Freedom Line Blog

In an interview with CFIF, Ryan Young, Fellow in Regulatory Studies at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, discusses the soaring cost of overregulation, CEI’s annual survey of the Federal regulatory state, “Ten Thousand Commandments,” and the government’s biggest offenders.

Listen to the interview here.

In the never ending succession of bad legislation coming out of Congress, the Democrats added another one to the list today.

By a 223-202 vote, the House passed the “Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2009.”  Twenty-seven Democrats joined every single Republican to oppose the legislation.

The bill is a hodgepodge of more regulations, higher taxes and new government.  After Sarbanes-Oxley, Congress thought it had effectively ended the debate over financial regulations.  For Congress, it’s never too late to re-regulate.

You can read the Congressional Research Service summary of the legislation here.

Here is the CBO’s cost estimate of the bill.

Here’s a contradiction to chew on for a while:  Google’s chief executive Eric Schmidt tells The Washington Post that he’s wary about destructive overregulation of the Internet…  Yet he simultaneously favors so-called Net “Neutrality?”

According to Mr. Schmidt, “it is possible for the government to screw up the Internet, bigtime.”  The article reports that he went so far as to say that “it would be a terrible idea for the government to involve itself as a regulator of the broader Internet.”

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

But how can Mr. Schmidt square his accurate concern about destructive Internet regulation with his advocacy of Net “Neutrality,” which would needlessly introduce federal rules into Internet service for the first time?  Stated simply, he can’t.  Nevertheless, he and Google foolishly advocate Net “Neutrality” because they believe it serves their short-term corporate interest.  Of course, the insurance and pharmaceutical industries initially believed the same thing about ObamaCare, before belatedly recognizing the toxic longer-term reality…