RED TAPE HOLDS THE NATION TOGETHER: Wayne Crews on what needs to happen to make the President’s Federal Regulatory Budget actually work. Perhaps surprisingly, there is bipartisan support for reform, but it never seems to happen.

If it doesn’t, this number will continue to chew up our lives: in 2015,

9.778 billion hours was required to complete the federal paperwork requirements from 22 executive departments and six independent agencies that have been historically subject to survey.

That’s 4.7 million people working nominally in the private sector but actually just filling out Federal forms. As Wayne points out, that’s also almost 14,000 human lifetimes, each year.

AMBITION SHOULD BE MADE OF STERNER STUFF: Cambridge University students have been warned that Shakespeare plays may distress them. As one academic quoted in the article says,

If a student of English Literature doesn’t know that Titus Andronicus contains scenes of violence they shouldn’t be on the course.

What is it about places called Cambridge?

WELL, I NEVER: UN’s “Sustainable Development Goals” report turns into another opportunity for America-bashing. Bjorn Lomborg:

The United States scores a surprising number of reds and yellows, ranking 42nd out of 157 countries overall. In fact, the US fails to achieve a single green ranking for any of the 17 SDGs, sharing this dubious honor with only Greece, Italy, Latvia, Mexico, Spain, and Turkey, among OECD nations. (War-torn Yemen, by contrast, scores green for both “Climate Action” and “Partnership for the Goals”.)

America-bashing is popular and easy. But US taxpayers do give nearly a quarter of all the money spent on direct development aid by rich countries. A report that gives the world’s biggest donor the lowest possible rating for “Partnerships for the Goals” would seem to have some underlying issues. (Myanmar, Uzbekistan, and Saudi Arabia all score green marks in this category.)

Of course, the UN’s approach is fatally flawed. As I said when the goals were launched in 2015:

The U.N.’s approach is flawed because it focuses on simply announcing a slew of targets that are unlikely to prove achievable, especially as there are tradeoffs involved in meeting some targets over others.

Moreover, the U.N.’s emphasis on “sustainability,” as generally defined among development bureaucrats and NGOs, imposes significant burdens on developing countries’ freedom and ability to achieve the rapid increases in human welfare that were the target of the original Millennium goals.

But a focus on “sustainability” does have the advantage of letting UN bureaucrats criticize their biggest funder. Incentives matter.

HOLY ALLITERATION, BATMAN: This piece by the excellent Eric Boehm at Reason is very good for its content, but it wins a prize for its title – Loosening Looney Licensing Laws Likely to Lift Labor Force.

A CAPITAL ERROR: You may remember the fuss over income inequality a few years ago caused by the release of Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the bestseller no-one read. it turns out that yet another paper has found problems with Piketty’s data:

I conclude that Piketty’s data for the wealth share of the top 10 percent for the period 1870 to 1970 are unreliable. The values he reported are manufactured from the observations for the top 1 percent inflated by a constant 36 percentage points. Piketty’s data for the top 1 percent of the distribution for the nineteenth century (1810–1910) are also unreliable. They are based on a single mid-century observation that provides no guidance about the antebellum trend and only tenuous information about the trend in inequality during the Gilded Age. The values Piketty reported for the twentieth century (1910–2010) are based on more solid ground, but have the disadvantage of muting the marked rise of inequality during the Roaring Twenties and the decline associated with the Great Depression.

Phil Magness and Robert Murphy, who first drew attention to these errors, are vindicated once again.

TYRANNO-SOROS REX: George Soros has transferred $18 billion – the bulk of his fortune, it seems – to his Open Society Foundation. This puts the Foundation second only in assets to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Twenty years ago, my friend Marlo Lewis wrote about how Soros was using self-contradiction to attack free-market economies, ignoring what free-market economists actually say:

Far from postulating “perfect” competition, laissez-faire advocates eschew this airy construct as a source of interventionist mischief. Attainment of this impossible state of affairs would not even be desirable. “Perfect” information could be achieved only by diverting vast resources from other consumer priorities.

Soros with his billions may be able to afford a more socialistic world; those in need of economic opportunity cannot. Soros pontificates that open societies can no longer define themselves in terms of opposition to Communism. But free societies must always define themselves in opposition to tyranny. Otherwise, they may be tempted to sell their birthright for a mess of potage like the statist claptrap Soros is peddling.

Soros’ Foundation now has a huge war chest to promote this claptrap.

MORE GOOD ENVIRONMENTAL NEWS: In addition to Glenn’s point below about America’s emission still declining, there was the good news yesterday that EPA head Scott Pruitt will be moving to stop “sue-and-settle,” the process by which the agency reached deals with enviro groups that threatened court action, in effect letting the green groups dictate priorities.

