Blog
New Paper: Antitrust Regulation is #NeverNeeded
My colleague Jessica Melugin and I, along with our former colleague Patrick Hedger, have a new paper out today, “Repeal #NeverNeeded Antitrust Laws that…
News Release
Antitrust Investigations against Tech Threaten to Hamper Pandemic Response and Recovery
The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) released a new report today arguing that large technology companies are making invaluable contributions to our quality of life…
Products
Repeal #NeverNeeded Antitrust Laws that Hinder COVID-19 Response
View Full Document as PDF Big technology firms have been invaluable in easing the burden of quarantine for millions of consumers…
Blog
This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
Scientists may have found potential chemical evidence of life on Venus—phosphine gas, which in Venusian conditions may well have been produced by anaerobic (non-oxygen-using)…
Blog
Trade News: WTO Rules China Tariffs Violate Rules, Aluminum Tariffs Dropped, No Trade Deal with EU
Usually policy-related news slows down near elections; nobody wants to rock the boat. This has not been the case with trade policy. Three important stories…
News Release
WTO Rules Against Trump’s China tariffs, but the Problem Remains the Tariffs Themselves
The World Trade Organization ruled today that President Trump violated global trade rules by unilaterally imposing tariffs on over $350 billion worth of Chinese…
News Release
Trump Administration Backs Down on Tariffs on Canada Aluminum, But Long-Term Problems Unfixed
In another high stakes trade matter today, the Trump administration decided to back down from plans to impose tariffs on Canadian aluminum. Just before…
Blog
This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
It was a four-day work week due to Labor Day. There were massive fires along the West coast, and Congress declined to pass a $500…
News Release
New CEI Report Finds Bipartisan Embrace of Harmful, Interventionist Tech Policies
Neither major political party holds a monopoly on bad ideas when it comes to federal policy towards the technology sector, according to a…
Study
Terrible Tech 2.0
View Full Document as PDF Executive Summary If you are looking for bipartisanship in Washington, D.C., the technology policy sector may be your…
Blog
This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
As Labor Day marked the unofficial end of summer, the unemployment rate went back down to 8.4 percent, and Attorney General Barr announced that the…
Blog
This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
COVID-19 deaths passed 200,000 in the United States, and are roughly 1 million worldwide. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s passing sparked a fresh Supreme…
Blog
This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
COVID-19 deaths passed 200,000 in the United States, and are roughly 1 million worldwide. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s passing sparked a fresh Supreme…
Blog
Retro Review: William H. McNeill – Plagues and Peoples (1976)
William McNeill was one of the 20th century’s leading big-picture world historians. Interconnectedness is a major theme of his work. Plagues and Peoples applies McNeill’s…
Blog
Retro Reviews: Azar Gat with Alexander Yakobson – Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism (2013)
Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism is the rare book that makes the reader see the world differently, permanently.
Blog
This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
The last week saw another political convention, another police shooting, and two hurricanes. There was at least one major positive story, though. Polio has finally…
Blog
This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
The spring 2020 Unified Agenda was published on August 17. Due four months ago, it collects every rulemaking agency’s plans for upcoming regulations. The number…
Blog
This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
Kamala Harris was announced as the Democratic dvice-presidential candidate, a massive storm swept through the Midwest, and Congress is out of session until September. The…
Blog
New CEI Video: Eliminating Never Needed Regulations to Help with Recovery
In a new CEI video, Kent Lassman talks about three things agencies can do rein in regulations that are hindering the COVID-19 response and making…
Blog
This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
August’s 2020 disaster list so far includes a massive warehouse explosion in Beirut that killed more than 100 people and Hurricane Isaias. In positive news,…
Blog
Cautious Optimism on July Jobs Numbers: Prudence, Resilience Will Aid Recovery
In July, 1.8 million new jobs were created, and the unemployment rate dropped to 10.2 percent. That is a welcome follow-up to the second quarter’s…
News Release
July Jobs Numbers Show Economic Impact of Coronavirus Policy Reversals
CEI labor policy expert Sean Higgins breaks down what the jobs numbers from July are telling decision makers:…
Blog
Canadian Aluminum Tariff Increase is #NeverNeeded, Should Be Repealed Instead
President Trump on Thursday announced he will reimpose 10 percent aluminum tariffs against Canada. Originally enacted in 2018 on national security grounds, the tax was…
News Release
Aluminum Tariff Increase is #NeverNeeded, Should Be Repealed Instead
Blog
This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
