Recent innovations, such as easy-open tabs on cans, have prompted the Department of Agriculture to issue a 13-page update to its food container inspection regulations. If you have some spare time on your hands, you can have a look by clicking here.

Yet, an article in the Washington Times today quotes Roger Middleton, a piracy specialist at the London-based Chatham House: “the international community was still ’solidly against’ armed guards aboard vessels at sea” and goes on to note that “American ships have taken a different line from the rest of the international community.”  Remember when Ross Perot sent his own team to Iran to rescue his employees.  Americans aren’t immune to self-defense and rarely are as concerned as the “international community” about the root causes that have driven these poor individuals to resort to piracy.

Perhaps, America hasn’t gone quite as crazy as we think.

The vote occurred with no discussion, and no hearing was even held on his nomination, although hearings have consistently been held on OSHA nominees in the past, even for far less controversial picks.

Lawyer and Second Amendment expert, David Kopel explains how Michaels wants to ban guns in and near workplaces, and could use his position at OSHA to do so, if the political climate shifts in favor of gun control. (Some businessmen in high-crime areas possess guns to protect themselves against armed robbers, and even strict local gun-control laws have generally contained exceptions to allow such businesses to defend themselves.)

The fact that such bans might undermine, rather than enhance, workplace safety would not deter Michaels, who would be happy to rely on junk science.   Michaels wants to reverse the Supreme Court’s Daubert decision limiting the use of junk science.

As the Washington Times noted, “Mr. Michaels also is an anti-gun zealot who has described ‘gun violence’ as an issue of ‘public health’ that ‘invariably demands more and stronger regulation, not less.’ As Walter Olson of the Manhattan Institute explained, by way of warning, on Aug. 15: ‘That’s by no means irrelevant to the agenda of an agency like OSHA, because once you start viewing private gun ownership as a public health menace, it begins to seem logical to use the powers of government to urge or even require employers to forbid workers from possessing guns on company premises, up to and including parking lots, ostensibly for the protection of co-workers. In addition, OSHA has authority to regulate the working conditions of various job categories associated with firearms use (security guards, hunting guides, etc.) and could in that capacity do much to bring grief to Second Amendment values.’”

As I noted in a New York Times story, Michaels’ appointment could “dramatically alter OSHA’s approach to ensuring workplace safety.” Michaels has been called “one the nation’s foremost proponents of allowing junk science to be used in jackpot-justice lawsuits.”

Many business groups raised concerns about his nomination and extreme views.

Iain Murray notes that Michaels seeks to ban useful products from the workplace based on imaginary risks. One newspaper calls Michaels “virulently anti-business.”

The lopsided committee vote in favor of Michaels is probably explained by log-rolling.  As The Wall Street Journal has noted, some Republican committee members likely voted along with their Democratic colleagues to approve Michaels, in exchange for Obama’s recent nomination of an aide to the ranking Republican committee member, to sit on the board of an independent agency that is supposed to be bipartisan (the NLRB), but which Obama could conceivably have made even more partisan and liberal than it is by nominating a liberal RINO rather than a GOP aide to that post (that might have invited a filibuster, but there are only 40 Republican Senators, and it takes 41 votes to successfully filibuster a nomination).

Jupiter, of course, is about as far away from America as one can get.

But wait, there’s more:

The town code regulates items such as when garbage cans can be placed outside, noise volume, parking of boats, heights of fences, the number of tenants and landscaping. Lawns cannot be higher than eight inches in developed residential areas.

The ban, due to take effect in 2011, has not been repealed outright. But, in response to public outcry, it has been delayed:

The FDA announced it would commission a study to explore alternatives to reducing the illness vibrio vulnificus, and also do an economic analysis of how the ban would impact the oyster industry.

“Before proceeding, we will conduct an independent study to assess how post-harvest processing or other equivalent controls can be feasibly implemented in the Gulf Coast in the fastest, safest and most economical way,” according to an FDA news release.

