Don Boudreaux, Susan Dudley, and Bradley Schiller make some good points:
-Companies spending lots of time and money in Washington begging for handouts is not capitalism.
-Stricter regulation isn’t the solution. Companies routinely rig regulations in their favor to hobble competitors. That isn’t capitalism, either.
If the embedded video below doesn’t work, click here.
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Posted in Competition, Economics, regulation
Tagged boudreaux, capitalism, dudley
Gene Healy on presidential candidates’ bipartisan love for Teddy Roosevelt:
Modeling your re-election strategy on an obnoxious authoritarian’s failed third-party run for the presidency a hundred years ago is an interesting choice, but not necessarily a wise one. It’s a move of desperation, unlikely to work.
GOP front-runner Newt Gingrich calls himself “a Theodore Roosevelt Republican.” Despite (or because of?) T.R.’s many flaws, politicians from both parties have long found something irresistible about our pulpit-pounding 26th president.
But T.R.’s enduring appeal is an enduring mystery. What’s so attractive about Roosevelt’s political philosophy? A loudmouthed cult of manliness? A warped belief that war is a good tonic for whatever ails the national spirit? A contemptuous attitude toward limits on presidential power?
John McCain, the 2008 GOP nominee, also suffers from a Teddy Roosevelt complex, as Matt Welch details in his book McCain: The Myth of a Maverick. If there’s any lesson to be learned from presidential candidates’ shared T.R. fetish, it’s that only those truly in love with power can endure the the hell of the campaign trail to acquire it.
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Posted in Elections, Political Animals
Tagged 2012, 2012 election, gene healy, john mccain. newt gingrich, matt welch, presidential power, teddy roosevelt
In an effort to shorten its lengthy and complicated tax code, the Commonwealth of Virginia is considering adding an $8,000 tax deduction for people who have their cremated remains shot into space.
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The TSA has allegedly strip-searched an elderly woman for wearing a back brace. They suspected it was a money belt; turns out it was a back brace, just as the woman said. Two points to make here:
One, how degrading for the poor woman. Life is hard enough with a bad back.
Two, this strip-search was security-unrelated. Suppose the woman was wearing a money belt. Even the crispest of $100 bills can’t bring down a plane. Currency does not pose a safety threat of any kind.
The TSA is also explicitly disallowed from searching for criminal evidence unrelated to passenger safety. And there isn’t even anything criminal about carrying hidden cash. If anything, it’s probably safer to carry it that way.
Fortunately, the GOP is stepping in with a strong response that cuts to the heart of the problem: a new bill that would remove badges from official TSA uniforms. Agents might also lose the stripe on the side of their pants.
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Posted in Security Theater
Tagged gop tsa bill, tsa, tsa badges, tsa strip-search
Uriminzokkiri, the North Korean government’s official news website is threatening a real war on christmas:
“The enemy warmongers… should be aware that they should be held responsible entirely for any unexpected consequences that may be caused by their scheme,” it said.
“This issue… is not something to be ignored quietly,” it said.
Why such harsh words? Because in some years, South Korea places christmas lights within sight of its border with North Korea.
Leave aside the North’s official atheism; this doesn’t seem to be a religious issue. The lights send what is possibly a deliberate foreign policy message. Electricity is a rare thing in North Korea, especially outside of Pyongyang. The sight of bright electric lights shining from the hated South has to be bad for morale.
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Posted in International
Tagged christmas, christmas lights, korean christmas, korean government, religious issue, Uriminzokkiri, warmongers
I am quoted in an editorial in today’s New York Sun:
Ryan Young of the Competitive Enterprise Institute wrote to say that America itself is not entirely a “free-market fundamentalist nation. “Federal, state and local governments combine to spend roughly 40% of GDP,” Mr. Young pointed out, “and that doesn’t count the cost of compliance with federal regulations.”
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Posted in Economics, Media Appearances
Some recent goings-on in the world of regulation:
-The PATRIOT Act is having the unintended consequence of stalling the growth of cloud computing. The Act empowers the federal government to snoop through databases, which makes foreign entities skittish about doing business with Google and other firms. The PATRIOT Act’s national security benefits are somewhat less clear than its economic costs.
-Arlington, Virginia is deregulating massage parlors. Shockingly, it turns out that they are legitimate businesses, not prostitution fronts.
