The Wall Street Journal uses the clash between the Steelers and Packers as an opportunity to make a much-need point about taxes. Because of Pennsylvania’s flat tax, Ben Roethlisberger keeps a greater percentage of his salary than Aaron Rodgers, who gets raped by Wisconsin’s “progressive” tax system. Packers fans shouldn’t worry about this, though, since […]

On the 30th anniversary of his inauguration, I posted a bunch of videos that captured Ronald Reagan’s greatness, but I think we need only one for the 100th anniversary of his birth. This video illustrates Reagan’s superior understanding of fiscal policy. He points out how the Keynesian economists and politicians were profoundly wrong when they […]

Iain Murray of the Competitive Enterprise Institute has put together a very depressing column for National Review. To put it bluntly, he exposes the true size of the federal workforce, which has 5.5 hidden employees for every official bureaucrat. Officially, as of 2009, the federal government employed 2.8 million individuals out of a total U.S. […]

I’m sick of the TSA and haven’t written about that incompetent bureaucracy since posting a mock press release early last month. But after enduring the slowest-moving line in recorded history at the Miami Airport yesterday, motivation is no longer a problem. So it was serendipitous (in a bad way) to see a story in the […]

Al Gore really knows how to get a good turnout.

I’m not really sure what to say about the politicians in Malawi. Is this really a serious problem in the country? Will there be a new government agency to enforce the rule? How do they identify perpetrators if there is…um…no accompanying sound? On the other hand, this is far from the most damaging thing a […]

One of the many great things about America’s Founding Fathers is that the Declaration of Independence refers to “unalienable rights” including “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” But there’s not even a suggestion that it is the job of government to provide happiness. Brazil’s politicians have a different view of such matters. They’re considering […]

The internal revenue code is nightmarishly complex, as illustrated by this video. Americans spend more than 7 billion hours each year in a hopeless effort to figure out how to deal with more than 7 million words of tax law and regulation. Why does this mess exist? The simple answer is that politicians benefit from […]

School choice should be the civil rights issue of the 21st century. Rich people already have school choice, both because they have the ability to live in good school districts and they have the resources to send their kids to private schools. The children of poor people, by contrast, are warehoused in failing government schools. […]

Ronald Reagan would have been 100 years old on February 6, so let’s celebrate his life by comparing the success of his pro-market policies with the failure of Barack Obama’s policies (which are basically a continuation of George W. Bush’s policies, so this is not a partisan jab). The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis has […]