Regulation
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Speak Not of Legislation as Law
Particular laws can be undesirable, and legislation often serves useful purposes. Nevertheless, legislation is not law. So the common habit of using “law” and “legislation” as synonyms sows much confusion.
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Scooter Nation
You have to travel around a bit to discover the astonishing way the dockless electric scooter has transformed urban life in America.
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Governments Can Harass Airbnb, But They Won’t Stop Progress
“Government and lobbying power can slow down the pace of change but they won’t stop progress.” ~ Chloe Anagnos
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Vaping: Risky for Teens, But a Safe Target for the FDA
E-cigarettes certainly carry with them some complicated health problems. But in terms of getting a big, flashy regulatory win, they are far less complicated than many arguably more dangerous products whose sellers have both deeper pockets and connections within government.
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Kim Kardashian’s Fight For Criminal Justice Reform
“Giving judges discretion over sentencing helps the individual under review, society as a whole, and the taxpayer, who won’t have to financially support yet another nonviolent convict for decades into the future. But most importantly, it helps to lessen the burden that the drug war has placed on the shoulders of people of color.” ~…
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Government Is Like a Bad Football Fan
Fans will be fans. Peanut galleries will always be with us. It’s entertainment, and a major reason why we actually like sports, music, and books. Everyone is a critic. That’s all fine. But let’s not forget the profound difference between those who do and those who pretend to do, nor the difference between those whose…
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Small Water Bottles Banned in AIER’s Back Yard
Government bans are polarizing, constrain peoples’ behavior rather than changing it, must be enforced, and can be manipulated by corporate interests.
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Capping Ubers Won’t Fix New York’s Problems
Hard caps can seem like a tantalizingly easy way to “protect” both incumbent drivers and New Yorkers facing grinding traffic, but a close look at those caps questions just how effective they can be at their stated goals. And the issues facing both groups illuminate underlying problems with no easy regulatory fix.
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The Case for Permissionless Everything
I understand why people often fear freedom or the consequences of breaking the rules, and thus acquiesce to government restrictions on their freedoms. But I fear that we have gone too far in this timid and cowardly compliance. So long as everyone respects everyone else’s rights, we should have permissionless consumption (foreign and domestic), permissionless…
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Student Debt: The Bermuda Triangle of Blame
The $1.5 trillion student-debt crisis is ongoing but can certainly be mitigated if colleges, government, and students work together.
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Rent-Seeking Is Alive and Well in Trump’s Tariffs
Rent-seeking is a problem that those on the left should have to answer for whenever they propose extensive new regulations. But as President Trump’s recent steel tariffs show, the problem knows no political ideology, and is an inevitable occurrence at the friction point between personal connections and power. The only way out, it would seem,…
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The Real Problem with Paid Family Leave
The direct and unavoidable result will be that all childbearing-age, low-income women are likely to pay for their potential absence from work through lower wages as employers will assume they will have to fill out for them when they take time off. There is no avoiding that.
