Pressing issues facing the world during this difficult time. As we confront the challenges brought on by covid19, conversations like this have never been more important. Hope you enjoy and find value in these discussions which will now begin. As reminder we will be taking audience questions and when could you just met yours at the button located at the bottom of your screen. Type in your questionable try to get to it toward the end of the broadcast. Todays briefing is from Victor Davis Hanson, senior fellow at the hoover institution. Is focus that his focus is been military history. He has written or edited 24 books, the most recent is determined. Hes been awarded both the passion amenities metal and the prize, i would have it hanging around my neck 24 7. How how are you today . Very good. Thank you for having me. An interesting question before get into the policy side of things, a lot of us are watching this from Population Centers around the country, around the globe, cities and suburbs and excerpts. What we know the difference that is occurred in the past couple of weeks. Life is come to a standstill. You are come to us from a family farm, you are fifthgeneration farmer but you right now are about 15 miles outside of fresno i think. Im curious as to what difference you note in the Agriculture Community in this kind of situation . Well, i think there is a sense that life can go on and it will go on because agriculture by definition is, least the production side, is solitary existence. What im looking at her almonds or looking down at a great vineyard or plum orchard icy trucks going by constantly headed toward the coast or even the east coast with chickens and eggs and be, theres a sense that agriculture is really important. People are looking to it to make sure it is delivered to people who are sheltered at home. And that theres not as great a danger because of population density. As i said, Fresno County is a big county. Its got over a Million People, 1. 2 million weve had only a little over 100 cases and two guest. The of the role counties that i live near, kings county, kern county, they are analogous. They have far fewer cases per million residents and far fewer locality. So its not the feeling of being in battle that we had, say at Stanford University for the shutdown. Victor, here we are in the year 2020. Over half of the americans have been told to stay at home. Business and then told by government whose essential to his doctor people been told to keep their distance from each other and is no siebel into this. Maybe the end of april, maybe the end of may, june, july, wo knows when . If you go back and look at a virus that struck the United States in 1957, the hong kong flu, we could use a politically incorrect term back then called the hong kong flu, but the economy did not shut down in 1957 when we went through that string. If you go back to 1918, president Woodrow Wilson did not hold a daily press comforters to talk about the influenza epidemic. Congress did not do massive spending bills and response and economy did not come to a halt. Why are we doing things differently in 2020 . Theres a variety of reasons. One, is where much more technologically sophisticated interconnected population so we do it because we can do it. We had television and the way we are communicating over the internet right now. People want instant information. We are much more affluent population where we all do with dying in late 70s. That was a much more tragic society, the case of the socalled spanish flu during the war which would kill about 50 Million People, 60 million. Where people were used to a more physical existence and im speaking in this house thats been in my family for 145 years and they have kind of a history and i grew up hearing my grandparents talk about the 1918 flu and they quarantined themselves out here but they were completely selfsufficient. They had their own water, their own sewage, their own food and they just didnt go many places and there were many places to go. I remember the stories of my aunt who went out to swim once in 1922 at seven. She got polio and ended up over here in the corner crippled for the rest of her life. She stayed in the south until she died in the 1980s and i can remember the 1957 flu. I was four or five years old, thats one of my first memories that we had a tent in the house and a humidifier and were all sort of told to breathe this air so we wouldnt die and i remembered everybody but penicillin was a miracle drug so we had doctor mills and who would go out in a car and then we went out and roll up our sleeves and he gave us a shot and i dont know whether it helped for the virus. I know it didnt help the virus but we thought penicillin was still a magic drug. Today just come one after another in this situation and i get up in the morning and i have breakfast, i want to honor cuomo give his breathing. I watched gavin newsom if his breathing, i wantpresident trump to his breathing, each day seems to be a continuation of the past. You looked at societies and you times are looking at the question of discipline in the society, is there any model we should be looking at and for how long a country , especially a country that values civil liberty and freedom,how long can a society go on like this . When we been in similar situations, world war ii, if you remember the japanese internment and paranoia and came from sober and judicious and liberal minded leaders earl warren and fdr. They later regretted it but at the time there was a panic that gripped the nation. We look back fondly at the productive history of world war two, but that was not a sustainable situation to have that much of your gdpdevoted to military production. And i can tell you that if this thing continues, the way it charted by some of our modelers, the price will not just be economic, it will be in human lives because youre already starting to see even out here social breakdown. I can tell you within my circumference, there are people who are opening illegal barbershops out in the barn and of course, theres an illegal Daycare Center right down the street. Are canteens