What a week. COVID-19 deaths passed 150,000. Second-quarter GDP declined 9.5 percent from a year ago and 7 percent from the previous quarter. In more uplifting…
Blog
2020 Second Quarter GDP Decline Is Worst in U.S. History—But Not 32.9 Percent
The good news is that the second quarter’s GDP numbers aren’t nearly as scary as the more dramatic headlines are saying. The economy has not…
Blog
Observations from the Tech Antitrust Hearing
This post collects some observations from yesterday’s lengthy House Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law hearings with the chief executives of Amazon,…
Blog
This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
Confirmed COVID-19 cases in the United States surpassed 4 million last week. Congress returned to session after its July 4 break and is putting together…
Blog
New #NeverNeeded Paper: Price Gouging
Massive shortages happened almost instantly when it became clear that the coronavirus would require a nationwide lockdown. Both Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and an Amazon…
News Release
Report: Anti-Price-Gouging Laws Do More Harm Than Good
Policymakers called for price gouging laws in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, when massive shortages—and rising prices—ensued nationwide for hand sanitizer, personal protective equipment,…
Study
#NeverNeeded Price Gouging Laws Would Harm COVID-19 Response
Price gouging becomes a hot topic during every crisis. It has become especially topical during the COVID-19 crisis. Almost overnight, the need exploded for goods…
Blog
Deregulate to Stimulate: #NeverNeeded Regulations Are Harming Health and Economy
The Code of Federal Regulations contains more than 1.1 million regulatory restrictions. State and local governments have additional rules. Some of those rules have a…
Blog
How to Spot a #NeverNeeded Regulation
Regulatory reform is one of the most important weapons there is for fighting COVID-19 and for aiding the economic recovery after the worst passes. Where…
Blog
This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
After another busy week for agencies, the 2020 Federal Register is on pace to be 79,121 pages. None of those pages include the Spring 2020…
Blog
How to Make #NeverNeeded-Style Reforms Stick
There are lots of good regulatory reform ideas out there. The ideas with the most staying power share a common theme. They don’t just treat…
Inside Sources
How to Reform Never-Needed Regulations – and How to Keep Them That Way
Policymakers have waived more than 600 regulations as part of the COVID-19 response. Federal agencies lifted rules against telemedicine and remote education.
Blog
This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
New COVID cases continued to rise, and the Supreme Court handed down a number of controversial decisions to end its term. Regulatory agencies issued new…
News Release
#NeverNeeded Report: Systemic Regulatory Reform Will Aid Economic Recovery from COVID-19
Policy makers at all levels of government have waived more than 600 regulations, including rules impeding access to medical care and making the economic shock…
Blog
New #NeverNeeded Paper: Regulatory Reform
Regulatory reform is one of the most important policy responses to the COVID-19 crisis. Removing obstacles to health care can save lives. Removing barriers against…
Study
How to Make Sure Reformed #NeverNeeded Regulations Stay That Way
Policy makers at all levels of government have waived more than 600 regulations in response to the COVD-19 crisis.[1] Those rules were…
News Release
Report: Tariff Relief Would Help COVID-19 Recovery
A new Competitive Enterprise Institute report proposes three plans Congress and the Trump administration can enact immediately to lift trade barriers in the way of…
Blog
New #NeverNeeded Paper: Remove or Reduce Tariffs
Trade barriers are an obvious #NeverNeeded candidate for removal during a pandemic and a recession. They make medical supplies scarcer and more expensive. They raise…
Study
Repeal #NeverNeeded Trade Barriers
The most important priorities during the coronavirus pandemic are keeping people safe and minimizing economic damage. Trade barriers are harming both priorities. This paper contains…
Blog
This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
The USMCA trade agreement came into effect on July 1, and three states increased their minimum wages. The unemployment rate went down to 11.1 percent.
Blog
Managed Trade: USMCA Comes into Effect Today
The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) comes into effect today. USMCA’s policy changes are modest, and its economic impact will be small. But it sets a…
Blog
This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
Consumer spending rose 8.2 percent in May, a new record that gives hope for a quicker economic recovery. On the other hand, new coronavirus cases…
Blog
Podcast: Reforming #NeverNeeded Regulations
The John Locke Foundation has released a Rebound Plan for North Carolina, where it is based—the basketball reference is a nice touch. It contains reform…
Blog
Supreme Court Declines to Hear Steel Tariff Case: Time for Congress to Act
President Trump’s steel tariffs were intended to boost U.S. manufacturing. They backfired to the point where a group of steel-using industries sued to stop the…
Blog
This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
Trade protectionists have taken to calling free traders soft on China. According to John Bolton’s forthcoming book, it turns out to be the other way…
Blog
Has Trump Been a Net Deregulator?
