Late last month that rarest of commodities, a new U.S.-built commercial transport ship, completed its maiden voyage by entering the harbor of San Juan, Puerto Rico to deliver its cargo. Called El Coquí, the vessel is among the world’s first hybrid roll-on/roll-off container vessels—a “ConRo” in industry parlance—that is powered by liquefied natural gas. Supporters of the Jones Act, a protectionist law which mandates that ships transporting goods between U.S. ports be U.S.-owned, crewed, flagged, and built, have pointed to El Coquí as a symbol of the measure’s success. The President of the Shipbuilder’s Council of America cited “American skill and ingenuity, as well as critical laws like the Jones Act” in his remarks praising the new ship. A senior official with Crowley Maritime, which owns the ship, added that investments such as El Coquí “would not have been possible without the [Jones] Act.” What El Coquí truly represents is the outdated thinking behind this law. According to its supporters, the Jones Act helps ensure U.S. expertise in shipbuilding and a domestic capability that can be relied upon in times of war. But as El Coquí demonstrates, it’s unclear how much expertise the U.S. shipbuilding industry possesses or how purely American this capability really is. The vessel’s very DNA, for example, is more foreign than American, with design work largely performed by Finnish company Wärtsilä using a team mainly located in Poland and Norway. In addition, testing for a model of the ship took place at a facility in the Netherlands. That’s not all. Its celebrated LNG propulsion system features engines from a German company, MAN Diesel & Turbo, that were produced in Japan. The actual LNG tanks were supplied by another German firm, TGE Marine Gas Engineering. No doubt a thorough inventory of the various components used to build the ship would reveal numerous other examples of sourcing from abroad. The only parts of El Coquí guaranteed to be truly U.S.-built are the hull and superstructure, which is how compliance with the Jones Act’s domestic build requirement is assessed. This demand, however, brings with it a fearsome price tag. To take delivery of El Coquí as well as a sister ship, Crowley Maritime is estimated to have paid $350 million, or $175 million per vessel. For perspective, the largest containership in the world, the G‑Class, features a price tag of $950 million for six ships, or $158 million per vessel. That’s a $17 million discount for a ship with a vastly larger cargo capacity. And despite its bigger size, the first G‑Class ship was delivered in a mere 18 months. El Coquí required 45 months. That’s about as much time as it took the United States to secure victory in World War II. The key difference between El Coquí and the G‑Class is that the latter is built by Samsung Heavy Industries in South Korea. While the number of large oceangoing commercial vessels built in the United States per year typically numbers in the single digits, Samsung says that its Geoje shipyard alone churns out 30 ships. With vastly greater numbers of ships under construction the South Korea shipyard is able to realize larger economies of scale than its U.S. counterparts, producing at significantly lower cost and in less time. Because of the Jones Act these cheaper ships are effectively forbidden fruit. Instead, carriers engaged in domestic transport must purchase their vessels from U.S. shipyards at vastly higher prices. These high prices, in turn, deter competition and raise costs to consumers. The law’s alleged national security upside, meanwhile, rings hollow given the industry’s deep international exposure and reliance on foreign know-how. Jones Act-compliant ships may be officially labeled as U.S.-built, but—as is the case with all manner of manufactured products—the production process spans the globe. The Jones Act brings with it considerable disadvantages in exchange for benefits that, upon closer examination, are almost entirely mythical. It’s time to rid ourselves of this nonsensical and counterproductive law.

According to press reports, South Africa’s government has begun expropriating privately-owned farmland without financial compensation, thereby ignoring the post-apartheid political settlement, which allows for land redistribution in the country on a “willing buyer, willing seller” basis.

Eighteen years ago, Zimbabwe embraced a similar policy. As a consequence, South Africa’s northern neighbor’s economy collapsed and the country descended into penury and political violence. This scenario is likely to repeat itself in South Africa. An attack on property rights will result in the destruction of South Africa’s farming community, dramatic reduction in agricultural productivity, and mass unemployment. It could also lead to a collapse of the banking sector (which depends on land as collateral for loan-making) and the local currency, hyperinflation, and even bloodshed.

