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Tossing Free Trinkets—Obama’s Mandatory Paid Leave Proposal
Standing high at the rostrum in the House of Representatives during his State of the Union speech, President Obama acts like he’s throwing free trinkets…
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Supreme Court Refuses to Make Dodd-Frank More Draconian
Today, the Supreme Court lifted a cloud of uncertainty that had been hanging over consumers, community banks, and credit unions by refusing to take…
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On Cybersecurity, President Obama Offers Mixed Bag in SOTU
Technology policy rarely earns more than a brief mention in the President’s annual State of the Union address to Congress. But tonight, when President Obama…
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CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation
40 new regulations, from solid waste to washing machines.
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Union Exemptions from Criminal Law Must End
In 2012, a U.S. Chamber of Commerce report compiled a list of states that grant labor unions exemptions from criminal laws such as stalking, trespassing,…
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What the Greek Elections Might Mean for Economic Liberty?
With the Greek parliamentary elections being only two weeks away, it seems that the opposition leftist party SYRIZA is set for a victory on January…
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WSJ Editorial Board: Abolish the Federal Gas Tax
In recent days, a growing number of congressional Republicans have signaled a willingness to increase the federal excise tax rates on gasoline and diesel. As I…
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Free to Prosper: Top Priorities for the 114th Congress
With the start of the 114th Congress comes a fresh opportunity to address the challenges created by a broken government. To kick off this new congressional…
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Could the FDA’s New Calorie-Count Mandate Harm Winemakers?
The trade association, WineAmerica, which represents 600 wineries in the U.S., seems to think so. The group has hired a lobbyists to push the…
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Right to Work Is Good for Business and Workers
Research shows right-to-work states experience greater manufacturing growth compared to states without such laws. That is because many businesses consider RTW, which makes union dues…
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CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation
Happy New Year to all of our regulatory followers! Wayne Crews previously summed up 2014’s year-end statistics in this post. Among the highlights are 3,541…
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Automated Vehicles Update: Big Feature at CES, California Rules Delayed, Georgia Cautious on Regulation
It’s been a few months since I last checked in on automated vehicles (AVs), commonly called driverless cars or autonomous vehicles. Below are some developments of…
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Terrorist Attack on Charlie Hebdo Reveals the Sorry State of Free Speech in the West
My wife Sylvie, who grew up in France, is terribly shocked about yesterday’s terrorist attack on the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, which murdered 12 people, including…
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Big cy pres victory in 8th Circuit: Oetting v. Green Jacobson
with new opinion from 8th Circ, @tedfrank continues to reshape fed. judicial policy on giving class money to charity http://t.co/D1Yy3BgJu9—…
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Obama Should Help Borrowers by Shedding Dodd-Frank, Not Pumping FHA
“If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.” So said Ronald Reagan in 1986. Reagan was describing the unintended effects of…
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Bureaucrats Demand That Harvard Parrot Their Uncodified Views about Sexual Harassment
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20 States Raise Minimum Wage: Happy New Year?
The minimum wage is one of the most popular policies for fighting poverty, and proposed increases to it usually poll very well. But the twenty…
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Central “Planning” Often Creates Disorder, While the Free Market Provides Consistency
Government planning often contains contradictory elements that provide inconsistent signals for regulated entities about how to behave. For example, the New Deal of the 1930s…
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CEI’s 2015 Unconstitutionality Index: 27 Regulations for Every Law
There’s this idea floating around about America’s do-nothing Congress, that laws aren’t being passed. The Los Angeles Times called Congress “ineffective,” in 2013 since it passed…
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2014 Ends with a 78,978-Page Federal Register; 3,541 Rules and Regulations
At year-end 2014, the Federal Register stands at 78,978 pages, the fifth-highest count ever. (The published version contains 79,066 pages, but I net out blank and skipped…
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Democrats vs. Government Unions
If late House Speaker Tip O’Neill’s famous saying that all politics is local has a corollary, it may be that politics is at its most…
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CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation
The federal government took Thursday and Friday off to celebrate the holidays. Despite the rare three-day work week, agencies still published 25 proposed regulations, more…
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NLRB Advances against McDonald’s
By issuing complaints against McDonald’s on December 19, 2014, the National Labor Relations Board gave unions a boost and further riled business groups. On July…
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CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation
69 new regulations, from washing machines to plants for planting.
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Besting a Billionaire: How a Grassroots Campaign Stopped a Ban on Internet Gambling
This week we get to say goodbye to the 113th Congress. For those who believe in free markets and individual liberty, it was a doozy.
