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CEI leads coalition supporting OCC preemption of Illinois Interchange Fee Prohibition Act
CEI today sent a letter to Jonathan Gould, the Comptroller of the Currency, cosigned by 22 other free market groups, supporting his office’s efforts…
Blog
Let’s put the next SpaceX in our 401(k)s before its launch onto public markets
As Artemis II achieved liftoff for the first moon voyage in more than 50 years, space news also rocked the investment world with the breaking…
News Release
Statement of Support for the Unfunded Mandates Accountability and Transparency Act
The Unfunded Mandates Accountability and Transparency Act (UMATA) represents a timely and necessary modernization of federal oversight. Nearly three decades ago, the original and overwhelmingly…
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National Review
Obama’s Idea of Transparency
Chris Horner is mentioned in a National Review article about the Obama administration’s lack of transparency: The Internal Revenue Service’s handling of the Lois Lerner…
Investor's Business Daily
States Tire Of Regulatory Overreach, Take Obama EPA To Court
William Yeatman is mentioned in an Investor's Business Daily article discussing why 12 states are suing the Environmental Protection Agency over proposed rules on greenhouse-gas emissions:…
Investor's Business Daily
Big Government Can’t Keep Up In Digital Era
Article by Michael Barone Earlier this week, I was thinking of writing a column about the lying and duplicity of ObamaCare backers who argued that…
Blog
The Let Me Google That for You Act
When it comes to government transparency, more is better. As a general principle, the government should make public as many of its documents as possible…
Austin American Statesman
Texans Should Beware of Internet Sales Tax
Texas is one of the nation’s best states for doing business, according to a recent CNBC survey. Lone Star lawmakers deserve credit for the pro-growth…
Blog
New Study Estimates around $70 billion in Financial Regulatory Costs
Complying with regulations is part of the cost of doing business. For bigger businesses that can absorb those costs (or rather, pass them on to…
Forbes
SEC Crowdfunding Barriers At South By Southwest
In mid-July, South by Southwest (SXSW) – the Austin-based yearly festival that brings together the creators of film, music and technology every March – trekked…
LA Times
Lawyers Challenging Health Subsidies Seek Quick Supreme Court Ruling
Lawyers challenging President Obama's healthcare law filed a quick appeal with the Supreme Court on Thursday, urging justices to take up the issue this fall…
Forbes
Executive Branch Power In The Crosshairs As GOP Readies Vote On Lawsuit Against Obama
Obama favors Executive Orders. Approval ratings seem to suggest the public favors Anti-Executive Orders. Increasingly, “the silken bands of mild government” that…
Human Events
Of Obsolete Regulations and Post-Prohibition Haggis
What comes to mind when you think of Scotland? Bagpipes, certainly, perhaps Scotch whisky, maybe William Wallace (or at least a version that looks suspiciously…
Blog
The American (Business) Revolution
On our nation’s 238th birthday, a flood of public events, political speeches, and TV specials will remind us of the courage of our colonial ancestors…
Blog
Ex-Im’s Invitation to Corruption
When government has a lot of money and power, it is natural for people to curry its favor. It is just as natural for those…
Human Events
1984 was an Enlightening Year
This year marks a quarter century since the collapse of the Berlin Wall. And that got me to thinking about how the world has changed…
Blog
Cantor’s Loss a Warning Shot to Supporters of Ex-Im Bank and Johnson-Crapo
Defying conventional wisdom as he often does, Pulitzer prize-winning pundit George F. Will disputed the notion that in the wake of the shocking primary loss…
Forbes
Can Ralph Nader Get Progressives and Libertarians to Make Common Cause?
Eighty years old and still full of piss and vinegar, Ralph Nader should perhaps add honey to his repertoire, as he attempts to woo libertarians,…
The American Spectator
Exporting Solyndras?
The New York Times’ crusading columnist Joe Nocera is an unlikely supporter of crony capitalism. Yet this week he has come out unabashedly in favor of the…
Human Events
Government and Baseball
Have you heard the one about attending a boxing match and a hockey game breaking out? Good jokes always contain elements of truth to…
Business Insider Australia
How A ‘Bunch Of Commies’ Are Forcing The Fortune 500 To Stop Destroying Rain Forests, Overfishing, And Burning Fossil Fuels
Even Greenpeace’s detractors have taken note of the organisation’s newfound potency. Fred Smith, former president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and founder of the…
Forbes
There’s A Way To Pay Off America’s Budget Deficits That Is Easy, And Wholly Painless
Whatever your views on the role of government, one thing is clear: There will be no way to pay for it if the economy doesn’t…
Forbes
Government Employee Unions Tee Up California’s Bankruptcy
Half a Billion Dollars. That’s how much the California Teachers Association and the powerful Service Employees International Union have spent on California politics since 2000.
Forbes
Paul Ryan Mentor Bob Woodson Slams War on Poverty
“Keep doing what yer doing and you’ll keep getting what you got.” Thus spoke Robert Woodson, explaining why the War on Poverty, now entering its…
Forbes
How to Ease the Crushing Costs of Federal Regulations
“You can look at the federal budget and see what we spend. There is nothing like that with respect to regulations. I tabulate the annual…
Forbes
Dueling Visions For Taxing Times: Grover Norquist v. Robert Reich
This is why I got into radio: A pairing of guests representing two competing visions for the nation’s economic future, each making their case in…
Forbes
Will Republican Culture Warriors Snatch Defeat From The Jaws Of Victory?
