Unleash Prosperity Hotline
Issue #40 Written By Stephen Moore
1) The Rising Death Toll: Lockdown Kills 40 Million Jobs
One of the themes of this Hotline is that the coronavirus lockdown will go down as one of the most horrific blunders in American history. It is now official: Forty million Americans – one in four – have lost their jobs over a policy that had very little demonstrable impact on the course of the COVID epidemic. Now the stress pandemic and economic hardship is ripping through our country.
The chart shows the massive job casualties. Even this week’s “only” two million first time jobless claims easily surpassed the pre-lockdown record of 695,000 in October 1982.
There are some bright spots. Georgia is back on the move, with jobless claims down by 65,000 this week. Kentucky and Louisiana are also moving in the right direction — and finally, so is Pennsylvania, after its hapless governor was forced by a revolt to allow a partial reopening in most of the state. California, Washington, and New York are still in a deep freeze, with jobless claims continuing to rise.
Enough already. Every state needs to let its citizens engage in normal American life and provide for themselves and their families. And the federal government needs to do its part by making it less expensive to create jobs and more rewarding to work by suspending the payroll tax.
2) Lockdowns Kill
Dr. Scott Atlas, a physician and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and his team have combed through public health records and actuarial tables to put a number on the devastating non-economic consequences of the virus lockdowns. They believe “they will be far beyond what the virus itself has caused.”
Their report makes sober reading:
“Lives also are lost due to delayed or foregone health care imposed by the shutdown and the fear it creates among patients. … Emergency stroke evaluations are down 40 percent. Of the 650,000 cancer patients receiving chemotherapy in the United States, an estimated half are missing their treatments. Of the 150,000 new cancer cases typically discovered each month in the U.S., most – as elsewhere in the world – are not being diagnosed, and two-thirds to three-fourths of routine cancer screenings are not happening because of shutdown policies and fear among the population. Nearly 85 percent fewer living-donor transplants are occurring now, compared to the same period last year. In addition, more than half of childhood vaccinations are not being performed, setting up the potential of a massive future health disaster.”
https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/499394-the-covid-19-shutdown-will-cost-americans-millions-of-years-of-life
3) Coronavirus Used As Excuse For Internet Censorship
As the absurd debate rages over whether Twitter should “fact check”/censor President Trump, let’s be reminded just how much the coronavirus panic has emboldened would-be Internet censors.
Earlier this month, the French parliament passed a new law forcing social networks to remove controversial content within 24 hours or face fines of up to $1.4 million.
The new French law doesn’t refer to the virus, but Simon Chandler of Forbes reports “the French Government and the Assemblée Nationale has exploited fear over online coronavirus misinformation to pass it.”
4) In the U.S., Trump Punts to the FCC
The heart of President Trump’s social media executive order is a request for a new rulemaking at an independent agency, the Federal Communications Commission, to define the contours of what “good faith” moderation of user-generated content includes for the purposes of the liability shield in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
The president is legitimately concerned that social media companies will put a heavy thumb on the scale for their preferred political candidates and causes. The policy question is, should government prevent a private company doing so? The obvious answer is no.
The more difficult question is whether government should extend liability protection designed for user-generated content to content that undergoes an editorial process. If Twitter, for instance, deprecates some content while promoting other content such as “fact checks,” is it not in some ways more like a newspaper choosing what to publish than the owner of a bulletin board? It’s not obvious, although we always prefer to err on the side of not unleashing the trial lawyers.
We do have confidence in Ajit Pai and his FCC colleagues Mike O’Rielly and Brendan Carr to sort this issue out in a way that is consistent with free-market principles and the First Amendment. But ultimately any change to the current rules should be enacted by Congress, not by an FCC that could easily flip back to Democrats and use newfound regulatory powers to engage in censorship itself.
5) Harvard and Yale want Lawsuit Protection!
First, we saw elite colleges seek federal bailout money despite being having multi-billion dollar endowments. Now they and other higher ed institutions are asking Congress for liability protections linked to the coronavirus.
Politico reports that dozens of higher education groups wrote Congressional leaders this week expressing “fears of huge transactional costs associated with defending against COVID-19 spread lawsuits.” They asked that Congress “enact liability protections for universities and anyone who works for them.”
Here is our advice to Congress and the White House: Harvard and Yale should not get legal protections from abusive lawsuits related to COVID-19 unless small businesses and other local employers in places like Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and Youngstown, Ohio also are afforded the same freedom to run their operations without fear of curbside lawyers seeking to profit from the recent national crisis.
Maybe the Ivy League schools can convince Nancy Pelosi to cross the trial lawyers so we can get our economy up and running.
6) Forbes: Must Read
Our Steve Forbes hails it as “an absolute must read.” Tesla CEO Elon Musk alerted his 35 million Twitter followers to it. And Fox News analyst Brit Hume is a fan.
It’s the story of how virus lockdowns came about. “(They) may eventually be known as one of the biggest medical and economic blunders of all time” concludes tech entrepreneur, military veteran and bioengineer Yinon Weiss.
“In the face of a novel virus threat, China clamped down on its citizens,” Weiss wrote in his introduction. “Academics used faulty information to build faulty models. Leaders relied on these faulty models. Dissenting views were suppressed. The media flamed fears and the world panicked.”
7) This Weekend Help the Economy By Going to Your Favorite Restaurant
The noose loosens. Starting this weekend, most of the country will have reopened restaurants shuttered by virus lockdowns.
In all, 41 states have allowed restaurants to reopen for dine-in service of some kind, or intend to do so soon. Another five states have more limited access – such as outdoor dining. Four states – New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Hawaii – have no plans to reopen restaurants.
The patchwork of state and local laws can be confusing so eater.com has assembled a comprehensive guide to just where Americans are allowed to eat, drink and be somewhat merry.
8) The Worst County Executive in America
Meanwhile…to fully appreciate the absurdity of the ongoing lockdown dictates in blue state America we recommend watching this three minute video of Montgomery County, MD Executive Marc Elrich trying to explain the byzantine new rules for public activities. He looks like Harvey Korman playing the doofus governor Hedley Lamarr in Blazing Saddles.
Montgomery County is one of the wealthiest counties in America with one million mostly high paid liberal lawyers, lobbyists, and government employees who make up the Washington swamp that still hasn’t been drained. Thanks to Elrich, the county is still on full lockdown despite having only 182 COVID deaths outside of long-term care – a fact apparently better known to protesters than to Elrich and his health director.
Watch Elrich get relentlessly heckled by constituents as he announces the county is finally moving to modest Phase I reopening on Monday. If you can make heads or tails out of these rules, you are a lot smarter than we are.
Editor’s note: The best part is the very animated sign-language guy interpreting for the hecklers!
9) Quote of the Day – No Second Wave
Dr. Maria Neira, the Public Health and Environment Director for WHO, says she doesn’t expect a second “important wave” of the coronavirus. She told a Barcelona, Spain radio station “this last possibility is being increasingly ruled out.”
“We must be very careful in affirming that this is the end of the wave, but the figures at least show us that the transmission and explosion of the initial weeks has been avoided,” she said. She called on the public to be “neither paranoid nor excessively relaxed,” and to “learn to coexist with infectious illnesses.”
10) Steve Moore and a thousand protesters take on Pritzker Lockdown at Chicago Rally 
11) Not a Joke, but Should be a Joke