that are supposed to have takeout food and are serving food people sitting down. And i talk to a lot of people from a lot of different varieties of life and their attitude is like the 1950s. That life was okay. It wasnt great but im not going to destroy my childrens livelihood on the basis of some edictand im going to try to navigate around it. There are people who when you go to the store here and a person is told one paper towel or one toilet paper, and they walk out with you, the clerk is in a dilemma because she says if i dont, if i allow them to do it, they at least let me charge them and i can get the money from them but if i say only one, they will walk out with you and its my inner misdemeanor thats not going to be prosecuted so theres a frame of society and i think that because were such a diverse country and we have the same diversity as europe does, south dakota is not louisiana, Central Valley is not san francisco. New york is not north dakota or south dakota and we need to be more flexible and while the state allow the county to be more liberal in the way they adjudicate the perceived danger to their subset population. Victor, you mentioned models, university of washington has been doing a marble on this and revises numbers today. It now suggesting going to hit 80 mortality number this sunday which is good news, that means were coming to the pub in this thing and you are going to go downhill after that. Heres my question, there are one of two ways to look at that, either can you look at the glass halffull thing we made, we kept our distance and we are keeping this thing under control and conversely, people could look at this and say heres another example of if you want to use the phrase the news, lack of institutional confidence, scientists told us this is what happened and it didnt. Which of the studio think thats going to prevail, the half full or the half empty arguments. I hope is the halffull because theres a logic to the shutdown. If youre shutdown and youre getting get paid at least some of the population is and you feelthis is a sustainable proposition and youre not aware of the effects on other people and the selfemployed because your closedend , then you think that the numbers have to be ever increasingly more optimistic , you have to get not 2. 5 percent mortality rate but one percent or half a percent or youre not going to go out until its 99. 8 like a flu year, becomes a logic of its own and it drives reality so what im worried about is that we have to realize that is not a dichotomy between the economy and the coronavirus. Its between lives and the lives and were going to lose a lot of lives to suicide, substance abuse, anxiety and stress, neglected doctors appointments, neglected surgeries if we dont allow collectibility in people to go out and as far as the modeling goes, this is the first epidemic as a historian that i can think of when the modelers had no Accurate Information whatsoever about the denominator, the number of people who actually had it. And only based on those who are ill or feel exposed and took the effort to go get tested and most people believe and not a model in itself thats attentive the actual case numbers. Its important because then that adjudicate the lethality rate for caseloads and then people say well, it started out one percent, now its 2. 5. Oh my gosh. Its bound to go down when we have more data of people who have antibodies or inactive cases and even the numerator of the number of people dying is object to interpretation because a lot of people with physical issues and challenges are being listed as dying from the virus rather than with it so theres so much uncertainty and thats reflected in the inability of the modelers to be correct. Were not going to have to. 2 Million People die of Imperial College and meal service instead, i dont think the washington modelers would want to go back to their initial data. I dont think the modelers who convinced gavin newsom three weeks ago to say that by the end of this month 25 million californians will have a case of covid19 and given the lethality rate that would imply 1 million are going to die and i dont think mike inohio should have said on march 12 , that he thought hundred thousand people had an active case when in fact there were about 100 who had tested positive, maybe 500 that might have had. We said it was definitely every six days based on his commissioner or Health Directors modeling and that would give us today when he four days later 1. 6 million ohioans and probably 40,000 dead and as i look atthe statistics yesterday , they have a little over 100 dead and about 5000 cases so there is a downside to modeling. A modeling that we have to be careful that when you make a model is not going to say construct. It has consequences and so far im afraid the media as suggested the consequences are always good as the pessimist serves two purposes. The pessimist warns us what could happen and therefore we get a little hysterical and take the necessary measures and he said if i hadnt have done it you wouldnt have taken these measures and if hes right hes served a grim person who is accurate. The optimist suffers a lose lose situation, if he says modeler is exaggerating, the data is incomplete, when you found to be correct everybody says yes, but it was only because of the pessimist and people change their behavior at major investment possible and if hes wrong, given life and that they say the optimist will hear a murder because you said it wouldnt be as many dead and because of you, people were not cautious so we got to keep in mind the cited psychological landscape that these models are given. There are consequences when somebody tells western governments at 2. 2 million americans are likely to die. And that had a lot of ramifications. They didnt do that in larger. 