A Federal Bailout Won’t Fix States’ Finances

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, April 26, 2020

Bailing out the Illinois state pension system is the worst idea from a week in which we were discussing the health benefits of mainlining Lysol.

(Please do not mainline Lysol. It will kill you.)

Irresponsible state and local governments are attempting to exploit the fear and disruption of the coronavirus epidemic to push off the consequences of their decades of reckless and culpably dishonest policies onto the federal government. This will inspire a great deal of conversation about “moral hazard” and “fairness,” but the fundamental problem is something else: Such a bailout would not work because it would not actually solve the real-world problems that threaten to cripple state and local finances.

Contra Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, this is not exclusively a “blue state” problem.

State and local governments are facing short-term financial problems that are tied to the epidemic and the imposition of social distancing, lost tax revenue prominent among them. With businesses forcibly closed and unemployment soaring, there is less money coming into state, county, and city tax coffers. Some states are better prepared for this than others: Wyoming maintains a “rainy-day” fund that has socked away in it funds equal to 109 percent of the state’s annual government expenditures. Alaska has more than half a year’s expenditures tucked away, North Dakota 30 percent, New Mexico 27 percent. Most states have a good deal less, and some have very little: New York has only 3 percent, Pennsylvania 1 percent, and Senator McConnell’s home state of Kentucky less than 3 percent. Illinois, to nobody’s great surprise, comes in at 0.0 percent, no doubt from spending all its money on Chicago-style avocado toast.

Conservatives often have been critical of these funds, characterizing the reserves as excessive and arguing that the funds should be drawn down to finance tax cuts. In uncertain times, Wyoming’s big fat fund looks pretty smart.

Illinois still looks like Illinois.

The thing about unforeseeable circumstances is, they’re unforeseeable. Nobody knows which days are going to be rainy, though we do know with a reasonable degree of confidence how many rainy days there will be in a year or a five-year period. Responsible people and governments save up for emergencies — even if they do not know what the emergency is going to be.

Or they used to. But when credit is cheap, the ability to use debt in lieu of emergency savings can be very alluring. And it even may make financial sense on a limited fiscal horizon.

Because the United States has for so long relied on driving down interest rates as a form of economic stimulus, carrying lots of debt and very little cash savings may make financial sense on any given day or in any given week. If you can get a 3.5 percent mortgage with inflation at 2 percent, then it makes more sense to keep your money invested than to drain your brokerage account to buy a house or make a big down payment. If you are the federal government and can get your money for nothing, then there’s a certain sort of logic to running big deficits. State and local governments can’t usually borrow quite as cheaply as Washington can, but the incentives are much the same.

The political incentives are even more powerful than the financial ones. A few curmudgeons and your favorite scold aside, everybody likes spending. Nobody likes paying taxes. If you can get an extra $1 trillion a year to throw at the voters without taxing them an extra $1 trillion a year, then that has strong appeal.

But the shenanigans get more complicated than that. One of the largest problems facing state and local governments, from Illinois to Oklahoma and from Los Angeles to Dallas, is “unfunded liabilities,” meaning the differences between the promises governments have made to their employees and the money they have set aside to pay for those things.

This mostly has to do with pensions and medical benefits in retirement. Government workers are a powerful political constituency — they run California — and they want the same thing everybody else does: more. In order to keep them happy, governments may give them bigger salaries, but these have to be paid for on an ongoing basis, which means putting these expenditures in the budget and collecting taxes to pay for them. Those taxes are not very popular with the people who have to pay them. So what governments do instead is ask their employees to forgo larger increases in salary today in exchange for more-generous pensions and retirement benefits in the future. But instead of saving the money they’ll need to pay those future benefits, irresponsible state and local governments spend that money in the here and now, shortchanging their pension funds.

