The Heritage Insider: Justice Thomas on the Court's obligations, we could have supersonic flights again, Congress can stop the war on worker freedom, banning offender status info leads to more discrimination, how the FDA increases Epi-Pen prices

October 29, 2016

 

 

Clarence Thomas speaks about his 25 years on the Supreme Court. We could have more and better supersonic flights if regulators would get out of the way. Congress can end the Obama administration’s war on worker freedom with its power of the purse. Banning employers from asking about an applicant’s criminal history will actually make it harder for minorities to get jobs. How the Food and Drug Administration limits Epi-Pen competition.

 

 

The Constitution belongs to the people. Justice Clarence Thomas has been sitting on the Supreme Court for 25 years as of this week. He shared his views on the job at The Heritage Foundation this week: “I think we are obligated to make the Constitution and what we write about the Constitution accessible to our fellow citizens.” The Constitution, Thomas continued, “is theirs, and I think we hide it from them when we write in language that’s inaccessible. […] Genius is not putting a two-dollar idea in a twenty-dollar sentence. It’s putting a twenty-dollar idea in a two-dollar sentence, without any loss of meaning. But that takes work. And it takes organization and editing. […] We owe it to people to present to them their Constitution in a way they can understand it to enfranchise them constitutionally.” [The Heritage Foundation]

 

Time for more supersonic flights. Eli Dourado and Samuel Hammond write that repealing the ban on overland supersonic flight would be a boon for air travel: “Despite our stagnation in speed, aircraft engineering has advanced significantly since the time of the Concorde. With lighter materials, more efficient engines, computer modeling, and simply more experience, it is certainly possible to create an aircraft that is faster and more affordable to fly on than the Concorde. Why hasn’t it happened? Our answer has been that the blanket prohibition of overland civil supersonic flight—in place in the United States, the biggest potential market, since 1973—has greatly reduced investment in supersonic technologies and research. […] To be sure, there are legitimate concerns surrounding supersonic flight, particularly concerns about sonic booms. But as we have shown, these concerns can be well addressed directly through noise standards and other more narrowly tailored regulations rather than the blanket prohibition we have today. An endemic, complacent regulatory attitude—like the view that subsonic aviation is good enough—may be a genuine link between our supersonic regress and our broader economic stagnation.” [Mercatus Center]

 

How to end the war on worker freedom. The Obama administration has used its regulatory powers to enact restrictions on worker choice that Congress declined to enact in legislation. Congress, write Trey Kovacs and John Berlau, can protect worker choice and reclaim its authority to set policy by using the power of the purse to defund these policies. Such policies include the Ambush Election Rule, which “drastically reduces the time frame between the filing of a petition and the date on which a representation election is held”; the Joint Employer Rule, which overturned a clear standard for defining a joint employer relationship in favor of “an extremely broad and vague definition under which companies may be held liable for labor violations committed by other employers”; the Fiduciary Rule, whose vague mandate that fiduciaries act in savers’ best interest will impose a hefty price tag on an already regulated industry and risk depriving low- and moderate-income savers of personalized financial advice; and the Overtime Rule, whose attempt to expand overtime pay will likely be offset in ways that are inconvenient and costly to workers. [Competitive Enterprise Institute]

 

Removing offender status from job applications increases discrimination against minorities. Jennifer Doleac and Benjamin Hansen write: “Well-intentioned policies that remove information about negative characteristics can do more harm than good. Advocates for these policies seem to think that in the absence of information, employers will assume the best about all job applicants. This is often not the case. Research has shown that providing information about characteristics that are less favorable, on average, among black job-seekers—including criminal records, personality tests, drug tests, and credit histories—actually helps black men and black women find jobs. These outcomes are what we would expect from standard statistical discrimination models. More information helps the best job candidates avoid discrimination.” [Cato Institute]

 

What’s the deal with Epi-Pen price spikes? The answer is a lack of competition, which is at least partly the fault of the Food and Drug Administration. As Devon Herrick explains, the FDA has already approved 10 different auto-injectors that are legal to market, and epinephrine hasn’t had patent protection for a long time. But in order to sell a competing auto injector pre-loaded with epinephrine, a manufacturer needs to get the product approved by the FDA as a new drug. The FDA hasn’t been likely to do that because the generic version of the auto-injector—based on a 1977 design—doesn’t have some of the features that the newer EpiPen has. [National Center for Policy Analysis]

 

 

 

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