While Canadians are defensive about their health care system, and often times hold it up as a superior model, tens of thousands nevertheless voted with their feet in 2013 for America’s quasi-market system. Each year the Fraser Institute surveys physicians across…
The title of today’s column may not make much sense if you’ve never watchedThe Producers, a 1960s Mel Brooks comedy featuring Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel, but you’ll soon see the connection. That’s because we’re going to laugh at Obamacare, otherwise known as the gift…
My favorite Heritage Foundation publication (other than…ahem…my studies on government spending and the flat tax) is the annual Index of Economic Freedom. Like the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World and the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness…
Last June, in response to a question about indiscriminate spying by the National Security Agency, I made two simple points about the importance of judicial oversight and cost-benefit analysis. I want – at a minimum – there to be judicial oversight whenever the…
Every so often, I share stories about the ridiculous and outrageous way in which the federal government squanders our money. So when I saw this New York Post story about the feds pissing away a six-figure sum on condom research, I figured this would be a perfect…
If you ask an economist about the difference between capitalism and socialism, you’ll probably get a boring answer about the size of government, the impact on incentives, and the power of the state. Or maybe you’ll get a nit-picking answer, sort of like when I…
Washington is in the middle of another debate about redistributing money. But that’s hardly newsworthy. Politics, after all, is basically a never-ending racket in which insiders buy votes and accumulate power with other people’s money. The current debate about…
In the famous “Bridge of Death” scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, some of the knights are asked to name their favorite color. One of them mistakenly says blue instead of yellow and is hurled into the Gorge of Eternal Peril. I can sympathize with the…
I’ve shared many charts over the years, but two of the most compelling ones deal with poverty. The numbers in this chart, which are based on Census Bureau data and scholarly studies (see here, here, here, and here), show that the poverty rate was steadily…
One of my most widely read – but also most depressing – articles was from about two years ago and it exposed the fact that Washington, DC, is now the nation’s richest region. I explained that Washington is rich because of unearned wealth. Almost all of the loot that…