Category: regulation

Categories
national politics & policies regulation

If This Be Price Control

drug prices, pharma, drugs, price controls

In the recent pandemic, we learned that government and pharmaceutical companies do not have the least bit of an antagonistic relationship. It’s all buddy-buddy, a Big Gov/Big Pharma partnership.

And an expensive mess, sadly, in which Americans routinely pay prescription prices many times higher than folks around the world.

Now that President Donald Trump has signed an executive order aimed at “Delivering Most-Favored Nation Prescription Pricing to American Patients,” you have probably heard complaints that Trump’s plan amounts to “price controls,” which Republicans say they are against, and Trump, too, says he adamantly opposes. 

But the The Wall Street Journal editorial that mounted this case, and Joe Lancaster’s argument in Reason, assume that the current order makes sense. The present system is in no way a free market in drugs. It’s the result of patent policy, massive subsidies to consumers, an insane approach to insurance regulation, and abridgements to free trade.

“There are many good reasons why we should pay more for earlier access to new medications than our trading partners,” write Darius Lakdawalla and Dana Goldman, quoted in Lancaster’s Reason article.  

And then they go on to recommend an elaborate government scheme that itself is more a form of price controls than Trump’s workaround.

While I doubt that all of Trump’s boasted benefits will pan out, the status quo is a rigged market, and Congress — which could debate and fix it, theoretically — does nothing to restore a free market, thereby earning its low ratings from the public.

Leaving it to the executive branch. 

Which is not supposed to legislate this sort of thing at all.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

NOTE: Jeffrey Tucker wrote a much longer piece defending Trump’s plan — arguing that in a rigged system such as ours, calling Trump’s most-favored-nation policy a form of price regulation, and the status quo not, is witless.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Krea and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
free trade & free markets national politics & policies regulation

Egg Prices Crisis

eggs, inflation, bird flu

“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.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Krea and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
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.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Krea and Fireflly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
regulation too much government

How to Kill a Bureau

CFPB

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.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Krea and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
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. 

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Krea and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
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.

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 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

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Flux and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
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.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Flux and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
regulation too much government

Control of Air Traffic Control

airport, control tower, airplanes

A terrible accident near Reagan National Airport reminds us that reform of our air traffic control system has been overdue for decades.

One story discusses the pilots’ longtime concerns about safety problems specific to Reagan National. But the decrepit state of air traffic control afflicts every airport.

John Tierney outlines some of the problems.

  • Too many controllers rely on outdated technology. Elsewhere, controllers use sophisticated computer systems to handle complicated hand-off (and other) tasks efficiently. But American controllers are “still using pieces of paper called flight strips” that must be carried around the control room.
  • U.S. controllers lack access to satellite technology that would enable them to more precisely guide and monitor planes. No infrared systems on runways either; controllers must look out the window to see what planes are doing, a big problem during bad weather.
  • Lousy politics has obstructed change. An independent corporation, not a “cumbersome federal bureaucracy,” should be operating the control towers, Tierney argues. But widely supported efforts to fix things have gone nowhere, partly because some lawmakers want to maintain congressional control.

Robert Poole of the Reason Foundation, who has been pushing for reform of U.S. air traffic control for five decades, thinks now something may happen.

“The public and opinion leaders now know a lot more about the FAA’s shortcomings,” he says. “With DOGE and the Trump administration shaking things up, perhaps the time for real reform has finally arrived.”

Let’s hope accountability has safely landed. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Flux and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
free trade & free markets regulation too much government

Unplugging the EV Mandate

gas engine, electric cars, global warming, climate, government, regulations

Under the Biden administration, gas-powered vehicles were on a government-impelled road to decline.

In March 2024, the EPA finalized Biden’s “crackdown on gas cars” by issuing absurdly stringent emission standards. The idea was to advance the administration’s “climate agenda” by sending gas-powered modes of transportation to the junkyard.

Leaders of the petroleum industry were among those who saw that the scheme would “make new gas-powered vehicles unavailable or prohibitively expensive for most Americans.” The policy would “feel and function like a ban.”

This was just one of many examples of Biden-oppression pushing American voters who value at least their own freedom into the Trump camp.

Electric vehicles have pluses and minuses. In past columns, I’ve expressed much enthusiasm for the technology, but recognized that it must develop naturally, in a free market, rather than unnaturally, out of ideological hope and fear-ridden “need,” forced by government regulation and subsidy.

As James Roth has noted over at StoptheCCP.org, we’ve had a century and a half to fine-tune gas-powered vehicles, a mature technology that is “beloved by the public.” Why not let electric and gas cars compete fair and square in the market? And why give an artificial boost to totalitarian China’s heavily subsidized and promoted EV industry by crippling the gas-car industry here at home?

President Trump has heard the cry of those who prefer to step on the gas.

Section 2(e) of his sweeping executive order on “Unleashing American Energy” states that it is the policy of the United States to “eliminate the electric vehicle mandate . . . by removing regulatory barriers to motor vehicle access” and other thumb-on-scale interventions in the market.

Is the future of gas cars going to be great again?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Flux and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts

Categories
Internet controversy regulation

Net Neutrality: Dead Again

Net Neutrality, internet, price controls, government, freedom

Net neutrality, a scheme to centrally plan the provision of broadband Internet access by private companies, is dead.

At least for now. 

No harebrained scheme is ever definitely dead for sure and forever in politics. Not on this planet.

Net neutrality had been killed before. But last year, Democrats on the FCC in favor of micromanaging how broadband Internet access is priced and how broadband companies may invest their resources revived the misnamed doctrine, a confection of the Obama era.

Fortunately, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has put the kibosh on this recrudescence of out-of-control power-grabbing. The court explicitly noted a recent Supreme Court ruling that deference need no longer be accorded to regulators who make the law say whatever they want it to say.

The Sixth Circuit ruled 3-0 that the FCC had overstepped its authority under the law. 

And it cited the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision last year in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. This was the decision that overturned the Chevron doctrine (according to which judges must defer to bureaucratic misinterpretation and hijacking of law if such hijacking can be somehow construed as “reasonable”).

The Wall Street Journal points out that “ending Chevron will make it harder for regulators to exceed their authority. . . . This is a victory for self-government and the private economy over the willful administrative state.”

That, and the more basic truth that net neutrality is itself an incoherent, unworkable policy, is more than enough reason to celebrate this revenant notion’s reiterated demise.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Illustration created with Flux and Firefly

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)
See recent popular posts