The Competitive Enterprise Institute Daily Update
Issues in the News
1. HEALTH
A new study finds Americans are unsure about the safety of biotech foods.
CEI Experts Available to Comment: Director of Food Safety Policy Gregory Conko on why milk and meat from cloned animals is safe for consumers:
“After reviewing hundreds of scientific and medical studies, experts at the notoriously risk-averse FDA have given the [cloning] process a clean bill of health, as have the agency’s panel of independent scientific advisers and a National Academy of Sciences committee. That comprehensive risk assessment includes research by the U.S. Department of Agriculture examining more than 140,000 individual measures of nutritional and other compositional characteristics and finding no statistically significant differences between offspring of clones and conventionally bred animals.”
2. BUSINESS
U.S. and European regulators investigate charges that manufacturers of LCD monitors are part of a price-fixing cartel.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Director of Technology Policy Wayne Crews on the flaws inherent in current antitrust law:
“Despite the wide success of economic deregulation in the transportation, communications, and banking sectors, there has been no concerted effort to reconsider the moral and economic basis of one of the oldest forms of federal intervention—antitrust. Now, flawed antitrust theories are being ‘exported’ to Europe . A reform campaign based on the insight that antitrust is actually anti-competitive and anti-consumer is long overdue.”
3. TECHNOLOGY
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), incoming chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, outlines plans for regulation of private, commercial databases.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Vice President for Policy Wayne Crews and Policy Analyst Brooke Oberwetter on the free market solutions to identity theft and data security breaches:
“But are the problems that legislative solutions can address really market failures, or has the industry simply been slow to adapt to emerging threats? The problems identified by proponents of regulation could all be fixed far more effectively and efficiently with market solutions—among them, liability, insurance, third-party monitoring and ratings, and property rights—than with government mandates.”