Something as simple as the concept of tradeoffs can cause cognitive dissonance to good-hearted people who want too hard to drive the society toward their perception of the good.

A nice illustration of that is the cost in lives of making cars that use less gasoline. How can doing good for the environment possibly be harmful? Oh, it can be deadly.

Nicely illustrated by CEI’s Sam Kazman on John Stossel’s show.

2,000 Deaths per Year … for the Environment is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

As Iain Murray points out at National Review‘s “Corner,” there’s no date on the calendar each year that reminds us, the way income tax filing day does, of the huge share of our economic labors that the government commands in the name of regulation. In part this is because the costs of regulation are even better disguised than those of taxation: while paycheck withholding may lull us into complacency about our income tax burden, it is downright transparent compared with the costs of regulation, which the ordinary citizen may never recognize when passed along in the form of higher utility bills or sluggish performance by some sector of the economy. Iain notes the good work done by his colleagues at the Competitive Enterprise Institute:

Regulations cost $1.75 trillion in compliance costs, according to the Small Business Administration. That’s greater than the record federal budget deficit — projected at $1.48 trillion for FY 2011 — and greater even than all corporate pretax profits. This is only one of many findings of the new edition of Wayne [Crews'] “Ten Thousand Commandments: An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State,” a survey of the cost and compliance burden imposed by federal regulations.

As is now becoming evident, the Obama Administration is presiding over one of the most extraordinary expansions of regulation in all American history, in areas from health care to consumer finance, university governance to “obesity policy,” labor and employment law to the environment. Not all these developments originated with Obama appointees — some had their start under President George W. Bush or with lawmakers in Congress — but this administration has pursued stringent regulatory measures with extraordinary zeal, notwithstanding the odd feint to soothe business-sector misgivings.

Here are three more or less random samplings from recent days of the quiet momentum that’s built up in Washington toward a much bigger regulatory state:

• Reflecting the historical development of the Food and Drug Administration, the introduction of new medical devices such as pacemakers and joint replacements is still somewhat less intensively regulated than the introduction of new pharmaceutical compounds. As Emory’s Paul Rubin relates at Truth on the Market, pressure is building in Washington to correct this supposed anomaly by intensifying the regulation of devices. As Rubin notes, “virtually all economists who have studied the FDA drug approval process have concluded that it causes serious harm by delaying drugs,” yet the premise of the new campaign for regulation “is that we should duplicate that harm with medical devices.”
• Much of the new regulation of consumer finance has taken the form of rules governing what information lenders can ask for or consider about borrowers’ situation in extending credit. One such proposed rule, from the Federal Reserve, “would require credit card issuers to consider only a person’s independent income, and not the household’s income, when underwriting credit cards in an effort to protect young adults unable to repay debt.” Great big unforeseen consequence: many stay-at-home parents will now be unable to establish credit in their own names (via).
• Among a slew of other high-profile regulations, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has chosen this moment to demand very rapid new reductions in emissions from industrial boilers (“Boiler MACT” rules). Per ShopFloor, Thomas A. Fanning, who runs one of the nation’s largest electric utilities, the Southern Company, thinks trouble lies ahead:
  

  EPA has proposed Utility MACT rules under timelines that we believe will put the reliability and affordability of our nation’s power system at risk. EPA’s proposal will impact plants that are responsible for nearly 50 percent of total electricity generation in the United States. It imposes a three-year timeline for compliance, at a time when the industry is laboring to comply with a myriad of other EPA mandates. The result will be to reduce reserve margins—generating capacity that is available during times of high demand or plant outages—and to cause costs to soar. Lower reserve margins place customers at a risk for experiencing significant interruptions in electric service, and costs increases will ultimately be reflected in service rates, which will rise rapidly as utilities press ahead with retrofitting and projects to replace lost generating capacity due to plant retirements.

At least we’ll be able to avert brownouts by switching over readily to fracked-natural-gas, Alberta tar-sands, and latest-generation-nuclear options — or we would had all those options not been put under regulatory clouds as well.

If There Were An Annual ‘Regulation Day’ is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Recently, activist and filmmaker Annie Leonard released a video titled “The Story of Citizens United v. FEC,” an eight-and-a-half-minute criticism of last year’s Supreme Court case of the same name.

Well, sort of.

Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Lee Doren made his own video critique in response to Ms. Leonard’s offering, and points out quite clearly that Ms. Leonard doesn’t really deal with any actual constitutional problems in her position—essentially ignoring the decision and its rationale—and instead spends most of her time corporation bashing.

Lee was kind enough to cite, inter alia, a blogpost I wrote last year about what “corporate personhood” does and does not mean. If Ms. Leonard was going to ignore the decision, it may have at least served her well to read that post before producing her video. As I pointed out, under the logic she puts forth, “individuals acting through corporations should be denied their freedom of speech because corporations are ‘state-created entities.’ The theory goes that if a state has the power to create corporations, then it has the power to define those entities’ rights.” Ms Leonard’s video was made by (or coordination with) Free Range Studios—a corporation—and thus she’s making the argument that Congress should be able to keep her from or punish her for making that video because Free Range Studios shouldn’t have rights.

Despite the misinformation in Ms. Leonard’s video, we believe she and Free Range Studios have every right to be wrong as publicly as they see fit, even if she doesn’t.

Please watch Lee’s full video below, and look for the Cato shout-out around the 12:20 mark. If you’re in the Chicagoland area, I’ll be speaking about corporate rights and corporate personhood at John Marshall Law School tomorrow at 10:15AM local time. Feel free to stop by and please introduce yourself. 

