My Iowa caucus predictions from yesterday were hopelessly wrong, probably because I was picking with my heart rather than my head. As I noted a couple of weeks ago, Mitt Romney’s openness to a value-added tax makes him a dangerously flawed candidate, and I hoped Iowa…
Late last year, Spanish voters kicked out a socialist government and elected a new government led by the supposedly conservative People’s Party. Is that translating into smaller government and more freedom? Doesn’t look that way. It seems that Spanish right-of-center…
In June of last year, I posted several examples of idiotic government policy from both the United States and United Kingdom and asked which nation had the dumbest bureaucrats and politicians. Since then, we have found new examples of brain-dead government and…
Last January, I identified five things that worried me for 2011. Here’s what had me concerned, along with some ex post facto analysis about whether I was right to fret: 1. A back-door bailout of the states from the Federal Reserve – Thankfully, I was way off base with…
Paul Krugman has told us that awful stories about government-run healthcare in Britain “are false.” I guess this means that the media must be dominated by conservative liars, since we keep getting reports about substandard care and needless deaths…
I’ve written many times about politicians and bureaucrats screwing taxpayers with lavish compensation packages, but this story from Philadelphia is jaw dropping. Councilwoman Marian B. Tasco is retiring Friday, but only so she can collect a $478,057 pension check and…
Last year, I came up with a saying that “Bad Government Policy Begets More Bad Government Policy” and labeled it “Mitchell’s Law” during a bout of narcissism. There are lots of examples of this phenomenon, such as the misguided War on Drugs being a precursor to…
Kevin Williamson of National Review is always worth reading, whether he’s kicking Paul Krugman’s behind in a discussion about the Texas economy, explaining supply-side economics, or even when he’s writing misguided things about taxation. But I’m tempted to say that…
The statists are making a big issue out of income inequality, hoping to convince ordinary Americans that redistribution is their only hope for a better life. I’ve explained with a pizza analogy that this is horribly misguided because it falsely assumes the economy is…
Mark Twain famously observed that, “It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.” That’s a generalization, of course, but one that makes a lot of sense. Especially since I’ve written about…