by | ARTICLES, BLOG, BUSINESS, FREEDOM, GOVERNMENT, QUICKLY NOTED
One of my favorite topics is the Jones Act, a little-known maritime law that has a big impact shipping goods. I have written extensively on it before, so I was delighted to see the Competitive Enterprise Institute publish a paper on the topic since the Jones Act has been in place for 100 years now. Below is the Executive Summary, and then a link to the full paper. It is a must-read for understanding why the Jones Act needs to be abolished.
“The Jones Act requires any ship traveling between two U.S. points to be U.S.-manufactured, -owned, -flagged, and -crewed. This heavy-handed protectionist measure was enacted in 1920 with the stated purpose of ensuring a strong merchant marine to support America’s commerce and the nation’s preparedness for war and national emergency. A century later, the evidence is clear: The law has not only failed to accomplish any of those objectives, it has systematically undermined each of them.
Today the Jones Act mostly covers well over 30,000 tugs and barges plying America’s inland waterways, and its punitive restrictions mainly benefit railways and trucking companies.1 As for America’s once mighty oceangoing merchant marine, the law has protected it to death: Less than 100 oceangoing vessels remain in the Jones Act fleet. As of 2019, the few American shipyards that can build commercial oceangoing vessels are being kept afloat by defense contracts.
The law’s supporters argue that because its costs are difficult to quantify, it is not clear that it costs anything. This is highly misleading. The law is designed precisely to restrict the supply of domestic shipping so that American domestic ship operators and shipbuilders can charge more. Shipping rates on Jones Act routes are typically several times more expensive than rates in the competitive international market, especially in terms of cost per nautical mile traveled for a standard container. The Jones Act’s proponents are fervent supporters of “buy American” but the law favors imports over domestic commerce. It is protectionism for foreigners.
The law has also failed its national security mission. The military utility of the Jones Act fleet has faded faster than the Jones Act fleet’s dwindling numbers. Modern warfare requires transport ships that are fast and flexible, while the global maritime industry is heading in the other direction, with transport ships that are increasingly slower, bigger, and less maneuverable. As for national emergencies, every time one requires sealift, the Jones Act needs to be waived so victims can get the relief they need from ships that are actually available.
According to one study, the Jones Act is equivalent to a 64.6 percent tariff on domestic seaborne trade. For Alaska, Hawaii, and especially Puerto Rico, the impact is particularly onerous. The impact of the Jones Act on American energy is also notable, and difficult to justify in today’s world of globally dominant North American oil production and falling prices.
While repeal of the Jones Act would be ideal, at a minimum, significant reforms are long overdue.”
You can read the full analysis here.
by | BLOG, EDUCATION, OBAMA, POLITICS
It is clear, from any economic sense, that compensation paid in the private sector is more beneficial to society than that paid in the public sector. This is because amounts in the former is controlled by people risking their own money making sure it is maximizing output for a given input. (It also works for charities funded by people parting with their own hard earned money).
Federal state and local governments and government funded not-for-profits are less good for society, and they normally pay too much for what they receive in services. So how stupid must one be that we want to incentivize- by forgiving student loans – those who would take more from and contribute less to society??
by | BLOG, FREEDOM
Martin Luther King’s vision was of a colorblind society. Slowly but steadily, in the years since his death, we have worked to make that legacy a reality, culminating in the election of an African American as President of the United States. Yet what should have been a high point for race relations in this country was instead undermined by the very person who could have embodied MLK’s vision.
The Obama administration from top to bottom started looking for race in everything, from Dodd-Frank to college admissions to discrimination in auto loans. . He was a huge proponent of disparate impact theory. This theory states that if a group is not proportionately represented, the reason is automatically bias. This theory would hold that if white people are underrepresented in professional football, the reason is racial prejudice. No need to look at other non-bias reasons that could account for the numbers. For instance, when disparate impact theory was applied to auto loans, it created lawsuits against dealerships for discriminating against black buyers even though in reality the dealers were never given any information related to race on applications when processing loan applications. Obama ultimately had all of his policy departments, especially employment and housing, hyper-sensitive about race. In this way, it made people into victims and those accused of being discriminatory angry because they weren’t actually discriminating. As a result, this type of identity politics was incredibly destructive. In 2009, shortly after Obama took office, a New York Times/CBS News poll showed two-thirds of Americans regarded race relations as generally good. At the end of his presidency, 69% of Americans considered race relations as generally bad.
