Libertarian: Why the CDC Wasn’t Prepared
Massive spending at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention didn’t help it beat back “the biggest disease threat America has faced in a century,” sighs Reason’s Eric Boehm. A new Competitive Enterprise Institute report, in fact, reveals that the CDC’s ever-increasing budget led the agency to focus on “alcohol and tobacco use, athletic injuries, traffic accidents and gun violence” instead of its core mission: protecting Americans from “health threats.” Yes, those other issues are important, but other agencies were doing “duplicate work,” so the CDC could have spent more time and money researching diseases — including “emergent influenza-like infectious” viruses. Instead, the agency “squandered” its resources, leaving it unprepared for the coronavirus. Americans should hold those responsible for that to account.
From the left: Haters Choose Tribe Over Facts
Michael Flynn “is a right-wing, hawkish general whose views on the war on terror are ones utterly anathema to my own beliefs,” declares The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald. Yet “that does not make his prosecution justified.” One’s view of Flynn personally or his politics shouldn’t matter in assessing his case “any more than one has to like the political views of the detainees at Guantanamo to find their treatment abusive and illegal.” But because “politics is now discussed far more as tests of tribal loyalty” than “actual ideological or even political beliefs,” it’s hard “to persuade people to separate their personal or political views” of Flynn “from the question of whether the US government abused its power in gravely dangerous ways to prosecute him.” Sadly, distinguishing “ideological questions from evidentiary questions” — “vital for rational discourse” — has been “eliminated at the altar of tribal fealty.”
Chalk beat: Success Academy’s Next Shocker
Student performance at the Success Academy charter schools has long “stunned the educational establishment,” and now, predicts Robert Pondiscio at City Journal, it’s poised to do so again amid the pandemic — “serving as both an inspiration and a rebuke.” SA is “reaping the harvest of the habits, expectation and culture” it built for more than a decade. “Parents are more conditioned” than those at other schools to play “an active role in their children’s schooling.” And Success was “better positioned” for remote learning: Every student from fourth grade up already had a school-issued Chromebook, and digital communication between home and school “has long been a standard feature of life” at Success. When the dust clears, contends Pondicio, it should “surprise no one” if SA kids are “again defying the odds.”
Legal beat: It’s the Judge Politicizing Flynn Case
In a “bizarre” move, notes National Review’s Andrew C. McCarthy, federal Judge Emmet Sullivan invited “third-party groups with no legal interests in the case to file amicus briefs” against Attorney General William Barr’s “pro forma” decision to dismiss charges against former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. Sullivan “knows the law calls for him to accede” to Barr — but apparently wants to figure out how to “convict Flynn” anyway. Yet it’s Sullivan’s decision, not Barr’s, that is “dubious”: He knows he is constitutionally unable to “stop the Justice Department from dropping the case,” so he issued this “blatantly political directive” to “frame the Justice Department as politicized.” It’s “a travesty.”
Foreign desk: China’s Digital-Currency ‘Sputnik’
America should respond the same way to China’s tests of digital currency “blockchain” as it did to the Soviet Union’s launch of “Sputnik,” Cornell law prof Robert Hockett urges at The Hill: by refusing to “lead from behind.” China’s success in launching a digital currency could mean huge “structural harm to the US economy,” so we have to digitize “our money and national-payments infrastructure.” To begin with, “any citizen or legal resident of the US” should get an account on a “universal digital payment platform” — not only allowing Americans to receive payments such as stimulus checks at “literal light-speed,” but also letting the US “become once again the model for the world.” Digitizing now gives us an “answer to COVID — and to China’s new digital Sputnik.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board