Voice For Liberty

Tag: Regulation

  • At Americans for Prosperity, George Will is optimistic

    Friday night’s dinner at the Americans for Prosperity Foundation fourth annual Defending the American Dream summit featured Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist George Will as keynote speaker.

    Will’s message was that while progress in limiting the growth of government has been reversed, this can be overcome, and he believes that a restoration of liberty and economic freedom will happen.

    As the dinner was a tribute to former President Ronald Reagan, Will told the audience one of his favorite lines from Reagan during the 1980 campaign: “A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose your job. Recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his job.”

    Continuing, he said that “Barack Obama is Jimmy Carter 2.0 and it is time to hit the delete button.”

    Will told the audience that the “retreat of the state” that started with the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and the election of Ronald Reagan has been reversed. This should be reversed again, he said.

    On the federal stimulus, Will said that the downward revision of GDP from a bad number to an even worse number is evidence that the stimulus is not working.

    There are two things that the administration is saying that are “funny,” Will said. One is that our current crisis was brought on because there was too little government regulation and administration. The second is that the problem with the stimulus is that Republicans made it too small. “The government is dangerously frugal at the moment,” he said to laughter from the audience.

    But Will said that the government controls the money supply and interest rates, leading to control of home mortgages. He traced the edicts of government that increasing percentages of mortgages must be given to those with poor credit. These expansions of the federal government, along with the No Child Left Behind education law, happened under Republican administrations, evidence that not only Democrats are too blame.

    Government is dominating the energy sector too. He said that matters because “no less of an authority of energy” than Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that “America should use more natural gas rather than fossil fuels.”

    In health care, half of spending is already government money, and that will increase, as will the 138,000 pages of health care regulations.

    As to the alleged dangerous frugality of the government, Will said we are “marching into the most predictable financial crisis the world has ever seen.” This crisis is self-inflicted, he said.

    Illustrating the size of government, he said that at the time of the first world war, when federal government spending exploded, the richest man in American could have personally retired the federal debt. But today’s richest man could pay for only two month’s interest on the deficit.

    The administration’s planned spending program will result in a situation ten years from now when federal entitlement programs (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid) plus the interest on the federal debt will consume 93 percent of federal revenue. The debt will be one hundred percent of GDP. This will crowd out private borrowing and investment. As a nation, he said we don’t save enough to fund both government and the investment needs of the private sector economy.

    Will noted the remarkable progress of American medicine during his lifetime. But both presidential candidates campaigned against the pharmaceutical industry in 2008, which Will said was “shocking.” “It is time to quit stigmatizing those who create wealth, those who extend life, those who reduce pain. Get the government out of the way, and let them get on.”

    The economy is fragile, Will said, and we need not burden it more with taxes. He referred to Congressman Paul Ryan, who said we have a nation with “too many takers and not enough makers.”

    On education, he said we need an education system that “equips people to compete in a free society.” He criticized the short school year in the U.S., as compared to other countries. He told the audience that a major problem with schools is the teachers unions. The increased spending on schools has not worked. 90 percent of the difference between schools can be explained by characteristics of the students’ families, he said. “Don’t tell me the pupil-teacher ratio, tell me the parent-pupil ratio.”

    Even with as many problems as there are, he said that an “aroused citizenry” like that in the room tonight can fix the problems. He’s not pessimistic, he said, because Obama has stimulated a “new clarity” from the American people.

    There is a tension today between freedom and equality, two polar values. Liberals today stress equality of outcomes, and believe that the multiplication of entitlement programs to produce this equality serves the public good. But conservatives stress freedom, and that multiplication of entitlement programs is “subversive of the attitudes and aptitudes essential for a free society of self-reliant, far-sighted, thrifty and industrious people.”

    The Obama presidency has passed its apogee, Will told the audience. Quoting Winston Churchill, he said that “The American people invariably do the right thing, after they have exhausted all the alternatives.” Will said he believes that Americans believe that “a benevolent government is not always a benefactor, capitalism doesn’t just make us better off, it makes us better.”

    Will told the audience that “Americans for Prosperity exists on the principle that when you change the nation’s economy, you change the national character in the process.” Urging the citizen activists to get involved, he echoed a remark made by Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who had spoken earlier: “You are the point of the lance. Go to work.”

    Before his speech, Americans for Prosperity Foundation Chairman David H. Koch awarded Will the George Washington award. This is AFP’s highest award, given to Will for his work in defending and advancing economic freedom.

