Today’s excerpt from CEI’s film, Policy Peril: Why Global Warming Policies Are More Dangerous Than Global Warming Itself, rebuts the argument that regulatory climate policies can’t be bad for the economy because so many big businesses support them.

This is an odd argument coming from people who are usually suspicious of big business, or even hostile to corporations. When did they decide that corporate support is some kind of good-housekeeping seal of approval?

To watch today’s film excerpt, click here. To watch the entire movie, click…

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Below see CEI President Fred Smith’s comments on Jonathan Hillel’s piece in the San Jose Mercury News:

Hillel’s piece raises the very interesting question of whether the use of copyrighted materials must forever remain out of reach of most people.  The vast majority of creative works disappear from public view within a very short time of their release.   Few books or records are best sellers, many magazines (especially specialized magazines and journals) go out of existence in a decade or so.  Yet,…

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CEI President Fred Smith talks about the recent passage of climate legislation in Congress.  Read it here.

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Earlier today, Competitive Enterprise Institute President Fred Smith delivered an informative but lively, entertaining speech about the role of NGOs.  The speech was delivered at the Washington-based Atlas Economic Research Foundation, an umbrella organization that sponsors the creation of free-market NGOs worldwide.

Smith acknowledged that the libertarian movement, although weaker than its opponents, is gaining ground through the Internet, online video sharing and other peer-to-peer technologies.  The latest example of the successful usage of such technologies is yesterday’s landmark Tea Party…

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In a letter in today’s Wall Street Journal, CEI’s Fred Smith references Steven Gjerstad and Vernon Smith’s earlier op-ed to point out that radical egalitarianism policies have been one of the driving forces behind the housing bubble and the resultant financial crisis.  As Fred notes,

Steven Gjerstad and Vernon Smith suggest one unexplored aspect of our financial crisis: the role of egalitarian policies. To see this, note their distinction between the impacts of the $10 trillion loss in the 2000 stock market…

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When it comes to things such as environmental policy, the Progressives have been rather successful at promoting their world view.  They realized that it would be futile to argue that property rights and human ingenuity could not solve anything - so they did not try (immediately) to socialize oil or other sub-surface minerals but they did succeed in derailing the evolutionary process by which institutions emerged to resolve emerging problems.  The economist Ronald Coase  noted this in an essay pointing out…

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The bailout bill that passed through Congress today seeks to solve the financial mess by massively increasing government involvement in private finance. But more Government cannot be the answer to a government-created problem. The fact is that short-sighted government policies distorted the market in the first place. Bankers were certainly to blame for responding to these signals from government in the hope of a quick buck, but at its base, much of the problem was caused by government.

These are the…

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