The Press-Dispatch
Issue link: https://www.ifoldsflip.com/i/1460754
D-2 Wednesday, March 16, 2022 The Press-Dispatch OPINION Submit Letters to the Editor: Letters must be signed and received by noon on Mondays. Email: editor@pressdispatch.net or bring in a hard copy: 820 E. Poplar Street, Petersburg A morally weak Biden invites Putin's advances I wrote last week about the col- lapse of the Soviet Union as result of the strength, moral clarity and lead- ership of President Ronald Reagan. I quoted Reagan's observation that the ultimate battle we fight, around the world and at home, is one of good and evil. This battle never ends. Evil al- ways seeks to advance, constantly in search of the retreat of the pres- ence of good, as it seeks opportuni- ties for expansion. There simply is no other way to understand the horrible realities we confront today. Russian President Vladimir Pu- tin is an evil man. A murderer and a thief. He chose to advance his out- rageous and murderous agenda be- cause he understood that opposite him in the world stood weakness and moral relativism, not strength and moral clarity. While Putin utilizes Russia's pro- digious production of oil and gas as a major weapon in his war of ag- gression, the Biden administration is fighting its own war against Ameri- ca's oil and gas industry. I wrote recently about Biden's nomination of Sarah Bloom Raskin to be vice chair for supervision at the Federal Reserve Board of Gov- ernors. Raskin is a leading voice to shut down America's oil and gas in- dustry, which she called "a dying in- dustry." Under President Donald Trump, America's oil and gas industry was booming. However, President Joe Biden has reversed everything. The Biden administration re- turned the United States to the Paris Agreement on climate change, from which Trump withdrew. Biden canceled the Keystone XL pipeline that would have delivered 830,000 barrels per day of Canadian crude oil to the United States. And the Biden administration has committed to blocking any new oil and gas development on federal lands. One of the first victims has been suspending oil and gas leasing in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Now, as Americans see prices at the gas pump skyrocketing, and as Biden and Democrats worry about the fallout of this in an election year, the Biden administration is turning hat-in-hand for supplies to socialist despot Nicolas Maduro in Venezue- la, who ruined his own country and was sanctioned by Trump. Biden also is turning to Gulf pro- ducers Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to increase produc- tion. Aside from the rocky relations we now have with Saudi Arabia as the result of misguided Biden diploma- cy, the Saudis and Emiratis are con- cerned, as The Wall Street Journal points out, about alienating the Rus- sians, who now are a force in the Mid- dle East. How is it that the Russians have become power brokers in the Mid- dle East? Israeli leader and former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky writes in The Wall Street Journal that the Russians stepped in as a force in the Middle East to fill a strategic vacuum left when the Obama administration, of which our current president was a part, chose to ignore its threat to stand against Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad's use of chemical weapons against his own citizens. Then the Obama administration followed up with its ill-conceived nuclear deal with Iran, which Trump pulled out of and now the Biden administration is working to renew. Iran poses a threat to Gulf oil pro- ducers such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE and also to Israel, which it threatens to destroy. Sharansky notes that after Obama's retreat, the Russians set up a military base in Syria and now bro- ker its air space. Israel is dependent on Russian goodwill to allow them to counter Iranian aggression in Syria, a direct threat to their security. Two seats on the board of Amer- ican's largest oil company, Exxon- Mobil, were gained last year by Wall Street climate change activists com- mitted to transform the oil company Cowards and leaders Russia's invasion revealed big dif- ferences in how politicians deal with threats. The president of Ukraine, when of- fered evacuation, said, "I need am- munition, not a ride." He's a leader. By contrast, in Canada a few weeks before, when truckers staged a pro- test against COVID-19 rules, the cowardly Prime Minister Justin Trudeau felt so threatened by the peaceful protesters that he went to "a secret location." Then he invoked Canada's Emergencies Act. That empowered authorities to forcibly break up the protest. In one instance, police rode into a crowd on horseback. People were trampled. Nasty as that was, the part of the act that turned out most effective at stopping protest was freezing pro- testers' bank accounts. That's similar to what the West is doing to Russian President Vladimir Putin now. But Trudeau did it to his own peo- ple! "You do have to have a bank ac- count, really, to be able to live," says George Mason University law profes- sor Todd Zywicki in my new video. "Imagine if, during the Civ- il Rights era, Martin Luther King could have lost his bank account be- cause he trespassed at a Woolworth's counter." Of course, more people used cash then. Now we rely on banks and cred- it cards. The easily frightened Trudeau jus- tified his use of the Emergencies Act by saying the truckers received "dis- turbing amounts of foreign funding to destabilize Canada's democracy." Really? The truckers were going to "destabilize Canada's democracy"? "I don't know why you would say it's 'destabilizing democracy,'" says Zywicki. "This