“Rubio doesn’t even get through the first paragraph of the piece before making a significant error. “Today,” he writes, Congress no longer views industrial policy with the same skepticism that it once did, but “what replaces unfettered free trade remains hotly debated.”
Unfettered free trade? That’s hardly an accurate description of the current status quo in the United States—a fact that Rubio surely knows, since Florida’s sugar and fruit industries are the beneficiaries of some of the most aggressive protectionist policies on the books. Even before former President Donald Trump ramped up the use of tariffs, America had more protectionist policies than other large, developed economies: A 2015 report from Credit Suisse called the United States the world’s most protectionist developed nation.
Rubio’s inability to describe the current status quo matters. It’s a failure of the ideological Turing Test, and it reveals that he misunderstands the economic policies he’s trying to shift—or that he is deliberately misinforming readers about them. Either way, this ought to call the rest of his claims into question.
Unfortunately, that’s far from the only mistake in the piece.”
“A bill recently introduced in Colorado aims to make dating apps such as Hinge and Bumble safer for users. The first section of S.B. 24-011 would force all dating services with any users in Colorado to submit an annual report to Colorado’s attorney general about misconduct reports from users in the state or about users in the state. If that isn’t available, the app must report all misconduct reports from the entire United States. These reports would all become public.
While the bill leaves some of the details up to the state’s attorney general, this would probably mean that when people file false reports about each other on dating apps, the reports would all become public record. The bill uses the term “information about a member,” suggesting that it would require disclosure about each individual member. Scorned lovers, racists, incels, and others with hostile motives could file false reports and harm people’s job and dating prospects in the future. And a report on a government website looks a lot more legitimate than someone mad on social media. These reports might even lead to law enforcement investigating innocent users.”
…
“Dating apps are horrible because they have horrible users—like the man who brought me to a cafeteria, drank a beverage that he packed for himself without asking me if I wanted one, grilled me for 15 minutes, and ghosted. (I later learned he was 14 years older than he claimed and Hinge had repeatedly banned him. He’s tried to match with me three times more since that day.)”
“As far as consumer complaints go, of course, there’s nothing wrong with some of the DOJ’s concerns. We might wish that every product we owned was compatible with every other product we owned and that they worked in perfect tandem. We might wish we never had to consider tradeoffs between price, function, design, compatibility, etc.
Where this gets crazy is the federal government saying: Consumers being able to choose whether to use a product is not good enough. We’re going to step in and say that this business has to make a competitor’s products more accessible. It has a legal duty to undermine its own business interests to help outside—and many would argue inferior—products compete.
In the vein of other recent antitrust actions against tech companies, particularly under the Biden administration, the Apple suit relies on an absurd conception of how the law should work. And it’s a conception that could seriously harm innovation, weaken the position of U.S. tech companies, and mess with products many people like.
And many people really, really love Apple products, including iPhones.
The bottom line: Nobody has to use an iPhone, and no developer has to distribute its app through the App Store. There are other ways to communicate, other smartphone options, and other ways to distribute apps (including other ways to distribute apps to iPhone users). That many people still carry iPhones and distribute their apps through the App Store speaks to the fact that many people find the phone’s upsides and the App Store’s upsides stronger than any downsides.”
“For more than a year, the U.S. has experienced a shortage of Adderall, the medication used to treat attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Now, while continuing to deny its own role in the shortage, the federal government is making the problem worse by threatening manufacturers that could help ameliorate the crisis.
In October 2022, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced a shortage of amphetamine mixed salts, Adderall’s primary ingredient. The announcement noted that manufacturers were “experiencing ongoing intermittent manufacturing delays” and it anticipated that the shortage could last until March 2023.
As Reason has reported since the FDA’s first announcement, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) imposes production caps on Schedule I and II narcotics. Each year, drug manufacturers apply for a piece of the overall quotas. Even after a spike in demand during the COVID-19 pandemic, the DEA did not lift the production quotas on the ingredients used to make Adderall or its equivalents.”
…
“In April 2022, Ascent submitted its annual quota applications for 11 total drugs, but instead of a speedy approval, the company was subjected to a DEA audit.
Investigators pored over Ascent’s books and identified discrepancies that indicated sloppy record keeping. For its part, the company admitted to committing infractions, though the details seem needlessly petty: In one example, “orders struck from [DEA forms] must be crossed out with a line and the word cancel written next to them,” Walsh wrote. “Investigators found two instances in which Ascent employees had drawn the line but failed to write the word.”
The audit forced Ascent to shut down production at its facility on Long Island, near New York City; company officials told New York that this constituted 600 million annual doses that it is unable to produce. It began laying off workers after more than a year in regulatory limbo.
