Category: regulation

Egg Prices Crisis

“Get used to high egg prices,” The Atlantic blurbed Annie Lowry’s February 27 article, “it was a miracle they were low in the first place.”

Titled “It’s Weird That Eggs Were Ever Cheap,” it appears to have an agenda: prepare us for yet higher prices, or worse: no eggs.

“Consumers are furious,” explains Ms. Lowry, emphasizing that eggs are a very, very popular food. “Or at least they were, until a highly pathogenic form of bird flu spread to American flocks in 2022. Today, the Department of Agriculture is tracking 36 separate outbreaks across nine states. The disease has led to the death or culling of 27 million laying hens — nearly 10 percent of the nation’s commercial flock — in the past eight weeks alone.”

The culling of flocks — and which birds are selected — could potentially be the most controversial element of the story. Donald Trump, on the campaign trail last year, complained about the cull orders and promised to bring down egg prices fast.

But his administration’s new five point plan is no quick fix:

subsidize on-farm biosecurity upgrades
compensation to farmers forced to cull their flocks
investing in bird-flu vaccines and therapeutics
nixing some regulations
increasing foreign imports.

That comes to $1.5 billion spending increases to lower egg prices!

But it was a jokey comment by USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins that sent Trump critics into paroxysms. “I think the silver lining in all of this is, how do we solve for something like this?” said the Department of Agriculture head. “And people are sort of looking around, thinking, ‘Maybe I could get a chicken in my backyard,’ and it’s awesome.”

Ha ha.

But taking the joke as a serious proposal? The yolk’s on them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags economics, inflation, regulation, tariffs

Internet controversy regulation

Back Door Demand

As expected, Apple will withhold its most advanced data protection from customers of the iPhone in the United Kingdom rather than obey a UK order to provide a worldwide back door to such encryption.

This is probably Apple’s least worst choice given the alternatives confronting it. But that means British users of the iPhone won’t have this encryption at all.

Had Apple obeyed, the back door would have been installed on encryption-equipped iPhones worldwide, not just in the iPhones of persons residing in the sceptered isle.

The mandated back door would, of course, have been exploitable by cyberhackers contracted by enemy governments as well as by members of “good” governments claiming really good reasons for needing to rummage through your iPhone at will.

Members of the United Kingdom’s current horrific government are being coy, not even deigning to say whether they have ordered Apple to thus jeopardize Apple customers.

The order is, after all, supposed to be a secret.

But the Starmer government isn’t denying the order’s existence either. If major media reports were accusing me of issuing such an order, one that I had nothing to do with and regarded as wrong in principle, I would deny the deed hotly. But that’s me.

What should happen now?

Many things. For a starters, an end of the Starmer government. Release of the documentation of its order. Universal repudiation of the kind of reasoning that says the best way to ensure everybody’s security is to make everybody’s security impossible.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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regulation too much government

How to Kill a Bureau

First, Trump fires the holdover director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a radically anti-business agency. He appoints the new treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, as acting director.

Bessent orders the agency to stop everything — “rulemaking, communications, litigation,” Bloomberg Law reported. “A source inside the bureau who asked to remain anonymous said the order appeared to shut down the CFPB altogether, for the time being.”

So far, so good.

Trump replaces acting director Bessent with Russ Vought, a former and also the new director of the Office of Management and Budget.

The CFPB’s website goes dark and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) begins to audit the books.

Musk and his team will find bad things. But “efficiency” isn’t quite the issue. Suppose the Bureau proves to be extremely efficient and noncorrupt at the task of making businesses extremely inefficient?

The mission is bad.

This agency sets its own budget, is perversely cut off from congressional oversight, and, accordingly, has been able to run wild. One of its strokes of genius: treating video games as bank accounts, giving itself permission to do so with a quaint doctrine of “dormant authority.”

Now we have oversight. Internal. “The calls are coming from inside the house”; it’s being gutted from within.

