The Competitive Enterprise Institute Daily Update
Issues in the News
1. CONGRESS
The House of Representatives meets today to debate an increase in the minimum wage.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Editorial Director Ivan Osorio on the politics of the minimum wage:
“Politicians love the minimum wage. It is a perfect issue on which to demagogue, since it promises benefits to the public while requiring no tax dollars to be spent, because the costs fall entirely on private businesses. And its costs on workers are hidden — there is no organized political pressure group of people who would have occupied jobs that an increased minimum wage kept from coming into being. But policies that create good political opportunities for populist grandstanding are often bad policy, and that’s true with the minimum wage. It is economic nonsense, premised on the idea that government can mandate a free lunch: It would be nicer for everyone to make more money, so there ought to be a law!”
2. PRIVACY
The Senate Judiciary Committee holds a hearing on government data mining programs.
“Several bills introduced in Congress address what is popularly perceived as a matter of market failure in the area of cybersecurity: According to some, imperfect information, externalities, and a lack of proprietary incentives in the Internet ‘commons’ will perpetually leave the industry incapable of solving its own problems. A sampling of the legislative proposals includes plans to require reporting to customers when a data breach has occurred, regardless of the severity, and to mandate annual security audits not unlike the financial audits required by the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation.”
3. ENVIRONMENT
The President of the European Commission announces new plans to dramatically cut Europe’s greenhouse gas emissions.
“Alarm over the prospect of the Earth warming is not warranted by the agreed science or economics of the issue. Global warming is happening and man is responsible for at least some of it. Yet this does not mean that global warming will cause enough damage to the Earth and humanity to require drastic cuts in energy use, a policy that would have damaging consequences of its own. Moreover, science cannot answer questions that are at heart economic or political, such as whether the Kyoto Protocol is worthwhile.”