No matter how much I pontificate about Washington corruption, there’s no way I can get across the true extent of the DC establishment’s self-serving behavior. Washington is rich because government is big and the beneficiaries of this system are enjoying their status as America’s new gilded class. It’s even gotten to the point where children and other family members also put […]
read more...On several occasions, I’ve observed that the poverty rate in America was steadily falling, but that progress came to a halt in the mid-1960s when the government declared a War on Poverty. And I almost always included a chart showing the annual poverty rate over several decades. Moreover, I posted graphs showing how government programs trap people in dependency because of very high implicit […]
read more...Ukraine is in the news and that’s not a good thing. I’m not a foreign policy expert, to be sure, but it can’t be a positive sign when nations with nuclear weapons start squabbling with each other. And that’s what’s happening now that Russia is supposedly occupying Crimea and perhaps other parts of Ukraine and […]
read more...Like John Stossel and Thomas Sowell, I’m not a big fan of the Federal Reserve. It’s not just that I’m a libertarian who fantasizes about the denationalization of money. I also think the Fed hasn’t done a good job, even by its own metrics. There’s very little doubt, for instance, that easy-money policies last decade played a major role in creating the housing […]
read more...An underwhelming proposal.
read more...Time for another great moment in red tape. I wrote a couple of weeks ago that banks treat customers poorly in part because of bad laws and regulations from Washington. Money laundering laws were adopted beginning about 30 years ago based on the theory that we could lower crime rates by making it more difficult for crooks […]
read more...One of my goals is to convince people that even small differences in long-run growth can have a powerful impact on living standards and societal prosperity. In other words, the economy is not a fixed pie. The right policies, such as free markets and small government, can create a better life for everybody. And bad policy, […]
read more...There’s an ongoing debate about Keynesian economics, stimulus spending, and various versions of fiscal austerity, and regular readers know I do everything possible to explain that you can promote added prosperity by reducing the burden of government spending. Simply stated, we get more jobs, output, and growth when resources are allocated by competitive markets. But when resources are allocated […]
read more...If I banged my head against the wall every time politicians advocated bad policy in Washington – which is a tempting impulse, I would have been institutionalized because of brain damage a long time ago. But it’s difficult to maintain my self control when I think about minimum wage laws. All sentient human beings should know […]
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