President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday aimed at slashing regulations on American small businesses.
The order will expand regulatory review with the goal of dramatically peeling back federal regulations. The order is the Trump administration’s first step in repealing two regulations for every new regulation put forth, CNBC reports.
The measure also sets a $0 budget for new regulations in 2017, and a cap on the cost of any new regulations going forward. Once in effect, it will require federal agencies to propose any new regulatory rules to the White House for official review.
[…]By signing the order, Trump is following through on his campaign promise to put a moratorium on any new regulations when he takes office. Trump also promised to end “all unnecessary regulations” imposed on the energy industry and to “dismantle” the 2,300-page Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.
It’s good Trump!
Last week, there was another executive order designed to halt pending regulations.
The Washington Free Beacon reports that so far, Trump has halted $181 Billion (with a B) in regulatory costs:
In one of his first acts as president, Donald Trump effectively halted nearly $200 billion worth of regulations, according to a new analysis.
President Trump has taken aggressive action to curb regulations in his first week, promising to cut 75 percent or “maybe more,” and signing an executive order Monday to cut two regulations from the books when every new rule is introduced.
The first move came in the form of a memo to all federal agencies from Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, freezing all recently finalized and pending regulations. The American Action Forum, a center-right policy institute, found the action resulted in stopping rules that would cost the economy $181 billion.
Getting rid of regulations is important, because it frees up small businesses to put more resources on expanding and job creation. Most jobs are created by small businesses, and they are definitely complaining more lately about being overregulated.
Startups have been on the decline for 30 years, and I have written frequently on some of the possible reasons. One big open question: To what extent is government regulation playing a role in that decline? A blog post by Scott Shane, professor of Entrepreneurial Studies at Case Western Reserve University, offers a few data points that suggest rules and red tape could be hindering business formation. He notes, for instance, small business owners are complaining more about regulation than they have in the past — twice as much as in the 1980s, for instance. And this:
Over the past three-and-a-half decades, federal regulation has been rising, while new business creation has been falling, as the chart above indicates. Researchers at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the Hudson Institute, the Hoover Institution and the Heritage Foundation believe the pattern is more than a coincidence. The per capita rate of new employer business creation and number of rules pages in the Federal Register — a common measure of the scope of federal regulation — correlate -0.67 over the 1977 to 2012 period. Similarly, the per capita rate of business creation and the number of pages in the Code of Federal Regulation — another frequently used estimate of government rulemaking — correlate -0.78 over the same period. (A correlation of 1.00 means that two numbers move in perfect concert.)
Correlation may not prove correlation, but it can provide a helpful lead on where to look for the problem.
Trump’s focus seems to be to get job creation started again by lifting the tax and regulatory burdens on those who create jobs. That’s a very different focus than his predecessor.
Man helping a woman with proper handgun marksmanship
Dalrock blogged a splendid post about people who claim that there is a shortage of “good men”. He says that if there really were a shortage of good men, then people who want women to actually get married would be telling women not to delay marriage, but to instead get serious about marrying early, when their ability to attract a man is at its peak.
Dalrock writes:
We can see the same pattern in Dr. John Piper’s recent post Why Are Women More Eager Missionaries?* Piper explains that missionary work has become a pink ghetto:
…the actual situation among most evangelical faith missions is that between 80–85% of all single missionaries are women. It is a rare thing, like two out of every ten, for a single man to make missions his life’s vocation, which results in the overall statistics being that one-third of those in evangelical world missions are married men, one-third are married women, and 80 percent of the last third are single women. Which means that something just less than two-thirds of the total missionary force are women.
Piper’s main concern with the post however is not that there aren’t enough single men doing missionary work, but that women who choose this field aren’t marrying as they would like. Piper complains that the problem for husband hunting missionary women is really an exacerbated version of the same problem all Christian women have, and that is an overall lack of marriageable Christian men…
I’ll save you the quotation of Piper, but his reason why missionary women struggle to find husbands is – SHOCK! – that Christian men refuse to man up. I.e – Piper believes that there are not enough marriage-ready, marriage-minded men.
More:
But if Piper actually believed… that there was a severe shortage of husband material men, he would focus his attention on helping the women reading navigate this incredibly difficult situation. Overseas mission work may feel empowering for young women, but (according to Piper) single women going into the mission field are greatly handicapping their prospects in an already bleak field. His advice to young women would be to choose which was truly more important to them, being a missionary or finding a husband.
If Piper really believed that there were a shortage of marriage-minded, marriage-capable Christian men, then Piper would be counseling women who genuinely want to marry to make marriage a priority when they are younger, prettier and more fertile. Some women say that they want to get married “some day”, but the truth is that they want fun and thrills until they get tired of it, and they just expect a suitable man to show up right when they need one – even if the things a man wants in a woman are all gone.
So who is to blame if missionary women can’t find husbands?
Piper even tells a story which would be a perfect way to teach this lesson. He describes a single woman named Gladys Aylward who went to a place where she found no marriageable men, and then blamed single men for not following her and proposing marriage:
“Miss Aylward talked to the Lord about her singleness. She was a no-nonsense woman in very direct and straightforward ways and she asked God to call a man from England, send him straight out to China, straight to where she was, and have him propose to me.” I can’t forget the next line. Elisabeth Elliot said, “With a look of even deeper intensity, she shook her little bony finger in my face and said, ‘Elisabeth, I believe God answers prayer. And he called him.’” And here there was a brief pause of intense whisper. She said, “‘He called him, and he never came.’”
Now, that experience, I would guess, is not unique to Gladys Aylward.
If Piper really believed that Christian husbands were scarce, he would be sharing this anecdote to warn young women of the foolishness of moving away from the pool of men they hope to choose a husband from and then expecting God to send the man of their choosing across the world to propose. If we were in a culture of scarcity of good men, this would be the obvious lesson from this story. But we live in an age with unshakable confidence that good men are not only available all around us, but will always be abundant. If Piper believed that the husband Miss Aylward was praying for was surrounded by real life English women eager to win him as a husband, this story wouldn’t be complaining about why he didn’t drop everything, fly to China, and propose to a woman he had never met. If Piper believed that the man was sought after as a husband in England, he would be pointing out the foolishness of Miss Aylward flying off to China and then wondering why a man she had never met didn’t show up to propose once she decided she wanted to marry.
Now to be fair, in Miss Aylward’s case, she almost certainly did a lot more good as a missionary than she would have achieved with a marriage. She was not pursuing fun and thrills, she really was making a difference. Still, it was neither rational nor prudent to think that the odds of meeting a Christian man were very good in China. She either needed to accept that being a missionary in a secular country meant not marrying, or she needed to focus on marriage first when she was attractive to men as a life partner. (Many women are propositioned for sex as they age, but few of them are asked to marry) As homeschooling mom “That Mom” points out on her blog, having an influence through marriage and parenting is not compatible with the irresponsible thrill-seeking hedonism championed by impractical pastors like Francis Chan.
But some missionaries really are delaying marriage for frivolous reasons. The 33-year-old missionary woman I know keeps telling all her advisers that she wants to get married “some day”. Her last two boyfriends were both penniless students in their late 20s, who had never worked a full-time job in their entire lives. She feels that there is no need to prepare herself for the roles of wife and mother, either. Her negative $20,000 net worth? No problem. The 5-year gap in her resume? No problem. Her chorus of advisers tell her that God will give her a husband right on cue. A husband who won’t insist that a wife have chastity, sobriety, self-control, financial responsibility, beauty or fertility.
What men want in a wife and mother apparently has no importance whatsoever to women today. And women have no appreciation of how investing in a husband early causes him to be loyal to her when she is older. Women think that a husband will show up when she is ready, and be loyal to her even though she was absent during the hardships of the first decade of his career. Fun and thrills in your 20s are more important than helping a man through the difficult battles of his early career. Just show up when you are 35 -unchaste, wrinkly and infertile – and reap the rewards of his unassisted earning and saving.
Why do men like John Piper mislead women about the feasibility of their emotion-driven plans? Answer: because they fear women’s reactions to disagreement. Men are easier to criticize than women, because men are trained to take it, and not to show their emotions. Practically speaking, whenever a woman anoints her emotions as God speaking to her, her plan almost never works out. But it takes courage to tell a woman to make plans with her mind, instead of with her feelings.
I expect women today to disrespect male advisers, even those with proven ability, because we live in an age of radical feminism where even Christian women who deny feminism act as if they were radical feminists. But it’s not just men who are disrespected. Many women don’t even respect older women with proven ability (See Titus 2:3-5). They just block experts out and find advisers with no proven ability, but who agree with them.
There are four posts in the series, so far. I think Allen might be done, so I’m going to link to all four and snip something I like from each one.
The first post is on whether the fine-tuning is real, and whether a multiverse explains the fine-tuning so that there is no need for a cosmic Designer.
I just have to choose this quote from the atheist Stephen Hawking on the fine-tuning:
The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers [i.e. the constants of physics] seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life. For example, if the electric charge of the electron had been only slightly different, stars would have been unable to burn hydrogen and helium, or else they would not have exploded. It seems clear that there are relatively few ranges of values for the numbers [i.e. the constants of nature] that would allow for development of any form of intelligent life.
And from Luke Barnes, who I’ve mentioned before on this blog:
In my years of researching this topic, I’m amazed at how few scientists who have studied the fine-tuning details disagree with this core claim that the subset of life-permitting physics is a tiny fraction among possibilities. Since Luke Barnes is a top researcher on this topic, consider his input on the level of acceptance of the fine-tuning claim: “I’ve published a review of the scientific literature, 200+ papers, and I can only think of a handful that oppose this conclusion, and piles and piles that support it.[3]”
And on the multiverse as a way to escape the fine-tuning:
The key issue though is that for the multiverse to be an adequate explanation for the fine-tuning it requires the conjunction of several hypotheses for which we lack any empirical evidence:
A universe-generating mechanism that generates a plethora of universes
That this mechanism doesn’t itself require fine-tuning
The many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics
The ability to widely vary constants in those universes. If you think that it’s a foregone conclusion that String Theory/M-Theory[8] will come to the rescue in this area, you should watch this video clip by Oxford physicist Roger Penrose where he exclaims that “it’s not even a theory … it’s a collection of hopes”.
Occam’s razor therefore does seem to favor design over the multiverse. When one accounts for the extensive problems in affirming premise 2 and how these multiverse theories make predictions incompatible with our universe, the hypothesis that God designed the physics of the universe to bring about life is more plausible.
Here’s the second post, where he explains the fine-tuning argument philosophically, and gives an example of one of the constants that has to be fine-tuned in order to support complex, embodied intelligence of any kind.
The cosmological constant:
The inference to design will be more easily recognized if we shed some light as to the specialness of the required values. Consider the size of the bull’s eye and wall based on just 1 parameter – the cosmological constant. There is a natural range for possible values for this constant because there are known contributions that are 10120times larger than the overall net value. (There is a near perfect but inexact cancellation of contributions accurate to 120 decimal places). Let’s use the most conservative numbers in the physics literature that indicate a fine-tuning to 1 part in 1053. If the cosmological constant, which governs the expansion rate of the universe, had been larger than its current value by this tiny fraction, then the universe would have expanded so fast that no stars or planets would have formed and therefore no life. If the value were smaller by this amount then the universe would have rapidly collapsed before the universe cooled sufficiently to allow for stable information storage which is required by any self-replicating system such as life.
In the third post, he responds to objections to the fine-tuning argument. One objection you hear from atheists who don’t understand the science is that any selection of constants and quantities is as likely as any other, so our life-permitting set is just random. Now, first off, there are only 10 to the 80 atoms in the visible universe, so if the cosmological constant is fine-tuned to 1 in 10 to the 120, it’s not rational to say “it just happened randomly”.
But here is Allen’s response:
However, the assumption that any set of constants is just as likely as any other is the very thing that we want to know. Starting off with that as an assumption begs the question against design. As Luke Barnes articulates in this excellent podcast dealing with responses to the fine-tuning claim, suppose we’re playing poker and every time I deal I get a royal flush. If this continues to happen, you become increasingly convinced that I’m likely to be cheating. If I responded to an accusation of cheating by just saying “well any set of 5 cards is just as likely as any other so you can’t accuse me of cheating” you would be rational to reject this explanation. The question is not “how likely is any set of 5 cards?” but rather “how likely is it I’m cheating if I just dealt myself 10 straight royal flushes?” This question accounts for the possibility that I’m cheating which would almost certainly be true in this scenario. So the right fine-question is “given the fine-tuning evidence, how likely is it that the constants were set at random?” The values for physical constants conform to a very particular pattern – that which supports life. The fact that we have so many finely-tuned constants makes it unlikely that they were all set at random (at least in the single universe scenario and I’ve already shown some of the problems/challenges in multiverse explanations.)
Every 5-card hand that you draw is equally unlikely, but the royal flush is the highest hand in the game and always wins. Every hand you draw is unlikely, but whatever you draw is overwhelmingly likely to not be a royal flush.
Finally, the fourth post deals with the objection that the constants and quantities could not have been other than they are.
He quotes physicist John Barrow giving 5 reasons why the constants can vary, and then this:
Even if the constants and laws of physics couldn’t vary, there is even more reason to think that there were many physically possible sets of initial conditions. Paul Davies states this emphatically:
“Even if the laws of physics were unique, it doesn’t follow that the physical universe itself is unique…the laws of physics must be augmented by cosmic initial conditions…there is nothing in present ideas about ‘laws of initial conditions’ remotely to suggest that their consistency with the laws of physics would imply uniqueness. Far from it…it seems, then, that the physical universe does not have to be the way it is: it could have been otherwise.[4]”
John A. Wheeler agrees: “Never has physics come up with a way to tell with what initial conditions the universe was started off. On nothing is physics clearer than what is not physics.”
The constants and quantities are not determined by physics. They were selected by whoever created nature in the first place.
So that’s the series. I noticed that he kept linking to this Common Sense Atheism podcast featuring famous cosmologist Luke Barnes. I grabbed it to listen this weekend, and you might want to get it, too. It’s over an hour. It seems like it is one stop shopping to understand common objections to the fine-tuning argument, and how strong each one is.