The seeds of heightened racial division that were sown with Obama continue today because of the overemphasis on race even in scenarios that have nothing to do with it. We have abandoned the vision of a colorblind society. None of this is more apparent than the recent days of violence in the wake of the George Floyd tragedy. Though this was a tragic clear case of police wrongdoing, it is not clear that there was any racial motivation; that argument is tenuous. Is the killing of a black individual by a white policeman (creating a cascade of protests costing millions of dollars) as significant or more significant than the numbers of black deaths at the hands of other black perpetrators? According to the FBI crime database for 2016, the most recent year for which statistics are available, out of 2870 murders of blacks, 2570 of them were committed by other blacks, and only 243 were committed by whites, only a small percentage of whom were police. Thus, is this one (possibly) race-related death that much more important than other black-on-black deaths that occur daily? The looters and vandals, instead of bringing attention to the issue, dishonor the legacy of MLK with their behavior. He adamantly believed that:
“riots are socially destructive and self-defeating. I’m still convinced that nonviolence is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom and justice. I feel that violence will only create more social problems than they will solve.”
Colorblindness should continue to be a goal. We need the gentle wisdom of Martin Luther King now more than ever if we wish to get past this current era of racial divide.
by | BLOG, FREEDOM, GOVERNMENT, LAW
The world is going nuts. Between May 29-May 31, “Chicago saw its deadliest weekend of gun violence this year as protests, riots, and looting continued to rock the city after the death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer. A total of 24 people were killed and at least 61 injured by gun violence…. Chicago Police Superintendent David Brown said that 17 of the gun deaths occurred on Sunday alone.”
Yet according to the Washington Post police database that has tracked the number of people shot and killed by police since 2015 there were 9 unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites were killed by law enforcement in the entire country in 2019. In other words, more people were killed by rioters and looters in one weekend in Chicago than the total number of unarmed black men in all of 2019. And over Father’s Day weekend, 104 people were shot, 15 fatally, in Chicago. Where is the outrage? What is the REAL problem?
by | ARTICLES, BLOG, GOVERNMENT, HYPOCRISY, OBAMA, POLITICS
Last week, Nick Gillespie of Reason moderated a webinar on policing and protests with Jacob Sullivan and C.J. Ciaramella. Gillespie is a thoughtful libertarian whose discussions I generally enjoy. Thus, I was appalled to hear Gillespie –no less than five times during the hour-long segment–refer to the 2014 Ferguson incident with Michael Brown as the beginning of the focus on police abuse and brutality. That is completely fictional. It was very clearly established that the police did nothing wrong in that case, a determination subsequently confirmed by the DOJ report — under Eric Holder no less!
It’s bad enough that this particular lie continues to be propagated by the left and progressives and repeated again and again, but for Reason to do so? For Nick Gillespie to do so? This is shameful. There are certainly well known cases of very wrongful and egregious cases of police misconduct that inform society’s dealing with the problem. But the Michael Brown incident – with its now famous though absolutely false “hands up, don’t shoot” – is actually a potent example of a mantra of a movement built on a lie.
To present Michael Brown’s case in the same sentence as George Floyd or Breonna Taylor is both damaging and reckless and it undermines the credibility of any meaningful conversation on a very important topic.
by | BLOG, FREEDOM, GOVERNMENT, LAW
In the wake of the George Floyd tragedy, there have been calls to take over police stations and even defund police departments as solutions to perceived systemic racial inequality in law enforcement. Even if systemic racism is a real and serious problem, defunding the police is not in any way a fix. The key reason for this is: any systemic inequality and other systemic bias has been created by the very people who are now demonstrating, because they are responsible for putting in the people who created this problem into office.
Some people are protesting against policing that sends black people disproportionately to jail, claiming police are in more black communities to make arrests. Yet of course many of the 911 calls for police help come from within black communities. To a certain extent, there’s frustration against racism, but the protestors are not advocating for solutions, because they know there’s no simple fix; the liberal democrats and a large number of black leaders have been responsible for the entire political environment of every major city for the last several decades in which there have been protests. So here’s what they should advocate for:
Reform in the areas of qualified immunity, public service union protections, taxpayer funded lawsuit settlements, removing police from non-police activity, such as routine traffic violations and mental health issues, decriminalizing some behaviors and demilitarizing police will go a lot farther to solving issues instead of removing law enforcement altogether.
by | ARTICLES, BLOG, FREEDOM, LAW, POLITICS
I’ve been thinking a lot about the riots lately from my apartment in Manhattan, watching the looters come down my streets without a cop in sight. At first, I understood the protests to be about George Floyd and wanting appropriate action for the officers who were responsible for his death. So far, that has been handled correctly as the powers in charge have said the right things, and the perpetrators have been charged with murder. But now the tone has shifted; the assertion is that systemic police bias exists. However, the proposed fix has now become an outright assault on law enforcement, culminating in some cases in the takeover of police stations and the call for defunding of police units. That is neither okay nor actually productive.
