by Bob Barr | Aug 25, 2026 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily CallerDemocrat Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, believe it or not, has a valid point: should the country’s biggest real estate players be allowed to prevent American citizens from simply looking at which homes are even for sale? It’s hard enough to find an affordable home on the market today — should the available inventory now sit behind a paywall, too?Unfortunately, that’s exactly the situation today for potential homebuyers.The nation’s largest brokerage, Compass, and the dominant multiple listing service (MLS) in the Chicago area — Midwest Real Estate Data (MRED) — are working in cahoots to wall off listings behind a private, pay-to-see network.If lawmakers don’t step in, it will be only a matter of time before the practice spreads to listings nationwide.Warren sent a letter demanding answers, with a deadline of Aug. 21. As of this writing, and to no surprise, there has been no public indication that either company has responded. Wisconsin Republican Rep. Scott Fitzgerald, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee, sent a similar letter in July with an Aug. 5 deadline, asking Compass and MRED to brief subcommittee staff by that date; however, Compass never confirmed it would do so.The ball is now in the Trump administration’s hands — specifically the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission — to do something.For decades, MLS databases have been the shared bulletin board of the real estate world, and have worked like this: A real estate agent posts a house on the board, other agents immediately see it, and it soon appears on Zillow, Redfin, and other sites. Without this open-source board, it is virtually impossible for potential homebuyers to know what’s for sale.In...
by Bob Barr | May 9, 2025 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily CallerPresident Trump is right to make lowering drug prices one of his priorities. American consumers are sick of paying two, three, even five times more for medications than the prices outside our borders. A proposal the Administration is considering, however, threatens to make the problem much worse. It is true that the United States is in effect subsidizing the rest of the world’s drug costs. Since countries like Canada and France, with economies that are overtly socialist, impose strict government price caps on drugmakers, pharmaceutical companies charge Americans more to make up the difference – a situation that is neither fair nor free-market.So, when the Trump Administration reportedly began soliciting proposals to implement a so-called “Most Favored Nation” (“MFN”) policy for pharmaceuticals, it understandably attracted attention. On the surface, the move to a pharmaceutical most-favored-nation strategy sounds like a tough, Trumpian fix. In reality, it represents the same, discredited and dangerous idea the Left has been pushing for years, just repackaged in MAGA talking points.The positive, and practical solution to this inequitable treatment – one that actually is quintessential Trump — is to stop subsidizing drugmakers who treat American consumers like suckers and view our vast pharmaceutical market as a bottomless piggy bank. The problem is, no Big Pharma company wants to give up the substantial federal research dollars, tax credits, and government contracts now provided by Uncle Sam. The one action that would cause Big Pharma to stand up and take notice would be for the Trump Administration to seriously threaten to cut off that largess unless Big Pharma starts treating American consumers as fairly as it treats foreign governments. This actually could start to solve the problem...
by Bob Barr | Mar 19, 2025 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily CallerPresident Donald Trump’s planned executive order to bolster U.S. shipbuilding acknowledges a hard truth: China is winning the global economic battle, at least in the maritime sector. The U.S. defeated Japan in the Pacific theater of World War Two in large part because we could pump out new ships faster than the Japanese could sink them. America even flaunted its superior industrial base by launching vessels that served no purpose beyond boosting morale — most famously a floating ice cream factory. Today, however, our primary global adversary, China, has 200 times the shipbuilding capacity of the United States, giving Beijing a significant advantage in any naval war of attrition. While the fact sheet accompanying Trump’s E.O. accurately notes that China achieved its “position of dominance in the global market through unfair non-market practices,” this isn’t a simple case of socialism versus capitalism. Unfair or not, it is a very real and serious problem we must acknowledge and confront.Ironically, American companies have a much harder time building anything than their counterparts in communist China. Not only do American shipyards face much stricter environmental reviews than many foreign competitors, but they also face the one-two punch of expansive regulations and organized labor. Instead of addressing workplace health and safety concerns through our legal tort system or through collective bargaining with workers, shipbuilding companies (and manufacturers of all stripes) are forced to spend billions — and years — complying with invasive government rules. These in turn create an elevated “floor” that serves as the new starting point for each future labor negotiation.Neither side in this geo-political contest is abiding by free-market principles. The difference is that while China stimulated its shipbuilding industry with state...