The short-term problem for ailing state and local governments is diminished tax revenue from the epidemic. That is precisely the kind of problem that can be mitigated through ordinary fiscal responsibility: Don’t take on debt in good times, carry reserves when possible, diversify revenue streams. State and local governments have long experience riding the revenue roller-coaster. In California, much of the state’s revenue comes from capital-gains taxes, while in Texas much comes from energy, and both of those states maintain rainy-day funds precisely because of their experience with the volatility of their important revenue streams. States should carry larger reserves. It is true that it is easier for Alaska to do this than it is for New York State, because Alaska has all that oil revenue, but New York State lacks oil revenue because of Governor Andrew Cuomo’s fracking ban — not because of a lack of oil.

(What’s your excuse, Pennsylvania?)

If you doubt that the pension issue is central here, consider Illinois’s request for a federal bailout, which proposes $10 billion in pension aid but only $1 billion to help provide health care to poor people. It also seeks $15 billion in unrestricted assistance to the state and $9.6 billion in direct aid for the cities. This proposal was put together by the Democratic state-senate leader in Illinois, Don Harmon, who knows that current and retired employees are 35 times more important to him and his party than are poor people who need health care — and he did the numbers accordingly.

Congress cannot solve the problems in Springfield or in any other state capital — even if it knew how, and even if it wanted to. If Washington were to dump a few billion dollars into the lap of the feckless cartwheeling goobers who run Illinois, the underlying problem of chronic underfunding of future pension liabilities would remain, and Illinois would be right back where it is today in a year or two. A bailout would not solve the problem — it would keep the problem from being solved.

Under our Constitution, Congress cannot simply dictate to Illinois how it organizes its own affairs, and those affairs are going to have to be reorganized. Specifically, Illinois is at some point going to have to enter into negotiations with its pensioners and current employees and get them to agree to accept substantially reduced benefits. The state cannot tax its way out of this hole. Illinois’s unfunded liabilities right now are $137 billion. Another way of saying that is that Illinois has about 15 years’ worth of pension contributions to make up for. Given that making up this deficit would cost Illinois 100 percent of its tax revenues for about four years, it is unlikely to be able to make up the shortfall even if it wanted to. The state already is running chronic deficits as it is.

When it comes to the question of aid to state and local governments, Washington has to distinguish the short-term problems from the long-term problems. And the long-term problems will not — and cannot — be solved in Congress.

Illinois and other states with similar problems have a few tools for addressing them: higher taxes, lower spending, reduced benefits, and a few outside possibilities such as asset sales, something Illinois governor J. B. Pritzker has sought to explore. How to mix and combine those approaches is a question of politics. That is has to be done is a question of math.

And there is no sense in trying to bail out these states until they address the real problem: the epidemic of irresponsible government.

The China Apologists

By Christine Rosen

Sunday, April 26, 2020

In mid-February, in an appearance on Fox News, Senator Tom Cotton expressed doubts about China’s claims regarding the emerging coronavirus. “China was lying from the beginning, and they’re still lying today,” he said. He noted that just a few miles from the food market in Wuhan Province where China claimed the virus first started sits “China’s only biosafety level-4 super laboratory that researches human infectious diseases.”

Cotton continued: “Now we don’t have evidence that this disease originated there,” he said, “but because of China’s duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question.” Some of the nation’s most prominent print publications, including the Washington Post and the New York Times, immediately accused Cotton of trafficking in conspiracy theories. CBS News went so far as to invite China’s ambassador to the U.S. on Face the Nation to suggest that Cotton was “crazy.” Countless pundits and media figures also eagerly piled on: Post opinion columnist Jennifer Rubin illustrated the trend, tweeting that Cotton was an “irrational conspiracy monger” with a “cultist mentality.”

Meanwhile, the same expert quoted in a critical Post story about Cotton, Rutgers University biology professor Richard Ebright, appeared in a contemporaneous report by the BBC saying precisely what Cotton himself had said: that the virus might have emerged as the result of a “lab incident.”