This means one of two things: either grandmothers with snow globes in their carry-ons are the biggest terrorist threat facing the country, or the TSA is doing something wrong.

The way to prevent terrorism is to make terrorism difficult. Banning snow globes doesn’t make terrorism any more difficult.

Yes, larger snow globes probably violate the TSA’s three-ounce limit for liquids. But they are not bombs. They are, in fact, snow globes.

The House of Representatives recently passed the bill by a vote of 220 to 215.

According to the federal experts, the bill would likely either cost much more than projected, or result in some “hospitals and nursing homes” deciding to ”stop taking Medicare altogether,” notes the Washington Post.

The bill will increase taxes to “European levels of taxation,” while failing to provide European-style universal coverage.  It will vastly increase the costs of our health care system, rather than reducing it to European levels.   It reinforces foolish restrictions on national competition in health insurance, which do not exist in Europe.

Doctors afraid of being wrongly sued for malpractice despite providing good quality care order unnecessary tests (or defensive medicine), which wastes at least $200 billion annually. That’s nearly as much money as France spends on health-care for all its citizens.  The bill does nothing to reduce such costs, ignoring lessons from Europe.  (Many European countries have specialized health courts, rather than American-style jury trials, to cut lawyers’ bills, speedily compensate the injured, and prevent American-style baseless lawsuits against doctors.)

In European countries like France, doctors don’t need to be paid as much, because competing professions, like lawyers, are paid less.  European law is generally much more conservative than American law when it comes to lawsuits, including lawsuits against doctors.  Punitive damages are generally forbidden, and lawsuits are discouraged by making unsuccessful plaintiffs pay the other side’s legal bills.

The health-care bills backed by Obama also contain lots of waste and subsidies for politically-correct things like “cultural competency,” while cutting spending on crucial things like anesthesia.

Obama’s proposals contain provisions that he falsely claims will cut costs, but which actually exploded costs when tried by state governments.

BrewDog’s response? As recently reported by the blog BevLaw, BrewDog markets a product called “Nanny State Beer” for all those regulators and others who just can’t control themselves! It has just 1.1 percent alcohol. Its label reads:

Society today is an all too dangerous place.

ASBO-ed [Anti-Social Behaviour Order] three year olds loitering in alley ways, CCTV [Closed-circuit television] recording our every move and misplaced suitcases grinding entire public transport infrastructures to a halt.

No wonder you’ve been reduced to a quivering wreck, battening down the hatches at three in the afternoon with Ofcom [Office of Communications] on speed dial.

At BrewDog we appreciate your inability to know your limits - especially when it comes to alcohol – which is why we’ve created Nanny State.

This idiosyncratic little beer is a gentle smack in the right direction.

It’s time to draw your net curtains, sit back with Nanny and watch your favourite episode of Last Of The Summer Wine. It’s finally safe to enjoy alcohol again.

Please note: BrewDog recommends that you only drink this beer whilst wearing the necessary personal protective equipment and in a premises that has passed a full health and safety risk assessment for optimum enjoyment.

Good that BrewDog has a sense of humor, and fortunately, their products remain on the market–at least for now. What’s not funny, is the growing nanny-state mentality and what it can do to our freedoms. Beer is just one of their many targets. Watch out for regulations on soda, car windows, water, and even your waistline!

Image: From BrewDog blog site.

Fortunately, it turns out that children handling toy cars or other toys with brass parts does not raise their lead concentrations to anywhere near harmful levels. No harm, no foul, right?

Doesn’t matter, say regulators. No exceptions.

Toymakers presumably choose brass because it is cheap, durable, and better than alternative materials. Now they will have to turn to those second-best materials despite no evidence of harm.

There is also one benefit being overlooked. Copper alloys such as brass have natural antibacterial properties, a definite plus when children are involved.

So the next time you see little Johnny crying because he’s sick and his toy car’s axle is broken, you’ll know who to blame.

