January 2012

Obama Health-Care Plan Would Take Away 5 Important Freedoms, CNN Says; Obama Would Also Raise Taxes, End Affordable Plans, and Break Promises

by Hans Bader on July 27, 2009

in Energy, Environment, Ethanol, Global Warming, Healthcare, Politics as Usual, Stimulus to Nowhere, Trade

CNN notes that there are “5 freedoms you’d lose in health care reform” as promoted by the Obama Administration: the freedom to choose your doctors, the freedom to choose what’s in your plan, the freedom to keep your existing plan, the freedom to be rewarded for healthy living, and the freedom to choose high-deductible coverage.

Earlier, we described how Obama’s health-care plan would destroy many affordable health-care plans, raise taxes on the middle class, and break Obama’s campaign promises, as well as his recent pledge that “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it.”

As CNN notes, “the Obama platform would mandate extremely full, expensive, and highly subsidized coverage — including a lot of benefits people would never pay for with their own money — but deliver it through a highly restrictive, HMO-style plan that will determine what care and tests you can and can’t have.” “If you prize choosing your own cardiologist or urologist under your company’s Preferred Provider Organization plan (PPO), if your employer rewards your non-smoking, healthy lifestyle with reduced premiums, if you love the bargain Health Savings Account (HSA) that insures you just for the essentials, or if you simply take comfort in the freedom to spend your own money for a policy that covers the newest drugs and diagnostic tests — you may be shocked to learn that you could lose all of those good things under the rules proposed in the two bills” that Congressional leaders have drafted to implement Obama’s plan.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wants to rush the health-care bill through Congress before most people can even figure out what’s in the bill. That’s how she pushed through Congress the $800 billion stimulus package, which contained hidden provisions that ended welfare reform, and which is now projected to cut the size of the economy “in the long run.” (The stimulus package was supposed to deliver a short-run “jolt” that would quickly lift the economy, but unemployment rose rapidly after its passage, and the package has actually destroyed thousands of jobs in America’s export sector, as well as subsidizing welfare and waste.)

The bill may be rewritten at the last moment to provide more giveaways to special interests, like the huge cap-and-trade energy tax that Pelosi recently strong-armed through the House. (As Obama once noted, his version of that tax would make people’s electric bills “skyrocket.”) The energy tax was pushed through before the text of the bill even became available. The bill was over 1090 pages long and contained special interest giveaways to a legion of big corporations and their lobbyists. At the last minute, 300 more pages were added to the bill that few in Congress had even read, and had to be manually inserted into the existing 1000 pages after the bill was passed, based on guesses about where those pages would fit in. Thus, the bill did not even really exist at the time it was passed.

These tax increases are part of a long line of broken promises, such as Obama’s pledge to enact a “net spending cut,” which he flouted with proposed budgets that will explode the national debt through $9.3 trillion in massively increased deficit spending.

Obamacare would also apparently restrict resources for end-of-life care for the elderly, and mandate wasteful end-of-life counseling for the elderly (such as lecturing them about the right to hasten their own death by refusing nutrition).

Earlier, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office gave an honest but “devastating assessment” of the incredibly high cost of the health-care plans backed by Obama, which would cost well over a trillion dollars, to cover just a fraction of the uninsured.

Obama is angry about that truthful conclusion, as well as the CBO’s finding that his wasteful stimulus package will actually reduce the size of the economy “in the long run.” (Obama had claimed that only his stimulus package could save America from “disaster” and “irreversible decline“).

So Obama recently invited CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf, a “Democratic appointee,” to the White House to pressure him to reduce his cost estimates.

It is doubtful that Obamacare would live up to any of Obama’s claims. His other legislation hasn’t. His stimulus package has been a fiasco, as much of the public now realizes: just 25% say it has helped the economy.

