Not yet subscribed to the Oregon Roundup? Change that and your life forever by clicking here. It’s free, all it takes is your email, and all you’ll get from me is this weekly(ish) email. I’ll never sell or give your email address to anyone.
Happy Saturday,
I think this is the first Saturday Roundup that isn’t a correction for something I messed up in a Friday Roundup. It’s 2020, we’ve been cast in the holiday blockbuster Covid Part 2: This Time It’ll Crush Your Soul and, to be honest, what do you have to do other than read this here email?
Righteous Indignation
Watch this video of a Los Angeles restaurant owner whose outdoor dining area, constructed at some expense to her, was closed down while a movie company has constructed a large outdoor dining area right next door. She’s speaking for so many small business owners across America who are losing their dreams under shutdown rules that often seem, at best, arbitrary and at worst designed to exempt the politically connected and wealthy.
Supreme Court vs. Governors on Religion
The precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roman Catholic Diocese case, which stayed enforcement of a New York order limiting indoor gatherings for religious purposes more strictly than indoor gatherings for some other purposes, is already having broader implications. This past week, the Court remanded a case involving similar facts in California to the trial court to reconsider in light of its Roman Catholic Diocese decision.
Oregon Governor Kate Brown’s color-coded post-freeze order contains hard attendance limits on outdoor and indoor religious gatherings, while limiting capacity in retail and some other indoor uses to a percentage of total capacity. This order is highly susceptible to a Roman Catholic Diocese-style attack by an Oregon church. I thought Brown might amend her order in response to Roman Catholic Diocese, but she has not, in spite of its fairly obvious constitutional infirmity. She has not. If a church does challenge it and the State of Oregon expends resources defending the order in federal court, those are resources that could have been preserved.
This is an example of the truth that the response to Covid should be driven in part, but not completely, by science (SCIENCE!). We are a nation of laws and rights, and our constitutional order requires that those rights not be ignored by the state.
Relatedly, to their credit Bend City Councilors Justin Livingston and Bill Moseley proposed a resolution that would prohibit the expenditure of city resources enforcing Brown’s order against religious institutions. The resolution failed 5-2, but Livingston and Moseley had the better argument.
On Disasters
After every national-scale disaster, e.g., in my lifetime, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, 2008 financial collapse, Covid and the Ducks losing the Civil War, there’s a similar assessment of who or what’s to blame. The story goes: (1) there was a known threat; (2) some, usually a small number, of people thought the threat of sufficient weight to prioritize over threats other people thought were more important; (3) the cabal of people who prioritized the disaster that actually occurred were frustrated in their efforts to address it; and (4) if only we’d listened to those people, we could have avoided or mitigated the disaster.
The Wall Street Journal had a very good story in this tradition about Covid. If you’re not a WSJ subscriber, here’s a brief summary. Some public health experts have warned against the threat of a coronavirus originating in a place like south China for some time. The risk of coronaviruses jumping from animals to humans is increasing as there are more people, some of whom live in close proximity to animals, such as bats, that are cesspools of coronaviruses. There were warnings that, in some cases, were heeded, including by President George W. Bush, but only temporarily and soon overtaken by other disaster spending priorities. For example, the focus after 9/11 and the anthrax mail attacks was on bioterrorism. SARS, MERS and other lesser-known coronaviruses spiked spending and attention, but attention soon turned to other matters. Covid happened and the planet, especially those parts of the planet, like the U.S. and Europe, which were relatively unaffected by the earlier outbreaks, were relatively unprepared.
Voters and policymakers often take two lessons from this kind of story. First, that we must not make that mistake again and we need to prioritize preventing the same kind of disaster from occurring in the future. Second, that if we only empower the right really intelligent people, they’ll divine the nature of the next disaster and stop it.
The problem with this logic is that it leads to funding to prevent a repeat of the last disaster, often to the detriment of funding for other potential disasters. This is precisely what happened with coronavirus funding. The other problem is that for every smart person who saw coronavirus as a threat, other equally smart people thought other stuff a greater threat. In fact, some of those other people may have been right – we don’t often hear about the disaster that didn’t occur.
A more realistic approach to disasters is to acknowledge we don’t really know with any certainty what type of disaster we’ll next encounter, so it’s best to prioritize efforts that would be useful in responding to a wide range of problems. One thing that is needed to respond to any disaster is money, and lots of it. War, pandemic, hurricanes, climate change, etc. all require massive government expenditures. To that end, the best way to prepare for the next disaster would be to pay down the federal debt so that the government has more resources for a muscular response without debasing the currency or relying upon foreign countries like China, which may, you know, be involved in or even the source of the crisis, for more borrowing. Profligate spending between disasters hampers our ability to respond to them.
On parenting, leverage and Christmas
We are in that part of the year in which our two boys ask at least 4o times a day each how many days until Christmas. It’s fun that they’re so excited, even if the repeated questions grow tiresome. More importantly, the approach of Christmas provides to parents that which they need more than anything else: leverage.
Both the joy and the problem with parenting is that we love our children unconditionally, so it’s hard to force them to do what we want them to, even when it’s in their best interest. So, especially during the pandemic, when we’re cooped up with our kids ad infinitum, we rely on leveraging the threat of minor deprivations that are important to them but not actually harmful to them.
Christmas, especially this year, is a leverage bonanza. For minor infractions, I rely upon threats like, “No advent chocolate if you don’t X,” or, “You can’t write your letter to Santa if you don’t Y.” Sometimes, though, one needs to go thermonuclear. In the last few days, I’ve threatened, wielding my cell phone, to call Santa to tell him not to bring presents if the boys don’t do their homework. Desperate times call for desperate measures.
Unfortunately, our kids aren’t dumb and they’ll eventually catch on that I’m not really going to call Santa, but for now I’m going to maximize the leverage the season affords. Also, in case you were wondering, yes, I’m open to nominations for parent of the year awards.
Were you forwarded this message? Sign up. No sales, no spam, just the weekly(ish) email smart people delete without reading less often than other emails.
Have a great weekend!
Jeff Eager
jeff@oregonroundup.com
Read past Oregon Roundup editions
For speaking, media or parenting tips, or just to tell me while I’m wrong, email me at jeff@oregonroundup.com.
What I do:
EagerLaw PC – A business and real property law firm in Bend, Oregon.
Insite LGA Corp. – A campaign consulting, strategic communications and local government monitoring firm.
Waste Alert – Local government monitoring for the solid waste and recycling industry.