3 Stories You Should Read 3/31/2020: State policy, Al Gore, Richard Epstein

March 31, 2020 Confluence

Reading Time: 2 minutes

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In the category of: History will tell

The legal scholar who shaped Trump’s coronavirus response defends his theory

“Has anybody decided to shut down the economy for six months every year for flu season?”

In his view, lockdowns are examples of progressive political theory, which he told me was a “dangerous form of political ideology.” On March 30, he wrote that the best course of action would be to “ease restrictions as quickly as possible in those areas where the risks are lower, as a “Fortress America” approach, as he termed it, “may turn out to be more deadly than the coronavirus itself.”

Epstein is a respected libertarian legal scholar who has long railed against the aggressive use of government to impact public health outcomes. But he’s not an economist. He’s not a statistician. He’s not a doctor. He’s not an infectious disease expert. Still, the conservative Hoover Institute published a piece he wrote challenging scientific modeling predicting millions of American deaths, claiming that just 500 Americans would die. (When the death toll surged past 500, he followed up but maintained the predicted number of likely deaths can’t possibly be true, adding that the virus should be allowed to “run its course” to help the economy.)

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In the category of: An inconvenient truth

Al Gore Hammers Trump’s Coronavirus Lies: ‘You Can’t Gaslight A Virus’

Former vice president says Trump is learning the hard way to “pay attention to what the scientific facts are.”

Former Vice President Al Gore said he feels bad for supporters of President Donald Trump who’ve believed the misinformation coming from the White House during the coronavirus pandemic.

“Those who follow him, I’m afraid many of them have been misled,” Gore told CNN’s Don Lemon, noting Trump has claimed the virus would “disappear” and slammed criticism of his response as Democrats’ “new hoax.”

“I feel badly for those who believe that stuff and have not been protecting themselves,” Gore said. “And we still have states that have not adopted the kind of policies that Dr. [Anthony] Fauci and the real experts have advised, partly because they’ve made it kind of a political partisan kind of issue.”

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In the category of: Fault lines

Coronavirus is dividing blue cities from their red states

The struggle to contain the coronavirus pandemic is opening a new front in the long-running conflict between blue cities and red states.

Across a wide array of states with Republican governors, many of the largest cities and counties — most of them led by Democrats — are moving aggressively to limit economic and social activity. State officials, meanwhile, are refusing to impose the strictest statewide standards to fight the virus.

A growing chorus of big-city officials in red states like Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Texas and Missouri are now urging their governors to establish uniform statewide rules, arguing that refusing to do so undercuts their local initiatives by increasing the risk the disease will cluster in neighboring areas — from which it can easily reinfect their populations.

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