Regulation

Honest businessmen, who are well aware of the importance of customer goodwill, try to insure that their businesses are not harmed by the unscrupulous actions of others. Many of them have formed voluntary associations to provide self-regulation in their industries.

If the supply of new housing is restricted by the government’s monopoly power to initiate physical force against housing producers, the market price of housing will be higher.

Another example of “Soiled by Socialism” is government-mandated low-flow water faucets, showerheads, and toilets.

The U.S. Department of Energy has just announced a proposed rule to make dishwashers more “efficient” by limiting them to a maximum of 3.3 gallons per wash cycle, a reduction of one-third.

The Jones Act, the most restrictive cabotage law in the world, has decimated the number of American-flagged ships and the trade they carry, not built it up.

We need to go beyond the review-and-approval paradigm. The review-and-approval model is broken, and we should find better ways to manage risk and create safety.

If we want companies to stop engaging in woke-washing, we must steer the incentives back toward supporting firms for their core offerings and stop basing our purchases according to cause-related marketing messages and social labels.

The deployment of the terms essential and nonessential, however, has no precedent in our language. This is because of a view stemming from the democratic ethos and real-world commercial experience that everyone and everything is essential to everything else.

COVID policies were a great mistake, imposed by arrogant officials who were not following science, but rather were following their own authoritarian instincts.

The power to tax or to regulate is also the power to control, not just in the supposed “public interest” but in the interest of the regulators themselves, or specific politicians, or the government more generally.

Wyoming: Blue California’s Red Mini-Me?

The alternative to state licensing is free-market certification.

New Biden administration regulations will lower the standard of living of Americans.

Do as I say, or else you will be fined or sent to prison.

If Cruz really wants parents, and all Americans, to have freedom of choice, he should call for the abolition of the FDA.

—and a Black Market for ‘Unapproved’ European Imports.

How can we preserve the benefits of self-governing districts without the cronyism that so often goes along with them?

The Jones Act, more commonly known as Section 27 of the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, restricts foreign-owned ships from loading cargo in one US port and unloading it in another.

In Cedar Point Nursery v Hassid, the Supreme Court ruled that allowing labor unions to enter private property with a permission slip from the government violates the actual owner’s right to exclude.

Government should neither mandate nor ban vaccine passports or the other health decisions that individuals morally and rightfully should make for themselves.

A good thing about America having 50 states is that when states fail, we can learn from their mistakes. People defeated by California’s rules move to Nevada or Texas. But if the federal government adopts California’s rules, where can we move?

If science had been followed in 2020 – in all fields – we’d be much healthier and wealthier than we now are. But control freaks have used Covid-19 to justify still more government controls, still more statism.

The elephant in the room is that government interventions like California’s AB5 make Uber, Lyft and their drivers worse off because it imposes an outcome on them that they would not have voluntarily chosen.