In a ruling so dumb that only a panel of intellectuals could have written it, the EU has decided that companies may not claim that water cures dehydration. Dehydration occurs when there is not enough water in the body.
This decision was not reached lightly:
The ruling, announced after a conference of 21 EU-appointed scientists in Parma and which means that bottled water companies cannot claim their product stops people’s bodies drying out, was given final approval this week by European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso.
Not everyone is on board, though:
UKIP MEP Paul Nuttall said: ‘I had to read this four or five times before I believed it.
‘It is a perfect example of what Brussels does best. Spend three years, with 20 separate pieces of correspondence before summoning 21 professors to Parma, where they decide with great solemnity that drinking water cannot be sold as a way to combat dehydration.’
He added: ‘Then they make this judgment law and make it clear that if anybody dares sell water claiming that it is effective against dehydration they could get into serious legal bother.
‘This makes the bendy banana law look positively sane.’
You heard him right. The EU regulates the curvature of bananas.
I’d write more about the water ruling’s free speech implications and how indicative it is of Brussels’ attitude towards commerce, but there’s really no need to. This regulation is its own reductio ad absurdum.
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
November 18, 2011
>>Featured Story
This week, CEI released a new study debunking claims by environmentalist groups about the risks of commonly-used chemicals. The study’s authors, CEI Senior Fellow Angela Logomasini and Contributing Scholar Daniel J. Murphy, urge state regulators not to appease green lobbyists by forcing perfectly safe products off the shelves. CEI’s press release on the study is available here. You can read the full study here. 
[click to continue…]
OPINION
BRYAN CAPLAN: “The Reasons for my Hostility to ZMP”
“ZMP [Zero Marginal Productivity] coheres well with my elitism, but coheres poorly with my rejection of high-IQ misanthropy. The lower deciles contribute little to the economy in percentage terms, but the absolute value of their contribution is still hundreds of billions of dollars.”
HARVEY SILVERGLATE: “The Supreme Court: A Prosecutor’s Best Friend”
“The metastasizing of federal laws has ensured that seemingly innocuous behavior without any criminal intent behind it can lead to a conviction for a federal crime. Artists, doctors, and even professional baseball players have reason to fear the federal gaze. Indeed, no professional sector is safe from serious liability; no sector, that is, save the government itself. As death-row-exoneree John Thompson will undoubtedly show in his upcoming United States tour advocating against prosecutorial abuse, public servants are held to a much lower standard than their citizen masters, and even the most egregious of their crimes go unpunished, as notions of “prosecutorial immunity” are used to protect the criminal and the negligent.
CONOR FRIEDERSDORF: “What if the Law Required Campaign Contributions to Be Kept Secret?”
“Presently, our intuition is that transparency and disclosure are the best policies. But what if, like our counterparts in early America, we’re just enabling a kind of vote buying, whereby legislators know exactly who is bankrolling their campaigns, and skewer their behavior toward special interests as a result? What if less transparency would be as effective for us as it was for them? [...] There is an obvious objection. It was reasonably simple to implement a secret ballot. But campaign contributions? What if it proved impossible to actually keep their provenance secret? What’s to stop me from whispering to Joe Legislator, ‘You’re going to see $10,000 show up in your campaign account a week from now. It’s from me.’ That would be the worst of all worlds: gone would be the transparency of the current system, and politicians would still know who to keep happy!”
[click to continue…]
According to Bloomberg News, North Carolina Democratic Senator Kay Hagan is set to introduce a bill that would create new “progressive” and “exceptional” approval processes for new drugs to treat unmet needs. These would be similar to the FDA’s existing “accelerated approval” process, open primarily to AIDS and cancer drugs, which permits the agency to grant a conditional approval once intermediate clinical trials demonstrate improvement in a so-called “surrogate end-point” such as tumor shrinkage. Once granted accelerated approval, these drugs must still complete more rigorous Phase III clinical trials to demonstrate improvement in the ultimate clinical end-point of patient survival, or the agency may revoke the conditional approval.
