OpenMarket: Property Rights

Making good on its promise in Executive Order 13868  to combat the abuse of section 401 of the Clean Water Act by states seeking to block fossil energy infrastructure projects, the Environmental Protection Agency today issued updated guidance for states on implementing this provision. 

The 21st century Venezuela is a failure. It failed because it adopted socialism. Paul Larkin, Senior Legal Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, remarked in his talk “The Framers’ View of Property” that “For about a year, we have been lectured about the alleged virtues of socialism, despite the fact that we have a living example in Venezuela of what socialism tends to produce: no power, no food, no water, military rule, and people forced to buy used toilet paper.”

Our friends at the Atlas Network have an excellent new video out about legal reform in India that is helping small businesspeople stand up to corrupt government officials and make an honest living.

Environmental regulations transfer substantial wealth and can be subject to the same political failure and regulatory pork-barreling that characterize economic regulation—perhaps more so, given the international scale of control sought, and some of the movement’s anti-market roots.  

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has proposed a new wealth tax. We don’t know a lot of details on what is being proposed, but what little we do know suggests there is a constitutional problem. The Washington Post reported yesterday that Warren is being advised by two economists “on a proposal to levy a 2 percent wealth tax on Americans with assets above $50 million, as well as a 3 percent wealth tax on those who have more than $1 billion.”

The prohibition on taking a person’s liberty without due process of law is enshrined in the Constitution’s Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. But what does this mean? Does “liberty” only mean not being imprisoned, as some people have claimed, or is it far broader than that? In a new post on the Federalist Society’s blog, I argue that liberty, as originally understood by our Founders, was far broader than lack of imprisonment.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute views most market failure rationales for government intervention as wrong, overstated, or unproven (or all of the above). The Competitive Enterprise Institute views most market failure rationales for government intervention as wrong, overstated, or unproven (or all of the above). That belief is very difficult to test, however, because government has seized control of the relevant resources and blocks the market discovery process. 

“In a testament to the Trump Administration's America First Energy Plan, the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) third-quarter oil and gas lease sale in New Mexico broke all previous records by grossing nearly $1 billion in bonus bids for 142 parcels,” the Department of Interior announced in a press release on September 6th.

The Endangered Species Act (ESA), passed in 1973, has had several decades to accumulate a record of costs and benefits. Despite bureaucrats and activists often pointing to it as a success story of environmental policymaking, its record is one of enormous costs and shockingly few benefits. The time is long since due for a formal reckoning of the ESA’s economic impact—and a plan for how Congress and the executive branch can reform it. You can find the beginning of such a plan in the new CEI study “‘Whatever the Cost’ of the Endangered Species Act, It’s Huge”.  

An urgent fundraising appeal from The Nature Conservancy’s (TNC) “Global Policy Lead[er]” warns of congressional and administration efforts to change—and from the perspective of many—improve implementation of the Endangered Species Act (ESA). As a recent Competitive Enterprise Institute analysis demonstrates, the overall costs of the federal ESA program are easily in the tens and more likely hundreds of billions of dollars, begging the question, are we getting what we pay for? Campaigners for the current law like TNC skip over such information and make nice-sounding claims like: “the Endangered Species Act is one of our nation’s most effective environmental laws. 99% of the species it's protected have been saved from extinction!”