Bureaucracy and Regulation

Recently, the Biden administration introduced plans to limit increases in apartment rents to 5% annually.

Economic mythology said governments must regulate markets to prevent monopolies. In reality, it is the government regulation itself that creates monopolies, which do not emerge in free markets.

Many small colleges are shutting their doors, and it is largely the fault of overexpansion, government protectionism, and bureaucratic infiltration.

For all of the claims that governments “create jobs,” in reality, government jobs come at a greater cost than any value those jobs may create. Government jobs are a burden to the economy.

Last week, Julian Assange was freed and the Chevron doctrine was overturned. These are huge wins for liberty. Not long ago, they felt completely out of reach.

Issues of immigration are complex. The current system of open borders, detention and expanding access to welfare is destructive to our body politic.  We need to come up with a better system that protects the rights of all.

Commonsense safety measures are being replaced in our working culture by an impossible “no risk” standard. A culture of “can do” is replaced by the culture of fear.

While protecting “intellectual property” has a good sound to it — even among libertarians — such policies are harmful to authentic property rights. We need to pursue another path.

Environmentalists insist on banning fossil fuels and refrigerant gasses in order to end heat waves. That means people will face future heat waves (which will always be with us) without air conditioning, bringing even more heat-related deaths.

Mainstream economists often claim that “market failure” is everywhere. However, when one investigates these so-called failures, one has to conclude that government intervention often is behind them.