Category: regulation

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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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First Amendment rights privacy regulation

The War Against Anonymity

Mexico, privacy, cell phone

The Mexican government wants to stop people from using cellphones anonymously.

Every mobile phone number in Mexico — some 127 million — must now be biometrically tied to the owner’s identity. Cellphone owners must register their numbers by June 30 or lose signal.

The ID card to which numbers must be linked will in turn be linked, via QR code, to a national registry of biometrically verified records.

Who needs anonymity? Just criminals?

Criminals do use throwaway “burner” phones when committing crimes. They won’t necessarily be stymied now. Would they hesitate to steal other people’s cell phones, treat them as burners, then throw them away?

Maybe victims would act fast enough to get lost and stolen phones deactivated before thieves could use them, maybe not. Criminals may have several ways to circumvent the new law. 

We must remember, after all, that criminals are willing to commit crimes.

The safety of journalists, dissidents hiding from other governments, targets of abusers and stalkers, and anyone with good reason to keep his identity separate from his phone will be endangered by Mexico’s new mandate.

Some may say that Mexico’s ID database is inaccessible by all but authorized, benign, unbribable government personnel. One problem with this fairy tale is that not long ago, a cyberhacker used AI to steal 195 million taxpayer and other records from the Mexican government.

Not the first time hackers have grabbed “secure” data. And what has happened again and again and again and again, can happen again.

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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privacy regulation too much government

All Your OS Are Belong to Us

California, law, Operating System, OS, privacy

The always-wrong California legislature has unanimously passed — and the state’s always-wrong governor has signed — legislation to compel makers of computer operating systems to verify the owner’s age. The information from Linux, MacOS, Windows, iOS and Android would then be transmitted to the software (“apps”) running on each respective platform.

Reclaim the Net observes that in a “different timeline, wiring an age-surveillance layer into the boot sequence of every computing device in California is an idea that would have died in committee.”

AB1043 doesn’t require any upload of government ID or facial scan, just that the user report age when setting up the OS. I am not relieved.

All the shmexperts eager to erode our privacy say that requiring web surfers to type a number into a box to report age is insufficient. If California’s new law is allowed to stand, perhaps in part because it seems fairly innocuous — any plucky 12-year-old could type “89” when ordered to report age — would the politicians stop there?

Some kind of ID verification would be mandated sooner or later. Then use of fake IDs would lead to calls for biometric confirmation. Etc.

Reclaim the Net explains that Linux distributions don’t even have a way to comply with the silly California law. Decentralized Linux exists for people who don’t want to be surveilled when doing their computing, and “there’s no entity to mandate, no account system to modify, no API to build.”

These and many more objections appear to me to be just common sense — now illegal in California.

I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets regulation too much government

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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election law judiciary regulation U.S. Constitution

Fifty Years After Buckley

campaign finance reform, consequences, Tufte inspired

Congress began regulating campaign finances in the 1960s.

In 1976, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Buckley v. Valeo reined in such regulation . . . in part.

This month, at a symposium marking the 50th anniversary of the ruling, John Samples — a former Vice President at the Cato Institute and currently a Member of Meta’s Oversight Board — compared what happened after the 1976 ruling to what might have happened had the ruling been better or worse.

The alleged point of campaign finance regulation was to “level the playing field.” The actual point, Samples observed, has been to “protect the political status quo” by making it harder “to spend enough money to effectively challenge congressional incumbents.”

In Buckley, the court ruled that contribution limits were indeed valid (they aren’t) for the sake of combatting corruption or the “appearance of corruption.” But it also ruled that limits on campaign spending are limits on speech, hence invalid — thereby saving democracy, argued former Federal Election Commission chair Bradley Smith, in the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago: “The Buckley court understood that effective political speech requires resources.”

The Court also upheld compulsory disclosure of donors and donations. This led to chronic calumniation of donors, helping to poison public discourse.

Samples suggeststhat a more libertarian Buckley might have enabled major reform, even perhaps privatizing of New Deal and Great Society spending programs in the 1980s.

On the other hand, had the decision been worse, “validating spending limits” as well, Congress would likely have continued to hobble challengers. And thus, perhaps, prevented the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan and the emergence of a GOP majority in the U.S. Senate.

Unwarranted restrictions on freedom of speech should be removed completely. Substantially removed is better than not at all, sure. But now let’s finish the job.

Something Brad Smith’s Institute for Free Speech works on every day.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights Internet controversy regulation

Hating X: The Naked Truth

DEMS, censorship, Senate, EU, X, Twitter

Why do so many U.S. Democrats, like some Europeans, want to outlaw X?

The current stage of the U.S. assault on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter takes the form of senatorial demands that X be removed from iOS and Android app stores.

Why the enmity? 

Well, under the ownership of Elon Musk, X lets people say and write stuff that Democrats dislike. Such as criticism of Democratic policies and politicians, just the kind of speech the First Amendment was drafted to protect. (Criticism of Republican, Libertarian, communist, and anarchist policies and politicians? Also protected.)

The rationalization for the proposed ban is that X’s AI software, Grok, can generate pictures of nude or nearly nude people.

The ability to generate such images is hardly unique to this particular chatbot. If X is to be banned from app stores because of the possibility that users may post generated nudes on the platform, many more social media platforms would, logically, also have to be snared by the censorship net.

Yet, reports Reclaim the Net, the letter sent to the CEOs of Apple and Google “by Senators Ron Wyden, Ben Ray Luján, and Ed Markey asked the tech giants only about X and demanded that the companies remove X from their app stores entirely.”

Unsurprisingly, X has announced that the nude-ifying feature of Grok has been limited. I asked Grok, and it said that “there is now a taboo/restriction on generating or editing nudes (or near-nudes/revealing attire) of real, existing people from photos. It will refuse prompts to digitally ‘undress’ or sexualize identifiable real individuals. Attempts often result in refusal, blurring, or error messages.”

Fixed?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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political economy property rights regulation too much government

Too Damn High?

unintended consequences, renter, landlord, regulations, private property, property

It’s getting tougher to rent a place to live.

Applications now often entail fearsomely intrusive scourings of financial history. And, writes Jeffrey Tucker, “if you are unbanked or missed a payment at some point, you can forget it.”

This is about more than digital intrusiveness or the end of privacy. It’s about aversion to risk. 

The aversion may have many causes. Tucker stresses a factor that’s pretty glaring once you think about it: the federal government’s assault on private property rights during the COVID-19 pandemic. Some tenants eagerly exploited a federally imposed moratorium on rent payment — plus ban on evictions — only finally stopped by a 5-4 decision by the Supreme Court. 

At the state level, evictions continued to be outlawed until 2022.

So property owners assume that they cannot at all count on government to be in their corner. If a tenant fails to pay rent, folks in government (who include the ones with guns) protect the person who cannot or will not pay his or her bills. 

The concern must be even more intense if an owner’s property is located in a town with a track record of demonizing landlords and in the process of launching further assaults on property rights. (Example: New York City, where high rents are now officially called rip-offs.)

Landlords want to avoid tenants who would use any law or bureaucratic tendency to rationalize skipping rent payment. Since owners can’t count on government to protect their property rights, they are becoming ultra-cautious. 

That is why conscientious prospective tenants who may have a blot or two in their financial history are paying the price.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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