Today’s American Spectator Online has a piece by CEI VP Wayne Crews and I on curbing Congressional abuse of unfunded mandates. If the term is new to you, unfunded mandates are basically an accounting gimmick that lets government understate how much it costs taxpayers:
rather than fund a new federal job training program through a Department of Labor appropriation, Congress could mandate that all Fortune 500 firms provide, and pay for, such training. The first appears on the federal budget, the…
A new Maryland law makes it illegal for manufacturers to set a minimum retail price for their products in sales contracts. The law is meant to increase competition. Unfortunately, it will have the opposite effect.
As Wayne Crews and I explain in the The American Spectator, it could prevent retailers from competing with each other on non-price grounds, such as customer service, product demonstrations, and advertising.
Some products, such as televisions or cars, have high information costs. Customers want to know a lot…
This story just hit the Drudge Report’s front page. Declan McCullagh at CNET writes today about the latest revision of S.773, a bill that would give the president “emergency control” of the internet in case of a “cybersecurity emergency.” Wayne Crews, CEI Vice President for Policy, released a statement on the naming of the cybersecurity chief and wrote an article on this back in May. See an excerpt below:
Policy makers should avoid collectivizing and centralizing risk management, especially in frontier industries like information technology.…
Wall Street Journal columnist Gordon Crovitz has a great column in today’s paper on the anachronism that is antitrust law. He writes:
“Markets were so much simpler in the 1890s, when Sen. John Sherman got almost unanimous support in Congress to go after the Standard Oil Co. of Ohio. The Sherman Act and later antitrust laws were supposed to protect consumer interests. That’s not so easy when regulators have to deal with industries as different as oil, with its cartels and…
CEI’s own Wayne Crews is quoted in the Boston Globe this morning, explaining why real competition — not government-mandated ‘openness’ — is the best way to promote consumer choice.
Wayne takes issue with Ben Scott of Free Press, who describes cellular data access as “a classical net neutrality issue.’’ Apparently placing legal burdens on any new web platform is Mr. Scott’s strategy for encouraging the spread of mobile internet access…
There are hundreds of regulations that Congress and agencies have imposed on the auto industry, driving up their costs unnecessarily. As an illustration, these are the new rules from the DOT identified by Wayne Crews in the 2008 edition of Ten Thousand Commandments:
– Reform of the automobile fuel economy standards program.
– Light-truck Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards (2012 model years and beyond).
– Upgrade of head restraints in vehicles.
– Rear center lap and shoulder belt requirement.
– Monitoring systems for improved tire…
Even with the higher prices, [CITGO station owner Bipin] Ganhdi ran out of gas by mid-afternoon Friday. He is hoping his next shipment…
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