Monthly Archives: January 2017

Repeal and Replace

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…the Food and Drug Administration.  I’ve written before about the FDA’s shameful obstruction of an experimental drug that showed great promise—before the FDA’s obstruction, so those persons knew all about it—in mitigating Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy to the permanent detriment of the boys who have that ultimately fatal disease.

Here’s another shameful example of the FDA’s lethal obstruction, provided by Marc Thiessen in an end of the year piece for The Washington Post.  Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Lou Gehrig’s disease, is another fatal disease of the nervous system, this time one that destroys motor neurons in the spine so that muscles atrophy, including ultimately those that power the lungs, and the victim dies.  ALS is 100% fatal—or was until an experimental procedure was developed by the folks at the Center for ALS at the Emory University School of Medicine.  The procedure those folks developed involved injecting neural stem cells directly into the spinal regions where masses of the motor neurons affected by ALS are located.

Thiessen’s friend, afflicted with ALS, was fortunate to be able to have access to this procedure—which was so early in its development that the friend’s participation was in a trial stage whose purpose was nothing more than to show that the procedure was safe; it wouldn’t kill the receiving patients.  The procedure didn’t kill Thiessen’s friend.  Maybe it cured him (he died of brain cancer six years after his diagnosis of ALS, a post-treatment life span too short to say “cured” but plainly long enough to say “positive effect in putting the ALS into remission.”

That remission was the watchword is demonstrated by the fact that the man went from being unable even to walk to his mailbox for his mail to being able to walk Atlanta’s two-and-a-half-mile Walk to Defeat ALS four years in a row, and to do each with no problem.

Slam dunk for the procedure to go to final stage testing and production, right?

No.  Not with our FDA.  Thirty-two ALS victims have been allowed by the FDA to try the procedure in a time span during which 24,000 Americans have died of this disease.  Because the FDA demands proof of effectiveness through a Byzantine “testing and trial” sequence of experiments that only bureaucrats could find useful before it will approve a drug or a medical procedure.

It’s time to disband the Food and Drug Administration altogether and replace it in toto with an agency that will oversee such things, but that will approve on a showing of “does no harm.”  The efficacy of a drug or procedure belongs solely in the free market, with the doctor and patient making the use decisions.  This is not an area for Government, or Government’s bureaucrats, to interfere.

Oil-and-Gas Industry and Tax Breaks

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Here’s another post comes from a Wall Street Journal debate/point-counterpoint piece.  This time, though, I think the question itself is too narrow, limited as it is to oil and gas subsidies.  The imbalance in the WSJ question is illustrated by this claim from President-On-The-Way-Out Barack Obama (D):

Not only has President Barack Obama repeatedly called for a repeal of much of the oil-and-gas industry’s favorable tax treatment, his budget proposal for fiscal 2017 included a new $10-a-barrel fee on oil to help fund low-carbon infrastructure projects.

Mark Perry, of the American Enterprise Institute and a Professor of Economics in the University of Michigan-Flint School of Management, made the case for continuing these tax breaks, centering his argument on using taxes to create incentives to do Government-favored things in an otherwise free market.

Tax incentives are essential for unconventional oil-and-gas production, and there would have been no shale revolution without them.

Then Perry had this remark in disparagement of those who oppose the oil-and-gas industry generally:

For climate crusaders who view oil and gas as a problem instead of the lifeblood of our economy, rejiggering the tax code is seen as a catalyst for restructuring the energy economy.

Compare that with Perry’s claim quoted just above it.  Perry wants to use exactly the same tool—the tax code—merely to do precisely the opposite.  His own contradiction is just an argument for getting the tax code out of the market place.

Ryan Alexander, President of Taxpayers for Common Sense, is on the right side of this question, but too narrowly so.

The tax breaks that Congress provides on income derived from or devoted to certain activities are designed to encourage that specific activity. But what they end up doing is distorting economic decision making and rewarding activity that would occur even without the special treatment.

But it’s not just oil and gas energy.  Low-carbon infrastructure projects and other “green”-related energy enterprises do not need subsidies, just as oil and gas enterprises do not.  If these sorts of enterprises—even industries—can’t compete on their own in a free market, they’re not ready for production or sale.  Market forces alone—including market forces that pushed $100 oil into a fracking boom—are sufficient to determine whither oil, gas, and “green” energy, and any other aspect of a free market.