The law, passed last year, is part of an effort to keep obesity rates low and avoid related health problems.

One problem with using wasitlines as the primary metric is that results can vary among measurers. According to one article, “Satoru Yamada, a doctor at Kitasato Institute Hospital in Tokyo, published a study two years ago in which several doctors measured the waist of the same person. Their results varied by as much as 7.8 centimeters.”

That’s almost ten percent of the average waistline. It is sad that Japanese regulators have a strong enough nanny-state streak to legislate allowable physical dimensions. But the lack of precision in enforcing their edict must be maddening for the people involved.

“Electromagnetic radiation” is a fancy way of saying light waves.

Herberman has been on his cell phone crusade for a while now; I diagnosed him with a severe case of The Certainty last year.

Still, let’s assume he’s right that cell phones cause tumors. What actions should be taken? I present the following CDC data on leading causes of death as a way to guide our priorities:

Heart disease: 631,636
Cancer: 559,888
Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 137,119
Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 124,583
Accidents (unintentional injuries): 121,599
Diabetes: 72,449
Alzheimer’s disease: 72,432
Influenza and Pneumonia: 56,326
Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 45,344
Septicemia: 34,234

Deaths from cancer attributable to cell phone use? Zero. There is an important lesson to be learned here.

Think of it like this: every dollar and every hour of researchers’ time spent investigating cancer risks from cell phones is money and time not spent curing heart disease. Or cancer itself. Or stroke. These “big three” combine to end more than a million lives each and every year.

Which is a better use of limited research resources? Herberman, by bringing funding and attention to a non-issue, is quite possibly costing lives that could otherwise be saved.

The Certainty has very high costs. In Herberman’s case, measurable in lives.

“We must push our trading partners to do their part to curb harmful emissions and we must devise a border measure, consistent with our international obligations, to prevent the carbon leakage that would occur if US manufacturing shifts to countries without effective climate change programs.”

Currently the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, chaired by Senator Barbara Boxer, has rushed through its own bill without minority input to try to catch up with the House, which passed its cap-and-trade bill - H.R. 2454 — on June 26, 2009. The House bill contains a border tax adjustment measure, while the Senate bill does not.  At least, yet.  But Baucus’ comments are a strong signal that the Senate bill will also include tariffs or border “adjustments,” i.e., taxes.

This unfortunate idea is gaining greater traction among global warming advocates as a way to maintain U.S. competitiveness for industries, such as steel and cement, that would be facing higher costs if an energy suppression bill to address global warming is passed.  Proponents of “border measures” also see this as a way to curtail so-called leakage of carbon-intensive industries and related jobs to other countries without similar constraints. Of course, the common justification for those who want to hobble their competition is the refrain: “Level the playing field.”  In Washington politics, that usually means bringing your competitors down to your level.  Check out this article for some possible consequences.

These endorsements could portend a carbon tariff push in Copenhagen when world climate pukkas gather on December 7, 2009. Luckily for people in the U.S., it’s not likely that a newly minted global warming bill will be in their pockets.

It is defined as “all combustible particulate solids of any size, shape, or chemical composition that could present a fire or deflagration hazard when suspended in air or other oxidizing medium.”

Maybe it speaks well of workplace safety if OSHA has made combustible dust one of its highest priorities.

A pessimist might counter that OSHA, having regulated everything else, has been reduced to regulating obscurities in its never-ending search for something to do, and for someone to command.

One school of thought attributes the tragedy to politically-correct double standards imposed on the military that kept the alarm bells from going off.

Other commentators point to a gun-control policy that disarms soldiers while on military bases to create “gun-free zones,” leaving them defenseless in the face of an attack.

These explanations are not mutually exclusive. Doubtless other factors could have contributed to the tragedy as well.

As Garrett Peck, author of The Prohibition Hangover, notes in The Washington Post, this is long overdue. (The op ed is due to appear in the Post’s Sunday edition, but it’s already online.) The ABC system, which several states adopted after the end of Prohibition in 1934, is today an anacrhonism that doesn’t even work very well.