    Koch also spoke about the goals of Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which he said are to advance economic freedom and prosperity by limiting government growth, spending, and taxation. It is a grassroots movement that holds political leaders of every party accountable. AFP advocates for the free market economy, which he said improves lives and created the greatest nation on the face of the Earth.

  • How does Kansas rank in economic freedom?

    In measures of economic and personal freedom, Kansas ranks relatively well among the states, but lags behind some neighboring states. Recent actions by the Kansas legislature might drive its ranking down.

    Last year the Mercatus Center at George Mason University published a paper that ranks the states in several areas regarding freedom. According to the authors, “This paper presents the first-ever comprehensive ranking of the American states on their public policies affecting individual freedoms in the economic, social, and personal spheres.”

    What is the philosophical basis for measuring or determining freedom? Here’s an explanation from the introduction:

    We explicitly ground our conception of freedom on an individual rights framework. In our view, individuals should be allowed to dispose of their lives, liberties, and property as they see fit, so long as they do not infringe on the rights of others. This understanding of freedom follows from the natural-rights liberal thought of John Locke, Immanuel Kant, and Robert Nozick, but it is also consistent with the rights-generating rule-utilitarianism of Herbert Spencer and others.

    According to the authors, “No current studies exist that measure both economic and personal freedom in the fifty states.” So this is a ground-breaking work.

    How does Kansas do? Surprisingly, not too badly. Not outstanding, but not as bad as I might have thought.

    For the four areas measured, here’s how we did: In fiscal policy, Kansas is 28. In regulatory policy, 4. In economic freedom, 18. In personal freedom, 15. (In all cases, a ranking of 1 means the most freedom.)

    Our overall ranking is 12.

    Some of the remarks the authors made about Kansas include noting our large public employee payroll, even though state employees are not paid as well as private sector workers. Also: “The area of spending that could most stand to be cut is education, while the taxes that should have priority for cutting are individual income and property taxes.”

    Some of our neighbors do pretty well in the overall ranking. Colorado is 2, Texas is 5, Missouri is 6, and Oklahoma is 18. Nebraska is not as good at 28.

    Colorado undoubtedly benefited from its taxpayer bill of rights (TABOR) law, which places limits on the rate of growth of government spending, although it had been suspended for several years. Those in Kansas who favor government spending over private sector spending use Colorado as an example of a state that TABOR has destroyed, but in terms of economic freedom, it does very well.

    In case you’re wondering, for overall ranking, New Hampshire is best. The worst? It’s no surprise that it’s New York by a wide margin, with New Jersey, Rhode Island, California, and Maryland rounding out the bottom five.

    If this index were to be recomputed this year, Kansas might fall in rankings due to outgoing Governor Mark Parkinson‘s two landmark achievements — the increase in the statewide sales tax and the statewide smoking ban. Some of the other enacted laws detailed in the article In Kansas Legislature, a bad year for freedom and liberty would push Kansas’ ranking down, too.

    But since rankings are relative and consider what happened in other states, Kansas might not have changed much, as many states have passed tax increases and other freedom-killing legislation and regulations.

    The full study contains discussion of the politics surrounding these rankings, and a narrative discussion of the factors present in each state.

    You may read the entire study by clicking on Freedom in the 50 States: An Index of Personal and Economic Freedom.

  • Internet regulation, or net neutrality, would harm investment, says former official

    At a luncheon event in Wichita, Bruce Mehlman of the Internet Innovation Alliance told an audience that increased regulation of the internet — the principle known as “net neutrality” — would harm capital investment in broadband internet service.

    Mehlman was formerly Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Technology Policy and now serves as co-chairman of the Internet Innovation Alliance and as partner in a Washington lobbying firm.

    Mehlman laid out some of the facts of broadband internet: all the varied things businesses and people do with the high-speed transmission of data, the fact that broadband internet has been rapidly adopted, and the rapid growth of digital content.

    Today, 66 percent of American adults have a broadband internet connection at home. 95 percent have access to at least one broadband service offering, if they chose to subscribe.

    He cited a just-released Pew Internet & American Life project which found that 21 percent of American adults do not use the internet. Of these non-users, 48 percent indicated lack of relevance, 21 percent cited price as the reason, 18 percent said it was usability that kept them offline, and only six percent said access was the reason why they don’t use the internet.

    Mehlman said that these measurements are an indicator of the success of broadband internet adoption.

    The big policy battle for 2010, Mehlman said, is net neutrality. The basic principle of net neutrality is that “companies providing Internet service should treat all sources of data equally,” according to the New York Times. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) would not be able to manage their networks in terms of providing faster service to those who agree to pay, and they would not be able to block any content.

