Kudos to Country Time Lemonade and Domino's Pizza

Ryan Young reports at Competitive Enterprise Institute,

Every summer there are news stories about local authorities shutting down children’s lemonade stands over lack of licenses, permits, a lack of restaurant-grade kitchen or cleaning facilities, a zoning violation...the list is long. I wrote about this outrage back in 2011 here, and Iain Murray and I wrote a Townhall column here. Regulators are still at it, though. But now, junior entrepreneurs have gained a powerful ally.

Country Time Lemonade has offered to help pay fines and permits for young lemonade stand entrepreneurs who incur regulators’ wrath. Its Legal-Ade program will pay up to $300 to help families fight back against absurd regulations. In fact, each time this tweet is retweeted, Country Time will donate a dollar to the Legal-Aide program, up to $500,000.

Is this is a cynical, profit-driven marketing ploy? Absolutely. But so what? It will do some real good, and that’s what counts. Results are what matter, not intentions. This is not a new idea. As Bernard Mandeville pointed out in “The Fable of the Bees” way back in 1732, selfish intentions can generate altruistic results. As with bees, so with lemons.

When regulators bust children for learning work and business skills while having fun outdoors, they teach children the wrong lesson. By helping to set matters right, Country Time is helping children learn that it’s okay to show initiative, and that it’s okay to stand up to authority when you’re right and they’re wrong. Even the most hardened anti-capitalist can get behind that.

Also deserving kudos: Domino’s Pizza, for filling in potholes on its delivery routes that lazy local governments let linger. Who will build the roads? Now we know.

Are you confused about the proposed changes to "Net Neutrality?"

At Bloomberg, Megan McArdle writes about the proposed changes to "Net Neutrality."

The Internet Had Already Lost Its Neutrality

Even while the FCC was more strictly regulating, a few powerful companies took control of what we see and don't.

Under the Obama administration, the FCC looked to write regulations that would limit the ability of internet service providers to play favorites with certain services on their network. The administration was haunted by the specter of ISPs blocking political content, accepting payments from big content providers like Netflix to prioritize their services (thus making it difficult-to-impossible for upstarts to compete), and otherwise turning the internet into a closed garden rather than the open frontier its architects envisioned.

Unfortunately, the FCC ran into a problem: Courts kept telling the commission that it didn’t have the legal authority to force ISPs to keep their networks equally open to all comers. So a couple years ago, the FCC moved to reclassify ISPs as “common carriers” under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934. That offered much more scope for regulation, and finally allowed the FCC to realize the dreams of internet activists everywhere.

Too much scope for regulation, said critics -- including Ajit Pai, then a commissioner, and now the chairman of the FCC. Pai wrote a blistering dissent to the FCC’s decision, summing up the major problem with the FCC’s move: It forced ISPs into an 80-year-old framework designed for the telephone monopolies of a much different era. Those regulations were more concerned about things like controlling market power than, say, promoting innovation. And while the advocates for net neutrality stressed the benefits for competition among content providers, the critics asked what would happen to competition among ISPs, since heavy-handed regulation often acts as a barrier to entry for new startups, which can’t afford to negotiate the regulatory apparatus.

Those of us old enough to remember the telephone service looked like in the 1970s, before the FCC unwound a little -- which is to say, pretty much like the service our parents had when they were children, down to the astronomical prices for long distance calls, and the chunky plastic rotary telephones -- can see why critics were concerned about giving the FCC that kind of power to block innovation. No problem, retorted advocates: The FCC just won’t use much of its regulatory power. The technical term is “forbearance,” and the FCC offered to do a lot of it when it brought ISPs under Title II, for example by forgoing its statutory authority to set rates.

But offering not to use the power is not the same thing as not having it. A future commission might change its mind, and in the meantime ISPs would have to plan their investments accordingly -- knowing that the revenue they’d counted on to make some new project pay off might vanish at the stroke of a commissioner’s pen. That kind of regulatory uncertainty does not generally foster innovation, or for that matter, sound business decisions.

Unsurprising, then, that under Pai, the commission quickly announced a proposal to roll back the Obama-era innovations. A contentious public comment period followed, but today, the FCC announced the final word: Tier II regulation of ISPs is going away, and the net neutrality rules with it.

The internet will be filled today with denunciations of this move, threats of a dark future in which our access to content will be controlled by a few powerful companies. And sure, that may happen. But in fact, it may already have happened, led not by ISPs, but by the very companies that were fighting so hard for net neutrality.

Consider what happened to the Daily Stormer, the neo-Nazi publication, after Charlottesville. One by one, hosting companies refused to permit its content on their servers. The group was forced to effectively flee the country, and then other countries, too, shut it down.

Now of course, these are not nice people. Their website espoused vile hate. But the fact remains that what they were publishing was not illegal, merely immoral, and their immoral speech was effectively shut down by a small number of private companies who decided to exercise their considerable control over what we’re allowed to read. And what is to stop them from expanding this decision to other categories, forcing the rest of us to conform to Silicon Valley’s idea of what it is moral and right for us to see?

Fifteen years ago, when I started blogging, it was common to hear that “the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” You don’t hear that so often anymore, because it’s not true. China has proven very effective at censoring the internet, and as market power has consolidated in the tech industry, so have private firms.

