Blog
Federal Agency Seeks to Create Direct Path for Ousting Unwanted Unions
National labor policy guarantees employees the right to form a union to promote their interests. There are clear, longstanding rules and procedures that provide a…
Blog
Senate Votes Down Green New Deal, Alternatives Proliferate
The Senate voted on March 26th on a variant of the Green New Deal resolution. No Senators voted yes, 57 voted no, and 43 voted present. The…
Blog
VIDEO: What Do Entrepreneurs Actually Do?
Our friends at the Foundation for Economic Education have a new video that gives a great short introduction to entrepreneuship, and what businesspeople actually do…
Blog
Lyft and the ‘Cheers’ IPOs: How Overregulation Leaves Middle-Class Investors Behind
After much anticipation, Lyft finally went public today, opening on NASDAQ at $87.24 per share—well above its initial public offering price of $72. Lyft’s market…
Blog
Response to Conservative Supporter of Kigali Amendment
The Kigali Amendment is a United Nations environmental measure proposed by the Obama administration, and that ought to be reason enough for conservatives to be…
Blog
Bank Regulators Must Correct Flawed Volcker Rule Proposal
As my colleague Devin Watkins discussed earlier this month, a number of federal administrative agencies are refusing to correctly implement a crucial piece of regulatory…
Blog
Department of Transportation Should Rescind Crew-Size ‘Featherbedding’ Proposal
Unions in the railroad industry have a long history of “featherbedding,” the pejorative term for the practice of creating pointless make-work jobs. Most infamous was…
Blog
Union Subsidy Faces Judicial Scrutiny
“When you’re hired as a teacher, you should be teaching,” said Judge Jose L. Fuentes of the New Jersey Court of Appeals. This statement is…
Blog
Profiles in Courage: McConnell Video Mocks Green New Deal Advocates
Yesterday, the U.S. Senate voted against advancing Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-NY) Green New Deal resolution to the Senate floor for debate…
Blog
America’s Tech Regulators Should Not Follow Europe’s Lead
This week The Economist endorsed European “tech doctrine”—a combination of antitrust, tax, privacy, and regulatory policies that is rapidly being imposed on a mostly American…
Blog
Activists Build False Narrative to Fight Trump Reforms at EPA
Expect accusations to fly tomorrow as Democrats attempt to build a narrative that the Trump Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) wants to skirt science to allow…
Blog
User Fees, Rather than Tax Dollars, Can Promote Airport Efficiency and Lower Airfares
This morning, I testified before the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives at a hearing titled, “The Cost of Doing…
Blog
This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
As tempers flared over how many “chuggas” to say before “choo-choo,” the 2019 Federal Register topped the 10,000-page mark last week and the number of…
Blog
News Media Go Along with Greenpeace’s Attempt to Pretend Patrick Moore Not a Founder
For years Greenpeace has pretended that Patrick Moore was not one of the original co-founders of the radical environmental pressure group. More recently, a number of…
Blog
Senate Democratic Sponsors of Green New Deal Heroically Plan to Vote ‘Present’
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has scheduled a floor vote on the Green New Deal resolution for the week of March 24th. Democrats were caught…
Blog
Trump Administration Trying to Please Everyone on Renewable Fuel Standard
In trying to please both the supporters and the critics of the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), the Trump administration may end up pleasing neither. …
Blog
VIDEO: Building a Living on eBay
At a time when socialism seems determined to crawl back from the dustbin of history, it can be a challenge defending the moral legitimacy—and humanity—of…
Blog
Ignorance Is Strength, Dissent Is Stalinist
In an op-ed published yesterday in the UK Guardian, Michael Mann and Bob Ward warn Americans not to be “fooled by the Stalinist tactics being…
Blog
Brexit Brinkmanship
There is plenty of blame to go around for Britain’s current Brexit chaos. In a recent post, I pointed to how the Prime Minister’s handling…
Blog
CEI Supports EPA’s Proposed Revision of Power Plant Rule
Yesterday I submitted comments on behalf of the Competitive Enterprise Institute supporting EPA’s proposal to dramatically scale back the agency’s 2015 rule establishing “carbon pollution”…
Blog
Maryland’s Nanny State Targets Foam Cups and Containers
Maryland consumers may soon be deprived of one of my favorite products: plastic foam coffee cups. The Maryland House of Delegates has already passed a…
Blog
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…
Blog
Why National Right to Work Act Is Necessary
No worker should be compelled to join or pay dues or fees to a union just to get or keep a job. The U.S. Supreme…
Blog
This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
President Trump has declared passing the new NAFTA/USMCA as his top legislative priority, but congressional ratification will not be automatic. Mexico and Canada are also…
Blog
Interior States Take on Coastal States over Climate-Related Project Approvals