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Poll: Two-Thirds of Americans Oppose Federal Gas Tax Increase
A new poll from Benson Strategy Group and SKDKnickerbocker found that 67 percent of Americans oppose increasing the federal gasoline tax by 15 cents, or an…
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Activist Science Undermines Research on Honeybees and Pesticides
As reported in a blog post by David Zaruk, some of the “science” on the impact of neonicotinoid pesticides on honeybees appears to have resulted from…
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CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation
While Congress was busy with the 1,603-page Cromnibus bill (full text), agencies added nearly that many pages to the Federal Register with new regulations for everything…
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The 8 Amici (Part 2): Review of 4 More Briefs Opposing Breach of Joint-Employer Precedent
Joint Employer—Eight Amici for the Employers In total, 17 amicus briefs were submitted in June 2014, in the seminal National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) case…
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The 8 Amici (Part 1): Review of 4 Briefs Opposing Breach of Joint-Employer Precedent
Joint Employer—Eight Amici for the Employers In total, 17 amicus briefs were submitted in June 2014, in the seminal National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) case…
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Purple Haze, Seeing Red and Feeling Blue: The NLRB’s Crippling Overreach in Two Recent Actions
The National Labor Relations Board’s two recent actions cast aside decades of established practice and precedent. This disregard for the legal wisdom of consistency has…
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Political vs. Market Regulation: Uber Edition
Earlier this week The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell suggested that new entrants in the transportation market, like Uber, should face greater government regulation—despite having fueled much of…
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Lame Duck Quacks Needed Dodd-Frank Relief
Waaaah! That’s the sound of former House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) crying about stinging, bipartisan rebukes to his legacy of the Dodd-Frank…
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Congress Seeks Multiemployer Pension Reform in the CRomnibus
Congress seeks to reform multiemployer pensions in the CRomnibus (Continuing Resolution/Omnibus spending bill), which as of this evening remains in a precarious position.
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Indiana Supreme Court Upholds Right-to-Work Law
As the number of right-to-work states is expected to grow in the near future, the Indiana Supreme Court reaffirmed the legitimacy of the law in…
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Deteriorating White House Regulatory Disclosure Needs Active Congressional Review
Recently we’ve spent time reviewing Washington’s “Unified Agenda” of federal regulations, which came out just before Thanksgiving. It purports to tell what the alphabet soup…
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Rep. Leutkemeyer Moves to Choke off Operation Choke Point
The release this week of a new House Oversight and Government Reform Committee staff report into Operation Choke Point provides another opportunity to underline just how…
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New Minimum Wage Study: Tradeoffs Exist
Many progressives strongly support minimum wage increases. This is troubling, because the effects those increases actually have on many poor people are regressive. Signaling your concern for…
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The Future and the Regulated
Lawrence Summers, the enfant terrible of the economics profession, has written a thoughtful column on “Our Loss of Faith in the Future,” noting that…
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TTIP: Another Step in the (Lack of) Evolution in EU Trade Agreements
As the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) approaches an eighth round of negotiations between the United States and the European Union, the debate regarding…
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Gruber Testifies Before Congress on Obamacare Transparency Issues
Today, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Marilyn Tavenner and MIT economist Jonathan Gruber are testifying before the House Oversight and Government Reform…
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Small Business Regulations: Obama Red Tape Exceeds Bush Level
As we noted last week, President Obama has issued nearly half again as many “major,” $100-million regulations during his six years as President as George…
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11 Groups Urge Senators to Allow More Time to Consider NLRB Nominee McFerran
The Competitive Enterprise Institute and 10 allied organizations signed a coalition letter urging the Senate to delay the nomination of Lauren McFerran to the National…
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Competitive Enterprise Institute Event Highlights Department of Labor’s Crimanlization of Volunteer Work at For-Profit Businesses
The Competitive Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation are co-hosting an event on December 9th (see event details, here and below), which highlights the Department of…
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CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation
While the number of new regulations last week was normal, their cost was abnormal, totaling well over half a billion dollars just for the four…
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Seven Quotes about Communism: Take 2
A few years ago I assembled several quotes about Communism that I thought would make good epitaphs for it. Unfortunately, the ideology has turned…
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Obama’s Major Regulations 50 Percent Higher than Bush
Back in 2012, President Obama emphasized that he had issued fewer rules in his first three years as president than his predecessor President George W. Bush.
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Labor Scorecard Alert: “NO” on NLRB Nominee Lauren McFerran
The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) will score the upcoming U.S. Senate vote on the confirmation of Lauren McFerran to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
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Rep. Tom Petri Invokes Bad Reagan Policy to Justify Increasing the Gas Tax
Yesterday, retiring Rep. Tom Petri (R-Wisc.) joined wacky Rep. Earl "United Streetcar" Blumenauer (D-Ore.) to endorse increasing the federal gasoline tax by 80 percent.
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Dodd-Frank’s Conflict Minerals Rules Increase Misery
Earlier, we wrote about the misery inflicted upon the Congo and millions of desperately poor people by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act’s “conflict minerals” provisions. A…