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Costs of Antitrust Regulation and Institutionalization of Raising Competitors’ Costs
Antitrust policy is corporate welfare, a prominent illustration of how regulation, not just spending, enables and encourages transfers of wealth by force.
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Costs of Unequal Treatment of Citizens by Abandoning Negative Rights for a Positive Rights Framework
To many classical liberals (or libertarians), it is primarily the individual’s right of self-defense that is delegated to a government. We cannot unilaterally commence the…
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Facebook’s Call for Regulation Could Lead to Government Censorship
The Internet is unique in history not because it lacked “rules” about free expression, but that it expanded that broadcast freedom to all, not just…
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Regulation and Neglected Costs of Authoritarianism and Over-Criminalization
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…
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Regulatory Costs of Delegating Lawmaking Power to Executive and Unelected Administrators
The administrative state, blessed by Congress, has dispensed with the Founders’ system of legislation fashioned solely by an elected body. Regulatory reforms call for holding…
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The Regulatory Costs of Abandoned Federalism
The deterioration of the principle of separation of powers is a signature feature of the powerful federal Administrative State. This corrosion is accompanied by a…
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Costs of Regulatory Takings and Property Value Destruction
Takings issues noted here are just the beginning of government neglect of the institution of private property, notable especially in emergent sectors. But the disdain…
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Regulatory Costs and the Loss of Liberty
From classical liberal and individual rights perspectives, the administrative state is an affront to liberty almost by definition.
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Unmeasured Meta-Costs of the Administrative State
In my recent Forbes column “Rule of Flaw and the Costs of Coercion: Charting Undisclosed Burdens of the Administrative State,” I discuss some of the…
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Administrative Procedure Act Limitations: Process and Oversight Shortcomings
The Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 (APA) set up the foundation of the public consultation rulemaking procedure. Part one of this two-part glance at APA…
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A Brief Outline of Undisclosed Costs of Regulation
In my recent Forbes column “Rule of Flaw and the Costs of Coercion: Charting Undisclosed Burdens of the Administrative State,” I discussed checks on the…
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Administrative Procedure Act Limitations: Cost Measurement and Disclosure
U.S. Circuit Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III noted in a 2017 journal article that regulation sometimes contains “too much detail,” changes too “frequently and capriciously,” creates backlogs and…
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What If Trump’s Regulations Exceed His Regulatory Rollback Savings?
President Donald Trump has pruned rules and costs at a quicker pace than other presidents. But could his other policies torpedo that?…
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The 2019 Unconstitutionality Index
Even in an administration attempting to cut regulation, the number of rules from hundreds of federal agencies (nobody really knows exactly how many) will vastly outstrip the…
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Trump’s 2018 Deregulatory Effort: 3,367 Rules, 68,082 Pages
At year-end 2018, how is President Donald Trump’s regulatory reform project going?…
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What Regulations Has the Trump Administration Eliminated So Far?
The fall 2018 Regulatory Plan and Unified Agenda of Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions just appeared today. Notably, this is the first time the fall…
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Ditch Antitrust Regulation in Favor of Competing Bigness
The Federal Trade Commission (born in 1914, fathered by Woodrow Wilson) is hosting a series of hearings and discussions on “Competition and Consumer Protection…
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Federal Regulatory Cost Disclosure Reports Latest Ever
Why does it need to be such a headache to get timely reports on the costs and benefits of federal regulation? Government spends and it regulates.
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Real Sin for Social Media Companies Not ‘Censorship,’ but Getting into Bed with Government
Social media outlets have been filled with commentary this week about the decisions by Apple, Facebook, YouTube, and Spotify to remove content created by…
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European Regulators Wrong on Google Fine, Wrong on Antitrust Policy
Dominance and popularity are not the same as a coercive monopoly. The European Commission is behaving in protectionist fashion, not in a manner benefitting consumers,…
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Trump Maintains a One-In, Five-Out Pace for Rules and Regulations
How many deregulatory actions have been taken so far in the Trump administration? Along with 16 congressional “resolutions of disapproval” of existing Obama-era regulations—another…
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Federal Deregulation Can Exceed What Gets Reported in Unified Agenda
In tracking the Trump administration’s regulatory vs. deregulatory actions, there can be discrepancy between the official Unified Agenda compilation (the tally that’s been around…
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Did You Hear the One about the Entrepreneur?