Corporations Aren’t People But They Are (Legal) Persons is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

I’m usually in enthusiastic accord with our friends over at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, but it seems to me they’ve made a mistake by petitioning the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to crack down on GM’s ridiculous “we repaid our federal loan” ad. Some zealous enforcers would love for the FTC to do more to regulate speech by American business on matters of public concern, and it seems to me the last thing we should do is encourage such a trend.

For those who came in late, General Motors and its CEO Ed Whitmire were widely and rightly assailed here and elsewhere for asserting (in a column whose message was repeated in much-played TV ads) that the company had repaid its bailout loan “in full, with interest, years ahead of schedule.” Actually, as the inspector general of the government’s TARP program readily acknowledged, the firm had merely used one pot of federal money to repay another. Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley helped expose the dodge, and publications ranging from FoxNews.com to the New York Times joined in with scathing coverage.

Yesterday CEI announced that it had filed a formal complaint [PDF] with the FTC urging the commission to investigate the automaker’s ad campaign as misleading. It alleges that the ad campaign “could unfairly dupe consumers into a false, renewed confidence in the company” and that “consumer purchasing decisions can easily be affected by such considerations.” Nick Gillespie at Reason, CEI general counsel Hans Bader, and Todd Zywicki at Volokh have more.

There’s a long history of businesses’ responding to public criticism of their operations or products — and getting in further legal or regulatory trouble because of that very response. In one early case, the FTC went after egg producers for asserting, in the midst of a cholesterol scare that in hindsight appears overblown, that their ovoid wares were not in fact a menace to cardiac health. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence have asked the FTC to prohibit ads that imply that keeping a loaded weapon on hand will make a family safer. In Nike v. Kasky, a famous case that reached the Supreme Court [Thomas Goldstein, Cato Supreme Court Review 2003, PDF], shoemaker Nike was sued under a California law over the public defense it had put forward of its labor practices in overseas factories. Environmentalists have sought to suppress ads claiming that nuclear power is nonpolluting, and so forth.

Free-market advocates have generally argued that whatever the merits of laws or regulations banning misleading advertising in garden-variety commercial contexts, there are special dangers to the First Amendment and to robust debate generally in letting agencies and courts second-guess the content of “issue ads” and speech on topics of public controversy. To begin with, it encourages advocates to turn to the law to silence disagreeable speech rather than muster their best arguments to rebut it. In one grotesque example, MoveOn.org and Common Cause actually petitioned the FTC to institute a complaint against Fox News over its use of the slogan “Fair and Balanced”, since (they said) the network was neither.

Despite its current dependence on government, GM is in every relevant legal sense a private company, so any precedents forged against it will wind up applying to every other private enterprise that might wish to advertise on matters of public controversy. Which makes it a concern that CEI’s complaint cites with seeming enthusiasm broad FTC interpretations of authority — for example, its authority to suppress speech that might not be in itself false but could leave a potentially misleading impression.

If there is a continuum extending from more or less purely commercial speech (“Our tires last 40,000 miles”) to more or less purely political speech (“Our business is badly overtaxed”), GM’s ad campaign surely falls way over toward the “political” side. CEI’s response to this is to argue that the campaign might influence consumers’ purely economic calculations (as opposed to the political reasons they have to feel angry at GM) by making them more likely to see the company as solvent and thus as capable of making good its warranty promises. The words “strained” and “makeweight” come to mind to describe this argument. Does CEI really want to establish the future principle that a company’s over-sunny talk about its financial prospects will henceforth get it in trouble with two federal agencies, the FTC and SEC, rather than the SEC alone?

It all seems a rather high price to pay in principle for keeping the GM-TARP story in the papers for another day or two.

The FTC and Those GM Ads is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Alex Nowrasteh and Ryan Young of the Competitive Enterprise Institute make the case for immigration reform in an especially appealing way in a fresh op-ed this week in the Detroit News.

In a commentary article titled, “Fix immigration rules to crush black market,” they dissect a well-meaning but flawed Obama administration effort to fix the dysfunctional H-2A visa program for temporary farm workers. Instead of fine tuning an unworkable law, Nowrasteh and Young advocate liberalization:

That means making H-2A visas inexpensive, easy to obtain, and keeping the related paperwork and regulations to a minimum. That means no minimum wage hike. No costly background check requirements. People rarely break laws that are reasonable and easy to obey.

When legal channels cost too much in time and money, people will turn to illegal channels every time. That’s how the world works. Getting rid of immigration’s black market begins with admitting that fact.

Hear, hear.

Ending the Black Market in Low-skilled Labor is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Justice Department is on the job.  Perceiving a dire threat against the American republic, they have acted to keep America safe.  As my colleague Sallie James noted yesterday, they are stealing confiscating the money of Internet gamblers.

Reports Richard Morrison of our friends at the Competitive Enterprise Institute:

Just when it seemed that those in power had begun to think about Internet poker in a positive light, the Department of Justice throws us back into the digital dark ages by seizing $34 million in funds rightfully owned by around 27,000 online poker players. The government is alleging that the funds are associated with illegal online gambling and money laundering.

In a letter sent to Alliance Bank, the prosecutor said accounts held by payment processor Allied Systems Inc. are subject to seizure and forfeiture “because they constitute property involved in money laundering transactions and illegal gambling offenses.” The letter was signed by Arlo Devlin-Brown, assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.

Knowing that the federal government is busy violating our privacy and grabbing our money to save us from ourselves just makes one feel great to be an American

America Threatened as Never Before is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog