The politicians in Washington and their enablers in the academy are wildly wrong about how to boost growth. They think more government spending is a key to prosperity, but this blog already has revealed that the Great Depression was made worse because of bigger government. Experts have pointed out that the best way to boost […]

There’s a controversy in Texas because the State Board of Education has mandated the inclusion of certain materials in textbooks. This has elicited howls of protests from the left, which generally has controlled how some issues are portrayed. Since I don’t want leftist propaganda being pushed on kids, I’m mildly sympathetic to the Texas educrats, […]

The government’s so-called War on Poverty has been a dismal failure, largely because giving people money as a condition of being poor is a very good way of ensuring that some of them will choose to remain poor. But now the White House wants to make a bad situation even worse by concocting a new […]

You don’t need to watch old Gunsmoke episodes if you want to travel into the past. Just read the latest Congressional Budget Office “research” claiming that Obama’s so-called stimulus “increased the number of full-time-equivalent jobs by 1.8 million to 4.1 million.” CBO’s analysis is a throwback to the widely discredited Keynesian theory that assumes you can enrich […]

Ever wonder why unions care so much about the minimum wage when almost all union members get paid above that level? The answer is simply, but sleazy. As Walter Williams explains, they want to protect their high-pay status by increasing the cost of lower-skilled workers. For all intents and purposes, they are pricing poor people […]

Is there anything more despicable than a politician with personal (taxpayer-financed!) security guards who wants to prevent other people from having the right of self defense? Mayor Daley of Chicago is a good example of this strange species (scientific name: hypocratus sleazious). The priceless John Lott looks at the evidence from Jamaica to show the […]

When even the New York Times is writing articles about the collapse of the European welfare state, you know that the political establishment is finally recognizing the writing on the wall. Recognizing a problem and solving a problem, however, are two different things. They need to use an axe on their budgets, but the examples […]

Americans should not get too smug about the troubles in Europe because the Bush-Obama policies of wasteful spending are bringing us down the same path. The latest evidence comes from a well-researched article about personal income in USA Today showing that the share from private paychecks fell to a record low and the share from […]

Governments that tax work and subsidize sloth are committing a form of slow-motion suicide, and the Greek fiscal crisis is the canary in the coal mine of this phenomenon. Interestingly, some European governments are trying to halt the downward slide, though I suspect that most of them will fail to take the necessary steps. But […]

I have a question for my friends who support a national sales tax. First, some background. Beginning with the defeat of Woody Jenkins in his Louisiana Senate race back in the 1990s, various versions of the national sales tax have caused political headaches for GOP candidates. Even candidates from conservative states, such as Sen. DeMint in […]