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regulation

Ban Banning Gas Stoves

gas stove, fuel, regulations, freedom

Not long ago, you would’ve been labeled a conspiracy theorist if you suggested that a government report about how terribly unhealthy gas stoves are and how they ought to be banned meant that plans were in the works to ban gas stoves. 

“No, the government’s not taking your stove,” CNET said in January 2024.

What were we all worried about?

Tightening regulations, that’s what.

Absent a Trump administration, we would have witnessed a long series of ever-stricter regulations — always ratcheting up — to save us from the horrors of gas stoves.

Though we have been reprieved from many anti-energy Biden administration initiatives, a gas-stove ban may yet be coming to a state near you. 

Do you live in New York State? Well, your anti-gas-stove politicians want to ban installation of new gas connections. You need a connection to the gas to get the gas into the stove.

It’s being litigated right now. An Empire State regulation forbidding new gas infrastructure will take effect next January unless a court challenge succeeds. Even though it’s all just a conspiracy theory. . . .

Judge Glenn Suddaby is giving plaintiffs, who argue that the impending regulation imposes arbitrary hardships, time to submit new arguments. Then, if he’s not persuaded, he’ll dismiss their challenge. 

Unfortunately, the facts being promoted in New York State aren’t enough by themselves to motivate this judge to make a rational ruling.

No, government isn’t going to take your stove. But politicians and activists do seek to force you to give up your stove in the future. For want of fuel. Or because they’ve added sin taxes on the fuel or the stoves. Or both. 

Or something else.

That’s how the progressive regulatory agenda works.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets national politics & policies

Newsom Defends Gas-Car Ban

California, electric cars, climate change, global warming, regulations, ban

Last week, the U.S. Senate voted 51 to 44 to repeal a Biden-era waiver that let California set its own standards for regulating air pollution, stricter than national standards. 

Congress’s action means that California may no longer ban sale of new gas-powered cars by 2035.

With presidential prospects in mind, Governor Gavin Newsom has recently been trying to position himself as one of the less-unhinged Democrats; he has a podcast and talks (!) to conservatives. To keep up this act, he would have had to accept defeat of his autocratic attempt to circumvent markets and outlaw consumer choice in the auto industry.

Instead, Newsom is suing to overturn Congress’s good deed, which he says is all about “making America smoggy again.”

“This is not about electric vehicles,” he says. “This is about polluters being able to pollute more.” More than what? Gas cars aren’t a new thing. And electric cars, for all their novelty and appeal, come with a host of trade-offs from high price to extra weight to battery-charging problems — and EV pollution. 

Slogans don’t change that.

The tradeoffs hardly make electric cars automatically preferable to consumers free to make up their own minds what kind of car to buy.

When electric cars sell and develop in competition with gas vehicles, fine; no problem. But when government makes gas vehicles disappear by fiat? The salutary incentives provided by direct competition will also disappear. And our roads become filled with ill-fit technology.

The most fundamental issue here is not electric vehicles. And it’s not pollution. 

It’s freedom. 

To which Governor Newsom, sad to say, remains staunchly opposed.

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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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

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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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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.

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general freedom international affairs

Denial Is a River in Argentina?

“In the history of the Earth, there is a cycle of temperatures,” said Javier Milei during a presidential debate in 2023. “We are not going to adhere to the 2030 Agenda [a United Nations list of dozens of goals for curtailing countries’ use of resources]. We do not adhere to cultural Marxism. We do not adhere to decadence.”

Now Argentina’s President Milei is acting to formally withdraw from accords requiring countries to become poorer in order to “save the planet,” etc.

Although Milei has axed many government departments, his government still has a chief environmental officer. This personage had been leading the Argentine delegation attending the COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan, happening November 11-22, 2024. But Argentina had told the delegation not to participate.

Now Milei has pulled them from the summit. Why? That was not immediately announced. But “Milei has consistently denied the existence of a climate crisis,” moans the Buenos Aires Herald.

Denialist Milei doubtless recognizes hurricanes, tornadoes, and other incidents of drastic weather. He’d probably add, though, that planet earth has seen plenty of crisis-level weather before carbon-emitting industry arrived to take the blame.

Milei’s decision to exit COP29 came a day after his meeting with President-elect Donald Trump, of like mind on environmental and other questions.

Trump is expected to re-withdraw the U.S. from the 2015 Paris agreement, another anti-industrial environmental accord. We don’t know yet whether Argentina will also withdraw. 

