Category Archives: regulation

Drug Mistake

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President Donald Trump (R) signed an Executive Order that reclassified marijuana from a Schedule 1 drug (highly dangerous and tightly controlled) to a Schedule 3 drug (not so dangerous, not so tightly controlled, but still illegal at the Federal level.

This is a mistake.

Leave aside all the dangers of modern-day marijuana or its unproven medical uses (multiple studies conflict with each other on the effectivity of a variety of constituent chemicals).

If the purpose really was to improve access for research (to, among other things, address those medical uses and those dangers), there was a simpler way to do that. Schedule 1 drugs are, in fact, deucedly difficult to obtain, even for researchers. However, that could have been addressed by setting up a licensing facility that would ease access to marijuana by approved laboratories and approved researchers working in those laboratories specifically on marijuana research.

It still can be. Trump’s EO can be rescinded, and that licensing facility still can be stood up.

Nanny State Strikes Again

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The lede has it.

California regulators have given Tesla 90 days to meet compliance after an administrative law judge found the company deceived consumers by falsely implying its cars could drive on their own.

The article got specific down the page.

California’s DMV first brought the case against Tesla in 2022, arguing the automaker’s use of product names “Autopilot” and “Full-Self Driving Capability” amounted to false advertising. The regulator said Tesla’s use of this language implied to drivers that its cars could function as autonomous vehicles.

Ninety days to stop calling an autopilot an autopilot and to stop calling a full-self driving capability a full-self-driving capability. Never mind that Tesla’s instructions also instruct drivers to remain alert and to keep at least one hand on the steering wheel.

Because California’s government officials think California citizens are grindingly stupid and cannot think for themselves.

Red Tape Redundancy

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A letter-writer in Monday’s Letters section of The Wall Street Journal was rightly concerned about red tape redundancy, but he missed the mark on one form of it.

One can’t work with children without undergoing specific training and, in many states, extensive background checks. There’s value in those measures, but how about some coordination?
While living in New Jersey, I was fingerprinted for my teaching license in Somerset County and, later, in Middlesex County, despite having permanent certification in New York. I was then fingerprinted for gun purchases, coaching recreational soccer, and teaching Sunday school. At some point, it all becomes too exhausting.

There’s nothing redundant about being checked via immutable personal characteristics at each of those application points. Fingerprinting is an important way of determining that the person doing the applying is who he claims to be. Those multiple applications may or may not be by the same person.

Having been IDed by fingerprints and confirmed to be the same person across those multiple applications, though, there should be no need to repeat the rest of the applications beyond what’s unique to the function being applied for. Those repeats are what would be redundant and want better coordination.

If They Depend on Subsidies…

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…then they shouldn’t be in business. The subheadline laid it out:

Republicans want to shift subsidies away from some of the frailest companies in the industry

In this context, “the industry” is the health care coverage industry, and the subsidies are those paid health coverage providers in the Affordable Care Act. I claim, though, that “private” companies that require government handouts are neither all that private nor deserving of staying in business. If they cannot survive without taxpayer money as anything more than a shortish-term loan to survive a catastrophe, they should be left to go out of business.

The news writer at the link made a big deal out of the need for the subsidies to those coverage providers in order to hold down the prices—the premiums—the customers pay for the policies, jerking tears especially for the lower income customers. What he does not address, though, is the deductibles and the out-of-pocket caps those Obamacare policies have. The deductibles and caps each separately represent significant fractions of those lower income customers’ income. They, especially, had better not get sick. If they do, their strait is not much different from that of those folks who are uninsured at all.

The subsidies paid into their hands directly would at least give them a little relief, but that’s only a stop gap. The real solution is to eliminate the ACA altogether and free up the health care coverage industry, restoring it to a health insurance industry in a free market with policies marketable nationwide, rather than limiting them to intrastate sales with the permissions and regulations of fifty different States.

Companies providing health care coverage or insurance should see their prosperity in how well they treat their customers and how well they serve them. Their prosperity should not come from government handouts—transfers from us taxpayers who don’t use their services.

“The trade in babies and women’s bodies is an affront to freedom.”

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That Wall Street Journal subheadline is about surrogate motherhood and whether it ought be allowed to exist. Lois McLatchie Miller’s lede and next two paragraphs consist of this:

A New York ballroom filled with men discussing how to procure women’s bodies to produce babies, then discharge the mother from her role.
It sounds dystopian, but the September gathering was the latest conference of Men Having Babies, a group that helps gay couples—and single men, and even groups of three that call themselves “throuples”—form families through surrogacy. Online, they post photos of smiling male couples holding infants still slick from their mothers’ birth canals, celebrating a triumph of “modern family building.”
Those newborns know nothing of politics or reproductive technology. They know only the voice and scent of the woman who carried them for nine months—and whom they will never know again.

That truly is terrible, but it’s far from the norm. Surrogacy is broadly employed to provide healthy babies to families unable to have any of their own.

Alternatively, adopt a baby? Certainly. But the adoption, while also broadly beneficial to both the baby and the new parents, doesn’t get the parents a baby of their own blood, their own genetics. Surrogacy opens a path to that, wherein the father’s sperm is combined with the mother’s egg and the result implanted in the surrogate mother. Or a mother’s egg is combined with a sperm bank donor’s sperm and the result either implanted in the mother, or for her health reasons, implanted in a surrogate mother. Or the same with a donor’s egg and the father’s sperm.

The surrogate mother, then, in those cases carries the baby to term and then turns it over to the baby’s parents. That can be wrenching for the surrogate mother, but it isn’t always, and it does allow the surrogate mother to participate in the formation of a loving family. Even in the wrenching, the surrogacy contract takes care of the surrogate mother’s post-delivery needs.

Miller is a Senior Communications Officer at Alliance Defending Freedom International, so she should know better.

What’s necessary is not banning surrogate motherhood, nor even heavy regulation of it. What’s necessary are strong regulation, with heavy sanctions for misbehaviors and civil sanctions for egregious mistakes, of the outcomes. Along with that is the necessity of producing quality information that will allow childless families and prospective surrogate mothers to identify reliable and effective facilities—and each other—so as to allow both sides of the surrogacy to have satisfactory, rewarding outcomes.

Banning surrogacy altogether is what would be truly an affront to freedom. It would be an affront—a denial—of the freedom of families and individuals to decide for themselves how they will approach a family problem.