Monthly Archives: March 2013

CEI Podcast for March 28, 2013: The TSA’s Illegal Body Scanners

Posted on March 28, 2013 | Comments Off on CEI Podcast for March 28, 2013: The TSA’s Illegal Body Scanners

tsa body scanner
Have a listen here.

The TSA’s controversial full-body scanners were implemented illegally, since the TSA never put them through the required comment-and-review rulemaking process. Despite a court order, the TSA is still dragging its feet on complying with the law. Fellow in Land-use and Transportation Studies Marc Scribner has the latest developments in the case.

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Posted in CEI Podcast, Security Theater

The Year 2000

Posted on March 28, 2013 | Comments Off on The Year 2000

The two iron laws of modernity are 1) things are getting better, and 2) people think they’re getting worse. Or as the comedian Louis C.K. put it, “Everything is amazing and nobody’s happy.”

That’s what makes this essay by David Bauer such a good read. The year 2000 once seemed like a distant future point, almost an abstraction. It was also the setting for any number of high-tech science fiction fantasies. Then it came and went, and nobody thought much of it. Now, in 2013, the technology that we take for granted makes the year 2000 look downright primitive. No wi-fi, no smartphones, no social networking sites, no touchscreen tablets. As Bauer concludes his trip to the year 2000:

Here you are, back in 2013, where self-driving cars, 3D-printing, and augmented reality glasses excite people. All those things you missed while travelling back to 2000? Boring, everyday stuff we don’t even think about any longer.

Pessimistic bias wins again, unfortunately.

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Posted in Innovation

Smart Process, Not Just Smart People

Posted on March 27, 2013 | Comments Off on Smart Process, Not Just Smart People

Don Boudreaux’s latest Pittsburgh Tribune-Review column is simply superb, echoing both Israel Kirzner and Deirdre McCloskey:

The undeniably smart Steve Jobs’ vision for an affordable smartphone was dazzlingly creative. But that vision would have amounted to zilch had not many other people been available to help make Jobs’ vision a reality. Some of these other people were also smart. Others were of only ordinary intelligence. And almost every one of them was a complete stranger to Jobs.

Yet somehow, they all cooperated with Jobs and with each other to create the iPhone.

What has not been around, unlike smart people, for tens of thousands of years is the smart process that encourages the globe-spanning cooperation that makes goods such as the smartphone possible.

As Don points out, this “smart process” is a market economy. This is the Kirznerian insight that a market is not a thing or a place. It is an ongoing, never-ending process. Or, as Kirzner described market competition, a discovery procedure. Don also alludes to Deirdre McCloskey’s insight that this smart process cannot work unless people let it. Public opinion has to value things like innovation and commerce, and not look down its nose at them. The more that people denigrate entrepreneurs, the fewer of them there will be — and that means no smart phones, no matter how many smart people there are.

Read the whole thing.

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Posted in Economics, The Market Process

There Is Nothing Left to Cut

Posted on March 26, 2013 | Comments Off on There Is Nothing Left to Cut

The federal government spent $3.7 million on ex-presidents last year. It’s fair to provide them some security when needed, but this is a bit much — especially since all four living ex-presidents are wealthy men.

Right in line with his spending habits in office, George W. Bush is the worst offender, hooking taxpayers for $1.3 million. Besides racking up an $85,000 phone bill, he also spent $400,000 on office space. Those two items alone almost equal Jimmy Carter’s entire $500,000 tab.

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Posted in Political Animals, Spending

The Red Tape Challenge

Posted on March 25, 2013 | Comments Off on The Red Tape Challenge

The U.S. isn’t the only place in need of some regulatory housecleaning. Nor is it the only place that has some good ideas for doing so. Over at the Daily Caller, Christian Rice and I take a look at a successful model in the UK: the Red Tape Challenge:

Every few weeks, the British government publishes regulations on a government website focusing on a specific area of the economy. The public then submits comments as to which regulations in that sector are unnecessary or overly burdensome. People can also recommend ways to improve the rules or even eliminate them entirely.

The departments that administer these regulations then collect these Red Tape Challenge comments and use them to develop specific regulatory policy proposals.

There are a few more steps after that. The point is that adding public participation to a sector where there is currently almost none has worked out quite well. Read the whole thing here.

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Posted in Publications, regulation

CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

Posted on March 25, 2013 | Comments Off on CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

barnyard_pig
This week in the world of regulation:

  • Last week, 59 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register. This is down from 60 new final rules the previous week.
  • That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every 2 hours and 51 minutes — 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
  • All in all, 726 final rules have been published in the Federal Register this year.
  • If this keeps up, the total tally for 2013 will be 3,271 new final rules.
  • Last week, 1,262 new pages were added to the 2013 Federal Register, for a total of 17,836 pages.
  • At its current pace, the 2013 Federal Register will run 79,625 pages.
  • Rules are called “economically significant” if they have costs of $100 million or more in a given year. For the second week in a row, no such rules were published, keeping the total at 10 so far in 2013.
  • The total estimated compliance costs of this year’s economically significant regulations ranges from $2.632 billion to $4.910 billion.
  • So far, 65 final rules that meet the broader definition of “significant” have been published in 2013.
  • So far this year, 136 final rules affect small business; 19 of them are significant rules.

Highlights from final rules published last week:

  • Busy week at the FAA, with 20 new rules hitting the books – more than a third of this week’s 59 total rules.
  • Arizona may be landlocked, but that didn’t stop the Coast Guard from establishing a safety area in Lake Havasu for a local triathlon.
  • The Patent and Trademark Office issued a correction to its recent adjustment of patent fees.
  • If you export pork, you are required to file a weekly report to the USDA.

For more data, go to TenThousandCommandments.com.

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Posted in regulation

CEI Podcast for March 21, 2013: A Rainbow on the Right

Posted on March 21, 2013 | Comments Off on CEI Podcast for March 21, 2013: A Rainbow on the Right

rainbow-ocean
Have a listen here.

CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, is the largest annual event of its kind. It is also one of the most controversial, due to its exclusion of gay conservative groups such as GOProud. CEI hosted a widely publicized panel discussion at CPAC, titled “A Rainbow on the Right: Growing the Coalition, Bringing Tolerance Out of the Closet.” CEI Founder and Chairman Fred Smith, who moderated the panel, reflects on the importance of inclusiveness.

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Posted in CEI Podcast, Political Animals

A Decade in Iraq

Posted on March 19, 2013 | Comments Off on A Decade in Iraq

It was ten years ago today that President Bush, from the oval office, announced the Iraq invasion. Formal hostilities have been over for a while now, but U.S. troops are still there. As with Germany, Korea, and other countries we fought against long ago, they will likely remain there indefinitely. Here’s Gene Healy’s take on this ghoulish anniversary:

In a recent article for the New Republic, “The Eve of Destruction,” TNR’s John B. Judis describes “what it was like to oppose the Iraq War in 2003.” Lonely: “within political Washington, it was difficult to find like-minded” opponents of the war. “Both of the major national dailies — The Washington Post and The New York Times (featuring Judith Miller’s reporting) — were beating the drums for war,” as were most of “Washington’s thinktank honchos.”

Not all of them, however. In a 2001 debate on Iraq with former CIA Director James Woolsey, my Cato Institute colleague, then-Chairman William Niskanen, argued that “an unnecessary war is an unjust war” and one we would come to regret having fought.

Niskanen was right. A new report from the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University tallies up the costs: nearly 4,500 U.S. troop fatalities, an eventual budgetary cost of some $3.9 trillion and more than 130,000 civilians as “collateral damage.”

Read the whole thing. Gene also points to evidence that, partly due to the Iraq quagmire, both politicians and the public are starting to come around on the whole nation-building conceit. This is good news, but what a price to pay.

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Posted in International

CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

Posted on March 18, 2013 | Comments Off on CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation

deicing plane
This week in the world of regulation:

  • Last week, 60 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register. This is down from 69 new final rules the previous week.
  • That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every 2 hours and 48 minutes — 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
  • All in all, 667 final rules have been published in the Federal Register this year.
  • If this keeps up, the total tally for 2013 will be 3,290 new final rules.
  • Last week, 1,323 new pages were added to the 2013 Federal Register, for a total of 16,574 pages.
  • At its current pace, the 2013 Federal Register will run 81,245 pages.
  • Rules are called “economically significant” if they have costs of $100 million or more in a given year. No such rules were published last week, for a total of 10 so far in 2013.
  • The total compliance costs of this year’s economically significant regulations ranges from $2.632 billion to $4.910 billion.
  • So far, 57 final rules that meet the broader definition of “significant” have been published in 2013.
  • So far this year, 110 final rules affect small business; 15 of them are significant rules.

Highlights from final rules published last week:

For more data, go to TenThousandCommandments.com.

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Posted in regulation

Everyone Is an Anarchist, Sometimes

Posted on March 15, 2013 | Comments Off on Everyone Is an Anarchist, Sometimes

Ben Powell makes a great point:

Consider Cambodia in the late 1970s. The Khmer Rouge government intentionally killed more than two million of its own citizens. That’s an average of eight percent of the population killed each year while government simultaneously inflicted countless other horrors. Do you think the Cambodian people, faced with that government, would have been better off with no government at all? Congratulations. You are, sometimes, an anarchist.
When a state is as purely predatory as it was in Cambodia and many other places during the 20th century, even a worst-case Hobbesian war of all against all would seem more humane.

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Posted in Philosophy