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The 2020 Election Actually Had Some Free-Market Victories
Neither presidential candidate has much interest in limited government. But over at National Review, I look at some neglected down-ballot victories…
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Regulatory Relief Needs Better Transparency
Getting rid of #NeverNeeded regulations is one of the most important policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The short-term benefits are obvious, but the…
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James Madison on Why Politics Ruins Everything
Politics has a way of ruining everything. Even kind and intelligent people go through an instant metamorphosis when the conversation changes to politics. Their body…
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America Really Is Revolutionary
Several scholars I respect, including Daniel Hannan in his 2013 book Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World, have argued that…
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This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
The Los Angeles Dodgers won baseball’s World Series. GDP numbers bounced back in a big way, though the economy is still smaller than…
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Record GDP Numbers Need Context: Good news, but More to Do
Most of the talk about today’s GDP numbers will be related to the election. It shouldn’t. Presidents don’t run the economy; hundreds of millions…
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New CEI Paper: Antitrust Policy in Europe, Lessons for America
Today, CEI is releasing a new paper on antitrust policy in the European Union by Swiss competition commissioner Henrique Schneider. Europe’s approach to competition…
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This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
In the news last week, the Justice Department filed an antitrust case against Google. It is the highest-profile antitrust case since the 1998-2002 Microsoft case.
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Not the Strongest Case: DOJ’s Google Antitrust Complaint
On Tuesday, the Department of Justice (DOJ) filed an antitrust complaint against Google. It marks the beginning of the first major monopolization case since the…
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This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
It was a four-day week due to Columbus Day or Indigenous People’s Day—the controversy over which was just one of the things people were outraged…
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Tit-for-Tat Tariffs Don’t Work: Boeing and Airbus Show Why
A 16 year-long aerospace subsidies dispute between the United States and the European Union began another round this week. The U.S. claims that the EU’s…
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This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
It was another volatile pre-election week. A still-symptomatic President Trump returned to the White House from Walter Reed hospital during prime time. More key staffers…
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The House Judiciary’s Antitrust Reports and Predatory Pricing
It is human nature to fear what we do not understand. And if there is anything politicians do not understand, it is markets. This is…
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Jean-Baptiste Say on Manufacturing Nostalgia and Industrial Policy
In his 1803 A Treatise on Political Economy, Jean-Baptiste Say writes: "Production is the creation, not of matter, but of utility." That captures one of…
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This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
President Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis marked the first of what will likely be many October surprises. Congress agreed on one spending bill to avoid another shutdown,…
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Senators Introduce Regulatory Commission Bill
CEI’s approach to regulatory reform has an overarching theme: It is not enough to get rid of this or that harmful regulation. For the benefits…
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New Paper: Antitrust Regulation is #NeverNeeded
My colleague Jessica Melugin and I, along with our former colleague Patrick Hedger, have a new paper out today, “Repeal #NeverNeeded Antitrust Laws that…
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This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
Scientists may have found potential chemical evidence of life on Venus—phosphine gas, which in Venusian conditions may well have been produced by anaerobic (non-oxygen-using)…
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Trade News: WTO Rules China Tariffs Violate Rules, Aluminum Tariffs Dropped, No Trade Deal with EU
Usually policy-related news slows down near elections; nobody wants to rock the boat. This has not been the case with trade policy. Three important stories…
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This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
It was a four-day work week due to Labor Day. There were massive fires along the West coast, and Congress declined to pass a $500…
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This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
As Labor Day marked the unofficial end of summer, the unemployment rate went back down to 8.4 percent, and Attorney General Barr announced that the…
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This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
COVID-19 deaths passed 200,000 in the United States, and are roughly 1 million worldwide. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s passing sparked a fresh Supreme…
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This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
COVID-19 deaths passed 200,000 in the United States, and are roughly 1 million worldwide. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s passing sparked a fresh Supreme…
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Retro Review: William H. McNeill – Plagues and Peoples (1976)
William McNeill was one of the 20th century’s leading big-picture world historians. Interconnectedness is a major theme of his work. Plagues and Peoples applies McNeill’s…
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Retro Reviews: Azar Gat with Alexander Yakobson – Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism (2013)
Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism is the rare book that makes the reader see the world differently, permanently.
