OpenMarket

For years Greenpeace has pretended that Patrick Moore was not one of the original co-founders of the radical environmental pressure group. More recently, a number of media outlets, including CNN, BBC, Yahoo News, Newsweek, Esquire, Huffington Post, Eco-watch, and Electrek, have fallen in line with Greenpeace’s duplicity.  On March 12th, Moore’s opposition to global warming alarmism was tweeted by President Trump.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has scheduled a floor vote on the Green New Deal resolution for the week of March 24th. Democrats were caught off guard when Senator McConnell said in February that he wanted to have a vote on the resolution and have been trying to figure out what to do ever since. It appears that they have now settled on a strategy: they or nearly all of them will vote “present.”

In trying to please both the supporters and the critics of the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), the Trump administration may end up pleasing neither.  

At a time when socialism seems determined to crawl back from the dustbin of history, it can be a challenge defending the moral legitimacy—and humanity—of a capitalist economy. Efforts like that of my colleagues Fred Smith and Ryan Young are certainly welcome, as is new research from academics like Prof. James Otteson. It’s especially nice, however, to also see individual businesspeople telling their own stories of hard work and success.

In an op-ed published yesterday in the UK Guardian, Michael Mann and Bob Ward warn Americans not to be “fooled by the Stalinist tactics being used by the White House to try to discredit the findings of mainstream climate science.”

There is plenty of blame to go around for Britain’s current Brexit chaos. In a recent post, I pointed to how the Prime Minister’s handling of the withdrawal negotiations was simply incompetent, but at least some of the blame should now be handed over to the House of Commons, which has failed to produce a majority for any course of action.

Yesterday I submitted comments on behalf of the Competitive Enterprise Institute supporting EPA’s proposal to dramatically scale back the agency’s 2015 rule establishing “carbon pollution” standards for new coal power plants. This post provides some quick background on EPA’s proposal and then summarizes the key points of my comment letter.

Maryland consumers may soon be deprived of one of my favorite products: plastic foam coffee cups. The Maryland House of Delegates has already passed a bill that would ban all containers made with polystyrene foam, which—if eventually signed by Gov. Larry Hogan—would be the first statewide foam container ban. But that move will likely do more environmental harm than good, despite claims to the contrary.

Corrupt government and authoritarianism have been the historical rule rather than the exception. The U.S. Constitution’s elevation of individual rights and restraints on governmental power in particular represented the peak of the exception.

No worker should be compelled to join or pay dues or fees to a union just to get or keep a job. The U.S. Supreme Court reinforced this principle in Janus v. AFSCME, where the justices ruled that state and local public employees cannot be forced to financially assist a union as a condition of employment. “Forcing free and independent individuals to endorse ideas they find objectionable is always demeaning,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the majority opinion in Janus.