Category: free trade & free markets

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free trade & free markets national politics & policies political economy

Stupid About Greed

Representative Tim Burchett, Iran, oil, economics

Tough times. You encounter a politician. He takes your side on an important issue. He speaks eloquently and with apparent sense. But then switch the subject and suddenly he blurts out such stupidities that you wonder about his sanity, the state of the nation’s education, the very meaning of life itself.

Well, not that last one.

Let’s turn the page in our anti-hymnal to Representative Tim Burchett (R.-Tenn.). I’ve quoted him. He’s given off detectable glimmers of hope. Yet now he (in the words of an enthusiastic twitterer) “exposes the price of gas increasing in America has nothing to do with the Iran war.”

But what does he say?

“How much oil does America get from Iran? Zero.”

True enough. But so what? 

Our president’s un-declared war has resulted in conflagrations of oil wells and a cessation of petroleum transportation through the Strait of Hormuz. But while acid rain descends upon Iranians, it’s gas prices that concern Americans. And Burchett is disgusted.

“That’s how much this is a scam,” he said. “And these oil companies, shame on ’em. They’re using this opportunity to make record profits once again.”

We’ve heard this logic before. 

“It’s greed!”

No, it isn’t. Sure, I’m no economist — but I understand that the market for petroleum products is a worldwide one, and if supply collapses on the other side of the world, it’s going to affect prices over here. We may not buy from Iran, but folks elsewhere do, and when they cannot get what they need, they’ll go to competitors, and world prices will be bid up.

To avoid this natural process, we’d have to simultaneously decrease demand. And how would Burchett do that? 

The first casualty of a price hike is common sense.

Not here, though, for this is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets regulation

Alas, Poor Yorick

Australia, regulations, labor, internet

Working from home is a very old idea, becoming new again during this Age of the Internet. 

COVID made telework something of a mania. But there’s been some withdrawal of support for the arrangement from major corporations, and one of the main results of Elon Musk’s DOGE effort in government was to bring government workers back into the office.

Well, sort of. A few months later, some of the measures implemented by DOGE were halted or scaled back.

How goes the trend elsewhere? As soon as something becomes possible, someone in politics wants to make it mandatory. A Reason article by Reem Ibrahim takes a look Down Under: “Do You Have a Right To Work From Home? This Australian Politician Thinks So.”

This politician being Victoria’s Premier Jacinta Allan, who aims to lead Australia into a new era of labor paradise, giving “all employees, regardless of the size of the business, the right to work from home. The legislation — which will be introduced in July as a provision of the Equal Opportunity Act and go into effect in September — does not include exemptions for small businesses.

“Working from home,” Ibrahim writes, “is often a win-win for businesses and employees,” but he fails to say it often isn’t. How do you dig ditches or construct skyscrapers or fish in the deep sea from home? To handle the necessary exemptions and complexity, of course, plenty of red tape would be required, which Mr. Ibrahim does mention.

So, does Jacinta Allan advance this innovation because she is a leader of extraordinary foresight?

Doubtful. A few months ago she had to deal with a mini-scandal: Yorick Piper, her husband, was convicted of drunk driving and had his driver’s license taken away.

Gotta get hubby back to work!

Well, it was a temporary license revocation. But alas, poor Yorick: see what you’ve spawned?!?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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free trade & free markets regulation too much government

Thought Deserts

socialism, Mamdani, grocery store, economics

The U.S. is at war — a war that Trump had warned against; and UFOs/drones are again seen over New Jersey. But Senator Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) has something else on his mind, something a little closer to home: regulating grocery store pricing and marketing.

He has co-sponsored S. 3892, dubbed the “Stop Price Gouging in Grocery Stores Act of 2026.”

What is price gouging? Selling or offering items at a “grossly excessive price,” which the Federal Trade Commission is tasked with defining. But Luján’s real focus seems to be his distrust of surveillance in stores, which he fears will be used to adjust prices individually.

He somehow doesn’t mention why stores have increased surveillance of customers.

One word: thievery.

But Lujan isn’t alone, fecklessly fighting the food-market market. In Washington State and elsewhere, socialists and other politicians are trying to force grocers to stay open, even if their corporate owners have good reason to shut down a specific store. Seattle’s new mayor, Katie Wilson, says Seattle must not “allow giant grocery chains to stomp all over our communities, close stores at will, and leave behind food deserts.”

A south Tacoma neighborhood Safeway closed, so a state senator cooked up a bill to “give communities time to respond to grocery store closures.”

Truth is, of course, that grocery stores operate on slim margins. The more regulations piled on, and the more criminals you throw at them, the fewer groceries your community will have.

And the “liberals” who vote for such nonsense? They will not like the Mamdani stores they are left with — the subsidized product deserts that only now look good . . . 

