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National Labor Policy Increasingly Grants Big Labor Privileges as Union Membership Declines
A recent press release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the percentage of American workers in labor unions dropped again. In 2014, only…
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Gas Tax Mission Creep: From User-Pays to Carbon Tax?
The Niskanen Center is a new libertarian think tank that we at CEI look forward to working with on a number of issues. However, one where…
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CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation
Even in a shortened work week due to Martin Luther King Day, federal agencies still put out 40 final regulations and more than 50 proposed…
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Did Slanted NPR Story Lead to Hasty, Illegal Education Department Sexual Harassment Rules?
Bad things can happen when an agency (like the Education Department) throws caution to the wind and regulates based on slanted media coverage from National…
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Oregon Blueberry Farmers Prevail over Department of Labor Overreach
A majority of attention paid to federal agency overreach in the labor policy arena during the Obama administration has focused on National Labor Relations Board…
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President Obama Says We’ve “Turned the Page” – Really?
In previewing his 2015 State of the Union Address, President Obama said … "2014 was the fastest year for job growth since the 1990s.
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European Food Safety Authority Confirms BPA Safety—Again
The debate over the chemical Bisphenol A (BPA) has raged for years, with environmental activists continually hyping the risks associated with it. Used to…
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Obama Seeks More Double Taxation and Job-Killing Taxes in State of the Union Address
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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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CEI Reacts to President’s SOTU Address
Lawson Bader reacts to the State of the Union Address: “Whenever a president starts talking about economic inequality and more ways the government can help,…
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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…
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“I’ll Gladly Pay Future Generations for my Pension Check Today”
“I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today” was the trademark utterance of J. Wellington Wimpy, the mooching character from the old Popeye cartoons.
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Fraternal Order of Police Once Again Opposes Internet Gambling Ban
Once again, the Fraternal Order of Police expressed their staunch opposition to a federal prohibition on Internet gambling. In a letter sent to Sens. Harry Reid…
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Wisconsin Public Employees Exercise Freedom to Choose
Wisconsin unions have spent the better part of the past three years denouncing Governor Scott Walker's signature public-sector collective bargaining reform law, Act 10.
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Towards a Humbler Monetary Policy
Is it possible for opposite policies to both be wrong? Over at the Washington Examiner, I argue that it is. The U.S. is ending…
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United Streetcar: The Solyndra of Transportation
Over the weekend, The Washington Post published a fascinating article about the rise and fall of United Streetcar, an Oregon-based manufacturer that owes its very existence to the…
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CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation
Regulators had much to be thankful for during the short Thanksgiving work week, with new rules covering everything from grocery store ads to wireless signal…
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Thanksgiving and Markets
When the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony celebrated the first Thanksgiving on Massachusetts’ Cape Cod, they shared a feast with the Pokanoket tribe, in thanks to…
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Washington’s Thanksgiving Turkeys: Here Are All of the White House’s 200 Economically Significant Rules
As usual, the president will pardon a turkey again this year for Thanksgiving; For us turkey eaters, though, our federal holiday treat is lots and lots…
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Michael Mann Case Is about First Amendment, Not Global Warming
This morning the D.C. Court of Appeals heard oral arguments in Michael E. Mann v. Competitive Enterprise Institute, National Review, et al. CEI General Counsel…
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How to Reform an Antiquated Union Model
Vincent Vernuccio of the Mackinac Center has written a report that addresses the major problems of an American labor movement on life support.
