“European countries take a much more precautionary approach to additives in their food, Benesh says. “If there are doubts about whether a chemical is safe or if there’s no data to back up safety, the EU is much more likely to put a restriction on that chemical or just not allow it into the food supply at all.”
In the US, we’re more likely to see action at the state level. California banned four chemicals in 2023: brominated vegetable oil, Red Dye No. 3, propylparaben, and potassium bromate. This year, lawmakers in about a dozen states have introduced legislation banning those same chemicals and, in some states, additional chemicals as well. But federal oversight has been limited, constrained by priorities, authority, and by a lack of resources.”
“Certificate of need (CON) laws exist in various forms in 38 states and Washington, D.C. The stated goal of such laws is to keep costs down by preventing overinvestment in any single market. If regulators decide an area already has enough of any type of service, they can block new construction.
As a result, nobody in North Carolina can open or expand certain medical facilities without these regulators’ permission. Even purchasing an MRI scanner without their approval can be illegal. These restrictions prohibit Singleton from using his own clinic in New Bern for most of the surgeries he performs. He must drive two miles up the road to a competitor’s office, as it is owned by a major health care player. This unnecessary red tape increases costs and decreases scheduling options, and patients suffer.
Singleton has battled this scheme since he set up his clinic in 2024. Frustrated by a wall of bureaucracy and lack of progress, he sued in 2020 with representation from our public interest law firm, the Institute for Justice.
Getting to trial has not been easy. Wake County Superior Court tossed out his case in 2021 without discovery or witness testimony, and the North Carolina Court of Appeals upheld that decision in 2022. The state Supreme Court ruling simply allows Singleton to go back and try again.
Singleton is not alone in this struggle. The Iowa ophthalmologist Lee Birchansky fought for more than 20 years before state regulators relented and gave him permission to perform surgeries at his own clinic. In 2016, Virginia fended off a CON lawsuit from pulmonologist Mark Baumel and radiologist Mark Monteferrante. Kentucky spiked a home health care service that entrepreneur Dipendra Tiwari tried to launch in 2019. Connecticut blocked a cancer treatment center in 2022, clearing the way for political insiders to proceed unimpeded with their own cancer treatment center 45 miles east. None of these cases involved health or safety concerns.
CON laws work great for existing providers, who do not have to worry about rivals setting up shop and attracting patients with superior service. This also means existing providers can also take their doctors and nurses for granted, as CON laws keep rivals far away, limiting their ability to poach talent.
California, Texas, and 10 other states operate without CON laws. None of these states has experienced any measurable harm. In fact, multiple studies show benefits. For example, Matthew Mitchell, a researcher at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, says states that got rid of their CON laws have more hospitals and surgery centers per capita, along with more hospital beds, dialysis clinics, and hospice care facilities.”
“The Merchant Marine Act of 1920, also known as the Jones Act, requires any goods being shipped between U.S. ports to be transported on an American-owned, built, and flagged vessel with a majority American crew. Originally intended to protect U.S. shipbuilding, the Jones Act has made America’s maritime industry less competitive while increasing costs for consumers.
The failures of the Jones Act have disproportionately hurt Puerto Rico. In 2017, when Hurricane Maria ravaged the island, U.S. aid was delayed for more than a week until President Donald Trump signed a 10-day Jones Act waiver. Hurricane relief efforts were yet again stalled in 2022 after Hurricane Fiona. This time a BP tanker with 300,000 gallons of diesel remained idle off of the coast of the island until President Joe Biden granted a waiver for the ship.*
But even aside from disaster relief efforts, the Jones Act has also made energy in Puerto Rico more expensive and less reliable. Despite ambitious plans to source 100 percent of its electricity from renewable sources, Puerto Rico relies on fossil fuels for 94 percent of its electricity needs. However, since there are no Jones Act–compliant liquefied natural gas (LNG) tankers, Puerto Rico can’t just have LNG shipped in from continental U.S. Compliant coal vessels are few and far between too, so Puerto Rico is forced to source a majority of its fossil fuels from foreign nations.”
“Passed in 1969, NEPA requires federal agencies to conduct environmental reviews for major federal actions. The law requires federal officials to consult with relevant agencies about the impact of all “major Federal actions significantly affecting the quality of the human environment” before submitting statements to the Environmental Protection Agency. Major federal actions include private projects “subject to substantial Federal control and responsibility.”
