Usually, “bipartisan” means “twice as stupid.” But for real regulatory reform to happen, both parties need to be involved. President Obama’s recent executive orders requiring agencies to comb their books and repeal unneeded regulations should save a few billion dollars. But that’s just a drop in a $1.7 trillion bucket. Over at Fox Forum, I explain one bipartisan idea that could potentially save much more:
Agencies cannot be trusted to clean out their own books because they have no incentive to. Agency administrators want to maximize their
missions and budgets. Having them police themselves will not yield real savings.
There is a relatively easy fix: get independent outsiders with no stake in the outcome go through the Code of Federal Regulations make the
repeal recommendations. President Obama should appoint a bipartisan repeal commission to do just that and then send its package of repeal
proposals to Congress.
Congress, worried about backlash from interest groups with vested interests in existing rules, would have every incentive to water down
the package. To avoid that, Congress should impose on itself a requirement to have a straight up-or-down vote on the package within a
short time-say, 10 legislative days-with no amendments allowed.
Read the whole thing here.
After school shootings, psychologists fan out and provide “grief counseling” to student bodies, but it’s far from clear that this does any good. Critics say it just encourages students to wallow in despair, rather than putting the episode behind them, and forces students to relive the tragedy. Nevertheless, local governments persist in spending money on such activities. Now, even psychologists are admitting in The New York Times that similar grief counseling to New Yorkers after 9/11 backfired and harmed people: “researchers later discovered that the standard approach at the time, in which the therapist urges a distressed person to talk through the experience and emotions, backfires for many people. They plunge even deeper into anxiety and depression when forced to relive the mayhem.”
A report “due to be published next month in a special issue of the journal American Psychologist, relates a succession of humbling missteps after the attacks” by psychologists, notes The New York Times today. “Experts greatly overestimated the number of people in New York who would suffer lasting emotional distress. Therapists rushed in to soothe victims using methods that later proved to be harmful to some.” Worrying about “the consequences of letting people grieve on their own,” psychologists offered their counseling “unbidden” to “anyone who looked stricken,” resulting in some of those who received “treatment” becoming “annoyed or more upset.”
The fact that psychologists would overestimate the numbers of people who suffer lasting emotional distress in response to a negative event is probably not news to any large employer. In lawsuits against employers, psychologists hired by workers’ lawyers have falsely claimed that even mild, non-threatening workplace events cause serious psychological conditions like Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), violating limits on junk science laid down by the Supreme Court’s Daubert decision. In some jurisdictions, a plaintiff’s lawyer can easily find a psychologist to testify as an “expert witness” (for a fee) that the plaintiff has suffered PTSD as a result of politically-incorrect workplace jokes (even though that is impossible, according to findings by psychologists like Paul Lees-Haley).
Another area where psychologists have done harm is in the area of “diversity training.” We wrote previously about how diversity training backfires and leads to racial tension and lawsuits against employers.
Since time immemorial, Cook County, Illinois, has had very strict personal conduct regulations for its forests. Among other things, it has been illegal to:
- Hang out (only applies to felons)
- Tell fortunes
- Have your fly open
- Juggle
- Do a somersault
- Park illegally (redundant?)
- Perform acrobatic stunts
All those clandestine activities are now legal. Those laws are at least 100 years old, and were mainly intended to prevent traveling circuses and carnivals from setting up shop in the forests surrounding Chicago. No citations for any of these offenses have been issued within living memory.
That’s why Cook County’s forest preserve took the hygienic step of repealing the regulations. If a rule isn’t going to be enforced, or if it is clearly a relic of the horse-and-buggy era, it shouldn’t be on the books. Legislators around the country at all levels of government would do well to follow the example that Cook County’s forest preserve has set. It’s the regulatory version of spring cleaning.
As the debt ceiling deadline of August 2 draws closer, the demagoguery and fear-mongering of government officials has ramped up. This is not surprising given Washington’s spending addiction. Despite their harsh words and prophecies of Armageddon, I explain in The Orange County Register that these fears are no more than political theater and that the real threat is continued unsustainable spending financed through a debt limit increase.
Contrary to what spendthrift politicians have been saying, reaching the federal debt ceiling does not automatically trigger default. The debt limit simply caps the amount of debt that the U.S. Treasury may issue. The Treasury has the ability to prioritize its payments to bondholders and sell off assets (like TARP funds and gold) to avoid a default situation. Debt interest payments total $214 billion for 2011 – that’s less than 10 percent of $2.2 trillion in expected tax revenue this fiscal year.
…
Raising the ceiling for the 11th time since the start of the new millennium tells investors that the U.S. government is not serious about controlling its spending addiction. Instead, curbing the issuing of more debt and cutting spending will signal to bondholders that the government is finally trying to address the problem that created a debt crisis in the first place.