And his cap-and-trade energy tax, if passed by the Senate, would cost the economy trillions, while doing little to cut greenhouse gas emissions, since it contains so many special interest giveaways and environmentally-destructive provisions like protections for ethanol subsidies, which harm the environment, destroy forests, and cause world hunger. Meanwhile, Obama has undermined nuclear energy, which reduces greenhouse gas emissions, by wastefully blocking use of the Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste disposal site after billions of dollars in taxpayer money had already been spent creating it.

Regulation of the Day 21: Potato Research and Promotion

by Ryan Young on July 27, 2009

in Agriculture, Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Regulation, Regulation of the Day

The Agricultural Marketing Service ($1.3 billion 2008 budget, 5,500 employees) has a potato research and marketing plan, pursuant to the Potato Research and Marketing Act. Administering the plan is not free; potato handlers and importers are charged 2.5 cents per hundredweight of potatoes for the service.

A new proposed rule on pages 36,952-36,955 of the 2009 Federal Register would raise the levy to 3 cents per hundredweight.

Getting the Health Care You Pay For

by Greg Conko on July 27, 2009

in Healthcare, Personal Liberty, Precaution & Risk, Regulation

There was a good front page article in yesterday’s Washington Post on the history of advances in medical science and technology.  The conclusion:  Although the costs of treating many serious medical conditions has risen dramatically over the course of the last few decades, most of these cost increases have come hand-in-hand with significant improvements in health outcomes.  Take the article’s discussion of the evolving treatment of heart attacks:

“When I was in medical school, about all we had to offer was oxygen, morphine and prayers,” said Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute in La Jolla, Calif.  Topol, who turned 55 last month, graduated from medical school in 1979. For 15 years he was head of cardiology at the Cleveland Clinic, where he helped run some of the clinical trials that have changed treatment so dramatically.  Today, someone having a heart attack who gets to a hospital in time is likely to get cardiac catheterization, angioplasty, the placement of a medicated stent, therapy with four anticoagulant drugs and, on discharge, a handful of lifetime prescriptions.  “There’s been a complete transformation in how it’s handled just since I’ve been in medicine,” Topol said.  That transformation has saved the lives of millions of Americans.

Of course, not every costly intervention works as well as the others.  Drug-eluting stents cost from $600 to $1,000 more than bare metal ones, but only provide a very small advantage.  The question is:  Who gets to decide whether the expense is worth it?  With millions of additional Americans about to be brought into taxpayer-subsidized or paid health care systems, we naturally want government to make wise spending choices.  But health care reformers who want to give government bodies greater power to deny health care choices over-simplify the ability to make these decisions.

President Obama, for example, has been characterizing the comparative-effectiveness concept as simply as choosing between two drugs, one of which works better than the other and costs half as much (You can watch the President on YouTube here).  But, like the drug-eluting stent example, most (thought admittedly not all) health care choices boil down to more costly interventions working very much better for some patients and providing little or no benefit for others. “It is safe to say that almost everybody who has a heart attack wants the best treatment available. Nobody wants to turn back the clock,” the Post article acknowleges.  But, for the Administration, there are no hard choices:

“No part of health reform is talking about rationing who gets this care and improvement in treatment,” said [David] Cutler, the Harvard economist, who is one of President Obama’s principal advisers on health care.

To the Post‘s credit, the aritlce offers us this bit of reality:

Experience, however, suggests that treating heart attacks is very unlikely to get cheaper in the future — either for individual patients or for the country as a whole.  “The low-hanging fruit has been largely consumed,” said C. Michael Gibson, a cardiologist and chief of clinical research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. “We are now facing the battle of a half- to one percent improvements in mortality that will come at very high cost.”

Net Neutrality: A Dialogue With Ars Technica

by Jack O'Connor on July 24, 2009 · 1 comment

in Regulation, Tech & Telecom, Zeitgeist

CEI’s broadband reply comments from earlier this week received a generous quotation by Ars Technica’s Nate Anderson. Mr. Anderson took issue, however, with our claim that net neutrality mandates are essentially price controls:

“In particular, [neutrality rules] require ISPs to offer content providers a price of zero, and to differentiate prices to consumers only in certain limited ways,” says CEI’s filing. “The disastrous consequences of price controls are all too familiar. And while neutrality may currently align with industry best practices, that fact limits the possible benefits just as much as the possible harm.”

