protester in New York City seemed comfortable openly declaring on Fox News that he intended to lead his peers, laden with cheap gasoline, to set fire to a neighborhood, the “Diamond District,” where many Jews are known to work.

The doctrine that reduces human beings to the color of their skin does not befit any society, especially a multiracial one.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-covid-models-get-wrong-11592435169?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Here we go again. The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation has issued a new forecast that Covid-19 fatalities would spike over the summer in states that have moved faster to reopen. Cue the media drumbeat for another lockdown. Maybe someone should first explain why the models were wrong about so much the last time.

Take New York, where Gov. Andrew Cuomo locked down the state in mid-March based on dire warnings. His public health experts projected the state would need as many as 140,000 hospital beds and 40,000 intensive care units—two to three times more regular hospital beds and 10 times more ICU beds than were available. The UW model forecast that 49,000 regular beds and 8,000 ICU beds would be needed at the peak.

New York was hit hard, but Covid-19 hospital bed utilization in New York peaked at 18,825 and 5,225 for ICUs in mid-April. Even in New York City, hospital utilization never exceeded 85% of capacity and 89% for ICUs. Government-run hospitals in low-income neighborhoods with the most cases were unprepared, but they were ill-managed before the pandemic.

New York was the country’s frontline in the coronavirus attack, and caution was needed in the early days because so little was known about the virus. The original UW model, which was based on the experiences in Italy and Wuhan, assumed that strict lockdowns would curb infections, reduce hospitalizations and lower deaths faster than they actually did in the Northeast.

Asked last month about when fatalities and hospitalizations would meet state thresholds for reopening, Mr. Cuomo responded: “All the early national experts, ‘Here’s my projection model.’ . . . They were all wrong. They were all wrong. . . . There are a lot of variables. I understand that. We didn’t know what the social distancing would actually amount to. I get it, but we were all wrong.”