1918, 1957 read a didnt, im not saying they didnt have the statistical knowledge to make these models or the data retrieval abilities but they didnt have confidence that they were all knowing and they didnt have computers and things like that so there were much more humble about their own data and the ramifications for public policy. So lets just tune in on bill weiland and this is over instituting virtual policy briefing Victor Davis Hanson youmentioned western government. Rahm emanuel, former mayor of chicago and before that bill clintons famous chief of staff said never let a serious crisis go to waste. Youve been watching government, watching whats going on in congress and watching what californias been doing a wide and locally. Tell us what you think government has done well in terms of this crisis but also what would alarm you in the way of Civil Liberties. For example, would you be concerned that maybe a state like rhode island which is upset that new yorkers are driving through it on the way to massachusetts, could we see a situation where a state wants to shut down its borders because it wants to keep people that are sent out . How far you think this will push us on Civil Liberties . Were in a flux right now because weve reacted as we did after pearl harbor very rapidly to a difficult situation which the Chinese Communist government lied about the nature of the birth of the virus, the transmission rate of the virus, the infectiousness of the virus. The spread of the virus. And those armed troops were echoed by the World Health Organization when we have a travel ban on january 31, the World Health Organization said it was unnecessary because you couldnt really transmit persontoperson as they said a couple weeks earlier. Given all that given all the acrimony and the cep test kits didnt work. People were told to wear masks, not to wear masks, were getting to a point where they are starting to emerge a consensus that what were doing now has reduced the infectiousness, but where were at a crux is this is not a sustainable situation and were going to have to either have regional choice that people can modify the protocol or we have to realize that if we dont get these antibody tests, we have no idea of the degree of immunity. So we will just go out and then we will start the infectious process again and we will be able to justify this six or 7 trillion kit in the eb economy i guess on the rationale where we gave us reading time, leading hospitals overcrowded and we have the medical system and with the second or third or fourth way but each time we shelter in the face and we dont get out, we dont develop herd mentality and go out again and again, the only rationale i can see being given is that we are buying time, either echoes or vaccinations but not a sustainable situation read cost to the economy and human lives eventually and i think eventually in terms of the days rather than months, persuade people that we dont have a choice to gradually be careful while wear masks, proper hygiene, dont go to a sports event maybe but otherwise youd better get back to work. Im running for the audience questions, youre listening to Victor Davis Hanson a senior of the hoover institute. If you want to learn more about his research please go to our website and that is hoover. Org. Now must take some audience questions, lets begin with kevin m who writes to victor quote, to my knowledge after any significant crisis such as war, the economy sees a postwar boom. In the interpretation that we are ina war with the state historical rule apply now . I think it will. Once youre in 1919 or 1946, or even happened after the war there was research i did earlier on in my career that showed all the pessimistic appraisals that athens was worn out were false, that what there was kind of a boom after the Peloponnesian War and the answer is that people feel they survived something and theyve been starved for social action or travel investments so that they indulge their appetite and even beyond what they did before the crisis, then economists can argue whether that makes up for the law or not but there are also some auxiliary criteria we should examine where we are reaching a point in the summer were going to have record low fuel prices so driving, getting in a plane would be very cheap in a way never been. We have almost 0 Interest Rate and you can argue we are making a fast redistribution of money from passholders used to three or four percent and theyre getting zero and that lost revenue is going to be given to people who borrow money by zero interest but whatever view you take, its going to be an economic stimulus and then you have the government. I guess the logic of the government as been that we lost six or 7 trillion of liquidity through the stock market and gdp and that was real money that disappeared and therefore if i can be so crude, neanderthal like and say they printed money but the infused cash into the system and they claim it will not be in place because this is replacing at least temporarily lost capital but the point of all that wendy to answer is that there are going to be stimuli after this crisis that i think will really accelerate and then whats really important is what was the situation before the crisis. World war ii there were a lot of people who said we had a second recession, depression almost in 38 and 39 where we had 16 percent unemployment. We had negative gdp and its going to be like that again and they were very worried but in our case we ran into this creating 7 million jobs so when we lost 7 million jobs where back to the status quote of 2000 16, 17 so we had a Strong Economy and that really was important. Victor, greg and chris have written variations on the same question just what is their relation going to look like with china moving forward, whats it going to looklike a year or two from now . Chinas success was on the following assumptions, that they were going to outsource wrote labor. You can outsource wrote labor to china and they were going to produce polity merchandise in a manner that was consistent with world norms and world mercantile and trade protocol. And when they didnt do that with dog food or drywall or pharmaceuticals and people said well, that was an abuse or that was an aberration didnt endanger the paradigms. And there was a nacvetc that said well, we can outsource our pharmaceutical industry to china because the richer it becomes,