January 2012

Friday Regulation Roundup

by Ryan Young on April 23, 2010

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Regulation

Some of the stranger governmental goings-on I’ve dug up recently:

-It is illegal to deface milk cartons in Massachusetts. The punishment is a $10 fine.

-If you aren’t quite sure about the definition of “children’s product,” a proposed regulation would clear that up. Here’s a small sampling: “A determination of whether a product is a ‘children’s product’ will be based on consideration of the four specified statutory factors as further described in the discussion and examples provided in this interpretative rule.”

-The federal government has an Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.

-The government spends $23m per year on the National Agricultural Library.

-Wondering what the prevailing consensus is surrounding trailer homes? Check out the government’s Manufactured Housing Consensus Committee.

-Stimulus money is being used to replace peoples’ mailboxes – in some cases against their will.

-Eat your vegetables: The federal government has a Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee.

-Seasteaders take note: the federal government has an Outer Continental Shelf Policy Committee.

-$110,000 in stimulus money was spent on an industrial-grade, automated pizza oven.

-It is illegal for a 9th grader to have a mustache in Binghamton, New York.

Internet Gambling Catches Second Wind

by Brian McGraw on April 23, 2010 · 1 comment

in Nanny State, Personal Liberty

Pokerati.com reports that Senator Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is working on a new bill (one of many in the past year) to legalize and regulate online poker. It is unclear at the moment why or how this would differ from current efforts by Barney Frank. The bill is expected to be introduced in the second quarter of 2010, a few months after the enforcement deadline for the UIGEA.

In exchange for desperately needed campaign money, Reid has (likely) struck a bargain with Harrah’s Entertainment and MGM (who have collectively donated almost $300,000 to his 2010 campaign) to introduce legislation for regulated online poker on their behalf. The absence of sports-betting references from the bill gives it a higher chance of seeing support in Congress.

To explain recent progress, Pokerati links to a news story documenting the American Gaming Association’s (the biggest lobbying group for American brick-and-mortar casinos) official change in opinion on the desirability of Internet poker. Regarding the timing of all of this, Pokerati summarizes:

1. Let the UIGEA go into full effect June 1.
2. Eliminate the most powerful online poker operators currently in the industry (i.e. Tilt and Stars).
3. Pass a new law.
4. Let Harrah’s, the Sands, and MGM/Mirage set up shop.
5. Then let the European poker sites join the party.

How should we feel about this? On one hand, the underhanded method of sending the competitors packing then coming back to play ball is crony capitalism at its finest. On the other hand, the Vegas conglomerates haven’t been allowed to enter the Internet poker market at all.

Furthermore, support of a powerful industry is the necessarily catalyst for off-the-radar issues like Internet gambling to ever have attention paid to it in Washington. Without their support, it remains buried on page 7 of a socially conservative senator’s “things-to-outlaw” list.

Oh, and legalization would apparently create jobs. Is that before or after it bankrupts American families and destroys the social fabric of our society?

Waxman baseball tobacco ban not worth chewing on

by Michael Fumento on April 23, 2010

in Nanny State, Odds & Ends

Major League Baseball should ban players from using smokeless tobacco in dugouts and on the field because of its health risks and influence on kids, according to Rep. Henry Waxman (D.-Ca.), chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce.

“Millions of young fans are exposed on a daily basis to the use of smokeless tobacco by their heroes,” Waxman, a California Democrat, said recently at a hearing in Washington. “This is a serious health risk. The increased use of smokeless tobacco will mean millions more teens getting hooked on nicotine.”

A few points up front.

Anybody who uses tobacco in any form has a screw loose. It’s a powerful carcinogen. Chewing tobacco, or smokeless tobacco as it’s sometimes called, can cause cancer to any part of the body it touches, including lip, tongue, cheeks, gums, and the floor and roof of the mouth. Personally, I like those body parts. Granted most people who chew will not develop cancer from it. It’s all a matter of odds.

Chewing is clearly one of the most disgusting habits ever invented. The only ones I can think of that are more disgusting are too disgusting to mention. For example, there’s . . . Nope!

At one time in public places like post offices and train stations, women had to hold up their skirts as they walked because the floor was literally covered with spit. Sure, there were plenty of spittoons but invariably men’s aim was off and a lot of men never even tried to use them. Why, when there was a perfectly good piece of floor below them?