When the state of Washington rejected a proposed new coal export facility in 2017, it probably expected the usual appeals from the project’s developers. But it…
Blog
Washington Post’s Climate Alarmism Reaches the Sports Page
The news and opinion pages of the Washington Post have for years been filled with climate alarmism, but now it is spreading to the sports…
Blog
VIDEO: Raising the Steaks on Jones Act Reform
Our friends at the Cato Institute are continuing their valiant fight against the wasteful protectionism of the Jones Act, a 99-year old law that requires…
Blog
Democrats Invent New Joint Employer Controversy
There is a new invented controversy involving the National Labor Relations Board’s joint employer rulemaking, which seeks to clarify the definition of joint employer liability…
Blog
VIDEO: Why Antitrust Is a Problem, Not a Solution
With major political figures proposing the forced breakup of some of the nation’s most successful companies, the once-arcane field of antitrust law is now at…
Blog
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…
Blog
Agencies Failing to Follow Law on Key Financial Regulation
The Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 is one of the worst pieces of legislation to have become law in recent history. It created the Consumer Financial…
Blog
States Challenge Federal Internet Gambling Ban
This January, the Department of Justice (DOJ) issued an opinion that threatens legal online gambling in the U.S. The tenuous rationale on which the opinion…
Blog
This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
Last week was low-drama by recent standards, but still had some important developments. The U.S. trade deficit set a record for the second year in…
Blog
Maryland Considers Another Anti-Gas Pipeline Measure
The abundant natural gas produced in Pennsylvania and West Virginia could do a lot of good for East Coast states—reducing electric bills, improving reliability, and…
Blog
Defense Establishment Blasts Proposal for Trump Climate Review
In a letter released earlier this week, 58 “former national security leaders” urge President Trump not to approve the formation of a panel to review…
Blog
VIDEO: Deirdre McCloskey on “Bourgeois Dignity”
Given that it is International Women’s Day and almost CEI’s 35th anniversary, today is an excellent day to celebrate the impressive legacy of economist (and…
Blog
Labor Department Issues Proposed Update to Overtime Requirements
Last night, the Department of Labor’s (DOL) long-awaited proposed rule on overtime requirements was unveiled. The DOL intentionally wrote the rule to withstand legal challenge,…
Blog
Federal Labor Ruling Prohibits Unions Charging Non-Members for Lobbying
It has long been the law of the land that labor unions may only collect agency fees, or forced union dues, from non-union members to…
Blog
Higher Taxes, Wasteful Spending Not Solutions to Infrastructure Problems
In recent years, there have been increasing calls to raise federal fuel excise tax rates in order to address what many have called an infrastructure…
Blog
California Supreme Court Upholds Pension Reform, Punts on ‘California Rule’
On Monday, March 4, the California Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, upheld a major provision in the state’s 2012 pension reform legislation, but punted…
Blog
E-Cigarette Puritans Risk Lives
Tobacco companies faced a savage backlash in the 1990s when the public realized they willfully misled the world about the dangers of smoking. Yet when…
Blog
Florida Bill Shines Light on Union Subsidy
Taxpayer dollars should be used to benefit the general public, not special interest groups. Yet, the state of Florida doles out a massive subsidy to…
Blog
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…
Blog
Three Reasons Kigali Amendment Favors China over America
Beginning in the 1970s, many policymakers became concerned that the refrigerants used in most air conditioners and refrigerators were leaking into the air and depleting the…
Blog
What Do Economists Think about the Minimum Wage?
The playwright George Bernard Shaw once said that if you laid all the world’s economists end to end, they would not reach a conclusion. President…
Blog
House Democrats Take on Department of Energy over Appliance Efficiency Standards
The Department of Energy (DOE) has been regulating the energy efficiency of home appliances since 1987, ostensibly for the benefit of consumers, but the Obama-era…
Blog
This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
The Michael Cohen hearing shenanigans gobbled up the headlines, but actual substantive news happened regarding talks with China and North Korea—in particular, a planned tariff…
Blog
EPA Finally Initiates Air Quality Assessment of Renewable Fuel Standard
The Environmental Protection Agency recently announced that it is taking comment on the air quality impacts of the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) and will complete a study…
Blog
McCarthy Picks Republicans for Select Committee on Climate Crisis
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) on February 28th announced the names of the Republicans he has chosen to serve on the Select Committee on the Climate…
Blog
Trade, Job Losses, and Comparable Wages
One of the frequent objections posted by those who are concerned about free trade is that it leads to job losses. This is true. However,…