I’m a big fan of school choice. If we bust up the government education monopoly and create a competitive education market, we’ll get a much better education system at much lower cost. This isn’t just idle theorizing. The evidence shows that competition produces better results. That will be especially good news for children from poor […]

Sometimes you find support for capitalism and small government in some rather unexpected places. I was surprised, for instance, when I found out that Gene Simmons, the lead singer for Kiss, stated that, “Capitalism is the best thing that ever happened to human beings. The welfare state sounds wonderful but it doesn’t work.” That’s pretty […]

Maybe it’s because I have a bit of a old-fashioned moralistic streak to me, but I viscerally object to the notion that good people should pay bad people not to do bad things. That’s why, a few years ago, I didn’t react favorably when the former dictator of Libya asked for several billion dollars per […]

Back in 2010, I guest-hosted Larry Kudlow’s CNBC program for a couple of days. During one of the segments on my last show, I crossed swords with the other host, Simon Hobbs, as we argued whether patients needlessly died because of the government-run healthcare system in the United Kingdom. Since neither one of us had […]

One of the challenges of good entitlement reform (or even bad entitlement reform) is that recipients think they’ve “earned” benefits. If you tell them that programs such as Medicare are unsustainable and need to be changed, some of them suspect you’re trying to somehow cheat them. After all, they were forced to cough up payroll […]

I’ve shared several videos that make the case against Obamacare. Here’s one narrated by a Dutch woman warning that America shouldn’t repeat the mistakes of European government-run healthcare. Here’s one from Reason TV about how free markets produce lower healthcare costs. Here’s one explaining the need to deal with the government-caused third-party-payer crisis. And I […]

If I had to identify a “least-favorite” international bureaucracy, it almost certainly would be the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The OECD doesn’t waste as much money as the United Nations, it might not cause as much macroeconomic instability as the International Monetary Fund, and it presumably doesn’t produce as much bad research […]

As we get closer to the debt limit, the big spenders in Washington are becoming increasingly hysterical about the supposed possibility of default if politicians lose the ability to borrow more money. I testified yesterday to the Joint Economic Committee on “The Economic Costs of Debt-Ceiling Brinkmanship” and I explained (reiterating points I made back […]

We have an amazing man-bites-dog story today. Let’s begin with some background information. A member of the European Commission recently warned that: “Tax increases imposed by the Socialist-led government in France have reached a “fatal level”…[and] that a series of tax hikes since the Socialists took power 14 months ago – including €33bn in new […]