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Union Official Time Breeds Corruption
The Office of Labor-Management Standards of the Department of Labor conducts criminal investigations to unearth union wrongdoing that violates the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act.
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DOJ vs. Reason.com Commenters: How the Deck Is Stacked Against Anonymous Political Speech
Our friends over at the Reason Foundation, a venerable libertarian think tank and publisher of Reason magazine, recently received a grand jury subpoena from a federal prosecutor…
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DOJ vs. Reason.com Commenters: When Everything Is Deemed a “Threat”
The Supreme Court has said that true threats can be banned without violating the First Amendment, but that doesn’t mean that hyperbolic rants are unprotected…
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Bad Tradeoff: Ex-Im vs. a Weak Dollar
At this point, it looks like Congress will let the Export-Import Bank’s charter expire on June 30. This is not a big deal in grand scheme…
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The Right to Choose Your Investment Partner
The following is an abridged and revised version of my keynote address to the FinTech Global Expo at the San Diego Convention Center on May 29,…
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CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation
New regulations last week covered everything from growing cherries to airport security fees to preventing collisions at sea. On to the data: Last week, 65…
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Both Parties Should Oppose the Export-Import Bank
Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) chairs the House Financial Services Committee. The Export-Import Bank’s reauthorization falls under his jurisdiction, and he has been one of the…
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NLRB Approves of Vulgar Union Gear at Workplace
Under the Obama administration, the National Labor Relations Board has gone to great lengths to expand employee Section 7 rights to the point of absurdity.
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NLRB’s End Run Around Right to Work Laws
Yesterday, the House Education and Workforce Committee held a hearing entitled, "Compulsory Unionism Through Grievance Fees: The NLRB’s Assault on Right to Work," which examined…
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Henry Hazlitt and the Ex-Im Bank
Henry Hazlitt is most famous for his book Economics in One Lesson. Export-Import Bank supporters have consistently ignored a very important part of Hazlitt’s simple…
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Obama Has Issued More “Economically Significant” Rules in 6.5 Years than Bush Did in Eight
It happens to be the case that, in terms of overall counts of rules and regulations published in the Federal Register as final rules, the George W.
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Manufacturing Alarm: Dana Nuccitelli’s Critique of John Christy’s Climate Science Testimony
Environmental scientist Dana Nuccittelli accuses University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) atmospheric scientist John Christy of “manufacturing doubt about the accuracy of climate models” at a May…
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“Worker’s Choice” Proposal
On June 2, 2015, Vincent Vernuccio, the Director of Labor Policy at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy and one of my predecessors here at…
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The Value of Trade
WTO's new video, titled “Trade matters to me,” captures the consumer value of trade on an everyday basis, from pants to…
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Texas Court Upholds NLRB Ambush Election
On June 1, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas upheld the National Labor Relations Board's (NLRB) ambush election, which dramatically alters…
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Ex-Im and Boeing, Sitting in a Tree
In most years, nearly half of the Export-Import Bank’s business is for Boeing’s benefit. The relationship between the two is so cozy that Ex-Im’s informal…
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Employment Effects of the NLRB’s Joint-Employer Cases
Following the script of the U.S. Department of Labor Wage and Hour Administrator David Weil in his book The Fissured Workplace, the National Labor Relations…
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Here Are All 205 “Economically Significant” Rules in the Spring 2015 Unified Agenda of Federal Regulations
The Spring 2015 Unified Agenda of Federal Deregulatory and Regulatory Actions was released by the Obama administration just before Memorial Day weekend. It’s less of a…
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Understanding the EPA’s Power Grab through the “Waters of the U.S. Rule”
Last week, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) promulgated the Waters of the U.S. Rule, a…
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CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation
It was a four-day work week because of the Memorial Day holiday, but regulators still had a busy week, with new regulations covering everything from…
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Union Bosses Lobby for Exemption from $15 LA Minimum Wage
As I reported in yesterday, Big Labor spent a lot of money and resources supporting the Los Angeles' $15 minimum wage.
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Raise a Glass to Lower Taxes
You might not know it, but about half the cost of your preferred alcoholic beverage is made up of taxes and fees. One man in…
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Big Labor Money Behind Los Angeles Minimum Wage Hike
On Tuesday, the Los Angeles City Council voted 14-1 in favor of raising the minimum wage to $15 by 2020.
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Politics vs. Principle: Export-Import Bank Edition
On the merits, the case for closing the Export-Import Bank is a slam-dunk. This has made life difficult for the bank’s supporters, especially since the…
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Fourth Circuit Flouts Appellate, Evidence, and Class-Action Rules in Brown v. Nucor Corp.
In the past, businesses have been happy to put new factories in states like South Carolina and Virginia, due to their right-to-work laws and relatively…
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CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation
The big regulatory news from last week was the publication of the semiannual Unified Agenda, which lists most upcoming regulations from rulemaking agencies at various…
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Trade Promotion Authority in the Senate: Do-It-Yourself Economics
The U.S. Senate yesterday continued discussion on Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), also called the “fast-track” trade authority, which would give the President power to negotiate…
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Sen. Warren Gets Hit on Trade Issues
Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus (May 20, 2015) took on Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Mass.) contention that trade agreements are being negotiated in secret, with…
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Pollinator “Strategy”: Pork Barrel, Handouts, and Counterproductive Pesticide Policy
The Obama administration has finally released its National Strategy to Promote the Health of Honey Bees and other Pollinators. It’s the federal government’s answer to all…
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Long Mass Transit Commutes Are Horrible for Your Health
Joseph Stromberg at Vox.com has an article up arguing that “commuting alone by car” is “associated with obesity, high blood pressure, sleeplessness, and general unhappiness” relative…