Content providers pay for bandwidth on the competitive market, so it’s not clear what the line about “a price of zero” refers to (that money is passed along to other ISPs along the network path through the mechanism of “peering and transit“). But it is clear what groups like CEI want from a broadband plan: nothing at all.

There’s a lot more to say about net neutrality, especially regarding antitrust and regulatory capture. (For a brief summary of CEI’s broadband comments, check out our topic-by-topic summary.) This post aims to address Mr. Anderson’s objection on net neutrality in particular.

One of most incendiary moments in the history of the neutrality debate came during a 2005 interview with Ed Whitacre, then CEO of SBC. Ars reported Whitacre’s remarks:

How do you think they’re [Google etc.] going to get to customers? Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain’t going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there’s going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they’re using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes? The Internet can’t be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!

Reactions to that comment have been at the core of the neutrality debate. Whitacre was asserting SBC’s right to charge content providers directly for their use of SBC’s lines — in essence, the right to set the price of premium service quality higher than zero — and neutrality advocates have clamored ever since to prohibit that kind of pricing. CEI wasn’t the first group to recognize the dangers of price controls at the core of net neutrality. A paper by Robert Hahn and Scott Wallsten,  “The Economics of Net Neutrality,” made the same point three years ago:

Mandating net neutrality amounts to price regulation. In this case, the regulation would state, in part, that broadband providers charge content providers a price of zero.

Mr. Anderson was correct when he pointed out that content providers already pay ISPs indirectly through various transit and peering agreements, and he linked to an excellent Ars piece explaining how these payments work. The Cato Institute’s Timothy Lee raised the same point in his 2008 policy analysis, “The Durable Internet,” in reference to Hahn and Wallsten’s argument. Lee ultimately acknowledged, however, that direct and indirect payments are not perfect substitutes, and his conclusion was simply that direct payments are inefficient:

With thousands of network owners and hundreds of millions of users, it would be prohibitively expensive for every network to charge every user (or even every online business) for the bandwidth it uses. Transaction costs would absorb any efficiency gains from such an arrangement. It would make no more sense than an automobile manufacturer requiring its customers to make separate payments to the manufacturers of every component of a new automobile. One of the services an ISP provides to its customers is “one stop shopping” for Internet connectivity. This arrangement has important economic advantages and is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.

It’s indeed unlikely that direct payments would be worth the cost to negotiate them. Net neutrality is targeting prices that would probably remain zero anyway, at least for the foreseeable future. But for the most dynamic marketplace in history, etching the business models that prevail today in stone would be unwise — especially considering how often inefficient, outdated regulations impede market evolution.

It’s impossible to predict the evolution of content and technology online or the ways in which new developments might conflict with one another, and thus with neutrality. ISPs might even invent ways to save money for consumers by “unbundling” content, like the FCC nearly forced cable companies to do. No one knows. What is certain, though, is that thwarting innovation in service and pricing will close the widest open door to competition.

The Washington Post’s Conflicted Take on Honduras and the OAS

by Ivan Osorio on July 24, 2009

in International

That the Organization of American States has squandered whatever credibility it had should be obvious to all by now — and it’s not just right wingers saying so any more. The Washington Post gets its largely (though not entirely) right in an editorial today.

[I]t’s worth reporting on a meeting that took place Tuesday at the Organization of American States headquarters in Washington between OAS Secretary General José Miguel Insulza and three elected Venezuelan leaders who, like Mr. Zelaya, have been deprived of their powers and threatened with criminal prosecution.

The three are Caracas Mayor Antonio Ledezma and the governors of two states, Pablo Pérez of Zulia and César Pérez Vivas of Tachira. All three won election in November, along with several other opposition leaders. But since then, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has used decrees, a rubber-stamp parliament and a politically compromised legal system to strip the officials of control over key services and infrastructure.

