But State Still In Trouble With Global Warming Law
WASHINGTON, DC, July 21, 2009 – Top California lawmakers have included a plan for expanding oil drilling off the Southern California coast, as part of a budget compromise aimed at closing the state’s $26 billion shortfall. The move drew praise from the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
“State Republican legislators, led by Senate Minority Leader Dennis Hollingsworth, are to be commended for forcing Republican Governor Schwarzenegger and the Democratic majority in the legislature to accept a budget deal that includes no tax increases, significant budget cuts, and new offshore oil and gas production,” said
Myron Ebell, Director of Energy and Global Warming Policy for the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Ebell, however, also warned that drilling won’t be enough to save the state. “California’s budget agreement will not bail out California’s economy, but it won’t contribute to further decline. California must repeal the state’s economically catastrophic global warming legislation.”
Under the governor’s plan, the state would allow drilling off the Santa Barbara coast, estimated to generate some $1.8 billion in revenue over time. It would reportedly be the state’s first new offshore oil project in four decades.
In today’s Forbes, CEI Warren Brookes Fellow Silvia Santacruz talks about the lawsuit against Chevron-Texaco in Ecuador. Read it here.
The Senate hold on Sunstein’s appointment to head OMB’s OIRA has been lifted, so he’s likely to be confirmed. Republicans think his favorable attitude toward cost-benefit analysis for regulation is a good thing; some liberals don’t like the appointment for that very reason.
In Sunstein’s latest book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, he makes the case that people often make bad decisions, and a slight “nudge” (from whom? government, which doesn’t make bad decisions, just look around you!) can set things right and lead to better policy outcomes. Note the smuggling in of the idea that individual choices are properly classified as public policy questions. In any event, Adam Thierer had the following to say about this “libertarian paternalism” over at Tech Liberation Front:
Like so much of what Cass Sunstein writes, there is a subtle elitism at work here. But he often tries to dance around it or pretend it isn’t really elitist at all. In Nudge, that really comes through when he and [coauthor] Thaler use the oxymoron “libertarian paternalism” to describe what they are proposing. What a brilliant rhetorical tactic! Just add the term “libertarian” to your generally elitist proposal and thereby make the poison.. er, uh, medicine easier to swallow!
As the concept of “nudging” implies, there’s little regulators can cook up that they won’t regard as net-beneficial, and worthy of imposing on others. That’s the downside of cost-benefit analysis; it’s all to easy to claim benefits outweigh the costs of the program you champion if you’re the architect of it, or are the agency in charge. From that perch, the world is there for you to lord over; the rest of us are all people things are done to.
Today’s National Review Online editorial looks at the so-called Employee Free Choice Act’s arbitration provision, which would subject newly unionized companies to having a contract imposed on them by a federally appointed arbitrator.
The worst provision — worse, in fact, than the card-check gambit itself — would allow the National Labor Relations Board to impose contracts on businesses that cannot come to an agreement with a union. If a union enters the picture and the owners of a business are unable to negotiate a satisfactory contract, then the NLRB is empowered to impose “binding arbitration,” meaning that the government will write the contract and force the firm to abide by its terms. This amounts to extortion.
EFCA’s card check provision, which would allow unions to circumvent secret ballots in organizing elections, met considerable public opposition. But organized labor is not giving up on binding arbitration, which would allow unions bosses to corral more companies into paying into some severely underfunded pension funds.
For more on EFCA’s binding arbitration provision, see here and here.
By introducing new regulations the Congress together with major airlines are discouraging us to travel. While the Congress is deciding on how to regulate the size of carry-on luggage and while the airlines are charging us more in taxes than in actual fares, the passengers are still facing a ridiculous policy that a one-way airfare costs several times more than a roundtrip ticket. Weird arithmetic: a trip from one destination to another and back will cost you much less than a flight one way only. Is not that strange that 1+1=2 is less than 1? In fact if you are purchasing a roundtrip the cost of a ticket is up to 10 times cheaper than if you are booking a one-way trip. For example, a roundtrip from New York to Paris would normally cost you around $750. But if you need only 1 segment of this journey you would be asked to pay at least $2000. So booking a roundtrip and using only 1 segment of it saves you a lot of money. Seems very inefficient that the airlines are forcing us to “adjust” our travel plans in order to pay less instead of just making the price fair for a half of the trip as well.
The seventeenth in an occasional series that shines a bit of light on the regulatory state.
Today’s Regulation of the Day comes to us from the U.S. Department of Transportation ( $73 billion 2010 budget, 58,622 employees).
A new set of rules for sliding car doors will come into effect on September 1, 2010.
See pages 35,131-35,135 of the 2009 Federal Register for details.
Celebrate the LibertyWeek podcast’s one-year anniversary with Episode 52 – brought to you by your host Richard Morrison, returning guest co-host Jeremy Lott and distinguished special guest Timothy P. Carney. 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.
Today—July 20, 2009—marks the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The mission represents a significant milestone in human achievement and was watched live on television by millions of people around the world—another significant milestone. In the current pessimistic climate—where politicians and doomsaying demagogues regularly denigrate the power of human creativity—it is important to take stock of how far we have come in terms of social institutions, living standards, technology, and scientific understanding.
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