NEPA has dramatically increased the time and cost of major federal actions. In the case of roads, “the cost to build a mile of Interstate highway had tripled between the 1970s and today” and, “environmental reviews for 60% of federal highway projects took more than six years,” according to Robert W. Poole, director of transportation policy at the Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason.
The Building Chips in America Act exempts firms receiving CHIPS and Science Act funding from complying with NEPA.”
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“Marc Scribner, senior policy analyst at the Reason Foundation, says that “environmental regulations on PFAS or anything else would still apply” to projects exempted from NEPA because it’s merely a process law. The Environmental Protection Agency already has rules substantively regulating PFAS: The agency added seven PFAS to the Toxics Release Inventory in January and “two widely used PFAS–PFOA and PFOS–as hazardous substances under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act” in April.
NEPA is onerous and superfluous; it increases delays, inflates costs, and stunts innovation for all projects—not just those involving CHIPS-subsidized semiconductor firms. Instead of making exceptions for favored firms and distorting price signals even further, Congress should repeal NEPA in its entirety so that all firms presently subject to it are freed from the red tape of a permission-slip economy.”
“Last fall, Milei eliminated what The Wall Street Journal termed one of the world’s “strictest” rent-control laws. Per its report: “The Argentine capital is undergoing a rental-market boom. Landlords are rushing to put their properties back on the market, with Buenos Aires rental supplies increasing by over 170 percent. While rents are still up in nominal terms, many renters are getting better deals than ever, with a 40 percent decline in the real price of rental properties when adjusted for inflation.”
With price controls, businesses flee the market because they cannot get a sufficient return on investment. As a result, supply for whatever is controlled falls even as demand stays steady or rises. That’s why price controls on gasoline lead to long lines at gas stations. If prices can’t adjust to reflect supply and demand, then people simply can’t get the items they want.
Sure, removing controls initially raises prices—but then new businesses jump into the fray to capitalize on the market and the boost in competition then reduces prices. By contrast, tightening up government price controls just leads to increasing levels of scarcity and misery.”
“Alaska is an energy behemoth with massive reserves of oil, natural gas, and petroleum. It also, oddly, faces a looming natural gas shortage—not good for a state where half of electricity production depends on the stuff. The problem is that most natural gas deposits are far from population centers and pipelines to transport the gas don’t yet exist and may never be built. So, to get gas to Alaskans, you need to transport it by ship. But federal law requires that only U.S.-flagged liquid natural gas (LNG) carriers be used, and there aren’t any.”
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“A century ago, Congress passed the Merchant Marine Act of 1920 (better known as the Jones Act) to prop up the country’s shipping industry. The law “among other things, requires shipping between U.S. ports be conducted by US-flag ships,” according to Cornell Law Schools’s Legal Information Institute. The ships must also be built here. So, to move natural gas from one part of Alaska to another, you need American LNG carriers. And here we find another shortage.
“LNG carriers have not been built in the United States since before 1980, and no LNG carriers are currently registered under the U.S. flag,” the U.S. Government Accountability Office found in 2015. And while there’s lots of demand for more LNG carriers for the export market, not just for Alaska, “U.S. carriers would cost about two to three times as much as similar carriers built in Korean shipyards and would be more expensive to operate.”
U.S. Customs and Border Protection did make an exception to let foreign LNG carriers transport U.S. natural gas to Puerto Rico earlier this year, but only because the gas was first piped to Mexico before being loaded onto ships. Isolated Alaska doesn’t have that option.”
“Half of all drunk drivers who are involved in fatal car wrecks are extremely intoxicated—sitting at BAC levels of 0.15 or higher. In contrast, only 16 percent of those involved in fatal wrecks have BAC levels under 0.08 (and the number is even lower for those specifically in the .05 to .07 range who would presumably be impacted by a switch to a .05 legal limit).
The worst drunk driving perpetrators are also often repeat offenders who appear to be impervious to any legal limit. About 30 percent of DUI arrestees in Utah had a prior arrest for drunk driving and 10 percent had two or more arrests. This is the political reality that few want to address. The couple who has a couple of glasses of wine with dinner is not the problem—it’s the person who is well over the legal limit and often a repeat offender who is causing the majority of carnage on American roads. In fact, even Candace Lightner, the founder of MADD is against the proposal, stating that “running around trying to arrest everyone at .05 is impractical.””
“The most generic definition of a commodity is something of value that’s bought and sold. A not insignificant segment of the left uses this generic definition when they say we should “decommodify” housing—it should not be something that’s bought and sold like a normal product.
