Congressman Henry Waxman is one of the most odious statists in a town dominated by people who love big government. From his perch as Chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, this career politician played a big role in concocting Obamacare – including the costly provisions that will burden the business community and undermine job […]

George Orwell’s Animal Farm is famous for showing how the revolutionary zeal of the animals begins to wane after they take over the farm and the slogan “All animals are equal” is eventually amended by adding “But some animals are more equal than others.” The same is true for the American government. Investor’s Business Daily […]

My previous post dealing with whether citizenship should be automatic for babies born to illegals generated a lot of commentary, so it is with some trepidation that I wade back into the issue. But the Wall Street Journal column excerpted below seems to strike exactly the right chord and should (at least I think!) meet […]

I shudder to think how many American politicians and bureaucrats squandered our tax dollars by attending the enivornmental boondoggle in Copenhagen last December, but the behavior of one EPA official is a perfect illustration of how the political elite have no intention of abiding by the rules they want to impose on the rest of […]

I don’t know what’s more laughable, the fact that some EU bureaucracy is creating an 80-minute poem (with dancing, no less), or that the “low-grade bank clerk” who masquerades as the European Council President is going to publish a a book of haiku poems. But only one item is objectionable, and that’s the latter since […]

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, my Cato Institute colleague Alan Reynolds offers a simple economics lesson about pitfalls of class-warfare tax policy:  …the evidence is clear that when marginal tax rates go up, the amount of reported incomes goes down. Economists call that “the elasticity of taxable income” (ETI), and measure it by examining […]

This chart, published in the New York Times and based on work by Andrew Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute, shows the states with the most serious debt problems. Maybe I don’t follow state issues closely enough, but I was surprised to find that Alaska had the most debt and that California was not very […]

No, that’s not the name of a new TV series. We should be so lucky. Instead, it’s a good description of the government’s approach to tobacco. Instead of letting adults make up their own minds about costs and benefits of risky choices (which includes most things in life, such as crossing a street and eating […]

Tom Palmer of the Altas Network has a very concise – yet quite devastating – video exposing the Keynesian fallacy that the destruction of wealth by calamaties such as earthquakes or terrorism is good for economic growth. Tom cites the work of Bastiat, who sagely observed that, “There is only one difference between a bad […]