Glenn Fleishman:

Recent protectionist changes by the European Union further effectively exclude U.S. small businesses like mine from selling to EU customers. It’s a little complicated, but it has to do with how tax and customs fees are collected and extracted from low-value packages. This is not a tariff issue, unbelievably, but one about reducing competition.

The summary:

Delivering items under €150 per shipment into the EU now costs at least €3 per package, and may require hiring a specialty firm to manage time-of-purchase tax collection and payment because of the many differences in filing by EU nation. Shipping prices have swelled. No shipper currently offers rates close to affordable for modestly priced items, like books, while properly collecting the €3+ customs fee.

If these new rules were prompted by Chinese companies like Temu taking advantage of de minimis shipping exceptions (basically by shipping zillions of cheap items one at a time, rather than in bulk), the new rules ought to apply only for items arriving from China.

Everyone can see what the movement was broadcasting to every mother in crisis who was watching: kill your children and a crowd will call you a hero.

Is a story a nothingburger if mystery meat is involved?

Based on a story about the corporate sponsorships behind the MAHA Summit in Washington next week, we're about to find out.

Politico reports (HT: Jasmine Nisar):

Walmart, America's biggest retailer and a leading purveyor of the ultraprocessed [sic] foods MAHA decries, is among the sponsors. So are two artificial intelligence giants, OpenAI and Anthropic, whose chief executives recently asked Washington to regulate them in order to prevent their tools from wiping out humanity.

In exchange, they'll get to attend a private dinner with summit speakers, which include Health and Human Services Department officials. Other sponsors are less well known, but also have interests before Kennedy's health department, including makers of psychedelic drugs, diagnostics technologies and peptides that need government approval.

We can borrow a phrase from Faye Flam to reflect the conventional view of the above as tainted by the influence of ... industr[y].

The conventional view is half-wrong and half-right, but everything bad about lobbying is a direct result of the government improperly interfering with markets via regulation.

First, here's where Flam and many, many others go wrong:

Honest companies facing government regulation sometimes have no choice but to lobby just to survive, as Ayn Rand once argued of the railroads:

The best illustration of the general confusion on the subject of business and government can be found in [Stewart] Holbrook's The Story of American Railroads. On page 231, Mr. Holbrook writes:

Almost from the first, too, the railroads had to undergo the harassments of politicians and their catchpoles, or to pay blackmail in one way or another. The method was almost sure-fire; the politico, usually a member of a state legislature, thought up some law or regulation that would be costly or awkward to the railroads in his state. He then put this into the form of a bill, talked loudly about it, about how it must pass if the sovereign people were to be protected against the monster railroad, and then waited for some hireling of the railroad to dissuade him by a method as old as man. There is record of as many as thirty-five bills that would harass railroads being introduced at one sitting of one legislature.

And the same Mr. Holbrook in the same book just four pages later (pages 235-236) writes:

In short, by 1870, to pick an arbitrary date, railroads had become, as only too many orators of the day pointed out, a law unto themselves. They had bought United States senators and congressmen, just as they bought rails and locomotives -- with cash. They owned whole legislatures, and often the state courts .... To call the roads of 1870 corrupt is none too strong a term.

The connection between these two statements and the conclusion to be drawn from them has, apparently, never occurred to Mr. Holbrook. It is the railroads that he blames and calls "corrupt." Yet what could the railroads do, except try to "own whole legislatures," if these legislatures held the power of life or death over them? What could the railroads do, except resort to bribery, if they wished to exist at all? Who was to blame and who was "corrupt" -- the businessmen who had to pay "protection money" for the right to remain in business -- or the politicians who held the power to sell that right? (from "Notes on the History of American Free Enterprise," in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, by Ayn Rand) [bold added]

It is wrong to tar a business for lobbying, completely devoid of context.

And when is it right? (And where is the conventional wisdom half-right?)

Any dishonest enterprise hoping to gain the appearance of legitimacy by obtaining a government imprimatur via lobbying does deserve the blame, from those that wish to sell nostrums -- like many sponsors at this "summit" obviously hope to do -- all the way up to regulatory capture.

As the sponsorship of Walmart indicates, there will be mixed cases. This is also unsurprising. So many American businessmen are pragmatists that they will not turn down the opportunity to make money off of fools if it is legal to do so.

None of the above is particularly newsworthy, but there is an interesting wrinkle: Until a crank was appointed head of the Department of Health and Human Services, a huckster had to hope for some kind of workaround to being held up to scientific standards. That is, he needed the government to help him pass as a legitimate actor. Now, those standards are being actively undermined. For a time, "peptide" pushers may well gain an unearned patina of legitimacy by courting the likes of Bobby Kennedy, Jr.

But just as professional medical associations are calling into question recent changes in the CDC's vaccine recommendations, so will others notice what is going on, and, unless sound standards return (or the government forces people to accept its garbage -- See the field of nutrition.) the value of lobbying the government in that area may well decline.

-- CAV