I mean, maybe it should be okay for people to arrange and sell flowers to willing buyers without anyone being branded a criminal in the process, but how far can we take that lesson? Anytime you take an option away, for some people, it will have been the best option they had available to them. Take that choice away, and they don’t substitute it with whatever you thought was better for them. It just leaves them with nothing.
Category: Regulation
Posts about government regulation
N.Y. Law Banning Gun Carrying in Churches (Including When Authorized by Church) Unconstitutionally Discriminates against Religious Institutions
“Plaintiffs are likely to prevail on the merits of their claims under the Free Exercise Clause….” That seems correct to me, given the facially discriminatory treatment of religious institutions. The court also concluded that the prohibition likely independently violated the Second Amendment, for reasons similar to those given in Judge Sinatra’s earlier decision in Hardaway v. Nigrelli; and the court also concluded that the law violates the Establishment Clause…
New York City’s Foie Gras Ban Once Again Deemed Illegal by New York State
The city has not yet announced whether it will fight the order in court.
The order blasts “the City’s effort to use its police powers and business regulatory authority to bar the sale of a lawfully produced farm product—not for reasons of the health, safety, or welfare of its citizens—but to change animal husbandry practices occurring on farms outside its jurisdiction to which it objects.”
The Myth of Wild Nature and Creating a New Form of Paradise
A review of the new book Tickets For The Ark, by Rebecca Nesbit
Nesbit hammers home the absolutely correct point that there is no objective scientific standard providing some kind of value-neutral ecological baseline toward which conservation should aim. Since there is no goal or end state toward which any particular ecosystem is heading, who is to say that landscapes and ecosystems modified by human activities are somehow inferior?
https://reason.com/2022/12/25/the-myth-of-wild-nature-and-creating-a-new-form-of-paradise/
The “Unseen Effects” of California’s New Minimum-Wage Law
“In the economic sphere an act, a habit, an institution, a law produces not only one effect, but a series of effects. Of these effects, the first alone is immediate; it appears simultaneously with its cause; it is seen. The other effects emerge only subsequently; they are not seen; we are fortunate if we foresee them.”
Frederic Bastiat
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
What’s Next for America’s Independent Workers?
As these states’ experience shows, applying the ABC test nationally would force hundreds of now‐independent occupations to be reclassified as employees, regardless of workers’ and employers’ own contracting decisions. This could impose significant economic harms—including for the very workers the proposed rule is supposedly protecting.
https://www.cato.org/blog/whats-next-americas-independent-workers