Meanwhile, our experience of the internet is increasingly controlled by a handful of firms, most especially Google and Facebook. The argument for regulating these companies as public utilities is arguably at least as strong as the argument for thus regulating ISPs, and very possibly much stronger; while cable monopolies may have local dominance, none of them has the ability that Google and Facebook have to unilaterally shape what Americans see, hear, and read.

In other words, we already live in the walled garden that activists worry about, and the walls are getting higher every day. Is this a problem? I think it is. But that doesn’t mean that the internet would get better if Google and Facebook and Apple and Amazon were required to make every decision with a regulator hanging over their shoulder to decide whether it was sufficiently “neutral.”

The fact that these firms were able to cement their power at the moment when regulators were most focused on keeping the internet open tells you just how difficult it is to get that sort of regulation right; while you are looking hard at one danger, an equally large one may be creeping up just outside the range of your peripheral vision. Indeed, you may be making one problem bigger while trying to solve another. We may indeed be facing a future of less choice and less consumer power. But this decision is unlikely to be what brings us there.

Trump to eliminate $5.7 billion in regulatory costs today

Ace of Spades reports that President Trump issued Executive Orders today

Regulations costing businesses and citizens $5.7 billion -- rushed into action as Obama was leaving for his post-presidential golf tour -- will be eliminated today.

His order also demanded that for every new regulation put into effect, two regulations would have to be rescinded, and that the net cost of further regulations must be $0.

""The Obama administration was busy during its 'midnight' period for regulation, breaking records for December regulatory output, and publishing $157 billion in regulations," according to a new report from the regulatory watchdog American Action Forum....

Read more here.

New Obama regulations costing jobs and the economy

Ali Meyer reports at the Washington Free Beacon,

Labor regulations issued in the last year of the Obama presidency will cost the economy roughly $80 billion over the next 10 years and eliminate 150,000 jobs, according to a report from the National Association of Manufacturers.

The report analyzed seven regulations from the Department of Labor, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Equal Opportunity Commission, and the National Labor Relations Board. The measures included the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces rule, updated overtime rules, new silica standards, the Ambush Elections rule, reporting requirements for employment and wages, and reporting requirements for workplace injuries and illnesses.

The National Association of Manufacturers found that these rules could cost the economy $81.6 billion, eliminate 155,700 jobs, and impose 411 million paperwork burden hours on companies.

The reporting requirements for employment and wages would add more than 3,400 data fields to the current reporting requirements already in place. The rule would increase paperwork hours by 18 million and impose an annual implementation burden of $53 million.

Another regulation requiring companies to publish reports on workplace injuries and illnesses would add $1.1 billion in long-term costs, $10 billion in annual compliance burdens, and 90 million hours of paperwork.

Read more here.

Politicians accumulating money, power, and prestige

Glenn Reynolds writes in USA Today,

politicians don’t care, except to the extent that we make them care. Whatever they say when they’re running for office, their top priority once elected is to build a coalition that will keep them in power, and accumulating money and influence, regardless of whether the interests of that coalition coincide with the public’s.

One of the reasons that America enjoyed such tremendous growth over the past century was that technology outran regulators’ ability to keep up. Will that remain true over the coming decades? Let’s hope so. We can’t make it in the 21st century with a 1950s economic model, however appealing that approach might be to politicians.

Read more here.

You say you want limited government?

Tom Giovanetti writes at National Review,

Milk goes bad. So do laws, sometimes. Unfortunately, most laws stick around long after they’ve gone bad.

Over the past several months, the nation had a healthy discussion about the extent of the government’s snooping on Americans’ electronic communications. This contentious debate led to changes in the law. Congress actually did something useful. Why? Not because our elected representatives suddenly found their mojo, but rather because Section 215 of the Patriot Act — the section authorizing bulk collection of data and roving wiretaps — had an expiration date, which forced the issue. Instead of the eternal life bestowed upon most laws, these controversial provisions were subject to a “sunset clause,” which means they automatically expire unless specifically reauthorized. This meant Congress could not simply ignore Americans’ negative reactions to the revelation of massive federal surveillance — legislators had to actually do something rather than nothing, as is always their preference.

Unfortunately, most laws do not include such sunset provisions, and regulations almost never do, which means the vast majority of laws and regulations that currently govern the lives of Americans were put into place by previous generations. In some cases, we are governed by regulations that are 70 or 80 years old. How much sense does that make? Why are we still governed by rules put into place during the New Deal, or even earlier? How similar is today’s economy to the economy of 1934 — the year several major current laws, programs, regulatory structures, and even cabinet agencies were created?

Granting so many provisions eternal life means we are piling up taxes, laws, and regulations that are outdated, ineffective, redundant, sometimes contradictory, and otherwise simply past their prime. This imposes costs on the economy, complicates the judiciary, grows the government, and creates an increasingly incomprehensible bureaucratic morass that innocent businesses and citizens must attempt to navigate.

Limiting government means limiting the lifespans of its products: taxes, laws, regulations, and bureaucracies.

Read more here.

2013: few new laws, but lots of new regulations

Paul Bedard writes that federal agencies issued a whopping 3,659 rules and regulations in 2013.

Only 65 public laws were signed by President Obama in 2013, meaning that his government issued an average of 56 new regulations for every one, a record high ratio, according to the annual analysis by the Competitive Enterprise Institute.