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This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
The last week saw another political convention, another police shooting, and two hurricanes. There was at least one major positive story, though. Polio has finally…
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This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
The spring 2020 Unified Agenda was published on August 17. Due four months ago, it collects every rulemaking agency’s plans for upcoming regulations. The number…
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This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
Kamala Harris was announced as the Democratic dvice-presidential candidate, a massive storm swept through the Midwest, and Congress is out of session until September. The…
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New CEI Video: Eliminating Never Needed Regulations to Help with Recovery
In a new CEI video, Kent Lassman talks about three things agencies can do rein in regulations that are hindering the COVID-19 response and making…
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This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
August’s 2020 disaster list so far includes a massive warehouse explosion in Beirut that killed more than 100 people and Hurricane Isaias. In positive news,…
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Cautious Optimism on July Jobs Numbers: Prudence, Resilience Will Aid Recovery
In July, 1.8 million new jobs were created, and the unemployment rate dropped to 10.2 percent. That is a welcome follow-up to the second quarter’s…
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Canadian Aluminum Tariff Increase is #NeverNeeded, Should Be Repealed Instead
President Trump on Thursday announced he will reimpose 10 percent aluminum tariffs against Canada. Originally enacted in 2018 on national security grounds, the tax was…
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This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
What a week. COVID-19 deaths passed 150,000. Second-quarter GDP declined 9.5 percent from a year ago and 7 percent from the previous quarter. In more uplifting…
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2020 Second Quarter GDP Decline Is Worst in U.S. History—But Not 32.9 Percent
The good news is that the second quarter’s GDP numbers aren’t nearly as scary as the more dramatic headlines are saying. The economy has not…
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Observations from the Tech Antitrust Hearing
This post collects some observations from yesterday’s lengthy House Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law hearings with the chief executives of Amazon,…
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This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
Confirmed COVID-19 cases in the United States surpassed 4 million last week. Congress returned to session after its July 4 break and is putting together…
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New #NeverNeeded Paper: Price Gouging
Massive shortages happened almost instantly when it became clear that the coronavirus would require a nationwide lockdown. Both Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and an Amazon…
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Deregulate to Stimulate: #NeverNeeded Regulations Are Harming Health and Economy
The Code of Federal Regulations contains more than 1.1 million regulatory restrictions. State and local governments have additional rules. Some of those rules have a…
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How to Spot a #NeverNeeded Regulation
Regulatory reform is one of the most important weapons there is for fighting COVID-19 and for aiding the economic recovery after the worst passes. Where…
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This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
After another busy week for agencies, the 2020 Federal Register is on pace to be 79,121 pages. None of those pages include the Spring 2020…
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How to Make #NeverNeeded-Style Reforms Stick
There are lots of good regulatory reform ideas out there. The ideas with the most staying power share a common theme. They don’t just treat…
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This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
New COVID cases continued to rise, and the Supreme Court handed down a number of controversial decisions to end its term. Regulatory agencies issued new…
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New #NeverNeeded Paper: Regulatory Reform
Regulatory reform is one of the most important policy responses to the COVID-19 crisis. Removing obstacles to health care can save lives. Removing barriers against…
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New #NeverNeeded Paper: Remove or Reduce Tariffs
Trade barriers are an obvious #NeverNeeded candidate for removal during a pandemic and a recession. They make medical supplies scarcer and more expensive. They raise…
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This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
The USMCA trade agreement came into effect on July 1, and three states increased their minimum wages. The unemployment rate went down to 11.1 percent.
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Managed Trade: USMCA Comes into Effect Today
The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) comes into effect today. USMCA’s policy changes are modest, and its economic impact will be small. But it sets a…
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This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
Consumer spending rose 8.2 percent in May, a new record that gives hope for a quicker economic recovery. On the other hand, new coronavirus cases…
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Podcast: Reforming #NeverNeeded Regulations
The John Locke Foundation has released a Rebound Plan for North Carolina, where it is based—the basketball reference is a nice touch. It contains reform…
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Supreme Court Declines to Hear Steel Tariff Case: Time for Congress to Act
President Trump’s steel tariffs were intended to boost U.S. manufacturing. They backfired to the point where a group of steel-using industries sued to stop the…
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This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
Trade protectionists have taken to calling free traders soft on China. According to John Bolton’s forthcoming book, it turns out to be the other way…
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Has Trump Been a Net Deregulator?