Pierre Lemieux, in Regulation magazine, draws from the new 2020 edition of Ten Thousand Commandments to estimate the Trump administration's net impact on regulation. Trump’s…
Blog
This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
The rate of new coronavirus cases increased last week, adding a note of caution to tentative efforts at reopening. Regulatory agencies issued new final regulations…
Blog
Unintended Consequences of Price Gouging
Price gouging legislation routinely backfires. Price controls make shortages worse. In a crisis, this is especially harmful. And even if price gouging legislation were to…
Blog
#NeverNeed Regulations and the Coronavirus
What is the appropriate public policy response to COVID-19 crisis? In a new short video, Kent Lassman makes the case for lifting government barriers that…
Blog
This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
Friday’s 13.3 percent unemployment rate announcement was actually good news, and says much about the more than 600 regulations waived so far at various levels…
News Release
Great News on Job Recovery
Upending expert predictions, the U.S economy added 2.5 million jobs in May and the unemployment dropped to 13.3 percent, according to the Labor Department. This,…
Inside Sources
Pandemic Should Spur Large Scale Deregulation to Aid Recovery
Regulations are a big obstacle in fighting the coronavirus. They are also a major obstacle to economic recovery.
Blog
Pandemics, #NeverNeeded Regulations, and Ten Thousand Commandments
At Inside Sources, Wayne Crews and Ryan Young have an op-ed summarizing the main findings of Wayne’s new 2020 edition of Ten Thousand Commandments, plus…
Blog
Time to Permanently Sunset Waived #NeverNeeded Regulations
Many regulations have proven especially harmful during the COVID-19 crisis. But many of those waivers are temporary. Those temporary waivers should be made permanent. One…
Blog
This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
CEI released the 2020 edition of Wayne Crews’s annual Ten Thousand Commandments report, which gives a big-picture view of the federal regulatory state. Regulatory agencies…
Citation
Federal Regulations Cost an Estimated $1.9 Trillion per Year: Many Rules Hinder Virus Response, Economic Recovery
The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) today released the 2020 edition of Ten Thousand Commandments: An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State (10KC 2020), CEI’s annual survey of…
National Review
How Loosening Regulations Can Fight Coronavirus and Help the Economy
If a regulation isn’t needed during a crisis, it was probably never needed at all. To his credit, President Trump signed an executive order on May…
Blog
Out Now: The 2020 Edition of Ten Thousand Commandments
The 2020 edition of Ten Thousand Commandments is out. Wayne Crews’s annual report gives a big picture view of the federal regulatory state. There has…
Blog
Trump’s Executive Order on #NeverNeeded Regulations
In an op-ed in National Review, CEI Senior Fellow Ryan Young takes a look at President Trump’s new Executive Order directing agencies to get rid…
Blog
This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
President Trump issued an Executive Order encouraging agencies to keep #NeverNeeded regulations waived during the coronavirus permanently off the books. Meanwhile, regulatory agencies issued new…
Blog
Retro Reviews: Common Sense Political Economy
This review of Philip Henry Wicksteed’s 1910 textbook The Common Sense of Political Economy was originally published at Inertia Wins. Wicksteed was a leading economic…
Blog
This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
Retail sales declined 16.4 percent in April, setting a new record low for the second month in a row. Congress returned to Washington, putting the…
Blog
Time for a Federal Price Gouging Law?
Amazon’s vice president of public policy calls for a federal price gouging law in a recent post over at Amazon’s in-house blog. This is a…
Blog
This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
The first full week of May featured a continuing pandemic, the biggest unemployment increase in U.S. history, a hailstorm in the D.C. area, freezing temperatures…
News Release
April Pandemic-Caused Unemployment Rate Underscores Urgency of Getting Rid of #Neverneeded Regulations
CEI senior fellow Ryan Young indicated that April’s 14.7 percent unemployment rate was unsurprising and will probably continue in May. He called on policymakers to…
Blog
This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
The 2020 Federal Register passed 25,000 pages, and is poised to surpass last year’s page count by more than 1,000 pages. The number of final…
Blog
This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
New unemployment applications were down to 4.4 million last week. This is still more than an order of magnitude greater than the pre-coronavirus record. With…
Blog
Trump Defers Tariff Payments for Struggling Businesses: A Good Start, More Needed
President Trump has deferred selected tariff payments for companies experiencing coronavirus-related hardship. It came after more than two weeks of starts, stops, denials, and reversals.
