The Open Market Blog

• By: Hans Bader
• 10/31/2007

Jacob Sullum’s syndicated column describes Exxon Shipping Co. v. Baker, in which the Supreme Court will decide whether federal maritime law permits punitive damages…

• By: Michelle Minton
• 10/31/2007

As I wrote about earlier in the week, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had been talking about banning exclusivity deals between landlords and cable…

• By: Ivan Osorio
• 10/31/2007

This morning, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 17-4 to send the Law of the Sea Treaty to the Senate floor for ratification. The…

• By: Hans Bader
• 10/31/2007

Congress is set to pass a bloated farm bill that will increase federal sugar subsidies, which have cost taxpayers billions of dollars, and prevent…

• By: Hans Bader
• 10/31/2007

Trial lawyers have brought lawsuits seeking billions of dollars in damages against telephone companies for assisting federal antiterrorism surveillance programs. In today’s Washington Post, Senator…

• By: Fran Smith
• 10/30/2007

On the eve of All Hallow’s Eve, the Boston Globe‘s list of the “Top 50 scariest movies of all time” is worth a…

• By: Ivan Osorio
• 10/30/2007

As the Senate Foreign Relations Committee prepares to take up the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST; also known as UNCLOS, for United Nations…

• By: Angela Logomasini
• 10/30/2007

In Today’s Washington Post, Cindy Skrzycki reports on Devra Davis’s book The Secret History of the War on Cancer. According to Skrzycki, Davis asserts…

• By: Doug Bandow
• 10/30/2007

How you can profit from the coming nuclear holocaust will likely be the next publication by the conservative site Newsmax. After all, it just sent…

• By: Christopher C. Horner
• 10/30/2007

Today one presidential aspirant joined a growing list of senators in opposing U.S. ratification of the Law of the Sea Treaty. Taking as long as…

• By: Hans Bader
• 10/30/2007

The full Federal Circuit Court of Appeals has just rejected a challenge to an earlier ruling that the District of Columbia’s Prescription Drug…

• By: Fran Smith
• 10/30/2007

Eli–Re your post on the Robosaurus, I like these better. The one above weighs about 104,000 lbs. and the one below…

• By: Hans Bader
• 10/30/2007

The moderately conservative Judge Thomas Meskill has died, eliminating one of the few non-liberal judges on the New York-based Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

• By: Lene Johansen
• 10/30/2007

The other side of India’s boom is the corruption and lack of protection of rights for the poor. This story from NPR about a…

• By: Lene Johansen
• 10/30/2007

Nice commentary by Jonathan Chait on Marketplace last week about the problem with farm subsidies.

• By: Hans Bader
• 10/30/2007

Wealthy trial lawyer William Lerach, a big donor to liberal politicians who specialized in bringing class action lawsuits, has pled guilty to giving kickbacks.

• By: Lene Johansen
• 10/30/2007

As EU allows four more GMO crops (crops created with molecular plant breeding techniques), the new president of France puts a temporary “freeze”…

• By: Doug Bandow
• 10/30/2007

It appears that the Communist Party of China occasionally makes a mistake. Too bad millions of people already have paid a price and millions more…

• By: Doug Bandow
• 10/30/2007

The health care mess is complicated. It's a strange mix of government and private, with perverse tax incentives skewing the entire system. Handing the whole…

• By: Ivan Osorio
• 10/29/2007

One of the most interesting entries into the debate over the Law of the Sea Treaty during the last few days comes from…

• By: Ivan Osorio
• 10/29/2007

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has scheduled the Law of the Sea Treaty for a possible vote this Wednesday, and both opponents and…

• By: Lene Johansen
• 10/29/2007

Owner of one of the largest food retailers in Norway, Trond Lykke says organic food is selfish because it requires more land area and…

• By: Lene Johansen
• 10/29/2007

Regulatory insanity in the EU has been halted for another four years thanks to a concerted effort by lobby groups. The EU will, for now,…

• By: Eli Lehrer
• 10/29/2007

If you have an extra $2.5 million to spare, you can become the proud owner of The Robosaurus. Some specs from the web…

• By: Hans Bader
• 10/29/2007

The Supreme Court is weighing the $2.5 billion punitive damage award against Exxon arising out of an oil spill, which occurred as a result of…

