(06-30-2020, 11:57 AM)burger Wrote: (06-30-2020, 11:46 AM)Farm93 Wrote: I do worry about calling up Governors and local officials. Which Governors? Why those Governors?
Even selecting Governors from a particular party to testify would be tricky. Hogan and DeWine will have very different perspectives than Ducey and Stitt.
This alone shows that federalism like we have in the US does not work when trying to combat giant problems like covid. If you can't even figure out how to assess what went right or wrong in our federalist system, how should we have expected it to successfully fight the virus? In the US, there shouldn't have been 50 separate responses to covid. In each state, there shouldn't have been [number of counties or cities] responses to covid. This has resulted in massive duplication of efforts and putting grossly unqualified people in charge of the virus.
(Note: I'm not saying that you can't tailor the response to local infection severity, but there should have been ONE playbook from the start to deal with this, and everyone should have been operating off of that).
If you believe that Germany, Korea and Taiwan did a good job in this epidemic, you must then accept the fact that a Federalist response is potentially superior, because that is what all three have. The Taiwan system was actually designed directly by the USPHS back in the day. It is pretty much a copy of the one in the US, including "counties". Experience has shown that a distributed response can have many advantages. Consider what would have happened in the Bay Area if the counties had to wait on Newsom. Newsom actually moved pretty fast compare to say Cuomo, no doubt pushed by the actions in the Bay Area. Imagine what would have happened in California if we were constrained to wait on what Washington DC decided to do. Remember, Trump is president. You can't hypothesize the existence of an "perfect" Federal response, because we have a living counterexample.
In Germany, Bavaria was calling for a curfew 10 days before the Federal Government moved. That was possible because they had an independent organization that didn't have to listen to the federal government.
In fairness, like almost all organizational approaches, a totally "top down" approach can be made to work. Such systems tend to be slow, because all decisions have to go up the chain. If there are competent people in every position, it probably doesn't matter how things are organized. However, if there are going to be quite a few less than competent people involved it is pretty clear that a distributed system will not fail totally, while a top-down one may.
It is not that the Federal government does not have an important role to play. For example the USPHS is supposed to "enforce the national quarantine". They should have had people at all the airports meeting the planes from China and Europe and screening people going through immigration. It wouldn't have caught all the "sick" people, but it certainly would have detected some. There are lots of things that the USPHS used to actively do that haven't been done for years.. As an aside, until about 2012 whenever you arrived in Australia you actually spoke with a health officer who took your paperwork. I have seen them pull people out of the exit line because they looked sick or because of where they had been. After the automation of the immigration at airports, I didn't see much of that.
There are plenty of things the Feds were supposed to be doing that they didn't. There were problems at all levels, and nobody called attention to them. That isn't an organization problem, it is a personnel problem. I will just be happy if we can get the pieces we have working. It has worked well before, and others have demonstrated that it still can.