With the benefit of hindsight, Cotton’s concerns about China’s prevarications have been validated many times over. As Nick Wadhams and Jennifer Jacobs of Bloomberg News reported on April 1, a classified U.S. intelligence report found persuasive evidence that China has been intentionally misleading the world about infection and death rates in the country since the start of the crisis.

China’s state-run newspaper dismissed such claims, of course: “The U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion is an attempt to divert attention from surging deaths in the U.S. and other Western countries.” That same day, the New York Times published a lengthy story by Jeremy Peters headlined “Alarm, Denial, Blame” that called Trump and the conservative media’s response to the pandemic “a textbook propaganda campaign.”

In the past few months, many journalists have covered the coronavirus pandemic with rigor and integrity. One early warning about the danger of trusting China and the World Health Organization came in February in a well-reported piece by Jeremy Page and Betsy McKay in the Wall Street Journal. And reporters and pundits are correct to criticize the Trump administration’s inconsistent and often shambolic response to the pandemic. Even so, we must not allow the glaring blind spots in the mainstream media’s coverage of the virus in the preceding months to disappear down a convenient memory hole—in particular, their credulous approach to China and their lack of rigor in examining Chinese influence on the WHO.

From the beginning, the WHO’s statements about the emerging virus read more like Chinese propaganda than global health recommendations. On January 30, for example, when WHO director general Tedros Ghebreyesus finally acknowledged that the virus posed a global health emergency, he made sure to note that “this declaration is not a vote of no confidence in China.” To the contrary, he added: “The WHO continues to have confidence in China’s capacity to control the outbreak.” Just a day earlier, other WHO officials praised China’s Xi Jinping for helping “prevent the spread of the virus to other countries,” even though by that point WHO officials knew the virus had already appeared in at least 18 other nations. And yet, with the exception of the Wall Street Journal’s report, it’s difficult to find anyone in the mainstream media who didn’t take WHO largely at its word.

Or consider the media’s approach to the numbers, which are the main story of any pandemic. Without accurate data, it is nearly impossible to get a handle on the scope and scale of a global public health crisis. And yet, from the beginning, China withheld information, silenced internal whistleblowers, and engaged in a concerted effort to stifle bad news about the pandemic.

Nevertheless, American media outlets tiptoed around the Chinese misinformation campaign, refusing even to call it one or to invoke the word “propaganda.” A February 12 New York Times story by China correspondent Vivian Wang, about China’s unexplained decision to change the way it counted virus cases to downplay the pandemic, quoted an expert who acknowledged that the Chinese government had “an issue with trust” when it came to its claims, but allowed that saying so “may be terribly unfair.” The strongest statement Wang would make in her reporting was that “even the WHO, which has praised the Chinese government for its cooperation in fighting the outbreak, expressed confusion” about China’s new tallying methods.

By mid-March, when Americans were growing ever more concerned about the rising number of cases in the U.S., mainstream media outlets praised…China. “China Hits a Coronavirus Milestone: No New Local Infections,” the New York Times trumpeted in a March 18 headline; National Public Radio aired a similar story. Still other reporters spent time denouncing Trump for insisting on calling COVID-19 the “Chinese virus” in his public statements.

A March 26 story by Times science reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr. declared that, following a brief moment of denial at the outbreak of the crisis, “China’s autocratic government acted with ferocious intensity after the belated start, eventually shutting down swaths of the country.” McNeil paints a bleak and, by contrast with China, ineffective picture of America: “The public health system…has been outmatched by the pandemic. There was no Pentagon ready to fight the war on this pandemic, no wartime draft law.”

The clear takeaway is that China’s response has been far more effective than that of the U.S.—which, conveniently for the Chinese Communist Party, is also the message it has been promoting. Or, as Hillary Clinton couldn’t resist tweeting at Trump, in an egregious and ghoulish remark, “He did promise ‘America First.’”

