Free Republic

Prior studies have suggested a weak connection between the intrusive government measures to slow the spread of COVID-19 and the progression of the virus. Texas is in the news, and not in a good way, over an increase in COVID-19 cases over the past four weeks. There’s quite a bit of speculation over why the virus, which largely bypassed the Lone Star State until the end of May, suddenly seemed to become more pernicious.Some point to a lack of enforcement for social distancing measures and masks. Yet California, a state of similar size and demographics, where Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom...

By treating Black Lives Matters protests differently than other large gatherings, public officials and health experts have exposed themselves as hypocrites. We’re told a second wave of coronavirus infections is coming. As businesses open back up and states relax lockdown orders, the number of new cases is ticking up in a handful of states. We’ve heard warnings in recent days from the Centers for Disease Control and various public health experts and elected officials that a new series of lockdowns might be necessary.What these experts and officials don’t seem to realize is that Americans will never comply with their lockdown...

Starting life before there was a town as four walls and some dry goods for fur trappers, it served its first beer just 19 years after the town was founded and near-half a century before it was incorporated.The story below is the third in a series on America’s small businesses, their struggles under the shutdowns, and what they’re doing to survive. Over two weeks, The Federalist is traveling the country to tell more stories like this one.HUNTSVILLE, UTAH — Across the Wasatch mountains from the county seat of Ogden, in a tony country neighborhood by the Pineview Reservoir, and around...

More and more, from Virginia's beaches to the mountains up north to right here right now, people are coming to a consensus: Their governors' shutdowns are over.The story below is the first in a series on America’s small businesses, their struggles under the shutdowns, and what they’re doing to survive. Names and locations below have been obscured to protect the people who spoke with us from government retaliation. Over two weeks, The Federalist is traveling the country to tell more stories like this one.THE NEVADA DESERT — Sonny moved to this little mining town to work the oil rigs in...

Right now all of us have decisions to make about how much freedom is too much freedom. On the national lockdown loosening in some states and stubbornly persisting in others, Americans are very much of two minds. For some, including most of the media, it is an inconvenience, but a righteous one that saves lives. For others, often with smaller megaphones, it is a powerfully destructive force economically and socially. But we should be able to agree that, whether justified or not, the lockdown has been a massive infringement on Americans’ basic rights. At least since women received the right...

Blessing In Disguise. It’s Evil Social distancing is not something to celebrate. It is, according to the experts, what we must do right now. But it’s a necessary evil, not a societal good. As the U.S. government’s “30 days to slow the spread” order expires, with no indication that President Trump plans to extend it, it’s time to start asking whether it was worth it. Have the extreme social distancing and economic measures to which we have subjected ourselves accomplished the desired result? Was any of it even necessary to begin with? It’s a question we’ll be debating for years....

The South Dakota governor rejected the mandatory government-forced shutdown. Now, the media claim her decisions were made out of emotion and naked ambition, not courage. As the Coronavirus spread from Wuhan, China, to the United States, most governors quickly acquiesced to the media’s demand that they force a governmental shutdown of their states in order to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed. The media continue to be heavily invested in the shutdown model, even as the country realizes that hospitals are nowhere close to being overwhelmed and, in fact, many hospital systems are furloughing doctors and nurses due to the mandatory...

When half the working class is facing economic devastation and the other half still has to show up to work, are we really all in this together? I’m a lawyer in New York City, currently working from home due to the coronavirus shutdown. For me it’s working quite well. Almost all of my work was done on computer, internet, and phone even when I was doing it in an office, so doing it from a home equipped with a computer, internet, and phone is not really much of an inconvenience. In fact, comparing the distance from my home to my...

The New York Times' Bret Stephens took a lot of heat for arguing New York lockdown rules don't fit the rest of the country. I know the feeling. Bret Stephens has a tough job. I don’t mean like 19th-century coal miner tough, but as one of the “conservative” opinion contributors at The New York Times, he winds up pleasing none of the people a lot of the time. This is because much of the Grey Lady’s leftist readership doesn’t think the Times should run conservative views at all and much of the American right finds the anti-Trump “can’t we go...

