There's an event Tuesday November 28, 2023 at 11 a.m. at the Granary Burial Ground marking the 250th anniversary of the arrival of the tea in Boston. I'll be speaking briefly about Samuel Adams and his role in the Boston Tea Party. The event is free and open to the public, with no tickets or RSVP required. Any FutureOfCapitalism readers who would like to attend are warmly welcomed. Details are here.

Some recent work: "Students Are Easier To Replace Than Teachers," the Wall Street Journal.

"Middle Eastern Migrants Flooding Across Border and Into America From Mexico, a Story that the Times Dismisses but NPR and VOA Confirm," the New York Sun.

"Columbia's New Task Force on Antisemitism Might Want To Take a Look at the University's Policy of Providing Its Students and Faculty Free Access to the New York Times," the New York Sun.

Bloomberg News reports on the scandal-plagued management consulting business: "Now, campaigners are calling for more regulation and transparency."

The article says:

"For the most part, with consulting there are no certifications, no licensing — it's kind of a Wild West mentality," said Tom Rodenhauser, managing partner at Kennedy Research Reports, which tracks consulting firms....

Auditing is regulated in most major markets. In the US, the Big Four cannot provide both auditing and consulting services to the same client, and firms must meet audit standards. But most consultancies aren't listed entities and don't hold banking or money management licenses. Oversight of consulting is largely provided by professional standards organizations, not government agencies.

From a New York Times article on plans by former CNN and NBC executive Jeff Zucker to take control of Britain's Telegraph and Spectator with financing from the United Arab Emirates: "his vision for The Telegraph includes a potential expansion into the United States, where Mr. Zucker believes a market has emerged for a center-right news publication, according to a person with knowledge of his thinking who requested anonymity because the deal was not closed." (Emphasis added.)

Whether Zucker can pull this off, and whether he can do it using a British platform with Emirati financing, is an open question, but I do think he is correct to see the opportunity.

With the grim talk of kidnapped children, murdered Jews, and surging antisemitic crimes in America and worldwide, the big rally in Washington on Tuesday November 14, organized by the American Jewish community, might have been a downer.

But the event, which I spent some time at, left me uplifted and optimistic about the future of America, American Jewry, and the U.S.-Israel relationship.

I showed up early—just after the gates officially opened, at 10 am. It's a big space and there weren't yet many people there and I had that nervous feeling that the rally might backfire. What if they threw a big rally to support Israel and fight antisemitism and hardly anyone showed up?

Arrests related to unlawful anti-Israel activity on campus are soaring. In addition to the two arrests at Dartmouth College and 57 arrests at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst already noted here previously, recent days have seen seven arrests at Brandeis University, 20 arrests at Brown University, and about 20 arrests at the University of Chicago, apparently including a couple of faculty members. College students were also among those arrested "on charges of illegally protesting inside a congressional office building," according to a Washington Post account.

A tweet today from President Biden's official Twitter/X account—not his campaign account or personal account, but his official, president of the United States, @POTUS account: "I don't look at the economy through the eyes of Wall Street and Park Avenue. I look at it through the eyes of the people I grew up with in Scranton, Pennsylvania or Claymont, Delaware."

If you closed your eyes for a minute Wednesday night during the third Republican presidential debate, you might have thought it was a debate between socialist Senator Bernie Sanders and left-wing Democrat Elizabeth Warren rather than the party of Ronald Reagan.

"What we're seeing now in America is the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. We have to go and start beefing up the middle class," was an answer that Nikki Haley volunteered in response to a question about how she'd help rural Americans squeezed by inflation. One of Haley's opponents, criticizing her foreign policy, described her as "Dick Cheney in three-inch heels," but her class-warfare answer sounded more like Sanders or Senator Schumer. Cheney, at least, knows that a rising economic tide lifts all boats, and that America is a land of upward mobility rather than a place of entrenched, permanent class divisions. Also, if you look at post-tax, post-transfer income, it's not even clear that Haley's claim about widening inequality is accurate.

After staying out of the presidential race to focus on Virginia legislative elections, the Republican governor of Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, lost both the Senate and the House to Democrats in Tuesday's election.