Of course, Trump hasn’t helped when it comes to distinguishing between China’s misinformation campaign and the American response. During a press briefing on April 1, he conceded that China’s reported numbers “seem to be a little bit on the light side,” but then downplayed the concern by joking, “As to whether their numbers are accurate, I’m not an accountant from China.” But at other times he’s noted that the virus “could have been stopped right where it came from, China.”

Senator Ben Sasse has been more forthright and consistent. “The claim that the United States has more coronavirus deaths than China is false,” he wrote. He warned people not to take “Beijing’s garbage propaganda” seriously. This is neither a partisan nor a strictly American approach. China’s official virus count is so obviously skewed that in the UK, the House of Commons’ Foreign Affairs Select Committee issued a report in early April noting that “from the outset China has sought to obfuscate the data.”

The media’s willingness to make misleading comparisons between China and the U.S. isn’t evidence of a coordinated strategy or a conspiracy by left-leaning reporters. What we have is a press corps for whom cognitive dissonance in the Trump era has become such a familiar feeling that many no longer bother to delete the tweets or retract the stories whose factual inaccuracies are revealed days later—just so long as they continue to feed the desired narrative. All those scurrilous things written about Tom Cotton? Never retracted or corrected. Meanwhile, a meretricious organization like the WHO, whose culpability in mishandling the pandemic response is clear, continues to be treated respectably by journalists.

If our media are warriors for the truth, aggressively questioning the claims of the powerful and our institutions, why have they been so astonishingly cowardly about naming the obvious villain in this tragedy? And what does that tell us about how they define the truth?

The Ethics of Life at CNN

By Ramesh Ponnuru

Thursday, April 23, 2020

At the network’s website, religion editor Daniel Burke wades into the philosophical question of when it is permissible to sacrifice human lives for the greater good. On his telling, advocates of re-opening the economy are embracing a utilitarian ethic that is at odds with the perspective they bring to the abortion debate. He concludes:

The point here is not to play “gotcha.” It’s to expose the moral inconsistency in considering some lives worth fighting for, while abandoning others for the good of “most Americans.”

If unborn life is sacred, then so is all life, including the lives made more vulnerable when we go back to work.

On Twitter, Burke describes opposition to abortion combined with advocacy for re-opening as “moral hypocrisy.” I don’t agree.

Polling consistently suggests that a large majority of Americans is more worried that we will resume normal activity prematurely than that we will do it too late — so large a majority that it must include most pro-lifers. But those pro-lifers who view the question differently from that majority are not being hypocrites, inconsistent, or utilitarian. Sure, they think that the expected consequences of an action are relevant to whether it is morally justified. It would be perverse not to think that. Their position does not entail the view that the balance of consequences is all that matters.

If we could resume normal economic activity while knowing with certainty that three additional Americans would die as a result, nearly everyone would, rightly, opt for that choice. It would not make all of us utilitarians without concern for the sanctity of life — any more than we are monsters for not wanting speed limits to be set extremely low.

If it’s wrong to try to re-open everything now, as I believe it is, it’s because the economic gains would be much smaller than advocates think, the cost in lives could be much higher, and thus their judgment is off. It’s not because they are violating the principle that all human beings have worth, meaning, and moral status.

Burke writes:

One of the biggest problems with utilitarianism is the ease with which it treats individual lives as mere means for social ends.

Consider one famous thought experiment: Would you kill one healthy person to save the lives of five others who desperately need organ transplants?

Utilitarianism argues yes, for the greater good, the one should be killed for the five.

“It jars our common sense,” said [Oxford philosopher Julian] Savulescu. “People feel a tension and don’t know how to resolve it.”

Now the pandemic is forcing doctors, nurses and policy experts to face this thought experiment in real life.

“The question is staring us in the face,” said the Oxford philosopher. “Every day is judgment day.”

This seems wholly mistaken, thank goodness. Doctors and nurses are not, in fact, being asked to kill one healthy person (or even one sick person) in order to help others. The choice of words in the hypothetical example illustrates a defect of utilitarianism at the price of also illustrating its lack of applicability to the situation at hand.