ABC was once about promoting temperance, but the abstinence movement has basically died. Two-thirds of American adults drink alcohol. In reality, Virginia ABC is now about generating revenue for the state — and at that, it isn’t particularly efficient. Virginia can make more money — as can localities — by privatizing the system, both from auctioning the licenses and through ongoing tax revenue. The private sector will assume the operating costs, shifting ABC authority to where it properly belongs — regulation and enforcement.

And then there are the consumer implications.

Virginia’s ABC stores are a tower of mediocrity. They are centrally managed retail outlets that would have been palaces in the Soviet Union, but today they are anachronistic. They offer highly limited choices, often lacking exciting new brands or those with a cult following. Staff members generally aren’t knowledgeable about how to mix drinks or make cocktails. And the prices are artificially high because there is no competition: The state decides what to charge.

For more on The Prohibition Hangover, see here.

Having solved all of the community’s other problems, regulators now have the time to turn their attention to what is apparently a spat between neighbors. One resident is upset that the 15 cats (!) owned by a neighboring woman have been sullying his yard.

I might suggest that Coaseian bargaining might be a better solution than a law.

A fiat decision in favor of one party will leave at least one disputant dissatisfied. In this case, the cat lady is looking to move to a different town. Why not treat both parties as equals with rights to need to be respected? That approach is far more likely to generate an outcome everyone is happy with.

Presumably the offended neighbor is willing to pay some amount to keep the cats off of his yard. The cat lady is also willing to pay some price to keep her cats. Let them bargain, then. Maybe they can split the cost of building a fence. Whatever they agree on. The point is that there is a missing market here.

Allowing the parties to bargain creates that missing market. It allows the neighbors to come to a peaceful, mutually agreeable solution. Passing a law favoring one over the other is simply unfair.

The new law dramatically expands the reach of the existing federal hate-crimes law that was already on the books, by getting rid of the requirement that a hate crime affect federally-protected activities to be prosecuted in federal court.  It also adds sexual orientation, gender, disability, and transgender characteristics to a law that was originally designed to protect racial minorities.

The hate-crimes bill was opposed by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights for allowing the reprosecution in federal court of people found innocent in state court.  The Commission called the new law a “menace to civil liberties” because it is an end-run around constitutional guarantees against double jeopardy.

As explained earlier, the bill’s sponsors seek to use it to reprosecute people in federal court who have already been found innocent of hate crimes in state court, taking advantage of the “dual sovereignty” loophole in constitutional protections against double jeopardy.  Civil libertarians like Nat Hentoff and Wendy Kaminer thus object to the bill on double-jeopardy grounds.   Backers of the bill, like the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and Commissioner Michael Yaki, supported the bill partly as a way of prosecuting all over again people who were either found not guilty, or who were convicted only of ordinary crimes, while being acquitted of hate-crimes (like the teenagers acquitted of hate crimes in the Shenandoah incident, and the California case of Joseph Silva and George Silva).

Such re-prosecutions can be an enormous waste of money, and grossly unfair to the people who are reprosecuted, driving them into bankruptcy to pay lawyers to represent them all over again when they have already been found innocent in state court after an expensive trial.  When the government re-prosecutes someone, it gains an enormous tactical advantage over the defendant from using the prior prosecution as a test-run, even if the defendant is innocent — making a guilty verdict possible even if the defendant is in fact innocent.

The bill also raises serious constitutional federalism issues under the Supreme Court’s Morrison decision.

Passage of the bill was aided by lousy reporting, in which some journalists, like Reuters, depicted the bill as simply a harmless measure to add sexual orientation to the list of protected characteristics covered by the federal hate-crimes law, ignoring its many other, far more important (and dangerous) changes to federal hate-crimes law.

