This week your correspondent has been in Asheville, North Carolina, attending a conference on the Biltmore Estate. Biltmore, the largest privately owned house in the United States, was built by George Vanderbilt, the grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt, who amassed a vast fortune in shipping and railroads.

George’s descendants still own the house, but to maintain it they need to open it to the public and to run a hotel, conference venues, and engage in various agricultural and commercial ventures.

The Vanderbilt name is, or was, a byword for fabulous wealth, but there are no longer any Vanderbilt descendants in the Forbes list of 400 richest Americans. Their omission raises an important point. There is perpetual churn on the list of richest Americans as every year some people drop off as new ones come up. Look down the list and you’ll see that, while there are some who inherited great wealth, most of the richest Americans started from scratch and made it all themselves.

Recently the Democratic congresswoman from New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, known as AOC, said that billionaires “shouldn’t exist.” AOC presumably thinks she could put those billions she hopes to seize to far better use. Such arrogance could only come from someone as vapid as the Bronx’s finest. What AOC doesn’t understand is that, as shown by Nobel laureate, William Nordhaus, almost 98% of the value created by innovators like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs went to consumers, and not to themselves. People like Elon Musk and Sam Walton became wealthy by serving others with the products and services they want and need. What has AOC ever given the world, except inanities?

The fact that people can rise from nothing in this country means not only that our free-market system works as a great generator of wealth, but also that it is morally superior to the rancid socialism AOC would prefer.

But AOC, America’s flibbertigibbet-in-chief, doesn’t deserve the attention I’m giving her. On to the news of the week, for there is a great deal going on, with United States (US) President Donald Trump in China; a new chairman of the Federal Reserve; the Jones Act; The New York Times reveals itself to be a truly putrid rag; and the Bradley Prizes.

Trump goes to China … what of Jimmy Lai?

This week President Trump has been visiting President Xi Jinping in China, as discussed on the pages of The Common Sense and on the Talking Sense podcast. It isn’t clear, as I type this, what came from the summit as these two great powers spar over the status of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, energy, artificial intelligence, technology, Iran, and the Strait of Hormuz, and of course Taiwan.

We also don’t know the status of Jimmy Lai, even though Trump promised to bring up his case to Lai’s imprisoner, Xi. For those who don’t know, Jimmy Lai is a political prisoner in Hong Kong, being held on trumped up charges for the crime of disagreeing with Xi and his brutal regime. Lai left mainland China in 1960, at the age of 12, and moved to Hong Kong where, thanks to his hard work, intelligence, and entrepreneurial skills, he became enormously wealthy. After making a fortune in the fashion industry, he launched Apple Daily, a Hong Kong-based newspaper that stood for classical liberal values and the free market.

As a principled defender of freedom, Lai took on the totalitarian Chinese Communist Party that has broken its promises to the people of Hong Kong. For his troubles, the government shut down his paper and Lai has been imprisoned in horrific conditions for the past six years and, given his age (78) and poor health, he’ll likely die there.

Jimmy Lai, who is a Catholic, defends religious freedom and liberty in general. He had the resources to leave Hong Kong at any point and could be living in luxury in Paris or London or New York City. Being the hero Lai is, however, he decided to take a stand against the repressive communists and for liberty.

You’d think such a display of courage would have launched widespread celebrity campaigns for his release. You’d be wrong. The morally perverted useful idiots in Hollywood, like Mark Ruffalo, Cynthia Nixon, Javier Bardem, among many others, have busied themselves campaigning for Palestinian terrorist and murderer Marwan Barghouti and for the most part have ignored a true hero, Jimmy Lai.

We should all pray for his wellbeing and his immediate release.

Inflation and the new Fed Chair

This week the Senate approved the nomination of Kevin Warsh to be the next chairman of the Federal Reserve. The vote was almost along party lines, with a lone Democratic senator, Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman, voting with the Republicans. That single Democratic vote, from the Democrats’ most principled senator, shows how divided Congress has become. Back in 2006 Warsh received widespread bipartisan support to serve on the Fed board after he was nominated by President George W Bush.

What would cause almost all Democrats to withdraw their support now? In part because Warsh was picked by Trump and so they almost have to vote against him as a kneejerk reaction. But a deeper reason might be that Warsh has committed himself to getting the Fed back to its core mission of stable prices and away from policy setting and regulation on issues like climate change and diversity. The Democrats know that they cannot get these divisive and controversial policies past the voters, so they’d rather use less accountable agencies, like the Fed, to ram them down our unwilling throats. Warsh aims to put a stop to that, so the Dems are a “NO!”

Unfortunately for Warsh, he’s off to a rocky start, as just this week the consumer price index came in hot, with a 0.6% increase in April, after a 0.9% increase in March. The annualised rate, before seasonal adjustment, has come in at 3.8%, far higher than the Fed’s goal of 2%.

The increased cost of oil, thanks in part to the war against the Islamic Republic, has contributed to this hotter than expected inflation rate. And of course, the fact that we’re all paying more at the pump accounts for President Trump’s declining favourability rating, with only 40.3% approving of his performance in the latest Real Clear Politics poll average.

Your correspondent fears that, faced with rising prices and declining popularity, Trump will seek a compromise with the homicidal mullahs in Tehran, leaving that detestable regime in place and able to rearm. I hope Mr Trump remembers that while Americans hate high petrol prices, they hate losing more, especially to people who have vowed to destroy them. Let’s hope Trump stays the course.

Bad Ideas Don’t Die … Neither Do Bad Laws

Anyone who visits the United States will probably marvel at its dynamic economy, amazing wealth, and abundance. What’s truly miraculous about this country, however, is not just how rich it has become, but how rich it has become despite some truly idiotic laws.