I tried chewing tobacco once when it was offered to me in the Army. The nicotine rush came on so fast I almost fainted. The taste was horrific. Yeah, I spit and fast.

I also don’t doubt that seeing their sports heroes chew leads some younger people to chew, and that’s truly deplorable.

My problem with Waxman’s would-be edict is that this isn’t something the government should do, it’s something Major League Baseball, individual teams, and fan groups should do.

There has never been a more powerful motivator than societal opprobrium and approval. Society makes clear certain things are wrong or right through social carrots and sticks. But it doesn’t work when government does it, because government just passes a law. The more government became involved in negative behaviors like unwed pregnancy the worse they got, in part because government involvement replaced the old strictures.

Why is chewing already vastly less common than it once was? (Note inset photo with a spittoon behind every shooter in a gallery. When I go shooting, there’s no spittoon behind me.) It’s the success of societal opprobrium.

In other words, it’s precisely because I think that chewing is such a bad habit that I want government to back off. This is an issue for others to deal with. And actually, I’ve got a nifty idea. Instead of directly outlawing spitting, why doesn’t MLB mandate a spittoon at the pitcher’s mound and at each base? THAT will send a message!

Hidden EU Analysis: Biofuels Can Produce More CO2 Emissions Than Fossil Fuels

by Marlo Lewis on April 23, 2010

in Ethanol, Global Warming

Reuters reports that it used freedom of information laws to obtain a copy of text that was stripped from a December 2009 European Union study on biofuels. The hidden portion of the study found that biodiesel fuel made from North American soybeans has an indirect carbon footprint of 339.9 kilograms of CO2 per gigajoule — about four times larger than standard diesel from petroleum.

The suppressed analysis jibes with Fargione et a. (2008) and Searchinger et al. (2009), who found that CO2 emissions from the land use changes associated with biofuel production exceed the emissions avoided by combusting biofuels instead of petroleum-based fuels.

“The EU’s executive European Commission said it had not doctored the report to hide the evidence, but only to allow a deeper analysis before publishing,” Reuters reports. Uh huh. And if the analysts had found that biodiesel has a much smaller footprint than standard diesel, the Commission would have deep-sixed that study too pending a “deeper analysis.” Right!

“Given the divergence of views and the level of complexity of the issue … it was considered better to leave the contentious analysis out of the report,” the Commission said in a statement. Well, when it comes to energy — or health care, or financial industry reform, or almost any public policy issue you can think of — when isn’t there a “divergence of views” and a high “level of complexity”?

EU policymakers don’t want to be troubled by the facts — and they don’t want hoi polloi getting hold of information that calls their agenda into question.

And they wonder why public trust in the ‘climate science community’ is waning!

Parody Becomes Law: Crimes Against Homeless Become “Hate Crimes”; Hate-Crimes-Envy Spreads

by Hans Bader on April 22, 2010 · 4 comments

in Legal, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony

Florida is now poised to join Maryland and Maine in treating crimes targeting the homeless as “hate crimes,” with increased penalties of up to five years for assaults on a homeless person.

The idea started out in Maryland as a parody.  The legislation’s author, a socially-conservative state senator, was by his own admission “motivated by cynicism: He was offended by legislation adding sexual orientation to the list of protected categories, which includes race, religion and national origin.”  So to parody it, he proposed adding all sorts of groups like the homeless to the protected list.

But his idea unexpectedly took off, as anti-poverty groups and homeless advocates backed his legislation to add the homeless to the state’s hate crimes law.  And he came to view it as a good idea, based on what you might call “hate crimes envy”: wasn’t it only fair to add the homeless if gay people were already included, especially since homeless people were allegedly more “vulnerable,” more deserving, and had less political “clout?”   (There is a related phenomenon called “censorship envy” that results in foreign hate speech laws getting broader and broader over time, as each minority group demands its own protection against political blasphemy.)

Lost in this train of reasoning is the fact that violence against the homeless is already forbidden by law, without any need for hate crimes laws.  The idea that every “vulnerable” group needs its own hate crimes law threatens to leave criminal codes littered with special protections for an ever-growing laundry list of protected groups.