When putting together a chapter on entrepreneurship and regulation for the Fraser Institute’s new book “Demographics and Entrepreneurship: Mitigating the Effects of an Aging…
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Trump Administration Regulatory Agenda Released
Today the Trump administration released the Spring 2018 edition of the twice-yearly Regulatory Plan and Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions, accompanied…
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Zuckerberg Testimony Hints at Devil’s Bargain with Big Government
Much of the political class in Washington, D.C. is currently holding its breath for the big event of the week: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s long-awaited…
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Next Steps in Facebook Privacy Fallout
Privacy policies at Facebook—and, by extension, other major online platforms—have sparked furious debate in recent days because of the revelations regarding…
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Rumors of Nationalized 5G Point to Need for Reform of Existing Networks
Consumers will suffer from government efforts to create a nationalized 5G telecommunications network, and the rumoured plan to move in that direction needs to be …
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State of the Less Regulated Union: 6 Ways Trump Has Cut Red Tape
Rollbacks of federal regulation are a main element of the Trump administration’s economic recipe and deserve credit. It’s highly likely that the loosening of red…
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Antitrust Resurgence Could Transform Tech Innovators into Lumbering Public Utilities
Regulation in the technology sector is worse than government merely picking winners and losers.
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All Agency Guidance Invalid Unless Submitted to Congress
We urgently need a catalog of guidance documents that were actually submitted to Congress and the Government Accountability Office as required. …
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The 2018 Unconstitutionality Index: 28 Federal Agency Rules for Every Law Congress Passes
Even when an administration tries to cut regulation, the number of rules from hundreds of federal agencies will vastly outstrip the number of laws Congress passes.
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Trump Regulations: Federal Register Page Count Is Lowest In Quarter Century
Today, Friday, December 29, 2017, is the last federal workday of the year. This presents an opportunity to round up all rules and regulations produced…
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So, What Regulations Did Trump Eliminate?
President Donald Trump has made much news over slowing down the flow of regulations in 2017, and over new promises to reduce even more…
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Who Will Regulate Tom Wheeler?
When free competition suffers, it is government intervention that is the problem, not the companies doing the competing.
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Sugarplums or Lumps of Coal? The White House’s 140 Economically Significant Rules
In the White House’s new "Unified Agenda," the administration touts success in surpassing President Trump’s goal to eliminate two regulations for every one adopted.
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Trump’s New Regulatory Reform Agenda – By the Numbers
Today the Trump administration released the Fall 2017 edition of the twice-yearly Regulatory Plan and Unified Agenda of Federal Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions, accompanied…
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Testimony on Trump’s Executive Orders and Regulatory Task Forces before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee
Today, the U.S. House of Representatives House Oversight and Government Reform Committee conducted a hearing entitled “Regulatory Reform Task Forces Check-In,” to which I…
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Red Tape Rollback: Trump Least-Regulatory President Since Reagan
The Trump mode has been to regulate bureaucrats rather than the public. New, large-scale regulation has largely stopped in 2017, and where it hasn’t, new…
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Record Federal Income Tax Receipts Still No Match for Cost of Regulation
Corporate income taxes collected by the U.S. government, estimated as noted at $278 billion for 2017, are dwarfed by regulatory costs.
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Trump’s Regulations at Six Months: The Least-Regulatory President since Reagan
No one is surprised that the Trump administration would issue considerably fewer regulations than the Obama administration. Today we got not only “Donald J. Trump’s…
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Cooking Up Fewer Regulations: Trump’s Significant Proposed Rules Down Over 70 Percent Compared To Obama
Whether looking at predecessors’ first or final years, Trump is so far the least regulatory president of all.