    Some of the things that net neutrality would do, Mehlman said, include the following: ISPs would have to be transparent with rules and policies, they would not block or degrade certain types of internet traffic, there would be government-defined “reasonable” network management, there would be no “express lanes,” and there would be limits on service tiers and pricing plans. These concepts would also be applied to wireless broadband service.

    Advocates of net neutrality are particularly concerned that ISPs may block or slow service for some types of traffic. Mehlman provided three examples of attempts at this. In each case customers objected, and the ISP quickly reversed course.

    He noted the irony of Google — a company that has been a leading advocate of net neutrality — objecting to the creation of preferred classes of internet traffic, when a major component of Google’s business model is customers paying for preferential treatment of their advertisements placed on Google.

    Mehlman asked the audience to note the contrast between two heavily-regulated industries — telecommunications and cable TV — and a lightly regulated industry — information technology, which is the category that broadband internet and most information services fall into. Telecommunications and cable TV, throughout their history, have evolved slowly, and had exhibited little of the innovation that is characterized the internet and other information services.

    A recent court decision ruled that the FCC had no authority to regulate information services. So the FCC now has two choices. One would be to persuade Congress to let the FCC regulate the internet. The other would be to redefine the internet from an information service to a telecommunication service, reclassifying it as a “Title II” service.

    This last option has been described by industry analyst Craig Moffett as the “nuclear option.” The additional regulation that Title II designation brings would fuel investor uncertainty, and probably lead to a dramatic reduction in capital investment in broadband internet. Innovation would likely suffer.

    The event was sponsored by Americans for Prosperity-Kansas, Mid-American Communications Alliance, Wichita Independent Business Association, and Kansas Policy Institute.

  • Wichita event: The future of innovation and investment in broadband

    The FCC has proposed reclassifying the Internet as a public utility to get total regulatory control. How can you help stop the FCC Internet takeover?

    Learn about the efforts to keep the Internet in the free market during a free lunch seminar, “The Future of Innovation & Investment in Broadband” next Thursday at the Wichita Petroleum Club. Hear from Bruce Mehlman, co-chair of the Internet Innovation Alliance and former Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Technology Policy in the George W. Bush administration, on efforts to expand broadband access and how to keep the Internet in the free market.

    Registration is free when you RSVP, but seating is limited. Register by 5 p.m. Friday, Aug. 6, for a chance to win a $500 Apple Store gift card!

    The event is from 11:30 am to 1:00 pm on Thursday August 12, at the Wichita Petroleum Club, on the ninth floor of the Bank of America Building at 100 N. Broadway (north side of Douglas between Topeka and Broadway) in Wichita, Kansas (click for a map and directions)

    This luncheon is sponsored by Americans for Prosperity-Kansas, Mid-American Communications Alliance, Wichita Independent Business Association, and Kansas Policy Institute.

    Registration is free when you RSVP by clicking on action.mocomm.org/rsvp. Learn more by calling Susan Estes of AFP at 316-681-4415, or by email at sestes@afphq.org.

  • Financial reform passes Congress

    This afternoon the United States Senate passed sweeping financial services regulation, sending the bill to President Obama. As the President has championed this legislation, it is certain he will sign the bill.

    The Wall Street Journal reports “The measure, once implemented, will touch all areas of the financial markets, affecting how consumers obtain credit cards and mortgages, dictating how the government dismantles failing financial firms and directing federal regulators’ focus on potential flashpoints in the economy.”

    The Journal also issues a warning: “The work of remaking the financial-regulatory regime, however, remains far from finished. Thursday’s vote effectively opens a second phase of lobbying and policy making as financial regulators begin to shape the rules and framework laid out in the legislation. That rule-making process will determine how the new law affects those ranging from traders of complicated derivatives to consumers shopping for a mortgage or a credit card.”

    In an earlier story, the Journal reported on the broad reach of this bill: “Designed to fix problems that helped cause the financial crisis, the bill will touch storefront check cashiers, city governments, small manufacturers, home buyers and credit bureaus, attesting to the sweeping nature of the legislation, the broadest revamp of finance rules since the 1930s.”

    The Wall Street Journal’s collection of reporting on this topic is at Financial Regulation.

    ALG Condemns Financial Takeover as “One More Piece of Liberty Lost”

    July 15th, 2010, Fairfax, VA – Americans for Limited Government (ALG) President Bill Wilson today condemned the U.S. Senate for enacting the conference version of the Dodd-Frank financial takeover bill, sending the bill to the desk of Barack Obama to become law.