Mr. Insulza, a Chilean socialist who has been flamboyant in his defense of Mr. Zelaya, listened to the Venezuelans’ account. But the OAS leader insisted that there was nothing he could do about Mr. Chávez’s actions, even under the Inter-American Democratic Charter, which was adopted by all 34 active OAS members in 2001. This month, Mr. Insulza helped spur the OAS to suspend Honduras on the grounds that it had violated the charter. But in the case of Mr. Chávez’s stripping power from the governors and mayors, Mr. Insulza said, “I can’t say whether it is bad or good.” His authority, he said, is limited to “trying to establish bridges between the parties.”

That is not how Mr. Insulza handled the case of Honduras, of course. Far from promoting dialogue, the secretary general refused to negotiate or even speak with the president elected by the Honduran National Congress to replace Mr. Zelaya. Instead he joined in a Venezuelan-orchestrated attempt to force Mr. Zelaya’s return that, predictably, led to violence.

But that’s not all. The OAS made a mockery of its own Democratic Charter before the Honduran crisis broke out by deciding to readmit Cuba, a disgraceful incident which the editorial doesn’t mention. I also found it strange that, while the subhead asks, “Why defend the rule of law in Honduras but not in Venezuela?” the editorial itself acknowledges that Zelaya, whose position Insulza and the OAS are backing, was “responsible for violating the constitutional order” in his country.

Finally, the Post’s editors apparent endorsement of “OAS intervention” in defense of democracy and “for the administration…to depend on organizations such as the OAS to advance its policies in Latin America” strikes me as utopian. A better approach would be to let individual countries sort out their own internal conflicts. Honduras would be a good place to start.

Miami Is Corrupt and Weird

by Ivan Osorio on July 24, 2009 · 2 comments

in Politics as Usual, Zeitgeist

As I’ve noted before, “South Florida is corrupt and weird.” And just how corrupt and how weird is it?

First, corruption: The New Times, Miami’s alternative weekly, has issued corrupt local politician trading cards, “commemorating those halcyon days when bankruptcy loomed, graft was common, and lawmen busted bad pols like fishermen nail snook in the Keys.” What I find odd is that, given the long litany of corrupt South Florida politicians, they only found room for seven cards.

Now, weirdness: For what may be the first time ever anywhere, this week in Miami a couple of dumb hoodlums tried to sell a stolen shark to a fish market. The shark was apparently alive as they dragged it through the streets — and even took it onto the Metromover, an elevated trolley that runs in a circuit around downtown Miami.

Rob Orta, an employee at Casablanca Fish Market, told television station WSVN that the men offered his business the shark.

“But we don’t buy sharks off the street,” Orta told the station.

Wildlife officials later determined the animal was a nurse shark. The case could result in misdemeanor charges of improper killing and disposal of an animal and selling a shark without a license.

One resident of the area where the shark was dumped said he didn’t know what was going on at first.

“It was a relief that it was a shark,” said Keith Smith. “When I first saw it, I thought it was a body because of all the shootings that have been going on.”

For more on Miami corruption and weirdness see here and here.

(Thanks to Margaret Griffis and Jen Mass for the tips.)

Policy Peril: Looking for an antidote to An Inconvenient Truth? Your search is over. Updated 8/10/09

by Marlo Lewis on July 24, 2009 · 10 comments

in Global Warming

When Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth (AIT), came out in 2006, I expected to see some hard-hitting criticism by scientists of Gore’s unfounded alarmism and by economists of his blithe disregard of the human suffering that energy rationing (cap-and-trade) and mandatory reliance on costly and under-performing renewable energy would inflict on low-income households and poor countries. However, with a few notable exceptions, Gore’s film got mostly rave reviews, earned an Academy Award, and later helped bag him the Nobel Prize.

