Richard J Grant

Published in The Tennessean, Sunday, April 29, 2012 and Forbes with archives . by Richard J. Grant Just as most new regulations are “needed” to correct the damage caused by previous regulations, attempts to enforce such regulations often lead to a worsening of practice. City laws to regulate private transportation services and to enforce price fixing are an example of unnecessary laws that lead to even worse government intrusions. Municipal agencies looking for reasons to exist love regulations such as the ordinance passed in Nashville two years ago that requires limousine operators to charge their customers a minimum price of $45 per trip. Now inspectors from Nashville's Metropolitan Transportation Licensing Commission (MTLC) have an excuse for running sting operations to catch those limousine operators that have the audacity to charge their customers lower prices. But the MTLC inspectors have been operating above their station. Last week, Metro Nashville's poli...

Published in The Tennessean , Sunday, April 22, 2012 and Forbes with archives . by Richard J. Grant A sure sign that a politician is floundering is when he resorts to blaming those mysterious “speculators” for some price moving in an unpopular direction. President Barack Obama is merely the latest head of government to attempt to deflect public attention onto an abstract scapegoat. But even in the unlikely event that he understood the implications of his call, last week, for Congress to adopt tougher regulations against speculators in the oil markets, he can't distract us completely from his own role in the misdirection of speculation. Ironically, were President Obama less inclined to centrally plan our lives, the price of oil would not be a political issue at all. In those countries most-free from central planning, the prices of most goods tend to fall and incomes rise. We are better able to acquire more goods and services for every hour that we work. The case against t...

Published in The Tennessean , Sunday, April 15, 2012 and Forbes with archives . by Richard J. Grant Those who watched episodes of the   Little Rascals   from the early 1930s might remember the distinctive eagle in a white square that appeared in the end credits. This Blue Eagle was the symbol of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NRA), which became law at the beginning of the New Deal in 1933. Display of the Blue Eagle showed compliance with the NRA. It called on each industry’s leaders to meet together to write “codes of fair competition” that would result in uniformly higher prices and be binding on all producers in their industry, whether they signed on or not. With the NRA, labor unions had greater power to organize and restrict the supply of labor in order to push up wages without necessarily increasing productivity. The administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, much like its ideological descendants in the Obama administration, believed that the sluggis...

Published in The Tennessean , Sunday, April 8, 2012 and Forbes with archives . by Richard J. Gran t Whichever way the Supreme Court rules as to the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, those who opposed the act will continue to be asked, “With what would you replace it?” An ideal answer is not allowed to ignore immediate political constraints and the history of how we got where we are now. This is why we are often faced with choices between false or incomplete alternatives — and why some suggestions, even from Republicans, have sounded little better than watered-down nationalization, a timid postponement of the real deal. The deadly assumption that has plagued the debate and lured us into our current health-care predicament is that “health care is different.” It is argued that the practice of medicine is a very complex field and that patients lack the knowledge possessed by doctors. It is also argued that the stakes are high in the medical field...

Published in The Tennessean , Sunday, April 1, 2012 and Forbes with archives . by Richard J. Grant It is not necessary for the U.S. Supreme Court to find the individual mandate portion of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) to be unconstitutional in order to strike down the entire act, but it would be sufficient. It is also the most visible legal weakness in the act, which is why supporters of the ACA have now suggested that the mandate is severable from the remainder of the act. The ACA’s supporters hope that by sacrificing the mandate they can keep the rest of the act alive. Where there’s life, there’s hope; and the hope in this case is that the remainder of the act’s provisions will become sufficiently integrated into the system that they become politically entrenched. Then, a future Congress could find another, less constitutionally offensive method to serve the same function as the mandate. That other method would most likely be an overt tax. The e...