    “The American people have lost one more piece of their liberty, as the Senate has voted to create a hidden, permanent bailout that will enable faceless bureaucrats to levy taxes, bail out politically-privileged institutions and to seize and liquidate politically-unconnected ones, redistributing their assets to favored constituencies, like unions,” Wilson declared.

    “There will be no votes in Congress like TARP ever again, as Congress has abdicated the power to tax and spend elsewhere,” Wilson explained, adding, “Which solves a political problem for members of Congress, but is really just a con game so that they don’t have to take responsibility for unpopular bailouts and government takeovers.”

    Continue reading at Americans for Limited Government

  • Wichita downtown boom could be over before it starts

    As Wichita moves towards the release of the plan for the revitalization of its downtown, urban planners — both local and out-of-town — tell us that there’s a big demand for downtown living. People are tired of suburban living, they say. The recent draft presentation by the city’s planning firm Goody Clancy contained bullet points like “who favor living and working in vibrant downtowns” and “and they are part of broad demographic trends that are much more ‘downtown friendly’ …e.g., almost two-thirds of Wichita’s households include just one or two people.”

    Or, as “uber-geographer” Joel Kotkin wrote in the Wall Street Journal this week: “Pundits, planners and urban visionaries — citing everything from changing demographics, soaring energy prices, the rise of the so-called ‘creative class,’ and the need to battle global warming — have been predicting for years that America’s love affair with the suburbs will soon be over.”

    But as Kotkin later writes: “But the great migration back to the city hasn’t occurred.”

    Kotkin cites some figures showing the decline in the market for downtown condos in a few cities, and concludes “Behind the condo bust is a simple error: people’s stated preferences.” He shows some figures that support his contention that “Demographic trends, including an oft-predicted tsunami of Baby Boom ’empty nesters’ to urban cores, have been misread.”

    These demographic trends are behind the analysis that Goody Clancy uses to promote its vision for downtown Wichita. Kotkin’s research ought to give us concern that downtown visionaries are leading Wichita down a path that really isn’t there.

    Kotkin issues a note of caution for urban planners: “The condo bust should provide a cautionary tale for developers, planners and the urban political class, particularly those political ‘progressives’ who favor using regulatory and fiscal tools to promote urban densification. It is simply delusional to try forcing a market beyond proven demand.”

    What does this mean for Wichita? Wichita’s planners and leaders are promoting a light-handed approach to downtown development, saying, for example, that public financing will be only for public purposes. But Wichita has a history of heavy-handed interventionism in markets, using economic development tools of all types. And as the mayor recently said at a council meeting, he’s recently learned of new types of incentive programs that other cities are using.

    So I think Wichita’s leaders definitely will use the “regulatory and fiscal tools” that Kotkin warns of. It’s only without government intervention that we’ll know whether Wichitans really prefer suburban, downtown, or other forms of living. Urban planners and city hall bureaucrats can’t tell us that.

    The Myth of the Back-to-the-City Migration

    The condo bust should lay to rest the notion that the American love affair with suburbia is over.

    Pundits, planners and urban visionaries—citing everything from changing demographics, soaring energy prices, the rise of the so-called “creative class,” and the need to battle global warming—have been predicting for years that America’s love affair with the suburbs will soon be over. Their voices have grown louder since the onset of the housing crisis. Suburban neighborhoods, as the Atlantic magazine put it in March 2008, would morph into “the new slums” as people trek back to dense urban spaces.

    But the great migration back to the city hasn’t occurred. Over the past decade the percentage of Americans living in suburbs and single-family homes has increased. Meanwhile, demographer Wendell Cox’s analysis of census figures show that a much-celebrated rise in the percentage of multifamily housing peaked at 40% of all new housing permits in 2008, and it has since fallen to below 20% of the total, slightly lower than in 2000.

    Continue reading at the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) or at Kotkin’s website.

  • Financial reform bill as bad as can be

    The United States financial reform legislation that just passed through conference committee is just about the worst possible bill that could emerge. In its analysis, The Wall Street Journal concluded “perhaps the best summary is to hail Dodd-Frank as the crowning achievement of the Obama ‘reform’ method. In the name of responding to a crisis, the bill greatly increases the power of politicians and regulators without addressing the real causes of that crisis. It makes credit more expensive and punishes business without reducing the chances of a future panic or bailouts.”

    Others are critical of the bill, too. The Cato Institute’s Mark A. Calabria wrote “That thin semblance of reform will let Congress and the Obama administration claim they brought Wall Street to heel. But by dodging all the hard issues, this ‘reform’ makes it likely that the next crisis will put the last one to shame.”