No, taxes have no business being used for social engineering, or market manipulation, or managing private business decisions, or anything at all other than funding government so it can do its three constitutionally mandated tasks.

Government-Mandated Fuel Standards

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This post comes from one of The Wall Street Journal‘s earlier debate/point-counterpoint pieces.

Carol Lee Rawn, who runs the Transportation Program at Ceres, made her argument in favor of this Government intervention into the free market (many of you can guess my position on fuel standards set by Government rather than by market).

First, the standards benefit consumers and the economy. The standards set different mileage goals for different sizes of cars and trucks.

Umm, no.  The cars and trucks start out with differences in their intrinsic mileages; the standards don’t affect those differences in any qualitative way.  What they do, though, is run up the costs of all cars and trucks, reducing the ability of consumers to buy them in the first place.

Second, to remain competitive, the Big Three auto makers of Detroit must offer more fuel-efficient vehicles. During the last global spike in oil prices (when fuel-efficiency standards had essentially stagnated for years), the Detroit Three found themselves overinvested in gas-guzzling vehicles they couldn’t sell.

Couple things on this.  First, to remain competitive, the Big Three—and the others in our auto industry—have to make cars and trucks that folks want to buy and drive, not what Government will permit them to choose from.

The second thing points up the interlocking nature of a modern economy; individual factors cannot be taken in isolation from each other.  Were Government to get out of the way of the energy production industry, its departure would couple with the vasty seas of oil and natural gas right here in North America and the production thereof, and this would vastly reduce the likelihood of another spike, global or otherwise, in oil prices.  Which would render this factor a straw man.

Third, maintaining strong fuel-efficiency standards locks in growth for innovative suppliers to the auto industry.

This is just more of Government determining who will be allowed to succeed and who will be required to fail in our economy.  Furthermore, these suppliers have no more inherent right to exist than did buggy whip suppliers who’d innovated to provide bigger, better, more flexible whips.  Like those whip suppliers, who moved on to provide horns and gas pedals and etc to the automobile manufacturers that overwhelmed the buggy manufacturing industry, these suppliers can, in a free market, prosper just fine by moving on to supply other items to a reviving auto industry.

The bottom line: making great vehicles that go farther on every gallon of fuel is good for the auto industry and good for America.

No, the bottom line is letting Americans decide for themselves what’s good for them.  Vehicles that go farther on every gallon of fuel are part of that.  So are vehicles that last longer.  So are vehicles with better entertainment systems for the passengers.  Most importantly, so are vehicles made to American buyers’ wants and needs, not to Government specs.  Government has no legitimate role in dictating to us what our choices must be.

The Supremes and Congressionally Mandated Precedents

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Congressman Steve King (R, IA) is has introduced a bill in the House that would

bar the Supreme Court from citing Obamacare in forthcoming decisions as binding precedent.

By prohibiting the Supreme Court from citing ObamaCare cases, we will be truly eradicating this unconstitutional policy from all three branches of government so that the repeal will be complete. Furthermore, we must work to restore Article I authority and the Rule of Law by ensuring Congress is the only entity of our government making or changing laws.

I wholeheartedly and enthusiastically agree with the sentiment, but I think this is the wrong way to go about it.  I disagree with his blanket “can’t use Obamacare as precedent.”  There were parts of those rulings that remain useful—the mandated expansion of Medicaid having been ruled unconstitutional, for instance.  And since the collection of precedents in the Obamacare rulings can’t practically be gerrymandered to protect the useful precedents, I object to the bill as a whole.

Furthermore, I think the core position, the restoration of “Article I authority and the Rule of Law by ensuring Congress is the only entity of our government making or changing laws” is better done by a House/Senate joint resolution that explicitly reminds the Supreme Court of Art I, Sect 1 and of the incompatibility with that Section of a Living Constitution philosophy based on anything other than Art V.  And—perhaps—an explicit reminder of Art III’s “good behavior” clause and judicial oaths of office.

Tax Rates

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James Pethokoukis had a piece on this at AEIdeas, but I want to focus on just a small part of it.

[W]hat would be the economic case for lower rates for the 0.1%?

Pethoukis doesn’t object to these lower rates; he just has other job-growth priorities.

I have, though, two questions in answer to this question: what would be the economic case for excluding this or that group of Americans from an otherwise general tax policy?  And the obverse: what would be the economic case for forcing inclusion of this or that group of Americans into an otherwise limited tax policy?