Opportunity and lower costs

In her Friday Aug 16 speech, VP Harris offered admirable goals: “opportunity” and “lowering costs.” Opportunity is the antithesis of “equity,” and was a Paul Ryan/Jack Kemp Republican mantra. Lowering costs for consumers is the point of good economic policy.

As it’s not clear how her policy proposals advance those goals, I have a few modest proposals.

Lower costs

• Remove all antitrust exemptions, including for unions, insurance companies, and other price-fixers. Enforce antitrust against colleges and other routine violators.

• Remove all coverage requirements for health insurance.

• Eliminate corporate taxes. Tax people when they spend corporate profits.

• Prioritize economic immigration. If you want to come to the US, have a clean record, $10,000 in the bank, foreswear social services for a few years, come on in. Want to “lower costs” for health care, child care, elder care? Let them come. Legalize the 10 million who are here, working, paying taxes, staying out of trouble.

• Eliminate tariffs, buy-American requirements, and other import protections.

• Eliminate mandates for paid leave, health insurance, time off; eliminate hours, straight time vs. overtime laws, employee vs. contractor laws, minimum wages, comparable worth, and any other restriction on the right of workers and employers to contract. Employers will hire more people if they can more easily fire them. (This is also an “opportunity” move.)

• National right to work. You’re free to join a union, but the union may not force all workers at a plant or company to join.

• Eliminate “prevailing wage,” minority contracting, Davis-Bacon, and other cost-increasers for federal contracts and businesses receiving subsidies (IRA, Chips, electric vehicle chargers. See Marginal Revolution, and thanks to Malcontent).

• Eliminate restrictive zoning and building codes. Build what you want on your property. (Subsidies for home buyers without expanded supply just drive prices up more. Government built housing just substitutes for cheaper privately built housing.) Remove bans on factory-built housing.

• Remove rent controls and eviction controls. The ability to get rid of non-paying renters is key to getting landlords to rent and developers to invest in rental housing in the first place. See Argentina, where eliminating rent controls led to a quick supply of rental housing and lower rents, even before construction kicked in.

• Shot clock on all federal regulatory actions. One year from filing, if you haven’t heard an answer, your project is approved. Priorities include nuclear power, drug regulation, real estate development and redevelopment, and energy infrastructure. FDA especially. If it’s legal in Europe, it’s legal here. At least allow foreign clinical trials to count.

• Remove all “energy efficiency” mandates, starting with auto fuel economy standards and electric vehicle mandates. End ethanol in gas mandate. Bring back washing machines and dishwashers that wash. Let us buy whatever lightbulbs we want. Let the price of energy determine optimal efficiency.

• End the “whole of government” war on fossil fuels, especially natural gas. We forbid pipelines and US exports, and then tell the Ukrainians not to bomb Russian fossil fuel facilities in order to keep supply up and prices down? If you must, impose a uniform carbon tax and no other energy regulation. If it’s true that renewables are now so cheap, you won’t have to.

• Voucherize all health care and insurance subsidies, and let the free market rip to provide cheaper and better care.

• Repeal the Jones Act. (Of course! Thanks Adolfo.) This is the act that requires all shipping between US ports be on US made ships and manned by US merchant marine. It has destroyed shipping and ship building in the US, and sent lots of goods by (much more polluting) rail and truck instead.

• End all farm subsidies and price supports. (Thanks Jeff Carter.) How did I forget the oldest and most long-standing government effort to raise costs?

• End government monopolies and entry restrictions. For example, end the ban on private bus companies in cities.

Opportunity (in addition to the above)

• Universal school vouchers. No more teachers’ unions. (No more government employee unions, as Franklin Roosevelt understood.)

• Occupational license reform.

• Stop subsidizing pointless college majors.

This is just a beginning. I’ll return to this post and add more items. Feel free to make suggestions, I’ll promote good ones from the comments.