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Two Potential Outcomes for the Office of American Innovation
Yesterday the White House announced the launch of an Office of American Innovation. This is the latest of several moving and overlapping parts to President Trump’s…
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Assessing Prospects for Bipartisan Consensus on Regulatory Reform
The federal government doesn’t merely spend $4 trillion a year, it directs the private sector to spend and otherwise re-purposes enormous resources.
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13,953 Human Lifetimes Spent Annually on Federal Paperwork (2017 Edition)
The burden of federal government paperwork now takes up 9.778 billion hours a year.
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The 2017 Unconstitutionality Index: 18 Federal Rules for Every Law Congress Passes
Federal agencies in 2016 issued 18 rules and regulations for every law Congress passed.
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Federal Register Breaks Record by 10,000 Pages
Today standing at 91,642 pages, the Federal Register is 10,000 pages higher than the prior all-time record.
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Obama’s 2016 Federal Register Just Topped Highest Page Count of All Time
Well that didn’t him take long. President Barack Obama’s Federal Register, the daily depository of rules and regulations, added 572 pages today, and stands at…
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Federal Register Tops 80,000 Pages, 3rd Highest Ever Count
Today’s Federal Register added 572 pages, and stands at 80,562 pages for 2016.
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Federal Register Hits 4th Highest Ever Count, Will Top 80,000 Pages Tuesday
Yesterday the Federal Register hit its fifth-highest count of 79,380 pages.
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Federal Register Hits 5th Highest Ever Count, Days from All-Time High
We’ve documented here throughout November that the Federal Register is steamrolling through 2016, Obama’s final year.
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Federal Register Adds 1,177 Pages, Hits 7th Highest Ever Count
We noted here on November 1 that the Federal Register is on a roll, hitting 76,270 pages, the 8th highest level ever.
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A Federal Register Growth Spurt, Third Day of Record-Breaking Streak
The Federal Register is on a roll. On Friday, it hit 75,314 pages, the 10th highest level of all time, even though more than two…
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A Monster Federal Register This Halloween
Today, the 2016 Federal Register stands at 75, 670 pages, the 9th highest “yearly” count of all time—but it’s only Halloween.
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How a New President Can Roll Back Bureaucracy, Part 13: Establish ‘Office of No’
Implement a “Do Not Regulate” Office to Clarify Economic Liberalization Alternatives to, and Explicit Exit Strategies from, Command and Control Rules.
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White House Stalling Regulation Report Until after Election?
Today, Monday, October 17th, marks the latest that the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has ever been with its annual draft Report…
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Federal Register Tops 70,000 Pages, Headed for a Major Record
There’s no measure of regulation worse than counting Federal Register pages. But on the other hand, the bureaucracies aren’t exactly bending over backward to disclose…
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How a New President Can Roll Back Bureaucracy, Part 12: Acknowledge and Minimize Indirect Costs
This is the 12th entry in a series on how the next president can reduce bureaucracy. Earlier installments have addressed a freeze on rulemaking, the role…
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How a New President Can Roll Back Bureaucracy, Part 11: Analyze “Transfer” Costs
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How a New President Can Roll Back Bureaucracy, Part 10: Account Separately for Economic, Health and Safety, and Environmental Regulations
This is the 10th entry in a series on how the next president can reduce bureaucracy. Earlier installments have addressed a freeze on rulemaking, the role…
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How a New President Can Roll Back Bureaucracy, Part 9: Improve Classification of Major Rules
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How a New President Can Roll Back Bureaucracy, Part 8: Transparency Report Cards
Improving disclosure and transparency for regulatory output and trends is one area where a new president can unambiguously undertake unilateral initiatives without statutory regulatory reform.