    Later Calabria wrote “Perhaps it should come as no surprise that Sen. Christopher Dodd and Rep. Barney Frank, the bill’s primary authors, would fail to end the numerous government distortions of our financial and mortgage markets that led to the crisis. Both have been either architects or supporters of those distortions. One might as well ask the fox to build the henhouse.”

    Investor’s Business Daily agrees: “The two sponsors, Rep. Barney Frank and Sen. Chris Dodd, are as much responsible for the financial crisis as any two people in America. Yet, we’re now supposed to believe that they, and their flailing party, which can’t even meet its legal obligation to produce a budget, have now fixed our financial system.”

    We ought to be wary of government — who many believed caused the crisis — claiming that it can fix the present crisis and prevent another. Liberals believe that the right regulations, when enforced by smart and dedicated federal regulators, can prevent the usual failure of government regulations. But writing earlier this year in The Wall Street Journal Allan H. Meltzer explained why this won’t happen: “This is because regulation is static, while markets are dynamic. If markets don’t circumvent costly regulation at first they will find a way later. … Regulation often fails either because regulators are better at announcing rules than at enforcing them, or because the regulated circumvent the regulations.”

    While some might proclaim that free markets produce perfection, Meltzer wrote: “Capitalists make errors, but left alone, markets punish such errors.”

    We’re not leaving markets alone. Instead, we’re stepping up the intervention.

    Triumph of the Regulators

    The Dodd-Frank financial reform bill doubles down on the same system that failed.

    President Obama hailed the financial bill that House-Senate negotiators finally vouchsafed at 5:40 a.m. Friday, and no wonder. The bill represents the triumph of the very regulators and Congressmen who did so much to foment the financial panic, giving them vast new discretion over every corner of American financial markets.

    Chris Dodd and Barney Frank, those Fannie Mae cheerleaders, played the largest role in writing the bill. Congressman Paul Kanjorski even offered a motion to memorialize it as the Dodd-Frank Act. It’s as if Tony Hayward of BP were allowed to write new rules on deep water drilling.

    The Federal Reserve, which promoted the housing mania and failed utterly in its core mission of monitoring Citigroup, will now have more power to regulate more financial institutions and more ability to dictate the allocation of credit.

    Continue reading at The Wall Street Journal.

  • Chemical security legislation update

    The United States Congress is considering legislation to improve the safety of chemical plants. While a noble goal, this regulation has the potential to actually decrease chemical plant safety while increasing costs and destroying jobs at the same time.

    Currently the proposed legislation is in a senate committee. The following summary of chemical security legislation reports that Senator Frank Lautenberg, a New Jersey Democrat, may introduce a new bill on this topic.

    Debate over Chemical Plant Security Moves to the Senate

    By Beveridge & Diamond, P.C., April 21, 2010

    Following the House’s passage of a chemical plant security bill last November, the Senate has begun to turn its attention to the issue, with subcommittee hearings held in March and multiple bills either proposed or in the works. As in the House, the focus of contention thus far in the Senate has been the possible addition of inherently safer technology (“IST”) requirements into a reauthorization of the existing Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards (“CFATS”) program.

    Background

    The security of chemical facilities has been a subject of increased concern since the September 11, 2001 attacks, when it became apparent that stores of hazardous chemicals are a logical target for terrorists. Members of Congress have agreed on the need for a federal chemical facility security program, but have disagreed sharply on the issue of making IST mandatory. IST refers to technological and procedural steps intended to reduce the potential for a hazardous chemical release, in contrast to security measures intended to deter sabotage of existing processes. IST measures typically involve modifying processes to reduce the quantity of hazardous chemicals used or stored, reducing temperatures or pressures, or replacing a hazardous chemical with a less hazardous one. While facilities are always free to reduce hazards in these ways, a mandatory IST approach would require facilities to examine their industrial processes to evaluate safer alternatives and would enable a government agency to compel facilities to adopt the changes that it concludes are justified.

    Click to continue reading at Beveridge & Diamond, P.C.

  • Kansas smoking ban discussed on Kansas Week

    On the KPTS public affairs television program Kansas Week, the recently-passed Kansas smoking ban was at issue. Bob Weeks is in the Wichita studio along with host Tim Brown. Stephen Koranda, Kansas Public Radio Statehouse Bureau Chief, is in the Topeka studio.

    Additional coverage of the meeting of smoking ban opponents is at Kansas smoking ban opponents meet in Wichita. More coverage of smoking bans is here.