In noticing the upcoming debate tonight featuring Republican contenders, I wondered to myself under which candidate would the federal government actually be smaller after four years, should any of them win?
Maybe Ron Paul, in working with some imaginary 114th Congress; but of course Trump told the CPAC crowd that Paul could never win. But he’s fun to watch.
Tonight’s candidates will make the general case to to cut spending and debt. But sometimes it seems that “Big Government Conservative,” which detractors called Trump, is a redundancy. The largest spending and regulatory programs have and do enjoy their support. There’s more Tea Partly than Tea Party in my view.
Thus even slashing record spending and debt is no longer enough — even if the budget were balanced at, say, half its current level. The regulatory state has surged such that the U.S. is an increasingly hostile environment for anyone inclined to create a business (and employ others).
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In a vote today, the House of Representatives will determine whether federal construction projects will be open to competitive bidding. In 2009, President Obama issued Executive Order 13502 declaring that to win a federal construction project costing over $25 million, the contractor must sign a project labor agreement. Project labor agreements eliminate competition and discriminate against non-union workers. In the current economic state, the federal government cannot afford to mandate any contract which increases costs and furthers the burden on the taxpayer.
Section 415 of H.R, 2055 (The Military Construction (MilCon) and Veterans Affairs (VA) and Related Agencies Appropriations Act of 2012) abolishes the taxpayer waste of mandating project labor agreements. Not only are PLAs costly, they cost 10 percent to 20 percent more than merit-based contractors. PLAs enable the federal government to alter business behavior and strip workers of their right to freedom of association.
PLAs are pre-hire agreements mandating the employer to use a union workforce to receive the construction contract. The federal government, by mandating PLAs for federal construction projects, is clearly choosing winners and losers in the marketplace, affording contracts to employers willing to use union shops exclusively. Seeing how the federal government believes that more government spending will lead to economic recovery, this arrangement can be prevalent, severely contributing to waste, fraud, and abuse.
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The oncoming legalization of online poker charges ahead this week with more lawmakers “seeing the light” or at least the potential revenue dollars that online gambling could add to state coffers. News broke Friday that Nevada’s Governor Brian Sandoval signed a bill that would pave the way for licensing and regulation of online gambling in the state. The bill gives the Nevada Gaming Commission (the agency that regulates all gambling in the state) until this January to develop rules that would govern online gambling activities. However, those rules would not be implemented until the federal government passes some kind of legislation that officially legalizes online gambling. A graph of the odds of that happening would probably look something like a rollercoaster track. Yet, the events of the last three months make it appear as though legalization in some form or another is more likely than ever.
This past March long-time Internet gaming advocate Democrat Rep. Barney Frank teamed up with the newly minted Republican Rep. John Campbell of California and Republican Rep. Peter King of New York to introduce a new bill to legalize, regulate, and tax online gambling. Then on April 15, the Department of Justice shut down the most popular online poker sites serving Americans. Black Friday, as that day became known, was quickly followed by “Blue Monday” with federal prosecutors in Baltimore shutting down still more sites. The DOJ smack-down was preceded by several states taking independent action to legalize intrastate online gambling within their borders (including the District of Columbia, which did pass a budget measure legalizing the activity in the District).
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I received a blast e-mail this morning from 2008 Libertarian Party Vice Presidential nominee Wayne Allyn Root informing readers that John Hospers had passed away on Sunday. He was 93. I can’t yet find any mentions in the press, but will update this post as soon as more information is available.
For those unfamiliar with Professor Hospers, he was the first presidential candidate of the Libertarian Party in 1972. He and his running mate, Tonie Nathan, were the first (and so far only) Libertarian Party ticket to receive an electoral vote, which came after Virginia Republican elector Roger MacBride (who later became the LP’s 1976 presidential nominee) refused to support President Richard Nixon’s reelection. Tonie Nathan’s place on the ticket also resulted in her being the first woman in United States history to receive an electoral vote. She was also the first Jewish person to receive an electoral vote.
In addition to libertarian activism, Hospers was the longtime chairman of the philosophy department at the University of Southern California. He was well-known in libertarian circles as arguably the first academic philosopher to take seriously Ayn Rand’s Objectivist philosophy. At the time of his death, Dr. Hospers was Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at USC. He remained active in the liberty movement in the decades following his run for president. Professor Hospers will be greatly missed, and our thoughts are with his family and friends.
