OpenMarket

As the old saying goes, the worst vice is advice. So with some trepidation, let me suggest two things that bright, idealistic members of the new administration should keep in mind.

The first arises when you're asked by your boss to come up with a solution to some controversial political problem. You analyze the situation and come up with an effective plan. Then, however, you pull back from the audacity of the proposal and think, “If I suggest that, people will laugh.” So you water down the idea. But then your boss (also a newcomer to his administration job) makes the same calculus, and so on up the chain of command to the individual who can actually implement the plan. By that time, the “solution” is just a mild variant of the status quo, and the senior decision-maker wonders why she should take on a difficult political fight for such a small gain.

Your role in the new...

The newly elected congressional majority should be ready and willing to help implement President-elect Donald Trump’s promise to tackle onerous regulations. But what about so called “non-regulatory programs” that have significant public policy and marketplace impacts?

Congress can address problems associated with such programs by defunding them or by bringing them under the authority of existing environmental laws.

Top on the list should be the Environmental Protection Agency’s Integrated Risk Information System, also known as IRIS. IRIS gains its authority simply as a line item inside EPA’s Office of Research and Development. As a research program, IRIS operates outside the regulatory process and its accountability systems.

According to...

Last week, CEI filed its reply brief in our case against the Transportation Security Administration’s use of body scanners. To recap, CEI, the Rutherford Institute, and two CEI employees filed a lawsuit earlier this year challenging the agency’s final rule on airport body scanners. Our argument centers around the fact that the TSA’s widely unpopular body scanners lead many would-be air travelers to take to the much more dangerous highways instead, where some number of them die, and that the agency failed to consider this deadly modal substitution effect as required under federal law.

In our latest filing, we take the TSA to task for failing to meaningfully address our arguments:

TSA’s body scanner rule causes travel...

It isn’t Christmas Day yet, much to the chagrin of impatient youngsters, but it’s already time for America to put together a wish list for Christmas 2017. Not for family, friends, or Santa, but for the new Congress that will soon arrive in Washington. By this time next year, they should have provided some valuable and long overdue reforms to the American people. This list should include policies that enrich our lives and the economy by liberating our wealth-creating potential. Here are six gifts that Congress can give Americans before we bring out the tinsel and mistletoe again next year.

Whole forests have been cut down to print the books written about the financial crisis of 2007/8 and America’s response to it. Far fewer have been written on what’s wrong with the financial system now. Yet there’s a lot wrong with it. Despite historically low interest rates, banks aren’t lending to businesses or individuals, smaller and community banks have had to close or merge, low-income customers have seen free checking accounts disappear and their fees rise. The financial system is dysfunctional and not fit for purpose.

Most of the blame for this can be laid directly at the feet of the Dodd-Frank Act, passed in 2010 supposedly to stop another financial crisis happening by reining in the big banks with regulatory compliance. Yet the effect of the law has been to strengthen the position of the Wall Street banks most at fault for the crisis, while punishing the Main Street...

In this episode of RealClear Radio Hour, Brian Hodges discusses West Hollywood’s extortion of local developers and Robert Kanigel shares stories of Great American Cities heroine Jane Jacobs.

Opening the show this week is Brian Hodges, Principal Attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF). Brian tells the story of how his organization, the first public interest group to defend property rights and challenge government overreach, has helped change the American legal landscape. As an example, he details a current case in which PLF is defending an entrepreneurial couple from an unconstitutional attempt by the City of West Hollywood, California to extort a half-million dollar “affordable housing” permitting fee on their new condominium development.

On Tuesday the 2016 Federal Register topped 90,000 pages for the first time ever, and continues to extend its page-count record every day. New rules from the past week range from cooking products to quiet hybrid cars.

On to the data:

• Last week, 86 new final regulations were published in the Federal Register, after 86 the previous week.
• That’s the equivalent of a new regulation every one hour and 58 minutes.
• With 3,626 final regulations published so far in 2016, the federal government is on pace to issue 3,761 regulations in 2016. Last year’s total was 3,406 regulations.
• Last week, 2,284 new pages were added to the Federal Register, after 1,947 pages the previous week.
• Currently at 91,642 pages, the 2016 Federal Register...

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There are records, and then there are records.

A month ago, I blogged that President Barack Obama’s Federal Register, the daily depository of rules and regulations, stood at 81,640 pages for 2016. 

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The 115^th Congress convenes on January 3, 2017. Their early days will be the best opportunity policymakers have had in more than a decade to enact substantive regulatory reforms. Here are three they should pursue in the new administration’s first hundred days. All of them are based on politically viable ready-made legislation, which should make this essential task an easy one.

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The Environmental Protection Agency’s recent proposal, published eight months ahead of schedule, to keep in place the agency’s model year (MY) 2022-2025 greenhouse gas (GHG) emission standards for new motor vehicles, is the epitome of...