David Harsanyi
...The CDC, an agency specifically created to prevent the spread
of dangerous communicable diseases, has failed. Almost everyone would
agree that its core mission should be under the bailiwick of government.
Yet, for the past 40 years, its mission kept expanding as it spent
billions of dollars and tons of manpower worrying about how much salt
you put on your steaks and imploring you to do more jumping jacks.
The CDC’s funding was tripled from 2001 to 2010, with big
spikes in spending after the 2001 anthrax attacks and then again in 2005
as another zoonotic infectious disease — the avian flu — hit our
shores, killing thousands. Yet it still flubbed the Ebola scare of 2014;
it couldn’t even afford to keep an aerial “bio-containment unit” on retainer, so Congress gave it another big funding bump through the Global Health Security Agenda,
a one-time $600 million funding appropriation by Congress. The GHSA
ended in September of 2019, a year in which the CDC devoted $509 million
to emerging and zoonotic infectious diseases, but $951 million to
educational efforts to “promote” good health and $629 million to injury
prevention and control.
So here we are. The CDC — and other federal agencies such as the FDA —
haven’t just moved too slowly in tapping the expertise of our academic
and private sectors to fight COVID-19; they’ve actively impeded such
private efforts. An infectious-disease expert in Seattle confirmed, very early on,
that the coronavirus had hit the United States. She wanted to use her
existing flu study to help start mapping the virus’s genome, but instead
she had to navigate a bunch of ridiculous federal regulations. The CDC
didn’t merely botch
the creation of a COVID-19 test, it failed to turn to private companies
that could have created a test faster and better. Washington has
belatedly begun to roll back some of the regulations that have impeded
the private sector from acting, offering waivers to allow
doctors to practice in federal health-care programs across state lines.
But we remain behind because of the government’s early failures.
There is, of course, no magic solution to this kind of crisis. Not
even the most hardcore small-government conservative can pretend that a
state isn’t needed to help combat coronavirus or that we don’t need
healthy institutions that guarantee the efficacy of capitalism. Yet the
caricature of small-government conservatives that liberals have created
requires a refutation, most especially now.
Just because I oppose Washington’s efforts to dictate what light
bulbs we’re allowed to buy or what health-care schemes we’re allowed to
join, that doesn’t mean I want us to be Somalia. Just because I worry
about the moral hazards of federally guaranteed student-loan programs or
the wastefulness of solar-panel subsidies or our debt-generating
entitlement programs doesn’t mean I want to role-play Mad Max. And just
because I oppose the top-down economic planning schemes of technocrats left and right,
believing that they will inhibit the dynamism of American society,
doesn’t make me an anarchist. I’d simply like government to do much less
much better.
Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment