In case you needed a refresher course on European hypocrisy on surveillance and data privacy, the New York Times today obliges with two stories over which the connoisseur of human folly ought really to pause. The first involves the adoption by France’s lower parliamentary house of a new surveillance law so broad and so lacking in judicial review that it makes NSA’s legal authorities look like a straight jacket:
Reversing past policy, FDA will begin to regulate a class of products called “laboratory-developed tests” (LDTs), sometimes called “home-brew” tests because they are developed in and used in a single clinical laboratory rather than being manufactured and sold by big companies. There are far better options that would not obstruct innovation.
"When members of Congress feel no compulsion to act on national security grounds, then they are free to play politics," Harvard Law professor Jack Goldsmith wrote recently. And that's exactly what has happened. Republicans have remained free to criticize Obama for using too little force, Democrats to fret that he may be using too much — but neither side has been compelled to take responsibility for the outcome.
Why should libertarians and conservatives support a carbon tax? Three reasons. First, it is a less expensive, more efficient and more effective policy than the status quo: EPA regulation via the Clean Air Act and a host of green energy subsidies and mandates. And there is no plausible political scenario in which those regulations and subsidies can be rolled back by raw conservative political force.