Turning crimes into “hate crimes” can also make prosecutions considerably more expensive. Often, it is easy to establish that a criminal committed a crime, but very difficult to establish precisely why the criminal committed the crime.   A violent crime could have been committed because of personal animus against the victim (not a hate crime), an animus towards the victim’s group (a hate crime), or some combination of the two.  A criminal may select victims partly out of greed and partly based on membership in a protected group (like a robber who disproportionately preys on women or the disabled based on their perceived vulnerability), making it hard to determine whether the crime is a hate crime.   Proving why the criminal acted could add enormously to the expense of the prosecution even though the criminal is equally dangerous, and deserves to go to jail, regardless of why he committed the crime.

Moreover, homelessness is not an immutable characteristic, like race or gender, but rather is defined partly by behavior.  That makes it hard to interpret what it means to commit a crime based on someone’s homelessness, i.e., a hate crime.  If you get into a fight with a homeless person who is squatting on or near your property, over their squatting, is that based on their homeless status (because it presumably would not have occurred unless they were homeless), and thus a hate crime, or is it based on their behavior (the squatting, which is arguably linked to their homeless status)?  (Note that many so-called hate-crimes laws, like the federal hate crimes law, do not, contrary to their name, require proof of hatred, only that the defendant have acted because of, or partly because of, the victim’s protected status or characteristic.  As law professor and U.S. Civil Rights Commissioner Gail Heriot notes, if a burglar kills a male homeowner to avoid detection, but then lets a female homeowner live because he finds “himself unable to shoot a woman,” he has literally violated the federal hate crimes law, since his actions were based partly on gender.)

(My former apartment-mate in Los Angeles, a bleeding-heart liberal, got into a fight with a homeless man over his squatting on the parking lot of the apartments we lived in; it culminated in the homeless man slashing his tires.  It will probably never be clear to what extent my apartment-mate’s animus was exacerbated by the man’s bad smell and other characteristics arguably associated with his homeless status, such as his excreting on the pavement.  My apartment-mate was not pleased to have the homeless man there on premises while he was seeking to rent out the apartment, viewing it as an impediment to finding a tenant.  If prosecutors wanted to, they could easily find an “expert witness” to testify that my apartment-mate harbored an animus towards the homeless.  It is not hard to find so-called “expert witnesses” to testify to real or imaginary biases in California, as any lawyer who practices employment discrimination law there could no doubt attest.  A plaintiff’s lawyer can easily find a psychologist or diversity consultant to testify as an “expert witness” (for a fee) that the plaintiff has suffered Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder as a result of workplace jokes (even though that is impossible, according to findings by psychologists like Paul Lees-Haley), or that the plaintiff is a victim of discrimination (even if the plaintiff and the accused supervisor belong to the same gender or race).)

These state hate crimes laws are unwise, but at least they do not raise the serious civil liberties problems associated with the recently-expanded federal hate crimes law.  The federal hate crimes law is designed to circumvent constitutional double-jeopardy safeguards (by allowing people found innocent in state court to be reprosecuted all over again in federal court).  It also raises serious federalism issues, since it may exceed Congress’s power under the Commerce Clause.

The Excellent Powder — DDT

by Angela Logomasini on April 22, 2010

in Odds & Ends

Today, many people celebrate Earth Day, and for most, that simply means enjoying the beauty of the natural world. And what a perfect day it is here in D.C. for going outside! However, Earth Day has less innocuous roots. It is better understood as a political holiday, one that has advanced an anti-progressive ideology–a philosophy has done considerable harm.

That was certainly the message of an event yesterday hosted by Africa Fighting Malaria at the National Press Club. AFM released its new book: The Excellent Powder: DDT’s Political and Scientific History, authored by Donald Roberts, Richard Tren, Roger Bate, and Jennifer Zambone. It tells what amounts to horror story that started around the first Earth Day event, which took place on April 22, 1970.

DDT was originally condemned by Rachel Carson in her 1962 book Silent Spring, which claimed it was dangerous to public health and harmed wildlife. Carson, who is considered the mother of the modern environmental movement, went as far as to categorize it as “an elixir of death.” And her followers echoed those views at the first Earth Day. A brochure published by Environmental Action for the first Earth Day read:

“A disease has infected our country. It has brought smog to Yosemite, dumped garbage in the Hudson, sprayed DDT in our food, and left our cities in decay. Its carrier is man.”

Yet the real disease threatening people was not man-produced technologies like DDT, it was malaria. And this “excellent powder” was a potential solution.