Many supporters of the hate crimes bill want to allow those found innocent to be reprosecuted in federal court. As one supporter put it, “the federal hate crimes bill serves as a vital safety valve in case a state hate-crimes prosecution fails.” The claim that the justice system has “failed” when a jury returns a not-guilty verdict is truly scary and contrary to the constitutional presumption of innocence and the right to trial by jury.

But it is a view widely shared among supporters of the hate-crimes bill. Syndicated columnist Jacob Sullum pointed out in 1998 that Janet Reno, Clinton’s Attorney General, backed the bill as a way of providing a federal “forum” for prosecution if prosecutors fail to obtain a conviction “in the state court.”

Supporters of the hate crimes bill also see it as a way to prosecute people even in cases where the evidence is so weak that state prosecutors have decided not to prosecute. Attorney General Eric Holder has pushed for the hate crimes bill as a way to prosecute people whom state prosecutors refuse to prosecute because of a lack of evidence. To justify broadening federal hate-crimes law, he cited three examples where state prosecutors refused to prosecute, citing a lack of evidence. In each, a federal jury acquitted the accused, finding them not guilty.

As law professor Gail Heriot notes, “Some have even called for federal prosecution of the Duke University lacrosse team members–despite strong evidence of their innocence.”  Advocates of a broader federal hate-crimes law have pointed to the Duke lacrosse case as an example of where federal prosecutors should have stepped in and prosecuted the accused players — even though the state prosecution in that case was dropped because the defendants were actually innocent, as North Carolina’s attorney general conceded (and DNA evidence showed), and were falsely accused of rape by a woman with a history of violence (including trying to run over someone with her car) and making false accusations.

The Obama administration has long supported the hate-crimes bill, which it used as a wedge issue in the 2008 election.

As law professors like Jonathan Turley and Eugene Volokh have noted, the Obama administration recently urged restrictions on hate speech at the United Nations, joining in calls to treat such speech, protected by the First Amendment under Supreme Court rulings, as a human-rights violation in violation of international human-rights treaties. In the U.S., college hate-speech codes have been used to discipline students for criticizing affirmative action, discussing the racial implications of the death penalty, and calling homosexuality immoral.  In Canada and Britain, hate speech laws have been used to punish religious criticism of Scientology and homosexuality.

An unintended consequence is that the state of Louisiana is up in arms. The sterilization rule essentially bans raw oysters, a local delicacy, for seven months every year. Sterilization also affects the flavor of cooked oysters, a common ingredient in Cajun cooking.

Restaurateurs are livid. One describes the rule as “ludicrous.”Another calls it “a nuclear bomb” for the oyster industry. State officials are also upset, and have issued strongly worded statements opposing the rule.

Maloney, whose most recent legislative accomplishment was the Credit Card Holders Bill of Rights that was signed by President Obama in May and hailed by liberal groups, has teamed with conservative Rep. Scott Garrett, R-N.J., to introduce an amendment to extend the exemption for smaller public companies – those with less than a $75 million market cap – from the costly audit of internal controls from the law’s Section 404 to at least June 2011 and until the Securities and Exchange Commission and Government Accountability Office each perform a study. This is important because the current exemption expires next June, and SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro recently said that there will absolutely, positively be no further extension, despite the limited research on the effects of Sarbox on the very smallest companies and the extensive research showing often devastating burdens on midsize and even large ones.

Rep. Adler goes one further. His amendment would exempt small and midsize companies – those with market caps of less than $700 million, the mark above which the SEC classifies companies as “large accelerated filers” – from Sarbox Section 404 until the SEC promulgates “regulations that take into consideration the different characteristics and limitations of various sized companies,” according to a “Dear Colleague” from Adler. In the letter, obtained by OpenMarket but not yet posted on the web, Adler states: “My amendment will increase America’s competitiveness within the global economy and create jobs here at home. When a company goes public, investors invest capital, the company expands and jobs are created.”

