Regulation of the Day 211: The Color of Buildings

Posted on February 21, 2012 | Comments Off on Regulation of the Day 211: The Color of Buildings


Officials in Calcutta, India definitely have a favorite color: sky blue. The BBC reports that they are requiring many buildings throughout the city to be painted sky blue:

Government buildings, flyovers, roadside railings, and taxis should be painted a shade of light blue, a minister in the ruling Trinamul Congress government said.

Owners of private buildings will be also be requested to paint them in the same colour, the minister said.

Private building owners will be on the hook for their new look. Other cities in India and around the world have similar rules favoring certain colors. Seville, Spain famously emphasizes yellow and ochre in its buildings. The city is famous for bullfighting, and the colors symbolize the sand and blood of the arena. In Calcutta, sky blue represents a new government slogan: “The sky is the limit.”

India has made massive progress in poverty reduction since it half-embraced markets in recent years, but there is still a ways to go. These painting regulations certainly aren’t fatal to that noble project. But they do require diverting resources from other, more productive sectors to pay for all that painting. So it will be a little bit longer before Calcutta reaches that sky. But until then, at least it will look nice.

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Corporate Welfare Has Opportunity Costs

Posted on February 21, 2012 | Comments Off on Corporate Welfare Has Opportunity Costs

A recent Washington Times editorial quotes me saying as much:

“Washington spends about $92 billion each year on corporate welfare,” Ryan Young of the Competitive Enterprise Institute told The Washington Times. “Imagine if that money was left in the economy instead of squandered on companies that couldn’t make it in the marketplace.”

Read the whole thing here.

 

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Posted in Economics, Media Appearances

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Feel-Good Headline of the Day

Posted on February 17, 2012 | Comments Off on Feel-Good Headline of the Day

Politico: Congress set for do-nothing year

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Posted in Political Animals

The Economist: Too Much Regulation

Posted on February 17, 2012 | Comments Off on The Economist: Too Much Regulation

Sounds like writers for The Economist have been reading some of CEI’s regulatory research. From this week’s magazine:

Two forces make American laws too complex. One is hubris. Many lawmakers seem to believe that they can lay down rules to govern every eventuality. Examples range from the merely annoying (eg, a proposed code for nurseries in Colorado that specifies how many crayons each box must contain) to the delusional (eg, the conceit of Dodd-Frank that you can anticipate and ban every nasty trick financiers will dream up in the future). Far from preventing abuses, complexity creates loopholes that the shrewd can abuse with impunity.

The other force that makes American laws complex is lobbying. The government’s drive to micromanage so many activities creates a huge incentive for interest groups to push for special favours. When a bill is hundreds of pages long, it is not hard for congressmen to slip in clauses that benefit their chums and campaign donors. The health-care bill included tons of favours for the pushy. Congress’s last, failed attempt to regulate greenhouse gases was even worse.

There are lots of ways to simplify the 165,000-page Code of Federal Regulations. All new rules should have automatic 5-year sunsets, renewable by a Congressional vote. An annual bipartisan commission should comb through the books and create a package of obsolete or harmful rules for Congress to repeal. Congress should vote on all “economically significant” regulations, a la the REINS Act.

The list goes on. The sooner Congress and the President get cracking on enacting these reforms, the better off the economy — and unemployment numbers — will be.

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CEI Podcast for February 16, 2012: Washington’s Prescription Drug Shortage

Posted on February 16, 2012 | Comments Off on CEI Podcast for February 16, 2012: Washington’s Prescription Drug Shortage


Have a listen here.

Patients are suffering from a nationwide shortage of more than 260 different prescription drugs, many of them for different types of cancer. Senior Fellow Greg Conko explains why the biggest culprit for the drug shortage is Washington. DEA and FDA regulations make it difficult to ramp up supply, or to change prices to more accurately reflect demand.

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Posted in CEI Podcast, Economics, Health Care

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Regulation of the Day 210: Transgendered Air Travelers

Posted on February 15, 2012 | 1 comment

Canada is cracking down on the latest terrorist threat to innocent people everywhere: transgendered people. A July 2011 provision added to the Canadian Aeronautics Act’s Identity Screening Regulations says, “An air carrier shall not transport a passenger… who does not appear to be of the gender indicated on the identification he or she presents.”

Suppose someone was born female but lives life as a male. If his valid government-issued photo ID still identifies him as female, he may not board an airplane. It can take years of filling out forms and enduring hearings to convince courts to legally recognize that someone has crossed genders, as the economist Deirdre McCloskey (formerly Donald) movingly writes in her autobiography, Crossing. The result is a de facto ban on flying for most transgendered Canadians.

Dennis Lebel is Canada’s Transportation Minister. He supports the ban. He believes it increases passenger safety.

It doesn’t, actually. Here’s why. A passenger is a threat if he carries weapons or explosives on board. If he doesn’t, he’s not. This is true whether or not his appearance matches his ID, or whether it says “M” or “F.” This is true even if the passenger uses a fake ID, or none at all. Can this person bring down a plane? That is the question.

In other words, showing ID has precisely nothing to do with passenger safety. It’s all for show. The point is if you have weapons and explosives or not.

Lebel and the Canadian security screeners who work for him should keep this in mind. The nasty little provision may or may not be specifically targeted at gender crossers. But in practice it is discrimination, and it does not make air travelers any safer. If anything, by distracting screeners from searching for weapons and explosives, it makes passengers a little less safe. This is bad policy all around. It should be repealed immediately.

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Regulation, Jobs, and Creating Wealth

Posted on February 15, 2012 | Comments Off on Regulation, Jobs, and Creating Wealth

Here’s a letter I recently sent to Businessweek:

Editor, Businessweek:

Elizabeth Dwoskin and Mark Drajem’s February 9 article “Regulations Create Jobs, Too” points out that regulation doesn’t so much create jobs as redirect them somewhere else.

Lobbying, politicking, and special favors are part and parcel of the regulatory process. The result is that many regulation-created jobs are not created on the merits. If a job requires a regulation to be created, that usually means the job it replaced created more value for consumers. Regulations may not destroy jobs on net, but they do destroy wealth.

Markets respect no special interest; agencies like the EPA and SEC exist solely to cater to them. This is wonderful for politically connected companies like Breen Energy Solutions and Nol-Tec Systems, but the rest of us are poorer for it.

Ryan Young
Fellow in Regulatory Studies
Competitive Enterprise Institute
Washington, D.C.

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Posted in Correspondence, Economics, regulation

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Exports Good, Imports Bad?

Posted on February 14, 2012 | Comments Off on Exports Good, Imports Bad?

Most people think that exports are good, and imports are bad. Exports create jobs, imports destroy them. Don Boudreaux, in one of his inimitable letters to the editor, quotes the economist Frank Knight on what this actually means:

“The man from Mars reading the typical pronouncements of our best financial writers or statesmen could hardly avoid the conclusion that a nation’s prosperity depends upon getting rid of the greatest possible amount of goods and avoiding the receipt of anything tangible in payment for them.”

Yes, people really do think that way. We call many of them politicians. Read Don’s entire letter here.

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Posted in Economics, Pith, Trade

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Regulation of the Day 209: Playing on the Beach

Posted on February 13, 2012 | Comments Off on Regulation of the Day 209: Playing on the Beach


When President Obama and his family took a recent vacation to Hawaii, paparazzi snapped some pictures of the big guy playing a game of pickup football on the beach. It’s a good thing he wasn’t in Los Angeles, or he might have been fined. A recent ordinance made it illegal to throw balls and even Frisbees on the city’s beaches.

After the public raised a hue and cry, the city’s Board of Supervisors liberalized the ordinance. Kind of. Now Angelenos are allowed to play a game of catch on the beach – if they ask the lifeguard first, or get a permit. And if they don’t follow orders, they can still be fined. This lighter touch is still awfully heavy.

You can read the entire 37-page ordinance here.

Other highlights:

  • “No person shall dig a hole deeper than eighteen inches (18”) into the sand… except at Director’s discretion, in consultation with Fire Chief, for film and/or television production purposes only.” (p. 16)
  • “[A] person shall not camp on or use for overnight sleeping purposes any beach[.]” (p. 20; Oregon has a similar law)
  • “No person shall operate any model airplane, boat, helicopter, or similar craft… except in an area that may be established and/or designated for such use by the Director, and subject to all rules and regulations pertaining to such area.” (p. 28)
  • “A person shall not use, possess, or operate in the Pacific Ocean opposite any beach regulated by this Part 3 a fishing pole, spear, sling, or other spear fishing equipment… within 100 feet of any person[.]” (p.34. Worth asking: is the “opposite any beach” clause sending a message to spear fishers in Japan, China, and other countries on the opposite side of the Pacific?)

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Posted in Nanny State, Regulation of the Day

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Rising Voter Apathy

Posted on February 10, 2012 | Comments Off on Rising Voter Apathy

I don’t always agree with Peggy Noonan — and I certainly disagree with much of what she writes in her column today — but she makes a good point about why voter turnout and cable news ratings are down in this election year:

Maybe the story the political class is missing is not “They don’t like the Republican field,” or “They don’t like Obama.” Maybe the story is that people are tuning out altogether. Maybe they’re bored with politics, and most especially with politicians. Maybe they don’t think our government can’t (sic) solve anything. Maybe, even, our political class has done such a good job depicting the crisis we’re in that the American people, with their low faith in institutions, think nothing, really, can be done about it. So let’s check out. Let’s watch the game.

Businesses that treat their customers as badly as the Republican and Democratic parties treat theirs tend to go out of business. This may be exactly what we’re seeing.

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Posted in Elections, Political Animals

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