Category: Federal
Posts relating to the federal government
The AMA Said Trust Your Doctor on Smoking
Money blinds objectivity. When money drives decisions, controverting evidence is ignored, dissenting voices are ridiculed, open debate is suppressed, talking points are distributed, conclusions are delayed, and people die from a product with liability protection.
Wage and Price Controls Are Not the Answer to Inflation
Price controls have been thoroughly debunked by history and economic theory. In fact, one of the first lessons in a standard freshman introductory microeconomics class is explaining how controls on prices (and wages, hereinafter, just “price controls”) cause shortages and surpluses.
Freedom Denied Part 1: How the Culture of Detention Created a Federal Jailing Crisis
In 1987… just 29% of people charged with federal crimes were jailed before trial; the rest were released back to their families. But today, pretrial jailing has become the norm, and we conclude that “the culture of detention” is to blame:
Congress Misses Another Chance To Correct Blatantly Unjust Crack Penalties
The legal distinction between the smoked and snorted forms of cocaine never made sense.
As Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R‒Ky.) saw it, Garland’s memo usurped congressional authority by shielding crack defendants from mandatory minimum sentences. So instead of asserting that authority by rectifying a blatantly unjust penalty scheme, Congress has once again kicked the can down the road.
Border Wall Was Breached 11 Times Per Day in 2022
These billion dollar walls are easily cut through with conventional power saws that cost as little as $100. Of course, these are just the breaches that have been discovered.
https://www.cato.org/blog/border-wall-was-breached-11-times-day-2022-2
DEA Seizes Record Amounts of Fentanyl in 2022
The iron law of prohibition states that, all things being equal, as enforcement ramps up, smugglers prefer higher potency forms of a drug for the same reason those who sneak alcohol into a football game prefer hard alcohol in flasks to 12‐packs of beer. The lethal logic of the iron law of prohibition means that we cannot enforce our way out of the opioid crisis. And if fentanyl smugglers become somehow easy to catch, there’s always carfentanil, which is about 100 times more potent than fentanyl and has already been showing up in America’s drug supply.
https://www.cato.org/blog/dea-seizes-record-amounts-fentanyl-2022
Court: Requirement of Serial Numbers on Guns Doesn’t Violate Second Amendment
The Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms doesn’t extend to arms that aren’t typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes. Law-abiding citizens don’t typically possess firearms with obliterated serial numbers for lawful purposes, so Mr. Reyna’s indictment and guilty plea don’t offend the Second Amendment.
Judge Robert Miller, Jr., U.S. v. Reyna
Subsidies To Help Workers Would Hurt Poor People
Some people would benefit. Others would lose money or be rendered unemployable.
Workers’ best friend is a labor market that’s free of harmful government distortions. Such a market will not only oblige employers to continue to pay workers according to productivity but will also intensify firms’ efforts to become more productive.
https://reason.com/2022/12/15/subsidies-to-help-workers-would-hurt-poor-people/
The Supreme Court Should End Chevron Deference
Chevron is unconstitutional for several reasons. It gives judicial power—the power to interpret the meaning of the law—to the administrative state within the Executive Branch. The Constitution, however, grants all judicial power to the Judicial Branch. Chevron is also unconstitutional because it biases the courts towards the agencies, stripping the judiciary of impartiality and denying litigants basic due process. But a third reason, and the focus of our brief, is that Chevron deference is ahistorical, arising not out of the original understanding of the Constitution but rather out of the administrative bloat of the New Deal era.
https://www.cato.org/blog/supreme-court-should-end-chevron-deference