OpenMarket

Yesterday the Competitive Enterprise Institute published Steve Milloy’s new policy brief on the impact of revised federal rules for auto mileage and emissions, “Will the Trump Fuel Economy Reform Proposal Create Deadly Air Pollution?” This reform to the Obama-era policy on corporate average fuel economy standards is one of the current administration’s biggest (de-)regulatory initiatives, so the debate over what effects it’ll have on Americans is particularly important. 

During the final days of the Obama administration, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) proposed its “talking car” mandate. This would have required new vehicles to come equipped with radios to communicate information to other vehicles in order to convey hazard warnings to drivers. This was to use a specific communications protocol known as dedicated short-range communications (DSRC). The proposal was deeply flawed in numerous ways, as CEI pointed out at the time.

In retail, as in every industry, eras come and go. Few recent events mark the passing of an era like the announced bankruptcy of Sears. That the company that ruled brick-and-mortar and mail order would be felled by online retail and nimbler competitors isn’t surprising. What is unusual is for Sears’ reign to have lasted as long as it did.

Yesterday, I attended the Department of Labor’s final overtime listening session. It was an opportunity for the DOL to hear from the public on how best to craft a rule on who is eligible or exempt from overtime requirements. The recently released Fall 2018 Unified Agenda of Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions announced that a proposed overtime rule would be published in March of 2019.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute has been making a convincing case for a swift and condition-free approval from regulators of the proposed Sprint and T-Mobile merger since the beginning. It’s always nice, however, when someone from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology agrees with you. A recent study from MIT research associate Dr. William Lehr makes some of the points we’ve been advocating here on the blog and out in the ...

Our class action legal team here at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Center for Class Action Fairness, has a new video explainer on their upcoming case before the U.S. Supreme Court this term, Frank v. Gaos. Find out how they are fighting to make sure regular people benefit from class actions settlements, rather than attorneys and special interests.

On October 31, 2018, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Frank v. Gaos. The petitioners are class members challenging a class action settlement resulting from alleged privacy violations by Google’s search engine. Out of the $8.5 million fund created by the settlement, it paid nothing to class members. Instead, it paid $2.1 million to the lawyers, $1.1 to named plaintiffs and administrative costs, and $5.3 million in cy pres payments to a handful of unaffiliated third-party organizations, including class counsel’s alma maters and groups Google already supported through donations.

The fall 2018 Regulatory Plan and Unified Agenda of Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions just appeared today. Notably, this is the first time the fall edition has arrived on schedule in October since 2005. Here’s an administration overview of the new edition.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on October 6^th released a “Special Report (SR15) on Global Warming of 1.5 degrees C.”  The report considers the impacts of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures compared to 2 degrees and the policies that will be necessary to limit warming to 1.5 degrees. Each key finding is given with a level of confidence of low, medium, or high. Most assertions and conclusions are held with high confidence. 

We are sad to note the death of our good friend and strong ally, David Henderson, on September 30^th in London.  After a career as an academic economist and top economist at international institutions, including as head of economics at the OECD, David became a public defender of free markets and classical liberal economics and a most perceptive critic of corporate social responsibility.