Because few specialists in the science and economics fields took Gore to task, I jumped into the breach. At first, I thought I could write an adequate expose of Gore’s errors and exaggerations in about 20 pages. But as I dug into the book version of AIT, I found that nearly all of Gore’s assertions about climate change and climate policy were either one-sided, misleading, exaggerated, speculative, or just plain wrong. My critique–published by CEI in March 2007 under the title Al Gore’s Science Fiction: A Skeptic’s Guide to An Inconvenient Truth–grew to 150 pages.

I gave several talks based on this research, including an hour-long presentation on C-SPAN and a minute and fifteen seconds of fame on the Oprah Winfrey Show,* along with several video shorts produced by CEI.

Conversations with friends and colleagues persuaded me, though, that the best strategy was to fight fire with fire–produce our own “documentary” about global warming.

We teamed up with Jared Lapidus, a talented young New York-based filmmaker. Jared and I interviewed over 20 experts during 2008 and early 2009. The result is a film titled Policy Peril: Why Global Warming Policies Are More Dangerous Than Global Warming Itself. To view the film, click here.

Policy Peril reviews the science to assess whether global warming is the “planetary emergency” Al Gore claims it is. We take a critical look at what Gore and other alarmist claim regarding heat waves, global temperature forecasts, air pollution, malaria, hurricanes, ice sheet disintegration, sea level rise, and the paradoxical scenario in which global warming causes a new ice age. We conclude that global warming is not a catastrophe in the making. There is no climate “crisis.”

We then review the human costs–the health and safety risks as well as adverse impacts on jobs and growth–of Al Gore’s proposed “solutions”: carbon taxes, cap-and-trade, fuel economy standards, bans on new coal-fired power plants, mandates to “repower America” with renewable energy, and carbon tariffs. The film concludes that these policies have potentially devastating impacts on human welfare, especially to the extent they are exported to developing countries–which they must be if the world is to reduce global emissions 50% by 2050, as Gore and others advocate.

Finally, the film examines alternative strategies to enhance human well-being in a warming world. It concludes that “focused adaptation”–solving with proven methods existing health and environmental problems that global warming might aggravate (such as malaria and hunger)–would save far more lives at less cost than Kyoto-style energy rationing schemes. Moreover, the best climate protection strategy for the world is free trade and economic growth.

Over the next three weeks, I’ll be posting one excerpt from the film every other day along with comments and links to newer information that has since come out. The global warming debate is very far from “over.” In fact, the scientific, economic, and moral case against Kyoto-style energy rationing keeps getting stronger.

I look forward to your comments on the film, the individual segments, and the supporting materials.

– Marlo Lewis, Senior Fellow, Competitive Enterprise Institute

* Gore got the first and last word on Oprah, but I replied minutes after the show aired on Youtube.

Update 8/10/09

One of the excerpts from Policy Peril is the wrap up, where I summarize the main points of the entire film. If you’re one of those people who like to skip to the end to see how the story turns out, click here to watch the wrap-up segment. Or just read the text (with links to supporting information), which appears below:

Global warming is not a planetary emergency. To create the illusion of a crisis, Al Gore repeatedly crosses the line between fact and fiction, science and speculation.

There is no know way to make deep cuts in U.S. CO2 emissions over the next few decades without also making deep cuts in our economy.

Banning new coal power plants means banning the most affordable source of new electric power. It could also create an energy crisis.

Mandating a carbon-free electric system in ten years would fail dismally and set a world record for government waste.

Energy rationing schemes would transfer trillions of dollars from consumers to special interests.

Fuel economy mandates can kill by making the average car lighter, smaller, and therefore less safe in collisions.

Biofuel mandates may actually increase CO2 emissions and by inflating food prices threaten the world’s poorest people.

Banning coal plants in China, India, and other emerging economies would trap millions of people in deadly poverty.

Using proven methods to solve underlying problems that global warming might aggravate could save many more lives than Kyoto type policies at far less expense.