In socialist dreams.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Mamdani Attacks Workers

gig workers, freelancers, New York City, Zohran Mamdani

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is going after gig workers. To do his dirty work, the mayor is using holdovers from the Biden administration (who oppose independent contractors), reports C. Jarrett Dieterle at Reason magazine.

The boss of New York City’s Department of Consumer and Work Protection is Sam Levine, who during his tenure at the Federal Trade Commission was a follower of anti-business FTC chair Lina Khan.

The “Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice,” one Julie Su, was Acting Secretary of Labor under Biden. She has warned delivery apps — the apps that make it easier for gig workers to get jobs and get paid — that they had better “comply with worker protections.”

Su is suing delivery service Motoclick for “ignoring the minimum pay rate.” Also at issue are other sins that amount to contracting with independent contractors who, of course, use Motoclick’s app voluntarily and can stop whenever they find the terms not in their interest. She wants (a) millions in damages for the workers and (b) “to shut the company down completely.”

The Mamdani administration has also “settled with” such gig enablers as UberEats, Fantuan, and Hungry Panda for millions of dollars for not treating independent contractors as hourly workers.

Reason points out that Mamdani’s war on freelancers will be costly not only for gig workers and the companies that help them function but also for customers. “Just recently Instacart instituted a $5.99 regulatory response fee due to a recent extension of NYC’s minimum wage law to grocery deliverers.”

Who will be next to be pummeled by commie Mamdani?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets litigation regulation

Free to Advise

New York, law, lawyers, guilds, AI, labor, licensing

People should be free to talk to each other about whatever they want as long as they’re not thereby conspiring to rob and murder and so forth. They should even be able to give advice.

Including legal advice. 

New York State disagrees. 

The Institute for Justice is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to let the non-lawyer volunteers of a company called Upsolve keep giving advice to people facing lawsuits to collect debt.

As IJ explains, New York State is trying to “protect people from hearing advice from volunteers” who have relevant training. The point is that the First Amendment “doesn’t allow the government to outlaw discussion of entire topics . . . by requiring speakers to first obtain an expensive, time-consuming license.” (That Upsolve’s advisors have relevant training is relevant but also superfluous. Even untrained talkers have the right to talk, obviously.)

In 2022, a federal district court agreed with the plaintiff that its volunteers have a First Amendment right to speak and let Upsolve operate as litigation continued. Then a court of appeals ruled against Upsolve. Now IJ and Upsolve hope that the U.S. Supreme Court will step in and put an end to the nonsense. 

We know what this is about: politicians catering to lawyers who don’t want less expensive sources of legal advice out there competing for customers. 

It’s certainly not about protecting those who would have one fewer resource to turn to were this one taken away.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets regulation too much government

A Great Un-Finding

EPA, finding, auto emissions, climate

In 2009, President Obama and the EPA decided that the will-o’-the-wisp of fine-tuning the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere fell under the agency’s purview. They introduced a not-so-thin wedge to pry open a vast new province of regulatory oppression.

Obama had sought congressional legislation, but Congress had balked. 

So he proceeded without any new laws; or rather, as so often happens, told an agency to issue new laws. (According to one explanation of the difference between laws and regulations, regulations are rules to implement laws. This doesn’t cover the case of regulations or “findings” that are tantamount to new laws although no elected representatives passed them.)

“Health” was at stake, the tyrants declared. 

The flourishing of industrial civilization, and thus of human beings, are also matters of health. But no matter.

One consequence of the EPA’s newfound authority was the issuance of other dire “rules,” like the Biden-era mandate that most American-made vehicles be electric by 2032.

Now things may change. 

Bigly. 

President Trump has ordered the EPA to un-find its 2009 “finding” that it has blanket authority to regulate human emission of greenhouse gases.

The change will be challenged in court. 

The Trump administration doubtless expects — perhaps even wants — the litigation. A favorable Supreme Court ruling would block the EPA from re-finding its finding during future administrations. Then legislation — actual, congressional — would be the only way to reimpose the craziness. 

A circumstance in which the people might have a say.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets general freedom individual achievement media and media people social media

A Man of Learning

Scott Adams

Facts mattered to the man who told us “facts don’t matter.”

Ideas, principles, arguments — these mattered, too.

Which is probably what I will remember most about Scott Adams, who died yesterday. 

He had been suffering from prostate cancer for some time. During the moment, last year, when President Joe Biden’s possible prostate cancer diagnosis became a matter of public discussion, Mr. Adams informed us that he, too, had been diagnosed with that form of cancer, and that he had not long to live.