Take the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, otherwise known as the Jones Act. This is a federal law that requires goods transported by water between two American ports to be carried on ships that are built in the US, owned by US citizens, flagged in the US, and crewed by Americans. The law was passed more than 100 years ago to protect domestic shipping, but it has ended up costing us all unfathomable amounts of money.

The Jones Act has had some truly asinine consequences, as the Cato Institute has exposed. Take the transportation of fuels, for instance. There are around 7 500 oil tankers worldwide, but only 43 are compliant with the Jones Act and can transport refined fuels. The reason for this is that it can cost up to $220 million to produce a tanker in the USA, but only $50 million elsewhere. Furthermore, the cost of running a US-built ship can be as much as $8 million more per annum compared to a foreign ship.

To comply with the Jones Act therefore, American shippers end up transporting refined fuels from the Gulf of Mexico (ahem … sorry, MAGA, the Gulf of America) to Northeast states via the Bahamas. Thanks to the Act, it is cheaper to send the fuel on a circuitous route to a foreign port first, blend and reload the product, and then ship it back to America on a foreign ship, rather than use a Jones Act-compliant vessel.

In some cases it can be cheaper to ship refined products from India (a 10 000 nautical mile trip) to the West Coast than to ship from the Gulf (4 500 nautical miles away). For some New England states, it makes more sense to ship oil in from Europe than to get it domestically. Even though it doesn’t happen very often, some livestock ranchers find it more economic to fly cattle from Hawaii to the mainland on specially adapted planes, rather than comply with the Jones Act and ship them by sea.

Given the disruption to oil markets thanks to the blockade of the Straits of Hormuz, the Trump Administration announced in March that it is suspending the Jones Act for 60 days. That’s nice, but hey Congress, how about repealing the Act altogether?

The Jones Act stands as a monument to the way bad laws can persist when the beneficiaries are concentrated and those who pay the costs are dispersed. The handful of ship builders and owners who benefit greatly from this law are organised and politically engaged, while the millions of consumers who pay the price often don’t even realise how much better off they would be without the Jones Act. If it makes sense to suspend the Act now, it makes sense to get rid of it entirely and forever. Will it happen? Probably not, but I live in hope.

The Grey Lady’s Blood Libel

In 1144 in Norwich, England, a young boy, known as William of Norwich, was found dead. A rumour quickly circulated that Jews had kidnapped and killed the boy ritualistically. Despite the lack of any evidence, a Benedictine monk, Thomas of Monmouth, spread the rumour. It has persisted for many generations and has been embellished and made more lurid.

To this day there is a widespread belief that Jews kill children to use their blood for Passover matzah. This original blood libel has resulted in paroxysms of violence against Jews, leading to an incalculable number of deaths over the millennia.

It is one thing for a foul rumour to spread among illiterate and ignorant peasants in medieval Europe. It is another for The New York Times to engage in something similar. The New York Times is widely considered to be the newspaper of record and is known as the “gray lady.” Gray because of its dense typeface and lady because it is supposed to be formal and respectable. If only the Times lived up to its nickname. This week the disrespectable rag published an opinion piece by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Nicholas Kristof, claiming, among other things, that the Israeli government has trained dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners.

Others, such as Haviv Rettig Gur, Matti Friedman, and Moshe Emilio Lavi, have done a better job than I could in exposing Kristof’s ludicrous allegations and calumnies. What is true is that there is some degree of abuse in Israeli prisons. And you know where else abuse takes place? In every prison in every country on Earth. It turns out, much to the surprise of anti-Semites, that Israel is a country like any other, with good people and bad and everything in between, even among prison guards.

The Kristof piece was timed to distract from the real story of rape and abuse: that committed by Hamas terrorists and ordinary Gazan citizens on October 7th, 2023, and long after by those holding hostages. The Civil Commission released its report on sexual terror the day after the Times’s libelous allegations. The Commission’s report is thorough, rigorously researched, and meticulously referenced. It is also one of the most harrowing and heartbreaking things I have ever read. Kristof, on the other hand, relies on claims about rapist dogs put out by discredited Hamas-supporting fanatics going by the name of Euro-Med Monitor.

Why would The New York Times publish such outrageous lies? I think it is for the same reason media outlets have been feeding us the “Gaza genocide” lie. It is to assuage Western guilt for history’s greatest crime, the Holocaust. For if Israel is committing genocide, then any guilt about failing to act against the slaughter of Jews is washed away. If Israel is committing rape all the time, then maybe what Hamas did is somewhat equivalent and the keffiyeh-clad marchers in London and New York calling for destruction of Israel have a point.

When Zohran Mamdani’s socialist supporters scream “globalise the Intifada” on the streets of New York City, it’s understandable. Kristof, just like Thomas of Monmouth, is dehumanising Jews and some deranged and hateful maniac will act on his writing. Almost one year ago Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky were gunned down on the streets of DC by one such maniac. There will, no doubt, be more thanks to Kristof and his outlet. I think it’s time for me to cancel my The New York Times subscription.

That’s all for this week, except for one final note. This week I was honoured to attend the Bradley Foundation’s annual prize ceremony, in which the Foundation awards the Bradley Prize to three individuals in recognition of their achievements. This year the awardees were Senator Phil Gramm, recognising his work defending the free market and limited government; Professor James Hankins, for his work defending Western Civilisation; and Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, for his work defending religious freedom. I cannot think of three more worthy recipients. The recording of the ceremony is not up yet, but I’ll link to it in a later post … it will be well worth your time.