The best climate protection strategy for poor countries is rapid economic growth.

On a personal note, I’ve been analyzing public policy in Washington, D.C. for more than 20 years. I have never seen an agenda so lacking in justification, with so great a power for mischief, captivate so many influential people, the way this global warming agenda has.

We are still at the baby steps of this agenda. Yet already climate policies have increased world hunger, fueled deforestation, inflated energy prices, and enriched special interests at consumers’ expense.

The time to demand more reasonable policies from our leaders is now. Don’t be another lemming walking off the cliff of policy peril. Save our prosperity, and we can really improve the state of the world.

CEI Weekly: Attack of the National Broadband Plans

by Charles Huang on July 24, 2009 · 1 comment

in CEI Projects, Economy, Energy, Environment, Features, International, Legal, Odds & Ends, Personal Liberty, Regulation, Trade, Zeitgeist

CEI Weekly is a compilation of articles and blog posts from CEI’s fellows and associates sent out via e-mail every Friday. Also included in the Weekly newsletter is a brief description of CEI’s weekly podcast and a feature on a major CEI breakthrough made during the week. To sign up for CEI Weekly, go to http://cei.org/newsletters.

CEI Weekly
July 24, 2009


>>CEI Files Public Comments to FCC: Exercise Restraint From Regulating Broadband
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, signed into law earlier this year, set aside $7.2 billion for expanding broadband Internet access. Just this week, the FCC concluded its notice of inquiry regarding how these funds should be spent, and in particular, what new regulations should accompany the money. In our comments last month, and our reply comments this week, we explain that most of the proposed new rules are just price controls in sheep’s clothing, and that new subsidies will follow in the wasteful and anticompetitive footsteps of existing programs.
>>Read a summary of CEI’s comments here.
>>CEI’s filing gets covered in ARS Technica
>>FCC’s response to 8,500 pages worth of suggestions; “Sloppy,” and a “Lack of Seriousness and Purpose.”
>>Wayne Crews’ blog post runs through the harms of a national broadband plan.

>>CEI’s Policy Highlights
Coalition Letter on Optional Federal Chartering– Eli Lehrer
http://cei.org/cletters/2009/07/23/coalition-letter-optional-federal-chartering

>>Shaping the Debate
Justice Department’s Fear of Google Book Publishing is Misplaced
Jonathan Hillel in The San Jose Mercury News
http://cei.org/articles/2009/07/22/justice-departments-fear-google-book-publishing-misplaced
Toxic Revenge
Silvia Santacruz in Forbes.com
http://cei.org/articles/2009/07/21/toxic-revenge
Beach Plan Fix Would Require Another Fix Later
Eli Lehrer in The Carolina Journal
http://cei.org/articles/2009/07/17/beach-plan-fix-would-require-another-fix-later
Holding Paulson Accountable for This Mess
John Berlau in CBS News
http://cei.org/articles/2009/07/16/holding-paulson-accountable-mess