In the early 1990s, the United States was heavily involved in negotiating the transfer of power from the ruling National Party to the current government, which is composed of the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party. As such, the United States bears some responsibility for ensuring that South Africa’s post-apartheid political settlement, including protection of minorities and private property, endures. President Trump should warn the South African government that if South Africa’s Constitution is amended to allow for expropriation without compensation, South Africa will be suspended from the African Growth and Opportunity Act, as Zimbabwe had been. Moreover, the U.S. Congress should hold hearings on the situation in South Africa, if the government of South Africa continues its destructive economic policies.

Section 104 of AGOA states that a sub-Saharan African country is eligible for membership of AGOA if it “protects private property rights, incorporates an open rules-based trading system, and minimizes government interference in the economy through measures such as price controls, subsidies, and government ownership of economic assets; (b) [respects] the rule of law, political pluralism, and the right to due process, a fair trial, and equal protection under the law.” Furthermore, the text of AGOA states that “If the President determines that an eligible Sub-Saharan African country is not making continual progress in meeting the requirements described in … [Section 104] the President shall terminate the designation of the country [as being eligible for membership of AGOA].” Considering that South Africa is in breach or is about to breach a number of requirements for membership of AGOA, the president should act by issuing a preemptive warning to the South African government.

Lawrence D. Burns asks, in the Wall Street Journal and in his new book Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car, why the major automobile companies ignored the technology that could create self-driving cars and are now playing catchup to Google:

Early in 2011, two top engineers for Google traveled together to Detroit on what amounted to a diplomatic mission. They had just spent 18 months on a top-secret project called Chauffeur: the development of a car that could drive itself over 10 different 100-mile routes on public roads. Now they were looking for a partner to carry the project forward. “The idea was, if you’re going to make self-driving cars, you have to work with a car company,” recalls Chris Urmson, who made the trip with fellow engineer Anthony Levandowski. “Maybe they’ll sell us cars to build a fleet. Maybe we’re going to be retrofitting our stuff onto their cars to sell.”

But they couldn’t find any takers.

They might have been better prepared if they had read Cato analyst Randal O’Toole’s early warning, also in the Wall Street Journal but in early 2010:

Consumers today can buy cars that steer themselves; accelerate and brake to maintain a safe driving distance from cars ahead; and detect and avoid collisions with other cars on all sides. Making them completely driverless will involve little more than a software upgrade.

O’Toole’s article was based on his book Gridlock: Why We’re Stuck in Traffic and What to Do About It. Reading his manuscript was the first time I’d heard about the possibility of self-driving cars. You’d think Detroit would have been ahead of me, but maybe not so much.

Back in May I invited Aaron Rhodes to come over from his home in Hamburg, Germany, to talk about his new book from Encounter Books, The Debasement of Human Rights: How Politics Sabotage the Ideal of Freedom. The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto was in town to interview Rhodes, which he did after our forum. The interview appears in today’s Journal. It’s a tour de force, pulling together the many threads of a huge, complex argument and presenting them in a short, readable format.

If you’ve ever wondered what’s wrong with the UN Human Rights establishment but have never quite been able to put your finger precisely on what it is, this interview will answer many of your questions—and the book will spell out the details. The origins of a world in which dictators sit of the UN Human Rights Council, immune from criticism while condemning free societies, can be found in progressivism’s conflation of natural and positive law, which Franklin Roosevelt mastered with his “Four Freedoms” and his wife Eleanor helped institute in 1948 in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. With that foundation, equating rights to liberty with rights to social security, rest and leisure, periodic holidays with pay, job training, and more, it was only a matter of time before tyrants would find their immunity in their purported provision of such services, invariably at the expense of liberty, leading to the debasement of real rights.