Addendum: Reason‘s Managing Editor (and former CEI Warren T. Brookes Journalism Fellow) Jesse Walker has a post up with some more background information and links to a few of Hospers’ greatest hits. Read it here.
Addendum II: As commenter CLS notes, Professor Hospers was indeed the first openly gay man to receive an electoral vote. Another Libertarian first!
Roughly one week ago, an article appeared in The Odenton Patch covering an Anne Arundel County Police Department press conference where our benevolent ruling class is seen gleefully celebrating their “reward” in assisting a federal investigation which seized over $30 million dollars in internet gambling funds. They even ordered a giant Tiger Woods sized check for a photo-op. Note that though the operation was named “Operation Texas Hold’em,” it is unrelated to the recent crackdown on online poker sites such as Full Tilt and Poker Stars.
The gist of the story is that the police force set up their own online payment processor and processed payments for internet gambling sites as if they were a real legitimate business. The federal government used this evidence to seize funds belonging to those companies. If you visit the website of their now defunct business, they attempt to direct your outrage to the gambling sites:
NOTICE
Linwood Payment Solutions is a Department of Homeland Security Undercover Business set up to identify and prosecute companies accepting and paying out funds for U.S. customers who gamble online illegally.
If you have questions regarding funds withdrawn from your bank account for gambling purposes contact the online gambling company you provided your banking information to.
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Reporting from around the nation on the ridiculous, the sad, and the sometimes positive news about the state of alcohol regulations.
National: BuyaBeerCompany.com, a website set up by two ad execs hoping to purchase Pabst Brewing Co. with donations from individuals, was shut down by the SEC. Michael Migliozzi and Brian William Flatow were able to find 5 million people who agreed to invest a total of $200 million to purchase the brewery. Apparently, they were supposed to register the public offering with the SEC first. Since the men haven’t actually collected money, the SEC reportedly reached a settlement with the two gentlemen, rather than charging them with violations of federal law.
Alabama: A silly law that requires brewpubs in Alabama to operate within an historic building might be overturned. The House of Representatives passed legislation removing that requirement for brewpubs to obtain licenses. The bill also removes restrictions on brewing and allows the pub owner to sell their product to wholesalers in order to distribute their product beyond the brewpub.
Maryland: The Prince George’s County Board of License Commissioners is considering rule changes that would, among other things, allow county liquor stores to accept call-in deliver orders from residents. Not everyone in the state is happy with the proposed changes.
Ohio: Legislators in Ohio want to raise the cap on how high the alcohol content can be in beer from 12 percent to 18 percent. A provision in the proposed state budget would do just that, to the delight of brewers and craft beer lovers in the state.
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The latest happenings in the world of regulation:
If you thought leaving a spouse was tough, just be thankful that you’re not a brewery in need of a divorce from your dead-beat distributor. A recently released video from the Mackinac Center for Public Policy explains how the mandatory three-tier system for alcohol distribution has resulted in an acrimonious relationship between brewers and wholesalers and the deleterious effects it has had on the state’s market.
I have been writing for a while on the many problems stemming from the Prohibition-era system of alcohol distribution which, in most states, requires that producers of alcohol (i.e., distillers, brewers, or wineries) to sell their product to wholesalers/distributors (i.e., middlemen) and then those distributors then sell the products to retailers (i.e., pubs, restaurants, and stores). This means that producers are not allowed to sell their products directly to consumers, restaurants, pubs, or stores: they must sell them to one of a handful of wholesalers operating in their state. Apart from the often unnecessary increase in the producer’s cost of doing business, the requirement gives wholesalers an extraordinary amount of power and influence over producers because in most states breaking such a contract is difficult or impossible, which means that a wholesaler can literally shelve the producers product in their warehouse and the brewer can do very little about it.
In the video, Brett VanderKamp, the president of New Holland Brewing Co., describes the contract that brewers must make with distributors in Michigan as “harder to get out of than a marriage.” That is certainly the case in Massachusetts where small brewers have been lobbying to change the laws. Small brewers who want out of a contract with a distributor often have to go through an expensive legal battle only to take a chance on another wholesaler. Even if the brewery can prove that the wholesaler is failing to get their product on shelves or in restaurants, the cost of the legal battle is often too great for start-up breweries that — even if they manage to break one contract — have no guarantee that the next distributor they find will be any better.
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