Will the EU’s New Carry On Rules Actually Help Travelers?
On the latest episode of the Consumer Podcast, host Bill Wirtz sat down with Gary Leff of View from the Wing to unpack a change that will affect nearly every European traveler: the EU’s move to require that all airline tickets include a free carry on bag. The European Council and Parliament have reached an […]
Athens Gridlock: Why Greece Still Won’t Let Uber Compete
In March, taxi drivers shut down central Athens in protest of a new transportation bill working through the Greek parliament. Nikos Rompapas, president of KEFiM, the Greek Center for Liberal Studies, joined the ConsEUmer podcast to explain why a market that should have been settled years ago is still fighting over the basics. The bill […]
A Roadmap to Restoring Patient-Centered Healthcare
There’s a quiet rule change working its way through the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Most Americans will never hear about it. But it tells you everything about how Washington thinks about drug prices. CMS calls it a “narrow modification” to close a “program integrity loophole.” In reality, it is another turn of […]
We’re from the government and we’re here to help
The Ultra-Processed Foods Misinformation Crusade in the US and Canada Paternalistic public policies are one of those rare subjects that both the left and the right often agree on. While each side of the political spectrum has different visions for how people should live their lives, they both often agree that they know better about […]
New York Has a Housing Crisis. Blaming Software Won’t Fix It.
Washington is finally paying attention to affordability. The President has made bringing down prices a centerpiece of his agenda, and even leading progressives are offering ideas. That’s a welcome shift, but federal momentum won’t mean much if states continue piling on the regulatory barriers that made things unaffordable in the first place. And few states […]
EU Digital Rules Disproportionately Target American Tech. Reciprocity Matters.
Europeans want to build their next tech champion. It’s a noble goal, and an important one. But rather than reforming the system to make it possible, why does the European Union spend most of its time and energy dismantling American ones? On June 25, the European Commission took another step to ratchet up its regulatory […]
Regulators must catch up to the personalized health revolution
Is shining a red light device on your testicles the best way to boost testosterone? What about injecting BPC-157 to heal a shoulder injury or speed up your mitochondria? One in three Americans now use ChatGPT or some other AI chatbot for health advice, leaping past institutional medicine and into the world of health and […]
Ban the Boomers
If we won’t trust teenagers online, we definitely can’t trust Grandpa Australia now bars anyone under 16 from holding a social media account. Britain just followed, and Canada is due to finalize theirs soon enough. The logic is bulletproof: some people can’t be trusted online, so the government decides who logs on. Fine. Let’s apply […]
US-EU Trade Deal: Let Us Not Repeat TTIP’s Mistakes
Yesterday, the European Parliament approved two pieces of legislation that implement the EU’s tariff commitments on all US industrial goods and provide preferential market access for a broad range of US agricultural and seafood goods, while extending the tariff-free imports of lobster and lobster products. It took slightly less than nine months for the European […]
Italy’s Energy Crisis Response: Well-Intentioned, But Will It Work?
As oil prices surge in the wake of the Iran conflict, European governments are scrambling to shield consumers from the pain at the pump.
Who Benefits From 340B? Congress Should Find Out
Congress created the 340B Drug Pricing Program more than 30 years ago with the goal of helping safety-net providers stretch limited resources to expand care for vulnerable patients. Hospitals and clinics that prioritized serving low-income, uninsured, and rural populations would receive discounted prescription drugs, which allowed them to reinvest those savings into patient care and […]
Liberal Democracies Dominated Early Open-Source AI – Now China is Winning
Pull up any global leaderboard for open-source AI today and read the names: Qwen, DeepSeek, Kimi, GLM. They are not from Silicon Valley, the United States, or even a liberal democratic nation with a capitalist economy. They are from Hangzhou, Beijing, and Shanghai, Chinese-born and bred. Three years ago this would have been unimaginable. The […]