I was recently invited to speak at the annual Conservative Leadership Conference in Raleigh, North Carolina, a regional red-meat gathering of the conservative faithful trying to…
News Release
CEI Short Film “I, Pencil” Wins Grand Prize at Manning Centre Competition
WASHINGTON, March 28 –The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s (CEI) animated short film, “I, Pencil” about the free-market wonders of making the common pencil won first…
Forbes
Can Booming Dubai Remind America How To Grow Again?
If you despair for America, visit Dubai. If you fear our nation’s best days are behind us, visit Dubai. If you believe American entrepreneurship is…
Forbes
Can Silicon Valley Sic Schumpeterian Disruption On Bloated City Governments?
It’s one thing to ship your tax money off to Washington, resigned to the fact that you have little control over the distant bureaucracy that…
Forbes
The Way It Was Under Walter Cronkite: We Were Starved For Media
“And that’s the way it is,” intoned Walter Cronkite, the “most trusted man in America,” at the end of each news broadcast. It seems…
Forbes
Acton Academy: Socrates’ Antidote for Government School Hemlock
Only someone in deep denial, or in total thrall to teachers’ union propaganda, believes our inner city public schools are anything more than dropout factories.
Forbes
10 Ways To Dodge The Mess We Baby Boomers Are Leaving The Millennials
The Greatest Generation bequeathed Baby Boomers a nation on the rise. After saving Western Civilization from fascism, they rebuilt a war-torn world, powered an economic…
Forbes
White House Income Equality Agenda Makes War On Progress
In tonight’s State of the Union Address, Mr. Obama will attempt to shake off the most disastrous year of his presidency by doubling down on…
Forbes
The Antigua Forum: Exporting A Different Kind of Latin American Revolution
Call it the “Free Market Davos.” The Antigua Forum, sponsored by Universidad Francisco Marroquín, in Guatemala, finished its third annual conference last week. For three…
Forbes
Anatomy of an NPR Hatchet Job, Target: Oil & Gas
“On-The-Job Deaths Spiking As Oil Drilling Quickly Expands” screams a supposed National Public Radio exposé on the “terrible price” we’re paying for the fracking…
Forbes
2013: The Year The Progressive Narrative Collided With Reality
When it comes to crafting winning political narratives, progressives have a natural advantage over conservatives. That’s because progressives have a free hand to project rosy…
Forbes
Obama to Health Insurance Companies: Merry Christmas. Now, Drop Dead.
Insurance is a complicated product. Even President Obama figured that out. Hundreds of highly trained actuaries spend thousands of hours assembling risk pools to determine premium levels,…
The American Spectator
Santa Capitalism
We should call it the “Great Fact,” argues University of Illinois at Chicago economist Deirdre McCloskey. “It” is the Industrial Revolution that, starting in Great…
Human Events
23 and Me for You and Me
My son’s birth is among my most treasured memories. I knew immediately his arrival had transformed my life. But, the joy of that memory comes…
Human Events
The Battle of Two Hedgehogs
As it happened, Simon won the bet. Because of his victory, he became a conservative hero. He died in 1998, but he continues to be…
Forbes
The Knockout Game Goes Viral, The Hunger Games It’s Not
Enthralled with the movie saga of starving and oppressed young heroes rebelling against brutal government tyranny? Then what do you make of gangs of inner-city…
Forbes
Battling For The Heart And Soul Of America’s Political Parties
To our progressive friends, it seemed like a century of advocating for government-sponsored universal health care reached fruition when the Affordable Care Act became the law…
Forbes
Why Obama’s Healthcare.gov Will Never Work As Specified
“I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.” Thus answered the HAL 9000 computer in the classic Stanley Kubrick movie 2001: A Space…
Human Events
Obama, Father of all Czars
Article I, Section 9, Clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution states: No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States[.] But when George…
Human Events
Obama’s Brinkmanship
We all remember the term “brinkmanship” from the Cold War, coined by President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. In an interview in Life…
Forbes
Is Eric Holder Playing Don Corleone To Jamie Dimon’s Bonasera?
As Don Corleone said to Bonasera in The Godfather’s iconic opening scene, “Some day, and that day may never come, I’ll ask a service of you.” For…
Forbes
The Land Of The Free Is Now A Nation Of Sheep, Wolves, Pigs And Sloths
No, this is not another diatribe about the futility of many gun control laws and the geographic correlation between the level of gun crime and…
Human Events
In Name Only
Traipsing through Dulles Airport the other day, my eyes were drawn to a series of wall poster advertisements. Each one featured a supposed “foreign aid…
Human Events
Converting the Unconvertible
Here’s a thought experiment: What words come to mind with the following statements? I grew up in Marin County, Calif., during the late 1960s and…
Human Events
No Bipartisanship, Please
We’ve heard it a million times: What Washington needs is more bipartisanship, more cooperation among the parties … like the old days. To which I…
Forbes
President Obama’s ‘Syrialoquy’: To Bomb, Or Not To Bomb
To bomb, or not to bomb, that is the suggestion; Whether ’tis nobler in the polls to suffer The Slings and Arrows of…
Forbes
Betting on the Apocalypse
ONE day in October 1990, the iconoclastic economist Julian L. Simon walked out to get the mail at his house in the Washington suburb of…
Staff & Scholars
Clyde Wayne Crews
Fred L. Smith Fellow in Regulatory Studies
- Business and Government
- Consumer Freedom
- Deregulation
Richard Morrison
Senior Fellow
- Antitrust
- Business and Government
- Capitalism and Free Enterprise
Ryan Young
Senior Economist and Director of Publications
- Antitrust
- Business and Government
- Regulatory Reform