Yet the anti-progressive drumbeat continued against DDT and June14, 1972, it was banned domestically. Many other nations and the World Health Organization would follow suit by discontinuing its use despite the fact that this insecticide was needed to fight malaria-carrying mosquitoes.

According to author, and AFM President, Richard Tren, DDT was “unfairly vilified” and the book attempts to set the record straight, addressing both science and politics. Co-author Don Roberts, Ph.D., concurred, noting that activist campaigns against DDT use have imposed “severe and grievous harm” on poor people in developing countries. Millions have died needlessly because DDT use was drastically curtailed, allowing malaria-carrying mosquitoes to flourish. When DDT was used malaria rates dropped dramatically around the world, and malaria disappeared from many western nations like the United States. After it was discontinued, rates have skyrocketed into the hundreds of millions, particularly in Africa, with several million people dying every year, mostly children under five.

A medical entomologist, Roberts explained that his contribution to the book stems from his decades of research starting in the 1970s regarding malaria and DDT in the field (in developing nations around the world), in the laboratory, and in the literature. He saw first-hand the extraordinary power that DDT had in the 1970s in efforts to control disease outbreaks. On DDT’s health impacts, Roberts explained that it is toxic–but not very. In fact, modern pesticides are hundreds of time more toxic. Yet we find no human deaths from environmental exposures of from them or DDT. DDT posed no health issues even though DDT was used in extremely large qualities in the United States, including in the home. Roberts remembers his mom using it in the kitchen to kill flies.

Roberts’ research eventually showed that DDT had the ability to repel mosquitoes, a fact that is more important than its toxic effects. If used to repel rather than kill mosquitoes, the insect’s resistance to the substance would remain low and DDT could be used long-term to protect humans from deadly mosquitoes.

Tren elaborated on this point during the question and answer portion of the event. He explained that DDT resistance was a problem when it was used in large, toxic doses to protect crops. But the use of relatively small quantities of DDT to repel mosquitoes from homes to prevent malaria poses a very minor threat of resistance. In any case, Tren explained that where resistance exists, it is best combated by constantly introducing new pesticides rather than imposing bans. Unfortunately, in addition to bans, government regulations make it increasingly difficult to get new pesticides on the market. In fact, the number of public health pesticides available is in decline.

Tren’s point about new pesticides brings us full circle. Conservation and public health are laudable goals, but the anti-progressive goals of Earth Day are not. Rather than condemn chemicals or business, we should celebrate the progress that mankind has made in making life healthier and safer. Indeed, human ingenuity and modern technologies should be credited for finding solutions to environmental problems as well as enhancing the human condition. Political approaches taken by modern-day greens have done the opposite.

Public Employee Unions’ Suffocating Grip on California

by Ivan Osorio on April 22, 2010

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Employment, Labor, Regulation

The current issue of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal features a must-read account of how government employee unions have turned California into “The Beholden State,” by Steven Malanga. The piece covers a wide range of issues and trends relevant to public sector unionism, so I will focus here on one particularly interesting section, in which Malanga ties together organized labor’s support for greater government intervention in the (already heavily regulated) health care market with the growing crisis of underfunded union and public employee pension funds. As in so many stories of recent union power grabs, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is a major player.

The SEIU’s rise in California illustrates again how modern labor’s biggest victories take place in back rooms, not on picket lines. In the late 1980s, the SEIU began eyeing a big jackpot: tens of thousands of home health-care workers being paid by California’s county-run Medicaid programs. The SEIU initiated a long legal effort to have those workers, who were independent contractors, declared government employees. When the courts finally agreed, the union went about organizing them—an easy task because governments rarely contest organizing campaigns, not wanting to seem anti-worker. The SEIU’s biggest victory was winning representation for 74,000 home health-care workers in Los Angeles County, the largest single organizing drive since the United Auto Workers unionized General Motors in 1937. Taxpayers paid a steep price: home health-care costs became the fastest-growing part of the Los Angeles County budget after the SEIU bargained for higher wages and benefits for these new recruits. The SEIU also organized home health-care workers in several other counties, reaching a whopping statewide total of 130,000 new members.