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How a New President Can Roll Back Bureaucracy, Part 7: Track Regulatory Accumulation
This is the seventh entry in a series on how the next president can reduce the scope of bureaucracy. Earlier installments have addressed a freeze on…
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How a New President Can Roll Back Bureaucracy, Part 6: Enhance Disclosure in ‘Unified Agenda’
There are rules, and then there are rules. Agencies are supposed to alert the public to their priorities in the semi-annual “Regulatory Plan and Unified…
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How a New President Can Roll Back Bureaucracy, Part 5: Scrutinize Informal ‘Guidance’ Documents
When a new president scrutinizes agency rules as we have called for in this series, he or she also needs to bring “guidance documents” under…
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How A New President Can Roll Back Bureaucracy, Part 4: Expand Number of Rules Receiving Cost Analysis
The Office of Management and Budget conducts review of some significant or major rules’ cost-benefit analyses, but not quite as many or as deeply as…
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How a New President Can Roll Back Bureaucracy, Part 3: Review, Revise, Repeal, and Sunset
Short of the moratorium advocated at the top of this series, and in keeping with the spirit of executive orders and retrospective reviews that agencies…
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How a New President Can Roll Back Bureaucracy, Part 2: Boost Resources and Free Market Staff
If we must take the central, top-down administrative state as a given—and it seems that for the time being the Constitution is not coming to…
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How a New President Can Roll Back Bureaucracy, Part 1: Freeze Regulations Temporarily
In today’s economy, talk about regulatory liberalization has become a bit more bipartisan.
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Rewards and Risks of a Federal Regulatory Budget (Part 6)
By shedding light on comparative agency activity, budgeting and simultaneous improved congressional oversight could counter agency overreach.
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Rewards and Risks of a Federal Regulatory Budget (Part 5)
Benefits, even more so than costs do not lend themselves to measurement by a third party or external observer, and abuse will result from the…
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Rewards and Risks of a Federal Regulatory Budget (Part 4)
This week I began by making the case for the idea of a regulatory cost budget but wanted to spend time exploring looming pitfalls and…
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Rewards and Risks of a Federal Regulatory Budget (Part 3)
Monday in this space, I advocated the idea of a regulatory cost budget but noted there exist looming pitfalls and political traps that could derail…
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Rewards and Risks of a Federal Regulatory Budget (Part 2)
I advocate the idea of a regulatory cost budget but note that there exists looming pitfalls and political traps that could derail it or easily…
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Rewards and Risks of a Federal Regulatory Budget (Part 1)
Our case for capping and “budgeting” regulatory costs across federal agencies opens by asserting that that, perhaps apart from certain raw compliance and paperwork burdens,…
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Can a New President Cut Regulations Unilaterally?
Both presidential candidates have delivered economic speeches over the past two weeks, and both have at least given a nod to red tape and the…
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Next Administration Will Have to Try Harder on Regulatory Moratorium
In a speech yesterday to the Detroit Economic Club, Donald Trump proposed a moratorium on new federal regulations.
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Federal Register Tops 50,000 Pages, Yet Obama’s Report to Congress Is MIA
The annual Report to Congress on the Benefits and Costs of Federal Regulations and Unfunded Mandates on State, Local, and Tribal Entities is quite overdue.
