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Mamdani accuses BK Dem leader of attempting to bypass ‘will of voters,’ jumping into party’s internal feud

NY Post
1 month 2 weeks ago
Mayor Zohran Mamdani accused the leader of the Brooklyn Democratic Party of trying to “circumvent the will of voters” — as she proposed last-minute rule changes that could help her hold onto power. Chairwoman Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, a state Assemblywoman representing Central Brooklyn, is pushing a proposal to dramatically boost the number of voting members...
Peter Senzamici

Regulation: Protecting Incumbents And Suppressing Competition

Zero Rss
1 month 2 weeks ago
Regulation: Protecting Incumbents And Suppressing Competition

Authored by Hal Snarr via Mises Institute,

A previous article attributed widespread airline service failures not to individual carriers but to government interventions sold as consumer protections. Through a web of intricate regulations and controls, the state restricts entry, grants shared monopoly privileges to approved carriers, and creates what Rothbard calls a state-enforced cartel. The result is an illusion of competition that allows poor service to persist without attracting better alternatives. This article examines how the same pattern protects incumbents and suppresses competition across other industries.

The banking system provides perhaps the clearest example. Entry requires a charter, regulatory approval, access to payment networks, compliance with extensive federal and state laws, and deposit insurance. The Federal Reserve supplies bank reserves, emergency credit, and the benchmark underlying prime rates, while the FDIC protects depositors from losses and reduces their incentive to distinguish between prudent and imprudent banks. Together with the discount window, this protection creates moral hazard by socializing risk and encouraging loans banks might not otherwise make. The result is an illusion of competition within a protected system that shifts the consequences of risky banking onto taxpayers and the broader economy.

Credit card pricing reveals the consequences. Banks appear to compete through branding, rewards, introductory offers, fees, and expanded credit access, yet interest rates remain remarkably high relative to the prime rate. The CFPB found that the ten largest issuers controlled 83 percent of outstanding balances and generally charged higher rates than smaller banks and credit unions. Perks and easier access create an illusion of competition that conceals the monopoly rates paid by customers who carry balances.

This restriction of competition becomes even more explicit in health care. Certificate-of-need laws allow incumbents to exercise a competitor's veto by opposing applications to build facilities, acquire equipment, add beds, or offer new services as unnecessary. Rather than letting patients determine whether another provider is needed, the state allows existing providers to declare the market adequately served. These restrictions help explain why many communities entered the pandemic with so few ICU beds. North Carolina eye surgeon Dr. Jay Singleton, for example, remains barred from offering lower-cost surgery at his own facility while his constitutional challenge proceeds. The outrage would be deafening if the state allowed McDonald's to veto a Burger King opening across the street by claiming that Whoppers were duplicative. Yet health care incumbents exercise precisely this power, putting Rothbard's monopoly privilege into practice by asking the state to block entrepreneurs they might otherwise have to outperform.

Montana's waste-removal rules extend the same competitor's veto from hospitals to dumpsters. Parker Noland discovered that construction companies were dissatisfied with existing debris-removal services. After borrowing money to buy dumpsters and a specialized truck, he began advertising but soon received a cease-and-desist order from the Montana Public Service Commission. Continuing required a certificate of public convenience and necessity through a process that allowed existing waste companies to oppose his entry without explanation. Republic Services and Waste Connections protested his application, while other certificate holders demanded his tax returns, revenues, financial statements, and other business records. Unable to match their legal and financial resources, Noland withdrew. Rather than merely enforcing safety standards, the state empowered his prospective competitors to deny dissatisfied customers an alternative.

Professional licensing extends the same exclusionary power to entire occupations by allowing organized interests to control entry in the name of quality and public safety. Through its influence over medical education, accreditation, licensing, and professional membership, the American Medical Association helped determine who could become a physician and often applied these restrictions discriminatorily. Black physicians were excluded from many state and local medical societies, limiting their access to the national association, hospitals, and professional opportunities. Following a three-year investigation, the AMA formally apologized in 2008 for the harm inflicted on black physicians, their families, and their patients.

