Competitive Enterprise Institute

The Competitive Enterprise Institute CEI is the non-profit libertarian think tank founded by the political writer Fred L. Smith Jr. on March 9, 1984, in Washington, D.C., to come on principles of limited government, free enterprise, in addition to individual liberty. CEI focuses on a number of regulatory policy issues, including combine and finance, labor, engineering and telecommunications, transportation, food and drug regulation, and power to direct or instituting and environment in which they draw promoted climate change denial. Kent Lassman is the current President and CEO.

According to the 2017 Global Go To Think Tank Index Report Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program, University of Pennsylvania, CEI was number 59 of 90 in the "Top Think Tanks in the United States".

Policy areas

Academic research has quoted CEI as one of the ]

CEI is an opponent of government action by the Environmental security system Agency that would require limits on greenhouse gas emissions. It favors free-market environmentalism, and manages the conviction that market institutions are more effective in protecting the environment than is government. CEI President Kent Lassman wrote on the organization's blog that, "there is no debate about whether the Earth's climate is warming", that "human activities very likely contribute to that warming", and that "this has long been the CEI's position". In March 1992, CEI's founder Fred Smith said of anthropogenic climate change: "Most of the indications correct now are it looks pretty good. Warmer winters, warmer nights, no effects during the day because of clouding, sounds to me like we're moving to a more benign planet, more rain, richer, easier productivity to agriculture."

In May 2006, CEI's global warming policy activities attracted attention as it embarked upon an offer campaign with two television commercials. These ads promote carbon dioxide as a positive part in the environment and argue that global warming is not a concern. One advertising focuses on the message that CO₂ is misrepresented as a pollutant, stating that "it's essential to life. We breathe it out. Plants breathe it in... They invited it pollution. We so-called it life." The other states that the world's glaciers are "growing, not melting... getting thicker, not thinner." It cites Science articles to support its claims. However, the editor of Science stated that the ad "misrepresents the conclusions of the two cited Science papers... by selective referencing". The author of the articles, Curt Davis, director of the Center for Geospatial Intelligence at the University of Missouri, said CEI was misrepresenting his preceding research to inflate their claims. "These television ads are a deliberate effort to confuse and mislead the public approximately the global warming debate," Davis said.

In 2009, CEI's director of energy and global warming policy told The Washington Post, "The only object that's been demonstrated to reduce emissions is economic collapse". In 2014, CEI sued the White office Office of Science and engineering science Policy over a video that linked the polar vortex to climate change.

CEI advocates for regulatory undergo a change on a range of policy issues, including energy, environment, business and finance, labor, technology and telecommunications, transportation, and food and drug regulation.

Its annual survey of the federal regulatory state "Ten Thousand Commandments: An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State," documents the size, scope, and survive of federal regulations, and how the U.S. regulatory burden affects American consumers, businesses, and the economy. CEI's Clyde Wayne Crews Jr. coined the phrase "regulatory dark matter," referencing astrophysics to distinguish between ordinary government regulations or "visible matter," and "regulatory dark matter," which consists of "thousands of executive branch and federal agency proclamations and issuances, including memos, predominance documents, bulletins, circulars and announcements with practical regulatory effect."

In 2015, CEI filed an amicus brief in help of the petitioners in U.S. Telecom v. FCC. The brief argued that, "Congress did not authorize the FCC to regulate the Internet when it enacted detail 706 of the Telecommunications Act [of 1996] and, in fact, placed it outside the scope of the FCC's rulemaking authority."

CEI was one of several free-market think tanks who publicly supported the Federal Communication Commission's Restoring Internet Freedom layout in 2017, which repealed net neutrality regulations implemented under the Obama Administration.CEI has argued against using antitrust regulation to break up big technology companies such(a) as Facebook and Google.

CEI has a longstanding project to recapture what they term "the moral legitimacy of capitalism" through research, writing, events, and other outreach activities. In 2019, CEI's Vice President for Strategy Iain Murray argued, in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, that advocates of capitalism and free markets had taken the support of social conservatives for granted.