Posted by America was just getting its first taste of the wrath of COVID-19. For weeks, state governors had been screaming about coming shortages of essential safety equipment. They had been begging for help from the federal government. They warned that, without help, entire state healthcare systems could be overloaded to the point of collapse, and they are still hammering on that warning to anyone who will listen.
Then, on March 22, the president’s chief economic advisor, Peter Navarro, explained why the White House was not using the Defense Production Act (DPA) to direct the activities of private businesses, essentially forcing them to meet the public need for emergency supplies. (The president had “invoked” the Act so that he could use it if he felt it was absolutely necessary. But he didn’t think it was, or would be, necessary.)
“We are getting what we want without the heavy hand of government,” Navarro responded.
Except that they weren’t. Four days on, hospitals were desperate. Nurses started wearing trash bags for lack of protective gowns. The CDC, on its official website, somehow decided that recommending “bandanas” in the absence of protective masks was legitimate medical advice. Hospitals started converting veterinary ventilators for use on humans.
And instead of the federal government stepping in to manage the chaos, allocate precious resources, and force private companies to deliver a desperately needed increase in supply, what American hospitals got was: school kids sewing surgical masks; medical students holding street-side donation drives; and churches scrounging for supplies in their basements.
Yes, the richest country on Earth was reduced to what Rachel Maddow on 3/26 called “dumpster diving” for life-saving equipment and supplies.
At Long Last, a Conversion? Not likely.
Today, the White House finally announced that it was using the DPA (kinda-sorta no one is really sure how much of it is being used) to force General Motors (GM) to make ventilators — this after a Twitter spat with GM CEO Mary Barra. She said GM was willing to do whatever was required, but that it would cost millions to re-tool an electronics factory to make ventilators and she wanted help with the bills. That provoked the president’s fury and he raged at her on social media, in the end slapping GM with an executive order (again, kinda-sorta) — but it was the only company to receive one.
Questions: Why the stiff reticence to invoking the DPA? Why only one company? Why just ventilators instead of all the other stuff hospitals need?
The latter two questions are easy to answer: The president said last night on FOX TV that he doesn’t believe the projected shortages are real, based on his gut feeling. (We’ll be able to check that in a few weeks.) So it looks pretty simple: he still doesn’t think using the DPA is necessary, but he had a personal beef with Mary Barra and wanted to slap her down, all the other “fake” shortage projections be damned. This was personal.
And what about that first question? Not using the DPA because conservative Republicans deplore the “heavy hand” of government ?… Well it goes back a long long way.
“A hand from Washington will be stretched out and placed upon every man’s business; the eye of the Federal inspector will be in every man’s counting house. The law will of necessity have inquisitorial features, it will provide penalties. It will create a complicated machinery. Under it businessmen will be hauled into courts distant from their homes. Heavy fines imposed by distant and unfamiliar tribunals will constantly menace the taxpayer. An army of Federal inspectors, spies and detectives will descend upon the state. They will compel men of business to show their books and disclose the secrets of their affairs. They will dictate forms of bookkeeping. They will require statements and affidavits. On the one hand the inspector can blackmail the taxpayer and on the other, he can profit by selling his secret to his competitor.”
Richard Byrd Sr., Virginia Speaker of the House (1908-1914)
Woah. This guy sounds like the patron saint of conspiracy theorists everywhere. But that sentiment grew and grew over many decades.
Barry Goldwater, one-time Republican presidential candidate (1964) and godfather of today’s small government movement, was famous for his pithy condemnations like: “Government should stay the hell out of people’s business”; and “I fear Washington and centralized government more than I do Moscow”; and “I have little interest in streamlining government or making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size.”
Today, Goldwater would be considered a sissy by the he-men of the right. Goldwater, really a libertarian, was an early proponent of gay rights and railed against religious influence in politics. Whereas the heir to the “conservative” throne, Ronald Reagan, would eventually combine evangelical Christianity and conservative politics to create a formidable and world-changing political force.
With Reagan leading the charge, anti-government zeal became a core tenet of their right-wing political religion. One of Reagan’s most famous lines, given during his first commencement, tersely claimed: “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.”