-Toronto parent gets hit in head with soccer ball, school bans balls from its playground.
-TSA stops 17-year old girl because her purse had a design of a gun on it. Not a real gun. Not even a replica of one. A gun-shaped leather patch sewn into her purse.
-13-year old boy arrested for burping.
-Washington, D.C. requires licenses for street photographers.
-The heavily-subsidized Chevy Volt might be a bit of a fire hazard, according to testing. No real-world incidents yet, thankfully. GM is offering to buy them back from concerned owners – of which there are only about 6,000. The Nissan Leaf has not experienced similar troubles.
-Department of Transportation set to ban truck drivers from texting, using cell phones.
-Electronic devices cause zero interference with a plane’s communications. That means the FAA regulation requiring passengers to turn them off has zero safety benefits. Kudos to the New York Times for advocating this regulation’s repeal.
-Boy, 7, kicks bully in the groin. To most people, that’s fair retaliation. To officials at his school, that’s sexual harassment.
Sweden’s government-run health care system denied a legless man a wheelchair because authorities were “uncertain if the impairment was permanent.”
McDonald’s outsmarts the Happy Meal police in San Francisco.
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Posted in regulation
The REINS Act would require Congress to vote on all economically significant regulations — rules that cost at least $100 million per year. The House passed the bill yesterday, and now it moves on to the Senate. Vice President for Policy Wayne Crews talks about the impact REINS could have on increasing transparency and accountability. He also offers up a few more ideas for further regulatory reform.
Comments Off on CEI Podcast for December 8, 2011: House Passes the REINS Act
Posted in CEI Podcast, regulation
Tagged accountability, regulatory reform, reins, REINS Act, transparency
This letter of mine in response to Andy Stern’s recent op-ed ran in today’s Wall Street Journal:
If America is indeed a free-market fundamentalist nation, it sure has a funny way of showing it. Federal, state and local governments combine to spend roughly 40% of GDP, and that doesn’t count the cost of compliance with federal regulations.
In his eagerness to attack free markets, Mr. Stern has confused the mixed economy’s crony capitalism with the real thing.
Ryan Young
Competitive Enterprise Institute
Washington
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Posted in Correspondence, Economics, regulation, Spending
I’m all for the Occupy Wall Street movement going out there and having their say. Many of the activists seem almost completely innocent of economic knowledge, as I’ve written before.
But I do lean left on many issues — I’m against crony capitalism and corporate welfare. It’s time to get out of Iraq, Afghanistan, and our other top-down nation-building adventures in this Hayekian bottom-up world. The PATRIOT Act and the Bush-Obama administrations’ other civil liberties excesses should be repealed outright. I favor LGBT rights and legalizing gay marriage. Drug prohibition is as bad of a policy failure as alcohol prohibition was. I prefer welcoming immigrants to shunning them.
As someone who has studied the economic way of thinking and makes his living looking at the data, obviously my preferred economic policies differ from what most Occupiers want; they haven’t and they don’t. But we share the common aim of helping the poorest of the poor. Means may differ. Ends don’t.
I question their means.
Today in DC, Occupiers occupied a stretch of K Street and snarled up an already-hellish evening commute for thousands of people. Two points:
One, this is not the way to win people over to your side. It is an astounding PR failure. As Rory Cooper tweeted, “Hey OccupyDC – my wife is stuck downtown and my child is trapped at school. You’re doing a heckuva job selling your socialism.”
Not how I would have put it. I prefer tact. But you see his point.
Socialism is also a dead horse; one wonders why Republicans insist on beating a horse that died two decades ago. Cooper may work for the partisan Heritage Foundation, but you also don’t have to be right-wing to resent people who block your way home after a long day at work.
Occupiers have closed a lot of minds that they could have opened instead.
The second point is more subtle, but also more fundamental. They are saying, “I have set up a tent on a busy street. Therefore, your arguments are invalid.”
The shallowness of this kind of thinking speaks for itself. But the real shame is that they have much better arguments to offer. Some of them are right, and some of them are wrong. But they still have substance. They should offer those arguments instead.
My unsolicited advice is to keep saying what they have to say with passion — but also with tact. Again, why close minds that you could open?
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Posted in Political Animals, The Partisan Mind
Tagged occup, occupy dc, occupy k street, occupy wall street, ows
Inertia Wins! 