Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz have a great column in USA Today explaining why we should let private companies be in charge of airline security. As a frequent traveler, I wish this would happen, but governments rarely give up power once they have expanded into a new area: After the underwear bomber’s attempted mass murder, […]
read more...It seems that the European Union’s governing entities, the European Commission and the semi-ceremonial European Parliament, combine the worst features of statism and collectivism from the entire continent. The Euro-crats make lots of noises about subsidiarity and other policies to leave decision making in the hands of national and local governemnts, but it seems every […]
read more...The French government is relentlessly awful in its support for tax harmonization, regulatory harmonization, and other policies to drag other nations into the cesspool of statism. But France’s desire for a one-size-fits-all approach miraculously vanishes when it comes to language. Even though English is now the world’s language, especially for commerce, the French are resorting […]
read more...German politicians are notoriously bad on European issues, almost always pushing for more centralization, harmonization, and bureaucracy. So it is surprising to see that the German government is rejecting a Luxembourg proposal to give the EU a direct source of tax revenue. This may just be a case of a stopped clock being right twice […]
read more...According to a Washington Post story, Obama wants to be the anti-Reagan, a President who permanently changes the American people’s attitude about big government. Obama’s efforts to make statism popular, however, are not exactly working out as he hoped. According to a new Washington Post-ABC poll, the American people have become much more libertarian when […]
read more...This has a similar title to an earlier blog post, but the topic is completely different. The U.K.-based Times has a fascinating story about how tax rates are driving business out of London, thus showing the insanity of class-warfare tax policy. Two excerpts are must reading, though the message will fall on deaf ears at […]
read more...This story from San Diego seems like a typical case of bureaucratic over-reaction. A school vice principal decided that a student’s science project may have been a bomb, so he set in motion events leading to a school evacuation. Without knowing further details, that decision may have been at least somewhat reasonable, but the part […]
read more...As reported by the Financial Times, Sebastian Pinera, the brother of Cato’s Jose Pinera, was elected President of Chile this weekend. The press is viewing Pinera’s election through the right-left lens of Latin American politics, but this is a bit misleading since Chile has remained a very pro-market nation during nearly two decades of supposedly […]
read more...While there is always a tendency in Washington to over-analyze the meaning of elections, I think that we can draw the following conclusions from Scott Brown’s victory: 1. Obamacare is an albatross for the Democrats. The White House wants to blame Coakley for being a bad candidate, but Massachusetts is a very left-wing state. Every […]
read more...