rules

In this episode of The Heartland Institute’s weekly Budget & Tax News podcast, research fellow and managing editor Jesse Hathaway talks with Donald Larson, a candidate running to represent Ohio’s 9th Congressional District, about his political campaign’s focus on e-cigarettes and regulatory overreach.

In today’s edition of The Heartland Daily Podcast, Dr. Barry Poulson, Professor of Economics at the University of Colorado and advisor to the Task Force on Tax and Fiscal Policy at the American Legislative Exchange Council, joins the show to talk about America’s debt crisis.

The Environmental Protection Agency has a new target in it’s sights…strippers. Now that we have your attention, In this edition of The Heartland Daily Podcast, research fellows Bette Grande and Isaac Orr discuss how the EPA is targeting oil and gas wells that produce less than 15 barrels of oil equivalent per day. These wells, also known as stripper wells, are under attack from new EPA methane regulations that inappropriately apply rules for new wells on these typically older, lower volume wells.

As more evidence comes to light exposing Google’s much increased search and Android dominance in the U.S. since the FTC closed its search and Android antitrust probes in January 2013, it only becomes clearer that the FCC’s AllVid proposed rulemaking to “Unlock the [set-top] Box” is obviously anticompetitive overall, not pro-competitive as the FCC naively claims.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines “Certainty” as: “The quality or state of being certain especially on the basis of evidence.” As we know, evidence abounds that the world is inherently a very un-certain place.

In a recent article published by Bloomberg View, Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein discusses “an important but widely overlooked speech” made by Elizabeth Warren (D), in which the Massachusetts senator bemoans the influence of powerful industry groups on the regulatory process. To Warren, the problem is not overzealous administrative bodies, eager to impose unwanted, unnecessary new rules, but regulatory capture—the notion regulation is, in the words of economists Michael E. Levine and Jennifer L. Forrence, “simply an arena in which special interests contend for the right to use government power for narrow advantage.”

The Founding Fathers who wrote the Constitution – were by 1800 thoroughly implementing it. If they didn’t yet have the federal government doing something – the federal government wasn’t to be doing it. So unless a subsequent amendment added an authority to the federal panoply – it’s been an unConstitutional addition.

In arbitrarily applying Title II telecommunications rules to only the ISP half of Internet communications, while politically exempting the entire edge half of Internet communications in its Open Internet order, the FCC has ensured that information that was proprietary and controllable in the closed telephone world becomes public and uncontrollable in the open Internet world.

Like it or not, lawmakers’ decisions have a large effect on our everyday lives. From increasing the cost of a car people need to take their children to soccer practice or go to work, to restricting job opportunities using occupational licensing rules (which reduce the supply of providers and raises prices), lawmakers’ actions have a serious and quantifiable effect on how much Americans pay for the things they need and want.