Details of the bill are not yet available, but I understand that “progressive approval” would function essentially like accelerated approval does now, but that the pathway would be open to any drug that would be the first approved treatment for a given disease or condition, or for an identifiable sub-population with the disease or condition. “Exceptional approval” would be available in cases where standard controlled clinical trials would be unfeasible to conduct, such as when the patient population is so small that enrolling a large clinical trial of thousands of patients would be nearly impossible. It would also be open to cases in which it would be unethical to conduct a standard placebo-controlled trials because that entails some patients getting no active treatment.
The accelerated approval process has been somewhat controversial, inasmuch as it can result in the withdrawal of an approved drug that has benefited some, but not all, patients taking it. That’s what happened with the breast cancer indication for the drug Avastin, which I wrote about earlier this year. It also becomes difficult for manufacturers to enroll clinical trials once a product may be legally sold to any patient whose doctor prescribes it. There’s a critical discussion of accelerated approval here.
The process is by no means perfect. But to the extent that it helps get needed drugs to market sooner, accelerated approval has been a tremendous boon for patient health. So, I look forward to seeing Sen. Hagan’s bill, and I applaud her efforts to help expedite the availability of new treatment options.
Maryland’s governor just decided to shower money on Bowie State University, a school that is almost as bad as a diploma mill. When I applied to college, Bowie State’s median SAT score was 617 total — out of 1600. (My SAT score was 1520.) You could get nearly that score by leaving the entire test blank except for your name (you got a quarter of a point for each blank answer, to discourage random guessing.) One of my high-school history teachers went there despite its bad quality because it was right near his house. He took courses like “arithmetic for college students,” and although he never fully mastered arithmetic, he was a genius compared to many of his classmates (who viewed him as a strangely studious egghead). Bowie State is a monotonously left-wing place, and one of its professors was famous for claiming that the U.S. government invented AIDS as a conspiracy to kill blacks.
Now, The Washington Examiner reports that “Maryland officials on Wednesday approved the purchase of 32 high-end pianos for Bowie State University, costing taxpayers more than a half million dollars amid a looming $1 billion shortfall. With a 2-to-1 vote, the Maryland Board of Public Works signed off on a $553,000 contract . . . Gov. Martin O’Malley and Treasurer Nancy Kopp . . . voted for the contract.”
[click to continue…]
Every holiday season features a slew of laughable articles denouncing the destruction of American tradition. Meghan Cox Gurdon’s piece in The Washington Examiner today is more of the same. She attacks Target, Wal-Mart, and other retailers (“co-evils,” she calls them) for their decision to open stores on Thanksgiving. She says, “Something beautiful is being smashed.” It’s a “breach of civic decency,” a “horrible stain over the Thanksgiving table.”
Why? Retailers aren’t invading homes or dumping products and advertisements on the turkey. Nor are customers being forced out of their homes at gunpoint. The knowledge that some store somewhere is operating won’t ruin my potatoes or make me trample grandma on my way to the door. Cox Gurdon claims, “If getting big bargains means rushing through Thanksgiving dinner at Grandma’s, you know it’ll happen.” Actually retailers don’t know that. Many families, if not most, will stay home this Thanksgiving as they always have. Retailers are taking the risk that they won’t.
Articles like this aren’t just rhetorical excesses. They underpin arguments against free-enterprise by supporting the myth that companies control consumers. In reality, the opposite is true: businesses must respond to their customers’ wants or they disappear. If enough consumers stay home this Thanksgiving, expect retailers to open later next year. In fact, the reason retail stores have remained closed for so long on Thanksgiving is so few people want to shop on holidays. Maybe this year will be different, but I say, let the people decide.
Yesterday, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee held a hearing on the granting of nearly $13 million in bonuses for executives of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The day before, all but four member of the House Financial Services Committee voted to strip these bonuses for the failed government-sponsored enterprises and subject them to the federal pay scale. (Horror of horrors, the Fannie executives wouldn’t be able to make more than the vice president’s salary of $230,000!)
But when it comes to aiding millionaires, Americans should be doubly outraged at Fannie and Freddie and at their enablers in Congress. Some of the very same members of Congress expressing outrage about the bonuses may be on the verge of enlarging Fannie and Freddie’s role in the housing market and at the same time increasing government subsidies to millionaire owners of McMansions. As I wrote in National Review last month, the Democrat-controlled Senate and a handful of Republicans voted to hike the conforming loan limit for mortgages that Fannie and Freddie can buy and the Federal Housing Administration can insure to $729,750. Now, the House of Representatives has to decide whether to include this in its version of a “minibus” appropriations bill.
