Stefan Axelsson writes about fishing regulation:
If you’re a good driver, you follow the rules of the road, obeying the speed limit, coming to full stops at stop signs, and yielding to pedestrians in crosswalks. And that ought to be enough. But now imagine that the government mandated you carry a state trooper in your passenger seat, one assigned to ensure you obey every traffic law at all times — and one whose salary you were obligated to pay out of your own pocket.
Sound far-fetched? It’s not. Something similar is happening to me today.
I make my living fishing out of Cape May, N.J. While I don’t have a state trooper riding in my car, the federal government makes me carry a monitor on my vessel to observe my activities and report back to the government.
And yes, the government wants to force me to pay the monitor directly — at least when I fish for herring — at a cost of more than $700 a day. That comes on top of an obligation to provide the monitor with a bunk and meals during what can be days-long outings. At times, the monitor is the highest-paid person on the boat, outearning both the captain and the crew.
Matt Weidinger of the American Enterprise Institute writes about the expansion of unemployment insurance:
With economists anticipating a recession in 2023, Congress may soon revisit its regular practice of expanding unemployment benefits to aid growing numbers of laid-off workers and stimulate a sagging economy.
In recent decades, these additional federal benefits — normally paid after unemployed workers exhaust six months of state unemployment checks — have been tailored to suit current economic conditions. For example, Congress offered modest additional benefits after a relatively mild 2001 recession, while record expansions accompanied the Great Recession and the pandemic. In each case, benefit expansions were authorized, and sometimes extended, on a temporary basis — and then expired as conditions improved.
But for some liberal lawmakers in Washington that’s not enough because, when it comes to federal benefits, it’s never enough.