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GAO: Union Official Time Costs Underreported
In October, the Office of Personnel Management released the long-awaited report that estimates the cost and amount of time federal employees spend on union activities…
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The Federal Register Topped 70,000 Pages Today
The Federal Register, where federal agencies’ daily rules, regulations, notices, “guidance,” bulletins and other material accumulate each day, just topped 70,000 pages for 2014. 70,052…
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New Field Study Confirms Neonicotinoids Have Little Impact on Honeybees
As the Ontario provincial government in Canada considers policies that may force farmers to stop using, or drastically reduce use of, a class of pesticides called…
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NLRB’s Mysterious New Member Dodges Important Questions, But Stresses Need for Fully Staffed Board
On December 16, Nancy Schiffer’s term on the National Labor Relations Board will end. Sharon Block was set to take her place but the Obama…
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CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation
It was a bit of a slow week as these things go, but regulators still published new rules on everything from stress testing to sage…
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Adelson’s Online Gambling Ban Losing Political Steam
It was a bad week for Sheldon Adelson. The billionaire casino owner has said he’ll spend whatever it takes to stop the spread of legal…
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Taxpayer-Funded Green Ministries in Prince George’s County Violate the Constitution
Reporters like separation of church and state, unless it’s progressives violating it. Then, they lose interest in the concept. A recent Washington Post story cheerily reported on churches…
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President Obama’s Executive Overreach Compounded by Regulatory Dark Matter
In recent years the Federal Register has topped out at well over 70,000 pages, two times at more than 80,000. Each year over 3,500 rules issue from…
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A Big Payoff for Patient Investors
There’s a fascinating story in The New York Times this week about pharmaceutical companies and the process of discovering new drugs. Fifteen years ago, the…
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Corporate Action against Disease Points Way to Resiliency Strategy for Developing World
In a piece at The Freeman today, I examine how corporations in the developing world have reacted to the threat to their workers from diseases such…
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Don’t Get “Grubered” by the Lauren McFerran Nomination to NLRB
Chief Labor Counsel and Deputy Staff Director of the jurisdictional Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee Lauren McFerran has her confirmation hearing at 10:00AM…
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New NLRB Nominee Would Strengthen Big Labor’s Agenda
The left has a troubling Big Labor agenda that can only be accomplished by a pen-and-phone strategy to evade the U.S. Senate and House. The…
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Liberals and Conservatives Challenge Overreach of Dodd-Frank’s FSOC on MetLife
As CEI brings suit before the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals tomorrow challenging the constitutionality of unaccountable bureaucracies created by the Dodd-Frank “financial reform” law…
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Congress Needs to Act to Bring about a Drone Revolution
Earlier this morning, a full panel of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) overturned a previous ruling from an NTSB administrative law judge in the Pirker case. In Pirker, the…
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Crowdfunding Is Entrepreneurship’s History and its Future
In America and around the world, aspiring entrepreneurs are meeting their colleagues and their mentors in official and unofficial sessions of Global Entrepreneurship Week. Created…
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Biased Anti-Bias Regulations
Anti-bias regulations are sometimes biased and at odds with civil liberties. The Cato Institute’s Walter Olson gives a recent example from a left-leaning region in Spain:…
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How the “Stupid” American Public Pays for Gruber’s Deception
The Washington Times points out that Jonathan Gruber, our nation’s most famous sufferer of foot-in-mouth-disease, has profited greatly from the “stupid” American public to whom he…
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CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation
The Federal Register took Tuesday off to observe Veterans’ Day. The short week was still a busy one, with Thursday’s edition alone totaling 783 pages. On to…
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Gruber’s “Speakola” Virus and Pelosi’s Selective Memory
Obamacare supporters say that when deciding King v. Burwell and the related Halbig v. Burwell, challenges to the law that the Competitive Enterprise Institute helped fund and coordinate,…
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CFPBs Prepaid Debit Card Rules Will Harm Low-Income Consumers
Today’s action by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to issue unprecedented burdens on providers of prepaid debit cards shows why the bureau needs to be held…
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USPS Data Breach Highlights Union Hypocrisy
Recently, a United States Postal Service computer system experienced a security breach. The result: around 800,000 current and former USPS employees' private information, including their…
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Obama’s Meaningless China Deal on Climate Change
It will be up to future Presidents and Congresses after he leaves office in January 2017 to decide whether to require the emissions reductions.
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Minneapolis Adopts Unconstitutional Racial Quotas in School Discipline
Given a choice between following the law, and doing what a bureaucrat with power over them wants, many people will do what the bureaucrat wants,…
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Miami-Dade Contracts Keep Paying Government Employees to Perform Union Business
In the summer of 2013, Miami-Dade County Property Appraiser, and current Lieutenant Governor of Florida, Carlos Lopez-Cantera tried to fire an employee who wasn't showing…
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Obamacare: Cert Granted on Friday, and Gruber III on Saturday
It was very good news, delivered in a very surprising way. Shortly after noon last Friday, the Supreme Court announced that it would review our…
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The Long National Nightmare of Dodd-Frank Is Almost Over
One of the prime reasons for the continuing economic uncertainty that bedevils so many ordinary Americans is the presence in law of the Dodd-Frank Act…
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Right to Work Should Be on the Agenda in Ohio and Wisconsin
One takeaway from the midterm elections is politicians who support labor reform, which protects worker choice and reduce union coercive power, should not fear political…
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CEI’s Battered Business Bureau: The Week in Regulation
Election week was a busy one on the regulatory front, with new rules on everything from fuel taxes to wireless spectrum. With the Senate changing…
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The Good, the Bad, and the Public Sector Unions
Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Steve Malanga has commented on the growing differences between private and public sector unions. Malanga describes the various instances…
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The Fall of the Berlin Wall, 25 Years Later
This weekend marks the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. While much is going to be written about this quarter-century anniversary, my colleague…