The U.S. Postal Service has been hemorrhaging money for decades, and it’s not hard to understand why. As a government protected monopoly, the Postal Service cannot adjust to changing market conditions like an ordinary business. In addition, they are often…
Daily Analysis
Government "Inspections" Trump Actually Cleaning Oil
When you’re a government bureaucrat, it’s never a bad time to interrupt people with real jobs, doing real work, in order to apply pointless rules. Rather than deploying all resources to address the oil spill in the Gulf, the Coast Guard has been holding…
Bailouts Discourage Tax Competition Between States
Big Government bailouts haven’t just been directed toward businesses and Wall Street, they’ve also been deployed to prop up Big Governments. Having taken “stimulus” money while fully aware that it was a one-time windfall, politicians in many…
Daniel Hannan Sees America Europeanizing
Britain’s Conservative MP Daniel Hannan, made famous in America for the viral YouTube video of his fiscal takedown of Gordon Brown, recently wrote of his regret for supporting Barack Obama in the general election of the 2008 presidential campaign. A European…
Great Moments in Government Waste and Stupidity
Here’s a depressing story from the Columbus Dispatch that shows the government’s ability to be incompetent and wasteful at the same time. A labor dispute that never should have existed (but did, thanks to the incestuous relationship of unions and…
Pontificating about the Stupidity of Big-Government Stimulus
Obama and the Democrats are trying to enact a third so-called stimulus (a.k.a., jobs bill). I’d make a joke about three strikes and your out, but we should remember that this is actually the fourth attempt since we should count Bush’s lame faux stimulus in…
Another Reason Why Welfare Is Economically Destructive
I’m normally not a big fan of the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development since it is an international bureaucracy that persecutes low-tax jurisdictions. But the economists at the OECD sometimes do good work (the same can be said of the…
Producers on Strike
The Wall Street Journal wisely warns against drawing too many conclusions from one month’s job data, but they also point out that the economy is much weaker than the White House claimed – in large part because of a series of public policy decisions that…
The Sleazy Combination of Big Business and Big Government
There’s an article in the Wall Street Journal showing how already-established companies and their union allies will use the coercive power of government to thwart competition. The article specifically discusses efforts by less competitive supermarkets to block…
You Don't Need to Waste More Money to Shrink Government.
It’s rather symbolic of what’s wrong with Washington that a commission ostensibly created to promote deficit reduction is seeking a bigger budget, as noted in the Tax Notes story excerpted below. Rather than impose a bigger burden on taxpayers, though, I…