Pierre Lemieux, in Regulation magazine, draws from the new 2020 edition of Ten Thousand Commandments to estimate the Trump administration's net impact on regulation. Trump’s…
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This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
The rate of new coronavirus cases increased last week, adding a note of caution to tentative efforts at reopening. Regulatory agencies issued new final regulations…
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Unintended Consequences of Price Gouging
Price gouging legislation routinely backfires. Price controls make shortages worse. In a crisis, this is especially harmful. And even if price gouging legislation were to…
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#NeverNeed Regulations and the Coronavirus
What is the appropriate public policy response to COVID-19 crisis? In a new short video, Kent Lassman makes the case for lifting government barriers that…
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This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
Friday’s 13.3 percent unemployment rate announcement was actually good news, and says much about the more than 600 regulations waived so far at various levels…
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Pandemics, #NeverNeeded Regulations, and Ten Thousand Commandments
At Inside Sources, Wayne Crews and Ryan Young have an op-ed summarizing the main findings of Wayne’s new 2020 edition of Ten Thousand Commandments, plus…
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Time to Permanently Sunset Waived #NeverNeeded Regulations
Many regulations have proven especially harmful during the COVID-19 crisis. But many of those waivers are temporary. Those temporary waivers should be made permanent. One…
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This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
CEI released the 2020 edition of Wayne Crews’s annual Ten Thousand Commandments report, which gives a big-picture view of the federal regulatory state. Regulatory agencies…
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Out Now: The 2020 Edition of Ten Thousand Commandments
The 2020 edition of Ten Thousand Commandments is out. Wayne Crews’s annual report gives a big picture view of the federal regulatory state. There has…
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Trump’s Executive Order on #NeverNeeded Regulations
In an op-ed in National Review, CEI Senior Fellow Ryan Young takes a look at President Trump’s new Executive Order directing agencies to get rid…
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This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
President Trump issued an Executive Order encouraging agencies to keep #NeverNeeded regulations waived during the coronavirus permanently off the books. Meanwhile, regulatory agencies issued new…
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Retro Reviews: Common Sense Political Economy
This review of Philip Henry Wicksteed’s 1910 textbook The Common Sense of Political Economy was originally published at Inertia Wins. Wicksteed was a leading economic…
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This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
Retail sales declined 16.4 percent in April, setting a new record low for the second month in a row. Congress returned to Washington, putting the…
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Time for a Federal Price Gouging Law?
Amazon’s vice president of public policy calls for a federal price gouging law in a recent post over at Amazon’s in-house blog. This is a…
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This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
The first full week of May featured a continuing pandemic, the biggest unemployment increase in U.S. history, a hailstorm in the D.C. area, freezing temperatures…
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This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
The 2020 Federal Register passed 25,000 pages, and is poised to surpass last year’s page count by more than 1,000 pages. The number of final…
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This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
New unemployment applications were down to 4.4 million last week. This is still more than an order of magnitude greater than the pre-coronavirus record. With…
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Trump Defers Tariff Payments for Struggling Businesses: A Good Start, More Needed
President Trump has deferred selected tariff payments for companies experiencing coronavirus-related hardship. It came after more than two weeks of starts, stops, denials, and reversals.