The Orange County Register
Assembly Bill 5’s Harms Can’t Be Exempted Away, It Must Be Repealed
The top two priorities for the coronavirus pandemic are keeping people safe and minimizing economic damage, in that order. California’s Assembly Bill 5 is harmful…
Blog
Retro Review: Vlad Tarko’s Biography of Elinor Ostrom
Elinor Ostrom’s pioneering work on “polycentrism,” the existence of multiple sources of government authority or power within a single political system, is especially relevant during…
Blog
Congress Has Already Introduced Bills to Reform #NeverNeeded Regulations
Policy makers have already waived more than 350 regulations and counting that were slowing the pandemic response and harming economic recovery. But with a 185,000-page…
Blog
This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
Please do all you can to keep yourself and your loved ones safe. Hopefully Congress will also act on some of the #NeverNeeded regulations that…
Blog
California’s #NeverNeeded AB5 Is Harming the Coronavirus Response
California’s AB5 law was already backfiring before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. It has cost thousands of jobs—many of which are home-based. During a time of…
Blog
How to Spot a #NeverNeeded Regulation
Not every regulation on the books is directly harming the COVID-19 response. There are a lot of other regulations that need reform, but the #NeverNeeded…
Blog
This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
When Congress convenes next week, it will likely begin work on a Phase 4 stimulus bill. CEI analysts have made the case that addressing #NeverNeeded…
Real Clear Markets
An Effective Pandemic Response Would Be Deregulation
During a pandemic, regulations should not get between sick people and health care, or between hungry people and food. This also applies in normal times.
Blog
Deregulation Is an Effective Pandemic Defense
In a new op-ed in RealClearMarkets, Iain Murray and Ryan Young outline the major points of CEI’s just-released #NeverNeeded paper, which identifies regulations harmful to…
Blog
Retro Review: The Year Civilization Collapsed
This review of Eric H. Cline’s 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, was originally published at Inertia Wins. Despite covering events in the ancient past,…
Blog
This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
Quarantine and stay-at-home orders will likely last through the end of April in many places. In more heartening news, governments are rolling back numerous #NeverNeeded…
Washington Examiner
Prepare for the next pandemic with a commission to kill #NeverNeeded regulations
The coronavirus pandemic needs a long-term policy response.
Blog
The #NeverNeeded Regulatory Reduction Commission
In a new Washington Examiner op ed, CEI Senior Fellow Ryan Young proposes a Regulatory Reduction Commission to act as a permanent watchdog to prevent #NeverNeeded…
Blog
Trump Administration Suspends Tariffs, but Not Confusion, for Three Months
On Friday evening, the Trump administration announced it would stop collecting all tariff revenue for three months, effective immediately. In ordinary times, the news would…
Blog
This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
Coronavirus deaths topped 1,000 in the U.S. last week, while new cases continued to double every few days. Meanwhile, agencies issued new final regulations ranging…
News Release
CEI Experts Blast Attempts to Politicize COVID-19 Relief Bill
While the nation suffers, Washington has descended into an unseemly squabble over the latest COVID-19 relief bill. Politicians from all quarters are attempting to expand…
Blog
This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
Governments are responding to the coronavirus with a getting rid of harmful regulations on restaurants, schools, and stores. Most of these rules were never needed…
Blog
Getting Rid of #NeverNeeded Regulations Hindering Coronavirus Response
What can Washington do to minimize harm from the coronavirus? Some of the best policy responses are coming not from imposing new regulations, but from…
Blog
This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
It was a rough week. Coronavirus infections and deaths continued to climb. Wall Street is officially in a bear market, and Congress and President Trump…
Blog
Coronavirus and the Limits of “Flash Policy”
The coronavirus outbreak is serious, and it deserves a serious response. If you’re healthy, help people out. If you have elderly relatives or neighbors, reach…
Blog
This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
Coronavirus continued to spread, the Democratic presidential field significantly narrowed, and the former head of the UAW was charged with embezzlement. Meanwhile, agencies issued new…
Blog
This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
The coronavirus outbreak began to infect financial markets as well as people, with stock markets having their worst week since at least 2008. The number…
Blog
The Minimum Wage Tax Increase
By far the most common criticism of minimum wages is that they cost jobs.
Inside Sources
Tariffs — Possible Minimum Wage Hikes — Raise Taxes, Harm Workers
Presidential candidate Tom Steyer recently proposed increasing the federal minimum wage to $22 — more than triple the current level of $7.25, and the House…
Blog
This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
During the four-day week, Lawrence Tesler passed away. The underappreciated inventor created the cut, copy, and paste functions on computers. The Hair Club for Men…
Blog
This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
Spring Training began for all 30 Major League Baseball teams, bringing joy across the nation. Meanwhile, agencies issued new final regulations ranging from grains ounce…
Blog
The Spectrum Case against AB5
California’s Assembly Bill 5 (AB5) is intended to classify more independent contractors as formal employees. The goal is for workers to get higher wages and…
Blog
Antitrust Enforcement in 4-D
Competition is an ongoing discovery process. The reason firms exist is not to enable or restrict competition. It is to reduce transaction costs. There is…