The AMA's review shows that this discrimination extended beyond black physicians. Women accounted for only 2.9 percent of medical-school graduates in 1915 and remained a small minority for decades. Jewish applicants also faced blatant discrimination. In 1939, JAMA editor Morris Fishbein acknowledged that they were rejected "simply because they were Jewish" but defended the practice because Jewish physicians already represented a substantial share of the profession. Although the AMA's apology focused on black physicians, the broader record demonstrates the danger of allowing professional organizations and incumbents to control entry. Presented as patient protections, licensing and accreditation helped create a state-enforced medical cartel that restricted the supply of physicians, raised prices, and reduced patient choice.

Control over entry and consumer choice also shapes public education, where the government acts as both financier and provider. Families must fund the system through taxes whether they use it or not, while licensing restricts who may teach, accreditation limits which institutions may compete, and political authorities determine curricula, funding, and operating standards. Parents are largely limited to their assigned public school, permitted charter schools, nearby private schools they must pay for separately, or moving to another district. Even these alternatives remain subject to state approval and regulation, while compulsory-attendance laws leave children no option to reject their poorly performing schools. Unlike a restaurant that loses revenue and eventually closes after repeatedly failing its customers, a failing public school may receive additional funding because the state restricts entry, compels attendance, and supplies it with captive customers.

This system burdens families with the fewest resources most heavily because they have the least ability to escape it. In my view, the availability of even one viable alternative helps explain why public schools in affluent neighborhoods often perform well. The threat that dissatisfied parents can send their children elsewhere disciplines the incumbent school. Wealthier families can afford both the coerced tuition imposed through property taxes and the additional cost of private schooling, or they can move to a district with better schools. Lower-income families, especially in urban areas where political authorities restrict charter-school competition, often have none of these options and remain trapped in failing schools. Desperate parents who evade residency rules to place their children in a better public school risk prosecution and jail.

Where licensing restricts entry directly, food regulations protect incumbents more subtly by imposing costs that large corporations can more readily absorb and influence. Major producers spread FDA compliance expenses across millions of products and employ teams of chemists, lawyers, lobbyists, and regulatory specialists beyond the reach of smaller competitors. The GRAS process also allows them to hire experts, declare substances safe, and introduce them without formal FDA review or notification, even though legal sale implies government endorsement. The Environmental Working Group estimates that nearly 99 percent of chemicals added to the US food supply between 2000 and 2021 entered through GRAS rather than formal FDA review. Large producers can then use these self-certified additives to mass-produce inexpensive foods, rewarding regulatory influence and scale rather than the whole-food alternatives consumers might otherwise choose.

The pharmaceutical industry adds patent privileges and rules requiring third-party payers to purchase prescribed drugs for patients to the regulatory advantages already evident in food production. Although defenders consider patents necessary to finance research, scientific discovery and the desire to improve human life motivate R&D across industries. Patents nevertheless favor drugs over potentially effective natural substances, which generally cannot receive protection unless their compounds are modified or synthesized. Large firms can also finance years of testing and regulatory review that may exhaust smaller competitors' capital. FDA approval provides a government endorsement, while mandated third-party payment weakens patients' sensitivity to price. These protections and the purchases they compel shield Big Pharma, raise prices, encourage patent farming, and replace consumer judgment with administrative permission.

Inside government-owned airports, political authorities decide which businesses may operate and what they may sell. Burger King and McDonald's, for example, compete not side by side for customers but for permission to enter. This lack of competition once left me with the worst burger I have ever purchased. I threw it away after one bite, which says something because I was a poor PhD candidate at the time. A few years later, airport security prevented me from bringing a Chicago-style pizza home from an economics conference. Both experiences illustrate how government restrictions create an illusion of choice while shielding the fortunate few from outside competition. The weakened market discipline that permits an airport vendor to sell an inedible burger also allows airlines to provide poor service. Both compete for political permission in protected markets rather than for customers in open competition.

Together, these examples show why the airline ordeal discussed in a previous article indicts markets cartelized through regulations and other interventions enacted as consumer protections. Firms that entered after these regulated markets were established should not bear the primary blame because they merely respond to incentives that reward political entrepreneurship over market entrepreneurship. What appears to be competition among incumbents is largely OPEC-style jostling within a protected system. This cartelization increasingly resembles the old-world European mercantilism that provoked Marx's rage, generating the scarcity, high prices, and declining quality that fuel the populism of Mayor Mamdani on the Left and President Trump on the Right. Healing this political divide requires looking beyond individual firms and dismantling the regulations that cartelize them. Restoring open competition would replace political permission with consumer choice and unleash the entrepreneurship that produces lower prices, higher quality, greater choice, and superabundance.

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/24/2026 - 18:25
Tyler Durden

Operation Economic Outcast is a recipe for success against Iran

NY Post
1 month 2 weeks ago
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Monday launched what he called Operation Economic Outcast — a global campaign to shut down every last source of financial oxygen feeding a fractured rump regime in Tehran that’s already circling the economic drain.
Richard Goldberg

Mamdani’s grocery scheme just exposed another lefty hypocrisy

NY Post
1 month 2 weeks ago
Progs have long worked to keep Walmart out by arguing that the little guys couldn’t compete against the massive price discounts the chain has the scale to offer. Yet steep price discounts, 30% on “core goods,” are the central justification for Mamdani’s plan insanity.
Post Editorial Board

US Scraps September Korea Marine Drills In Wake Of Iran War Strain

Zero Rss
1 month 2 weeks ago
US Scraps September Korea Marine Drills In Wake Of Iran War Strain

Fresh on the heels of President Trump controversially ordering scaled-down US-South Korea military drills last week, there are emerging reports of more canceled plans for joint exercises.

South Korean and American force were going to hold large-scale maritime drills focused on amphibious landing exercises in September, but Seoul has said the Pentagon had to back out related to constraints due to Iran war deployments.

Marine Corps file image

"The US Marine Corps formally notified our forces in June that its ability to deploy forces during this year’s Ssangyong exercise would be constrained due to the situation in the Middle East," Han Seung-jeon, a spokesman for the South Korean Marine Corps, said in a press briefing Monday.

After this month's Ulchi Freedom Shield were halted early so as not to provoke North Korea (as indicated by Trump), these next exercises - dubbed "Twin Dragons" - have apparently been canceled entirely.

The Twin Dragons exercise has previously featured thousands of American and South Korean forces practicing beach front landings.

At its height years ago, it included over 20 navy vessels, 30 warplanes - and 40 amphibious-assault vehicles transporting, and well over 10,000 personnel.

"Now it is the most recent example of Asian pullbacks from the U.S. More than 2,000 U.S. Marines stationed in Japan were transferred to the Middle East in March," The Wall Street Journal reports.

"South Korea’s president publicly opposed the withdrawal of U.S. air defense assets this spring from his country. A Pacific-based American aircraft carrier, the USS George Washington, just replaced in the Middle East the USS Abraham Lincoln, which had been deployed for more than 250 days," the report adds.

All of this is likely to strain tensions further between Washington and Seoul, something which has alarmed lawmakers on Capitol Hill.

"Both Democrats and Republicans have warned that the pullback on Ulchi Freedom Shield drills risked undermining the alliance with South Korea, calling for the exercises to be restored," observes WSJ.

US pulls back on major South Korea beach drills amid Iran strain — NYT

The Pentagon scraps next month’s Ssangyong amphibious exercise, citing military demands from the war in Iran

The drill was set to feature more than 10,000 Marines pic.twitter.com/ChxdX0OWVc

— RT Intl (@RT_on_X) August 24, 2026

But it's clear that Trump is pushing for a new opening with Kim Jong Un, hearkening back to the two leaders' historic face-to-face meetings which marked a foreign policy high-point of Trump's first administration. So far, Pyongyang has not backed off its condemnations of Seoul and Washington's ongoing close cooperation.

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/24/2026 - 18:00
Tyler Durden

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