One of the biggest problems with the systemic bias narrative is the fact that the overwhelming majority of cases of racist police brutality have occurred in cities where liberal Democrats, supported by significant involvement of black officials, have been running the system for roughly 50 years. In other words, if systemic racism exists, it exists within the realm of Democrat policies and leadership. Thus the majority of those protesting are–at the same time–the very people responsible for such a racist system in the first place.
A recent article in the WSJ reviewed the very idea of systemic police bias and found that statistics don’t bear out such a charge. “Crime and suspect behavior” on the other hand, are the factors that drive most actions taken by law enforcement. For instance, in 2019, African-Americans accounted for just under 25% of those fatally killed by police, which was a statistic relatively unchanged for the prior 4 years. Likewise, the Washington Post police database shows that in 2019, 9 unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites were killed by law enforcement, a number which had decreased since 2015. Furthermore the National Academy of Sciences published an important report in 2019 on the very topic of “officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings” which concluded: “we did not find anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparity.”
The problem is more police quality control than it is police bias. Very often, police unions use their power to represent a bad cop (as is their job), giving bad cops protection instead of accountability. In the case of George Floyd, the officer who knelt on his neck allegedly had a total of 18 misconduct reports in his file, and yet he was still allowed to hold a badge. But this isn’t a new thing. The Atlantic took pains back in 2014 to chronicle how police unions and arbitrators keep bad cops on the street. Yet they still exist largely unchecked today. Want true systemic reform? Tackle the issue of police unions.
In fact, there are other policy changes that can be done to ameliorate the situation. Starting with ending ludicrous public service union protections as mentioned above, we can also limit qualified immunity, make the offending police individual or department be responsible for lawsuit settlements, and end militarizing the police. Such items are the result of years and years of liberal and minority policies that have produced the broken system we see today. These areas of police reform will go a long way toward rebuilding public trust instead of removing law enforcement from the public altogether.
by | ARTICLES, BLOG, COVID, ECONOMY, GOVERNMENT, QUICKLY NOTED
Veronique de Rugy (one of my all time favorite people) and Tad DeHaven of the of the Mercatus Center have written a wonderful article about why there should not be state bailouts (pandemically-induced or otherwise) It is a great read here:
A key thing to note is about Veronique’s observation of why New York’s perennial claim that it sends more money to Washington than it gets back. The situation occurs because 1) the federal tax code is very progressive (thanks to NY and the other liberal states that insist on it) and New Yorkers have high incomes, and 2) NY receives relatively less money in the form of federal contracts and federal employee wages: (my note: this is logically caused by the fact that New York has made itself such a terrible place to do business -including sky-high costs and ridiculously burdensome regulation and taxes- that it can’t compete for these projects. Furthermore, the fact that New York taxpayers send more to Washington than they get back has nothing to do with why the government can’t balance its budget. The government is not the taxpayer. The states send no money to Washington – their earners do.
The states often argue that if corporations can get bailed out, states should as well. But note, that before there is ever a consideration of a corporate bailout, the corporation has taken dramatic steps to stem the problem, chopping costs, revising operations, and demonstrating that with the bailout funds the entity will again be viable. There is also a promise to repay the amounts with a significant return to the government.
But what about the states? There has been virtually no movement to reduce their budgets – in fact, NY continues to show that it is not only refusing to lay off personnel whose jobs are no longer viable, but they intend to go ahead with scheduled increases even to employees who are not working. No company would dream of requesting a bailout in those circumstances. And without serious and immediate cutbacks, how would the states ever have the capability to repay any bailout funds?
Many states have failed their fiduciary responsibilities to their citizens. If these lawmakers requesting bailouts are so concerned about their states, they should aim to reduce the size and scope of their governments, and the wildly out-of-control spending that created revenue shortfalls prior to the pandemic, instead of expecting others to subsidize their irresponsibility.
