by Dan Mitchell | Jun 5, 2016 | Big Government, Blogs, Welfare and Entitlements
Like America’s Founders, I like constitutional constraints on government and dislike untrammeled majoritarianism. So my gut instinct is to reject Swiss-style direct democracy as a governing system. Yet I have to give credit to the Swiss people for being very sensible...
by Dan Mitchell | Jun 4, 2016 | Big Government, Blogs
Socialism is a very bad concept. It deserves mockery rather than respect. But that’s true of all statist ideologies. Last year, as part of a column on the collapse of the Soviet Empire, I put together a statism spectrum showing the degree to which various nations...
by Dan Mitchell | Jun 3, 2016 | Bailouts, Blogs, Health Care
At the risk of understatement, Obamacare is a mess. It’s been bad for taxpayers, bad for consumers, and bad for healthcare. It’s even been bad for some of the special interest groups that backed the legislation. The big insurance companies supported the law, for...
by Dan Mitchell | Jun 2, 2016 | Blogs, Tax Competition, Taxation
I wonder whether October 3, 1913, was the worst day in American history. That’s when one of America’s worst presidents signed into law the income tax. The top rate was only 7 percent when Woodrow Wilson approved the income tax, and the tax only applied to the very...
by Dan Mitchell | Jun 1, 2016 | Big Government, Blogs, Taxation
Who is the worst President in U.S. history? No, regardless of polling data, the answer is not Barack Obama. Or even Jimmy Carter. Those guys are amateurs. At the bottom of the list is probably Woodrow Wilson, who gave us both the income tax and the Federal Reserve....
