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In Friedrichs v. CTA, Supreme Court Can Strike a Blow for Free Speech
Oral arguments in one of the most important Supreme Court labor cases in years are set for January 11, with potential major implications in the…
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RealClear Radio Hour: Humanity First and Family Medicine Man
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Promoting Economic Freedom in 2016
It was Marxists who wanted permanent revolution, but it is capitalists who have delivered it. The last 50 years have seen a sustained revolution in…
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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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CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation
2015 was a record-setting year, with the Federal Register reaching 82,035 pages. This breaks the previous record by more than 600 pages, or roughly the length of Moby…
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The Good the Bad and the Big: Top 3 Consumer Policy Stories of 2015
2015 was a big year for health and consumer news. Unfortunately, many of the biggest stories were viral in the true sense of the word:…
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CEI’s Year in Review: Defending Freedom and Promoting Free Markets
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CEI Looks Ahead to 2016
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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…
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2015 – The Year of Equity Crowdfunding
As 2015 comes to a close, it’s time for year-end retrospectives, in which the past year is proclaimed the “year of” something. So in that…
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RealClear Radio Hour: Legacies of Empire & A New Magna Carta
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CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation
78 new regulations, from drones to ground beef.
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Washington Says Merry Christmas With 80,000 Pages Of Regulation
There may be a federal war on coal in the ground, but Washington has plenty of coal for your Christmas stocking. The Federal Register—where federal…
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Holiday Liquor Laws: Where to Buy Your Christmas Cup of Cheer
Nobody wants to drive an hour over the border just to get booze, especially on Christmas Day. However, 27 states in the union still have…
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Scrooge Was the Ultimate Job Creator
In a 2013 essay for Forbes that is quickly becoming a Christmas classic, my colleague Fred Smith took a fresh look at the character of…
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RealClear Radio Hour: Mom, Boogey Man, and Popehat
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CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation
There are just eight more editions of the Federal Register remaining to be published this year. With new regulations in the last week covering everything from truck…
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“UN climate change goal? We’re there now” – John Christy
Every month John Christy and Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama, Huntsville, report global temperature data from their satellite monitoring program, known as the…
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COP-21 Adopts Big, New Paris Climate Treaty (But We’re Not Supposed To Call It a Treaty)
COP-21 (the 21st Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) concluded in Paris only one day late on Saturday, 12th…
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Republican House and Senate Give Huge Victory to President Obama’s Climate Agenda
The House and Senate on 18th September passed omnibus appropriations legislation that provides $1.15 trillion to fund the federal government for the remainder of FY…
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Automated Vehicles Update: California DMV Releases Draft Rules and Some Notes about that Crash Study
CALIFORNIA DMV AV OPPS RULES PROPOSED: On December 16, the California Department of Motor Vehicles released its draft licensing and operations rules for consumer automated vehicles,…
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Obama Claims the Paris Climate Agreement Is Not a Treaty. Huh?