Hear Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) decry the “privatization” of real estate development at a recent event promoting her Homes Act. That bill, jointly authored with Sen. Tina Smith (D–Minn.), would get the federal government back into the business of building and operating public housing units.
Their debate remarks notwithstanding, there’s no indication that Vance and Walz want to go so far as to completely end private housing markets.
Rather, they want to stop certain types of people from buying and selling housing—corporate speculators in Walz’s case, illegal immigrants in Vance’s. (In past remarks, Vance has also said we should squeeze corporate investors out of the housing market.) Once we get rid of the demand of Wall Street and illegal immigrants for housing, there’ll be more left for normal, decent Americans, the thinking goes.
As I wrote on Tuesday, that’s a mistaken attitude. There’s plenty of evidence that corporate investors and immigrants lower the cost of housing. The former provides the capital, the latter the labor, to get needed housing built.
There’s also no reason to think that a free market would transmute rising demand into ever higher prices. There’s not some fixed number of housing units. Increased demand might raise prices in the short run. But higher prices also encourage more homebuilding. That brings prices back down.
If it was profitable for developers to sell homes at $300,000 a unit and then more immigrants or speculators swoop in and buy houses, pushing the price up to $400,000, developers will respond by building more housing until the price falls back down to $300,000. If they were making money producing homes at that price, there’s no reason they’d suddenly stop just because demand increased.
Over time, capitalist innovation will lower production costs such that more and more housing is available at a lower price. This is what it actually means to make something into a “commodity” and we see examples of it everywhere in the economy.
There are more people and more demand than ever. Yet, somehow the price of common commodities and mass-produced consumer products keeps falling.
Real prices falling in the face of ever-rising demand is what it actually means to “commodify” something.”
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“With zoning codes limiting how much new housing can be built at one time, the size of home-building firms has fallen, reducing economies of scale and construction productivity. Building codes dictating how homes have to be built has further helped to close off innovative construction methods.
Those regulatory restrictions on new supply never went away, with the result being that the price of housing has risen in tandem with rising demand. Additionally, new technology that promised to automate construction tasks has repeatedly failed to take off.
Rather than becoming a commodity, home-building has stayed a cottage industry (no pun intended). Real prices continue to rise and housing affordability has become an issue of national concern debated by candidates for federal office.
In this context, Walz and Vance have decided to double down on the zero-sum nature of the housing market. They say we need to decommodify housing by preventing the wrong people from buying a fixed stock of housing.
This is exactly backwards. Housing supply is fixed by regulation, not nature. If we stripped away regulations on homebuilding, supply would rise and prices would fall.
We’ve failed to make housing a commodity and that’s exactly the problem.”
“According to the study, reservations today are 46 percent less likely to host wind farms and 110 percent less likely to host solar projects compared to neighboring non-reservation lands. Although the lands provided to Native Americans have historically been less agriculturally productive, those lands are now seen as perfectly conditioned for solar and wind energy, according to research from the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.
Federal policy, however, continues to pigeonhole Native Americans into farming because of how difficult it can be to use the land for anything else. Since the Dawes Act of 1887, which broke up communal land into parcels among Natives in an attempt to assimilate them into American society, and its subsequent reversal through the Wheeler-Howard Act, Native land policy has been overwhelmingly bureaucratized.
Despite its reversal, the Dawes Act has had long-lasting consequences. Inheritance rules imposed by the law spurred a phenomenon called fractionation, in which parcels of land had to be divided up between all heirs after the owners passed away. As a result, some parcels have hundreds of owners, increasing the cost of development exponentially as the number of owners who needed to be contacted for approval ballooned.
A green light from the Bureau of Indian Affairs is also required for most energy projects on Native lands. “Typically, you have to work with different agencies, including the Bureau of Indian Affairs,” said Sarah Johnston, one of the study’s co-authors, “which, anecdotally, can be quite slow in terms of getting the necessary approvals.” Additionally, ownership records from the Bureau are often incomplete, making cases involving fractionated land even more fraught.
Were reservation lands to host more energy facilities, this would help lower the rate of unelectrified tribal communities. In just Navajo Nation homes, the largest federally recognized tribe in the United States, 21 percent lack electricity.
Altogether, removing regulatory barriers would give Native American tribes the ability to move past the raw deals they’ve gotten throughout history, allowing them to generate electricity, wealth, and prosperity for their communities.”