I've seen a few "let's reevaluate freedom regarding cannabis" articles recently - must be a slow news week 😂 people like Sabet trade on their audience's unfamiliarity with cannabis to make weird claims like the one that "we regulate potency in other drugs" - oh, like alcohol, where Everclear (100% alcohol) is available in most places? Doesn't pass the smell test, unless you're sniffing to detect a pile of BS.
Compared to the US, the one huge and important thing that Europe does better for the working class is gov't run healthcare. As folk age, healthcare at the personal level becomes far more important than getting a bigger raise at work.
"We don’t know whether someone in, say, the 50th percentile of the income distribution in the US. in 2018 has enjoyed much better improvements in living standards than someone in the 50th percentile in Germany or Italy." -- and why not???
All nations should be publishing absolute levels of consumption and wealth for their 50% median income citizen -- the IMF should be collecting such info (maybe it does?).
Absolute values like square Feet of housing per person (or Sq meter), median calorie consumption.
We don't even talk about what are good median health care metrics - partly because in most countries the median person doesn't need hospital treatment that year.
We should be pushing to publicize the growth, or not, of all quintiles (20, 40, 60, 80) as well as 50% median, and top 1% . (Or is that the top 99%?) The big income problem is that the top 1% increases are so much larger than the median increases.
The US regulatory system is different from the EU system. There's a lot more give and take with the US system in that regulated entities have the capacity to push back to a great deal on regulations. The existence of judicial review of administrative decisions also gives regulated parties the right to seek redress through the courts. The recent Sackett v. EPA decision from this term of the Supreme Court is a great example of something that would not be possible in the European system. This case pushes back radically on the EPA's interpretation of the meaning of "waters of the United States" that has otherwise held sway for generations.
The notice-and-comment informal rulemaking process only seems pointless or arbitrary if you do not also consider it in conjunction with how it works in the case law. The APA has already been effectively constrained quite a bit from its initial design in practice. The European analogue would be "what if the APA procedures had just been frozen in amber" combined with a total lack of judicial oversight, impossibility of redress from regulated parties, and an added layer of politics on top of it that systematically denies power to small states within the Union. Brussels deserves to be ******** and all the bureaucrats should be ****** by rhinos fired up with PCP.
So the US system is bad, don't get me wrong, there are nonetheless checks built into the system that permit for course corrections. The kinds of debates that used to happen in both houses of Congress instead happen internally between opposing groups of attorneys within a regulated subject matter area. The notice-and-comment process is supposed to make it look like an open debate but the only people either side pay attention to are attorneys with sufficient clout.
I've seen a few "let's reevaluate freedom regarding cannabis" articles recently - must be a slow news week 😂 people like Sabet trade on their audience's unfamiliarity with cannabis to make weird claims like the one that "we regulate potency in other drugs" - oh, like alcohol, where Everclear (100% alcohol) is available in most places? Doesn't pass the smell test, unless you're sniffing to detect a pile of BS.
On the Tom Fairless article, it definitely feels poorer in parts of it than I would have thought.
Compared to the US, the one huge and important thing that Europe does better for the working class is gov't run healthcare. As folk age, healthcare at the personal level becomes far more important than getting a bigger raise at work.
"We don’t know whether someone in, say, the 50th percentile of the income distribution in the US. in 2018 has enjoyed much better improvements in living standards than someone in the 50th percentile in Germany or Italy." -- and why not???
All nations should be publishing absolute levels of consumption and wealth for their 50% median income citizen -- the IMF should be collecting such info (maybe it does?).
Absolute values like square Feet of housing per person (or Sq meter), median calorie consumption.
We don't even talk about what are good median health care metrics - partly because in most countries the median person doesn't need hospital treatment that year.
We should be pushing to publicize the growth, or not, of all quintiles (20, 40, 60, 80) as well as 50% median, and top 1% . (Or is that the top 99%?) The big income problem is that the top 1% increases are so much larger than the median increases.
The US regulatory system is different from the EU system. There's a lot more give and take with the US system in that regulated entities have the capacity to push back to a great deal on regulations. The existence of judicial review of administrative decisions also gives regulated parties the right to seek redress through the courts. The recent Sackett v. EPA decision from this term of the Supreme Court is a great example of something that would not be possible in the European system. This case pushes back radically on the EPA's interpretation of the meaning of "waters of the United States" that has otherwise held sway for generations.
The notice-and-comment informal rulemaking process only seems pointless or arbitrary if you do not also consider it in conjunction with how it works in the case law. The APA has already been effectively constrained quite a bit from its initial design in practice. The European analogue would be "what if the APA procedures had just been frozen in amber" combined with a total lack of judicial oversight, impossibility of redress from regulated parties, and an added layer of politics on top of it that systematically denies power to small states within the Union. Brussels deserves to be ******** and all the bureaucrats should be ****** by rhinos fired up with PCP.
So the US system is bad, don't get me wrong, there are nonetheless checks built into the system that permit for course corrections. The kinds of debates that used to happen in both houses of Congress instead happen internally between opposing groups of attorneys within a regulated subject matter area. The notice-and-comment process is supposed to make it look like an open debate but the only people either side pay attention to are attorneys with sufficient clout.