New data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that only 7.2 percent of private-sector workers belong to unions, which makes sense since unions behave in a myopic fashion and undermine competitiveness (and thus reduce jobs in the long run). On the other had,…
Dan Mitchell
Daniel J. Mitchell is the President of the Center for Freedom and Prosperity and the Center for Freedom and Prosperity Foundation. Dr. Mitchell advocates limited government and fundamental tax reform, and is the nation’s leading opponent of tax harmonization schemes developed by the Brussels-based European Union, the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and the United Nations.
In addition to fiscal policy, Dr. Mitchell is a trenchant observer of economic developments and an expert on Social Security reform – particularly the fiscal policy impact of reform and what the US can learn from other nations that have created personal retirement accounts.
Good Advice for Republicans from Tom Sowell.
I’ve always been mystified by GOP politicians, pollsters, and consultants who argue that the GOP needs to support big government in order to win votes. The biggest victories for Republicans in living memory, after all, are the 1980 and 1994 landslides, when the…
Replace TSA Incompetence with Market Efficiency.
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…
Statism Update from Brussels.
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…
Sometimes the French Oppose Harmonization
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…
Germany Opposes EU-Wide Tax
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…
The American People Reject Big Government.
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….
An Omen for America?
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…
Sounds Like the School Bureaucrats Need Counseling, not the Student.
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,…
Omen for Massachusetts?
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…