Regulation articles from March 2004

Regulation archives from March 2004

Science and preferences.(For The Record)(Letter to the Editor)
March 22, 2004... In "Letting Environmentalists' Preferences Count" (Fall 2003), Peter Van Doren raises the important and neglected question of why we should demand that environmentalists justify their beliefs via the natural sciences. His skepticism arises from...

Science and public policy.(For The Record)(Letter to the Editor)
March 22, 2004... In his article "Letting Environmentalists' Preferences Count" (Fall 2003), Peter Van Doren is surely correct that environmentalists are entitled to their preferences, regardless of whether those preferences are based on "sound science" or not....

Between polar opposites.(For The Record)(Letter to the Editor)
March 22, 2004... S.Fred Singer's review (Winter 2003-2004)of our book, Reconstructing Climate Policy: Beyond Kyoto, confuses our argument. Singer calls our proposal clever, but then dispenses a string of discourteous barbs that are inapposite and unbecoming,...

Postscript to U.S. v. Microsoft.(For The Record)(Letter to the Editor)
March 22, 2004... Tim Brennan's article ("The Legacy of U.S. v. Microsoft," Vol. 26, No. 4) correctly indicates that the Microsoft case failed as a rigorous test of so-called "post-Chicago" theories of competition. However, his evaluation is based on inadequate...

Annual report to Congress on regulation.(Mercatus Reports)(compliance costs )
March 22, 2004... STATUS: OMB accepting comment until May 20 In mid-February, the Office of Management and Budget released a draft of its annual report to Congress on the costs and benefits of federal regulation. As in years past, the report tallies agency...

CAFE standards.(Mercatus Reports)(Corporate Average Fuel Economy)
March 22, 2004... STATUS: NTHSA accepting comment until April 21. For years, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has been criticized (and even sued by the Competitive Enterprise Institute) for undermining its Traffic Safety mission by...

Contact lens prescription release.(Mercatus Reports)
March 22, 2004... STATUS: FTC comment period closes April 5. The Federal Trade Commission proposes to require that optometrists and ophthalmologists must give contact lens prescriptions to consumers once the process of fitting lenses has concluded, instead...

Qualified health claims for food.(Mercatus Reports)(food labeling)
March 22, 2004... STATUS: FDA is reviewing comment. The Nutrition Labeling and Education Act (NLEA) of 1990 gave the Food and Drug Administration authority to permit health claims on food labels. A "health claim" is a labeling claim that links a substance...

The IRS's missing 'check'.(Mercatus reports: commentary)(Internal Revenue Service)
March 22, 2004... IN THE WANING HOURS OF THE CLINTON administration, the Internal Revenue Service released a new rule that would have required banks to report the interest they paid to "non-resident alien" depositors. The rule was met almost immediately with a...

Reconsidering the FHTF.(Briefly Noted)(Federal Highway Trust Fund )
March 22, 2004... AS THE NEW FEDERAL TRANSPORTATION bill winds its way through Congress, many libertarians and free-market advocates are urging policymakers to deemphasize the Federal Highway Trust Fund (FHTF) and federal involvement in highway transportation....

Do the mutuals need more law?(Briefly Noted)
March 22, 2004... IN 2002, ELIOTT SPITZER put a scare into investors who pick their own stocks by questioning the reliability of securities analysts. He recently followed that performance with an encore frightening of the millions of Americans who trust their...

The real oil problem: behind the myths of an oil crisis and an oil weapon is a very real danger posed by a clumsy and shortsighted cartel.(Energy)
March 22, 2004... ACCORDING TO "CONVENTIONAL wisdom," humanity's need for oil cannot be met and a gap will soon emerge between demand and supply. That gap will broaden as the economies of Europe, Japan, and several emerging nations grow and increase their energy...

Economics at the pump: does "anti-price gouging" legislation really help gasoline consumers?(Energy)
March 22, 2004... WHEN GASOLINE PRICES CLIMB at the pump, as they inevitably do from time to time, it sparks contention about the industry, pitting drivers against retail station owners, station owners against oil companies, and oil companies against...

Politics and corporate crime legislation: if politically powerful corporations feared corporate crime laws, then why are so many statutes on the books?(Corporate Governance)
March 22, 2004... CORPORATE CRIME IS BACK IN THE NEWS. The last few years saw some of the most spectacular revelations of corporate wrongdoing in U.S. history and led to the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. This legislation added to the already...

The new age of big government: made worse by the 2001-2003 tax cuts, the looming federal fiscal crisis means more government intervention in human lives.(Budget & Taxes)(Cover Story)
March 22, 2004... FOR MANY DECADES, A MAJOR THEME IN American conservative thought and politics has been battling "big government." While partly waged on the regulatory front, the main action for at least three decades has centered on the fiscal system. This...

Another look at biotech regulation: are Europe's labeling laws for genetically modified foods cost-effective, or even necessary?(Agriculture)
March 22, 2004... DISCUSSIONS OF APPROPRIATE REGUlatory norms for genetically modified foods date back to the early 1980s. Twenty years later, agreement among key trading countries on what such norms should be remains elusive. Some countries, including the...

A troubling requirement: why should the FASB require the expensing of options if it has no idea how it should be done?(Accounting)
March 22, 2004... SINCE THE ENRON COLLAPSE IN MID-2002, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) has been pressed to require that companies include the hypothetical expense of their employee stock options in their financial statements. Many lawmakers and...

Probing liberty's first principles.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... SKEPTICISM AND FREEDOM: A Modern Case for Classical Liberalism By Richard A. Epstein 311 pp., Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2003 I will say it up front: Richard Epstein is really, really smart. A reasonable presumption is...

Glimpsing another mindset.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... INSURRECTION: Citizen Challenges to Corporate Power By Kevin Danaher and Jason Dove Mark 288 pp., New York, N.Y.: Routledge, 2003 Kevin Danaher and Jason Dove Mark's new book Insurrection presents the views and strategies of those who...

Psst ... Janet--can you keep the FCC distracted?(The Final Word)(Federal Communications Commission)
March 22, 2004... GOD BLESS JANET JACKSON. I'm hoping that Michael Powell and the Federal Communications Commission will be so busy chasing her breast down, investigating it, and whipping it into submission that they'll overlook another little item that's...