However, as my colleague Will Yeatman points out, the real problem is the EPA missing its statutory deadlines on purpose to allow this to happen:

During the Obama administration, for example, the EPA missed 84 percent out of more than 1,000 Clean Air Act deadlines by an average of 4.3 years. The problem is that the agency’s failure to meet its legal responsibilities allows environmental special interests to sue and thereby dictate regulatory priorities to the EPA.

Any solution to this problem must start with the EPA making timely performance of its responsibilities a priority, which the agency has yet to do under any administration.

In other words, the EPA has habitually put its discretionary responsibilities above its mandatory responsibilities. If Scott Pruitt can change that culture, the swamp will be a little less murky (although still in dire need of draining).

LOCAL NEWS DESERTS: Has Facebook killed off local newspapers through its advertising algorithms? This seems to me to be the crux:

Facebook in particular was meant to be part of the solution to the problem of sustaining hyperlocal publishers. The publishing tools and hosting services Facebook offers for free are compelling. But in sparse or poorer areas, they do not allow for the traditional civic bargain of the local press, wherein the businesses and individuals who can afford to advertise, in effect pay for the journalism that covers a community.

When you get down to it the problem was summed up by Terry Pratchett quite nicely in The Truth:

People like to be told what they already know. Remember that. They get uncomfortable when you tell them new things. New things…well, new things aren’t what they expect. They like to know that, say, a dog will bite a man. That is what dogs do. They don’t want to know that man bites a dog, because the world is not supposed to happen like that. In short, what people think they want is news, but what they really crave is olds…Not news but olds, telling people that what they think they already know is true.

Social media tends to provide the “olds” quite readily. Without the olds, a “news” paper is very thin – and who is willing to pay for that, civic bargain or no?

GARY COHN GOT PLAYED: How CFPB Director Richard Cordray tricked the White House into thinking he was going to resign. The trick enabled him to publish a ton of regulations that will severely restrict financial choice for millions of Americans. He should have been fired on Day One. He should still be fired today.

THEY DON’T NEED ENERGY, THEY CAN USE ELECTRICITY INSTEAD: Driverless cars are giving fuel economy engineers a real headache. It turns out all those sensors use a lot of power. Who knew?

HEAVEN OR HELL?: A glimpse at what life might be like when lived on the blockchain.

AT THIS RATE IT’LL NEVER GO PLATINUM: The USA is still outside the top ten in the new Fraser Institute/Cato Institute rankings of economic freedom. The top ten:

1. Hong Kong
2. Singapore
3. New Zealand
4. Switzerland
5. Ireland
6. United Kingdom
7. Mauritius
8. Georgia
9. Australia
10. Estonia

The US is ranked joint #11, alongside Canada.

BREXIT BLUES: A year ago I wrote that the UK and the EU were in a prisoners’ dilemma over Brexit. As negotiations grind to a halt and a “No Deal” Brexit is looking more likely, that still seems to be the case. There’s clearly a win-win position here, but the EU side especially doesn’t seem interested in it. More on this from Julian Jessop, the Chief Economist at the Institute of Economic Affairs, at the Telegraph (free registration required).

CLEANING UP THE EPA MESS: Reuters has seen the EPA’s proposal to replace the Obama-era Clean Power Plan that was a major part of the last administration’s war on coal. That unlawful power grab would have raised the price of energy for most people and shuttered power plants to achieve a reduction in global warming of 0.02 degrees C by 2100. However, as EPA is actually following the law on regulations, which takes time, the various court cases could do the job before the administrative repeal winds its way through the process.

OMNISHAMBLES: British Prime Minister Teresa May was supposed to begin the fight back against Jeremy Corbyn’s extreme leftist Labour Party in her speech to the Conservative Party Conference today. Things didn’t go as planned. A BBC comedian handed her the British equivalent of a pink slip right at the beginning (questions are already being asked about security). Then she broke out in a coughing fit that just wouldn’t stop, apparently brought on by a hectic schedule of interviews today. And to top it all, letters started falling off the slogan behind her. And for those of us who care about policy, there was a lot of interventionist “the government is here to help” in the speech, something Ronald Reagan could have warned her against. I can hear the sound of Corbyn laughing from here.

