Tributes are pouring in for Edward M. “Ted” Kennedy, who lost his battle with brain cancer late Tuesday evening at the age of 77. Most tributes to the “Liberal Lion” focus on his accomplishments at expanding government spending and regulation. And indeed, those were the bulk of his achievements.
But for a brief, shining moment, in the mid to late 1970s, Kennedy viewed smaller government as the most compassionate answer in one area of economic life: transportation. Kennedy was the prime mover…
The news of the federal fraud charges against billionaire Texan financier Sir Allen Stanford (he got the knighthood from his dual citizenship from Antigua) has been greeted with glee by pro-regulatory forces because he dared to lobby against financial regulations in the early part of the decade. The Huffington Post huffs and puffs:
Though tough anti-money-laundering legislation overwhelmingly sailed through the House Banking Committee in 2000, it had difficulty getting to another vote as powerful GOP lawmakers — then-House Majority Leader Dick…
The beer industry is cheering a recently introduced bill that would roll back the excise tax on brewers in the Washington, DC area to pre-1991 levels. The industry sees the bill as a wise measure to relieve the economic pressures on small and large brewers alike. H.R. 836 the Brewers Excise and Economic Relief (BEER) Act was introduced by the bipartisan duo of Reps. Earl Pomeroy (D-ND) and Tom Latham (R-IA). And given that the prices of ingredients for beer are…
Great point by Carter Wood over at the excellent Shopfloor blog of the National Association of Manufacturers. Building on my point at NRO about the tension between infrastructure projects and existing regulation, Carter says:
There is good reason to fear that any significant project that promotes both quick economic investment and long-term competitiveness — say, modernizing and expanding the nation’s electrical grid — will immediately be hit by litigation lasting years and years and years. In which case the only thing being…
Yesterday’s NYTimes had a good article on the city of Pittsburgh and its surprising resurgence.
A generation ago, the steel industry that built Pittsburgh and still dominated its economy entered its death throes. In the early 1980s, the city was being talked about the way Detroit is now. Its very survival was in question.
…
Entrepreneurship bloomed in computer software and biotechnology. Two of the biggest sectors are education and health care, among the most resistant to downturns. Prominent companies are doing well. Westinghouse Electric,…
Today at noon Eastern time, I will enter the lion’s den.
I will be live in the New York City studios of liberal network Air America having a friendly discussion about deregulation on The Thom Hartmann Program. Hartmann, author of books such as “”Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class,” usually broadcasts form Oregon, and when I’m guest I have joined him by phone. But today, he’s broadcasting form the home office and I will be joining him live and…
Like many of us at CEI, it looks like my former boss Phil Gramm isn’t interested in helping anybody pretend that today’s financial crisis was caused by “deregulation.”
Money and credit in the U.S. have, of course, been tweaked, folded, sqeezed and re-tweaked by a central bank—the Federal Reserve—for almost a century. On top of that, if cable news and talk radio are any indication, few seem to be forgetting that the collapse is largely rooted in a failure of welfare-statism—the…
At the hearing being held today by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, in which former Lehman Brothers CEO Dick Fuld is now testifying, an earlier panel attempted to look at the causes of Lehman’s collapse and the broader credit cirisis. And this gave an opportunity to committee members to ride their various hobby horses.
Rep. Carolyn Maloney’s horse and “whipping boy” was deregulation. She blamed the entire crisis on deregulation, and specifically the repeal of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall law that…
The $700 billion financial-system bailout was billed as a miracle cure for the economy, but the stock market dropped dramatically after it was enacted, falling more than 500 points. In the Washington Post, the liberal journalist Sebastian Mallaby points out that “blaming deregulation” for the financial crisis makes no sense. He puts some of the blame for the crisis on the Fed’s easy-money policy — an argument made by commentators across the political spectrum, including the conservative Wall Street Journal, and international investors. He also notes…
Today — five days after a courageous independent vote against Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s $700 billion bailout for Wall Street — the U.S. House of Representatives disappointingly approved the same basic measure. Many of the bill’s other “sweeteners”, such as earmarks and a regressive increase in deposit insurance for upper income bank customers –will also cost taxpayer hundreds of billions of dollars.
All this week I and my colleagues have pointed out ways this bailout could, in addition to being costly,…
Time magazine contributors Andy Serwer and Allan Sloan give us an article in the latest issue meant to explain what is going own with the current financial crisis (better explained here). Serwer and Sloan, for all their “combined 65 years of writing about business” can’t seem to produce any coherent or unbiased reporting on this crisis and the reasons for it. They just fall back lazily on an argument that has been circulating the last few days, placing the blame at the…
On the front page of the Washington Post, writer Steven Pearlstein contradicts himself by writing that mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are being “rescued from the harsh discipline of markets and the consequences of their own misjudgments,” undercutting arguments for “privatization, deregulation, and a faith in free markets.”
But the failure of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is hardly an indictment of the free market: Fannie and Freddie are “Government-Sponsored Enterprises,” not products of the free market or the…
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