RedState expressed hope the CFPB’s “hyperaggressive regulation-writing and legal thuggery will be markedly reduced” and that the agency may even be closed.

Yes, end it, as critics have long argued.

Existing only to harass and murder businesses and free enterprise, it is one of many federal agencies that must be put out of our misery.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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property rights regulation

Death of a Cemetery

property rights, meadow, cemetery, graveyard

Not everything worth fighting for, or against, is being taken up President Trump and Elon Musk. There are other battles. For a moment, at least, let us direct our attentions closer to home to consider the causes taken up by, say, the Institute for Justice and Pacific Legal Foundation.

Unlike a taxpayer-funded NGO, always on the march to push big government or social decay, these organizations go to bat for people around the country who are being abused by local governments.

As an example, take a current IJ case, Brooks Township in Michigan, which has been struggling to prevent Peter and Anna Quackenbush from opening a business: a cemetery.

This was to be a “green” burial forest that the township board blocked because it disliked the idea.

After losing a court fight over a proposed ban of all new cemeteries as a way to block Peter and Anna’s particular cemetery, the township is now seeking to impose an ordinance dictating that “No new cemetery shall be created, installed, constructed or instituted … unless a written cemetery permit has first been approved and issued by the Brooks Township Board under this Ordinance.”

In other words, a de facto ban by a Board that has made clear its determination to stop Peter and Anna from opening a cemetery on their own property. If this ordinance is allowed to stand, no permit will be issued to them. It’ll be the end of the cemetery.

Worth fighting against.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags property rights, regulations

insider corruption regulation too much government

Killing a Bureau

consumer protection, bureaucrats, paperwork, regulations, freedom

First, Trump fires the holdover director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a radically anti-business agency. He appoints the new treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, as acting director.

So far, so good.

Trump replaces acting director Bessent with Russ Vought, a former and also the new director of the Office of Management and Budget.

The CFPB’s website goes dark and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) begins to audit the books.

The mission itself is bad.

This agency sets its own budget, is perversely cut off from congressional oversight, has been able to run wild. One of its strokes of genius: treating video games as bank accounts.

Now we have oversight. Internal. “The calls are coming from inside the house”; it’s being gutted from within.

RedState hopes the CFPB’s “hyperaggressive regulation-writing and legal thuggery will be markedly reduced” and that the agency may even be closed.

Yes, end it: as critics have long argued. Why does this agency exist except to harass and murder businesses and free enterprise? One of many federal agencies that should expire.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Previously on the CFPB:

Give Them Credit — February 2, 2014
Invulnerable Government — November 28, 2017
Peel Back the Onion — November 30, 2017
Protector Protection — January 6, 2020

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Tags bureaucrats, consumer protection, freedom, paperwork, regulations

Common Sense regulation

Cooking with Gas

If you’ve been wanting to buy a gas stove but have been worried about the federal government’s determination under Biden to outlaw selling them and other nice things, relax. You’re now going to be cooking with gas.

I’m looking at a paragraph of one of the many executive orders issued by President Trump to get the government off our necks.

I refer, of course, to provision (f) of Section 2 of “Unleashing American Energy.”

To wit: “It is the policy of the United States … to safeguard the American people’s freedom to choose from a variety of goods and appliances, including but not limited to lightbulbs, dishwashers, washing machines, gas stoves, water heaters, toilets, and shower heads, and to promote market competition and innovation within the manufacturing and appliance industries.…”

Water heaters … toilets and shower heads … and gas stoves?

It shouldn’t be such a big deal to be able to keep buying this or that modern convenience. We’ve already invented and can mass-produce, mass-distribute these things. We have a functioning market economy. And most of us don’t want to be Amish.

But if you’ve got successive administrations hell-bent on returning us all to the Stone Age in order to control global weather and spare Mother Earth further inconvenience — well, adamant interruption of this trend is indeed a very big deal.

It seems that certain insanities will be stopped cold at least for the next four years. Maybe even beyond.

Industrial civilization: a good thing. Let’s keep it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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