wayne crews

Expensive Jobs

by Ryan Young on August 27, 2010

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Stimulus to Nowhere

Through June, the government spent about $620 billion of stimulus money. The Obama administration claims that the spending has saved or created 2.3 to 2.8 million jobs.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume those job creation numbers are true. In fact, let’s pick the rosiest number — 2.8 million jobs.

At a price of $620 billion, that comes out to $221,428.57 per job. Startlingly inefficient.

Now consider that that $620 billion had to come from somewhere else. Some of that money came from taxes. That leaves less money left over for consumers and businesses to spend. Some of the stimulus money was borrowed. That leaves less capital for private companies borrow.

The private sector tends to spend less than the government to create a job. Since stimulus spending is spending more money to create fewer jobs than the private sector, it is actually causing net harm to the job market.

In place of the spending stimulus, I humbly offer a deregulatory stimulus. CEI VP Wayne Crews and I offer some specific proposals here.

Federal Register Hits 50,000 Pages

by Ryan Young on August 17, 2010

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Regulation

And it’s on pace to hit a near-record 80,447 pages. Over at the Daily Caller, I crunch some of the numbers and offer up some Ideas for regulatory reform, inspired by Wayne Crews’ 10,000 Commandments.

-The Federal Register’s accelerating pace is due to two things. One is implementation of the health care and financial regulation bills. The other is that, fearing a party change in Congress, lame-duck regulating may have already begun.

-Keeping Federal Register page counts in check is important. Keeping the contents of those pages in check is even more important. Comprehensive regulatory reform involves much, much more.

-Such as five-year sunsets for all new regulations unless specifically reauthorized by Congress.

-And a comprehensive look at the regulatory state in each year’s Economics Report of the President.

-And a bipartisan commission to comb through the books for harmful or obsolete regulations. They would hand their recommendations for repeal to Congress for an up-or-down vote, without amendment.

Wayne Crews on Cybersecurity and the Presidential “Kill Switch”

by Ryan Lynch on June 30, 2010

in Video, Zeitgeist

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJHmrHAxkVY 285 234]

CEI in the News: March 29, 2010

by Richard Morrison on March 29, 2010

in Video, Zeitgeist

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGhZZwYaxrc 285 234]

Unfunded Mandates

by Ryan Young on November 5, 2009

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Politics as Usual, Regulation

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 second does not. For politicians, it’s the perfect scheme. The government can spend — or, rather, force other people to spend — as much as it wants without adding to the deficit.

Decency demands this trickery stop; fortunately, a bill from Rep. Virginia Foxx looks like it would do some good on that front.

Regulation of the Day 57: Minimum Price Agreements

by Ryan Young on October 7, 2009

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Legal, Regulation, Regulation of the Day, Tech & Telecom

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 about these products before they commit to a purchase. They want to know what they’re getting. Try before they buy.

By forcing retailers to compete against each other to give customers more and better information and service, minimum price agreements can help consumers get what they want and boost sales at the same time.

Government gets ‘emergency’ control of the internet in new Senate bill

by Gary Howard on August 28, 2009 · 1 comment

in Legal, Personal Liberty, Tech & Telecom

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. Yes, we need government-backed “police forces” to protect private networks and infrastructure, but we also need the “barbed wire” and “door locks” which private companies continuously compete with each other to improve. When government overrules market competition for information/electronic security, it creates barriers to innovative private security solutions. We become less secure, not more.

Some reports indicate that the administration and Congress are seeking government authority over private networks-like power grids and computer networks-in the event of breaches. The very term “cyber” at once means everything and therefore nothing: American telecommunications, the power grid; virtually anything networked to some other computer is fair game to a new czar. The dominant tenor of the cybersecurity debate today is toward greater federal control over private infrastructure.

Washington has a proper role. It entails protecting government’s own networks and setting internal security standards, not regulating private networks. It involves arresting computer criminals and avoiding creating threats to data security in the form of data retention mandates, national ID schemes, proposals to re-regulate encryption, and czars that set terms for all they survey.

Security is an industry, and industries-and abstract concepts like “technology”-do not need czars in Washington. Innovation in information security and privacy protection do not flow from D.C. Rather, a government tech czar would likely grow in “stature” as a target for lobbyists. A federal technology chief could all too easily become an agent for establishing government authority over frontier technologies.

Both suppliers and customers increasingly demand better security from all firms. Improving private incentives for information sharing is at least as important as greater government coordination to ensure security and critical infrastructure protection. That job will entail liberalizing critical infrastructure assets-like telecommunications and electricity networks-and relaxing antitrust constraints so firms can enhance reliability through the kind of “partial mergers” that are anathema to today’s antitrust enforcers.

Private cybersecurity initiatives will gradually move us toward thriving liability and insurance markets for cutting-edge sectors. Heavy-handed cyber-czar gestures and legislation cannot address the lack of authentication and inability to exclude bad actors that is at the root of today’s cybersecurity problems.

Like everything else in the market, security technologies-from biometric identifiers to firewalls to encrypted databases-and cybersecurity services-from consulting to liability insurance to network monitoring-benefit from competition. Corporate information and security officers deal with cybersecurity concerns every day. It’s not clear what government could really fix-but it could break a lot.

See the statement release here.

The Antitrust Anachronism

by Greg Conko on August 3, 2009

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Legal, Regulation, Tech & Telecom

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 long product cycles, and technology, where fast change is a constant necessity for survival.”

and, especially in regard to computer technology and the Internet,

“by the time regulators can assess a technology market, the market has often moved on. Not long ago, Google was the upstart and the search leaders included names like AltaVista and Excite. ‘Regulatory intervention in the high-tech sector thwarts the natural evolution of the market,’ argues Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. ‘Worse, it distorts the response of competitors. Antitrust investigations steer the market in unnatural directions, creating instabilities in entire industry sectors.’”

Since the 1980s, antitrust law has undergone a seachange, due in large part to scholarly research at Harvard and the University of Chicago, documenting the competition-enhancing effects of many behaviors previously viewed as anti-competitive.  As a consequence, regulators and courts have become vastly less aggressive in their pursuit of anti-competitive witches.

Unfortunately, new Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Christine Varney is trying to reverse much of this progress, claiming at one point that “there is no such thing as a false positive [i.e. that antitrust enforcement would accidentally preclude pro-competitive behavior], you know, let’s get real.” Now, that’s a pretty stern rebuke to most antitrust scholars–including Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, who has helped roll back the sterner edges of antitrust enforcement, specifically on the grounds that false positives are real, substantial, and pernicious.  Let’s just hope that the courts take their obligations seriously, and that they don’t give Ms. Varney a free pass on this kind of radical reactionary enforcement.

Crews in the News: Consumer Choice Doesn’t Come From Regulation

by Jack O'Connor on July 8, 2009

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Regulation, Tech & Telecom

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…

Deregulatory Bailout

by Iain Murray on December 12, 2008 · 10 comments

in Bailout Watch, Economy, Mobility

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 safety and tire pressure.
– Automotive regulations for car lighting, door retention, brake hoses, daytime running-light glare, and side impact protection.

Plus these from the EPA:

– Rulemaking to address greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles.
– Clean air visibility, mercury, and ozone implementation rules.
– Review of National Ambient Air Quality Standards for lead, ozone, sulfur dioxide, particulate matter, and nitrogen dioxide.
– National emission standards for hazardous air pollutants from … auto paints.

These rules and all those from previous years need to be reanalyzed in the light of the industry’s troubles to see whether they should be repealed, suspended or weakened. In particular, attention should be paid to their aggregate effect on the industry. A deregulatory bailout would save the industry billions, and also save thousands of lives.

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