by Bob Barr | Mar 6, 2025 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily CallerIn his first few weeks in office, President Donald Trump has been busy bolstering the causes of energy choice and freedom for citizens of the United States. One of his first official acts was to pull us out of the Paris Climate Accord, the one-sided agreement that had imposed harsh and unfair restrictions on the United States. Trump created a new National Energy Council led by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, charged with streamlining energy permitting, expanding gas and oil exploration, and establishing American global “energy dominance.” Then, to round off his first day as our 47th President, he signed an executive order aimed at eliminating Biden’s “electric vehicle mandate” — shorthand for a series of subsidies and regulations aimed at artificially boosting demand for EVs. Some of these measures, such as rolling back the EV tax credit, will at some point require congressional action. Moreover, even with Republicans controlling both houses of Congress, those who disagree with energy choice and Trump’s energy freedom movements still have plenty of options at their disposal to push their “green” agenda forward. One side-door tactic would be to use “blue state” legislatures to advance policies that would stand little if any chance of passing congressional muster. Vermont and New York already have passed “climate superfund” legislation, and similar bills are pending in other states. Putting a price tag on a particular company’s contribution to the damage supposedly caused by climate change is a murky endeavor at best, and fraudulent at worst. As climate policy analyst Paul Driessen notes, climate activists are all too happy to “blame fossil fuels for heat waves, cold spells, hurricanes, wildfires (including those caused by arsonists, electric companies and forest mismanagement), floods,...
by Bob Barr | Jan 17, 2025 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily CallerIt needs to be said loud and clear: murder is not a “policy choice.” Grotesquely, however, socialized medicine advocates are taking advantage of the December 4th slaying in New York City of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson to press their policy agenda. A Generation Lab poll released last week found that 50% of college students — a demographic largely conditioned by social media — viewed accused killer Luigi Mangione either “extremely” or “somewhat” favorably. Only 19% thought the same of Thompson. In the background of such disinformation are such books as “Deadly Spin: An Insurance Company Insider Speaks Out on How Corporate PR Is Killing Health Care and Deceiving Americans,” by Wendell Potter, Cigna’s former Vice President of Corporate Communications. In 2024, Cigna was the sixth-largest health insurance company in America, with $195 billion in revenue.Among other things, the book instructed health executives how to survive an “ambush” interview by leftwing documentary propagandist Michael Moore, whose 2007 film “Sicko” praised Fidel Castro’s communist medical system, and itself became a major impetus for the 2010 passage of the increasingly troubled Obamacare system.As Peter Suderman wrote last month in Reason Magazine, Obamacare’s high costs to participants hit hard because “it required coverage of a slew of federally mandated essential health benefits, regardless of whether those benefits were needed or wanted.” Then, a spendthrift Congress (one of many) uncapped benefit subsidies in 2021 with the “American Rescue Plan Act” during the COVID-19 pandemic, and again in 2022 with the “Inflation Reduction Act.” Those actions allowed “households making up to $350,000 a year in some cases, to obtain subsidized coverage, at a cost of about $30 billion to $40 billion annually.” The subsidies expire at the end...
by Bob Barr | Dec 26, 2024 | Daily Caller Article |
Daily CallerWriter Greg Steinmetz titled his 2015 book chronicling the life of Sixteenth Century German financier Jacob Fugger, “The Richest Man Who Ever Lived.” Whether a biography centuries from now will describe Elon Musk in similarly grandiose terms, as his contemporaries we will never know. Suffice to say, however, that this richest of men in this first quarter of the 21st Century will have left his mark as one of the era’s most influential individuals.Elon Musk actually shares much in common with Jacob Fugger, notwithstanding their very different geopolitical worlds. Both Fugger and Musk are risk-takers. Both are bold and self-assured. As noted by Fugger’s biographer, the German money lender was bold to the point of being imperious. Even more to the point perhaps, while Fugger is described by Steinmetz as one of the true architects of modern capitalism, Musk is one its most apt students, having parlayed a sound upbringing in South Africa into a business empire the components of which touch virtually every sector of government and business around the world (and beyond); including most notably the social media giant X (formerly Twitter), Tesla as the world’s preeminent proponent of electric-powered vehicles, and SpaceX which is leading the long-overdue revitalization of America’s space effort. Fugger in his time was despised by components of what we would today accurately describe as The Establishment, especially the then-massively powerful Roman Catholic Church. In fact, Fugger’s exercise of his financial prowess and power brought the Pope to his knees and forced the Church to reverse centuries of dogma and permit what had previously been officially taboo – charging interest for loans. In our time, Musk has come...