President Obama insists that the international climate agreement adopted at the COP 21 conference in Paris is not a treaty. His reason for doing so…
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Congress Rewards Education Department for Overreaching and Flouting Checks and Balances
At Powerline, lawyer Paul Mirengoff writes about one of the many disturbing provisions buried in the budget-busting omnibus spending bill currently being passed by Congress as…
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Obama Cements Status as King of Regulatory Bloat
Today marks a milestone for the one brandishing the Mighty Pen and Phone. The Federal Register hit 78,648 pages today. The Register is where the federal…
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Omnibus: No Financial Reg Relief, Dangerous GSE Provision, But a Little CFPB Sunshine
My Competitive Enterprise Institute colleagues and I have made the case for members of Congress to use the omnibus spending bill as an exercise…
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Why the Omnibus Shouldn’t Include Cybersecurity Legislation
Later this week, the House is slated to vote on a $1.1 trillion “omnibus” spending bill to fund the federal government through next fall. Naturally,…
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FAA Releases Mandatory Drone Registration Interim Final Rule
On December 16, the FAA will publish its interim final rule (IFR) on Registration and Marking Requirements for Small Unmanned Aircraft in the Federal…
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Omnibus with Significant Reg Relief May Be Worth Supporting
As the year-end omnibus spending bill is about to be unveiled, there will be a scramble to examine its provisions. In many policy areas, my…
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RealClear Radio Hour: The Miracle of New Zealand
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CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation
It was a comparatively slow week for regulations, though agencies still published new rules ranging from bright lamps to train doors. On to the data:…
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COP-21 Nears Agreement on New Paris Climate Treaty
A third straight night of all-night negotiations will almost certainly end Saturday morning with a new climate deal at COP-21. The Paris Climate Treaty is…
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Things Get Heated at Senate Hearing on Climate Science
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CCAF Asks Supreme Court to Hear Challenge on Duracell Class Action Settlement
Today, the Center for Class Action Fairness petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to hear a case challenging an abusive class action practice where trial lawyers pay themselves…
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5 Reasons the COP-21 Meeting in Paris will Fail
A white paper from the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is the first comprehensive report by Congress on international climate negotiations, encompassing the United…
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Congressional Committee Favors State-Based Legalization of Online Gambling
Wednesday’s hearing was not good for those hoping to make a case for a national online gambling prohibition. While the House Oversight Committee hearing was supposed…
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FAST Act Debrief: A Few Policy Notes on the Latest Highway Bill
Last Friday, December 4, President Obama signed into law the FAST Act, which reauthorizes federal surface transportation programs through Fiscal Year 2020 to the tune…
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Ex-Im Is Back from the Dead, Kind of
On Friday, President Obama signed into law a five-year, $305 billion highway bill. Marc Scribner, CEI’s resident transportation expert, has his thoughts on the…
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Protecting American Workers and Job Creators with the Omnibus
This week, Congress is working against the clock to avert a government shutdown and pass new spending legislation before the current continuing resolution expires on…
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Regulatory Dark Matter
How do regulations get made? Agencies have to follow specific procedures, first outlined in the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act. The trouble is that many agencies simply…
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Deck Stacked at House Oversight Committee Hearing on Internet Gambling
Tomorrow the House Oversight and Government Reform (OGR) Committee will hold a hearing titled, “Casino in Every Smartphone – Law Enforcement Implications,” to discuss…
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Deflate Drug Prices by Reforming the FDA
This Wednesday, the Senate Select Committee on Aging will hold a hearing on “sudden price spikes” among certain off-patent drugs. The most widely publicized of these…
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COP21: CEI’s Myron Ebell and Chris Horner Branded as Climate Criminals for Threatening Bogus Consensus
A group calling itself Avaaz (“Voice”) has plastered “wanted” posters of seven “climate criminals” on Paris streets and billboards during the COP21 climate negotiations. Avaaz worries that…
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RealClear Radio Hour: Polarizing Media & Intellectual Safety
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CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation
With most of December still to go, the 2015 Federal Register is already the seventh largest ever, going back to 1936. It remains on pace to set the…
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Repealed 82 Years Ago, the Spirit of Prohibition Lives On
Tomorrow, December 5, many of us will raise a glass in celebration of Repeal Day—the anniversary of the end of that disastrous experiment of alcohol prohibition…
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COOL Ruling Puts U.S. in the Hot Seat
In a move intended to avoid harmful retaliatory tariffs from Canada and Mexico, five Democratic senators wrote to both majority and minority Senate leaders,…
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Four Takeaways from the COP-21 Paris Climate Treaty
As we near the end of the first week of the COP-21 negotiations in Paris, the focal points of the expected climate treaty have…
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Senate EPW White Paper: Essential Background on the Obama Administration’s Climate Treaty Agenda
A new white paper from the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is the first comprehensive report by Congress on international climate negotiations, encompassing…
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Official Time and Criminal Misconduct by Federal Employees
With under two weeks until Congress must pass an omnibus spending bill to avoid a government shutdown, one policy that should be on the chopping…
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Five Facts on COP-21
As global leaders converge on Paris for the 2015 Climate Conference (COP-21), the goals of the meeting remain unclear to millions of Americans. To help…
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Will DOL’s “Fiduciary Rule” Silence Dave Ramsey?