• By: Hans Bader
• 10/29/2007

The Washington Post has a news story Sunday about how teen pregnancies have fallen in Washington, D.C., and nearby suburbs since 1996 — a…

• By: Gregory Conko
• 10/29/2007

So far as I can tell, it’s gotten no attention whatsoever, but today is the 25th Anniversary of the Food and Drug Administration’s approval…

• By: John Berlau
• 10/29/2007

Today, I have a piece in American Thinker on how environmental regulations, much more than global warming, were likely a factor in the intensity…

• By: Doug Bandow
• 10/29/2007

The problems of the health care system are many and complex--burdensome state regulation, massive federal programs, counterproductive tax incentives, and the popular presumption that health…

• By: Doug Bandow
• 10/29/2007

It's time to pull out the world's smallest violin for The Nation magazine. They are lefties, but at a time when the conservative establishment is…

• By: Michelle Minton
• 10/29/2007

Halloween will be a little scarier this year. Along with the other horrifying regulations on this Wednesday's schedule we can now…

• By: Doug Bandow
• 10/29/2007

Trade sanctions are a favorite foreign policy tool, but they don't have a very good record. It's hard to find a case where sanctions forced…

• By: Gregory Conko
• 10/29/2007

The Italian language version of my book, The Frankenfood Myth, co-written with CEI adjunct scholar and Hoover Institution fellow Henry I. Miller, was…

• By: Fran Smith
• 10/26/2007

Okay, here’s a government action I can agree with: Pennsylvania Secretary of Agriculture Dennis Wolff ordered 16 dairies in Pennsylvania to correct their milk…

• By: Ivan Osorio
• 10/26/2007

In his now weekly DC Examiner Friday column, Tim Carney, CEI's 2005-2006 Warren Brookes Journalism Fellow, looks at just who exactly stands to most…

• By: Ivan Osorio
• 10/26/2007

We thought President Reagan had killed it, but it keeps coming back — “it” being the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST), which Reagan…

• By: Doug Bandow
• 10/26/2007

It may be a forlorn hope that politicians of either party will ever be truly fiscally responsible, opposing spending programs that either are not authorized…

• By: Michelle Minton
• 10/26/2007

There is no McDonald's in Ethiopia. Perhaps if there was, 3000000 people would not die this year from malnutrition. In a world where poverty…

• By: Doug Bandow
• 10/26/2007

There's nothing new about partisans playing hardball when it comes to politics. But it is unusual when partisans attempt to jail their opponents. That apparently…

• By: Michelle Minton
• 10/26/2007

People often denounce the profit motive as harsh and unfeeling. Only volunteer or government offered aid is supposedly offered with the sincere desire to help.

• By: Hans Bader
• 10/25/2007

The Commission that selects administrative law judges (ALJs) in Washington, D.C. is leaning towards not reappointing Roy Pearson, the ALJ who brought a $54…

• By: Fran Smith
• 10/25/2007

“Time to ditch Kyoto” says a commentary in Nature magazine’s October 25 issue. The article, written by Gwyn Prins and Steve Rayner, points…

• By: Hans Bader
• 10/25/2007

California wildfires have driven hundreds of thousands of people from their homes, caused death and destruction, and consumed more than 700 square miles of land.

• By: Fran Smith
• 10/25/2007

Cato’s Center for Trade Policy Studies has just released a study by Dan Griswold showing that increased trade is not responsible for a lower…

• By: Michelle Minton
• 10/25/2007

The new SCHIP bill set for a vote today, attempts to woo Republicans by prohibiting illegal immigrants from enrolling in the program. These changes don’t…

• By: Richard Morrison
• 10/24/2007

• By: Fran Smith
• 10/24/2007

The Wall Street Journal today carries an opinion piece by Stephen J. Rose (subscription required), a labor economist with the Progressive Policy Institute, titled…

• By: Hans Bader
• 10/24/2007

The European Commission is taking Finland to court to try to force it to ban the sale of snus, a form of smokeless tobacco.

• By: Hans Bader
• 10/24/2007

MSN says that Merrill Lynch wrote down the value of its mortgage holdings by nearly $8 billion just in the past quarter, producing a…

• By: Ryan Radia
• 10/24/2007

Comcast is under fire again, this time for spoofing network packets to stop its users from uploading using peer-to-peer software. The technology Comcast…