Newt Gingrich writes in the Washington Post to defend his assertion that Obama is a socialist. He cites several examples of the President’s big-government agenda, which are excerpted below. These are all examples of bad policy, to be sure, but other than the…
Daily Analysis
A Sordid Combination of Tax Greed and Protectionist.
Tax-news.com reports that the French and Italian governments want Europe to impose a tax on imports from nations that don’t adopt misguided climate-change/global-warming rules. This is awful policy, but the good news is that such a policy presumably won’t…
Bush Was a Statist, not a Conservative
A former White House speechwriter, Mark Thiessen, has jumped to the defense of his former boss, writing for the Washington Post that George W. Bush “established a conservative record without parallel.” Even by the loose standards of Washington, that is a…
Excellent Video Channeling Bastiat
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…
Free-Market Organ Sales Would Save Lives.
USA Today reports on a study showing that payments to donors would significantly increase the supply of kidneys available for transplant. Such a system potentially could save thousands of lives per year, so it is perplexing that statists are so viscerally opposed. The…
More Sarkozy Demagoguery on Financial Regs.
Nicholas Sarkozy spoke at Columbia University in New York on Monday and, as he has done before, demonstrated that everyone who calls themselves a conservative is not a free marketer. The French President pressed for an expansion of global financial bureaucracies and…
We'll Pay More and Get Less, but at Least Castro Is Happy with Obamacare.
I actually think this it is unfair to highlight Fidel Castro’s endorsement of Obamacare, but I’m in a grumpy mood because I’ve started a diet, so I’ll simply twist the knife a bit by noting that we probably could improve American healthcare by…
A Proposal that Actually Would Improve Health Care and Lower Costs
While the politicians in Washington are poised to undermine the healthcare system with additional layers of taxes, spending, and regulation, Steven Chapman proposes to use markets to improve a part of the system that is suffering from a punitive form of price…
Personal Accounts Are Better than Empty Promises from Social Security
My Cato colleague Jose Pinera makes a powerful argument for “privatizing” Social Security, which is something that has happened in about 30 nations. My Ph.D. dissertation was on Australia’s private system, so I’ve always had a soft spot for…
Decimating Obamacare.
Dan Mitchell doesn’t get to talk until after the 3-minute mark, but he then explains why Obamacare will undermine the healthcare system. His basic point is that government intervention is the reason why the current system has problems, and that those problems…