It is indeed sad that 40 percent of millennials favor the government banning speech that some deem offensive, according to a recent Pew poll. Even…
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RealClear Radio Hour: Rocker Conservationist and Apocalypse Averted
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Pennsylvania Legislature Begins Process of Firing Attorney General Kathleen Kane
Last month, Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane stubbornly clung to office, refusing to resign even after she was suspended from practicing law for her alleged…
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CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation
Despite a respite for Thanksgiving, the 2015 Federal Register is now on pace to set an all-time record page count. It began publication in 1936. New regulations…
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Douglass North, 1920-2015
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Much to Be Thankful For
Thanksgiving is tomorrow, and all of us have much to be thankful for. Over at Inside Sources, I have a Julian Simon-inspired take on the…
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Thanksgiving: Massachusetts Discovers Property Rights
Thanksgiving is a day layered in tradition and myth. The standard story makes much of the creative efforts of our ancestors, the assistance provided by…
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Washington’s Thanksgiving Turkeys: Here’s Your Chance to Fill Up on the White House’s 218 Economically Significant Rules
The president will pardon a couple turkeys again this year for Thanksgiving. The birds will take a carbon-intensive cross country flight from San Francisco International…
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Fracking: The Gift Keeps Giving
“U.S. proved crude oil reserves hit levels not seen since 1972, surpassing 39 billion barrels in 2014, according to newly released federal data,” Michael Bastasch…
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3 Political Food Developments to Be Thankful For
For most of us in the U.S., we don’t have to worry about getting enough food. Quite the opposite actually; holidays like Thanksgiving can be…
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A Fundamental Misunderstanding of Free Enterprise
Today, in The Guardian, columnist Zoe Williams repeats an idea often advanced by progressives, that entrepreneurial activity is dependent on the action of others, especially “government,”…
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Problems with Mandatory Drone Registration
On Saturday, the Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) Registration Task Force issued its recommendations on a mandatory UAS registration proposal. The report is available here. On…
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Government Submits TSA Body Scanner Final Rule Schedule to Court
On October 23, 2015, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ordered the Department of Homeland Security to produce a schedule for final rule…
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CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation
The number of new regulations on the year passed the 3,000 mark last week, and the Federal Register is nearly on pace to set an all-time record…
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RealClear Radio Hour: Dodging The Devil’s Bargain, Appreciating Crowdsourced Evolution
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House Commerce Committee Approves “Pizza” Bill to Ease Onerous Calorie Labeling Rule
While most consumers are blissfully unaware, a provision tucked into the Affordable Care Act could cause food vendors a lot of headaches. Starting on December…
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Anti-Capitalism on Campus
Prof. Brad Thompson of Clemson University writes this week in Minding the Campus on the impact of corporate donations to institutions of higher education. In particular, he describes…
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The FAQ on COP-21
What is COP-21? The 21st session of the Conference of Parties (COP-21) in Paris is a United Nations meeting to adopt a plan requiring greenhouse…
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NLRB Attack on McDonald’s
No one accuses the government of being responsive to the public. Whether you are a veteran seeking care or need to renew your license at…
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Calling All Public Choice Scholars
Earlier this month the Cato Institute generously hosted a small roundtable discussion of CEI’s recent study “Virtuous Capitalism: Why there Is Less Corruption in…
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Unconstitutional Sexual-Orientation Set-Asides in Massachusetts
Government contracts should go to the lowest bidder, not be set aside for a particular group. So it is unfortunate that Massachusetts’s governor is now…
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Less than 1 Percent of Federal Regulations Get Cost-Benefit Analysis
The Obama administration likes to assert that all the rules and regulations pouring out of Washington have positive net-benefits. Billions of dollars in postulated net…
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Virtuous Capitalism in Theory and Practice
Government is responsible for billions and billions of dollars of corruption and corporate welfare. Considering the potential returns on investment compared to honest entrepreneurship, it…
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Should a Billionaire Decide Where Pennsylvanians Can Gamble?