Virus management is about power and control, the two things the elite always want and therefore don’t want to relinquish even when the virus recedes. The big-picture story of American politics of the last four years has been a battle royale between elite power structures and millions of ordinary Americans. Donald Trump’s 2016 election win, the Russia collusion hoax, and the impeachment drama were all essentially tussles between elite control and democratic norms, between the will of the powerful and the will of the 2016 voters, a.k.a. Trump supporters. A loose assortment of unelected bureaucrats, D.C. power players, Democratic leaders,...

Now we have better data and experience that beg a more sophisticated approach as our nation grapples with balancing public health and the economy. “First, do no harm.” It’s a saying almost as old as the idea of medicine itself. I heard it a lot in medical school. And it’s a saying that our state and national leaders need to think long and hard about right now. In many respects, I am proud of the way our leaders and experts have stepped up to find ways of fighting the novel coronavirus, COVID-19. They acted quickly, on limited information, and based...

In this current crisis, the longest if not the first complete shutdown in U.S. history, the freedoms of American democracy are being tested in ways we scarcely ever imagined. Out of nowhere little Napoleonic governors arise to enact decrees prohibiting gardening or strolling on an empty beach — decrees that seem to have little purpose other than to reflect that they can do so. Snitches volunteer to out felonious social deviants who are seen cooking in the backyard with a neighbor. A little horned-devil virus seems to be trying to do what those Russkies never could. Experts with all sorts...

With virtually everything and every business in New Jersey shut down, why are liquor stores deemed essential business and allowed to remain open and operational? For as long as this pandemic has gone on, the left has shouted incessantly that we must “believe in the science and the scientists” and the experts and anyone else who cements the idea of shutting down an entire economy. Okay. Let’s trust the science and the experts and follow their advice to shut it all down. Would that satisfy the left? Of course not. Because it’s never enough. Once you give in to one...

Our nation's leaders are demanding that American children pay for this crisis through debt-financed spending, while depriving them of the education they need to make that even remotely possible. One of the many significant but underappreciated effects of U.S. politicians’ response to coronavirus is their pre-emptive mass school shutdowns. It is likely these shutdowns will harm the next generation far beyond the trillions in government spending these children will someday be forced to pay off for previous generations.For one thing, the school shutdowns will cripple children’s economic future by depriving them of up to an entire year of learning. That’s...

If the American public stays home en masse even after public officials lift stay-at-home orders, the ‘re-opened’ economy will look nearly as morose as the current one. If we reopen it, will they come? That paraphrase of the signature line from “Field of Dreams” illustrates a dilemma facing the Trump administration, along with state and local leaders, as they contemplate when and how to reopen elements of the economy shut down by the coronavirus pandemic.Just because the Trump administration gives word that individuals and businesses can reopen doesn’t mean that most, or even any, of them will do so.A dozen...

What the media and policymakers are not telling us is that the longer we delay the development of herd immunity, the more elderly or high-risk people will become infected and die. COVID-19 is severe. There is no doubt about that. We are now also learning that it is not a matter of if but when many of us will get coronavirus, whether we develop symptoms or not. Our only hope is to “flatten the curve,” relieve stress on the medical system, and wait for a vaccine.So, we isolate ourselves and stay at home. As a result, the economy is being...

While this shutdown has already done enormous damage, it is the uncertainty about when and how it will reopen that could prove far more destructive in the long run. Our leadership class responded to the outbreak of the coronavirus by shutting down the economy on a nationwide scale. While this will mitigate the loss of life the virus might otherwise have caused, it’s clear we’re also confronting a challenge no medical innovation can cure. We face an unprecedented situation — not a global pandemic, we’ve seen those before, but a modern capitalist economy that turned itself off for potentially more...

It is vitally important, literally life and death, that the proper costs and benefits are weighed with the decision on how much and how long to shut down economic activity through the pandemic. As the coronavirus pandemic continues across the world, leaders and policymakers have scrambled to respond to the growing health crisis. In the United States, multiple state governors have issued statements urging their citizens to follow social distancing guidelines.Other governors have taken more extreme measures, issuing orders to effectively lock down entire state economies. The current goal of these responses has been to slow the spread of the...