For those who hoped that Youngkin's brand of commonsense, pro-business, pro-parent, religiously inspired politics would be a winner in Virginia this year the way it was when Youngkin was originally elected governor in 2021, it was a disappointment.

But American politics is full of comeback stories—from Bill Clinton, who lost a campaign for re-election for governor of Arkansas in 1980, to Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, who lost the 1978 Democratic primary in Massachusetts to a challenger named Ed King. Clinton and Dukakis both returned to the governors' offices and to the national political scene. Richard Nixon lost a presidential election in 1960 before winning in 1968 and 1972. Ronald Reagan lost a presidential campaign in 1976 before winning in 1980 and 1984. Joe Biden ran for president in 1988 and lost; he eventually won in 2020.

As the Federal Reserve's Open Market Committee approaches its next meeting on December 12 and 13—the last regularly scheduled meeting of 2023—Chairman Jerome Powell and his team will be making a decision about interest rates after taking a careful look at the economic data.

One key ingredient in both the Consumer Price Index and the Personal Consumption Expenditures price index that measure inflation is rent. We're not talking here about the imputed rent of owner-occupied housing, which is a story in its own right, but about rent paid by tenants of apartment buildings and other rental housing. Rent of that sort is about 7.5 percent of total consumer spending covered by the CPI market basket as of December 2022, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

If you look at the most recently available federal government numbers on this, they show rent going up. The slope is flattening, but it's still positive.

Perhaps because it happened at a state school rather than an Ivy League university, it hasn't yet gotten a lot of press attention, but campus police at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst arrested 56 students and one staff member in the early morning hours of October 26, according to a report by WBUR and a statement from the office of the U. Mass. chancellor, Javier Reyes. The statement says the protesters were arrested "for refusing a lawful order to depart a university building after it was closed." WBUR says the students were demanding that Reyes "condemn the Israel Defense Forces' attacks on Gaza and cut the university's ties with defense contractor Raytheon Technology."

The migration of high-income taxpayers to low-tax Florida has been a long-running theme here. The latest example: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The Instagram post in which Bezos announces the move to Miami from Seattle mentions family reasons (his parents) and business ("Blue Origin's operations are increasingly shifting to Cape Canaveral).

President Biden and his Republican rivals are responding to the crisis of campus antisemitism with an approach emphasizing regulation.

Lawyers are responding with threats of litigation.

Such tactics may be useful in pressing university administrators. But regulation and litigation have real limitations, too. In thinking about the best way to respond to the mobs of Hamas sympathizers rampaging through college campuses and terrorizing Jewish students, policymakers and parents might find more success by pursuing, in parallel, a more market-oriented approach, emphasizing competition and choice.

President Trump and President Biden have both emphasized top-down regulation.

In an October 28 speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition, Trump reminded the group, "I signed a landmark executive order fighting antisemitic hate on college campuses, and affirming that discrimination against Jewish students will be aggressively punished as a violation of civil rights."

Sahar Tartak has a piece in the Washington Free Beacon about how the Yale Daily News, without his knowledge, added a correction to his opinion piece: "I Said Hamas Raped and Beheaded. The Yale Daily News Issued a Correction."

The New York Sun has an editorial with details on the situation at Harvard, where an outside factfinder hired after students complained found a Harvard Kennedy School professor created a hostile learning environment "based on their Israeli nationality and Jewish ethnicity and ancestry." Very much worth checking out if you are interested in Harvard or the antisemitism on campus issue: "Harvard's Empty Words."

Still, unfortunately, relevant is Bernard Lewis's brilliant article from the December 2005 American Scholar, "The New Anti-Semitism." It's worth reading in full, but the part I found particularly resonant was this, on how Jew-hating serves two purposes, one for disloyal Jews and one for non-Jews:

In anti-Semitism's first stage, when the hostility was based in religion and expressed in religious terms, the Jew always had the option of changing sides. During the medieval and early modern periods, Jews persecuted by Christians could convert. Not only could they escape the persecution; they could join the persecutors if they so wished, and some indeed rose to high rank in the church and in the Inquisition. Racial anti-Semitism removed that option. The present-day ideological anti-Semitism has restored it, and now as in the Middle Ages, there seem to be some who are willing to avail themselves of this option.