by Dan Mitchell | Dec 1, 2019 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Socialism
Fifty years ago, Venezuela was ranked #10 for economic liberty and enjoyed the highest living standards in Latin America Today, the nation is an economic disaster. Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro deserve much of the blame. Their socialist policies have dropped...
by Dan Mitchell | Nov 30, 2019 | Big Government, Blogs, Taxation, VAT
I wrote yesterday about Japan’s experience with the value-added tax, mostly to criticize the International Monetary Fund. The statist bureaucrats at the IMF are urging a big increase in Japan’s VAT even though the last increase was only imposed two months ago (in a...
by Dan Mitchell | Nov 29, 2019 | Blogs
It seems that the International Monetary Fund and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development have an ongoing contest to see which bureaucracy can be the biggest cheerleader for bad fiscal policy. They compete (OECD vs IMF) to promote more spending. They...
by Dan Mitchell | Nov 28, 2019 | Blogs, Economics, Free Market, Socialism
By global standards, the United States is a bulwark of capitalism. Yes, government is too big and there’s far too much intervention, but we have enough private property and free enterprise to be ranked #5 for economic liberty. Which helps to explain why...
by Dan Mitchell | Nov 27, 2019 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Socialism
In pure socialist systems, governments own and operate companies (the “means of production“). Such an approach also requires central planning and price controls. But you don’t need socialism to have government-controlled companies. There are plenty of “state-owned...