The SEIU’s California numbers have given it extraordinary resources to pour into political campaigns. The union’s major locals contributed a hefty $20 million in 2005 to defeat a series of initiatives to cap government growth and rein in union power. The SEIU has also spent millions over the years on initiatives to increase taxes, sometimes failing but on other occasions succeeding, as with a 2004 measure to impose a millionaires’ tax to finance more mental-health spending. With an overflowing war chest and hundreds of thousands of foot soldiers, the SEIU has been instrumental in getting local governments to pass living-wage laws in several California cities, including Los Angeles and San Francisco. And the union has also used its muscle in campaigns largely out of the public eye, as in 2003, when it pressured the board of CalPERS, the giant California public-employee pension fund, to stop investing in companies that outsourced government jobs to private contractors.

In other words, SEIU pushed CalPERS to make an investment decision based not on what the returns from it would be, but on how it would advantage SEIU’s organizing — in this case, by maintaining a larger government workforce. This should constitute a clear violation of fiduciary duty under any sensible definition of the term. This kind of politicization of union pension investments has been going on for some time, so some pension funds have years of lost gains behind them today.

Further, to unionize “health-care workers paid by government medical programs like Medicaid,” unions are now trying to redefine the definition of “public” to any social service provider who receives state subsidies, even while not being directly employed by the state. By extending new subsidies to more people, the recently enacted health care “reform” bill has created even more opportunities for such a dubious expansion of the definition of “public.”

Now that Andy Stern has announced his retirement, is he is riding off into the sunset triumphantly after leading SEIU during its successful campaign to pass Obamacare, or is he jumping off a sinking ship as he leaves SEIU a financial mess? Maybe a bit of both.

For more on SEIU, see here, here, and here.

For more on public sector unions, see here and here.

“A lie told often enough becomes the truth.”

by Marc Scribner on April 22, 2010

in Odds & Ends, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual

In [dis]honor of the 140th anniversary since pinko pin-up Vladimir Ilyich Lenin spawned, I’d like to present the Lenin Prize for the Reification of Destructive Ideologies to ACORN CEO Bertha Lewis. Ms. Lewis has taken a lot of heat since the ACORN-appearing-to-aid-and-abet-child-prostitution scandal broke, but remains incredibly committed to her organization–one based on a particularly vile and inane form of bureaucratic socialism. As the leader of a group that can claim more credit (excluding government) for perpetuating urban poverty than any other, the following should not be surprising.

Earlier today, Reason‘s Damon Root posted an e-mail authored by Lewis disparaging a Brooklyn man whose home was condemned through eminent domain:

Finally, the itch that was Daniel Goldstein has been scratched and scratched out.   After almost seven years of flawed strategies, smear campaigns, stupid tactics, disingenuous rhetoric and total disregard for people who have lived in the downtown Brooklyn community for years before he even thought about coming here; finally he got what he really wanted.  A Deal.  Not for the community he claimed to love so much, but for the only beneficiary of his community of one, himself, Double Dealing Danny Goldstein.

Her cranky little missive is in response to Goldstein’s announcement that he has agreed to vacate his home next month. Goldstein lives/lived in the Atlantic Yards area of Brooklyn, which is currently undergoing forced redevelopment. Naturally, as with most comprehensive redevelopment plans, this one entails kicking many low- and middle-income residents and business owners to the curb in order to transfer the property to a wealthy private developer.

But why, you might ask, would ACORN, an organization with a stated mission to “[help] those who have historically been locked out,” support wealthy private developer Bruce Ratner’s land grab over the rights of residents? Because even for committed socialist dupes, money talks. Ratner quietly funneled money into the group in 2008 following a funding panic in the wake of a multi-million dollar embezzlement scandal involving high-ranking ACORN officials. It is also alleged by a former ACORN official-turned-whistle-blower that ACORN and Lewis were promised kickbacks from Ratner in the form of control of new affordable housing units, an arrangement that could net the organization tens of millions of dollars in the coming years.

For more on Atlantic Yards, the state’s land grab, and the Ratner plan, visit Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn.

General Motors Repays Tiny Portion of Taxpayers’ $50 Billion Bailout; Obama Backers Bash Critics of Bailout

by Hans Bader on April 22, 2010 · 1 comment

in Bailout Watch, Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Employment, Energy, Labor, Legal, Mobility, Politics as Usual, Precaution & Risk, Regulation, Sanctimony, Zeitgeist

President Obama’s tax-cheat treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, is trumpeting the fact that General Motors has paid back a small fraction of what taxpayers gave the company, noting that “GM had repaid in full the $4.7 billion balance it owed under the government’s Trouble Asset Relief Program.” But this so-called “repayment” was just an accounting trick.  GM used government bailout money to make the “repayment,” as the New York Times has noted.