[click to continue…]
Have a listen here.
Conflict minerals are goods that come from sources that use the revenues to fund civil wars and other atrocities. CEI Founder and President Fred Smith talks about why restricting conflict mineral trade can mean more violence, not less. He also discusses why the Gibson guitar company was unjustly raided by the federal government for importing wood that may or may not have been illegally harvested by its suppliers.
Imagine a home is on fire.
Now imagine the inhabitants of that home arguing among themselves about how to put out the conflagration, or even if they should do so. As the flames draw near, the ceiling nears collapse, the smoke chokes their lungs, they finally agree to try and agree to procure a Dixie Cup full of water to fight the fire, and they give themselves a deadline to do it.
If you think this type of comical dithering in the face of mortal danger would be insane, you’d be right. If you think it sounds a lot like what Congress is doing with its extra-constitutional “Super committee,” a delegation of 12 House and Senate members (never has that word been more accurate) charged with finding some way to cut the deficit by at least $1.2 trillion over ten years, you’d also be right.
If the super committee cannot agree on cuts by their November 23 deadline, well, CNN sums up the possible consequences: “A failure to pass any agreement would result in $1.2 trillion in automatic across-the-board spending cuts starting in 2013, evenly divided between defense and non-defense spending.”
Proposing $1.2 trillion in cuts over 10 years as our national debt tops $15 trillion is a joke. Failing to even agree on that (which at this point looks quite likely) is a sick joke. What the super committee is having a hard time agreeing to would amount to less than a Dixie Cup full of water to fight our economic fire — it would be a thimbleful, if that. As Alexis Simendinger wryly notes in Real Clear Politics:
The country’s economic situation in the near term remains precarious even if Congress does what the law says it must — reduce deficits over 10 years by at least $1.2 trillion. And it would worsen if the super committee fails to reach agreement next week. If that happens, the political stalemate would sink market confidence, potentially weaken ratings of U.S. debt, and further rattle public confidence in government.
To say the least. If your house burns down, assuming you survive, you can move into another house or rebuild the old one. When your economy burns down, where do you go?
You can replace a house; how do you replace a republic?
OPINION
BRINK LINDSEY: “The Start-Up Act: Blueprint for an Innovation Recovery”
“The best way to promote innovation is to clear the way for the main agents of innovation: the entrepreneurs who create new businesses. Existing firms innovate, but their contributions are usually incremental — improvements in existing products or production processes, or the introduction of new products through pursuit of well-established R&D agendas. When it comes to so-called discontinuous or disruptive innovation — the kinds of breakthroughs that topple the status quo and give rise to whole new industries — the catalysts of change tend to be new firms. ”
INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY EDITORIAL: “Is the U.S. Lazy on Investment?”
“President Obama told CEOs in Hawaii that the U.S. had been “lazy” in attracting foreign investment. Actually, the White House has been pretty busy demonizing it. The Obama administration has a record of making life miserable for foreign investors that put their capital on the line to create jobs in the U.S. Politically wedded to special interests such as Big Labor, White House officials have hurled scurrilous charges against foreign companies and muscled others in ways no domestic company would tolerate.”
BRIAN RIES: “Facebook Deactivates Salman Rushdie’s Profile, Makes Him Use ‘Ahmed‘”
“For a few hours on Monday morning, Salman Rushdiehad just about had it with Facebook. [...] ‘Facebook deactivated my account because they thought I wasn’t me,’ [Rushdie] explained on the site. ‘Now they insist I call myself by the first name I have never used. What a bunch of morons.’ That rarely used first name, Ahmed, is what’s printed on his passport. Salman, technically speaking, is his middle name. And a post about ‘name standards’ on Facebook’s Help Center—which the company on Monday acknowledged is a bit dated and then quickly updated after a query by The Daily Beast—suggested that middle names simply aren’t allowed.”
[click to continue…]
RSS Updates 
RSS E-Mail Updates 
Twitter 
Facebook 
CEI.org 
WorkPlaceChoice.org 
GlobalWarming.org 
CEI On Demand Video 
Liberty Week Podcast 