The Competitive Enterprise Institute Daily Update
Issues in the News
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1. HEALTH
A federal advisory board votes against recommending the drug Arcoxia, proposed as a successor to the painkiller Vioxx, for approval.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: General Counsel Sam Kazman reacts to a poll that found that 80% of orthopedic surgeons would like to see Vioxx back on the market:
“In recent years FDA has been repeatedly attacked for approving allegedly defective therapies. But as this physician survey shows, the real threat to public health is that FDA’s approval process is already too long. Any attempt to make it more stringent will only worsen this problem.”
2. BUSINESS
Financial professionals argue the necessity of updating the Securities and Exchange Commission’s approach to financial regulation.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Center for Entrepreneurship Director John Berlau on the need for SEC reform:
“Corporations, like all human institutions, must be constrained to reduce the risks of fraud and error. Mostly, competition can better discipline these tendencies than can bureaucratic one-size-fits-all rules. Calamities are often the unintended result of past political interference in the market rather than of any inherent market failure. Fraud must be punished, but there can be no error-free economy. Yet our first challenge when such errors—or crimes—occur should be to carefully examine whether existing government regulatory policies may have weakened the disciplinary forces of competition—and, if so, we should move to repeal such policies.”
3. ENVIRONMENT
The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service receives a flood of comments on the proposal to list the polar bear as a threatened species.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Senior Fellow Marlo Lewis, Jr. gives his recommendations:
“CEI recommends that the Fish & Wildlife Service not list the polar bear at this time. Too little is known about the role of natural variability in recent and ongoing Arctic ice losses. Too little is known about polar bear status and trends. Too little is known about how actual GHG levels will affect polar bear habitat in the foreseeable future. The dire ice loss forecasts on which the agency relies are too speculative to support a determination that could in principle affect every <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />U.S. firm and household.”
Blog feature: For more news and analysis, updated throughout the day, visit CEI’s blog, Open Market.