Ascent sued in September 2023, seeking an injunction “compelling DEA to respond, to Ascent’s applications for quotas.” The DEA quickly denied all of Ascent’s quota applications, saying that it “lacks confidence in the data provided by Ascent in its quota requests” but giving no specifics.”
…
“It’s entirely possible that Ascent did keep shoddy records, and perhaps it did misplace doses of drugs like opioids or stimulants that are ripe for abuse (allegations that the company denies). But the DEA’s policy of artificially constraining the supply of those drugs continues to harm those patients who actually need them.”
“Today, Amazon terminated its planned acquisition of iRobot, manufacturer of Roomba robot vacuums, as the companies saw “no path to regulatory approval.” iRobot then announced that it would be cutting nearly one-third of its work force.
While the companies blamed regulators in the European Union for the termination, meddlesome U.S. lawmakers played their own part in souring the deal.”
…
“as the companies waited on regulators, iRobot was losing money: The company took out a $200 million bridge loan in July 2023 to tie it over until the deal closed (at which point Amazon lowered its offer to account for the new debt). With the deal scuttled, Amazon will now pay a $94 million termination fee, but iRobot expects to report an operating loss of as much as $285 million for 2023.
It’s worth wondering, then, if this is what lawmakers like Warren had in mind. The FTC letter worried the merger “could harm consumers and reduce competition and innovation in the home robotics market.” But without the merger, iRobot could very well face insolvency, and nearly one-third of its work force will lose their jobs—and considering the company is based in Massachusetts, a substantial number of them may very well be Warren’s constituents.”
“All investment is risky. What better way to avoid that risk than to use other people’s money? Federal, state, and local governments dispense gifts, grants, and loans to private companies, generously funded by taxpayers and usually with vague promises of economic development in return. While politicians say they don’t like to pick winners and losers, even the “winners” sometimes turn out to be losers for taxpayers.”
“The modern presidency has tremendous powers, of course, but this is still quite the stretch. Hawley is asking the White House to engage in central planning at an absurdly micro-level—and there is, thankfully, no law that actually allows the president to order a factory to continue producing aluminum if its owners have decided to stop.
Even so, the fact that Hawley is even making this request illustrates something important about how Republicans now view the relationship between government and business. It also says something about how the failures of protectionism will spur calls for more protectionism. And, finally, about how the phrase “national security” has become warped beyond recognition to justify further governmental intrusions into the economy.”
…
“It might shock Hawley and some of his colleagues to learn that the Defense Production Act is not a set of magic words that allow presidents to do whatever they’d like. In fact, all the law does is require that businesses fulfill orders from the government before other orders from private customers.
That’s because it is a law meant to be used during wartime. Here’s how it works: Let’s say there’s a war going on and the U.S. military desperately needs 10,000 widgets to ensure victory, lasting peace, and blah blah blah. The Pentagon sends a guy to the widget factory in Albuquerque to request those 10,000 widgets, but the owner of the factory says the 10,000 widgets sitting on his lot have already been purchased by his friend Bob and that the government will have to wait until the factory can produce another 10,000 widgets—so come back in two weeks.
Ah, but wait! The president just signed an order invoking the Defense Production Act for widgets, so now the guy from the Pentagon gets to cut the line. He can buy those 10,000 widgets, and Bob has to wait for the next set to come off the assembly line.
That’s what the Defense Production Act allows. It can’t conjure up new solar panels or additional supplies of insulation out of thin air. It doesn’t allow the government to put a gun to anyone’s head and force them to make baby formula or to keep an aluminum smelter running.”
…
“Remember those 10 percent tariffs on imported aluminum imposed by then-President Donald Trump in 2018? That was naked protectionism, and the announced closure of this Missouri smelter seems like pretty good evidence that it failed. There’s other evidence too: As Hawley points out in his letter, this is the third aluminum smelter in the U.S. to announce plans to downsize in recent months. Unfortunately, the failures of protectionism only ever seem to spur calls for more protectionism.”
“California’s attempt at forcing gig workers to become traditional employees backfired by driving many of those workers out of their jobs.
In the wake of a new law (Assembly Bill 5) that was intended to reclassify many independent contractors as regular employees, self-employment in California fell by 10.5 percent and overall employment tumbled by 4.4 percent, according to a study released Thursday by the Mercatus Center, a free market think tank housed at George Mason University. In professions where self-employment was more common, the effects were more dramatic, and in some fields employment declined by as much as 28 percent after A.B. 5’s implementation.”