is democracy. Cana- dians trying to stand up for their rights." Fortunately, such abuse of power doesn't happen in the United States. Except it does. In 2013, Zywicki reminds us, "Companies engaged in completely legal services found themselves los- ing access to bank accounts ... being forced to shut down." It happened because the Obama administration launched Opera- tion Choke Point, which encour- aged banks to choke off accounts of pornographers, gambling business- es, payday loan operators, gun deal- ers and other businesses that they didn't like. Gun dealer Kat O'Connor did ev- erything the government demand- ed — filled out the paperwork, got federal and state licenses, paid hefty fees. But suddenly, online payment processors wouldn't deal with her. She then tried companies like Stripe, PayPal and Square. "It always ended up with an email saying they were closing my accounts," she told me. She assumes the blacklisting was "a backdoor attempt at gun control." It probably was. Choke Point continued until Don- ald Trump was elected. But O'Connor is still blacklisted. Once government labels you a prob- lem, the bureaucrats may choke off your finances forever. That's infuriating. But part of my job is taking the oth- er side. So, I said to Zywicki, banks are private businesses, lending their own money. Why should they lend to people they don't like? Private busi- nesses can make whatever choices they choose. Zywicki had a good answer: Banks are not really private businesses. "There are barriers to entry. You have to get permission to start a new bank. ... The financial services industry is so intertwined with gov- ernment." That government connection means bureaucrats who regulate banks can silence government's crit- ics by cutting off access to their mon- ey. In Canada, protesting truckers re- sisted pressure from police and poli- ticians for weeks. But once Trudeau froze their money, that was the be- ginning of the end of their protest. When governments can de-bank you, you are not really free. "We need to tolerate people saying things we don't like and separate that from their ability to make a living," says Zywicki. "We've merged those two things. That's a very big threat to the free society." We live in a strange world. John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Stan- dard Oil, helped provide the ener- gy that powered the American cen- tury beginning in the early 1900s. Today, his grandchildren spend the billions of dollars that he donated to the Rockefeller Foundation to attack the same oil and gas industry that he almost single-handedly built. Like- wise, Henry Ford's trust, the Ford Foundation, now spends millions of dollars on climate change — as if the automobile was a sinister invention. And now we learn from the Chron- icle of Philanthropy that the Hewlett Foundation and a partner foundation will donate some $40 million "to five academic institutions" to "rethink" the benefits of free markets. Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard were two of America's most out- standing entrepreneurs, co-found- ing their iconic computer company Hewlett-Packard out of a garage in Northern California. According to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, the purpose of the foundation grants is to "challenge neoliberalism, an intellectual move- ment that began in the late 1940s that established broadly accepted principles on the role of markets and governments that became firm- ly established over decades." Specif- ically, the grants are meant to dis- credit "the economic models of Frie- drich Hayek and Milton Friedman, (whose) policies were to shrink the size of government, reduce govern- ment debt, open up trade, and dereg- ulate the market." The Hayek/Friedman mod- el, of course, was adopt- ed under former Presi- dent Ronald Reagan in the United States and under former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom. In short, neoliberal- ism was the intellectu- al counterassault to the faddish trend in Europe and Asia after World War II toward socialism and communism, two economic models that eventual- ly crashed and burned by the end of the 20th century, when the Ber- lin Wall came down and China aban- doned Maoism. Now the trustees at the Hewlett Foundation appear to have remark- ably concluded that the wrong side won in the fight against big govern- ment totalitarianism. It raises the question of why any- one today would look back on these reforms and conclude they were a mistake. The Hayek, Friedman, Reagan and Thatcher eras reestab- lished the supremacy of free mar- ket capitalism, free trade, privatiza- tion and lower tax rates. It launched the most significant period of wealth creation, poverty reduction and tech- nological progress in human histo- ry. The World Bank and others had concluded that over the period when free markets regained their foothold (1980 -2020), close to 2 bil- lion people on the planet, almost half living in Chi- na and India, were moved out of severe poverty due to the triumph of liberal- ization and the collapse of central government planning. The median in- comes in the U.S. and the U.K. soared, and the plan- et's wealth tripled. A strong case could be made that free trade alone has done more to re- duce global poverty than every gov- ernment welfare program invented. Even 100 Hewlett and Ford founda- tions couldn't reduce human depri- vation more than free trade, low- er tax rates and deregulation. The Brookings Institution has shown that deregulation, which began un- der former President Jimmy Carter and then Reagan, lowered costs to consumers by roughly one-third in the industries where price controls and other government interferenc- es were lifted. Larry Kramer, the president of the Hewlett Foundation, said the goal of the grants is to overcome the man- tra that "government is bad, mar- kets are good." Ironically, he said this in the immediate wake of the big government debacle of COVID-19, when politicians made decisions Although we've seen significant progress in preventing and treating severe cases of COVID-19, thanks to vaccines and therapeutics, we still face a raging debate over remaining governmental restrictions, including those on personal travel. The Biden administration has regularly imposed or extended heavy-handed mandates. Courts have struck down or blocked some of these, including a vaccine require- ment for federal workers, attempt- ing to impose a vaccine mandate through businesses and other orga- nizations, and needlessly prolonging the eviction moratorium. With the wave associated with the omicron variant subsiding—na- tionwide case averages are down 94 compared to mid-January—ma- ny governments and agencies final- ly are relaxing rules and changing their tone. Even Left Coast states are moving closer to normality, allowing for more personal choice and respon- sibility. At the federal level, two mandates on personal travel are still in place: A masking requirement that cov- ers airports, commercial flights, bus- es, and trains. A testing requirement for those on incoming flights from other coun- tries. The mask mandate for various forms of travel is scheduled to ex- pire March 18, although Biden ad- ministration officials are extreme- ly vague about whether it will be ex- tended. The testing requirement has no expiration date and there are no signs that it will be removed. In response to this uncertainty, a coalition including the U.S. Cham- ber of Commerce, airlines, and the hotel industry has sent a letter to the Biden administration asking for re- lief from the mandates. With busi- ness travel down 50 and internation- al travel down 78 compared to 2019, a huge number of jobs are at stake. (Mass transit ridership is also well below 2019 levels). Support for the travel-related mandate comes from a predictable source: labor unions. Following in the footsteps of the Na- tional Education Associ- ation's demanding mask mandates for schoolchil- dren, the union repre- senting flight attendants wants the aviation mask mandate extended. It would be one thing if these travel mandates were vital pillars of public health standing in the way of catastrophe. However, this is plainly not the case: Airplanes rapidly recirculate air through high-end filters, making them much less likely to facilitate contagion compared to other en- closed settings that don't have mask or testing requirements. Mask mandates have been an ab- ject failure at broadly containing the spread of the coronavirus, de- spite what mandate promoters claim. Some of this has to do with the inef- fective nature of cloth masks most commonly used by the public. Fur- ther, with two years of global da- ta to work with, it is now clear that mask mandates can't prevent or even meaningfully slow outbreaks. In contrast with the ineffec- tiveness of mandates, individuals who are concerned about catching COVID-19 can choose to wear prop- erly fitted N95 masks, which are dra- matically better than cloth masks for blocking airborne viruses. According to the Centers for Dis- ease Control and Prevention, 88 per- cent of U.S. adults have received at least one dose of vaccine, and 89 per- cent of seniors are fully vaccinated. Those who are vaccinated face dra- matically lower risk of complications from an infection, and boosters pro- vide even more protection. Americans had more than enough time to decide whether to get shots, and natural antibodies following in- fection also provide measurable pro- tection. Meanwhile, children face much lower risks than adults due to the nature of the virus. As such, the case for universal an- ti-COVID-19 require- ments is increasingly shaky. The Biden adminis- tration should follow the lead of governors across the country by removing the remain- ing federal COVID-19 mandates for travel. Not only would this benefit the travel and hospitality industries, it would further signal that we can move on from collective panic about the disease and finally return to nor- mal. Humanity should be learning to live with COVID-19 and focus on minimizing the number of severe cases with vaccines and treatments, rather than seeking the impossi- ble goal of eradication. As there is no persuasive reason for nationwide travel mandates for masking or test- ing, the federal government should allow airlines and local transit agen- cies (which are more accountable to the public) to decide rules for them- selves. In addition, federal and state leg- islatures should take a closer look at how much unilateral power has been ceded to the president, governors, and executive agencies under the guise of public health. Allowing one person to impose emergency mea- sures with no expiration date rep- resents the antithesis of our nation's founding purpose and principles. It's past time for America's lead- ers to deliver realistic expectations about what the future holds, and to stop imposing unworkable, ineffec- tive, and even illegal mandates on the public. David Ditch is a policy analyst in the Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget at The Heritage Foundation. Race for the Cure By Star Parker Give Me a Break John Stossel Eye on the Economy By Stephen Moore Free market capitalism is under siege Heritage Viewpoint By David Ditch We don't need nationwide travel mandates to control COVID See SEIGE on page 3 See ADVANCES on page 3 Court Social