But if you’re betting Yes, I like your chances.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment property rights social media too much government

The Squirrel vs. The State

squirrel, government, regulations

“Squirrel!”

In an age of short attention spans and viral memecraft, the latest cultural moment regarding a squirrel could influence more minds about politics than all the quips, speeches and gaffes of Trump and Harris combined.

The news is not hard to understand. “Wild squirrel that was taken in by Mark Longo seven years ago was confiscated after conservation officials received reports of ‘potentially unsafe housing of wildlife,’” is how The Guardian put it on Halloween. 

“An orphaned squirrel that became a social media star called Peanut was euthanized after New York authorities seized the beloved pet after a raid on his caretaker’s home, authorities said,” was Saturday’s Guardian update.

After the six- (or ten-) officer raid and after the execution, the deluge: ire and satire flooded the meme-o-sphere.

Not a few governments enforce laws against taming wild animals. One concern is rabies, though the rabies danger of a squirrel rescued as a baby and raised indoors must be preciously close to ZERO. When individuals own tigers and other predators, the danger is obvious — but certainly P’nut was not such a concern.

This is just the way the modern State operates: bureaucratically, with lumbering indifference to property rights (the squirrel was indeed owned, and housed privately), liberty (sans harm, the case to leave well enough alone is pretty clear), and common sense (Andy Griffith would not have put down the squirrel; he would have told Barney Fife to put down the revolver). 

How ridiculous and cruel government can be!

Maybe the last half dozen of undecided Americans will pull the lever, Tuesday, for less nonsensical government intrusion because of it.

It certainly doesn’t make the meddler class look good.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Note: We also mourn the passing of Fred the Raccoon, a fellow rescuee at P’Nut’s Freedom Farm, also confiscated and executed by the State of New York for the same trivial infraction of his owner: not licensed by the State.

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education and schooling general freedom ideological culture

Nondiscrimination as Discriminatory 

DEI, diversity, quotas, race, racism, regulations, education

Two parts gall, three parts random irrationality; eye of newt, toe of frog. 

That’s how you cook up the latest leftist madness.

According to the wizards running Columbia University, deliberately race-neutral policies are discriminatory if they have a “disproportionate impact.”

Columbia has updated its antidiscrimination policy about bad things you can do on campus that might get you investigated and sanctioned. The revised policy declares that one bad thing is “having a neutral policy or practice that has a disproportionate and unjustified adverse impact on actual and/or perceived members or associates of one Protected Class more than others.” 

This, the policy asserts, “constitutes Discrimination” — with a capital D.

Those “protected classes” make up a formidable list. If the idea is that treating another person abusively subjects one to penalties, why not just say this? Then no groups need be listed.

But Columbia University seems to find focusing on discriminatory nondiscrimination a more productive way to spend its time than coping with unambiguous racial and ethnic hatred on campus.

Columbia is among the schools that has responded to vicious harassment of Jewish students with little more than pro forma protest. Even as a Columbia representative tells USA Today that “calls for violence have no place at Columbia,” anti-Israel and anti-Jewish students keep calling for violence. Will they be kicked out?

Eliana Goldin, a Jewish student at the school, says that the administration is well aware of “the credible threat to Jewish students, and they’re still playing both-sideism.”

Which strikes me as Discrimination with a Capital D.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment education and schooling general freedom

Kamala Harris’s Attack on Parents

Kamala Harris, truancy, truant, schools, education, regulations, consequences

Among the skeletons rattling around in presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s closet is her support — while San Francisco’s district attorney and while running for state attorney general — for a law to punish parents for their children’s absences from school.

The story, reported by Huffpost, NPR, and others several years ago, has more recently been publicized by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Harris supported the harass-parents truancy program when it was conceived in the state legislature, saying that “a child going without an education is tantamount to a crime.” Under the program, which still exists, a school can refer persistent truancy to a district attorney’s office, which can then threaten to prosecute parents.

One victim was Cheree Peoples, who was arrested and handcuffed in 2013 while still in her pajamas. “You would swear I had killed somebody.” Her daughter Shayla had missed twenty days of school in the current school year. Cheree faced a possible penalty of $2,500 or a year in jail. 

Shayla has sickle cell anemia and required frequent hospitalization. 

Shayla’s mother fought the charges for a long time. Eventually, they were dropped.

Harris bragged about the truancy program while being inaugurated as attorney general. “If you fail in your responsibility to your kids, we are going to work to make sure you face the full force and consequences of the law.”

Today, Harris says the harass-parents law she championed has been abused by others. But isn’t the law itself the abuse?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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