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Retro Review: Vlad Tarko’s Biography of Elinor Ostrom
Elinor Ostrom’s pioneering work on “polycentrism,” the existence of multiple sources of government authority or power within a single political system, is especially relevant during…
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Congress Has Already Introduced Bills to Reform #NeverNeeded Regulations
Policy makers have already waived more than 350 regulations and counting that were slowing the pandemic response and harming economic recovery. But with a 185,000-page…
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This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
Please do all you can to keep yourself and your loved ones safe. Hopefully Congress will also act on some of the #NeverNeeded regulations that…
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California’s #NeverNeeded AB5 Is Harming the Coronavirus Response
California’s AB5 law was already backfiring before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. It has cost thousands of jobs—many of which are home-based. During a time of…
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How to Spot a #NeverNeeded Regulation
Not every regulation on the books is directly harming the COVID-19 response. There are a lot of other regulations that need reform, but the #NeverNeeded…
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This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
When Congress convenes next week, it will likely begin work on a Phase 4 stimulus bill. CEI analysts have made the case that addressing #NeverNeeded…
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Deregulation Is an Effective Pandemic Defense
In a new op-ed in RealClearMarkets, Iain Murray and Ryan Young outline the major points of CEI’s just-released #NeverNeeded paper, which identifies regulations harmful to…
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Retro Review: The Year Civilization Collapsed
This review of Eric H. Cline’s 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, was originally published at Inertia Wins. Despite covering events in the ancient past,…
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This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
Quarantine and stay-at-home orders will likely last through the end of April in many places. In more heartening news, governments are rolling back numerous #NeverNeeded…
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The #NeverNeeded Regulatory Reduction Commission
In a new Washington Examiner op ed, CEI Senior Fellow Ryan Young proposes a Regulatory Reduction Commission to act as a permanent watchdog to prevent #NeverNeeded…
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Trump Administration Suspends Tariffs, but Not Confusion, for Three Months
On Friday evening, the Trump administration announced it would stop collecting all tariff revenue for three months, effective immediately. In ordinary times, the news would…
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This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
Coronavirus deaths topped 1,000 in the U.S. last week, while new cases continued to double every few days. Meanwhile, agencies issued new final regulations ranging…
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This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
Governments are responding to the coronavirus with a getting rid of harmful regulations on restaurants, schools, and stores. Most of these rules were never needed…
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Getting Rid of #NeverNeeded Regulations Hindering Coronavirus Response
What can Washington do to minimize harm from the coronavirus? Some of the best policy responses are coming not from imposing new regulations, but from…
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This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
It was a rough week. Coronavirus infections and deaths continued to climb. Wall Street is officially in a bear market, and Congress and President Trump…
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Coronavirus and the Limits of “Flash Policy”
The coronavirus outbreak is serious, and it deserves a serious response. If you’re healthy, help people out. If you have elderly relatives or neighbors, reach…
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This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
Coronavirus continued to spread, the Democratic presidential field significantly narrowed, and the former head of the UAW was charged with embezzlement. Meanwhile, agencies issued new…
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This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
The coronavirus outbreak began to infect financial markets as well as people, with stock markets having their worst week since at least 2008. The number…
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The Minimum Wage Tax Increase
By far the most common criticism of minimum wages is that they cost jobs.
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This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
During the four-day week, Lawrence Tesler passed away. The underappreciated inventor created the cut, copy, and paste functions on computers. The Hair Club for Men…
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This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
Spring Training began for all 30 Major League Baseball teams, bringing joy across the nation. Meanwhile, agencies issued new final regulations ranging from grains ounce…
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The Spectrum Case against AB5
California’s Assembly Bill 5 (AB5) is intended to classify more independent contractors as formal employees. The goal is for workers to get higher wages and…
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Antitrust Enforcement in 4-D
Competition is an ongoing discovery process. The reason firms exist is not to enable or restrict competition. It is to reduce transaction costs. There is…
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This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
The impeachment trial ended the way everyone expected, the State of the Union address happened, and the coronavirus outbreak intensified. Agencies issued new final regulations…
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House to Vote on PRO Act This Week
The House of Representatives is expected to vote this week on the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act. The legislation would essentially nullifies 28…
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This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
The impeachment trial continued, Brexit happened, President Trump signed the USMCA trade agreement, and the 2020 Federal Register topped 5,000 pages. Agencies issued new final…
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This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
The Federal Register had a four-day week due to Martin Luther King Day, but agencies still found time to issue new final regulations ranging from…
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How Antitrust Intervention Backfires
Antitrust policy interventions into the market rarely work as intended.
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This Week in Ridiculous Regulations
In a busy week, President Trump signed Phase One of a trade agreement with China on Wednesday. On Thursday, the Senate ratified the USMCA trade…
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Senate Passes USMCA, Sets Bad Precedent for Future Agreements with China, UK, EU
The USMCA trade agreement passed the Senate today. USMCA is valuable damage control. Three years of unpredictable tariff increases, threats of increases, and diplomatic tensions…
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Phase One Trade Agreement with China: Tariff Stability, at the Cost of Managed Trade
Phase One of a trade deal with China has enormous value as damage control against further tariffs, but it comes at a cost. The Trump…
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Minimum Wages Rise Across the Country
Twenty four states rang in 2020 with minimum wage increases. Most of the increases are modest, so the tradeoffs will be, too. But there was…