The Competitive Enterprise Institute Daily Update
Issues in the News
1. TECHNOLOGY
Tech companies lobby for federal data privacy regulation.
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:
“Numerous high-profile cyber-attacks have spawned intense calls for government intervention into information security practices. Tired of the many online threats—including identity theft, data security breaches, and destructive viruses—the public and even some industry representatives are increasingly open to using government regulation to deal with electronic security issues.”
2. BUSINESS
Louisiana business owners express concern over not getting their insurance coverage renewed.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: President Fred L. Smith, Jr. on recovering from Hurricane Katrina:
“Yet, this disaster as the one before it, gives Louisiana a new chance. Louisiana can rebuild its tax, regulatory, legal, and welfare policies as it also rebuilds its physical structures. But to do so it must liberate the creative talents and energies of its people. Louisiana has for too long allowed itself to become a banana republic (absent, of course, the bananas). It is time for the state to use this disaster to displace the failed populism that for so long has crippled its economy.”
3. ENVIRONMENT
A new United Nations study finds that humans have had significantly less impact on global warming than previously thought.
CEI Experts Available to Comment: Senior Fellow Iain Murray on the effort to censor the scientific debate over climate change:
“Yet today, there appears to be a band of scientists and agitators who are willing to use the methods of Galileo’s persecutors to protect their own cherished theories. In the field of climate science, some people want to declare the scientific debate closed, allowing only those public statements that advance the approved idea that global warming is occurring, that man is responsible for it, and that it will probably be catastrophic unless greenhouse gas emissions are drastically curbed.”