Read the whole article here.
The House will vote on the Jobs Protection from Government Interference Act today. Sponsor Rep. Tim Scott and other representatives of Congress have proposed numerous bills to amend the National Labor Relations Act in response to the NLRB and Boeing lawsuit. The litany of Band-Aid bills attempting to fix bad legislation with slightly better legislation does not achieve labor reform. Congress has missed the root of the problem of labor law in the U.S.: the NLRA. True labor reform cannot happen when an unelected board with a Big Labor agenda interprets the laws governing labor relations.
In the 112th Congress, the Secret Ballot Protection Act, H.R. 2118, State Right to Vote Act, and Jobs Protection from Government Interference Act have been proposed. Reining in the NLRB and amending the NLRA is the sole purpose of all these proposed bills.
To have four bills proposed in the first half of the Congressional session to amend one act makes it the clear the need for repeal not amendments. There is no amount of legislation that can undo the bias of the NLRA and the NLRB toward organized labor.
Republican lawmakers cite the financial crisis and unemployment for the need to amend the NLRA. Indeed, unemployment and lack of job creation has put a spotlight on the job killing actions of the NLRB. However, the proposed bills do not achieve a level playing field between the employer, employee, and union boss or create certainty for the business community to invest in the U.S.
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What is the role of community spaces in the democratic process? Which is better at producing good community spaces: civil society and the market, or government? Many people see community spaces as essential facilitators of the dialogue needed for a healthy democracy, and look to government to maintain such spaces. For these people, private control eliminates the fundamental character of a community space, turning it from a civic to a commercial purpose.
Naomi Klein characterizes the anti-globalization movement as about reclaiming public spaces overrun by privatization.
The spirit they share is a radical reclaiming of the commons. As our communal spaces—town squares, streets, schools, farms, plants—are displaced by the ballooning marketplace, a spirit of resistance is taking hold around the world. People are reclaiming bits of nature and of culture, and saying ‘this is going to be public space’.
At the end of July, I attended a seminar put on by the Institute for Humane Studies, where GMU economics professor Daniel D’Amico argued that the opposite is the case. Where Klein sees venal commercial interests, D’Amico sees civil society. For D’Amico, and for me, it is wrong-headed to think that the best way to maintain community spaces is to have government control them. While people do debate about government, government is not about debate. Government is about force.
This difference is sharply seen when we look at what happens when people misbehave in government-controlled “public spaces” as opposed to places of commerce.
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There are apples and other fruit sitting around my house, and my four-year-old daughter can eat an apple anytime. By contrast, she seldom gets to eat McDonald’s french fries. So when I go to McDonald’s, I want her Happy Meal to include french fries (which take time to cook), not apple slices. But under pressure from public-health activists and potential lawsuits, McDonald’s is now substituting apple slices for much of the french fries that historically came with a Happy Meal.
I have no idea why apple slices are such a fetish for public health activists. There’s nothing bad in an apple, but they’re not a paragon of nutrition, either — an apple has only a little over 10 percent of your day’s supply of vitamin C, not much different than an order of McDonald’s french fries (and after you slice up an apple, the vitamin C in it dissipates faster). An orange or grapefruit packs a lot more nutrition than an apple. (For dieters, though, apples are good, since they make you feel full fast. But I and my family don’t need to go on a diet.)
Many so-called public-health activists are ignorant control freaks. If they had any brains, they would support substituting baked potatoes for french fries, not apples. Baked potatoes have much more nutrition than apples.
But instead, those busybodies got the Obama administration to ban white potatoes from the federal WIC program (WIC money can be spent on far less nutritious things than potatoes, things that are starchy, fatty or sugary, like apple sauce, which has no nutrition unless vitamin C is artificially added to it).
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The Huffington Post reports that the Department of Justice is fixing to slap a lawsuit on Wells-Fargo for “allegedly preying upon African American borrowers during the housing bubble and steering them into high-cost subprime loans,” which seems a little strange, considering that this was the goal of certain government policies leading up to the subprime crisis.
In the 1990s, the Clinton administration pushed for increased homeownership among traditionally under-represented groups. The Department of Housing and Urban Development released the “National Homeownership Strategy” in 1994. The plan for increasing homeownership includes this ominous statement:
For many potential homebuyers, the lack of cash available to accumulate the required downpayment and closing costs is the major impediment to purchasing a home. Other households do not have sufficient available income to to make the monthly payments on mortgages financed at market interest rates for standard loan terms. Financing strategies, fueled by the creativity and resources of the private and public sectors, should address both of these financial barriers to homeownership.
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