Free Republic

I was huddled in a Connecticut legislative hearing room on a chilly spring morning three years ago, awaiting my chance to testify about a proposal to over-regulate e-cigarettes. I’m a big fan of innovation, so I’m always eager to speak out against entrenched interests seeking to stifle progress with regulations designed to kill improvements in our health. Proponents of more regulation regularly use scare tactics, shoddy science and false allegations that people like me are against “all regulation.” The Public Health Committee hearing room in Hartford was packed with people on both sides of the divide, waiting to address a...

San Francisco passed America's first ban on plastic bags in chain groceries and drugstores in 2007. In a research paper for the Institute for Law and Economics, law professors Jonathan Klick and Joshua Wright crunched state and federal data on emergency room admissions and food-borne illness deaths and figured that the San Francisco ban "led to an increase in infections immediately upon implementation." They found a 46 percent rise in food-borne illness deaths. The bottom line: "Our results suggest that the San Francisco ban led to, conservatively, 5.4 annual additional deaths." So is San Francisco's bag ban a killer? Conceivably,...

Some things are easy to mock, such as Al Gore – Pope Gorus IV of the Holy Church of Global Warming – selling his Current TV for hundreds of millions of oil dollars. But some other things are so bizarre it’s difficult to mock them because they come across as mockery already. Such is the case with the “Capitol Wellness Expo” happening on Capitol Hill this week. The master of ceremonies for the event is a woman named Judy Kosovich, an attorney who, among other things, has written of the need for people to reconnect with the Earth. OK, that’s...