During the Reagan administration I served for a time as director of policy for the State Department’s Bureau of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs where I saw human rights hypocrisy up close. During the annual meetings in 1987 in Geneva of what was then the UN Commission on Human Rights, for example, we introduced a resolution condemning Cuba’s human rights record, only to be met with objections from European nations, effectively excusing those abuses by pointing to Cuba’s health care record. With the end of the Cold War, which tended to sharpen the difference between these two kinds of rights, the distinction has become increasingly blurred, as Rhodes explains, drawing on his experience as director of the International Helsinki Federation from 1993 to 2007 and his present position as president of the Forum for Religious Freedom – Europe.

“Can anything be done?” Taranto asks at the end of the interview. “I wish that the Trump administration would talk about human rights once in a while,” Rhodes answers. “They should talk about freedom.” 

Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts has introduced legislation that would radically overhaul corporate governance in America, requiring that the largest (over $1 billion) companies obtain revocable charters from the federal government to do business, instituting rules reminiscent of German-style co-determination under which workers would be entitled to at least 40% representation on boards of directors, placing directors under a fiduciary obligation to serve “stakeholders” as opposed to owners as currently, prohibiting political expenditures by corporations unless approved by at least 75 percent of directors and shareholders, and restricting directors and officers from reselling incentive stock within five years. 

“Let’s be clear, none of these are new ideas,” writes leading corporate governance expert Stephen Bainbridge of UCLA. “They are either academic utopian schemes or failed European governance models. There are very good reasons none of these dusty relics of eons of progressive corporate thought have made it into law.” His series of posts picking it apart in detail begins here.

Our friend James Copland of the Manhattan Institute points out that Sen. Warren’s proposal would pull down three main pillars of U.S. corporate governance: shareholder primacy, director independence, and charter federalism. Each has long been a subject of extensive research and debate, and the alternatives, European or otherwise, simply do not have as good a track record of supporting a dynamic economy that generates world-beating enterprises across a wide range of business sectors (as opposed to, say, the kind of specialty manufacturing at which Germany does well.) Worker board representation, in particular, shapes incentives in ways that discourage important forms of risk-taking and reallocation of capital across sectors. 

All of which helps explain why few startups would willingly accept Warren-style rules in drafting their by-laws. But there’s a big additional problem in applying the rules, as Warren would, to existing companies that have already been capitalized under different assumptions: it would in effect confiscate at a stroke a large share of stockholder value, transferring it to some combination of worker and “community” interests. This gigantic expropriation, of course, might be a Pyrrhic victory for many workers and retirees whose 401(k) values would take a huge hit in exchange for new rights of uncertain value to install board members. Already, some early enthusiasts for the Warren plan are treating the collapse of shareholder value as a feature rather than a bug, arguing that it would reduce wealth inequality. 

Whether or not it would accomplish that, it would test the restraints the U.S. Constitution places on the taking of property without compensation. Alas, the courts have been inconsistent about the extent to which they will recognize as takings, and provide a remedy for, legislative enactments that strip away much of the value of financial instruments or other property rights without expropriating fully 100% of their value. Cato over the years has been very much part of that legal debate, arguing for a strong interpretation of the Fifth Amendment’s language: “nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” 

Confiscatory proposals like Warren’s make it more important than ever that we be prepared to defend this element of liberty in the courts. 

John Kelly, who writes a local column for the Washington Post, set out to investigate a century-old milk bottle claiming medicinal qualities and discovered a mid-20th century story of rent-seeking and crony capitalism:

But the big change for Burton-Parsons came in the late 1960s, when it entered the burgeoning soft contact lens market — not the lenses themselves, but the solution used to clean them.

And that’s where things took an interesting turn.

Up until 1974, consumers could purify their contact lenses by boiling them for 10 minutes in distilled water with salt tablets. But that year an Food and Drug Administration microbiologist named Mary Bruch — known as “the first lady of contact lenses” — gained oversight of that product. Bolstered by FDA ophthalmologist Arnauld Scafidi, Bruch started disallowing soft lens manufacturers from utilizing salt tablets, decreeing that consumers risked eye infection.

