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…