More importantly, this “repayment” is a drop in the bucket compared to what GM has received from taxpayers.  The federal government has yet to recover the lion’s share of the more than $50 billion it loaned the company.  Why?  Because that $50 billion was mostly “converted into stock held by the Treasury Department.”  That’s billions of dollars for stock in a company that, for all intents and purposes, was bankrupt. (GM just lost another $4.3 billion.)

The only reason GM had enough money left to pay back any of what it owes taxpayers is because of Toyota’s recent safety issues and recalls, which drove car buyers away from Toyota to GM and Ford.  Only that kept GM from burning through most of the taxpayers’ money.

Even though GM still hasn’t paid back the $50 billion, and received billions in additional handouts through programs like the incredibly wasteful Cash for Clunkers (which cost taxpayers and used-car and car-parts businesses billions), Obama backers now claim that critics of the bailout owe Obama, GM, and the UAW “an apology.”

Ironically, GM would never have needed a bailout if it had just received relief from costly regulations such as CAFE rules (which wiped out at least 50,000 jobs) and dealer-franchise laws.  That’s so despite GM’s massive burdens from excessive union wages and benefits (worth up to $70 an hour), and rigid union work rules.

The Obama Administration left those wasteful work rules and excessive benefits largely intact, and gave the United Auto Workers Union (UAW) a big chunk of General Motors‘ stock, even though the UAW helped bankrupt the company, and the company has value today only because the federal government pumped billions of taxpayer dollars into the company (and engineered the wiping out of General Motors’ bondholders, some of whom were non-union employees who had invested their life savings in the company).

Veteran political commentator Michael Barone called the Obama administration’s treatment of Chrysler and GM bondholders “gangster government.” Law professor and bankruptcy expert Todd Zywicki called it an attack on “the rule of law.”

Back in 2008, Zywicki prophetically warned that a bailout would prove worse for the auto industry than for automakers to just quickly file for bankruptcy.   Zywicki noted that by enabling automakers to get rid of expensive union contracts and red tape, a “Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing will likely result in a stronger domestic industry.”   It would provide  “a mechanism for forcing UAW workers to take further pay cuts, reduce their gold-plated health and retirement benefits, and overcome their cumbersome union work rules.”  It would also help automakers get rid of redundant auto dealerships that should be terminated but aren’t because of state dealer franchise laws.  Nobel Prize winning economist Gary Becker also argued that bankruptcy would have been better than a bailout in achieving “needed reforms.”

But the federal government ignored their wise advice, and chose to embark an incredibly costly bailout instead.   The bailout of GM and Chrysler is similar in many ways to the British government’s unsuccessful auto bailout in the 1970s, which ultimately failed despite a cost in the billions.

The federal government used money from the $700 billion bank bailout for the auto industry bailout. Legal scholars at the Heritage Foundation, Clinton administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich and many other commentators have argued that using the bank-bailout money for auto bailouts was illegal.

“Basic needs” need to be regulated, say Dems

by Fran Smith on April 22, 2010

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

Reason’s Ron Bailey, in an “I told you so” article today, points out that Senate Democrats are poised to support a bill that would give the federal government the power to regulate insurance rates.  He was referring to a NYT article – buried on page A12 — that said that Senator Tom Harkin, the chairman of the Senate health committee, was going to push for a bill, possibly one introduced by Senator Dianne Feinstein, that would give the Secretary of Health and Human Services the power to block rate increases “found to be unreasonable.”

Here’s what the California senator had to say about her bill:

Mrs. Feinstein said her bill would close what she described as “an enormous loophole” in the new law. And she said health insurance should be regulated like a public utility.

“Water and power are essential for life,” Mrs. Feinstein said. “So they are heavily regulated, and rate increases must be approved. Health insurance is also vital for life. It too should be strictly regulated so that people can afford this basic need.”

Looks like the Dems are really pushing their agenda to expand the list of “basic needs” that the federal government has to regulate – read that as take over. Better check out Maslow for what comes next.

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