>>Best of the Blogs
Corrupt, Bullying Nicaraguan Ruler Emboldened by Obama’s Demand That Honduras Accept Return of Would-Be Dictator
by Hans Bader
Nicaragua’s corrupt, authoritarian president Daniel Ortega is now pushing a change to his country’s constitution to extend his rule. Ortega is a former communist backed by Venezuela’s anti-American strongman Hugo Chavez. He uses vote fraud, arbitrary arrests, and intimidation to expand and perpetuate his power. Ortega has been emboldened by the Obama Administration’s demand that neighboring Honduras permit the return of its corrupt, bullying ex-president Mel Zelaya, who was removed for similarly seeking to perpetuate his rule.
http://www.openmarket.org/2009/07/22/corrupt-bullying-nicaraguan-ruler-emboldened-by-obamas-demand-that-honduras-accept-return-of-would-be-dictator/
Democrats Inconsistent on Senior Death Discount
by Greg Conko
Cass Sunstein who is nominated to be the next Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs faces opposition coming from far-left Democrats and the environmental and consumerist movements over his embrace of cost-benefit analysis in regulatory policymaking.  Especially troubling to these groups is Sunstein’s support for what critics deride as the “senior death discount,” which Time describes as “the statistical practice of taking into account years of life expectancy when evaluating a regulation.” If that’s a problem for Cass Sunstein, then what are we to make of various Democratic proposals to allocate fewer health care resources on the basis of their expected value to society?
http://www.openmarket.org/2009/07/23/democrats-inconsistent-on-senior-death-discount/
Obama Health-Care Plan Destroys Cheap Health-Care Options, Raises Taxes, Breaks Promises
by Hans Bader
Obama promised not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year. But he is now breaking that promise by proposing to tax some middle-class families to pay for health care. Obama has also falsely pledged that if you like your health insurance, you will be able to keep it under his plan. But the Congressional health-care bills he backs would destroy countless inexpensive health-care plans by gutting a federal law called ERISA that makes it possible for employers to offer them.
http://www.openmarket.org/2009/07/23/obama-health-care-plan-breaks-campaign-promises-destroys-cheap-health-care-options-raises-taxes/
Want Recovery? Remember Antitrust is Anti-Economy
by Wayne Crews
Antitrust is a form of economic regulation. And like all economic regulation, it transfers wealth from somebody to somebody else, often in response to special-interest urging. Partly in recognition of such shortcomings, many economic sectors like transportation and telecommunications were (partly) deregulated and liberalized during the last quarter of the 20th century. But antitrust regulation typically gets a pass. Even in the “new economy,” this century-old smokestack era law is used to justify constraints and conditions imposed on vigorously competitive modern companies. Antitrust is wrongly seen as being in the public interest, as having a superior role to play in policing markets relative to the alternatives.
http://www.openmarket.org/2009/07/22/want-recovery-remember-antitrust-is-anti-economy/

>>Podcast
Episode 52: Tim Carney – Uncensored
We start with the short-sighted lobbying of HMOs for more government control of health care, the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing and the latest New York City corruption scandal. We then move on to potential antitrust troubles for Japanese beer makers, India’s refusal to play the global warming game and some avenging Olympic News.
http://www.libertyweek.org/2009/07/20/episode-52-tim-carney-–-uncensored

>>Support CEI
Like what you read?
The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s 25-year record of success is made possible by our over 3,000 supporters. Make sure to stop by www.cei.org/support and make a donation to continue your support or become a supporter. Curious about all the possible ways to donate to CEI? Contact Al Canata at acanata@cei.org or 202-331-2280 to find out more.

To sign up for CEI Weekly, go to http://cei.org/newsletters.

Charles Huang
Web and Media Associate
Competitive Enterprise Institute
chuang@cei.org
http://www.cei.org
http://www.openmarket.org
202-331-1010

Our Colleague Julie Called it “Subprime Healthcare”

by Wayne Crews on July 24, 2009

in Healthcare, Insurance, Nanny State, Odds & Ends, Personal Liberty, Regulation

I think that about sums it up.

Reports of the death of climate skepticism are greatly exaggerated

by Marlo Lewis on July 24, 2009 · 1 comment

in Global Warming

Is the science debate on global warming “over”? Politicians, pundits, and academics never tire of repeating “the debate is over” mantra. They could not be more wrong.

As I explain today on MasterResource.Org, all the basic science issues in the global warming debate–attribution, sensitivity, and even detection–are unsettled and more so now than at any time in the past decade.

For those who want to delve more deeply into these and other fascinating issues, check out the marvelous Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) report, Climate Change Reconsidered, authored by Drs. Craig Idso and Fred Singer with 35 contributors and reviewers. On a wide range of issues (nine main topics and 60 sub-topics), the NIPCC report demonstrates that the scientific literature allows, and even favors, reasonable alternative assessments to those presented by the U.N. IPCC, the self-anointed scientific “consensus.”

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