The ‘Failed State’ Canard

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Friday, April 24, 2020

We’re living through a global pandemic and staring down the specter of a sudden-onset economic recession. One should expect a certain amount of overstatement and anxiety from analysts and writers dealing with cabin fever, myself included. Weeks ago, exasperated by the U.S.’s still-much-too-meager testing capacity, I wrote that ours had been a “sub-third world” response to the coronavirus. But I was wrong, as are the other writers who have subsequently expanded on the same notion.

George Packer, in a widely noted jeremiad in The Atlantic, complained that the COVID-19 crisis has exposed the United States as a “failed state” with “a federal government crippled by years of right-wing ideological assault.”

This is just not true. As our own Jack Butler pointed out, Packer’s claim that President Trump stripped funding from the CDC is false. Although Trump favored cuts, the CDC’s funding has increased — not that it has made good use of the extra money. This is not a lean and mean virus-fighting machine, getting by on starvation-level resources. It maintains a Hollywood liaison to consult on films. In recent years, it has expanded beyond its core mission to promote motorcycle safety and sponsor programs dedicated to fostering “safe, stable, nurturing relationships” in schools. If you’re wondering why there was lots of political and social messaging larding up CDC documents on COVID-19, just realize that when Congress increases an agency’s funding, the result is likely to be more ideological make-work jobs rather than a more effective workforce.

“Fine,” you might say. “So the CDC is not evidence of a failed state. But what about the larger health-care system?” Well, there is much to complain about in the way the United States provisions and distributes health-care resources. But the underinvestment and underdevelopment that are characteristic of failed states are not remotely present here.

The United States spends more per capita on health care than any other nation on earth, and it’s not particularly close. Yes, much of it is private spending, but that private spending also drives research and innovation — there’s a reason why the world is increasingly depending on the U.S. for the scientific breakthroughs necessary to combat the pandemic. And as for public-sector health-care spending, ours is not notably low — it’s roughly equivalent to those of the developed nations of Western Europe.

Packer’s piece depends on the belief in a fairy tale common to prosperous liberals, the myth of a government starved by the Reagan and Gingrich revolutions while more enlightened governments in Europe continued to grow their egalitarian public sectors. In fact, almost the opposite is true. Since the 1980s, as our nation has continued to age, the share of our citizens covered primarily by government entitlement programs has continued to increase, while European countries have tended to engage in privatizing reforms.

It’s actually easier to imagine a British version of Packer’s lament, but that would implicate the austerity policies of more fashionable Europhiles and Tory “modernizers” such as George Osborne and Philip Hammond, rather than the uncouth American right-wingers or the spendthrift populist Boris Johnson. The East Asian states that have done best in fighting COVID-19 are not social-democratic but hyper-capitalist. Compared with them — and to America —Western Europe has done much worse at containing the spread of the coronavirus and the holding down the death toll. Even the response of Germany, which has been praised so much for its competence, looks little different from that of, say, Oregon, or Texas, or even Florida.

Of course, there is much to criticize and lament in the American effort to fight the virus. President Trump’s mixed messages and relentless partisanship have made everything harder. The White House still lacks a clear vision for getting a sufficient test-and-trace regime together. And America has been slower to describe and educate the public on what it will look like to live with the virus between this initial phase of the crisis and its final abatement. But to one extent or another, these problems have plagued our peer nations in Europe, too, and it isn’t as if our response has been without its virtues.

Indeed, while much of the criticism leveled by Packer and others at the White House is true, their lamentation about American society is mostly false. Our bottom-up, federalist response to the virus is encouraging and showing results. Our partisan lines have blurred somewhat, if you look beyond Twitter: Colorado, governed by a Democrat, is easing restrictions early; some red states, such as Ohio, closed quickly and decisively. A supermajority of Americans that cuts across party lines supports the notion of staying home and has stayed home. The curve is looking more than flattened in most regions now.

