“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.”
“Noah acknowledges, in passing, one particular provision of the existing nuclear regulatory framework on the United States that’s very important: radiation is held to the As Low As Reasonably Achievable (ALARA) standard, which makes it essentially impossible for nuclear to be cost-competitive.
Suppose I had a design for a cost-effective nuclear reactor, and I said I should be allowed to build it, because electricity is good and air pollution is bad. The regulator is going to look at it and say, “Well, that reactor seems awfully cheap to build, why not add a bunch more features to make the radiation levels even lower?” And then I will say, “That would be hideously expensive in a way that is net bad for public health, because it leads to more burning of fossil fuels and worse air pollution.” But the regulator comes back and says, “We’re not using a cost-benefit framework, we’re using ALARA.” And I say, “That doesn’t make sense, coal ash is radioactive — you are creating more radiation by raising my costs.” And the regulator says, “I don’t regulate coal plants, I regulate you — ALARA!”
As Jason Crawford writes, “any technology, any operational improvement, anything that reduces costs, simply gives the regulator more room and more excuse to push for more stringent safety requirements, until the cost once again rises to make nuclear just a bit more expensive than everything else. Actually, it‘s worse than that: it essentially says that if nuclear becomes cheap, then the regulators have not done their job.”
This is a deeply dysfunctional regulatory paradigm, and it reflects the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s origins in 1974 legislation that was explicitly motivated by a belief that the old Atomic Energy Commission was too friendly to the industry.
In 2019, Congress passed the Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act, which, among other things, “requires the NRC to develop new processes for licensing nuclear reactors, including staged licensing of advanced nuclear reactors.” The hope of NEIMA’s proponents was to change 45 years of the NRC fundamentally being an agency that says “no” to stuff and make them into an agency that would create a regulatory pathway under which new kinds of nuclear reactors could be licensed and built. And after several years, the NRC did get around to writing the new rules for SMRs, but they came up with an even longer and more cumbersome regulatory process.
Earlier this summer, the ADVANCE Act reiterated Congress’s determination for the NRC to change.
But the NRC staff, to the best of my knowledge, fundamentally does not believe that America’s elected officials genuinely want them to make it faster and cheaper to build nuclear reactors. And one reason they don’t believe it is that even though the Biden administration says lots of pro-nuclear stuff, has plenty of pro-nuclear appointees, signed the ADVANCE Act, and has done a lot to help with SMRs in terms of financing, they still coughed-up an NRC nominee who basically supports the status quo. You need a team of political appointees at the agency who are willing to both drive change and also personally take the heat when change makes people mad. You can’t “just use nuclear, bro.” You need to put people in place to actually drive specific policy change in a way that will let the industry grow and work.
And of course, even if you did that, it might not work.”
“We don’t need a formal study to tell us that taking away sex workers’ ability to communicate online makes their lives worse—sex workers have been saying that for a decade now, since the federal government started taking down websites where they advertised (RIP MyRedBook, Rentboy, The Review Board, Backpage, and so on). But here’s a(nother) study saying exactly this.
For the study, published in the journal Social Sciences, researcher Melissa Ditmore and her team conducted a national survey of 440 sex workers, asking about how they used online platforms, how the use of these platforms affected their working conditions, and how laws like the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA)—which led to platforms removing and restricting sex worker accounts—affected their work lives. Survey respondents included folks who had engaged in webcam work, phone sex work, strip club work, pornography, independent escorting, street-based sex work, working at a brothel, working at a massage parlor, BDSM/fetish work, working for an escort agency, and other types of sex work.
Ditmore’s team found—unsurprisingly—that “platform policies and practices often remove and/or limit sex workers’ access to them, which, in turn, restricts their ability to earn income and compromises their capacity to live and work safely.””
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”
Ten percent said deplatforming led to more interactions with law enforcement, and 11.5 percent said it led to more social service interactions.
Around 9 percent said deplatforming led to more interactions with madams/agencies/managers/pimps.
Around 8 percent said they experienced “exploitative work conditions” after deplatforming” and 6.7 percent said they experienced “abusive work conditions.””
https://reason.com/2024/09/04/deplatforming-doesnt-make-sex-work-safer/
“Permitting reform isn’t just bureaucratic minutiae; it’s a critical, deeply moral issue for anyone who believes in free markets, individual liberty, and economic progress. Our permitting regime is a web of red tape that stifles innovation, slows growth, and leaves Americans poorer, less free, and increasingly frustrated with a government more interested in regulating than enabling prosperity.
This isn’t some esoteric topic for policy wonks; it’s about the real, tangible effects of overregulation on Americans’ daily lives. Housing costs, job availability, energy prices, and technological advancement all hinge on how our government handles permits. And right now, it’s failing miserably.
Take housing. Some areas like California and New York City face a crisis largely due to onerous permitting processes. Builders must navigate a Kafkaesque labyrinth of regulations just to break ground, assuming they are even allowed to build. These delays add years to construction and inflate costs by tens of thousands per unit.
This isn’t mere inconvenience; it’s a genuine disaster for middle- and low-income families priced out of the market. The American dream of homeownership is being strangled by red tape. Worse yet, Americans are priced out of lucrative labor markets because rents are so artificially inflated in job-rich cities.
But that’s just the beginning. Permitting processes are choking the energy sector. Important infrastructure—pipelines, wind farms, grid modernization—is being held up for years by endless environmental reviews, public comments, and lawsuits. Now, two judges have signaled to developers that permits which took years to obtain could be canceled on a whim if subjected to pressure from the climate activists.
This isn’t just bad policy; it’s economic sabotage resulting in higher prices, less reliable supply, and missed opportunities for cleaner, more efficient energy.
What about other infrastructure? Roads, bridges, and transit systems fail to get fixed when approval for repairs takes years or sometimes decades. An outdated, bloated process prioritizes procedure over results, making some projects obsolete before they begin. Meanwhile, the government wastes massive amounts of money on infrastructure subsidies when all we need is to allow people to build.
The free market thrives on innovation and speed, allowing swift responses to societal needs. The current system is its antithesis—slow, cumbersome, and designed to prevent change rather than facilitate it.
It’s not just harming businesses; it’s harming everyone. Imagine what we could achieve with reform: affordable housing, more jobs, lower energy prices, modernized infrastructure. We could unleash a new wave of American innovation and growth. Yet these reforms are repeatedly blocked by bureaucrats protecting their turf, politicians appeasing special interests, or activists who believe halting progress is virtuous.”