Like most newspaper readers, I knew of Adams from his Dilbert comic strip. I missed his career in writing books, in the aughts and early teens. But I caught up with the man when he predicted, in 2015, that Donald Trump possessed a “talent stack” that would likely lead to winning the presidency — an insightful judgment — that may have helped the prophesied event to occur.

Adams became one of the more interesting podcasters, an intellectual powerhouse who urged us to reframe how we think about politics, culture, our very lives. I never became a fan, exactly, but I not only admired him, I liked him. He was quite a character; he was a man of character.

It was interesting, especially, to watch him develop in the context of our odd (transitional?) moment in history. On the late pandemic, for example, many of his early opinions and meta-opinions were misguided. But he changed his mind, as many of us have. And though, as I mentioned above, his most famous assertion was that, in matters of persuasion, “the facts don’t matter,” he was persuaded to change opinions when he learned more. 

So may we all.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Scott Adams

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Regulating Restrooms

Perhaps you remember the good old days — when men were men, women were women, and private establishments could maintain men’s restrooms and women’s restrooms for the men and the women without worrying about totalitarian edicts from a Human and Civil “Rights” Commission.

Those days may not be gone forever. But it sure must feel like it to the owners of the Hideout Arcade Bar & Grille in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.

The restaurant refused the request of a man, what news reports call a “biological man,” who wanted to use the woman’s bathroom at the restaurant. His reason was that — well, I’m not sure his exact rationale matters. Anyway, the restaurant said no, doubtless feeling that it had a right to protect the sensibilities of the women using its bathrooms and to establish rules for their use.

He must have complained, because the Delaware Human and Civil “Rights” Commission got involved and, ignoring any common-sense defense the restaurant offered, has fined the restaurant $2,000 and imposed “anti-discrimination training” — i.e., reeducation — on its employees. 

No word on whether they’ll be forced to wear dunce caps, as were some unfortunates during China’s Cultural Revolution.

Commission members might say they’re merely following the law — they just work there. Delaware enacted an Equal Accommodations Law mandating that “All persons within the jurisdiction of this state are entitled to full and equal accommodations, facilities . . . regardless of . . . sex.”

Notice that the law did not say “heedless” of sex, however.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets insider corruption national politics & policies

Protection from Us?

unions

On Labor Day, National Review pointed out that less than 10 percent of all U.S. workers currently belong to unions.

This percentage has been declining for decades. Even during the Biden administration, when the president and his puppeteers did their best to pump up unions, the percentage declined.

In the private sector, only 5.9 percent of workers are union members.

This is great news because unions are typically bad news. By using government-sanctioned force to compel membership and extract wage rates above the market rate, collective bargaining reduces the number of workers who can be employed in a company or industry — thereby distributing wealth from the many to the fewer — and makes firms less efficient.

Only long-run increases in economic productivity enable wage rates to be permanently and generally increased in real terms.

Now, a union devoting itself only to helping workers cope with problems in the workplace — problems like an abusive supervisor or gratuitously dangerous working conditions — would be fine. But unions as we know them don’t confine themselves to such support and often don’t even offer it. Union bosses prefer to secure above-market wages perhaps because they can then siphon off some of those “rents” (as economists put it).

Meanwhile, unionism is still going strong among public employees. Although government workers constitute only about 15 percent of U.S. workers, these workers “make up about half of the population of union members,”National Review reports.

Who are these government workers protecting themselves from? 

Well, from you and me, basically. 

We might pay them less and we might fire them more often — if we could.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Regulating Refineries to Death

California, regulations, fuel, engery

Punish them! 

That might as well be the explicit goal of California’s regulators and politicians — and all too many voters — for the results are clear enough. All who refuse to use electric cars and solar energy must suffer . . . with ever-higher gas prices, at the very least.

Two major oil refineries that provide gas for California as well as a few neighboring states have announced that they are closing their doors. They can’t hack it.

One analyst predicts that in consequence of these closures and related destruction of production, the price of gas will shoot up to $8 per gallon.

Lane Riggs, CEO of Valero Energy, which is closing a refinery near San Francisco, says the state’s tough “regulatory enforcement environment” is to blame for the loss of the sixth-largest refinery in the state.

Also throwing in the towel is a Los Angeles refinery, this one the state’s seventh-largest, operated by Phillips 66.

Brittany Bernstein notes that Phillips announced the closure “just 72 hours after California passed ABX-2, which requires refineries to hold additional inventories of finished stocks.” Yet another arbitrary burden on a company’s ability to function.

Last year, Chevron moved its headquarters from California to Texas because of the toxic environment for producers in California.

The researcher who’s predicting $8 per gallon gas, USC Professor Michael Mische, says Californians have “legislated ourselves into a situation where the costs are extraordinarily high and the political environment is extraordinarily harsh.”

Solution: reverse and undo. Please permit me to assume that this is possible.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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