Packer’s own critique of American life, while passionate, is one-sided, betraying the very lazy partisanship and privileged lack of self-awareness he claims to decry. America’s endless culture war is the sort of thing in which rich and free countries engage with a spirit of leisure. Packer’s rant only proves how inadequate it is to the needs of the moment.

America Can’t Face China Alone

By Matthew Continetti

Saturday, April 25, 2020

You can’t beat something with nothing. But America seems determined to try.

America’s attempt to integrate China into the global economy as a “responsible stakeholder” failed. China’s economy has become more statist, its political system more repressive, its foreign policy more bullying, its ambitions more outsized than they were 20 years ago. China did not challenge American leadership directly. It altered the character of international institutions from within.

The multilateral institutions that comprise the American-led liberal international order have been decaying for some time. Coronavirus has accelerated the deterioration. NATO, the United Nations, the European Union, the World Trade Organization, the World Health Organization — they are unresponsive, unaccountable, divided, demoralized, defunct. The world is a more dangerous place.

We are used to autocratic domination of the U.N. General Assembly and the secretariat’s various commissions. No one bats an eye when Russia or China vetoes a Security Council measure. Less publicized were the concessions made to China as part of the Paris Climate Accord. Or the fact that the World Trade Organization treats the world’s second-largest economy as a “developing” nation. But the way Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director of the WHO, caviled and covered for Beijing as the coronavirus spread throughout the world is impossible to ignore. Drift, confusion, and chaos result.

There are three options. The first is to work within the system to revitalize the existing structures. The second is to build alternative institutions. The third option is to do nothing.

President Trump has tried a hybrid of options one and three. But with a twist. Where others might try a kind word or some quiet diplomacy to inspire reform and collaboration, he turns against the very institutions America created to force them to live up to their commitments. He browbeats NATO members into spending more on defense. He cheers for Brexit and supports the EU’s internal critics. He cripples the WTO’s arbitration mechanism and threatens to withdraw entirely. He suspends funding for the WHO.

It’s the “America First” foreign policy Trump promised. And the results have been mixed. NAFTA was replaced. NATO budgets are up (for now). Mexico agreed to have asylum-seekers wait on its side of the border while their claims are adjudicated. China signed a “Phase One” trade deal.

But there’s a cost. Allies may accede to your demands, but resentment builds. The foundations of the alliance weaken. Unpredictability inspires fear and caution. If sustained for too long, though, it conveys irresoluteness and fecklessness. Adversaries begin to probe. They buzz flights and collapse the oil price, resume shelling U.S. troops and harassing U.S. naval vessels, begin tailing container ships in the South China Sea.

The democracies look inward. NATO is silent, the EU split, America distracted and distressed. China exploited this strategic vacuum. It launched a global disinformation campaign falsely assigning responsibility for the pandemic to the United States. Its agents pushed scurrilous and panic-inducing messages to U.S. cellphones saying that President Trump was about to impose a national lockdown policed by the National Guard. Its diplomatic “Wolf Warriors“ enforce the party line whenever foreign governments challenge Beijing’s preferred narrative.

Chinese propaganda used to amplify achievements and repress criticism. Now it attacks directly overseas enemies of the state. The strategy, writes Laura Rosenberger in Foreign Affairs, “aims not so much to promote a particular idea as to sow doubt, dissension, and disarray — including among Americans — in order to undermine public confidence in information and prevent any common understanding of facts from taking hold.” It’s working.

China isn’t invincible. It is reaping the economic whirlwind of the coronavirus it hid from the world. None of its neighbors are thrilled about the growth of Chinese power. Its internal political situation may be unstable. But the speed with which it has used the pandemic for geopolitical advantage is extraordinary. Look at how it plays favorites with its distribution of pharmaceuticals and personal protective equipment, how it stepped into the breach with a new flow of cash for its friend Dr. Tedros. Confronting China’s rise requires “a common understanding of facts,” and partners with whom to share those facts in common. These days, America is lacking in both.

