From the right: Dems’ Disdain for the Jobless
Democrats claim President Trump had a “slothful response to the COVID-19 crisis” — but, blasts National Review’s Deroy Murdock, it’s Democrats who have “hurled wrenches into the works” and slowed aid. “On the brink of bipartisan passage of COVID-19 relief,” for example, “filibustering Senate Democrats” and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “abused this national emergency to demand taxpayer dollars” for pet causes. Then they chose to “sandbag” Republicans’ proposed small-business assistance because it didn’t have “set asides for minority- and women-owned businesses.” Dems should have to “tell the American people why racial and gender quotas are more important than saving employees from joblessness and companies from bankruptcies.”
Conservative: Corona Vindicates Nationalism
In The American Conservative, George O’Neill Jr. writes: “President Trump has for decades been consistent on the need to secure the border, rebuild American manufacturing and be clear-eyed about the dangers of Communist China.” Now the radiating pandemic has vindicated him and his nationalist vision. Too bad many firms refused to heed “the president’s advice years ago” and failed “to bring their supply chains home.” That includes pharma and medical supplies, yes, but also many other industries, “where we see the same hollowing out,” ultimately endangering our security. As the pandemic shows, “national production is the key to national defense.”
Law prof: Don’t Make Insurers Pay
“Companies are naturally looking to their business-interruption insurance for relief” from the coronavirus crisis, Bloomberg Opinion’s Stephen Carter notes, but learning “the typical policy excludes losses stemming from pandemics.” Some states “are considering legislation that would order insurers to pay for businesses’ coronavirus losses no matter what the policy seems to say,” and President Trump “has hinted” he is in favor. Unconstitutionality aside, making “pandemic exclusions in insurance contracts unenforceable” would be “unwise.” The result would be “an across-the-board increase in the price of at least business-interruption insurance and possibly other categories as well, to cover the risk that when the next disaster strikes, legislatures will decree that some other policy exclusion also cannot be enforced.” Let’s not “solve” this problem “by making things worse.”
Foreign desk: Humbling France’s Welfare State
France, “the developed world’s biggest public spender,” has been “humbled” by the coronavirus outbreak, notes Lionel Laurent in The Washington Post. “The French welfare state rarely lacks for anything,” yet “the country has suffered the same supply shortages seen around the world.” That’s because of France’s “omnipotent state,” not in spite of it: Neighboring Germany, with its “decentralized structure,” has successfully managed the virus, while France’s “top-down system” favors “flashy mega-hospitals in urban areas” and fewer beds elsewhere. Because of that centralization, President Emmanuel Macron is spending unprecedented sums, fueling tax hikes. “A rethinking of the top-down way of doing things would be wise.”
China watch: Xi’s Sneaky Strategy
Leaving China with President Trump after a state visit in November 2017 hosted by President Xi Jinping, former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster recalls in The Atlantic, he was more convinced than ever “a dramatic shift in US policy was overdue.” The country’s Communist leaders today “believe they have a narrow window of strategic opportunity to strengthen their rule and revise the international order in their favor — before China’s economy sours, before the population grows old, before other countries realize that the party is pursuing national rejuvenation at their expense and before unanticipated events such as the coronavirus pandemic expose the vulnerabilities the party created in the race to surpass the United States and realize the China Dream.” China’s strategy is “co-option, coercion and concealment,” but “free-market economies like ours control the majority of the world’s capital, and we have far more leverage than we are employing.” Without pushback from America “and like-minded nations, China will become even more aggressive in promoting its statist economy and authoritarian political model.”
— Compiled by Karl Salzmann & Kelly Jane Torrance