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Washington Post “Fact Checker” Column Still in Denial over Regulatory Costs
The Washington Post “Fact Checker” column is running its critiques of the Republican convention, and in the process is trying again to rebuff a $15,000…
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House Judiciary Subcommittee Assesses OMB Review of Federal Regulations
Last week on July 6, the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee’s Sub-Committee Subcommittee on Regulatory Reform, Commercial and Antitrust Law conducted a hearing on…
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Testimony on Regulatory Budgeting before the House Budget Committee
Today, the U.S. House of Representatives Budget Committee conducted a hearing on An Introduction to Regulatory Budgeting, and I was invited to testify by Chairman…
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Examining Agency (Over)Use of Regulatory Guidance Documents
Today the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Regulatory Affairs and Federal Management conducted a hearing on "Examining the Use of Agency…
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Wireless Net Neutrality: You Were Warned
Hundreds of people have been burrowing into this week’s D.C. District Court of Appeals 2-1 decision giving the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) everything it wanted…
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New Options for Regulatory Reform from Speaker Ryan
We here at the Competitive Enterprise Institute appreciate the release of the new report by the Task Force on Reducing Regulatory Burdens, issued as part…
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Controlling Federal Agency Guidance Documents: A To-Do List for Congress and Reformers
When I wrote about the proliferation of federal agency guidance documents and other regulatory “dark matter” that skirts Congressional oversight and even normal…
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Federal Regulations Affecting Small Business
It is often said that there is no such thing as a free lunch, something particularly true for the small businessperson. The “Small Business…
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Regulation: A 28 Percent Hidden Tax For The Family
When corporations pay taxes, you pay taxes. That is, while it’s popular to tax rich corporations, and even if they write the check to the…
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Regulatory Cost Blowout: Burden Is Triple the Deficit, Greater than Personal and Corporate Income Taxes Combined
The last time the federal government balanced the budget was between 1998 and 2001. But those were days when a $2 trillion federal budget…
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The Barack Obama Regulatory State Towers over that of Bush
A glance at the overall count of rules and regulations leads one to suppose regulatory burdens are decreasing. After all, since Obama took office the…
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The Proliferation of Federal Agency Guidance Documents
Recently we looked at some prominent recent examples of federal agency guidance—costly to-dos for the private sector. Today I wanted to say just a…
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When Bureaus Attack: Recent Examples of Federal Regulation by “Guidance Document”
In the recent paper “Why Congress Must End Regulation by Guidance Document,” I described the rise of federal agency regulatory dark matter and…
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Federal Agency “Guidance Document” Disclosure Gaps Show Congress Is in the Dark on Regulatory Overreach
In “A Quick and Dirty Inventory of Federal Agencies' Significant Guidance Documents,” I provided, well, a quick and dirty table depicting “significant” (usually, not always,…
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A Quick and Dirty Inventory of Federal Agencies’ Significant Guidance Documents
Much is written by many on federal agency regulations’ expansion and costs. Beyond those, guidance documents, memoranda, notices, and other regulatory dark matter…
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Obama’s 7 Years of Regulation Easily Outstrip Bush’s 8
Annually, despite ups and downs, the number of federal rules and regulations tops 3,400. While the overall rule counts in the Federal Register and…
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Common Property, Gains from Trade—and Statehood
Historian Staughton Lynd argued that the contemporaneously drafted Constitution and Northwest Ordinance of 1787 were themselves components of a larger implicit package that harmonized the…
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Oversight Hearing Will Find Federal Regulatory Transparency Quite Opaque
The 2015 edition of White House Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) annual Draft Report to Congress on the Benefits and Costs of Federal Regulations was latest we’ve seen…
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Barack Obama as FCC Chairman
The saga of executive branch overreach continues, and we got a twofer today. The House Judiciary Task Force on Executive Overreach held a hearing this…
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The One Year Anniversary of Net Neutrality
In the pen and phone era, one of the many examples of the descent into arbitrary lawmaking influencing an entire sector of the economy is…
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Presidential Candidates Neglect Regulatory Bureaucracy
Allowing a $19 trillion federal debt when it was obvious that interest rates couldn’t remain zero forever is Exhibit A that legislatures rarely control spending.
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The 2016 Unconstitutionality Index: 39 Federal Rules for Every Law Congress Passes
The New Year brought news of yet more executive action by President Obama, most prominently this time on tweaking the Second Amendment and access to…
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Bureaucracy Unbound: 2015 Is Another Record Year For The Federal Register
With one day to go in 2015, the Federal Register tops off at 81,611 pages. That’s higher than last year at 77,687 pages and higher than it’s…