The casino industry has been good for my home state of Pennsylvania. For whatever ills one might claim goes along with gambling, the gaming industry…
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Net Neutrality Questions FCC Commissioners Need to Answer
In a House Energy & Commerce Committee oversight hearing on Tuesday, November 17, all five Federal Communications Commissioners will testify. Net neutrality, the FCC’s broad push…
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A Look Ahead to CEI’s Future
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The Mild, Mild West: Regulation in America
Over at the newly launched U.S. edition of the U.K.-based CapX wesbite, Wayne Crews and I have a short primer on U.S. regulation: America…
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CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation
Wednesday’s Veterans’ Day holiday made it a short work week, but the Federal Register still passed the 70,000-page mark, with new regulations covering everything from Flugzeugbaus to…
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RealClear Radio Hour: American Colossus and Private Alternatives
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Judge Allows Deposition of EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy
Clean Air Act §321(a) requires the EPA to monitor job losses due to the agency’s environmental regulations. In March 2014, Murray Energy, an Ohio-based coal…
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Senate Likely To Vote on Resolutions To Block EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Rules for Power Plants Next Week
The Senate is tentatively scheduled to take up the two resolutions of disapproval of the EPA’s greenhouse gas rules for new and existing power plants…
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Farewell and Toast to CEI’s Future
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CFPB’s Database Should Be Bipartisan Privacy Concern
The behemoth Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) played a big role in Tuesday night’s GOP presidential debate on Fox Business, both during the commercials and…
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Five Infuriating Facts about Federal Regulation
Each year, we produce Ten Thousand Commandments (10KC), an extensive report on the size, scope, and true cost of federal regulations. 10KC exposes the burdens put…
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Daily Fantasy Sports Betting: Gambling or Game of Skill?
That is the big question in New York today after that state’s attorney general issued a cease and desist order to DraftKings and FanDuel—the two…
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CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation
New rules last week covered everything from relaxed grape handling to unclaimed funerary objects.
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Churchill: A “Foolish Moth”, and FDR’s Raw Deal
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China Burns 17% More Coal Than Reported
China has been burning up to 17% more coal per year than previously reported, according to new data released by the Chinese government. New York’s…
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O Says No to Keystone XL
President Barack Obama on 6th November determined that the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline is not in the national interest and therefore denied the cross-border permit necessary…
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CEI FOIA Reveals Clinton Email Security NDA
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Bureau of Labor Statistics Releases October Jobs Report
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Text of Trans-Pacific Partnership Trade Pact Released
The office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) has released the complete text of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) – a huge trade pact…
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Passcode for Liberty: Why the Government Shouldn’t Restrict Encryption (Video)
Most Americans own a smartphone and use cloud computing services such as Gmail, Dropbox, and Facebook. Increasingly, we store sensitive data on our devices and…
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Who’s Playing Politics on the Keystone XL Pipeline?
“The White House on Tuesday said President Obama had no intention of bowing to a request from the company behind the Keystone XL oil pipeline…
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What Does the World Think of Capitalism?
The Legatum Institute in the U.K. has an important new international poll out about public attitudes towards capitalism and the business world. They hired YouGov to…
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Republicans Should Support Rep. King’s Amendment to Prohibit Davis-Bacon Requirements
The House of Representatives is voting on the Highway Trust Fund this week. Numerous amendments have been added to the bill. One that should garner…
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Don’t Spare the ROD: An Inventory of Resolutions of Disapproval under the Congressional Review Act
Before Thanksgiving Day, both chambers of Congress are likely to consider so-called “Resolutions of Disapproval” to attempt to reject major, cripplingly expensive Environmental Protection Agency regulations…
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Freddie Mac’s Loss Shows Need to Protect Taxpayers from GSE Raids
I wish baseball great Yogi Berra were still here—upon the release of Freddie Mac’s new quarterly report showing a sudden Q3 loss—so he could offer…
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Federal Menu Laws Need Some Common Sense
This week, the House Energy and Commerce committee will hold a mark-up hearing on the Common Sense Nutrition Disclosure Act (H.R. 2017), a bipartisan bill intended…
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Sell a Kidney, Save a Life
Last week I blogged about the idea that some things should not be part of a market economy, and highlighted one rather silly example of…