JIM BUCHANAN, IN MEMORIAM: The Nobel Laureate economist and father of “public choice” economics, Jim Buchanan, would have been 98 today. Recently he’s been the target of a concentrated posthumous character assassination by Duke’s Nancy Maclean, who blames him for creating modern conservative ideology (and the all the ills that come with it) in her book Democracy in Chains. George Mason University historian Phil Magness has been relentlessly fact checking her sources at his blog, and the results aren’t pretty. Duke economist Mike Munger also did a detailed and devastating review. The left, of course, has characterized these careful critiques a “stealth attack on a liberal scholar,” because apparently there can be no other kind.

For those of you who just want to learn a little about one of the great economists, here’s Ryan Young’s obituary from 2013.

WHO REGULATES THE REGULATORS?: The President, as it turns out. Wayne Crews’ Red Tape Rollback Report details how the Trump Presidency has started out as the least regulatory in modern times, and just how that has been done.

A RIVER RUNS TO SUE IT: A Denver lawyer and a deep green enviro group are suing Gov. John Hickenlooper and the state of Colorado on behalf of the Colorado River. They’re asking the court to hold them liable for abuses of the river’s “right to exist, flourish, regenerate, be restored, and naturally evolve.”

In strict legal terminology, this is nuts. As Fred Smith said about a similar move for trees back in 1995, “It’s time to stop being silly and start thinking seriously about what we might do to improve the planet on which we live.”

BEND THE KNEE TO THE CFPB: Elizabeth Warren and her ilk are cynically using the Equifax security breach to stop the Senate from disapproving of the CFPB’s arbitration rule, as Reason’s Eric Boehm explains well here. Cui bono?

The CFPB’s arbitration ban doesn’t help consumers and doesn’t help banks, but it would be a major boon to trial lawyers. The arbitration ban is another proxy war in a long-running battle between business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and trial lawyers, as Politico’s Lorraine Woellert reported last month.

There’s a lot of money at stake. The CFPB study that supposedly justified the new rule shows that class action attorneys made more than $424 million in the three-year period examined in the study. Consumers during that time, if you’ll remember, got settlements averaging $32 apiece.(*)

And let’s not forget where a lot of money trial lawyers rake in from these settlements ends up…

More on the role of trial lawyers in this from my colleague John Berlau, and from Ted Frank, genuine champion of the little guy.

* Edited to add: That $32 per consumer figure actually overstates the benefit to consumers from class actions considerably. The average payout across all class members is actually around $1.45, and that assumes the CFPB’s claim rate of 4% is correct. Other evidence suggests it’s lower than 1%, which means that the average class member receives pennies – or simply a worthless coupon.

PARTY LIKE IT’S 1649: Leftists worry about judicial nominee’s Catholicism, deny it’s a religious test. As Harvard’s Adrian Vermeule says on Twitter, “I guess we have an answer: no, they have no shame.”

INTERNET 4.0: Chris Berg (Australia’s free speech champion), Sinclair Davidson (of Catallaxy Files fame), and Jason Potts have put together The Blockchain Economy: A beginner’s guide to institutional cryptoeconomics. If they’re right, regulators and taxmen have a lot to fear.

IT’S A SHAKEDOWN: More evidence that the London Uber ban is about politics and demanding concessions, not safety. You can read my take here if you haven’t seen it already.

PERHAPS EVERYTHING IN THE GARDEN WASN’T ROSY: We kept hearing from the usual suspects during the last years of the Obama presidency that recovery was strong, the economy was near full employment, and all those people who were complaining of hardship were delusional. Two new data points have just emerged to provide further evidence that that picture was itself a delusion. The first, from the CFPB of all places, is a survey conducted last year that finds that over 40 percent of Americans can’t make ends meet. The second is a new research paper that finds that after the financial crisis, banks – especially the big banks – stopped lending to small firms, which we know is at least partly due to crushing regulation from the likes of the CFPB. The result?

In counties where the largest banks had a high market share, the aggregate flow of small business credit fell, interest rates rose, fewer businesses expanded, unemployment rose, and wages fell from 2006 to 2010. While the flow of credit recovered after 2010 as other lenders slowly filled the void, interest rates remain elevated. Although unemployment returns to normal by 2014, the effect on wages persists in these areas.

If new businesses aren’t forming, opportunity decreases, and wealth cannot grow. This is pretty basic stuff. The Obama “recovery” simply wasn’t one for vast numbers of Americans.

DATA – THE MODELER’S BURDEN: Ross McKitrick takes a hard look at all the arguments over whether climate models are overestimating warming at Climate Etc. His conclusion: “The model-observational discrepancy is real, and needs to be taken into account especially when using models for policy guidance.” Exactly what we’ve been warning about for two decades.

BUT THEY KEEP THE CONSULTANTS EMPLOYED: A new study finds that the average effect of political campaign advertising is *zero*. Residents of Virginia this year may have already figured that out.