Indeed, new research from the University of Pittsburgh’s Kenneth Lehn and others demonstrates in detail the damage Sarbox is doing to job growth by showing how its costs reduce business spending on research and development and other precursors to job growth. Rammed through Congress in 2002 in the rush to “do something” after the Enron and WorldCom accounting scandals, Sarbox has had many perverse effects recognized by Republicans and Democrats. In 2006, now-Speaker Nancy Pelosi decried the law’s “unintended consequences” for entrepreneurs.

University of Rochester researcher Ivy Zhang has found that Sarbox has racked up $1.4 trillion in direct and indirect costs to the U.S. economy, with no quantifiable economic benefits. By far, the biggest cost is from Section 404’s internal control mandates, which the American Electronics Association calculated as costing U.S. public companies $35 billion a year, and as much as quadrupled an individual company’s auditing and compliance costs, according to the Foley & Lardner law and consulting firm.  This section’s price tag is largely because the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, the powerful yet unaccountable regulator created by Sarbox (and whose constitutionality is being challenged in a case before Supreme Court this term in which CEI attorneys are serving as co-counsel), required full-blown audits for internal controls as well as a company’s number. That is what turned Sarbox into what has been called “The Accountants Full Employment Act,” in which accountants are reviewing “internal controls” such as possession of office key, the number of letters in an employee password and other items of little relevance to the average shareholder.

Tech journalist John Battelle reported that Sarbox was even frustrating for a company as big as Google, because of the extensive red tape that went along with documenting innovative technology. According to Battelle, becoming Sarbox compliant when Google went public in 2004 was “no small feat,” because “the law requires an audit trail of every third party transaction, and Google has millions of them a week in its [search] engine.” And keep in mind that Google already had a market cap of more than $1 billion when it went public in 2004. So the smaller innovative companies with the potential to be the Googles and Microsofts of tomorrow might not be able to get over this Sarbox hurdle and raise the capital they need by going public.

And new, groundbreaking research shows that Sarbanes-Oxley hits cutting edge software and biotechnology firms especially hard, reducing the amounts they spend on research and development that could lead to new fields that create new job.  A 2008 paper from University of Pittsburgh economist Kenneth Lehn that was selected for a conference of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta finds that “greater evaluation and testing of

internal controls [is] required for firms with activities involving specialized knowledge.” And Lehn’s study includes data from 2007, after the SEC and PCAOB supposed “tailored” Sarbox to make compliance easier for smaller companies.

A letter from The Biotechnology Industry Organization that Lehn cites states that biotech firms “are directing precious resources from core research and development of new therapies for patients” to costly Sarbox compliance.

And ironically, the bells and whistles of Sarbanes-Oxley’s “internal controls” may ironically be taking the core focus off of rooting out fraud. In 2007 Countrywide Financial Corp. was praised for its Sarbox controls by the Institute of Internal Auditors. Two years and many scandals later, its former executives have been charged with securities fraud. And certainly, overall transparency doesn’t increase when companies go private or delay going public, as many have chosen to do because of Sarbox’s costs.

In addition to the valuable Adler and Maloney-Garrett measures, Rep. Michelle Bachmann, R-Minn., will likely introduce a worthy amendment to keep the underlying Investor Protection Act from expanding Sarbox and the PCAOB’s reach to include non-public broker dealers (an incredible power grab that jettisons the whole justification for Sarbox protection of average investors – they might have to change the name to the NCAOB – Nonpublic Company Accounting Oversight Board) until the Supreme Court rules on the entity’s constitutionality.

Her amendment will  also likely propose transferring the responsibility of appointing powerful members of the PCAOB from the SEC to the President, with Senate confirmation. This is what CEI and other attorneys argue in the court case is constitutionally required, since PCAOB members are important “principal officers” with authority to make rules that have such a large impact on the U.S. economy. The Bachmann amendment is also bipartisan in spirit, as it gives more power to President Obama, but also institutes the constitutional accountability needed for this powerful agency.