The Administrative State

Victory Over Communism! Texas Decriminalizes Lemonade Stands

Featured image I know I wrote here several years ago now about how the modern culture of bureaucracy—the imperatives of the administrative state—had filtered all the way down to most local governments, as seen by the number of instances where little kids’ lemonade stands were shut down for bureaucratic reasons. Police in Coralville, Iowa, for example, shut down 4-year-old Abigail Krstinger’s sidewalk lemonade stand because she lacked a $400 city permit—a feat duplicated »

Someone Gets Serious About Leaks

Featured image Unfortunately, it isn’t the federal government. It’s Apple, Inc.: A recording of an internal briefing at Apple earlier this month obtained by The Outline sheds new light on how far the most valuable company in the world will go to prevent leaks about new products. The briefing, titled “Stopping Leakers – Keeping Confidential at Apple,” was led by Director of Global Security David Rice, Director of Worldwide Investigations Lee Freedman, »

CRB: The cold civil war

Featured image The new (Spring) issue of the Claremont Review of Books is in the mail. Thanks to our friends at the Claremont Institute, I have read the new issue in galley to select three pieces to be submitted for the consideration of Power Line readers. As always, wanting to do right by the magazine and by our readers, I had a hard time choosing. You, however, can do your own choosing »

The Trial as how-to manual

Featured image Does anyone read Kafka anymore? I doubt that high school and college students take him up as faithfully as we once did, but the bureaucratic tyrants running the Department of Education in the Obama administration appear to have drawn on Kafka’s Trial as a how-to manual rather than a modernist warning of a nightmarish future. The book opens: “Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he »

Farming In Fear

Featured image Earlier this week, I attended an event in Michigan that included a screening of a brand-new documentary called Farming In Fear. The film, just 28 minutes long, tells the story of Martha Boneta, who bought a small farm in Virginia and tried to make a go of it by selling produce and so on. She was viciously harassed by a variety of government agencies and environmental groups who evidently intended »

Keep the Internet Free, Part 3

Featured image “Net neutrality” is one of those technical-seeming issues about which it isn’t hard to make up one’s mind. Four good reasons to oppose it: 1) It is a solution to no known problem. 2) Why would we want the federal government to control the internet? 3) MoveOn.org and the Daily Kos are for it. 3) In Glenn Reynolds’ words, “Nothing says forward looking for the 21st century like a regulated »

Can the Congressional Review Act Bring the Obama Administration to Its Knees?

Featured image I was on a conference call this morning with Senator James Inhofe, who said that he will be filing a Congressional Review Act report on any major EPA regulation that is introduced before Congress either passes his bill, S. 2161, into law or the EPA starts abiding by Sec. 321(a) of the Clean Air Act. (As always, following the law is too much to expect from the Obama administration.) Those »