The only cleaning solution she approved was made by Burton-Parsons, which by then was headquartered in Seat Pleasant, Md., and owned by the Manfuso family, which also owned horse-racing tracks around the state. Its product — Boil-n-Soak — cost four times as much as the simple salt tablets.

It emerged during congressional hearings in 1980 that Bruch and Scafidi had been repeatedly wined and dined by Burton-Parsons executives. The Washington Post’s John F. Berry wrote: “Expense records showed that top executives bought Bruch more than 50 meals at places ranging from Caesars Palace in Las Vegas and Brennans in New Orleans to Maison Blanche and L’Auberge Chez Francois in the Washington area . . . [Bruch] also told the congressional committee that she exchanged vintage wine with one of the Manfusos who shared her interest in fine wine.”

Scafidi was unable to provide research to substantiate his claims that salt tablets were unsafe.

In 1974, Burton-Parsons had annual sales of about $5 million. In 1979, after five years of a near monopoly, it was sold to Alcon Laboratories, a subsidiary of Nestle S.A. of Switzerland, for $110 million, according to industry estimates.

Bruch and Scafidi were investigated by the FBI for the favors they allegedly gave the firm. Scafidi resigned, and Bruch was fired.

More on rent-seeking, crony capitalism, and lobbying regulators.

Earlier this month the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released preliminary estimates of the opioid overdose rate for 2017. The total overdose rate rose to approximately 72,000, up from a total overdose rate of 63,600 in 2016, an increase of roughly 10 percent. The total overdose rate includes deaths from numerous drugs in addition to opioids, such as cocaine, methamphetamine, and benzodiazepines. The opioid-related overdose rate increased as well, from a little over 42,000 in 2016 to over 49,000 in 2017. This increase occurred despite a 4 percent drop in heroin overdoses and a 2 percent drop in overdoses due to prescription opioids. A 37 percent increase in illicit fentanyl-related overdoses explains the jump in the death rate.

All of this is happening while the prescribing of high-dose opioids continues to decrease dramatically—over 41 percent between 2010 and 2015, with a recent report showing a further decrease of 16 percent during the year 2017.

This is more evidence, if any more was needed, that the opioid overdose problem is the result of non-medical users accessing drugs in the black market that results from drug prohibition. Whether these users’ drug of choice is OxyContin or heroin, the majority have obtained their drugs through the black market, not from a doctor. A 2007 study by Carise, et al in the American Journal of Psychiatry looked at over 27,000 OxyContin addicts entering rehab between the years 2001 and 2004 and found that 78 percent never obtained a prescription from a doctor but got the drugs through a friend, family member, or a dealer. 86 percent said they took the drug to “get high” or get a “buzz.” 78 percent also had a prior history of treatment for substance abuse disorder. And the National Survey on Drug Use and Health has repeatedly found roughly three-quarters of non-medical users get their drugs from dealers, family, or friends as opposed to a doctor.

Media and policymakers can’t disabuse themselves of the false narrative that the opioid problem is the product of doctors hooking their patients on opioids when they treat their pain, despite the large number of studies showing–and the Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse stating—that opioids used in the medical setting have a very low addiction rate. Therefore, most opioid policy has focused on decreasing the number of pills prescribed. Reducing the number of pills also aims at making less available for “diversion” into the black market. This is making many patients suffer from undertreatment of their pain and causes some, in desperation, to turn to the black market or to suicide.

Since 2010, opioid policy has also promoted the development of abuse-deterrent formulations of opioids—opioids that cannot be crushed and snorted or dissolved and injected. As a just-released Cato Research Brief as well as my Policy Analysis from earlier this year have shown, rendering prescription opioids unsuitable for abuse has only served to make non-medical users migrate over to more dangerous heroin, which is increasingly laced with illicit fentanyl. 

This is how things always work with prohibition. Fighting a war on drugs is like playing a game of “Whac-a-mole.” The war is never-ending and the deaths keep mounting.

The so-called “opioid crisis” has morphed into a “fentanyl and heroin crisis.” But it has been an unintended consequence of prohibition from the get go.