Business moguls like Mitt Romney, too, never stopped harping on the superiority of the “free market” over the tools of government in every circumstance, for every purpose, for all time. Yet it was crusader Grover Norquist, a former speech writer in the Commerce Department during the Reagan years, who helped turn free-market, anti-government zealotry into a government-killing mania: “My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”
This is the guy who also said: “We are trying to change the tones in the state capitals — and turn them toward bitter nastiness and partisanship.”
You gotta give the guy (and his movement) credit for chutzpah, and achievement. They certainly have gotten a lot of what they wanted in terms of shredding the social safety net and sowing bitter conflict at every level of public service (even if they so far have failed to shrink the overall size of government). But they won at a severe cost, now, to the rest of us. As put by another conversative voice, about the Republican party:
“It’s become unhinged from a relationship with the public and it’s been gained by a lot of interests — both ideological and financial,” he says. “As a result, you have policies that are crafted by lobbyists and by ideologues rather than by … sincere representatives of the public interest.”
Daniel McCarthy, editor of The American Conservative, to NPR in 2012
Negative Spin Has Real-World Consequences
Holding back the “heavy hand” of federal help is, quite possibly, killing people.
Think about it this way: government just is. Every society of people needs designated people who can run things. That’s just a fact. Government is a tool, and the bigger the country, the bigger the tools needed to keep the place humming. (Pun intended.) So let’s concede, for the sake of argument, that whatever “hand” the U.S. government wields, it is necessarily “heavy.”
Peter Navarro has thus placed the heavy hand of the federal government squarely on the scale, in favor of private market evangelism. Too bad private markets are not equipped for the job of crisis management. As evidenced by… well, by the chaos we are seeing all over the country, unfolding minute by minute.
Not an hour goes by that we don’t see the failure of private markets: Drug store chain CEOs promised drive-through testing facilities all over the nation. Sorry, nope, not happening due to… you guessed it: supply shortages and logistical tangles. The president promised that Google was building a national database tool for triaging COVID testing. Nope.
Every day private markets for masks and gowns and ventilators descend deeper into chaos. The governor of Massachusetts said that a confirmed order for millions of dollars of supplies simply “evaporated” before their eyes when someone outbid them. That someone was probably another state governor, or the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), or some other government entity — because they are all bidding against each other in an insane frenzy that’s driving up prices. Private reserves of essential supplies in Texas were being auctioned online to the highest bidder. The “invisible hand of the market” was price gouging at the exact moment that thousands (perhaps a million or more) American lives were on the line.
And in this one sense, private markets aren’t failing; they’re doing exactly what they’re designed for: finding an efficient clearing price for goods and services. Too bad that it’s doing so at the cost of life-saving medical efficiency.
Finally, consider that it was the private market that set up all these risk dominoes to fall: shifting payrolls to part-time and gig workers to shave wage and benefit costs (reducing or eliminating health insurance benefits); reducing “just-in-time” inventory systems to threadbare levels to shave operating costs; building far-flung supply chains vulnerable to bottlenecks in the name of reducing manufacturing costs.
The system was built not built to survive a crisis; it seems designed extraordinarily well to fail in a crisis. (Except maybe the grocery store business and the food supply chain; although if seasonal workers are too sick to show up for the Spring planting season, all bets are off come the Fall.)
There Is Something Called the “Public Interest”
When one thinks of PR “spin” one rarely thinks in macro terms, but ideology is its own kind of “spin.” Savvy practitioners wield it with a heavy hand in order to short-circuit your critical faculties and provoke a knee-jerk response: you falling in line with whatever prescription they are selling.
This time, they want you to buy into the belief that the government should not usurp the role of private markets even in the name of public interest, even when governors are shouting from the rooftops that they need the feds to do just that, when millions of lives are at risk, when bodies are piling up, when the entire system is on the verge of collapse. Block your ears, close your eyes, and just keep repeating to yourself: “private markets are better… private markets are better… private markets are better…”
Joe Nocera, writing for Bloomberg, was right in his headline when he said:
“Heavy Hand of Government Is Just What Crisis Needs: Using the Defense Production Act to obtain equipment and coordinate supplies is simple common sense”
This whole “heavy hand of government” business is just an insidious form of spin. It’s an ideological confection offered to people like an enormous dollop of whipped cotton candy — frothy, sweet and easy to eat a ton of it, but it dissolves into nothing in an instant, and it’s terrible for your health. Maybe even deadly.
That’s the power of spin at work: the power to kill people, literally.