By all means, punish the World Health Organization for collaborating with China. But also be prepared to stand up another mechanism to do the good work its founders intended. Go ahead, demand allies live up to their commitments. But also recognize that partnerships of like-minded nations were critical to success in the First Cold War. This is the time to build new institutions that reflect the realities of a 21st century that pits liberal democracies against an authoritarian surveillance state. For every moment that passes without American leadership brings us closer to a world where the sun never sets on the five golden stars.

Some Conspiracy Theories Are More Equal Than Others

By Jonathan S. Tobin

Friday, April 24, 2020

In the United States, left-wing megadonor George Soros tends to be resented by right-wingers for his massive funding of leftist protest movements and the Democratic Party. Conservatives have launched polemics against Soros and his Open Society Foundations over what he and his admirers call “democracy building” but that they see as a radical agenda that undermines the freedoms of the liberal order. The New York Times casts such polemics in a sinister light. An October 2018 feature described a campaign of “vilification” of Soros that had moved from “the dark corners of the internet and talk radio to the very center of the political debate.” What complicates matters is that Soros has been the focus of anti-Semitic invective, especially in his native Hungary, where he has been a tenacious opponent of the Viktor Orban government.

Some on the right have tried to link activists working to defeat Donald Trump in 2016 and to derail the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh as a Supreme Court justice to Soros’s billions. As the Times presents it, those efforts were inherently illegitimate, even if the activists did in fact get funding from one of Soros’s foundations. Anti-Trump and anti-Kavanaugh were simply liberal causes; questioning the funding and organizing behind such causes amounted to conspiracy-mongering rooted in hatred and hostility to democracy.

Yet when right-wingers took to the streets in recent weeks to protest coronavirus lockdowns as a violation of their civil rights, the Times took a page out of the same anti-Soros playbook. Its coverage of the demonstrations, rather than analyzing their merits or lack thereof, was aimed at casting doubt on their legitimacy. Recalling its coverage of activists who opposed the passage of Obamacare a decade ago, the newspaper’s focus was on those who provided funding and legal support to the demonstrators. A front-page headline read, “The Quiet Hand of Conservative Groups in the Anti-Lockdown Protests”; an op-ed titled “Who’s Behind the ‘Reopen’ Protests,” by Lisa Graves, appeared the same day.

According to Graves, the notion that the lockdown protests were spontaneous or the product of frustration on the part of ordinary Americans who believe that federal and state governments have overreacted to the pandemic was spurious. Graves is identified as the head of an outfit calling itself “True North Research,” a left-wing group that is silent about its own sources of funding, and as “the curator of KochDocs.” The demonstrations, she avers, can be traced back to the Koch family and other libertarian and conservative funders.

The Times’ news article was a bit more equivocal in that it acknowledged that the anti-lockdown protests were “organized by local residents and are framed primarily against what they view as government overreach.” But, like Graves’s op-ed, the news story is focused on establishing links between the demonstrators and conservative donors and political operatives. Both items also drew parallels between the recent protests and the Tea Party movement, which tried to mobilize grass-roots pushback against the Obama administration’s health-care reform and other liberal projects.

Whether or not the lockdown protests are justified is a matter of debate. Some of those who turned up to protest used rhetoric or displayed signs making inappropriate analogies between the lockdowns and Nazi Germany. It’s also true that the calculus by which democracies balance individual rights against the efforts of government to deal with national emergencies like war or a pandemic is always murky. While some of Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer’s emergency orders seemed excessive and arbitrary — such as forbidding state residents to visit their second homes or banning the sale of gardening supplies — there was still a good argument to be made in favor of strong measures to prevent a public-health catastrophe.

At the heart of the Times’ coverage is a refusal — or an inability — to see the issue from the point of view of ordinary Americans. It should not be that difficult to understand that people simply want to be allowed to go back to work and provide for their families, or that they believe, as many have put it, that the cure is worse than the disease. Many of the same people are appalled by big-government interference in their lives, confiscatory tax policies, and nanny-state policies.

The irony is that left-wingers like Graves, who are given a platform by the Times and claim to speak for the interests of working people, have no patience for blue-collar Americans who do not share their political worldview—especially those who support President Trump. That Trump has encouraged the protesters illustrates his ability to identify with these people, even if his tweets in their favor flatly contradict administration policies.

Instead of covering the protesters as people deserving of respect for exercising their First Amendment rights, and offering viewpoints by more sympathetic observers, the Times dismisses the protesters’ concerns, essentially demonizing them as a pack of extremists or the cat’s-paws of, in Graves’s words, a “well-funded right-wing infrastructure willing to devalue human life in pursuit of its political agenda.” To put it plainly, to attack the lockdown protesters by suggesting that they’re manipulated by conservative masterminds is to peddle a conspiracy theory—albeit one that speaks to liberal prejudices.

The Times and its liberal readership are oblivious to the hypocrisy. If it’s sinister for conservatives to question the money and influence behind liberal advocacy projects, then it’s not right to delegitimize advocacy supported by conservatives either.

What We Get for Our University R&D Spending

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, April 23, 2020

In response to Universities Decline Coronavirus Relief. Will They Turn Down Subsidies after the Pandemic?

A number of Ivy League schools have turned down epidemic-relief funds. Daniel Tenreiro writes: “Harvard, Yale, and the rest are tacitly admitting that they do not deserve pandemic-relief funding.”

I am not sure that this has anything to do with who deserves what. But those universities are not currently in need of the offered money, are supported by large endowments, and are sensitive to criticism.

Daniel adds: “But in normal times, they receive massive annual subsidies. By one estimate, Ivy League schools receive around $7 billion in taxpayer money every year. Federal dollars directly fund university research and tuition fees, while tax benefits constitute another massive subsidy to elite U.S. colleges. If we shouldn’t subsidize universities during recessions, should we subsidize them when the going is good?”

I suppose that depends on whether you think the country is better off with or without, say, the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University.

The Ivies get the ink, but Johns Hopkins is the federal government’s largest university research partner. It receives about $2 billion a year in federal funds and spends $2.3 billion on research and development. This money goes to everything from the development of spacecraft to medical research to basic science. Some of the important protective gear that medical personnel use when dealing with infectious diseases was developed at Johns Hopkins in response to the Ebola epidemic. We would not have modern genetic engineering without work done at Johns Hopkins — or pacemakers, polio vaccines, and much else.

There’s work being done on coronavirus vaccines at Harvard right now.

It ain’t all underwater basketweaving and foot-stamping women’s-studies majors.

I am mystified by the Right’s increasingly implacable hostility to America’s best universities. Yes, I know, the English departments are full of tenured radicals, in Roger Kimball’s memorable phrase. But our universities are also home to some of the most important scientific, technological, and scholarly work being done in the world. Of course, there is much that needs reforming. There also is much to be grateful for.

(I suppose this is all part of that “nationalism” that celebrates the nation and its accomplishments, except for the Ivy League, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, the NFL, art, literature, classical music, New York City, Chicago, Seattle, Austin, Miami, Boston, Philadelphia, practically the whole of California . . .)

I do not think the question is who deserves money from the federal government. The question is what the federal government is getting for its money. The ROI on university-based scientific and technological research is pretty good compared to almost anything else the federal government does. The ROI on granddad’s Social Security check is not very much.

It is true that the major universities are tax-exempt nonprofits. So are political parties and churches and the National Association of Realtors and lots of other organizations. That does not seem to me outrageous. The elite universities and the research done there are exactly the sort of thing we should be encouraging. Of course waste should be avoided and meretricious work cut off. But that is a different kind of conversation.